Midday at Fuckhat

Torch in hand, Rolxim welded another indigo sheet of metal to her left shin, of which she now only had one. Its color was a bit more shiny than the plating of her own aircraft - not that she would have recognized it if it were in the pile, admittedly.
It was a bored sort of invalidity, if even that. Never mind the baby steps: she could run and kick with the best of them by now. It wasn't even the newness or the shock of it. Her legs, quite simply, felt stolen. She had two of them now - she hadn't had two of them since her childhood - made of an indiscriminate alloy from busted war machines and Steckenburg infrastructure. There were those, and there were the "reinforcements" on the scruff of her neck, riding down her spine and locking to the right of her torso, branching up her arm and bracing one of her fingers (and replacing two others). She could imagine the rough, tapering laugh of Teleis after complaining to her: "That's all you have to gripe about? Now you're no better than the rest of us."
When she knew she wanted to be a pilot, she was taken by the blueprints of Teqeda, whose contraptions were piloted by stout Blauxolm, six legs apiece, four feet on different pedals and two on the floor for stability. No battle wound, conquest story, or masterful mutation inspired her more, and within a few moons she had already begun to sprout the new, young limbs. The others in her city teased her for how short she would be by comparison. Then she became a pilot - a damn good one - probably kicked a few of their asses for good measure, and maybe made fun of the ones who gave up their form for something even more ridiculous-looking than a short hexapod. Greden became a large, slimy thing under Aox, and could barely form coherent sentences without vomiting up a brainless spawn from their pores.
Greden was dead. This wasn't new, and it wasn't something she wasn't used to, but she was reminded of it now and then, and it would catch her off guard. She held the torch steady, flexing her metal fingers out of habit.
To no one's pleasure, it was bright and only mildly breezy, which meant it was hot enough for some to complain about the weather, cool enough for others to disagree, and sour enough for a deathmatch to break out using arguments about the weather as a pretense. This planet's sun at zenith, sure enough, Rolxim could hear at least three distinct scuffles from different areas of the camp. With all the business of the day, she predicted nobody would bother her with her project: she trusted the scraps of her own kind's technology more than the molten kitchen utensils that likely made up at least some percentage of her inorganic parts, and with no plans for another major conflict anytime soon, nobody would miss the undersides of some battered, salvaged flyers. Or, rather, nobody who would miss them would be around to pick a fight about it.
They called this place "Fuckhat," which might be considered more or less funny after knowing that it was short for "Fuck Hatexi, and fuck his stupid fucking invasion plan." Even when their numbers were great, very few actually had any direct allegiances to the man. He simply was the first to pick up where Aox left off, and in the frenzy of rage, sorrow, and shame that followed his death, it seemed like the right call to take up arms in honor of him. Everyone served Aox, or served someone who served Aox, and so on. Not just anyone could be worthy to take up his banner, but Hatexi leapt to the helm at that crucial moment - right before failure would be tolerated as an outcome, but still before having a coherent plan was a necessity.
Teleis, Mafaor, Aox. That was the chain of command she knew by heart. None of them would be stupid enough to attack a whole city during an infiltration mission. None of them would be stupid enough to watch a thousand-strong force go up in flames just to steal a machine, kill some fish, and ponder philosophy. "Fuckhat" indeed.
"Ghh. My work not good enough for you?"
Rolxim didn't bother looking up at the voice.
"Don't get pissy, doc. You made it work. I'm just making it my own."
The combat medic came nearer and grabbed her free leg. They squinted their oblong eye at it.
"Just pay attention to the dark grey patches here." They tapped at it with a pudgy finger.
"What is it?"
"Fuck if I know, but it melts fast. Pull from the blasters of the smallflies."
She grunted in acknowledgement. She piloted a normal-sized flyer, herself. An indigo one, matte finish, two main blasters (one with a sight, won from a deathmatch with some big-mouthed hotshot), six blinder charges, and a "secret weapon" of her own design, firing chunks of battery-heated metal from the left. A dispatch bay to drop off the specialized infiltrators, none of whom she knew the names of or cared about. Six pedals to control it all - she had no need to keep a solid footing from paces in the air. She knew the thing front to back because she trained for it. Adapted to it. She couldn't imagine dying anywhere but inside the cockpit.
She never imagined it dying before she did, somehow.
"There's a fire going," the doctor mentioned, finally letting go of their handiwork. "Lots of meat."
"Not hungry," she lied. Her stomach had been silently bubbling at her since morning. The trouble was that someone tried to revolt yesterday - a displeasure with their life in Fuckhat, shared by all, but overall an unsuccessful attempt at securing order. Apparently, those in charge - whoever the hell they were supposed to be - didn't like whatever plans were proposed. So there was a fight, and so there were deaths, and so there was no question about what - rather, who - made up today's food stock. The promise of a hot meal was pleasant. The fact that she might have known the person... less so.
That was also a lie. She had no problem with that either.
The medic shrugged and went on back to a particular crowd. Rolxim cautiously padded at the new plating on her leg. It was sturdy enough, and probably made up for the fact that a gridmask kitchen appliance might be there. She blew out the torch and gave a test kick, then meandered over to a tree stump to sit down by. The fire crackled audibly. She gave a glance to the roasting haunch suspended over it, then immediately fixed her gaze elsewhere. There was a fight breaking out between two standards, one sinking their uncountable fangs into the other's shoulder. A gruesome howl, the spill of thick blood, jeers from the invested onlookers. A thought flashed into her mind - a scene where she'd get up, crack their skulls together, and take on the both of them at the same time. She certainly could, after all.
"See? You fit right in." Teleis' voice, imagined. "Welcome back to being a standard."
She was barely a standard when she joined Teleis. A handful of Mafaor's most trusted came through her home and tried recruiting for his reserve, in theory. The reality was that they wouldn't say no to some followers of their own, and the best way to go about that was food - what it always seemed to come down to. Buffets of foreign creatures, freely offered gifts from the generous Mafaor loyalists. There would be more where those came from, at a price every young Blauxolm would have to pay at some point.
She wasn't interested. Or maybe she was interested a little - she definitely sampled the wares - but at that moment she was busy trying to wrestle free from Greden's heavy pin. Rolxim threw punch after punch at their greasy, laughing face, the nonstandard thick skin of their neck wobbling with each hit. She snarled, then spat at the ground to her right. A forfeit. A loss. Greden chuckled and lifted themself off from her, then yanked her to her feet - the sturdier two, though the rest had begun to grow in - without permission. She shrugged them off. Mafaor's vanguard pretended they didn't witness any of it, turning away before Rolxim could meet their eyes.
Then someone pushed her forward. She stumbled, but caught herself, then spun around while baring her fangs.
"You're thinking like a standard. You've got six legs, you gotta account for what that does to your core. Your balance is changing - learn it." That was the first of Teleis' many battle pointers she'd receive. Not that she made much use of it then, flailing herself right back into the ready arms of her challenger. Teleis stopped her mid-charge with just a spread palm to the stomach.
"You charge in when you're piloting. Hand-to-hand, you're better off playing defensive. You know how to throw?"
Her breath slowed from its frantic pace. "No," she eventually murmured.
"Let's fix that. Bend your knees. Get low. Fists up, make it look like you're gonna deck someone. That's it..."
She spent the rest of the evening learning how to toss Teleis, a standard about twice her own size, and ended the night lobbing her into the booth where Greden was about to pledge themself to Mafaor. She remembered her mentor's coarse laughter, fading near the end of her breath, as she rose from the splinters. That was the day that Rolxim chose her leader.
The spread of unknown meat, once just a backdrop to the scene, now enticed her more than the rest of the memory. She could kill for some real food right about now. As far west as one's legs could take them were some red-furred scampering things, if one knew where to look. Warm-blooded, too. She'd only had them a few times before, front-loaded to the moments before the war, but now between the risk of gridmask detection and annihilation by the wildlife (the more common occurrence - some "monsters" were not to be underestimated), the returns weren't so plentiful at Fuckhat. Even so, she'd settle for the stringy muscles of the pouncing critters, or even the salty swim bladders of the fish Hatexi seemed so hellbent on destroying. Her hunger rumbled at her, and she slapped her traitorous belly in response.
"Traitorous" was definitely the right word.
Rolxim was relieved when she dispatched the last of her flyer's freeloaders, even if firing indiscriminately at buildings wasn't her idea of a good time. She only caught a glimpse of him - the Negative, like the one Aox had allied with before his betrayal. He must have attacked, and she must have blacked out. She woke up to the scent of what she believed might be her next meal.
It was the smell of her own charring flesh.
Adrenaline, or the medics, or whatever leftover survivors there were carried her roaring self to what would become Fuckhat. Years trained by Teleis, who was devoted to Mafaor, who was indebted to Aox. Years spent developing her own six legs with the dreams of piloting something big. The legs were down to zero, and the "something big" was abandoned in the heart of a gridmask city. And all her stomach had to say about it was that whatever she left behind must've tasted great.
Her stomach was a traitor, and she had no stomach for traitors. The irony wasn't lost on her.
She snapped back to reality, watching one of the brawlers tumble sideways through the fire, kicking over the tainted meat. An uproar rose from the sidelines. Bone and rock projectiles flew in protest. The floored combatant growled, turned on his side, and spat. His eyes shifted from anger, to defeat, to a sort of scared embarrassment, noticing his tap-out saliva on the metallic foot of a bystander.
Rolxim decided she was in a good mood, and knocked him out with a kick to the skull. The move was met with a round of laughter and hollering, to which she added her own. Her own voice died down after a couple of seconds, with the voices of thirty or so others sounding more hollow than the day before. This is what they were without leadership - rowdy, without a plan, and itching to fight. The only part that hurt was the "without a plan" bit. Whatever was suggested last night, it must have been better than another day getting brain damage over the weather. But she wasn't a part of it, clearly, because she was still there by midday. That, or all the standards looked too much alike that even they couldn't tell each other apart.
When the crowd dispersed, she knelt over and picked up the last of the meat, then walked past the unofficial borders of Fuckhat. Doing most of the digging with her three metal fingers, she spent the rest of the afternoon widening a pit, undisturbed by anyone - Blauxolm, gridmask, monster. By night, it was large enough for her to drop the cooked limb inside and cover it with dirt. There was no reason to do any of this, she lied to herself.
"Fit right in," she mouthed.
It wasn't anybody she recognized.
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