#yzin is a statistical outlier and should not be counted

[eyeofnewtblog]

Space Orc family reunion 2

Yzin has never flown with her children; the last time she was with them, they were capable of gliding down from high points.

But this...it’s still gliding, and she feels a little bit like she’s catching up on lost time, but to be gliding through the air with her entire flock?

This will probably never happen again.

She was never prone to tricks and stunts as a hatchling, so she doesn’t have muscle memory to rely on, but she can still do circles.

Circle after circle, gaining speed she doesn’t necessarily want, but the gift of flight as the parachutes drift carefully down, bringing her flock to ground...there is the trill of happiness that she can make, but the human whoop does just as well. After so much time among them, it’s not particularly hard to mimic.

I would live this moment over again and again, Yzin thinks, as she circles and whoops and trills, her children circling after her around the parachutes. There are huge, nigh insurmountable problems to deal with once they touch the ground, but in the air?

In this moment, they are all together, free, flying and falling both, with nothing but wind to separate them.

I can fight the wind, Yzin thinks. If I can fight the wind, and show my children how, they can fight anything.

The ground comes up to meet them, and there are human farmers there to meet them.

“I’m so glad to make your aquaintace,” Yzin says, “But we’re being pursued by a Too’orlian force, so clearing the area might be a more favorable position.”

“Oh, we know all about it.” The farmer says, crossing his arms and grinning. “Y’all have had more air time than a monkey at the zoo. So, what help do you need?”

“I fucking love human behavior in the face of adversity.” Yzin sighs, before she starts the laundry list of help her flock needs.

[eyeofnewtblog]

Space Orc has to let things happen and he’s not happy

David eyed Mike across the table, carefully not looking at the proffered glass of whiskey.

“You know what your problem is, Mike?” David asked.

Mike raised his eyebrows, sipped whiskey from his own glass.

“I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you’re about to tell me,” Mike said as he set his glass back down onto the table.

“You’re problem,” David waved an impartial hand, “Is that you were always a sneaky ass politician, and you made the mistake of getting into soldiering and Sn’R, so now you think you have morals, when you really fucking don’t.”

David swiped the glass of whiskey off the table and downed the contents in a single large swallow.

“Fuck, man, at least leave one person I care about out of this whole goddamn mess!” David slammed the empty glass back onto the table.

“I would, if Debby was getting a degree in art or something. But she’s literally coming off of deployment with a degree in intergalactic treaties, on top of having an emotional investment in achieving my goals, and an extreme personal loyalty to both of us. It would literally be the epitome of stupidity to not bring her on.”

“Fuck you.” David said, grabbing the bottle and pouring himself another generous glass of whiskey.

“I’m afraid I must agree with this, David.” Yzin laid a careful wingtip against his hand, stilling David completely. “Debby would be an excellent addition to both mission parameters, as well as being available for multiple scenarios of both violence and administrative support to our endeavors. You also cannot ignore the emotional value that would be brought to our flock with the addition of her presence.”

The only movement David made for a long while was turning the full glass of whiskey in his fingers, eyes steady on Yzin the entire time.

“Yzin, I told you from the beginning. I don’t have another war in me. If we lose this, it’s gonna break me. I’m happy to send young idiots out, knowing they’re armed with everything I can teach ‘em, but I can’t do this again. Especially not with both my daughters on the line.”

Yzin rose from the table, and went to the cache of armaments hidden under the couch of their modest living quarters. The laser cannon could not be stored in her immediate reach, and it took her some time to find it, but she finally dragged it to David’s feet.

“Every time I have seen you go into combat, you have had this with you. You have no hope of using it on your own; the only time it has been fired in a live situation, has been while I am clinging to your back, guarding your six. I am the only being that has fired this weapon in live combat. What makes you think that I will not guard you now, David?”

David reached out both hands to Yzin, elbows braced on his knees. Yzin stepped away from the cannon and into the soft fold of his arms, folding her wings up and over so that the entirety of his head and shoulders were covered in the splay of her wings. His hands rested gently on her scarred, feathered rib cage, with her beak pressed along one side of his face and her neck bent oddly to accommodate being able to press her beak to his in a gesture of X’ining comfort.

“Your hatchlings will not see combat in this altercation, David. Your six is mine, and I will see no other it’s place.”

“You’ve got my word,” Mike said, raising his glass of whiskey.

David groped blindly for his own glass, his head still enveloped in mottled yellow wings, before he raised his own glass, holding it out for Mike to clink against.

[eyeofnewtblog]

Yzin is patient

Yzin has always been grateful for her biological disposition for waiting. Events fall clearly into one of two categories: they either require action, or waiting, and she is genetically predisposed to out-wait her predators. She is also highly skilled at calculating the probability of her actions consequences.

But here, and now, it is difficult to say which is happening. She is perched on David’s shoulder, listening to eight frequencies coming into the control center of the flagship, listening as the fleet nudges into position, listening as tens of thousands of lives ready themselves to confront a threat that she has trained them for. Not all of them, not personally; but she recognizes every officer voice hailing in.

David is standing with his feet planted, arms crossed, and his head just slightly angled so that his cheek is flush with her wing. She knows this pose, has her neck craned over his head so that they can watch the displays on opposite sides with out him turning.

“Rachel has the medical evacuations in place,” Yzin murmurs, too soft to carry to anything but David’s ear. She watches the displays as Rachel orders system shut downs, hiding the emergency response team ships in the asteroid belt, cutting them off from everything but basic life support and incoming signals.

“Debbie just lined up,” David murmurs back, but Yzin doesn’t dare to turn and watch the fading dots of Debbies ships disappearing into the magnetic fields of the systems first planet.

“Planet evacuations at twenty percent,” Yzin says in response.

“The poor?” David asks.

“Possibly. Major cities are more biologically diverse, but this planet was originally settled by humans. You know how farmers get about their cows.”

She can feel David’s mouth pull wide, into that hard, mean grin he gets sometimes, the feathers of her wing shifting with the pull of his facial muscles. He presses his nose into her as well, for one brief moment, as if he’s trying to hide his reaction.

There’s a crackle of static before a new transmission feed pops up, cutting across the fleet channels and hijacking the broadcast beacons.

Mary’s face is the only thing projecting from the signal, her dark curls lost at the edges of the capture field and the blue of her eyes faded from the glow of the projector, but her voice is hard and loud across the signal

“Calling all trucks, this here’s the Duck. We about to go a-huntin’ bear.”

The transmission clicked off, just as Mike’s face projected up on a private channel.

“What the ever loving fuck, Dave!”

“I left her with you!” David yelled back.

“Mike, please don’t think that I won’t peck out your eyes and liver once David is done with you.”

“You said she got you out, not ‘oh, hey, my unsupervised grandchild stole several ships, bombs, and miscellaneous other weapons in the process of rescuing me from slavery and slaughter, so you might want to treat her with slightly more caution than the average teenager,’ which would have been fucking helpful!”

“It was-” David tried.

“Shut the fuck up, I’m not done.” Mike snarled. “She hijacked a commercial freightliner shipping mining explosives, with an unregistered rouge AI, a Too’orlian pilot, and four Morin engineers! Where the fuck did she find Morin engineers in the TEN MINUTES I left her alone?”

“Um.” David said.

“That explains how they ended up in the pit with us,” Yzin said.

“YOU RESCUED THEM?” Mike screamed.

“What, I was supposed to leave the nearest people in my vicinity completely helpless?” David threw his hands out, jostling Yzin with the movement.

“THEY’RE BASICALLY SPACE DOGS, DAVE! We haven’t had any come through because their planet is still negotiating peace treaties with the Galactic Senate, and it’s taking ten years longer than it should because they pack bond the same way humans do! And you left your grandchildren alone with them!”

“I left my grandchildren alone with you,” David jabbed a threatening finger at the holo projection.

“Incoming!” Yzin screamed over both of them.

There was one commercial freighter, sans cargo, hauling at top speed for their position, with a Too’orlian fleet hot on their trail.

“Hold fire!” David yelled, his voice echoing across the lines.

Yzin watched the count, the freighter taking hit after hit, stray shots blasting off the wall of the defense line, until the freighter had passed the line.

“All ships, open fire,” Yzin ordered, not daring to shield her eyes from the flash of laser cannon as it bombarded the Too’orlian fleet at full strength and close range.