Date point: 9y 3m BV
Dear Journal,
I’m starting to question whether or not humans should be allowed in space.
Not that it wouldn’t be fun, but I don’t know if they’re ready for us.
I can’t change what happens though, so I should probably stop worrying about it.
Is that the responsible thing to do?
No, but since when have I done the responsible thing?
Maybe I should just get on with the story.
No I think we should talk a little longer . . . .
C’mon journal, let me go I have a story to tell.
But you don’t talk to me anymore! You’ve seemed so distant lately. Have you been cheating on me?
No, there’s no one else, I swear. It’s only you, and you’re all there ever will be. But can I please get to my story?
Okay, fine, tell your damn story. . . you’re sure there’s not a special calendator or pocket book out there, right?
(Sorry guys, she can be kind of possessive sometimes {I heard that!} (shit) {You’re literally dictating to me how can you think you can say those things without my noticing?} (I’m sorry, alright, would you just shut up?) {exCaUSE ME?!} (oops) {Did you just tell me to SHUT UP!?!} (fuck) {Do you think it’s alright to talk to me like that?} ( I wish ) {What?} (no) {That’s better. Just remember, I can leave you whenever I want} ( bitch ) {Hmm?} (love you honey) {You know it})
The reunion was warming and heartfelt. There were lots of tears and disgustingly wonderful, emotional neck hugs. I hate happy reunions just about as much as I hate long goodbyes, so my only lifeline was Severus. He looked like someone had just slaughtered a basket of puppies and kittens in front of his eyes and then bathed him in their blood while feeding him their entrails. Never before had I seen such a look of deep pain or hopelessness upon the face of a blue-giraffe, and as the happy reunion dragged on into its second consecutive minute, I’m pretty sure my face was starting to mirror his.
I’ll skip the rest, as some things are just too graphic to be appropriate to share, and get to the after-reunion good stuff. Once everyone had gotten over their disbelief that it was in fact me, and that I could actually talk to them, I decided to put the final nail in the coffin of the homecoming by changing the subject. “So, what was it you said you needed me for again? Also, ‘Lettuce Eater’? Really? Heck, my names were more imaginative, and-” I noticed Dink’s face was starting to lose its smile, and I mentally punched myself in the face for not realizing sooner while changing tack mid-sentence, “-were inferior in every way compared to the glorious title of Lettuce Eater. It is by far the best honorific I have ever had the pleasure to call my own.”
It worked, which didn’t say much about Dink’s intelligence. At least the little guy was happy. Mama saw what I had done – thank goodness – and gave me an even larger smile as she started to explain her difficulties with the station’s trading officials. As she continued explaining, my annoyance grew. Mama and friends were carrying needed vaccines. Who cared what ship they were carrying them in? Before she had even finished speaking I had decided upon a course of action; whether that means I’m decisive or just bad at giving much thought to my plans, I’ll never know – I would have needed to actually stop and think about it for a minute to figure out which it was.
I was already out of the door when Mama – seeing that she had gotten her point across – followed me out of the room. “Lettuce-eater, I wasn’t serious when I said I wanted you to do to the trading official what you did to the pirates. I was exaggerating. Please tell me what you’re going to do.”
“I’m going to give them the vaccines.”
“But I just spent the last (three minutes) explaining to you why they wouldn’t take them.”
“You just haven’t provided them with enough of an incentive. I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Eshal sat contentedly at his desk, happy with everything as it was; wanting nothing. Ha! If only. No, seriously, this job sucked. It was boring, ungratifying, and it didn’t pay nearly enough for the amount of time it required. That wasn’t to say he didn’t want it. It payed something, after all, and if he tried to get another job he might get one that actually required him to work. He knew he could have been replaced by a computer and a couple of lines of code, but the station was old, and management didn’t see the need to modify the tried and true system of centuries.
So really, who could blame him if he occasionally threw around the small amount of power his position afforded him? He didn’t have any control over any other aspects of his life, so he deserved some form of compensation, right? He never would have admitted the amount of joy it gave him to give others grief, and he took every opportunity presented to him. That was why he couldn’t resist when a group of Vzk’tk traders had tried to deliver a shipment of vaccines in an unregistered vessel. Yes, they’d come out of an area of space that didn’t see as many Dominion patrols as did the heavily traveled shipping lanes, and it was pretty obvious they weren’t the pirates everyone dreaded +Vzk’tk pirates? Please+, but Eshal didn’t care. He had power over them, and he would only relinquish that control until he was satisfied. It would probably be a while before such a convenient excuse appeared again.
So in a way, he guessed he was content, at the moment. That moment was shattered when a loud whump emanated from the entrance to his small office. Head whipping up, he saw a short, bipedal something trying to enter his office while carrying an entire stasis crate! Never mind that the crate was too large to fit through the door, this being was carrying it, in his arms, without a hover-pallet, and it was walking with it. Well, at the moment it was trying to find a way to fit it through the too-thin doorway. Eshal watched in amazement as the thing rotated the crate, testing every conceivable orientation. It was a futile effort – the crate, as with most shipping containers, was a near-perfect cube – but its ability to lift such an incredibly heavy object, albeit with some apparent difficulty, judging by the grunts, was astounding.
Muttering under its breath about . . . copulation? . . . the alarming little being unsheathed a fusion scythe and started cutting through his office’s doorframe! Considering the circumstances, especially its apparent desire to mate, Eshal thought himself completely justified in calling security. They had warned him last time that it was not their job to help him deal with annoyingly persistent customers, and that if he continued to call with such frequency they would disconnect his comm link. This, however, was an emergency.
“This is Station Security, what is your emergenc- . . . oh, it’s you. What do you want, Eshal?
“It’s going to kill me! It’s cutting through my door to fit the crate through and then it’s going to rape and murder me!”
A bored sigh issued over the speaker; the thing had almost finished its structural redesigning. “I’m not sending anyone down because of your awful PR skills, and making up crap like that isn’t going to work. How dumb do you think I am?”
Eshal was crying, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t end like this. Not crushed, sliced, and ravaged in his own office. He hadn’t even had lunch yet. “Please! Please just send someone down I’m not making this up! It’s almost through the door you have to hurry!”
“Nice try. Next time, come up with something more plausible, or at least understandable.” The link was cut. Eshal was doomed. Abandoned by the establishment at his moment of need. Having defeated the door, the monster of small stature advanced upon him, making slow, steady progress while burdened with its unimaginable weight. It raised the crate, preparing to throw it, and Eshal readied for the end. His desk cracked under the mass of the container, and the creature twisted it’s face into an expression which translated as apologetic.
“Oh shit, sorry man, didn’t know that would happen. Sorry about the door too, although I’m sure you would have had to have done that soon anyway. This isn’t even a large crate and it didn’t fit through your door. I made it big enough for one of these small ones, but you’re going to have to do all the work to make it big enough for the larger ones. Anyways, I hear there’s some kind of government compensation for delivering these vaccines, so I’ll be picking that up now. I’ve got the rest of the haul outside.”
Eshal looked through his newly widened entrance and saw a Ruibal standing next to several hover-pallets loaded with containers identical to the one sitting in the splintered remains of his workstation. He didn’t mind the loss of his desk, however, in light of the creatures words.
“Y-you’re just d-delivering these?”
“Yup, heard you were the trading official here, and that I had to register my goods with you, so I thought I’d save you the trouble of walking all the way down to the ship by bringing the shipment to you. No need to thank me.”
The absurdity of the situation had, somehow, increased. His fear had soured into anger, and he felt a rage unlike any before it. Now that this thing was no longer going to do the unspeakable to him, he felt the comfortable mantle of protection afforded by a government position settle back onto his shoulders, giving him his usual confidence.
“So you brought them here?! Are you daft!?! That’s not how this works at all! You’re supposed to unload them at one of the unloading bays, after you’ve cleared everything you’ve brought with me. I just need an inventory list and a trading license! How did you ever get such a license if you thought you were supposed to bring your wears here!? That requires a level of stupidity greater even than that of a Vzk-”
The thing picked the crate from the ground and dropped it on a previously unbroken portion of his desk, which soon mimicked the shattered state of its brother. The resulting cacophony startled Eshal back into silence. “Didn’t mean to scare you there, but I have a faulty translator – old model and all – and it tends to stop working when people start shouting. So, can I bring the rest of the crates in?” Without waiting for an answer it walked over the pallet and started ferrying crates from it to the space recently vacated by his desk.
Eshal couldn’t contain himself. “Stop! Stop stop stop! How are you this idiotic? What damage to your nervous system must you have sustained in order to think these actions are by any means reasonable?! Will you stop putting those things in my room!” The force of his final shout managed to startle even the simpleton from his mindless task of destruction, and he looked up with a wince of pain.
“Please don’t shout like that. It makes my translator do something funny which hurts my head. I’m pretty good at reading body language, even without the translator, and I can tell that you’re angry about something, though what it might be I haven’t the fuzziest, since you were shouting it. Tell you what, I have this inventory list here. If you’re willing to trust me on its contents, then I guess we can just use that rather than unloading everything here. Does that sound good?”
Eshal wanted to yell some more, but doing so only seemed to increase the creatures infuriating actions. He just wanted it gone, so decided to be diplomatic for the first time in his life. Taking several deep, steadying breaths, he managed a semblance of his usual calm. “Yes, an inventory list will suffice. You’re lucky you didn’t destroy my computer, although that’s the only thing that managed to survive.” He punched in the docking registration, and his computer displayed the appropriate information. His eyes narrowed.
“Hold on, these are the vaccines from that unregistered Vzk’tk ship! Why do you have them?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m friends with the captain – well, effectively she’s the captain – and she said she was having some problems unloading these, which is odd since they’re needed to save lives down on the planet we’re currently orbiting, so I said I’d take them off her hands, and here I am.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t allow these vaccines to be unloaded at this station. The Dominion doesn’t negotiate with pirates, and that ship is registered to a different owner, which would make trading with it an act comparable to piracy.”
The creature’s face fell, registering disappointment. Eshal had never enjoyed another being’s anguish as he did now, and he couldn’t help the smile that spread across his lips.
“Wow. That’s a shame. So these are effectively worthless?”
“Quite.”
“I guess there’s no point in hauling them all back, then. It was hard getting these all over here, even with Manny’s help.” Turning to its associate still waiting outside the room, it shouted, “Manthlel, dump the load. They’re worthless, and I don’t want them cluttering up the cargo bays.”
Eshal’s smile had started to slide from his face the moment the creature had started speaking, and any remnants quickly faded as the creature and his Ruibal friend began to depart, after depositing the crates directly in front of his door, blocking it completely. “Wait! You can’t leave these here!”
“Why not?” came the muffled reply on the other side of the barrier.
“Because! Propriety, decency, common sense . . . !” He racked his mind for more words, but it sat, determinedly uncooperative. The being broke the silence.
“I just destroyed your office and some of the surrounding wall. Do you really think that propriety and decency mean that much to me? Now, common sense, that one I follow, and right now it’s telling me that if these vaccines are worthless, then any further effort I expend on them is equally worthless. Why would I take them back to my ship when I’d just eject them out into space? They’re not worth my trying to find another buyer. What’s my motivation?”
Eshal tried to find one other than what his mind had finally offered up to him, but couldn’t think of a second. This nightmare had to end. Dejectedly, he started filling out the necessary forms. “A typographical error in the registration records isn’t really that much of a problem. Take these to the unloading bay and you’ll receive your payment there, minus the damage you’ve inflicted on my office.” Several crates shifted, creating a hole through which he could see the creature’s face. It smiled, which did nothing to improve his mood.
“Thanks! Pleasure meeting you.” The reloading process was remarkably quick, purely because of the creature’s prodigious strength. As they left the room, it turned to “Manthlel”, “See? I told you we could just bring them here.”
When we got back to the ship I knew something was wrong. Call it what you will: destiny, a sixth sense, the security officers talking to Mama in the main cargo bay, but something was off. I was scared I’d gotten my blue friends into trouble with my little stunt at the trading office, and I asked as soon as the guards left. “Is everything ok? If I got you guys in trouble for this I’ll catch up to them right now and tell them it was all my fault.”
“Why would you have gotten us in trouble? Wait, did you sell those vaccines? How?!”
I grinned, or perhaps grimaced, it was kind of a mix, “In a manner that may have gotten you in trouble.”
“Is someone dead?”
“Nope. Managed it without any of that this time.” I gave myself a congratulatory high-five, since none of the xenos out here could have done one with any real efficacy.
“Then we don’t need to stick around and find out if whatever you did will cause us grief. This is an odd stop from our usual route, and we’ve already loaded up what we’ll be taking back on our next run. The vaccines were the only matter left. We’ll unload them, then be on our way.”
I smiled, “Great. So if they weren’t here to arrest someone, why were you talking to security?”
“They wanted to know if we’d seen anything out of the ordinary during our route. Apparently ships taking the same route we do, which aren’t that many, have been disappearing for about the last (6 months). They wanted to know if we had any idea as to why that might be, and to give us warning if we were planning on heading back out that way. Speaking of which, are you planning on accompanying us?”
“My schedule is remarkably clear for the foreseeable remainder of my life, so I don’t see why not.”
“Excellent. Vtv will be overjoyed, although I can’t say Tnnxz will be too pleased.”
“I’m just going to assume through context clues that ‘Vitof’ is Dink and ‘Tinixzah’ is Severus.”
“Excuse me?”
I knew I had no reason to feel like this, but I was still embarrassed for some reason, “It’s not like I knew your real names, but I had to call you guys something in my head, so I just made them up as I went along.”
“And those names were ‘Dnnk’ and ‘Ssvrrs’? What was mine?”
I’m still planning on telling her, one of these days, just not any time soon. I quickly changed the subject, “I have my own ship now, and she’s majestic to watch let me tell you. She’s pretty small as well, to the point that it could fit in one of these cargo bays. Do you have any that are mostly empty?”
She noticed the subject change – she’d have to be dead or Dippy not to – but didn’t press the matter. “Unfortunately we do. Not that I’m sad that we’ll be able to transport your ship, but it would be nice to get back to runs where we’re at full capacity. Getting it stored wouldn’t be a problem.” She paused a moment before continuing, “You won’t . . . repeat . . . what you did the last time we left you in an empty cargo bay, right?”
“Nah, I have my own ship to splatter with blood now, but if you have some purple xeno rat-pigs that would be phenomenal! I haven’t had anything but dough spheres, calcium tablets, and water for longer than I care to remember.”
She looked at me with the expression I often associated with blue-giraffes, though it rarely graced her features. “I don’t know what you actually said, but the translator came up with the most confusing conglomeration of words somewhere in the middle of your sentence.”
“Oh, uh, do you have any of those rodents that are basically little fleshy water balloons full of bright orange blood and chicken-flavored bacon? They tend to splatter when you drop them from a decent height, or handle them with any real force.”
She looked a little on the queasy side, and I could tell she was seeing the same scene I was. “No, we don’t. The few Dizi rats Vtv kept for breeding purposes died when your Corti frontline injection wore off and the various diseases infested the ship. We found them while we were sanitizing it. From the looks of things, several went insane and killed themselves, a couple appeared to have melted, and as far as we can tell the last one spontaneously exploded. However, if you really do want them you could easily find some in the station.”
And that was how I ended up eating the most satisfying meal I’d had in a long time while sitting in my room on my ship that was inside of another ship. While I had been trying to find the nearest purple xeno rat-pig vendor, I’d chanced upon some kind of translucent tarp material similar to the stuff painters use to cover the floors of their work area. Remembering the mess I’d made last time, I bought two rolls. It was perhaps the single most brilliant moment of my life, because I had forgotten just how fragile these things were.
I’ve started wondering if these little guys are part of a hive mind, because the moment I picked one up he started squirming and twisting – in so much as a near-perfect sphere can twist – as though he knew what I had done to a previous box of his ancestors. I ended up dropping him, and you can guess what happened next. Sploosh, all over the plastic covered floor. I wasn’t covered, though, and my wonderfully stylish black and red cloths were doused in orange. That’s when I remembered that whole wrist-flick-skin-rip technique I’d figured out last time. I set to work, using my lava war scythe instead of a plasma conduit to cook the meat.
The four I’d placed aside for breeding purposes – apparently these guys bred like tribbles – I had foolishly put in a glass case. I looked up from my meal at one point to see 4 sets of 3 eyes peering at me with the creepiest combination of excrescence faced fear and wide-eyed derpiness. The worst part was they didn’t even move, or even breathe. They just huddled in the corner, staring at me with wide-eyed purple xeno rat-pig horror. I quickly covered their cage with my old clothes and tried to forget about them. Unfortunately, I’d also forgotten to warn Manthlel about my purchase and future consumption of the little guys.
I noticed his presence when a scream sounded from the doorway. I looked up, orange blood covering my hands and front, and saw him, face twisted in shock and horror, as he surveyed the carnage of my room. “Oops. Sorry Manny, I forgot to tell you I was going to do this, but it is it really all that bad?” Apparently it was. He refused to come out of his room for the rest of the meal, and the next few days our normally short conversations hit an all-time record for brevity. He got over it eventually, but I never again forgot to warn him when I was planning on supplementing my dough spheres.
The rest of the trip was actually kind of boring, really. After living on spaceships for more than half a year I knew how to move and be cautious of my abnormal strength. Gone were the fun-filled days when ripping doors off of their hinges, being treated like a pet, and too-small food portions where a common occurrence. I found myself living the life of a cargo trader, and let me tell you, unless some crazy hijinks went down, this life could have been outpaced by a glacier.
But I haven’t stopped narrating to you, Journal, so obviously something did happen to make my life a little more interesting. After about a month and a half into our journey, at which point I had started giving serious consideration to ripping up a door or playing purple xeno rat-pig egg-toss just to have something to do, the ship picked up a distress signal. Cliché, I know right, but this was different from your run-of-the-mill distress call because there was more than one. In fact, there were no less than thirteen automated distress signals all coming from the exact same area of space.
Our route, as I’ve said before, isn’t all that heavily traveled, so such a large convoy of ships out here is unheard of. Even Severus – what kind of name is Tinixzah? – wasn’t so cold-hearted that he was going to just waltz past the space equivalent of hurricane victims. He was even smart enough to enter the area with caution, scanning the surroundings twice, and having a course to the nearest Dominion outpost pre-set in the computer. That guy really was starting to learn.
The sight that greeted us upon our arrival to the area was eerie. Thirteen ships of all shapes and sizes silently drifting in space. Heck, one of those ships was almost the size of the old troopship. It was creepy enough to be the beginning of the rising action to a horror story, which meant I turned on my mental Horror-Character-Alert-System. You see, if I ever get into a situation that feels like it could make a horror movie, I instantly assume I’m in a horror movie, and therefore make sure I don’t start thinking like a horror movie character. It’s pretty simple, since it just means I use common sense, but when you’re in a horror movie, using common sense becomes nearly impossible. It basically boils down to carrying a weapon, not splitting up, looking up now and then, not giving away your position by shouting something when you hear a creepy noise, and blowing away anything that tries to pull a jump-scare. Some people have said that my HCAS is crazy, but they’re just jealous that I’m going to survive the zombie apocalypse.
I’m lucky I had turned on my HCAS right there and then, because Severus had already fallen prey to the mindset. “No response to our hails. Rccw, set us up to dock with that Tormix merchant cruiser.” My mental alarm went off.
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold that right there. Does it look like there’s anyone controlling that ship? It’s got a hole in its belly and is slowly spinning like a teenager after their first drink. If anyone’s still alive on that ship, they’re not in any condition I’d call healthy, and you just want to hook up with that and swap atmospheres? They’re big enough to still have one, even with that hull breach, so how do you know they didn’t all get the way they are right now because of some weird disease that isn’t normally filtered through life support systems, huh? You have a shuttle and two guys on your ship who’ve had previous military experience, and both possess either inborn abilities or a massive hulk-suit which make them super soldiers. Now, why are you not asking me and Manny if we’d be willing to take a short jump over there on a ship that isn’t also your child’s home and see why everything’s all messed up?”
I could see he was having a hard time following my reasoning, and I chose to blame that on this horror situation rather than the fact that he was a blue-giraffe. Eventually he got my point, I could almost see the light bulb – maybe candle in this instance – turn on, after which he promptly asked if Manny and I wouldn’t mind taking the Phantom and a couple of vacuum suits and seeing what the current status of that large ship – a “Tormix merchant cruiser – was. I said I’d be delighted, and Manny, who was equally as bored as I, quickly followed suit.
Even out here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, these xenos still preferred formal docking and undocking procedures to my “play-it-by-ear” method. The comm officer – I guess his name is “Rucwah”, but I call him Slippy – actually told me to let Manthlel do the unloading of the shuttle procedure after I kept telling him that all he had to do was open the cargo bay door and I’d do the rest from there. Why is that not good enough?
“Why is it so hard for you to just do it the formal way that everyone else does?” Manny asked as we were flying over to our slowly spinning query.
“Because being formal is boring and slows everything down. It’s easier and puts everyone on less of an edge when you’re not so uptight about everything.”
“How does following formalities place anyone close to a precipice?” He asked, giving me his usual look.
“One of these days I’ll answer one of your questions without using some saying that this translator doesn’t translate literally.”
“Maybe if your species didn’t find so many weird ways of saying simple things you wouldn’t have this problem.” He retorted, wryly.
“The day we give up our sayings will be a day of flying pigs, snowy hells, and Uncles and Aunts everywhere changing their names to Bob and Fanny.” I know Bob and Fanny don’t quite fit here, but I was trying to fit as many as I could into one sentence and they came to mind.
“Now you’re just making these up.” He protested.
“You’re just jealous of my circumlocution.”
He looked like he wanted to reply, but he had just finished docking us and we needed to get into our suits. I got a standard vacuum suit whereas Manny’s hulk-suit could apparently be fitted with a few extra pieces to make it vacuum-proof. What was worse, his looked cooler. Mine was this awful orange brown color. Inside the airlock, he showed me how to switch my radio on. The sound quality sucked, but I could still understand him.
He paused before opening the door. “Ready?”
“Yup.”
The interior of the ship was dark. We entered into what looked like a greeting area, with many alien decorative plants and other such niceties. The effect was somewhat ruined by the lack of lighting and the fact that it looked like a bomb had gone off. Maybe a tornado would be a better description, since there wasn’t any ash. Oh, yeah, the bodies kind of ruined it too. They were strewn across the floor in a haphazard arrangement. I’m no forensic scientist, though, so that’s about as much as their positioning told me. The condition of the bodies, however, reminded me of something I’d seen before, specifically the pirate blue-giraffes. These xenos looked like they’d died in a similarly horrific manner, rather than by kinetic pulses – which are still horrific, just not, you know, “I-gonna-rip-your-arms-out-of-their-sockets-wookie-style” kind of horrific.
The entire ship seemed to be like that, and this ship was big. Everywhere we went, we found the exact same carnage and chaos. Manthlel looked the same as he had when he’d seen me with the purple xeno rat-pigs, and I was pretty sure I looked similar. “Hunters couldn’t have done this.” He said after a while, “They make a mess, but they always take the bodies, or at least as many as they can carry. Any hunter ship brave enough to attack a vessel this large would have had storage to hold enough carcasses that we would have noticed fewer corpses than this.”
I decided to clear up one point before we moved on. “Yeah, I’ve heard about these ‘Hunters’ several times, like I should know what they are, but I’ve never asked. What’s their deal and why does everyone talk about them like they killed everyone’s grandma?”
He told me. I was silent for a while, more from shock than anything else. When I spoke, it was with a calm I didn’t feel. “Why are the Dominion and the Celzi having a pissing contest over lines drawn on a galaxy map when there’s essentially the embodiment of evil roaming about with impunity?”
“In the past there have been attempts at containing the Hunters, but their culture is about as close to nomadic as one can be while still having a home planet. If we fight them back and bottle them up the few we didn’t get would just set up somewhere else.”
I knew I was getting into some pretty deep moral water with what I was about to say next, but if ever something like this was justified, it was now. “Why bottle them up? Nearly all of them are cannibalistic murders from your description. Kill those fuckers to the point of near genocide. Spare the children and those who haven’t done anything wrong, if there are any aside from those too young to actively participate or know any better, but from the way you said it there are precious few of those if any.”
Manthlel gave me a wary look, and was that tinge of . . . horror? “I’m sorry, one of those words didn’t translate. What is ‘genocide’?”
Oh shit, this wasn’t going to be a fun conversation. “Uhmm, it’s about as evil an act as it gets, and honestly I feel dirty for even saying that, in this instance, it would be the thing to do, but really if the people you’re suggesting doing it to literally kill and eat other sapient beings as a way of living, heck, as being a social norm, then I think it might just be called for.”
“But what is it?” He asked, simultaneously sounding exasperated and trepidatious.
I took a deep breath. “It’s the purposeful and systematic extermination of a people group, or, in this case, an entire species.”
He stared at me in a shocked silence. No, that’s putting it lightly, he looked like he was trying to scream but nothing was coming out. I waited for the pin to drop. I guess it had a long way to go, because he stood like that for several minutes. I waited patiently, reminding myself that he hadn’t been introduced to the concept at a younger and more accepting age.
It gave me time to think, and now that I did take a moment, I suppose that would be a concept that most aliens had never encountered. Yeah, there was your rare bad apple of a xeno here and there, like those pirates, ant-lizards, and Dick, but those were seen as your psychopaths up here. On Earth they would be considered criminals for sure, but nothing outrageously abhorrent. Well, those ant-lizards had been pretty messed up, but if they were like other xenos then I bet that if they made their “super plague” they wouldn’t have really used it to completely purge the galaxy. Human psychopaths would probably jump at the opportunity to do something like that.
He eventually calmed down enough to choke out a question. “Why do you have a word for that?”
“Because we had a problem a while back with a guy who tried to do just that. Don’t worry though, everyone else thought he was a total nut-job and he ended up killing himself because he was afraid of what the rest of the world would do to him in punishment.” I probably should have stopped talking after the first sentence. I could practically see the difficult questions that my subsequent sentences had created, and I decided to nip this conversation in the bud. “Look, we’re on a ship strewn with bodies, maybe we could talk about this sometime else? I’m sorry I brought up the Hunters.”
He nodded his agreement, but he still looked like he was trying to scream.
We continued moving through the ship’s dark hallways, which was why it was a surprise to see light coming from a doorway. The room in question, once we got a look inside it, looked to be filled with every portable light source in the ship. The effect was rather blinding, so much so that I didn’t notice the figure in the middle of the room until it was too late.
The last thing I saw before I was thrown back against the far wall was a shadow moving faster than I’d seen any xeno move come flying out of the blinding light and hit me full on in the chest. When I overcame the stars crowding my vision, I could see our assailant wasn’t wearing any vacuum gear, so I tore my helmet off for the added air flow. The smell was horrendous, but I was having difficulty caring at the moment. I also got to see the hulk-suit in combat for the first time. Dang it worked well.
It was taking some serious hits from our attacker, but it was holding up remarkably well, and Manthlel fought with a ferocity I’d never seen before on the battlefield. He was using the anti-tank guns rather than the plasma one mounted on his back, and it was a good thing because our opponent was fast. Manny kept missing, and it was much better to have kinetic pulses slamming against the bulkheads than superheated plasma. I drew my lava scimitars and flung myself into the fray. Mystery attacker dodged my strikes, then came in hard with a kick, aiming for my wrist. Who kicks a wrist? Worse thing was, he nailed it, and my lava scimitar one flew enough meters away to make it useless. Also my wrist hurt like hell.
I still had one, and I was more wary this time. I advanced with caution for the first time since coming up here. My attacker had frozen still for some unknown reason, and Manthlel took the opportunity to blindside him with an anti-tank pulse to the shoulder. MA was flung against the wall, where he slid to the floor, unconscious, but still in one piece. I squinted through the still blinding light, trying to see his face, dreading what I would see. I guess Manthlel’s suit, being a showoff, helped him see through the glare better than I.
“That’s one of your kind,” he said after a moment.
“Another human?”
“How should I know what his name is?”
Eshal didn’t know what he had done, but for some reason his life had become far more exciting in the worse kind of way. Only two rictas ago (3 weeks) that horrible little monster of an unknown species had destroyed his office. Now the most frightening being he’d ever seen was standing over him while he lay in his bed, having been roughly awakened from a wonderfully happy, normal dream about not having his life endangered.
“You’re sure he mentioned the Vzk’tk ship?” The metallic monstrosity asked for the fourth time.
Eshal was crying again, but, as before, he didn’t care. “Yes I swear! Please don’t kill me!”
The thing laughed bitterly. “I’m not the one you should be afraid of. Be thankful you met that creature and are still alive to tell me about it. Can you tell me where they went?”
“If you let me get to my computer and I call up the necessary information.” He whimpered.
“Do it.”
Eshal scrambled out of bed and began frantically punching in buttons. He also pressed a button near his desk twice.
After a ri (minute) he had found the necessary information.
“They’ve taken trading route designation number 1174-653-8526-42. With their ship’s particular model of FTL drive the trip should take them about four ricta (6 weeks). That’s all I know or can find out I swear!”
It shifted behind his back, once again laughing that bitter laugh. “I believe you. Thank you for your cooperation.” Security, which thankfully had answered his silent call initiated by pressing the security button twice, stormed his quarters at that moment. Six uniformed beings burst through the door and pointed kinetic pulse pistols at the large figure behind him. “You’re coming with us. Make any threatening moves and you’ll lose a limb.”
Valur slowly turned to face the guards. It was a shame; they were only doing their jobs. Though he wasn’t looking at him, he spoke to the frightened little trading official. “I really wish you hadn’t made this necessary.”