She hit the ground with a sharp crack, the impact carrying through her carapace and into her shoulder. All around her voices barked and cheered.

"Get up, Chalan! Get up!"

She scrambled to her hands and knees, small hands gripping the mossy stone as she turned around just as the other Drevling charged her. She tried to dodge to the side, or duck under her much larger opponents blow, but she wasn't fast enough and was sent back staggering into the stone with a huff and another sharp crack.

"Chalan! Get up!"

"Pathetic."

"No daughter of mine-"

"Get up!"

Chalan leaped upright nearly bashing her head against the bunk above her listening to the groans of other aliens as they rolled from the beds and down onto the deck of the communal sleeping quarters. There were at least ten bunks in all squashed together into a space so tight she barely had enough room to think.

The ship was cramped even for the smaller aliens, but for Chalan, it was almost maddening.

She felt like she had been crammed inside a cramped smelly cave rather than a spaceship. She practically had to crawl to get out of the bunk unfolding herself to collapse onto the floor where the other aliens squealed and darted out of the way, scatting in all directions as she stood to brush herself off back hunched so she wouldn't slam her head against the ceiling.

Everyone stared at her in fear cowering back against the doors as she stalked past, out the doors and down the hallway forced to squeeze themselves tight against the wall so she would not run them over.

It was as well they did, because she didn't care if they got out of her way or not.

She could hear others whispering as she passed by, listened to their voices bouncing off the walls and ceiling until they reached her ears, with words like.

Barbarian.

War.

Drev.

She did her best to ignore them, though a part of her was annoyed and another part of her was almost thrilled listening to them whisper behind her back.

They were afraid of her, and that was something she had never experienced during her lifetime.

She pushed her way through the doors and into the cargo hold, where she was finally able to stand up; the ship was still rather cramped, and even the cargo bay wasn't much taller than she was, but at least she could stretch.

As she moved, blue sand crunched under her feet.

She had left the Tesraki, Felix, back at the market with a word of thanks and advice about how to survive in this strange new world. He told her about credits, and how they were the most important thing to have when you were on your own. It didn't matter where you were or what you were as long as you had credits.

For her troubles, she had been given a few of her own – enough to buy better translation equipment and still have enough left over for food – even after she bought her ticket off world.

As that was the capital planet of the GA – or so she was told – there were plenty of extravagant GA ships to choose from: imperial cruisers, short liners, and transport vessels. However, those with a GA seal generally required identification and a reason to be traveling; plus none of them were heading towards A136.

Her ride – and the only ship on the launch field going to her destination – was an old cramped heap of scrap. In fact, it was so old, that no one could even really say what model it was, and the inside barely had room to breathe properly.

Either way it had been cheap.

She could stand a little discomfort.

She shuffled through the boxes and cases in the cargo bay before coming upon her bag sitting in a sandy corner where she picked it up, dusted it off, and then headed towards the shuttle bay.

Lights were blinking red in the hallway, and a cue of other aliens had already started for the shuttle.

Chalan scooted forward along the floor in boredom as she watched the other small creatures scuttle before her.

She was stopped at the door to one shuttle and the Tesraki shook his head at her motioning to the posted weight limit on the wall.

She didn't know what their measurements meant, but she stepped back in annoyance, forced to wait until the end, where she and one other Tesraki were the only ones aboard the shuttle.

The little ball had no windows, so she couldn't tell what was happening as the door shut behind them. The buckles just barely fit over her arms, and didn't manage to go over her chest, so she was forced to content herself with gripping into the bars for dear life hoping they would experience no unexpected turbulence.

As it was, the first part of the flight was fine, and the only turbulence they experienced came from entering the atmosphere of the volatile planet where they were buffeted back and forth with great prejudice by an angry wind.

By the time the turbulence stopped her arms ached from holding on so tight.

The Tesraki across from her had its eyes closed, and seemed none to pleased with the way the shuttle had been conducted though he didn't say anything.

She guessed as much by the way it held it's ears against the top of its skull face pinched.

A soft metallic thud echoed through their compartment, and a green light flicked on over her head.

In response, she threw off the belts and stood as the door hissed open, and a dry musty wind blew directly into her face from the interior of yet another cavern.

She stepped out onto the floor, the Tesraki scuttling around her and away as she turned in a tight circle.

She hadn't assumed she would end up underground, though she supposed that would be prudent considering what she had heard about the surface of the planet. Even so she didn't like the idea of forty foot tall columns of fire roaring above them.

Looking around, the only colors she saw were rusty orange, brown and grey, metal rusted from years of overuse or run-off from the nightly rainstorms.

"This way everyone, this way! Pay your landing fee at the gate."

Chalan's eyes narrowed, she hadn't heard anything about a landing fee. Reaching down into her bag, she pulled out the credit chip and tapped it discreetly against her leg checking her balance.

She still didn't entirely understand money related to 'this glorious economy' of which Felix had spoken, but she knew enough to know that it was one of her only lifelines. Without it, she wouldn't be able to travel or eat, which was already difficult on this strange alien planet.

The line was growing shorter as the Tesraki passed on their credits at the fee gate and then continued on into the tunnel their voices echoing off the metal.

They were only a few feet away from the gate, and the last two Tesraki passed on their credits.

Finally it was Chalan's turn, and she too stepped up to the gate.

"Credits?" The Tesraki announced, barely looking up at her.

Chalan gripped her spear more tightly in her lower right hand, having slipped it from her bag on their way down the line, "I don't have any credits." She said softly, glancing to her right as the Tesraki waited impatiently behind her.

"No credits, no passage."

She let the spear slip past her fingers, until the spear-point peered out a good foot beyond her hand, "I do not have any credits." She repeated allowing the light to run up the bladed spearhead.

The light glittered in the Tesraki's eyes catching its attention as it looked down freezing as its vision fell on her weapon.

"You will let me pass." She said, still quiet.

The Tesraki's ears pressed back against its skull, but it nodded, and Chalan stepped past the line to the protest of the following Tesraki none too pleased to see her passing without payment.

She didn't care, leaving the gatekeeper to deal with the issue as she passed into the tunnel. Voices faded behind her and others quickly swelled to take their place. Noise Echoed inside the tunnel rushing down past the metal and washing over her like the water of a river.

She held her spear tight against her side as she continued forward following the sound and the shadows of others before her.

Forced to duck under a series of low hanging pipes, Chalan was beginning to feel a slow ache in her back.

Ever since leaving her own planet, she had been forced to squat, kneel, curl up and crawl on her elbows all to make it through tiny alien spaces, and it was slowly beginning to take a toll on her body.

She wondered how her brother had dealt with it, or, hopefully, continued to deal with it, considering as he was so much taller than she was, nearly as tall as their mother, and still growing by the time he had left.

It made her insides ache to think about him.

She wondered where he was, if he was ok, if he was still alive?

Her thoughts were cut off a moment later as a light reached her from the end of the tunnel. The echoes grew louder and louder, like that river from earlier had gushed downwards into a waterfall.

Shadows moved and roiled at the other end of the hallway, silhouettes blocking out the light.

She tried bracing herself for what was to come. She had been surprised enough in the last few days, that she assumed there was nothing more that could surprise her.

She was ready.

With her spear still held tightly in her hand – a measure of comfort as much as it was a means of protection—she stepped into the light.

And was immediately proven wrong.

She stood with her hands out to either side staring out at the absolutely massive cavern bustling with hundreds if not thousands of aliens. The cavern ceiling overhead was uneven and rough as any natural cavern might be, but the lines of electrical wire, and the wan yellow light cast from strange glass spheres were less than natural.

Beyond that, the cavern before her looked much like the market on Irus, but this one was bigger, and dirtier. The booths were made out of discarded scrap, the tarps were of dusty brown and grey canvas, and the merchants, or shopkeepers were covered from head to toe in greasy black oil and flecks of orange rust, likely from contact with the old metal that lay about this place.

It was a dirty and mean place with dark pooling shadows and darker people.

Chalan became suddenly aware of how much she stood out, and quickly pulled her cloak against her body. Unfortunately for her, the length of her cloak was only long enough to cover down to her knees leaving the blue of her legs open to viewing, and, in this lighting, she stood out like a patch of moss on volcanic stone.

She kept her head down hoping that there was enough shadow to cover her legs, though none of it really even mattered anyway.

She was already tall enough that she would stand out.

And there was no fixing that.

To think that, the one time in her life that she ever felt tall, would be the one time she wished she wasn't.

However, despite her paranoia, no one seemed to notice her as she passed into the crowd, and even if they did, it was generally to step out of her way and then continue going about their business.

Voices called from either side as the Tesraki attempted to persuade passersby into buying their merchandise.

Chalan ignored them, she would try to find food later, but for now, she needed to find where they kept the humans.

Of course, logically, she knew she wasn't likely to find the human she wanted in the midst of the 'slaves' but it was as good a place as any to start. Otherwise, she didn't know where to find the humans.

Obviously she had looked into making it to their home planet, but when she had asked about passage to Earth, they had looked at her like she was insane and then moved on quickly as if the mere suggestion of the idea was going to infect them with insane and inappropriate ideas.

So, as it turned out, there was no passage to Earth, or its single colony—Mars--, and no one she had asked after Felix had been willing to talk to her about the subject.

She had seen so many humans during the war that to just have them vanish like that seemed incredibly confusing to her.

She continued to push through the crowd wandering through the market and contemplating whether she was going to have to start searching up and down every alley.

She had made it towards the end of the cavern and was beginning to turn back when something caught her eye.

It was the entrance to another tunnel, though this one was much wider than the first, and had a set of strange metal tracks leading down into the dimness. The yellow orbs that lit the room were much brighter about this area bathing the front of the cavern in a sickly yellow glow.

Two guards stood to either side of the tunnel, and Chalan cringed as she looked at them.

They were, perhaps, the ugliest creatures she had ever seen. She wasn't even entirely sure how to describe them. There were so many legs and so many wiggling antennae, she could barely determine where they began and where they ended, and their carapace was an ugly muted brown, while their legs were either bright yellow or orange.

She would compare them to some of the corpse crawlers on her planet, but even those were less revolting since they were not covered, like these creatures, in a layer of gelatinous slime.

Just their presence made her less than inclined to approach, but the simple fact of them being there told her that the tunnel was her best bet, so she approached the creatures making her strides long and purposeful. Better to let them think that she belonged there.

As she approached, the guards drew up, their back six pairs of legs clicking against the ground while their upper three pairs tensed around their weapons.

Sharp mandibles clicked at the front of their mouths.

Chalan kept her eyes straight intending to go straight past them and into the cavern, but there seemed to be no such luck; the two figures cut in front to block her way, the antennae on their heads wiggling, shifting towards her as if trying to sense more about her.

She resisted the urge to pull back.

"You will halt, intruder."

"There are no Drev listed on the roster." The other added, their voices clipped and harsh like the clicking of their mandibles."

Chhalan looked down at them, a good head shorter than she was.

She lifted her silver spear, "You might want to look a little closer."

Unfortunately for her, the veiled threat did not affect these creatures like it had done to the Tesraki at the gate. Instead their mandibles clicked at her, and they shifted in their places, "Your weapons mean nothing. Now leave!"

Chalan sighed, a gust of hot air huffing from the holes at the base of her neck. Alright, if that wasn't going to work, she was going to have to try something else.

Wracking her brains, Chalan found herself well and truly out of ideas. She wasn't a negotiator, no Drev were, and she didn't have any money.

Her only option was to try again... but harder.

She lifted her spear as the two creatures hemmed in around her, "I will make this very simple for you. Either you let me through, or I will remove your legs one by one in the most painful way possible." They didn't seem impressed, so she leaned forward, "There are no guards here, and I doubt anyone will be interested in confronting me after what I willdo to you."

Still nothing.

She huffed in frustration.

"Very well."

She discarded the idea of trying to talk her way in; clearly she had proven to be incompetent at that, so she moved to the only other idea she could come up with, that other idea being the natural progression of her first two ideas.

Threaten subtly.

Threaten openly.

Execute threat.

The ugly creature on the left had no time to react before it was on the ground choking and sputtering legs flailing. The side of her spear, just under the bladed head was covered in a layer of slime.

Chalan didn't have time to be disgusted as she spun her spear in the other direction and drove the reverse point hard, but not too hard, into the creature's stomach. It keeled over clicking and whistling as it tried to breathe, and she stepped over their bodies.

Looking around, the little tiff had been so fast that no one seemed to have noticed, so she walked through the tunnel with impunity leaving the two guards curled up choking on the floor behind her marinating under the sallow light.

Ahead of her the tunnel narrowed for a moment before widening out into another, wide, natural cavern.

Unlike the other cave, the cavern before her now was smaller and less crowded, however the merchandise she saw here was of a far different kind.

Large cages surrounded the perimeter of the room attended by one to three figures. Most of them were Tesraki, but there were more than enough of those slimy bug creatures, and at least one or two of those strange gelatinous aliens, their names, of which, she could not have guessed.

The cages themselves ranged in size and shape, some of them made up of rusting metal bars while others were composed of strange blue glowing fields which sizzled and buzzed as she passed by.

Voices filled the cavern, though they were low and discrete.

The cage on her left-- made of those glowing blue fields-- was occupied by a creature she actually recognized.

The Rundi sat, its legs folded underneath its long neck bowed, beady black eyes closed.

It was thinner than the ones she remembered from the war, and its skin appeared to be charred black as if from soot or fire.

It was a difficult sight to stomach, even for her.

It was not the wounds that bothered her, so much as deep pitiful hopelessness that emanated from the creature, more of an animal than a sentient being. The sight disgusted Chalan, and she turned her head away.

It wasn't honorable; better to give a creature an honorable death with all their facilities intact than let them live a half-life, using their bodies until their minds cracked. Death was honorable, this was not, and the people who practiced it disgusted her just as much as looking in through those cages.

They may have been her enemy once, but she didn't hate her enemy. War was not emotional like that, it was just a matter of.... Business? Perhaps that was an apt word, the Tesraki, Felix, had used it, and what he said made some semblance of sense.

War was a transaction, though sometimes the rewards were abstract, and there were no emotions involved.

These creatures did not deserve their lot, though she supposed her point in being here was not to wax philosophical. She turned her head in a low arc scanning over the room and the cages they contained, looking for humans.

She did not see any, though there was a colorful menejeri of other creatures present, those of which she sometimes did not recognize.

Both sentient and non-sentient creatures were represented here, and she even accounted for a few animals from her own homeworld she had not expected to see. But just like their sentient counterparts, the animals looked worse for wear.

Again the sight disgusted her.

Finding no humans, she squared her shoulders and made her way towards a group of the slavers. It took almost everything she had to restrain herself from drawing her weapon and stabbing them through the throat to leave them choking on their own fluids, but killing them would do no good at a time like this.

She needed information not trouble, and she had already gone and attracted more attention to herself than she had originally intended.

They saw her approach and looked up beady black eyes gazing hungrily at her carapace.

She knew what they were thinking, and if she was lucky, they would be dumb enough to try, though she doubted it.

She wanted nothing more than to have an excuse to spear them through the throat.

Chalan stopped interrupting their conversation with impunity, "Do you have any humans?" She asked, causing a stirring of surprise from the group of slavers. When they finally managed to rid themselves of their surprise, the group broke out into fits of mirth, the Tesraki chirping and theSlimy creature gurgling heartily.

"No, but I wish I did." One of the Tesraki sighed looking down at his credit chip with a forlorn sigh.

The slimy creature continued to gurgle, "If we were lucky enough to have humans, then we wouldn't have to be here."

Chalan tilted her head, "And why is that? I hear that humans were sold here often."

More gurgling and chirping from around the circle, "Listen, beetle,." A Tesraki Began "a lot of rumors go around these parts. Yeah they've sold humans here once or twice, but that was a while ago, since then the market has dried up and moved on to new places."

Her eyes narrowed, "Beetle." She murmured, "I haven't heard that term since the war."

The Tesraki stepped back a bit, "I...."

"That was a human term for us." She said quietly stepping forward towards the Tesraki, "And only someone who was involved in the war, or who has been around humans recently would know it."

The Tesraki continued to scamper back, while his friends looked on in mild surprise, though they did not attempt to aid their flailing friend.

He backed himself against one of the cages – the cage that so happened to have a creature from her planet inside. A Gorehorn

"I... I." The Tesraki stammered.

Behind him, the six legged, hunch-backed beast began backing away, its thick shoulders and bright yellow carapace glittering in the wan light from above.

Chalan raised her spear, "So which was it, the slave trade, or the war?"

He continued to stammer and Chalan didn't bother to raise her eyes. There was a sudden thundering form behind the Tesraki, and then he was thrown violently, almost twenty feet as the Gorehorn slammed its plated head into the side of the bars.

Chalan stepped aside as the slaver went skidding across the ground leaving streaks of blood and clumped fur in its wake.

The small group of slavers stared at her with wide eyes and quivering hands as she approached again, spear still held at its relaxed low-ready position. The Tesraki lay on the ground moaning and keening with pain, it's back likely broken.

Trembling slightly, the group backed away from her as she approached.

"When was the last time they sold humans here?" She demanded ignoring the Tesraki's pitiful moans.

The group of slavers cowered together.

"N-no idea. M...m-most of us weren't even here when that began."

"Why not?"

"That was for the big guys, not the small timers, and that was when they were using them here."

Sunny tapped her spear against the cavern floor, "Using them here? What for?"

They shook their heads, "We-we don't know. All we know is there was a buyer who would pay.... Extreme prices for any human, didn't matter what kind. Then when the buyer left, the market dried up."

"Do you know where they went?"

More vigorous head shaking.

"Do you know where I can find more humans?'

They continued to shake their heads.

She stepped closer, allowing the spear to slip even further through her fingers giving her at least two feet of reach now.

They were practically on the floor now, while the rest of the room watched, "Do you know who would know?"

"Noctus! Noctus would know." Said the slimy one quivering like a bowl of coagulated blood.

"Noctus? And where can I find him?"

"He will be in the market, he sells things there, he sells everything. He owns half the planet, please just don't..." They glanced towards her spear and she lowered it to her side. From their pitiful quivering and mewling, she could tell that they wouldn't be of much use beyond what she had already discovered.

Now it was time to find this Noctus.

She turned in her place spinning her spear through one of her hands, eyes falling on the choking and coughing figure lying in the center of the room.

She walked over kneeling next to the creature surprised to find that its back wasn't broken like she had first assumed. It would probably be fine.

Chalan ignored the creature's moaning protests as she reached down and pulled the credit chip from its hand, tapping it against the palm of her hand to see the balance.

She frowned, it wasn't much, not as much as she had hoped, but it was still more than she had. She slipped the chip into her bag and then stood turning to the creature's companions, "It will live." She turned to glance down at the pitiful pile of fur and bone, "Maybe."

Now to find this Noctus.