"I would rather not know if these collars have bombs in them." Elytra asked of Malakh, who was currently behind her, tools in hand as she tried to remove the baithaizan collar around her neck.
"Then you'll be happy the know that there weren't any," Malakh replied, "Could you hold it with both hands, however?"
Elytra did so, and a moment later a vibrating whir ran through the entire contraption before the whole thing hinged open at her throat. She pulled it away the moment she was able, and it was all she could do to not hurl the accursed thing across the room.
"I can take that. I'd like to see how they work." Malakh said as she came around to face her, and Elytra had to do a double take when she saw what the deorviran had strapped to her head.
"Is that a Longan Unit!?"
Rhea laughed, pulling her own unit out of a pocket of the jacket she was wearing. "Don't worry, these ones have been fully disarmed."
"But why keep them?" Elytra asked, aghast.
Pryseia shrugged as Malakh went behind her to remove her own collar. "Without the explosives, or the permanency with which the thalatte adhered them to us, they are useful tools."
"There's also the familiarity," Malakh added, "You get stuck with a device for 50 years or more, using it becomes instinct."
"You were a captive of the Thalatte for 50 years?!" Elytra gasped, "Your species must age differently than mine, because I would not have put your age far off from mine, and I am not quite that old."
"Hang on, I think this is a difference of calendars," Rhea said, putting on her own Longan Unit, "Or maybe not. Huh. Looks like one Hurni year is comparable to one Zoion year, give or take a week or so. So with that difference, it'd be about 55 of your years. That's interesting."
"And for a lot of the time it didn't feel that long," Malakh said as she finished unlocking Pryseia's collar, "You get entrenched in a routine long enough and time slips past you fast."
"Plus zoastasis has been proven to alter a person's perception of time," Rhea added on, "Harder to mark the passage of time when you can't see it reflected in your appearance."
Elytra frowned. "You mentioned that word before, but I was distracted from asking the meaning of it."
Rhea grimaced at that. "Yeah, oof, if you thought how long they had you in stasis was bad, this might be a little more of a doozy."
"If the information does give me a breakdown, I'd rather it happen in the presences of a doctor who can sedate me, rather than when I'm on my own." Elytra admitted, resigned.
The doctor in question sighed, but reached across the table so she could hold one of Elytra's hands in both of her own.
"There's more to it than this, but the primary function, the most noticeable function of zoastasis is that it completely halts the ageing process. It doesn't make you immortal, or invulnerable to illness or injury, but in theory, it prevents you from dying of old age."
"In theory?" Elytra repeated, feeling more calm than she expected at this revelation.
"Conflicts abound across the galaxy. People are often killed before they get the chance to live out their natural life span, let alone an artificial one." Nevara explained.
"The Bernetigan developed zoastasis before they discovered how to achieve FTL travel," Rhea carried on, "Don't need to stress about a journey taking centuries if you don't have a crew that'll die off part of the way through. They somehow managed to make it compatible with every known sentient species, which is a medical marvel. Of course, functional immortality would be a disaster if the populations of entire worlds underwent the process, so there's all kinds of laws and whatever in place so that the only way to get zoastasis is if you stay in space. And once you go through the procedure, you are way more restricted in regards to what you can or can't do to live on a world."
"You can only live on a world for a certain length of time," Pryseia began listing off, "You can't live on the same world more than once within a specific time frame. You're prevented from holding any kind of seat of power on whatever world you're living on at the time. You have restriction on what you can invest your wealth in. You're only allowed to hold relatively little property. Other such nonsense."
"None of which matters for a slave, anyway," Malakh said with a derisive laugh, "The cultures that take them often put them through the zoastasis process just so they don't need to worry about losing their slaves to the relentless grind of time."
"And so against our will we have been barred from the worlds we were born on, and thus are forced to make a living among the stars." Pryseia finished, arms thrown wide to encapsulate their entire situation.
Elytra sighed, processing all this new information. Of everything the Baithaiz had done to her, this was the least egregious. If she were being completely honest with herself, back before her abduction, thoughts of the future had been something she avoided. She'd had no idea what to do with her life, bouncing from job to job whenever she got bored, filling her days with whatever distraction she could to keep herself from thinking too hard about how directionless she was. Some days, she felt like she was just running out the clock on her own life. The potential of facing down eternity should have had her spiralling, but instead, for the first time in longer than she would like to admit, Elytra felt excited about whatever it was that lay before her.
One of her old bosses had suggested that she might be happier working in space, rather than remaining trapped on the world where she was born. She now realized she had a chance to see if their hypothesis was right.
"I'm either alright with this, or it's shocked me into numbness." Elytra admitted eventually.
Rhea patted her hand, saying, "If you ever need to talk about it, I'll listen."
"I think for now, I'd like to hear how you all managed to escape from the Thalatte." Elytra said.
Pryseia gave a little laugh, motioning at Rhea as she said, "The humans have an apt phrase for what the majority of how our egress proceeded: we had to hurry up and wait."
Cpl. Killzar recovered and was thrown back into service. Sgt. vel-Ahllan was once again ferrying cargo ships full of stolen artifacts out of enemy space. Dr. Marinos saw an endless parade of casualties passing through her medbay.
And as for Chief Khari, she was almost certain that she was going insane.
Of the Odazaen that had been acquired on Sgt. vel-Ahllan's Priority Una mission, all but one of them had been deployed across the Thalatte theatre of operations, turning tides with every engagement. That was, until, the Meleten unearthed their own Odazaen and were able to counter Thalatte mech engagements with mechs of their own. As such, the top brass was pushing for whatever advantages they could get, especially from a weapon that, on paper, should have been pressed into service already.
But this last unit refused to so much as move.
Bigger than a regular Odazaen, all the readings they could get off of it led them to believe that it would also be more powerful than its run-of-the-mill counterparts, but unlike an Odazaen, this one refused to engage the neural control system that allowed a pilot to maneuver the mech with nothing but their thoughts. The best of the best thalatte mech pilots had come through Trahho Station to try their hand at the unresponsive machine, but none of them had any luck.
And Khari knew for a fact that none of them would, because they weren't what the mech was looking for. It had told her.
The message hadn't been imparted verbally, or psychically. No language written or spoken had instilled this knowledge within her. She hadn't so much as picked up an errant energy signal with her Longan Unit (which was constantly on the scan for abnormal energy signatures; a safety necessity in her line of work), but when she entered the cockpit of this machine to run diagnostics on it the first time, she was overcome with a sense of recognition.
Not that she'd recognized something, but rather that something had recognized her.
It came nowhere near the profundity of the sensation that washed over her, but the closest equivalent was the feeling of being noticed by a friend you weren't expecting to see at that particular place or time, but they'd mistaken you for someone else, so while they were happy to see you, you weren't who they were looking forward to seeing.
Something along the lines of that, only the sensation had been strummed across her every nerve as if by a hand larger than a star.
Ever since that first time within the obstinate Odazaen, that sensation had buzzed away in her, marrow deep. No medical scans had turned up anything amiss, but she knew with absolute certainty that she had been fundamentally altered by that ancient Hyttan machine. It was like it had turned her into its own personal tuning fork, and had sent her out to find the tone that it needed to complete its harmony.
She'd had a few false positives, though she didn't know if the sensation was coming from the Odazaen, or from her.
The first time she saw the Doctor after she'd been inside the ancient machine, it had felt like something had reached into her chest and forcibly magnetized her heart so that it would always point towards the true north that was Marinos. But she'd been in love with the human for years, the pair of them forced to keep their feelings for one another under wraps as they violated Thalatte personnel regulation, so she wasn't sure if it was the machine recognizing something in the other woman, or just her own feelings for Marinos burning brighter than normal.
Then, when she'd crossed paths with the Sergeant again, it had felt as though something had grabbed her by her shorn mane and wrenched her gaze towards vel-Ahllan. But she'd been friends with the apiarian for longer than her natural lifespan, and was always on the lookout for her whenever the other woman's ship came into whatever deployment she was working on at the time. Was this new, more insistent urge from the machine, or did the brush vel-Ahllan have with death the last time they'd been on the same station just have her more paranoid than normal?
As for anybody else? Nothing beyond what she already felt for them, which ranged anywhere from polite acknowledgement to well-hidden resentment. No other person had struck whatever resonant chord now thrummed within her, and on a station as large and close to multiple active fronts as Trahho was, she saw a lot of people on her off hours.
This alien compulsion had her spending whatever free time she could spare in the most crowded areas she could find. Half the time she wouldn't realize where her feet had led her after her shifts until she'd been struck by the wall of sound that was a crowded room full of people. But even with this strange new pull within her demanding her to seek out others, her introverted nature usually won out in the end, and she'd make her way back to the barracks she was assigned to, and spend whatever time she had left before sleep pulled her under in pouring over the Longan schematics Marinos had managed to acquire.
It had taken a while, but Khari was certain that she could remove the Unit without it blowing her head off. Automatically, at least. She knew that thalatte officers all carried devices that could activate the kill switches in the Longan models that all slaves were outfitted with, and they'd built the devices such that the only way to shield them from the kill switch signal would be to tamper with them enough to trip the bomb into an early detonation.
The only way to be safe from that kill switch was to be away from Thalatte control, and the only way to be free of Thalatte control was to not have a rigged Longan Unit bolted to one's skull. Escape was going to require more than just the removal of those proverbial shackles, and Khari was hard pressed to come up with a solution for that whole conundrum.
But luck, or fate, or whatever presence that slumbered within the unresponsive Odazaen eventually saw fit to bring a solution to both her escape attempts and the strange compulsion that had her haunting docking bays when she would much rather be sleeping, with the return of one of the mech units from the front.
Thankfully no pursuit craft had chased the Thalatte ships out of Meleten space, and so the pilots had their injuries tended to over the course of their journey. Their mechs, however, hadn't been treated as kindly. On a craft meant more for transportation than repair, the engineering team aboard had neither the personnel nor the resources to get an entire unit's worth of front line mechs back into working order, and so the teams on Trahho Station were given that illustrious duty.
And so while standing on the deck of the hangar bay, assessing the mechs coming off the transports, Khari once again felt a pull forcibly drawing her attention in another direction. Her gaze halted on the line of pilots offloading from a different access port on the transport ship, and when her eyes fell on the Corporal stepping off the ramp, that alien sensation within her rang like a clarion call.
Of all the people in the galaxy, it seemed, the aloof Odazaen wanted Killzar in its pilot seat.
Getting her there, however… that was going to be a problem.