Accidental Deity
“Uh, hey Ari?” comes Zai’d’s voice from the direction of the hangar door. He sounds unusually nervous, but she’s too busy to stop and discover what he’s broken this time.
“What?” she calls back, planting a foot against the shell of the drop ship she’s been disassembling all morning, and twisting off another damaged panel. The damn thing had been hauled in by frontline hunters - scavengers sanctioned by the Ministry to recover bits and bobs from battlefields and crash sites - and had nearly been scrapped as unrepairable, except the electrical, payload, and small-scale propulsion systems are in near-perfect condition.
“There’s a trooper here to talk to you.”
“Qei can answer whatever questions they have, I’m busy.”
“They asked for you specifically. Kinda.”
Ari drops the panel into the ‘to be melted down’ pile ten feet below her, and pushes off the edge of the frame to see him over the top of the drop ship. One of his hands is twisted in the front of his coveralls, and the bioluminescent stripes on his cheeks and neck have flushed a light yellow, the Marnish equivalent of human trepidation.
“What do you mean kinda?”
Zai’d glances back towards the bay doors like he’s afraid to be overheard; he takes a few steps closer, but drops his voice too low to be heard.
“Speak up, kid,” she urges, trying to keep patience with him. He’s only an apprentice, and a jumpy one at that. Comes with growing up in Ur’thenian territory.
“It’s a shock trooper,” he hisses.
Ari can’t keep her eyebrows from jumping. Shock troopers aren’t unheard of around Maragalen, but they’re rare; they’re the Ministry’s premier soldiers, the best of the best, and are kept pretty close to the front lines. Maragalen is as far from the fighting as can be while still technically being on the war front.
“What do they want?”
“To talk to you!” the kid insists, stripes bleeding indigo in irritation.
“Alright, alright, I’ll be there in a minute,” she agrees, sliding back into the pod. She stuffs the motherboard she’d scrapped earlier in her pocket, repair or replace to be determined under a microscope, along with a couple of switches and dials to be refabricated.
When she steps out onto the platform needed to reach the two-man bridge, Zai’d is gone and in his place is an Argathian. They’re a human-like species in that they are bipedal, and the same general shape, but they have a secondary pair of arms with four-fingered hands tipped in hard, black fingernails the resemble talons; their noses are nearly flat to their faces, and their eyes are wide and deep, and they tend to keep their hair long as it acts as a secondary sensory point that can detect electrical changes around them.
This Argathian is a muted blue-green, dark hair pulled back from a scar that’s carved a valley across their face. The badge on the breast of their environmental suit indicates they belong to a bash squad, the unofficial designation for two-to-four man units meant to work independently of the chain of command to break hold lines hard and fast. They’re trained to be one-man armies, and just their appearance in nearby space can send enemy units scrambling.
“Can I help you?”
“You are the mechanic that repairs the drop ships?”
“One of them,” Ari confirms.
They step further into the repair bay, circling the drop ship she’s been ripping up until they’re standing in front of the platform; Ari has to look down at them from her perch despite the average Argathian coming in at seven-and-a-half feet.
“What will this one say?” they ask. Their name badge reads ‘Luah’.
“What?”
Luah offers her their hand, and it takes a moment for Ari to realize they’re showing her a metal plate welded to the forearm of their suit, not asking to shake her hand. Etched into the plate, in wobbly, uneven strokes: THIS IS NOT YOUR GRAVE. STAND UP. KEEP FIGHTING. WHEN ALL ELSE IS LOST, THERE IS STILL YOU. KEEP FIGHTING.
A prayer offered in the early hours of the morning, carved between too much liquor and not nearly enough sleep, a blessing and beseechment to whoever ended up in the cockpit of a drop ship Ari had pieced back together. It had started years ago, after Calanheld had fallen, and too many soldiers were being shipped home in pieces, their little scrap world used as a way station to evacuate what little of the colony was left. After too many stories of soldiers who’d given up, who’d stopped fighting, who’d decided it wasn’t worth it to keep going.
Ari has carved thousands of words into cockpits and hulls, prayers etched into wings and paneling, blessings twisted into wiring and dials.
“We pray to you, you know?” they say.
“Huh?”
“We call you Ylephr Maheed, the Blessing, the Divine. We pull your words from crash sites and bombings, weld them to us, let them keep us safe.”
She can barely hear them for the pounding in her ears. Certainly she meant for the words to encourage, to remind them even at the worst times that surviving is what matters, that wanting to live isn’t wrong, isn’t unfair. That they are worth more than an ugly death on a battlefield lifetimes away from their homes, families, friends.
But divinity?
“I don’t understand,” Ari says. Because she doesn’t. She’s just a mechanic. She’s nothing but a mechanic.
Luah raises two of their hands to cup her face, reverent, loving, awed.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
r/WritingPrompts - [WP] You are a drop-pod mechanic. To pass the time, you write a short, encouraging message on the inside of every pod you repair. Today, a heavily scarred veteran comes looking for the person whose message kept him sane.
