Spooker
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Grass Eaters 3 | 44 | Unacceptable
🕑 Added 2025-02-03 16:47:01 +0000 UTCSRNS My Other Ship, Spofke-7 (6 Ls)
POV: Sophie Garnier, Saturnian Resistance Navy (Ace of Clubs)
The Ace of Clubs brushed at the new scar on her cheek absentmindedly as she watched her minions escort the guest onto her bridge. Since the advancement of organic reconstruction technology in the early 21st century, scarring was entirely optional — and her wounds from her brush with death were trivial, but the scars had a nice aesthetic she enjoyed.
“What do you want from me— uh— Captain?” the guest asked her in his gruff voice.
“You can say it,” she replied with a grin. “Terrorist, Grass Eater, abomination. I’ve heard it all. A hundred light-years every direction, they’ve got a different slur for me in every system.”
“Where— where is this? Where are we?”
“BunnyLand, Amin. This… is BunnyLand,” the Ace said, pointing out the virtual window at the front of the bridge. “Look at it.”
“Oh, huh, that’s kind of cool, I guess.” Amin squinted at the barren, icy landscape on the monitor. “Well, I mean, I thought it’d be a little bit more—”
“This is the seventh planet in their outer system,” she clarified. “Not the one with life. The habitable one is the fourth planet. Spofke-4, the Reps call it… Don’t worry, we’re working on it.”
He took a deep breath before asking, “Why— why was I brought here?”
“You know who we are, Amin,” she said in her best friendly voice.
“Yeah, Red Zone Resistance. Look, I’m just a lowly ship engineer from Ceres. And the war’s over. We’re all friends now, right? I’m a nobody. Please… just let me go home.”
The Ace walked up and patted the nervous man on his shoulder. “Oh, Amin. I think you’re selling yourself way short here. You are so much more than just a regular engineer. The Resistance recognizes real talent and ambition — we really do. And I know you’ve got both of those.”
“Please, Captain,” he pleaded.
The Ace sighed. “Oh, don’t be such a fucking baby. Look, we’re not going to kill you. We just need your help on something. A little side project.”
“I’ll do— I’ll do what you ask. If you’ll promise to let me go.”
“Of course. Once you help us complete our project, we’ll put you back in the Rep lost-and-found at McMurdo. Unharmed, I promise. And we’ll pay you too, how nice is that?!”
Amin had the sense not to ask how much she was offering. “What— what do you need me to build?”
“What was that last project you worked on for the Reps at Ceres?” she asked lightly. She gestured to Felix standing next to her. “I forgot. Can you bring it up—”
Amin paled instantly. “Not that one. I can’t— I don’t have my tools and my research—”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got our own tools and computers here, even our own industrial fabricators and our own alien ships. It’s just reverse engineering right? Our people are very good at this kind of stuff. We were going to get there eventually. But for now, we just need you for a push in the right direction. A hint or two.”
“But— but— I can’t—”
She clasped his shoulder tightly. “Oh, Amin, Amin, Amin. Like you said, we’re all friends now, right? All on the same side. The human side. And the aliens, we’re fighting them out here for our very existence. You were there when they attacked Ceres! You know what they are! The enemy. And since we’re on the frontlines here, we deserve the very best that humanity can offer, don’t we?”
“Uh…”
“I asked you a question, Amin. We deserve the very best that humanity can offer, don’t we?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
System State Security HQ, Spofke-4
POV: Farsot, Znosian Dominion State Security (Position: Governor)
The predators were at it again.
They’d been roaming around the outer system for a few months now.
First, their fleet came in, trashed everything in Spofke that was armed. Then, some of them left. A few stayed behind — the ones that looked like they were of Znosian make, settling near the outer planets in the system. It was unfortunate that so many of them had gotten themselves captured.
Governor Farsot managed to get one of her unarmed relay ships out of the system, to talk to Znos, to call for help and get instructions since their FTL radios had been jammed. Znos had responded with uncharacteristic ambivalence. They promised to send help — eventually, but the State Security officer she talked to couldn’t commit to any specifics.
Farsot knew exactly what that meant. This was a border system, and the predators were loose in the interiors of the Dominion. They were on their own.
She noticed that the predators in Spofke now were different from how State Security intelligence described them. They didn’t bother to cover their tracks or hide their ships. Their radio discipline was lax, and they often taunted Znosians on the open radio. But physically, they mostly kept to themselves in the outer system. Farsot could only hope that whatever was going on in the Dominion, the Navy would sort it out and come exterminate these nuisances.
Nuisances that were now sending gadgets to her planet.
“What in the Prophecy is that?” she asked as the planetary defense sensors tracked one of the predators’ ominous-looking vessels.
“Looks like some kind of a… probe?” her attendant speculated. “We identified an array of instruments on it, and a transceiver.”
“What are they probing?” Farsot asked.
He shrugged. “Spofke-4, maybe? To gather information our planetary defenses. For a planetary invasion.”
“We have billions down here. The last intelligence burst from Znos said their total troop strength here is under a hundred thousand,” Farsot said. “They can’t invade us with those numbers, even if they are individually many times more effective than our estimates.”
“We saw on our telescopes that they were bringing more ships in.”
“Bah. Only a few. Our estimates have not changed significantly.”
He grunted without a response.
Farsot sighed. “Can we at least shoot the probe down?”
“Our long-range defenses were destroyed by the predators. But once that thing enters the outer atmosphere, we should be able to reach it. Is that—”
“Yes. Get the Marine chief. I want that thing gone as soon as it gets in range.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: Sophie Garnier, Saturnian Resistance Navy (Ace of Clubs)
“They took it out, Ace.”
“Did we gather the data we wanted?” she turned to Felix.
“Yeah. The short version is, their response time is shit. Looks like the Reps really did a number on their long range orbital defenses. Everything is ready.”
“Alright then. Let’s get this party started.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: Farsot, Znosian Dominion State Security (Position: Governor)
“There is a call for you, Governor.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s— it’s the predators from the outer system.”
“What did they, run out of salt?” Farsot snarled at her attendant. “What do the abominations want?”
“They wouldn’t say. They just jammed all wireless connections in our area and— and asked specifically to talk to you.”
“I’m not talking to the barbarians. They can’t be trusted.”
“They said that something bad would happen if we don’t talk to them,” her attendant added helpfully.
Farsot scoffed. “Bad? How bad?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t give details, but based on our analysts’ understanding of their body language, we think they implied it would involve a great deal of enjoyment on their end.”
“For the sake of the Prophecy,” she scowled. “Connect them to me.”
“Yes, Governor.”
The heavily-scarred face of the predator showed up on her console. For a predator, it was even uglier than usual.
“Hello, who am I speaking to?” it asked her.
She gave the predator her best mean mug. “I am Farsot. I am the governor of this star system. What do you want?”
“I am the Ace of Clubs of the Saturnian— Sirius People’s Navy, and I want a great deal of things, Farce.”
“My name is Farsot! You are pronouncing it incorrectly—”
It ignored her. “But we will start small, Farce. Today, we are going to begin the first round of what we call the BunnyLand negotiations.”
“What are we negotiating?” Farsot kept her scowl. “I would be interested if one of the items on the list is your head mounted on my wall.”
“Fascinating. You have the concept of trophies.”
Of course we do. We learned it from you disgusting predators.
It continued, “Well, that’s not on the table, but we did find six lost mining vessels near your asteroid dense belt.” The predator showed her all of its sharp teeth. Which… she knew in her head was its primitive way of expressing amusement, but in her heart, she felt every bit the hostility with her evolved understanding of civilized body language.
Farsot growled. “Yes, we have noticed their absence and the mining fluffle that sent them has taken responsibility. But you are the real responsible one. You will pay for this with your primitive existence.”
The predator shook its head. “Primitive? No, no, I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry. We haven’t eaten their crews. Yet. Actually, we have taken very good care of them. They are guests on our ship.”
“They are still alive?!” Farsot asked in disbelief. “We have already written them off and requisitioned additional mining crew from the hatchling pools.”
“Well, you can cancel your… requisition, because they are definitely still alive. We just need a little incentive to return them.”
Farsot narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?”
“We want to lease some real estate from you.”
Farsot frowned in confusion. “Use real words, barbarian.”
“You have a small island down there, in your big ocean. The big one.”
“We have thousands of small islands on our planet, you defect.”
“Defect— hah, good one. You’re a funny one, Farce. Here, I’ve got a picture of the island.”
A satellite photo showed up on her console, with alien markings superimposed over the familiar looking coastlines of Spofke-4.
“The island of Ginstvol?” Farsot checked her own datapad as her frown deepened. “It’s unoccupied and economically worthless. What do you need it for?”
“Coconut farm.”
“A what?”
“We’re going to build a fruit farm on it. Do you know what those words mean?” the predator asked condescendingly.
“We know what farms are, predator. Bah! Asking us what farms are. We have more farms in our Dominion than you have ships!”
“Sure you do, Farce. Sure you do. So… what do you say? A small, unoccupied island in the middle of an ocean. For the crews of six mining vessels.”
“Why would we want the crews back?” Farsot asked, frowning in confusion again. “I thought we were discussing the mining vessels.”
The predator seemed momentarily taken aback. “Uh… sure… yeah, you can have those back too.”
Farsot considered the trade, but not for very long. The predator was almost certainly lying about what they intended to use the island for, and the long-term costs to her planet’s security of having predators on its surface far outweighed whatever meager production value those mining vessels represented.
“The answer is no.”
The predator frowned. “Well, that’s too bad. We were really looking forward to our new coconut farms.”
“How about this? I will consider the deal if you jump out an airlock without a helmet?”
Rather than get angry, the predator let out a hearty predator laugh. “I like you, Farce. But let’s be a bit more specific here in our negotiation so we can get a little closer. Obviously, you’re not very interested in six mining vessels. How many mining vessels would you say an island of yours is worth?”
Farsot rolled her eyes and threw her arms wide. “A hundred.”
“A hundred?” the predator asked with a glint in its eyes. “Okay.”
“Wait… why? No! That’s not what I—”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
It took about two weeks for the predators to steal another ninety-four mining vessels from her star system. They were unnervingly efficient at it. She didn’t know how they kept getting away with it, but they did.
“When I said a hundred mining vessels, I didn’t mean you should go and take a hundred of ours!” Farsot fumed at the ugly face on her screen.
“You said you wanted a hundred, so we gathered a hundred for you. You aren’t going to go back on your word, are you, Farce?” the predator asked.
“We did not agree to a deal in the first place!”
“That’s too bad. But you do want your mining vessels back, right?”
“What do you really want from us, abomination?” Farsot asked miserably. “Why won’t you just go away?!”
“For starters, we want that planet of yours. It’s big and beautiful and habitable, and we want it. Hm… at least a large chunk of it. You can stay on some parts of it — a few fenced off reservations is our plan, but we’ll have the rest.”
Farsot’s jaw dropped. “You can’t do that! This is our planet, not yours!”
“The word on the grapevine is that you took it from another species you wiped out a few decades ago.”
Farsot grit her teeth at the annoying predator. What it said wasn’t going to change her mind, but she was more used to ordering around idiots and subordinates, not people who repeatedly challenged her understanding of Spofke’s planetary history. “So? It is ours now!”
“So… we’ll take it off you, the same way you took it off another species, starting with one island.”
“That— that is absolutely unacceptable!” she fumed.
The predator rolled its eyes. “Well, of course you’d say that now. Which is why we just want a very small piece of it first. Then, we’ll have another piece. And another piece. And when finally you give up your whole planet to us, you’ll wonder why you ever thought it was unfair in the first place.”
Farsot continued to gape at it. “Has that— that idiotic negotiating strategy ever worked?”
It bared its teeth at her. “In the history of our people? All the time. We even have a word for it: appeasement.”
“We have that word too!”
“And the beauty of it is… you can know it’s coming, and you’ll fall for it all the same.”
“No deal, barbarian.”
“We’ll see if you change your tune in a couple weeks.”
“There is no number of mining vessels you can steal that would compel us to give up our rightful place on this planet!” Farsot declared.
The predator shrugged. “Yeah, probably. But we’ve got other things to negotiate with. You’ll see in a bit, Farce.”
“Wait, no—”
Her attendant’s voice cut into his headset. “They’ve hung up, Governor.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Farsot did not sleep very well for the next week.
“Governor Farce— Farsot, the Marine chief is reporting something very concerning.”
“How many more mining ships did the Great Predators take this time?” she asked in annoyance.
“None, as far as we know. But one of the asteroids in the outer system is moving out of its regular orbit.”
“What?!”
“It appears there is some predator activity near it. They appear to be responsible for this.”
Farsot buried her face in her paws. “Of course! They have planetary tugs… Oh— oh no. Are they planning to throw the asteroid at our planet?”
“It appears… yes, Governor. Given its trajectory in the past couple hours, that appears to be their plan. Who do we do?”
“Contact the predators,” Farsot said in despair. “Their plan would ruin this planet! They can’t possibly be so insane as to go through with this.”
A few minutes later, her attendant got back to her. “They’re not answering the radio.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The predators made her wait two full days as the asteroid bore down on her planet. It wasn’t a very big one, only a few kilometers at its widest, but Farsot was no bred-illiterate. She knew what happened when those things made landfall from outer space.
The Marines on the surface could shoot down satellites and ships, but a whole asteroid like this? Perhaps they could deflect it, if it wasn’t being actively propelled. She had zero confidence they’d be able to stop it from landing, and after a couple meetings with the Marine chief, she was on the verge of despondence for the expected permanent productivity loss of the planet when the predators finally called her back.
The same predator’s face appeared on her screen. “My people said you’ve been calling for me, Farce. So… have you reconsidered your stance on leasing out your islands?”
Farsot ignored the question. “What are you doing with that asteroid?”
It played dumb. Of course it did. “Hm? Asteroid? Which one?”
“The one you are moving towards Spofke-4!”
“Yeah, which one? Or do you just mean the closest one?”
Her heart dropped. “There’s more than one— never mind. What do you plan to do with the asteroids?!”
“Oh… nothing in particular.”
Farsot looked into the camera sternly. “Really? Because it seems like you are planning on crashing it into our planet to kill lots of our people!”
The predator tilted its head. “Oh, huh, that is an interesting idea I hadn’t considered. Thanks for the suggestion, Governor Farce. We’ll have to explore—”
“Stop with these games! I know what you plan! I warn you, uncivilized predator: doing that could render this planet uninhabitable for decades, if not centuries! And that would make it useless to your short-sighted species!”
It did not flinch at this. Instead, it looked straight at the camera. “We did, in fact, consider that, Bun. You are right. We do want most of your planet intact for us. And yeah, if the asteroid touched down on one of your continents, it would kick up a lot of dust to block the star and start a new ice age down there or whatever — that’ll be a pain to clean up and terrible for the real estate value of our new neighborhood.”
Farsot tried to hide the triumph from her facial expression. “Like I said, it would take decades, or even centuries, before you would be—”
The predator interrupted her crowing with a dangerous glint in its eyes. “But then… we did some consulting with our local expertise — we’ve got a number of experts on your people, by the way. And they say that your people are, by nature, underground dwellers. That many of you live in tunnels and caves. That most of you aren’t bred to swim. An asteroid to the shallows near one of your coastlines, one big enough to generate some underwater earthquakes and big waves… all the disaster, and none of the costly cleanup.”
Farsot’s whiskers drooped.
That was exactly what one faction of Znosian schismatics did to another in the ancient history of the Dominion. Apparently one of the Grand Fleet apostates they’d captured had that esoteric piece of information. That made sense — when they set out for Sol, the Grand Fleet needed all the expertise they had on how best to exterminate the enemy’s home nest.
Which was also extremely unfortunate for her now.
“That probably won’t work,” she insisted, as if trying to convince herself more than the gleeful predator on her screen. “We’ve got— we’ve got proper irrigation and— we’ve got—”
“Want to see our computer modeling and casualty projections?”
“You— you’re— you’re—” she stuttered.
“See, Governor Farce… I believe the word you’re looking for is evil. But you don’t have that word in your own language, do you? Anyway… that island, whatever its name was. It’s just one island to start with, but since we’ve already gone to all this trouble, I’m afraid we’re going to have to insist on adding some sweeteners to the deal…”
Comments
Nicolae
and that is why you don't trade with terrorists.
TheArchivist
Tfw the SRN is no longer being a nuisance to their fellow human beings, and instead being an absolute menace to the buns Just sets the heartstrings aflutter…for a little while anyways
Ark
"you're horrible, you're an irredeemable monster!" "oh, oh, what took you so long, idiot."
