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Grass Eaters | 23 | Inevitable I
🕑 Added 2024-03-11 16:47:00 +0000 UTCMFS Pesmod
“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,” Amelia counted out loud as Malgeir spacers filed into the sleek Terran shuttle in an orderly line. “Twenty-two. And full.”
Holding out her arm like a bar, she halted the final two Malgeir crew members in the queue, offering them a sympathetic half-smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll take the next one with you two.”
“I’m sure we can squeeze in the standing room—” Speinfoent started, looking at the expanse of unoccupied space left in the shuttle cargo hold.
“No can do, eager beaver,” the Terran admiral declared loudly, her voice echoing with authority. “Navy regulations state that transport shuttles may not be overloaded except in combat emergencies, and wanting to save yourself a seat at the open bar doesn’t make the cut.”
He shrugged in acquiescence. The Terran Navy does seem to take their rules and regulations seriously. He decided it’d be best not to anger their hosts by ignoring those as he usually did.
As the docking doors cycled and the shuttle left, Amelia leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Also, the three of us are going somewhere else.”
Grionc’s eyes narrowed, catching her cryptic tone. “Somewhere else?”
“Yup. It’s on Luna too, just not quite the place they’re going. It can be our little secret.”
Speinfoent scratched his snout, not quite catching on. “Oh, I thought it was because your shuttles can’t be overloaded.”
“Well, that part is true. Sorry that you’ll be missing the open bar, for now, but we have some important fleet business to talk about, you understand?”
“What about the rest of our crew and Ambassador Niblui?” Grionc questioned, concern flickering in his eyes. “They’ll realize we’re gone and ask about us.”
Amelia’s eyes twinkled with a sly smile. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Fleet Commander. They’re meeting with politicians and diplomats. I’m sure the excuse they’re giving her is much more convincing than the excuse I just fed you.”
---
The next shuttle came shortly after.
Carla arrived with it, her eyes instantly locking onto Amelia and her alien companions. She’d seen them in person before on the Pesmod, the first time, but they hadn’t seen her before since she had her helmet on.
“Alright, strap in, folks. If our inertial compensators kick the bucket, we at least want the forensics folks to be able to identify your bodies,” Amelia joked, snapping her seatbelt securely as Carla assisted Grionc and Speinfoent with their own unfamiliar restraints.
Grionc looked up nervously. “Does that often happen?” she asked over the din of the main engines warming up as Carla strapped herself in last.
“Not since we borrowed your designs for them,” Amelia replied, wincing. “Seriously, they used to fail about once every ten thousand flight hours in normal space, at various levels. More often after they’ve been abused in combat. Maintenance got expensive. And we even got pretty good at designing our engines to cut out right as they did. Then, Raytech gave up making their own, copied one of your designs, and not a single gravity-related incident since the gen-three upgrades.”
Grionc chuckled. “Sitting in one of your shuttles, I’m glad we were able to share that technology with you.”
“Me too,” Amelia grinned. “As what one might call a frequent flier, I prefer my ships to not turn me into strawberry jam with a single component failure.”
The shuttle fired its thrusters, beginning their breakneck descent toward the moon’s barren surface below.
Speinfoent peered at a wall monitor displaying Luna’s sprawling cities lighting up in the night. “This doesn’t look like a very habitable place.”
Carla chuckled. “No, it was just the closest thing we could get to from our home planet. You should see our naval base on Europa. This is like a five-star resort area compared to that.”
“Europa, huh?” Speinfoent rolled the exotic name around in his mouth.
“Naval Station Europa. It’s on another moon much like this one. Too small to have an atmosphere, and the radiation from Jupiter is so intense… it will turn your skin into crispy bacon in seconds if you step outside without protection. That’s why our base there is tucked away safely, kilometers under its icy shell.”
Speinfoent tilted his head, clearly intrigued. “No atmosphere and kilometers of ice? Was there a practical reason to settle that… Europa?”
“Not really,” Carla shrugged. “Many of humanity’s earliest scientific expeditions to space were to find signs of life. About twenty kilometers underneath the surface of Europa is a liquid ocean, which many biologists at the time thought would be highly suited to alien life.”
“Were they right?”
“As it turns out, yeah,” Carla answered. “They found some weird microbes there, and that was kind of a big deal. Wrote some papers, got some research funding, made a few careers. Anyway, they drilled a bunch of deep holes and built a few of these habitat bases in the ice. We moved in after they mostly lost interest in microbial aliens after… well… after we found you decades ago. That was… an even bigger deal.”
Amelia added, “Europa’s location is nice and remote, too. Nowadays, most of the colonists go to the more developed Ganymede. Naval Station Europa is hours away from any prying eyes, and if anyone goes knocking, we can just shoot first and ask questions later. As a bonus, the subsurface icy ocean is an excellent source of water for us to power our base computers and radiate their heat. But don’t worry, we aren’t going that far today. Just good old Luna.”
Zooming toward the moon’s gritty surface, the shuttle’s final descent thrusters roared to life, tempering its breakneck speed. With the finesse of a ballerina and the accuracy of a master archer, the shuttle nestled itself onto the landing pad, bathed in the soft, artificial glow of its search lights. The landing pad began to descend, taking the shuttle with it into an underground cavern. Moments later, a mammoth metallic lid slid over the entrance, sealing it shut.
“Airlock,” Carla pointed out as air rushed into the cavern from the oxygen generators below to fill the cavern. The hissing of the sounds outside got louder and louder as atmosphere flooded the exterior until they could hear the blaring siren accompanying the red blinking lights.
---
After a few minutes, the airlock ritual finally completed. The siren stopped, and the lights turned green. With a gentle swoosh, the shuttle door retracted, unveiling a fortified hallway that ended in a behemoth of a door.
Speinfoent couldn’t help himself. “I’ll bite. What’s behind the door?”
“It leads to an elevator that goes down to a facility we call the Outpost. It’s one of our most secure facilities,” Amelia explained.
They followed her into the secured hallway, then into the elevator, which descended even further to lead them to… Speinfoent counted at least eight key-locked doors before they stopped at a giant entranceway.
Unlike the others, this one had no visible keypad or biometric scanner.
Intrigued, he turned to Amelia and asked, “So how do we get into here?”
Amelia shot him a strange look. “In just a second, I’ll knock on the door. And when I do, a sphinx pops out—”
“A sphinx? Hold on. My translator didn’t quite catch it,” Speinfoent interrupted. “What’s a sphinx?”
Amelia clarified, “A sphinx. That’s a large ferocious animal with the head of a Terran, it’s got wings and the body of a… it’s a vicious flesh-eating apex predator. Anyway, the sphinx comes out, and gives you a riddle. If you get it right, it lets you in, and if you get it wrong, it tries to eat you for dinner.”
Speinfoent’s eyes widened. “Whoa, hold on. What kind of riddles are we talking about?”
Amelia let out a deep sigh. “There’s a few it usually goes through, and I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked most of those. But sometimes when it’s feeling cheeky, the sphinx likes to ask a completely new riddle. Then, you’ll just have to rely on your wits to survive its challenge. Don’t worry though, it probably won’t like the taste of Malgeir, so it will only bite one of you at most. And if you’re fast, you can discourage it with a solid punch to their nose, kind of like a shark.”
She drew back her fist to begin knocking, but Speinfoent leapt forward, seizing her arm with his furry paw. “Wait! But that’s a terrible security system! Why would you have something like that instead of—”
That’s when he caught sight of Carla and Grionc, who were both snickering quietly behind him. The moment he looked their way, they burst into uproarious laughter.
He released Amelia’s arm, his shoulders dropping. “That was a practical joke. I see. Haha. Hilarious.”
Grionc was bent over in laughter and holding onto Carla’s waist for support. “What kind of riddles are we talking bwahahaha!”
Carla gasped for air. “Look at your face, I thought you guys were the real apex predators compared to us, hahahaha!”
Amelia waited for Carla and Grionc to finally cease their laughter before grinning at the young tactical officer. “Sorry to disappoint: there is no sphinx. I think we hunted those to extinction or something. Or maybe they were mythological? Bah, I never paid attention in history class. Anyway, the real answer is: there’s always someone watching the door to the Outpost on the inside to open it for us. And if we aren’t who we say we are, they hit the big red button and activate a miniature glow-in-the-dark bomb that incinerates the entire facility so its contents are kept safe from any potential intruders.”
“Umm— wow— that— umm,” Grionc stopped laughing to stutter, “that is somehow even crazier than the sphinx idea.”
But entirely believable from you paranoid Grass Eaters, Speinfoent added silently in his head.
---
Inside, Mark gestured towards the open door with a dramatic flourish of his right arm. “Welcome to my humble adobe, Amelia, Carla, and our new Malgeir friends.”
Amelia replied, “Excited to be here as always, Director.”
Just then, a soft beep emanated from the wall-mounted security panel, confirming their identities and ensuring they weren’t disguised imposters rocking nano-masks.
Director Mark turned his attention to Speinfoent, his eyes twinkling mischievously. “Think fast! What walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?”
Speinfoent let out a forlorn sigh. “I’m never going to live this one down, am I?” the young Malgeir officer asked miserably.
Grinning, Mark clapped his hands together. “This is the most secure facility in the known galaxy, so… you’ll have a couple hours before the story leaks out.”
Grionc looked around. “What kinds of secrets do you keep here, if you don’t mind me asking.”
Mark leaned in, lowering his voice. “The kind we kill for. Mostly operational data on external threats, but sometimes threats can come from within. We make the Navy deal with those. For example, we had quite a scare a few years back when some insane terrorists stole a working copy of the FTL radio and wanted to use it to get in touch with the Bunnies, excuse me, the Znosians, and tell them where we are so they can come ‘liberate’ Sol.”
Amelia shook her head, wincing. “Yeah, we had to take care of those guys very publicly. Luckily nobody else got any more bright ideas about that.”
Changing gears, Mark added, “But enough about our shadowy endeavors… you’re here because we have one of few high-fidelity simulators in Sol that isn’t always booked out by Navy Staff College students. And it’s conveniently on Luna. You can show them the setup, Amelia.”
She led the group into a large conference room.
At the console, Amelia swiped her credentials once more, and she activated the voice controls for the room. It wasn’t as efficient as typing, but with the voice translators, at least the alien guests can more easily tell what she was doing. “Activate the starmap.”
Lights around the room focused on the center, where a map of Sol’s galactic neighborhood showed up in three dimensions. After staring at it for a few seconds, Grionc began to notice familiar binary and trinary star systems and constellations that she recognized.
Amelia continued, “Display information in both English and Malgeirish.”
Labels began appearing in Malgeirish, and Grionc saw the systems that made up the Malgeir domain: few untouched by war, many fallen or contested. She saw stars that called up the ache of loss in her memories, the former worlds of the Granti Alliance, now a series of massive concentration camps — and worse — run by the enemy. And the much smaller constellation of systems belonging to the Terran Republic, which were marked in deep blue.
She also saw systems that she’d only heard of, the Znosian Dominion, death for any outsiders who dare enter. Marked in red, hundreds and hundreds of them dominated the center of the map. From this view, it looked like a medical scan of a metastasized cancer, its scarlet tentacles growing and swallowing other systems in its path.
“Zoom in on the Malgeir star systems.”
The map zoomed in on the Malgeir territory marked in green, and Grionc saw more information populate the hologram. Fleet movements. Navy ships. Logistic supply chains. Civilian refugee ships. On some planets, she even saw weather information and entrenched Malgeir armies desperately holding on to dwindling territory in the face of countless waves of Znosian ground troops and air support.
Grionc’s brow furrowed. Her eyes narrowed. Something was wrong. The frontline… is not in the right place. She drew Amelia’s attention and pointed at various places on the map. “Your intelligence is off. We liberated Datsot a couple months now. And several of these systems are ours, not the Znosians’. And there seems to be incomplete information on many of our fleets.”
Speinfoent, who had been quietly observing, chimed in. “Yeah, and what happened to the Sixth Fleet? It’s not even on here.”
“Correct,” Amelia responded, her expression calm. “Because what you’re seeing isn’t a snapshot of the war as it is today. This is a projection of what we believe the war will look like about a year from now.”
She delved deeper into the grim forecast, pointing at each point of interest. “Datsot falls again. That has been inevitable from the beginning. Your valiant Sixth Fleet? It’s cornered in the system and obliterated, down to the last destroyer. Capitalizing on that loss, the Znosians then unleash a series of crippling strikes against key spaceyard facilities near your core worlds. The damage ends your ability to produce ships and resupply existing fleets. Simultaneously, the raids on your vulnerable supply line make rebuilding them a pipe dream.”
With a voice command, she updated the simulator, “Show what happens in two years.”
The frontline shifted. The cerulean blue representing the Malgeir territories faded, leaving vast swathes of crimson in its wake.
Amelia explained, “The fleets that do remain are isolated and then destroyed. Home Fleet is forced out, encircled, and revealed to be the paper tiger— the sham that it is. The Znosians land troops on Malgeiru unopposed except for a handful of outdated ground to space batteries. Unlike at Grantor, there is no evacuation this time because all escape routes to Schpriss Prime have been severed. The Malgeir Federation ceases to exist as a galactic power. The end.”
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Answer: humans (infants crawling, grow up walking, elderly using canes)
