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Year : 2572

Planet Kiyasumeni

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"If we have a bigger hive, it would be easier to find people."

Her father tensed up, but kept on cutting flesh without even looking up. Patient she waited for the answer, but it took longer. It was in sound, he still wasn't so used to constant telepathic talk.

"There's nobody to find," he said.

She inched closer from the out side of the corpse. "But see, that's different now. I think there is someone else! Another like me."

Her father kept on cutting the flesh off their prey, which was odd. She was so sure family meant a lot to him, shouldn't he have responded more?

She must be using the wrong words.

"A sister. I think I have a sister."

His head shot up, and the blade almost went into his finger. Through the cold mask she couldn't see his expression, but she caught some of his open thoughts. Oh, it had been the wrong words. He had thought at first she'd gotten in touch with another normal xenomorph.

"Really like me. We're connected and she's coming alive more and more. I have to find her, but she can't tell me where she is. Maybe others know."

"No. Nobody's added to this shit, it stays us. No dinosaurs, no worms, nothing."

He reset the blade and continued cutting, more aggressive now.

"Please?"

"Go away, I'm working."

Her face fell. Normally he'd just ask her to help out. That was part of the life, they did things together so it was quicker, and he taught her things along the way. Sometimes she taught him new things too. She must've said something very wrong if he sent her away.

She slipped out of the cave on all four, but hesitated at the entrance. The jungle lay still around save for small wildlife. Most creatures had figured out the dangers of living here soon after Karga'te started teaching her how to kill better. She'd moved on to bigger targets by now, but it had stuck.

The solitude bothered her when it hadn't before. The strange other who had become more aware over the past months, or year, should have meant less loneliness. Being sent away by her father was an unpleasant kind of new.

There were others she could ask for help though.

She crawled up the tallest tree she could find Weather was clear enough and she soon spotted her target : a massive flat plateau to the west. While the jungle was a gamble, the plains had no herds today. She might make it before dinner.

They had a small hovercraft, which the Auton had donated. Probably. Her father had just taken it. They lived more or less near the plateau in case it needed maintenance.

Kirindi took it and was on her way; if her father noticed the sound, he didn't object.

The journey took a few hours. The machine wasn't in the best of shape, so she decided to have that fixed while she was there anyway."

By evening, the plateau towered over her long before she could enter it. The wide open front she passed. The market zone was full of people who would distract her and the paths small.

Worse, some would find her scary — she was chimera of two of three most feared tribes — and might shoot before she could make it clear she meant no harm. So, the long way around was the short way.

She slipped through one of the smaller back caves. These led to the staff area, part of which was hired off to the Auton, the only humans allowed here. Synthetic humans, but humans as far as she was concerned.

The Interstellar Alliances had all these strict rules about commerce, and didn't like it when other alien species did so within their territory. Or outside. They didn't like others to be in any kind of control, actually.

The Auton didn't like humans being that way and wanted to preserve life, and had split off of their society and ways, despite having been created to serve them. Now they served in another way by protecting the galaxy's life, humans and others alike, from the worst of humanity. That included her own weird kind, rare chimera things. She hoped they'd want to protect her sister too.

One of the gate workers waved at her. "Exhaust's sounding bad, here to have that fixed?"

She parked the hovercraft near others like it and said, "Yes, please."

The gateworker added a small label to hers and told her the time it'd take.

"Thank you," she said, and added in a hug because that was the best she could do like this.

It wasn't possible to telepathically link with them. They had their own hivemind through which they talked, which they called a matrix and had to tap into, but that was only cause they had burned their modems once. She couldn't get into it even with a modem, but hoped one day she'd be able to connect to them the right way.

Until then, she'd have to talk with sounds.

She wandered around the base, where the Auton busied themselves with preparing missions, tended to their ships and sometimes just played together. They had their own games that she didn't understand yet.

Most faces were familiar, but she was looking for better than that.

Acrariel Y-921 was one of the first synths she'd met. He'd been very nice, so she passed everyone else and ignored questions.

He was in the middle of loading up a big crate. Since he struggled, she hopped onto the pile and pulled it up. After setting it down, she turned to his surprised face.

"Hey little one, what are you doing here?"

She swung her legs and tail over the edge. "I noticed I have a sister, can you help me find her?"

"Woah, hold it. Why would you even have a sister here?"

"No, not here. I noticed her thinking somewhere else."

He paused before he said. "Oh, telepathy. Sorry, we cannot help with that."

"I just thought a map would help."

"Let us catch up, what do you mean with sister? Another child like you?"

"I don't think she's a child like me. She's not in a city. She's somewhere cold and alone. I have to find her and I need a map of the stars. Father won't help and I'm still not allowed to put other people in the hivemind. They can't look for me on another planets, so I hope the Auton can."

"Do you even know what she looks like?"

Kirindi shook her head.

"But she is a mixture like you?"

Eager nodding.

"Very much like me, because she wasn't reaching out. We're attuned and I noticed her first because nobody is so similar to me."

"Is ... how much of a xenomorph is?"

She shrugged. "What are xenomorph like? Father calls them hardmeat and says they are parasites, little more. He only thinks about them as far as it matters to how I fight, doesn't like them otherwise."

"They're uh ... like insects? Do you know what bees are?"

"Some of the bugs I've seen around here are them, right?"

He pulled out a tablet and held it up. On screen was a big picture of a yellow and black bug on a flower, the kind that made homes with spit and chewed up stuff.

Eagerly she nodded. "Yes!"

"They work like that, except without males and more workers castes. Lots of drones, one breeder, except with xenomorph the breeder also commands. She also has a praetorian guard, we actually think you're part of those. Queen, guardians, and seekers. Which one would fit the one you feel?"

Hmmm, which indeed? Kirindi tried to reach out again into the void, but the presence was the same as always. Cold, alone, here, where is everyone else? She wasn't very smart, and didn't understand questions.

But she had wants, and Kirindi could notice a little of that if she approached it less as seeker and more as guardian. Odd, how the way she thought of it altering the resonance.

"I think she expects people to come to her. I think I'd like her to help with that."

"That would be a queen," he said, frowning. "Does she say anything about what you have to do?"

"Only that she doesn't want to be alone."

He relaxed. "You have to understand it worries us if there's a lot of very smart xenomorph around. They're already bad enough as they are. It's good if they're more like you. More human. I'll talk with the others, okay? We'll see what we can do."

Eagerly she nodded. "Thank you!"

"You're welcome. Give me a minute to go into the matrix."

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Anudjan wired onto the matrix to find it into utter turmoil. Kirindi had reported another chimera like herself. The big question now was whether this mean some lost egg, or whether someone had created another one like herself.

"She doesn't make sense," Persephone tuned in, overpowering other voices. "Her entire look is too calculated. We've never seen a chimera this symmetric unless excessively complimentary engineering is involved. And now she comes in here acting like a perfectly adjusted child while asking for help finding a queen like herself?"

"The hunter doesn't want it either, from what I can tell," Acrariel said. "I'm not even sure he knows she came here."

"I think he's hiding something. We should check out that hive he allegedly escaped from," Persephone said.

"I'm pretty sure the crater we saw from orbit wasn't a lie." Acrariel enforced that with the footage he'd recorded.

"Still. This is all suspicious, we can't pass over any potential for clues."

"Assuming he is hiding something, what would you do about it? Capture him?" Anudjan said. "They tend to commit suicide when that happens. She won't cooperate if we somehow get him dead. Everything indicates she's imprinted with him cast as father. He's doing the job for as far as we can tell, so unless we can convince he it's for the better, subtracting her won't be an option. Furthermore, ethically speaking it would be murder. If this yautja ever murdered anyone, we do not know of it, and he is not threatening anyone at the time."

"Murder is a staple of yautja culture," Persephone said. "He most likely has."

"And we wouldn't even know that it is a staple rather than criminals, or that their name is yautja, if not for him," Anudjan said. "Let us see how this unfolds without provocation. You may send a vessel to the planet if we can spare one."

Not to say he was thrilled with the hunter here.

They had found them in tracking down Ripley 8's missing eggs, on a broken ship that had just escaped from an infected hive. After ascertaining he was a bad blood of the variety that didn't care for the hunt, and checking in with the owner of this planet, they'd let him live here with the child.

It wasn't entirely altruistic. The notion the chimera girl might cooperate with them at some point appealed, though so far she appeared to be only interested in expanding her hive. Maybe getting someone else on the scene helped ween her off the hunter.

"Ask her if she knows what planet her own egg was found on."

They could send a scouting mission, if nothing else.

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Karga'te was almost done salt and storing the meat when the hovercraft all but crushed into the entrance.

Kirindi bounded into the cave and Karga'te braced himself. Sure enough, she launched onto his back, and next he had her arms around his head and tail around him.

Her gleamed face leaned down from above. "She's a queen! She's like me but a queen version!"

He plucked her off and set her down. "What the hell did you just get that idea?"

"Auton explained me about the hive and all the differences in it! We figured it out. I'm not the queen, but there were more than one bunch of eggs, and someone always ends up the queen. Since there's so few of us and the way she calls, she's a queen. They're okay with finding her."

Fucking dammit.

"Let's all go find her! Please?"

"No," Karga'te said. Had she forgotten what he'd said before?

"She's not going away from my head and she should be here. The Auton think it's safe, and they were right about you and me."

"I don't have a ship." This actually meant he didn't want to go aboard with the Auton again. They'd poked at him last time and he was pretty sure they'd considered termination.

"The Auton do! They just need you to tell them where the planet you found me was."

"Did they actually say that?"

"Well, they said they can't right now." She looked down. "But I thought they could schedule a visit if they knew where it was because they wanted to know where it was."

"I already told them I don't know. Never even been to the cockpit of that clan."

"But ... uh ... " Sometimes she had these spirals where she didn't quite keep up.

He sighed. "Why do you think they're asking you this when they already asked me?"

She shrugged.

"They don't trust us. And we shouldn't trust them. They're machines with the goal to preserve humankind. Both of us are threats to this, I as a yautja and you as a kainde amedha."

Her face fell. "They did talk a lot about how it's good I'm more human. They want to be sure she is too. And I'm sure! She's not like a xenomorph drone! She thinks like me. Exactly like me. She's lonely."

He stopped.

"Is this other even talking to you?"

"She's a little like me at the start. Hazy. But she wasn't born from a human much like I did. It'll take longer."

"I mean, can you tell what the Auton will see? A monster that attacks them in confusion?"

She shook her head.

"You can go hunt for traces, and you'll end up with nothing but trouble. That whole attitude, thinking you can just hurl yourself at the wide void of space and get somewhere ... stupid. Get rid of it. It's how I ended up with the badbloods."

Kirindi's curiosity edged into his mind. He wouldn't let anything loose of who he'd been looking for. A wall went up around his mind. She didn't push telepathically, but couldn't let it be either.

"You did meet me."

"That was the most ridiculous luck I ever had. There's no guarantee you'll run into someone friendly, even with that talent of yours."

"Okay ... "

She drooped off again and he hated leaving her like that. Still. He also hated to disrupt what little independent life he had at last, least of all synthetics with weird ideas about how to handle humanity. Maybe some time in the future, if he got a ship he could actually fly, they could do it without them. He'd keep an eye open on what arrived at the market.

If she at least could find her sibling, that might be good enough. Assuming that one could be trusted not to erupt too.

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