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Grass Eaters 3 | 12 | Underground II
🕑 Added 2024-11-20 16:47:01 +0000 UTCGrantor City Outskirts, Grantor-3
POV: Torsad, Granti (Former Prisoner)
“What do want me to do?” the recently liberated prisoner, Torsad, asked.
“Do you still remember how to read?” Guinspiu asked as she reached into a sack next to her, rummaging through its items.
“Grass Eater or…?” Torsad asked.
“Which do you prefer?”
“I can still read Granti,” she said after a moment of hesitation.
Guinspiu took a clear plastic bag out of her sack with a self-satisfied grunt, and she handed it to Torsad.
Accepting it with some trepidation, Torsad peered into the baggie. Even in the dim light of the campfire, she could make out some of the lettering on the top page of the thin waterproof pamphlets. “Books? You want me to read books?!”
The elderly Granti shrugged. “There are pictures.”
She looked down at the characters on the book titles again, engaging the part of her brain that had been neglected for years in favor of desperate survival.
What in the world is a Red Zone War?
“I need to read all of these? Who even made these?!” she asked, feeling horribly out of depth already.
“That’s not important,” Guinspiu said as she waved a paw dismissively. “And yes, you do need to read all of it. Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time where you’re going.”
Torsad looked puzzled. “Plenty of time? Where am I going?”
“You can’t go back to the camp we rescued you from.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Where are you going to go then?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“We’ve got a place in mind for you, in Grantor City.” The elder rummaged in her bag some more.
Just how much… stuff is she carrying in that bag of hers?!
Guinspiu took out a laminated map, and she pointed at a claw near the eastern edge of the city. “Do you know this area?”
Torsad examined it, the layout of the city coming back to her in the back of her mind. “Yes, it’s all abandoned, I think. The Grass Eaters cleared everyone out of that sector last year.”
“Good. That’s as good a place to set up shop as any, then.”
“Set up shop?” Torsad asked. Then, remembering what the area was like, she objected half-heartedly, “But there may be Marines still patrolling in that part of the city.”
“Ah. Exactly.”
“Exactly?!”
“Do you have any objections to killing Grass Eaters? Lots of them?”
“Objections? Like morally? Or practically?”
“You’ll do, Torsad.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: Guinspiu, Granti (Head Councilor)
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous to send her out there without giving her one of your weapons?” Guinspiu asked, peering over at Mark’s tablet where he kept track of all the important information.
Mark shook his head. “Can’t give her a weapon. She’s not trained to use one, and giving her one without training is a recipe for making her over-confident. And an over-confident soldier is a dead one.”
“But…”
“She’ll be fine,” he cut her off gently. “She’s like thrice the size of any of those Znosian Marines.”
“They’re wearing power armor!”
“Not all day. And if she doesn’t figure it out… there are plenty more people back in that work camp.”
“That’s— that’s horrible!”
Mark shrugged. “It’s war, Head Councilor. And… we did save her life. If she succeeds here, we’ll give her a crew. Look at her file, she’s got management potential.”
You make it sound almost like a compliment.
Guinspiu gazed into the distance for a moment, then sighed and nodded. She looked back at his tablet and asked, “What does that red star next to her name mean?”
“It means they’re the ones who fight.”
“But the other ones… they don’t fight?”
Mark shook his head. “Not unless they need to. And we don’t need them to. There are more effective ways to win a war than just fighting.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Grantor City Work Camp 32, Grantor-3
POV: Icterael, Granti (Mechanic)
Priscae looked the new guy on the factory floor up and down. “You’ll do. What’s your name?”
“Icterael.”
“Nice to meet you, Icterael. I’m Priscae. Any experience with heavy machinery?”
“Not really.”
Priscae narrowed her eyes at him. “Not really, or none at all?”
“None at all,” he admitted.
“Good. You’re the perfect amount of useless to stay a while in this position then. Hold out your paw,” she instructed.
Icterael did as he was told. He’d gotten very good at that since the Grass Eater occupation began. The people who didn’t — they weren’t around anymore. Priscae pricked his outstretched paw with a small needle, and she collected some of his red blood into a transparent vial.
He grunted. “What’s that for?”
“Insurance,” she replied, sealing the bottle and placing it into an odd-looking device. It made a soft beep twice, and she stuffed both into her heavy-duty apron.
“Insurance for what?”
“For if you don’t do as you’re told.”
He shrugged. “I know how to follow instructions and keep my head down. What is this job about?”
“Quality assurance. We inspect things made by the Grass Eaters’ factories to make sure they were made correctly.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard.”
“It’s not.” As they walked, Priscae nodded at a four whiskers supervisor watching the busy activity from the catwalks above. She whispered out of the side of her snout, “Oh, by the way, as of two weeks ago, we’re an Underground shop. Hope you’re okay with that or—”
“What?!”
“The Grantor Underground. I’m sure you’ve heard of our activities recently—”
“Are you insane?!” he hissed at her. “That new crazy resistance organization? You’ll get me killed!”
“Don’t act stupid,” Priscae said, keeping a smile frozen on her face as a supervisor looked her way. “Grass Eaters are watching. If they ask, I’m training you. You’re one of us now.”
“I want no part of this madness. I’m going to report you,” Icterael said after a moment as they passed the Znosian guards. “As soon as my first shift’s over.”
“You can’t.”
“What do you mean I can’t? I get protein rations if I do,” Icterael said, his stomach already rumbling at the thought.
“You can’t. Or you murdered a three whiskers Marine officer a district over last week.”
“What?! No, I didn’t!” he said, shocked.
“Sure you did. In fact, if you try anything stupid, there will be skin tissue, fur, and blood all with your name on it. And it’ll be all over him.”
“What? How? No. You’re lying!”
Priscae took the vial of his collected blood out of her pocket and wiggled it at him. Understanding dawning on his face, he grabbed at the vial half-heartedly, but she snatched it out of his reach before concealing it all in her work uniform again.
“Doesn’t even matter. The genomic sequencer’s already transmitted it…” Priscae muttered. She looked back up at him, venom in her eyes. “If you screw around with us, our local State Security commissar will get an anonymous tip. They’ll come take your blood. And it’ll be a match with something they find on that dead Marine. And then they’ll torture you for information you don’t have for a couple days before they dump your body. They might not believe the tip, but it won’t matter at that point. And if you have family, then I feel bad for them too,” Priscae said coldly. “Betraying the Underground never ends well, and we always know.”
“What have you gotten me into, you… insane agitator?!” Icterael asked, fear apparent on his face.
“Oh, relax, Icterael. Don’t do anything stupid. It’s not like we do anything dangerous here.”
“I’ve heard of you people,” he whispered. “You blow up buildings and fight Grass Eaters and disappear collaborators—”
“Nothing like that here,” Priscae assured him. “Cell leader says our talents are more useful where we are. We just do our jobs… a little badly.”
“A little badly,” he repeated, his face skeptical.
They reached Priscae’s station. An assembly line rolled by, lined up with orange-painted metal boxes with an odd shine on them.
“What do you mean badly? And what are we supposed to do?” Icterael asked.
“These are self-sealing fuel tanks, for their Longclaws,” Priscae put her paw on one of them, patting it gently. “We check the coating to make sure it’s been properly applied.”
“So what’s this Underground thing then? Do you steal these for parts or what?”
Priscae looked around to check that no one else was watching, and handed him a roll of black adhesive tape. It looked just like any other roll.
He looked at the tool in his paw skeptically. “Tape?”
“Duct tape. Inside the fuel tanks, they’ve got a bunch of electronic sensors. That blue sensor on the side that moves up and down on the slider tells them how much fuel they have left. So,” Priscae said as she ripped a small piece of tape and taped up the bottom of the slider, “when we tape-seal the bottom around the twenty percent mark, the sensor stops there and never tells them when their Longclaws get below twenty percent fuel.”
As Priscae turned her handiwork over for him to inspect, Icterael peered into the fuel tank. “That’s… it?”
“That’s it.”
“What if… what if the Grass Eaters find out?” he asked in a slight whisper.
“Ah, see? That’s the beauty of this trick. They won’t. Because Znosian Longclaw crews are trained not to go under thirty percent fuel under normal circumstances. So… everything will seem fine unless they’re in desperate combat.”
“So it will only be a problem for them—”
“Yup. So it will only be a problem for them when it’s really a problem. When they’re… unlikely to be able to come back and report it if it becomes a noticeable issue on the battlefield. And if they do get to report it... it could have been anywhere along the chain. Or a real malfunction. And even if they look at it very carefully — well, I don’t know how long you plan to be doing this, but we’d probably both be long gone by then.”
Icterael scratched his head. “This seems… easy.”
“Oh, and we do really have to check the self-seal coating on the fuel tanks. Sometimes they send in defective ones on purpose to test us. But we’ll know if they do that ahead of time.”
“We will?”
“Yeah, one of our people in that department sends us a coded message when they do.”
“Okay, well, this doesn’t seem too bad then,” Icterael said slowly, weighing things on balance. He’d done way riskier things since the Grass Eater occupation started. Everyone had. He was more likely to get run over by an impatient Light Longclaw driver on the way to work than getting executed for doing… whatever this was.
“And… we get paid,” Priscae said, a little proudly.
“We do?!”
“Yup,” she replied, sneakily holding out half of a silver packet out of her apron to show him. “One protein packet a month. We get paid end of month.”
He shrugged. That wasn’t very much, but it was enough to survive and better than the nothing that the Grass Eaters paid him to be there. He got to not end up at a worse work site or — if he was really unlucky — a one-way work camp; being able to continue to breathe was the Grass Eaters’ idea of payment. “One protein packet? That’s not too bad. Where do your people get it—”
“Well, you get one protein packet a month. I get five,” she flashed him a small smile.
“Five protein packets?!” he asked, his eyes lighting up with jealousy. “A month?”
“Shhhh! Not so loud, you idiot.”
“How do I get more like you?” Icterael asked, a little more quietly this time.
“The easiest way: you recruit. You get the base salary packets of the people you recruit matched. I recruited a one-packet guy, a two-packet guy, and now I’ve recruited you. That’s four, plus my own, five.”
“One-packet? Two-packet?”
“That’s how important you are to the Underground,” Priscae explained. “We mess with the fuel tanks. Minor sabotage: one packet. One of the other guys I got, he’s in a munitions plant. That’s two-packets. Intelligence gathering: mostly three- or four-packets. I know of a female, eight-packets. I don’t know her name or real job, but she’s — like you said, blow up buildings, kill Grass Eaters, handle special tasks… that sort of stuff.”
“Ah.” Icterael thought for a moment and nodded slowly. It was a logical system, and the more he thought about it, the more he was on board with it. “Okay. That makes sense. More value, more packets.” He stopped nodding to scratch his head. “But wait… isn’t— isn’t that unsustainable? Like a— like a pyramid scheme?”
“It’s base salary, not total, silly,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And what are you, some kind of financial auditor? Just do your job, collect your one-packet, and don’t worry: you’ll always get paid right as long as you do as you’re told.”
“Ah. Okay. Hm… that makes sense. And eight-packets and above is… violence?”
“Something like that; you have to qualify though. They’ll talk to you if you do… So, are you thinking about going the eight-packets route? That’s more for me too, and I’ll make it worth your while before you go on a brave mission,” she winked seductively at him.
“Nah, tempting, but I’m good,” he said, chuckling at the offer.
Priscae did not seem too bothered. The occupation had been hard on everyone, and the grime on her… she must not have had a good rut in months.
Icterael continued after a while, “I have a littermate who works at a Grass Eater hatchling pool.”
Priscae nodded. “See? Now you’re thinking about it the right way. Good for you. Get them in on this. Hatchling pool’s two-packets, unless they’re in the special jobs. Like control room, overseer position, that kind of stuff.”
“He fixes the air conditioners in their computer room. Does that count?”
Priscae glanced at his face sharply and leaned in, putting a heavy paw on his shoulder. “Are you sure?”
He gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Yeah, he fixes air conditioners everywhere.”
“No, no, you need to be sure. Does he fix the air conditioners in the hatchling pool’s computer room specifically?”
He noticed that Priscae’s voice was suddenly both more urgent and excited than one should be at learning about his littermate’s boring IT job.
“Yes, he’s told me,” Icterael insisted. “He needed to get special permission. They’ve got big servers in there with all the blinking lights. The room’s very cold because they have to keep the machines all at the right temperature—”
“Which camp?” she asked.
“The one right next to the port. Why?”
Her voice was now almost hushed. “That… my friend, might be a twelve-packet job.”
Comments
AnAbsoluteVillain
Hope they are giving out sweet and sour, or General Tso so the Granti can wonder just as much as we do who this deliciously devious General is.
Tabby
And when we really get mean, we'll introduce cryptocurrency.
DeWhit
Ah, so that’s what the object fabricators are for…that’s rather ingenious
jrharper42
The enemy shall be defeated with the powers of Multi Level Marketing!
Valdis Trautmanis
That's quite the Maquis the TRO have going there
