Simple Pleasures

If there was one thing that remained constant when it came to Unggoy it was the smell; they always stank, whether they were dead or alive. Rehk sidestepped the flow of luminous blue blood as it spread in a pool around the fresh corpse of his shipmate, some wretch named Yapyap or Flipflip or a similar ridiculous moniker. He leaned gingerly over the spill and retrieved his shiv, yanking it with some difficulty out of the Unggoy’s neck.

“Teach you to steal from me,” he hissed, crest of deep crimson feathers fanning out as his skin flushed from the excitement. His left hand remained tightly clenched around a tiny data chip, a square wafer of human make -- his prize. “Teach anyone who steal from Rehk how it ends.”

It always ended thus: a body at his feet. The first time it had been within the walls of his own birthplace, his own brother on the floor. The second time it had been during training under the Covenant, the third during the stint in jail following that incident. And so it went. Always the stupid would covet his hard-won possessions, and always Rehk would make them pay for their folly.

No one would miss the Unggoy. No one ever cared about the fodder aboard the Penitence. No one would miss him if he turned up dead either, but Rehk had a knack for surviving. Survival often came with a price -- a gouged eye here, a broken bone there, a few missing digits -- but Rehk was good at bargaining with fate. Thus far he had always come out on top.

He cackled to himself, a discordant symphony of wheezing and clucking that echoed down the corridor as he turned his back on the scene and headed for the engine room. There were Lekgolo there, vulnerable without their gestalt forms, ripe for the feasting as long as he restrained himself to just a few. Nowhere near the level of their Covenant brethren, these; they were little more than slaves, kept to serve as maintenance on the Penitence.

As he entered the engine room he paused briefly and turned his head this way and that, searching for any sign of the resident Huragok. The outlandish beast was a prize possession for pirates, an invaluable asset, but it hated when Rehk would prey on the Lekgolo. Such complications were things Rehk made a habit of avoiding.

The trilling gasbag was nowhere to be found, which suited Rehk perfectly. And so he crouched over an aperture in the floor, peering down at the slender forms which slithered throughout the inner workings of the ship. He tensed, relaxed, waited… and snatched one of the worms just as it passed under him. The Lekgolo thrashed and flopped in a panic, a flurry which ended as Rehk took a bite out of the worm’s midsection.

He savored the taste, purred deep in the pit of his throat as he chewed into the carcass. No one would miss one worm.