#centaurians

“Boss! Got another lead on one’a Ego’s kids!” Yondu spun his chair to face the Ravager who has called him. “Little squirt’s as blue as you,” the man added as he turned the monitor toward his captain.

“Little squirt,” Yondu snorted. “She's big enough t’spit in yer eye. That ain't little.” He stood up and walked over to the monitor, tilted it so he could look better. “Wonder where she's from.”

“The big man’s notes say...um…” the Ravager trailed off and tried to close down his screen before Yondu could see.

Yondu gave him a glare and opened the note file himself. “Centuari IV. Where is she now?” He felt his jaw tense and made an effort to purge the emotional reaction.

“Asteroid belt miners.” The Ravager shifted in his seat. “About four jumps from here.”

“Chart it, let’s go,” Yondu snapped and shoved away the monitor. Shoved away the gaunt little blue face. With her big red-brown eyes, full of distrust already. He stomped to his chair and threw himself into it, put his feet up and crossed his arms over his chest. “Move out!”

She looked like she was maybe fourteen. That stretched, all-elbows look of an early teenager not grown into her body yet. Her narrow stripe of peach fuzz looked like it might come in red, like his had. Or maybe dark brown. The picture has been taken from an angle that kept her proportions shrunken, but he could still tell she'd spent a good amount of her childhood hungry. Yondu tried to keep his face still, but there were too many memories hiding in her face.

“She got a name?” he finally called back to the Ravager behind him.

“It’s a mouthful.”

Yondu smiled to himself. “Tell me.”

“Oluwaseyi? She answers to a bunch of variations.”

With a slow nod, Yondu let himself stare into the middle distance. “Oluwaseyi.” The name rolled off his tongue in a way the Ravager hadn’t managed. He took in a long breath and let it out again, curling his tongue to follow the clicks and thrums of his birth language. “God made this.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the headrest of his chair. “Yeah. I suppose he did.”

***

Luway crouched against the wall of the cell. She was tired of being shuttled around like cargo. She wanted out. She shifted uncomfortably and stared out at the guards pacing in the hallway outside her cell. Nobody ever thought the skinny little blue girl was something to worry about. It had worked in her favor more than once.

She ran a hand over the fuzz of her crest, a self-comforting motion, then sidled up to the grate as the guards paced down to the opposite ends of the corridor. She’d have just enough time… She worked her lock picks out of her pouch and started on the lock, chewing her lip as she focused on aligning the tumblers properly. None of the guards seemed to notice what she was doing and Luway sighed in relief when the lock relaxed in her hands, finally clicking into place.

The guards were looking away. It was perfect. Luway toed open the door carefully and poked her head out, tracking one set of guards, then the other. When both were solidly out of sight, she lightly sprinted across the hall and leaped for the ventilation shaft she had been studying. With a quick flick of her knife blade, she unscrewed the face plate and writhed into the cramped space, pulling the plate closed behind her. Moving silently, she waited for the guards to pace back towards her cell, watched them cross and pause to stare at the open door, the empty cage. She grinned gleefully. Let them suck on that for a while.

The alarms went off and she sighed. The only bad part about waiting to watch the guards freak out over her empty cell was that it would be harder to lift a pod. She wriggled down the narrow passages of the ventilation system, far too narrow for a fully-grown adult of any intelligent species she knew. Someday, she’d miss being this small and skinny. When she spotted the branch that serviced the hangar bay, she contorted herself around the curve and scrabbled, almost getting stuck there in a half U-bend. She pulled herself free with a gasp and threw herself down the passage, hitting the exhaust grate with her shoulder and rolling out behind a stack of crates.

More guards pounded across the hangar bay’s dock and she watched them leave before she made a mad dash for one of the small service pods that would be less noticeable when missing than an escape pod. She scrambled inside, ripped open the console and started matching wires until the engine roared to life. With glee, she locked down the outside of the pod and steered it for the open docking port, screaming her way past the confused and alarmed port authorities. “Later, bitches!” she howled into an open comm broadcast and cranked the little pod’s engine to full throttle.

***

“Looks like they’re having trouble.”

Yondu blinked and craned his neck to look at the screens as the ship made the final jump and they decelerated outside of the asteroid field. He looked just in time to see the miners deploying a spray of small maintenance pods in pursuit of one of their own, which seemed to be almost skipping across the edges of the field. “So they are,” he grinned.

The comm unit ripped to life and a female voice howled, “Later, bitches!” as the little service pod managed its only available jump. That kind of jump would only bring her as far as the nearest system, but it was enough to set the miners’ ship in disarray.

“Can we get a fix on that jump?” he called back.

“Yeah, boss,” came the instant response. “Pluggin’ it now.”

“Get the landing grapple ready,” Yondu added as he leaned forward in his chair, rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got us a godling to catch.” The ship jerked its way through the short jump and instantly, the landing grapple flicked out to catch hold of the service pod. The pod sideslipped and Yondu heard the controller behind him curse. The grapple flicked out again, this time securing the pod in space. Almost immediately, that same voice screamed out in inarticulate rage over an open comms channel. “Easy there, honey,” Yondu chuckled as he keyed into the same channel. “We’re not gonna hurt’cha.”

The barrage of half-garbled language that came back made him pause with an amused set to his lips. She was fluent in Centaurian. More than fluent, she spoke with the Eastern dialect he remembered from his childhood. He waited until she ran out of clicks and chuffs, then said calmly in the same language, “I didn’t think my mother was that flexible.”

The silence over the comm was profound and Yondu grinned quietly to himself. He’d surprised her. Good. “You speak the home language,” she finally said, her voice low and awestruck.

“I do,” Yondu agreed. “Mind if we bring you aboard? That pod can’t have much fuel left after the jump.” The girl didn’t answer and he smiled. She wasn’t stupid, either. “Girlie, we’re takin’ you onboard, don’ matter what you say,”  he said in Common. “Don’t give us no trouble.” He nodded to the Ravager controlling the landing grapple and the man started drawing the pod into the bay.

“Got her,” the man announced and Yondu nodded.

“Keep her under guard, but for fuck’s sake, don’t shoot her.” He stood up from his command chair and strode out to the catwalks. When he reached the docking bay, he found a ring of Ravagers with their weapons pointed at the little service pod, which was steaming in the warm, humid air inside the ship. “Come out, come out!” he hollered and hammered one fist against the side of the pod. From inside, the girl’s voice echoed back in a string of clicking vulgarity and Yondu laughed openly. “I hear you in there, girlie, and I admire your spunk. But we still gotta pry you outta that tin can. We can do it hard or we can do it easy and I’m not much in the mood for hard right now.”

The pod went eerily silent and several of his men shuffled their feet nervously behind him. Yondu sighed and turned to Kraglin. “Get her out,” he said, waving a hand, then raised his voice again. “Girlie, we’re opening this thing like a can of freeze-packed fish. If you know what’s good for you--and I’m sure you do--you get back from that door and be ready to do what I tell you to.”

Kraglin stepped forward with the laser cutter and started working his way through the pod’s outer hull. Yondu stood back with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting. When Kraglin was about a third of the way finished, the door suddenly sprang open, colliding with his shoulder and knocking him aside. Someone behind Yondu howled and there was a smattering of gunfire before he shouted them down again, “Don’t you dare kill her! We need her alive!”

With the hatch open, they could see inside the cramped service pod; it appeared empty. Slowly, Yondu walked up to the entrance and peered inside. “C’mon, girlie. I know you’re in there.”

“Name’s not Girlie.” Her voice lashed out like a blade and Yondu staggered backwards as the blue dart of a girl sprang out of a narrow hiding place. She had a knife in either hand and swiped at his face, then collided with his chest and shinnied up him like a tree. Before he could even react, she had kicked off from his shoulders and vanished over the top of the pod while the more trigger-happy Ravagers blasted after her.

“I know.”

***

That simple phrase in her home language, her heart language made her freeze in the shelter of the pod, breathing hard. Luway turned her head slowly, chewing her lip hard. He was Centaurian, like her. He spoke her language, even her own dialect. He was from her tribe. “Oluwaseyi. God made this. Did God make you, little girl?”

She pressed her forehead against the condensation-damp hull of the pod. He said her name. In their language. With her mother’s accent. Tears she didn’t want to deal with started to creep down her face. She had been alone for so long. Luway wiped angrily at her face and tried to track where her next move would need to be, where she needed to go to hide.

And then he whistled.

Luway looked up to see a yaka arrow hanging in the air above her head, glowing faintly red. He didn’t know where she was, couldn’t see her. But he knew she’d know the arrow. Nervously, she licked her lips and focused, slowly pressing the high-octave whistle through her mouth and over her lips. The arrow rotated like the dial on a compass, pointing back toward the men in the docking bay. She heard the other Centaurian chuckle, then whistle again, correcting the direction of the arrow. “We know each other,” he said. “You and I. Come out. I promise, nothing bad will happen.”

Carefully, she worked her way on her belly back across the top of the pod until she could peep over at him. The arrow returned to him, settling into his hand and he put it away inside his jacket, grinning confidently. “Come down like a good girl,” he called to her. “Show these creeps what manners look like.”

At his words, Luway felt something like pride in her chest. She lifted her chin and swung her legs around, glided down off the side of the pod and stood in front of him. She stared him down, this Centaurian with his precision yaka arrow and his implanted control crest. He looked her up and down, then met her eyes, just as stubborn. Just as alone, in spite of all his men behind him. “You can call me Luway,” she said.

“Yondu,” he replied. He held out his hand and flicked the fingers back towards himself, palm up. “The knives, girl. Hand ‘em over.” She reversed the blades and handed them to him. “And turn out the pockets.” He nodded at her coveralls. She let her lips twitch, then did so, handing him the rations bars she had stolen from the pod’s life kit and a stun fist to deliver an electric shock with a punch. “All of ‘em.”

Luway raised her eyebrows and held her hands out to her sides, showing him the inverted coverall pockets. “I’m out.”

Yondu tilted his head with an amused scowl. “Don’ make me check myself.” With a huff, Luway unzipped the horizontal access on her coveralls and reached into her pouch, removed the lock picks and handed them over. Yondu turned the little roll of picks over in his hand with a grin. “You’ve been dealin’ with the singles too long, girlie. You thought I wouldn’t remember a mama-pouch?”

“I didn’t think you’d be gross enough to mention it in front of singles.” Luway put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “What do you want with me, anyway? You know my name, so it’s not just a retrieval on a stolen pod.”

“Yer daddy sent us to fetch you,” Yondu said as he pushed her lock picks into the pocket of his coat. “Said it’s time for his wayward hopper to come home.”

Luway scoffed. “Ain’t got no daddy. Whoever sent you’s been lying.”

“His money’s good anyway,” Yondu said with a shrug. “C’mon quiet, girl, and we’ll put you in a room instead of a cell.” When Luway quietly came to his side, there was a burble of nervous whispering from the crowd of Ravagers and Yondu glared them into silence. “I say she gets a room. Instead of a cell. For good behavior.” He tilted his head to glance down at Luway. “And you can keep it if you don’ give us no more trouble. Can you do that for me, girlie?”

“You think it’s fuckin’ likely?” she shot back without looking at him and Yondu threw his head back to laugh.