Trying To Get By Ch. 01

She was aware that no matter what she did, how well she tried to hide herself away from them, how quiet and unremarkable she tried to make herself seem to anyone – sooner or later, some bright one somewhere would notice her somehow and become curious about her. That usually led to her finding out about it in some way, usually an unpleasant one, and then needing to make a fast escape.

The number of times when she'd had to run off with only the clothing on her back and a few things in her pack, leaving all of her possessions behind wasn't even worth thinking about. In fact, she was even now thinking that she'd been here in this area for too long, by the very few things that she'd heard in passing and by some of the questions that she'd been asked by individuals who were more than a little pointed about things.

It was something that she feared in a way, since it was just more proof that she wouldn't ever fit in here. No matter that she'd even seen people here who looked at least something like her to a good degree. They had people like that here.

But it didn't matter. As soon as something about her was revealed – or even mostly guessed at, she was on the run yet again.

She couldn't understand it. She tried to blend in. She had no bad habits which might single her out among them. She even went to great lengths to keep her thin tail hidden – as uncomfortable as that oftentimes was – and as invisible as she could make it. She had small horns hidden just inside her hairline. She kept them invisible as well.

She'd learned their speech – or their ways of speech, some of them. But they acted like seagulls to her, full of meanness to someone just a little different. So it was more than a little obvious that she'd never be welcome among them, no matter what she did.

On top of everything else, she ached to know what it felt like to have a relationship. She knew that she was different in a few ways and her personal preference notwithstanding; she'd have tried with anyone who showed her a little trust, showed themselves to be someone who could be trusted in return. But nothing such as that ever happened to her either.

She'd seen it once, the way that seagulls were to their own kind if that one was damaged or crippled in any way at all. They all gathered around that one, pecking and ripping until he or she lay dead.

And after that, they all went right back to screaming at each other that some scrap of anything which they might consider as food was theirs by divine right.

At least they didn't eat the ones that they killed in their meanness.

Irianni had watched it all, wanting to help, not knowing what she could do. She'd cried for a day at the horror of it all and what it meant to her in particular.

One day, they'd do something like that to her.

Human beings were just like that.

She could already sense what some of them were thinking with regard to the stranger among them. It was why she seldom stayed more than a day or two after she felt the beginnings of their suspicion.

So after much thought and deliberation – as well as what preparations that she could make, she'd begun this search long before the dawn, her long strides taking her through the slowly failing night. Running – or in this one case, walking quickly in the dark - was better than waiting.

She'd seen what hesitation could bring. Every time that she'd hesitated, wanting to think that she was just being a bit paranoid, it had ended by being a very close call. She walked on, more hopeful than determined.

By midmorning, she faced the shoreline way out there.

By noon, she was across it and the lake and right here where she was standing now.

She'd spent the rest of the day trying to get through the foreboding forest from different directions.

She barely even looked at any tracks that she did see anymore because they were all her own and for the first time, it was coming home to her that she might have used up the last of her cursed life on a forlorn and unfounded (read: foolish) hope in her heart.

She looked down slowly as the certainty of the feeling set in – doing her best to push away the stinging sensations at the corners of her eyes.

This was no place for tears.

She took a deep breath as she mastered the feeling once more and looked up and outward again, deciding now to just try to think of a way that she might find or build herself enough of a small shelter which might help her live through the coming darkness.

The hopeless feeling was still there and she needed another few moments to force her tired and unwilling body into action and while that went on, she scanned the horizon for something to do until then.

Out there, the wind was picking up, so she knew that if this turned into anything, she'd need to try to get through the night further inside the woods, maybe just at the edge of the foreboding part. She didn't know why, and couldn't come up with a reason, but every time that she'd been there today, coming at it in different ways, she hadn't felt a single zephyr of moving air.

Maybe near to that would be a better place, if she could drag a few fallen limbs together for a little hovel under one of the mighty trees. Every one of the larger trees had almost the beginnings of a circular wall of snow around the foot of them. A good place to dig in and place her branches before piling the snow back over the outside.

She was about to turn back in order to get started while she had at least a little light left to do it by when she noticed something far off at the other edge of the lake.

She saw a large "puff", for lack of a better term.

Something was disturbing the snow of the far shore.

It took her a second to think about it. The disturbed snow was flying upward and everywhere, moved by the growing wind that Irianni guessed was the harbinger of a storm. So to her mind, whatever was causing the snow to fly was not several hundred yards long. That was only the effect of the wind.

At that point, she saw that it was advancing and by the rate and direction, she thought that it could reach her side of the lake in about a minute or two, rather than the hours that it had taken her to walk here. The slowly rising wind was masking any sound that the strange thing might be making – Irianni could hear nothing but the wind past her ears, no matter how she turned her head to try to minimise it.

Then it slowed abruptly at less than the halfway point as she judged it and just ... stopped.

As she stood staring, just beginning to move backward so as to stand and watch from behind a tree, the snow billowed around the frontal part of the disturbance and floated off in the wind after a moment, leaving nothing to be seen.

She reached into her smaller pack on her waist and fished out her mother's binoculars.

Holding the appliance up to her eyes told her little, other than there was a slightly dull, shimmering, snowy nothingness out there at the spot where she remembered seeing the puff stop. Usually, she could tell if there was an object in the foreground because the range to it would change if she skimmed past it a little slowly. There was no indication in the display that there was anything out there now at all. The vague thing that she could just barely guess at had no discernible shape and was transparent.

Her binoculars were all that she had of her mother's things and they were a little far removed from what binoculars were on this world. They could make out a few of a distant object's features quite often and attempt to classify them. The script in display meant little to a human being, but she could read the written form of her mother's language, so usually, she learned a lot about something far off.

But there was nothing coming to her from them at all now.

After a moment, it was just the wind past her ears, incessant now in it's warning to her that the oncoming night would be less than pleasant to her and that she'd better get moving if she wanted to make her shelter while she could see what she was doing.

Just as she began to decide that she'd been watching nothing more than a huge "snow devil" as the people here called them, she saw a thin flash from out there in an upward direction. She stepped forward to get out from under the branches above her as she looked up, trying to follow with her viewers.

At that point, she saw an object at the most extreme magnification. What she saw didn't make much sense, since what was there was a brightly burning ball by that point. The display indication of something disappeared then, leaving only the ball of flame which carried on, arcing across the heavens as it fell.

She queried the processor and the original image returned for the barest instant. Going backward, she saw only instantaneous indications.

A powered craft, driven by hydrocarbon combustion and trailing ice crystals in the cold air behind it - which proved the combustion part. The height was in excess of 58 thousand of the human measurement of "feet", the velocity was a little more than 2 million, two hundred thousand-odd "feet" per hour – 420 miles plus. Changing the setting to 'Object' revealed that after whatever had happened, the 'craft' had gone from flying to oxidizing at a high rate – burning – as it fell.

She looked again and watched as it landed almost squarely – from this angle - on the place she'd left very early that morning, though she surmised that it was probably more coincidence than intent.

The intent had been to destroy whatever it had been.

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Inside the hidden vehicle on the lake, there was a soft background whine from the small standby turbine which quietly powered the craft as it sat on the ice and the occupant grunted softly as the display indicated the destruction of another airborne "watcher".

Probably a drone like the others, the occupant guessed, no crew aboard, driven and controlled by a remote communication link while it performed reconnaissance. They'd been noted before.

And destroyed before, if there was no way to hide in the brief warning time that was given because of the limited detection horizon here in these hills. It wasn't the preferred method.

Usually, there was sufficient warning available to stop and hunker down in more concealment so that the communication link could be disrupted properly. Once that happened, the watchers would all go to a fail-safe mode, their engines powering back to a flight idle as the vehicle flew on for a time, the hope being that the link would be restored.

But it never happened when they'd been detected in enough time. The link signals would be interpreted by the systems on this craft and then others sent to give sufficiently strong signals with matching encryption which would drive the watcher into uncontrolled and violent flight. Most often, it resulted in disintegration, the pieces falling to earth as another unexplained mishap.

The occupant was about to commence moving the craft again, just reaching to restart the fans which would lift it for the last bit of the journey when there was an indication of another kind altogether. It caused the occupant to look at a different display.

There was someone out there, standing in front of some trees on the low ridge next to the lake.

Whoever it was, they'd seen everything.

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Irianni looked up from her viewers, wondering at some fairly intense red brightness that she thought she'd seen around her a moment before.

Now she saw nothing like that.

It wasn't until the wind blew a little snow past her from the side that she saw it again – a bright red group of lines in the air right next to her. She looked to her left and saw three small bright spots on the trunk of the tree that she stood beside. They began to slip closer slowly, the marks disappearing into the open air between her and the tree.

Irianni spun and ran into the trees as fast as she could go. She didn't know exactly what the red had been, but she could interpret the intent easily.

Targeting.

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Out on the lake, the occupant had watched, ready to obliterate the one out there with one minute movement.

With a decision against it, the events in the display from moments before were replayed. The entire thing had to be played, reset and played again a few times before the occupant was satisfied at what had been seen.

Little more than the briefest of moments but now there was much to be considered.

The one out there on the cliff had not been one of the people who lived around here, though there were some of their physical traits in evidence. She – and it was fairly certain what the gender of the individual had been, though the clothing had hidden almost all of the visual clues - had seen at least a good part of what had happened not long before.

Normally, it wouldn't have meant much at all and the weapon would have been fired out of a need to protect the security of the home. The only thing which might have prevented that was if the targeted one was a child – which would have presented even more trouble, but no killing.

Other than that, it had been curiosity which had stayed the destruction. That – and the reluctance to leave a blast mark on the visible rocks out there.

With nothing at all on any of the displays, two quick blasts of compressed air were released to clear the intake extractors and the outer fans were started and the craft lifted up and began to slide toward the rock wall half a kilometer away.

If there had been anyone watching as the craft came near the vertical surface of the wall, it would have looked like there would be a collision very soon. But the craft slipped through the illusion of the wall and slowed along a hidden tunnel, turning around on it's own axis before it eased downward a moment later.

The occupant watched the scene on the cliff a few more times and then got out after powering the craft down.

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Irianni made her way in the failing light as quickly as she could and reached the silent woods again in a minute. She thought about it for only a moment, deciding that she'd scrape something together not far outside of that threatening clearing, a little back from the trees at the edge. There was never any wind in that place as she remembered and right then, she wanted some to helpfully begin to cover the tracks that she was bound to leave.

She ran around, even as the wind rose slowly around her, gathering boughs and branches, ripping them off if she could and dropping them to the ground. She ran to the base of the tree that she'd selected and kicked the thin snow at the very center of the wall away. Running out again, she began to take, carry, or drag the branches and boughs that she'd gotten loose to "her" tree and in a few minutes; she had the beginnings of a shelter.

A few more boughs, chosen because there were thick needles on the branches, and then some snow piled up quickly and by that point, a little desperately, and Irianni had a temporary home that she could wriggle into after smoothing out as much of the disturbed now as she could with one last branch.

She sat shivering inside, leaning up against the main trunk of the tree, her breath fogging the air as she tried to quiet herself while digging slowly and silently into her main pack, looking for one of the things that she'd put there for a meal.

The wind seemed to make up it's mind then and began to really blow, even reaching a low moan in some parts of the woods. Inside, Irianni was slowly getting warm, since the air around her was still inside her thin walls. Outside of those walls, there was another layer only inches away, the heavily snow-laden lower boughs of the tree itself and those boughs reached the ground in many places. The boughs above them protected the snow on the ones below and in only minutes, Irianni was as hidden as anyone could ever be.

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H'Yan-Ah finished her very late midday meal sitting in the main control area of what had once been – and still was, in point of fact, a vessel. Her morning had been spent in housekeeping and cleaning, eventually with sweeping as well. Her afternoon was spent in one of her two "terrain" vessels, looking for something to hunt. The hunt on foot had gone well and now the cleaned-out carcass of a buck hung in a lightly refrigerated chamber to age it slightly.

Now, her meal done, she sat absolutely still and wondered.

She'd been living alone in here now for longer than a year; by the way that time could be measured here. She used the human method for that, since it came to her mind more easily than the other. She'd learned it from her father, though he'd said that it wasn't his way. It had been a little while and she found herself thinking about him again.

He hadn't been "human" and H'Yan-Ah could understand all of that much better now, since she was grown and everything.

He'd told her once that she'd been born right here, on this machine made and used to carry her father's kind to other places – worlds – was the word that he'd used. Species of humans occurred naturally all over, especially in this particular galaxy for some reason. They'd come seeking to learn of the humans here, once their presence had been detected by the automated vessels which had been sent to make searches such as that.

But not this vessel.

This vessel had been the first which had come in answer to the searches of the automatic vessels, carrying her father's kind, a small group of them. The landing had gone wrong and the ship landed very hard. The vessel was not damaged very much at all, but a few key members of the group had been killed by virtue of the fact that they hadn't been using the seating restraints at the time. The survivors had sent their distress signals eventually and some time after, a larger vessel and crew had been diverted from their tasking to come to complete the first ship's mission before resuming their own.

The survivors were to be assimilated among the second crew and taken back to explain what had gone wrong, but the rescuing crew had learned of how it had gone after a little time and acted on their own. Her father's kind had always been warlike and between warriors of a culture where physical ability and prowess in combat were things to be traded on to find one's place among the people, weakness and stupidity were not tolerated much at all.

The landing had gone badly because it had been left to the automated systems – which were in place to deal with landings on their homeworld, or at least ones which had certain guidance facilities in place - not a wild and unknown one such as where they all were. The crimes of complacency and dereliction of duty had occurred only because all three of the females in the small crew had come into season within a few days of each other.

Recognising the very strong mating urges of their own species, there were protocols in place to segregate members of the crew in such an event so as to prevent the very thing which had happened – because they all agreed to ignore them.

So the landing was left for the ship itself to manage while everyone fucked themselves and each other silly. With no prepared landing surface detected, the craft actuated alarms, but was still left to deal with the landing and so the undercarriage was not lowered, the last landing being one at a place which had guidance. The craft bellied in and slid for a long distance, coming to rest – with a fair bit of an impact – at the base of some foothills of a mountain range. Considering that the vessel had the capability for vertical takeoff and most importantly vertical landing made it all a little ridiculous to the rescuers.

To make matters even worse, the human population here was of a fairly weak sort, not fit for the sporting contests which of course had been the very reason for coming here to take a few back as breeding stock.