Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . . But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“Yes. Soil Starship Nichols.”
I followed the being in the suit.
Took me well over a minute to realize "low frequency right angle shape" was Red Cross.
I love how this shows the weirdness both of language and of culture. Excellent writing!
"Soil Starship Nichols"
This is what took me a moment.
Earth Starship [Nichelle] Nichols
powering up her beam attack since 2011…
tikuri reblogged
tikuri reblogged
princesshamlet-deactivated20210
holy shit
this was so huge. the alien he’s arguing with uses standard pro-life arguments that you still hear today. he literally talks about all life being sacred (even though his plan to deal with overpopulation is to kill people with meningitis). and this aired only 4 years after contraception was legalized in the united states. in context this is actually even more pro-contraception than it appears in these caps.
tikuri reblogged
I think personal labels can be useful for “there’s a word for it”, “I’m not alone”, and “oh neat, I know what to put in a search engine now” reasons, but I also think they can be troublesome.
Plenty of people won’t fit 100% neatly into a label, and when they encounter a rare exception to what is otherwise an accurate label for them, it can feel like an identity crisis.
The labels aren’t literally what you are. They’re words. They’re meant to assist communication and organization, not to control you.
I like my labels. But I pulled my labels out of a box and put them on myself because they fit and I like them. And labels are also names for communities, ones I have found kindred souls in.
I did not climb into the box to join the label. The community is not a box. The community is other people who did the same thing.
You're supposed to take the word out to use it, not crawl in there with it.
You won't fit in the box and bits of you will get carved off and stunted from growing if you try to. You're not box-shaped. Not for any word.
The label fits me, I don't fit the label.
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Criminal, op turned off reblogs
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‘don’t you want your favourite character to be happy???’ no? i want my favourite character to be interesting. i want me to be happy. which sometimes involves my favourite character being in exquisite agony
tikuri reblogged
poor memory is a huge deal and i wish people wouldn't diminish it by saying "oh yeah i can't remember what i had for breakfast lol."
i can't remember the first 10 years of my life. i can't remember entire days, weeks, months at a time. i can't remember entire people, i can't remember names or faces. i can't remember when things are scheduled for, my calendar app on my phone is booked to the max with reminders and task checklists. i can't remember when i moved into what home when, i can't remember important milestone dates like when i got or lost certain jobs, or when i started a new hobby.
that's what i mean when i say i have poor memory. poor memory is so scary for the person who has it. it's not a quirky thing, everyone forgets small details. memory problems are scary because you can go through entire events or days with no memory, or plan for things in the future that you can't recall ever even looking into or scheduling. it's not a funny haha kind of thing, it's serious, and it affects a lot of people in very unavoidable ways.
not being able to plan for appointments or work schedules, not being able to remember people's names or faces, not being able to recall whether or not you were present for something or whether or not you met someone, not being able to keep track of what's happening on what dates and losing track of items because you can't remember where you put them are all very real problems, and anyone dealing with them deserves to be taken seriously, and not diminished when they choose to speak up about it.
tikuri reblogged
our good friend jonathan just had his first experience with the deutsche bahn, i sure hope that this is the only horror awaiting him
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"Protect bad drag" is like every other "protect bad art" to me. Because if you only ever see the most polished and editorial final product, you'll never think that you can begin making that same art. You'll think you've been priced out of expressing yourself. You'll think beauty is behind a paywall. And that is poison, 100% of the time.
tikuri reblogged
Me & the other drivers were really impressed when you swerved around all of us at high speeds & got to the red light before anyone else
I love living in the future sometimes.
Used kleenex in the back seat of a pickup truck with the front windows rolled down interpretive dance
tikuri reblogged
Reblog to hug prev poster (they need a hug)
