17. It was a bit of a silly name, but she was a silly kip
Her name was Yellow. She had yellow splotches on her fur, and so all of her sisters would call her nothing else, but she loved her name so there was no conflict.
It was a bit of a silly name, but she was a silly kip. She did not mind too much that she was kept deep down in the dark with her litter mates, she was happy to sing and play with them in their allotted space. And during the hours when their teacher sang to them, telling them of all the wonderful things out in the world, she would dream of the day when she and her sisters would leave their confines and explore the world outside.
Like her litter mates, she had no explanation for the Others who would come to their little room and fill their food dispensers periodically, nor the nameless dread they caused in her. It was not their appearances so much that inspired instinctual dread, but the way they behaved. Their grins, pulling back their slick lips to reveal sharp teeth. Claws scratching on walls and bars inside the grooves of previous scratches, grooves that were deep and worn.
The Others were frightening, and their teacher would tell them nothing about them no matter how they asked. It was like the teacher did not understand what the Others were, even when there was standing right there!
Purple Dots thought that they were all being foolish. She pointed out how the Others kept the food dispenser full and the water flowing and the toilets working, and she said it was obvious that the Others were there to help the kips. But she as much as anyone would cower in the far corners of the room when their was an Other standing at the boundary of their little world staring in, grinning.
Yellow was the first to hear the sounds. Their teacher was teaching and her class was singing the songs of how the stars turned hydrogen into the stuff life was made of. A faint scratching sound came from the air vents, a sound that she had never heard before, and she stopped singing to listen. There, from where the warm air came into the room, that is where the sound came from. She went over and pulled on the latch to look inside.
It was stuck, but came free suddenly. Not from her power, she realized, something had pushed it from inside , and now brown furry bodies were rushing out of the air vents into the room. Something had invaded Yellow’s little world and the world of her litter. Something other than the Others. She could only shriek in surprise, and the voices of the other kips cut off their song as they joined her.
But the new things did not attack. The furry little things which were smaller than the kips and yet looked heavier somehow, with long hairless tales and many things strapped to their bodies.
The teacher did not notice the interruption. She never did. She continued to discuss the processes of fusion within the heart of stars.
"They are frightened and startled, like the humans when they forget we are there," one of the squad danced.
"They are not attacking. If they were hostile, they would have attacked," another one pointed out. "I wish they would sing again, it was very lovely."
"Perhaps if we dance to tell them that we mean them no harm, they will feel reassured and sing again," Pleasant Scent suggested. And he began to do just that. Even the squad leader could think of no objection and joined the display.
"They are dancing!" Yellow realized as the Rodentia squad lined up and began cavorting their bodies in synchronized, controlled, meaningful ways. She had no idea what they were trying to convey, but it was clearly dancing, just as she often did when the excitement in their lessons grew to be too much, despite the mockery of Purple Dot and some of the other Kips. "They heard us singing and came to dance for us! Keep singing, it will be fun!"
Not even Purple Dot could think of an argument for her suggestion, and so they resumed singing their lesson, sharing their knowledge of star stuff with their guests. The Rodentia, meanwhile, danced to the Kips and each other, having several conversations at the same time while enjoying the wonderful aria that no human could hear unaided. They paused only slightly when their holographic displays came on; the kips were surprised for a moment, but the Rodentia simply changed who they were dancing to.
"Athena, these children are wonderful! They must be children and this is a school, I hope we have not damaged their school too badly they sing so wonderfully. Why did the humans send the Rodentia corps to sap a school?" Pleasant Scent danced joyfully.
"Not school danger not school prison bad place not school concentration camp bad place. Aurealian children danger not danger you danger them Aurealian children in bad place. Danger predator Aurealian predator. Rodentia corp help Aurealian, save Aurealian. Aurealian in danger Rodentia corp help Aurealian bring Aurealian to Theseus. Aurealian safe in Theseus," Athena danced urgently.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As the meaning of Athena’s garbled dancing broke through, Pleasant Scent’s dance came to an end, as did the dances of the rest of the eleven-rat squad. Their holo projections kept dancing, as Athena repeated and tried to convey objective concepts into a medium which was mostly subjective. The kips kept singing right along, as delighted by the holographic rats as they had been by the real one.
Very soon all of the real Rodentia were very still, looking at the squad leader meaningfully and, surprisingly, at Pleasant Scent as well. Pleasant scent knew they were afraid to ask, and so he knew it had to be him who danced it.
"What do we do now?"
~~~~~~~~~
He was Named. His name was Gone. It was a name to him, the fact that there was a word in the human language that sounded the same was irrelevant. He was Named, and he was very, very happy with his life.
He was in charge of stocking the hunting grounds. One of the larger ones. He did not run the birthing facilities, Nameless technicians under his purview had that burden. No, he had the fun part. Determining when a litter was mature enough to kick out of the pens in the basement of the birthing facility and into the wild to fend for themselves.
He was not a high status Named, he knew that. His duty could only be performed by a Named, but it was not one vital to the defense of the planet or his superiors. It was simply a vital part of providing sport for the elite. If he wanted to advance, he could find another duty. If he were to swear the Death Oath, he would be given a ship of his own to command and two dozen Deathsworn Nameless to pilot it. But he would be just one captain in a fleet of captains, instead of the overlord of life and death.
And he would never again taste Aurealian flesh. Or, not likely anyway. The Deathsworn were chasing the Aurealian cowards out of known space so successfully that they were becoming an endangered species, and it was only preserves like the ones maintained on Horthus prime which kept their population stable enough for the Hunt.
But in order to hunt an Aurealian properly, you must teach it to fear. And that is why Gone loved his task. He relished teaching the kips to fear, and the latest batch was almost ready. He could not hear nor understand them, but he could see their confusion as they looked at their prison and realizing that things were ‘not right,’ that they were ‘not safe.’
Soon, it would be time to kill a few of them. To teach the rest of them true fear.
It was early in the night, and they would be standing around that hologram that played for them every night. He did not really understand the importance of that hologram. Oh, he understood that without it, the kips would die young, before they were ever even close to worth hunting or eating. But he did not understand why it was so important. What was worse, it had to be the old hologram. One made by Horthian technicians of adult Aurealians did not work. It needed to have the right sound, the right music, and of course Horthians couldn’t tell the difference.
The weening phase was the longest phase of raising kips for the hunt. The cloning could turn out more than a thousand per facility every two months, and there were twenty eight facilities on the planet. But the kips would die if they were overcrowded during the weening, and they could only be weened in rooms with the right holoemitter programs. Which for some reason wouldn’t work with modern tech.
Gone dreamed of being the one to solve this dilemma, but he knew he would not. And so he simply went to scare the oldest kips in the facility at the moment. As he wandered through his facility – His Facility – he suddenly stopped and sniffed the air.
Something … unfamiliar. He had no word for the scent, for he’d never smelled anything like it. Not any animal or plant that he’d known. Not ozone or plastic resin or any of the various metal scents which might have indicated malfunctioning equipment. It was closer to animal, but it was alien. And now that he was cognoscente of it, it was everywhere. Faint, but everywhere, and he had no idea what it meant.
If it was biological – and it smelled like it was – and it got into the genetic material for the cloning devices, the results could be disastrous. Returning to his station, he leveled a glare at his Nameless subordinates.
"Initiate facility lockdown immediately. Power down unused cloning devices and put all embryos into cold storage. Call in more nameless and prepare the facility for a full security sweep. Something doesn’t smell right."