Chapter Text
The thing that set Czonka Shipbuilding apart from most other Accord military contractors was the Assisted Augmentation Program, or AAP. If you'd submit to having your healthy limbs amputated and replaced with ports for prosthetics, you could easily earn half again what all the other workers were earning. Granted, you had to pay the company back for the medical expenses AND the initial off-duty prosthetics, but even with the garnished wages that was still a significant pay raise on an already relatively lucrative job that came with on-site housing.
“Just three more months, then I'm fuckin' outta here,” Csilla grunted as she walked along the surface of the ship in spacedock thanks to her legs' mag-locks.
“Can't believe you'd walk away just when you get to start keeping ALL your wages,” came a woman's voice from her helmet. “Anyway, you're on keel duty today. We've got a drone out there with the parts you'll need.”
“I'da quit months ago if the company wasn't gonna repossess my limbs for breach of contract if I left before my term was up,” Csilla peevishly replied. “They've been working us like dogs with all this overtime lately. Just how many ships does the Accord NEED to deal with some overgrown weeds anyway?”
“At least one more I guess,” her co-worker replied over the comms. “Come on, quit your belly-aching. You don't want your mouth to dry out before we get our fifteen minute break.”
Grumbling some more, Csilla came to a stop at the edge of where the last shift had been bolting hull plating onto the exterior frame and welding the edges together. A pallet drone was already in place with all the plates she'd need, each one bigger than her entire person, but between the lack of gravity in the spacedock and the company's prosthetics she could lift them one handed with the clamp on her left arm. She was about an hour into her shift when the alarms sounded.
“What the hell's going on?” she asked her supervisor over the helmet's comms.
“Hold that thought,” the voice on the other end of the line replied, sounding frantic, even panicked.
“NOW Lee! Do I need to come back inside?”
“Uhhh,” her supervisor said, the sound of people panicking clearly audible in the background. “I'm... Afraid there's no point. The airlocks have all been locked down for security reasons.”
“The hell you say,” Csilla said, starting to panic. “Tell me what's going on!”
“Csilla,” her supervisor said, worry plainly audible in her tone, “I... There's a ship approaching the station. A compact ship. Look behind you.”
With a sensation like ice creeping up her spine, Csilla slowly turned in place. The ship was close enough to see with the naked eye and only getting closer.
“Fuck my life,” she said to herself, then glanced around. Thinking fast, she crawled underneath the armored shell of the ship she was working on and pulled a sheet of plating over herself as the station's weapon batteries started to fire upon the approaching ship.
With her view of the conflict blocked, and no sound in space, her only indication of what was happening was the occasional tremor running through the half-finished and unmanned cruiser she'd been working on. When Lee ceased responding to her attempts to communicate, she tried cycling through the channels to communicate with the other workers who were out on shift with her, but then something that sounded like a pre-recorded message of affini propaganda started spamming all of the frequencies and she hastily shut it off. Going full radio silence, she hastily applied just enough welds for the sheet of armor to stay in place without being shaken loose by the tremors. Once that was done however, there was nothing to do but curl up in a ball and hope that the station's guns could repel the invaders, or at least buy time until the Navy came to the rescue.
In the meantime, she focused on getting her breathing under control with the same method her therapist had taught her for coping with anxiety attacks, in order to stretch out her oxygen reserves. No telling when she'd actually get the chance to go back inside. She tried not to think about the very real possibility that chance would never come. Once even that was done however, there was nothing left to distract her. Every now and then the skeletal metal structure she was entombed within would shake, but other than that she had nothing to track the passing of time but the tortuously slow digital clock on her helmet's HUD meant the time until her break. After the first four minutes, she tried not looking at it in the hopes that the time would pass faster that way, but she couldn't help glancing occasionally. Seven minutes. Twelve minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty-one minutes. Twenty-five.
She noticed the tremors had finally stopped around thirty-seven minutes into the attack. She hadn't been blown to bits yet, so she allowed herself to hope.
“Lee, please for the love of FUCK say something,” she pleaded, trying the comms again. When the speakers actually kicked in however, that hope was quickly quashed when she realized that the owner of this voice was not human.
“Well hello there,” an affini's voice responded. “I'm so relieved to have you on the line, we've been looking for you petal. Can you tell us where you are? We promise you're not in trouble and won't be harmed.”
Hastily closing the comm channel, Csilla started to hyperventilate. The sound of the comm link IMMEDIATELY reconnecting despite her efforts did not improve her emotional state.
“It's okay, we're here to help. Are you able to make it back to the airlocks? They should be unlocked now.”
“Go away,” the terran shouted, shutting down the comm link for a second time as she tried not to think about how much air she had left in her tank, or how close she'd been to finally leaving the company and their shit-tastic station.
It was hard to say how much time passed after that point as she tried to get her breathing under control again, but it couldn't have been very long before the titanium hull plating she'd been hiding under was peeled away like the plastic film on a cup of synthgurt. They must have pinpointed her comm signal!
Peering up at the affini looming over her like some sort of eldritch monster, she pointed her welding laser at the creature's face in the hope that it wouldn't like fire. The beam of light lasted barely two seconds before the creature's vines wrapped around her prosthetic and crushed it like an empty soda can, putting an end to the onslaught of photons. In a last ditch effort, she swung at the creature with the massive clamp on the end of her left prosthetic, slamming it in the head with enough force to crack one of its eyes. Then there was a sound like hissing gas, and some kind of fog started to infiltrate her suit from the emergency oxygen resupply port, and she lost consciousness.
Csilla roused slowly, vision swimming and hazy. Where was she?
She tried sitting up, but when nothing happened her eyes widened with what should have been alarm, but in her hazy state only got as far as concern.
“My arms, where are my arms?” she asked, twisting her head this way and that as she realized she was reclining on some kind of medical bed.
“I'm afraid I had to remove them, far too dangerous with all that heavy machinery, but I took some measurements and we should be able to compile you some compatible replacements in just a few minutes.”
Csilla froze, twisting her head towards the speaker. It was the affini who'd captured her, sitting on a chair next to her bed with its arms folded.
Strangely, even though she felt like she should be panicking, Csilla couldn't quite find it in herself to do so. Her mind felt like it was swimming through syrup, unable to muster the kind of anxious energy she'd need to have a proper freak out.
“I really shouldn't encourage such violence,” the affini said, tapping the cracked lens in its right eye socket, “But I am impressed. You should be pleased to know that I've decided to keep you.”
“What?” the terran asked in confusion.
“I'm happy to explain, but first we should go over introductions don't you think? My name is Teinn Akran, twentieth bloom. She/her pronouns, please. And you?”
The terran stared as she tried to parse the onslaught of words in her impaired state. As her vision swam back into focus and without the flood of fear-fueled adrenaline from earlier, she could actually get a good look at the xeno. Surprisingly humanoid, the most obvious thing was that she was short for an affini, though still looming over a mere terran even while seated. She was also built like a brick shit house, arms bulging with densely corded vines that mimicked the contours of a power lifter's sinews. Rugged featured too, to the extent that the alien volunteering her pronouns had probably saved her some embarrassment. Kinda reminiscent of the butches Csilla fawned over at lesbian bars back on her home planet, actually.
After considering the hulking xeno's question, she eventually replied “Go fuck yourself.”
Rather than take offense, the affini just seemed to smile as if watching something amusing.
“Well, that's alright, I mostly asked out of formality. I already looked up your file in the facility's employee registry.”
“You talk too much,” Csilla said wearily, barely keeping up with the onslaught of word salad. “Just get it over with and eat me.”
“You'll have to ask a lot nicer than that if that's what you're into, pet,” Teinn said smugly, standing up and leaning over the bed to stroke the terran's forehead. “We're gonna be heading back to my place in a bit, anything you want me to grab from your quarters first?”
“Trunk under the bed,” Csilla said, too tired to argue or even really think about what the xeno was saying. “Left most of the stuff I cared about in a storage facility back on Elzebb so it wouldn't get stolen from the dorms, but my clothes and my meds are in there.”
“Good girl,” the alien said in a comforting tone, and Csilla couldn't help responding to her two favorite words with a blush, regardless who it came from. “Sleep now. When you wake up you'll be in your new home.”
Something pricked her neck, and she sank back into the syrup.
The second time she woke up, her head felt clearer, as if she'd actually gotten some rest and whatever she'd been drugged with had cleared her system finally. She seemed to be laying on her side this time, atop a large, plush cushion laid across the floor. And someone was petting her head.
Looking up, she found herself looking at the affini from earlier, now sporting an eye patch over the lens she'd cracked during... During her...
During her capture. Oh.
“You're awake. Good. It's almost mealtime. After that we have some things to discuss.”
Instinctively, Csilla tried to scrabble away from the large alien, but something was wrong with her limbs. When she looked down, she saw what it was and yelped. Back at the spaceport, she'd had two sets of prosthetics. The heavy company-owned ones designed for zero-grav with all the tools that she wasn't allowed to take home, and some relatively simple ones for her personal use with human-shaped hands and feet, better suited to daily life. These... Weren't those, but they were plugged into the same ports located on her pelvic and shoulder sockets.
Paws. She had paws now. She flexed one experimentally and shuddered. It looked like these ones had intentionally been modeled at least somewhat on the ones she used when she was off the clock, in that they were made with white metals and polymers that when combined with the lack of a dust cover gave them a somewhat skeletal appearance. Rather than human anatomy though, these ones looked like they belonged to some manner of dog-like canine, complete with dull black rubber claws and paw pads.
“Ah, about that.”
The harmonic sound of Teinn's voice temporarily distracted her.
“Don't worry, if they're not to your liking we can personalize them more later, but after how distressed you seemed the last time you woke up I figured these would be better than nothing in the meantime.”
Csilla was too shocked to do more than numbly ask “Was there something wrong with the ones in my quarters?”
The plant's hand tussled her hair.
“Opposable thumbs are a privilege, not a right,” she said condescendingly. “Past experience tells me this will limit the amount of trouble you can get into until you're settled in. We can talk about giving you back your old ones once you've earned them.”
“And how do I go about that?” Csilla asked, still numb with stupefaction.
That was when the affini turned her one remaining eye upon her, which flashed with a vibrant display of shifting patterns and colors.
“Oh, nothing much. As long as you're a good girl for me, I think you'll find I can be very accommodating.”