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Grass Eaters | 5 | Dark Forest
🕑 Added 2024-03-05 00:01:34 +0000 UTCTRNS Mississippi
In the belly of the ship, behind multiple hardened alloy composites, was the flag suite of the Mississippi. As a reconnaissance ship based on a next-generation missile destroyer frame, it would not normally have space for such a flag suite, but the Mississippi was specially designed and allocated for alien surveillance operations. Such operations required the political sensitivity and flexibility that flag officers often carried aboard, so the designers of the spacecraft put in one with a map room, a conference space, and a fully shielded SCIF at great expense to the taxpayers of the Terran Republic.
Which is why it was unfortunate that they chose me to lead this task force, Amelia Waters sighed internally. Political sensitivity and flexibility were not two of her strong suits.
At 52, she was not the youngest Vice Admiral in history. Neither did she have the most experience compared to some of the battle-hardened spacers fighting pirates and terrorist operatives in the outer Sol system. But she did once lead a high-profile hostage rescue mission against a brutal Resistance cell in the Saturn Red Zone. The VIP later went on to be elected a Senator, one of only three hundred in the Republic, and her career magically skyrocketed from there.
Getting married to him later may also have helped.
He claimed to fall in love with her at first sight for her pretty blue eyes and flowing brunette hair, which still made her day whenever she thought about it, but Amelia personally thought her best qualities were probably her dry humor and brutal honesty. Her first words to him — as he would often tell the story at dinner parties — were: “we got the handsome egghead, let’s get the fuck outta here.”
Twenty years later, they were still married. He was enjoying retirement, on a balmy beach somewhere in District 170, and she was out here trying to make sure the spacers under her command didn’t give away the existence of their species to the intelligent alien races fighting just outside the Republic frontier in compliance of the so-called Prime Directive.
There had been a few close calls.
Her communications hardline chirped twice.
She picked it up immediately. “What’s going on up there? Did the Puppers finally finish search and rescue?”
“Almost, Admiral.” The respectful voice of her flag aide, Carla Bauernschmidt, came from the bridge line with not the slightest hint of the German accent owing to her birth and upbringing in District 19. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and a slim, athletic build enhanced by long periods of time in gravity training, the thirty-five-year-old Carla attracted eyes wherever she went. Which was usually next to Amelia.
Coordinating her busy schedule as her effective chief of staff was a thankless job. When Carla finished this rotation, Amelia promised herself, she would get Commander Bauernschmidt a nice cushy promotion to a Terra-side posting. Somewhere nice and warm. With a beach, maybe.
Carla continued her report. “They ran into some trouble with one of the prisoners they captured from a Znosian ship that they disabled in the furball. From the sounds of their unsecured radio, one of the Bunny Marines that they took prisoner from a hibernation pod got out on one of their ships. She managed to get into the vents and took out half the reactor engineering crew before their ship security shot her dead.”
“What a trainwreck,” Amelia sighed.
“There is… something else, Admiral. A complication.”
“There always is. What is it?”
“Our sensors have picked up a batch of Malgeir escape pods from one of their destroyed ships. Twenty-eight pods. We estimate about three hundred spacers alive in them total. They have some limited movement, but their communications must have been fried. We think the Malgeir Fleet’s sensors aren’t strong enough to pick up their radar signature. Captain Harris is requesting permission to—”
“No,” Amelia replied briskly.
“Uh… No?”
“No. Negative. Nein, Kommandantin Bauernschmidt.”
“Would you… like to hear Chuck’s request first?” Carla asked.
“He wants to rescue the stranded Puppers. Dock with the escape pods and bring them onboard. We have space, he says, we can adopt them. They won’t bite. Or call up their fleet commander, hey you’re missing a few of your spacers, just look over there. Or send one of our drones over, and have it spoof one of their transponder signals. Or some shenanigans like that. Did I get one of those right?”
Carla was quiet for a moment. “Yes. May I ask… why not?”
“I believe that was covered in the mission briefing, Commander,” Amelia replied. “Somewhere in between ‘this is the most important thing you have to remember’ and ‘you must never forget about what I just said’. The Prime Directive is absolute: we must not risk exposing our existence to alien civilizations. Those are our primary rules of engagement.”
“Yes, but— but what about our… duty to rescue, in deep space? Isn’t it our job to disobey illegal orders?” her aide asked emotionally.
Amelia sighed. “You know… you wouldn’t be the first defendant to try to pull that argument in Neu-Nuremburg. Didn’t work out for any of the other people either. The Prime Directive is held above all other laws and regulations, including the Basic Terran Rights, because it is about not the right of any one individual but the right of our entire species: the right to survive.”
“Amelia, these are living spacers— people. People just like us—” Carla pleaded desperately.
“I know,” Amelia said, staring down at her Republic uniform. Despite their spotless appearance, they felt… dirty on her. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling.
“All we have to do— one transponder flash from a stealth drone! They won’t even know it was us!”
“Any risk is unacceptable and illegal, and Protocol Two doesn’t apply here.”
“Three hundred living souls!” Carla cried. “Three hundred of them.”
“Oh Carla, it’s more than three hundred. Way more,” Amelia replied, quiet with melancholy. “All these years we’ve stood quietly by. These murderous Buns and their Dominion’s crusade of extermination… We’ve done nothing. And we will continue to do nothing. Because what we do out here… it is not up to us; it is what the people of the Terran Republic have decided.”
“All that is required for evil to succeed…” Carla quoted.
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“How are we supposed to— how do you cope with that?” the young commander asked, lightly sobbing.
Amelia thought for a moment. “Me? Heavy drinking, mostly. Wouldn’t recommend it.”
The line was quiet for a minute.
When Carla spoke again, she seemed to have calmed down slightly. “Is there— is there a point to what we do? What are we doing here? All we are doing is watching— watching the Malgeir get destroyed repeatedly. Doing nothing. It’s just… sad.”
Amelia continued to stare down at her uniform. “We should be sad… we should. A peaceful species of trillions — with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years of history. Of life. When they die, it should make an impact on the universe. They shouldn’t just quietly disappear. Somebody— somebody should feel sad and remember them… When a civilization falls in the dark forest, somebody should be there if only to hear the haunting sound it makes when it does…”
“And that’s what we are… just… witnesses to this great crime?”
“For now.”
---
Mobriul Pod #01
Graers struggled for breath in the escape pod. He couldn’t get the life support machine to switch on either, and he could already feel the stale air get thin. Every inhale was laborious, each exhalation sounding louder in the silence that enveloped the pod.
Nispio rasped, “Tactical Officer, I… don’t think…”
“Don’t talk, Captain. The air will last longer.”
“I don’t think they’re coming, Graers. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know that. I’m sure they’ve got a ship looking for us now.”
“It would— it would have been nice… to see us liberate Datsot.”
Graers shook his ears. “Hold on Nispio, and you’ll see it with your own eyes. I’ve been there. My mate’s family, their ancestors were from there once. The oceans, the grasslands, the forests, and even the northern tundra… they’re beautiful. Once we get out of here, we’ll—”
He leaned to his side to try to look out the window, but all he saw when he looked over was the slumped figure next to him, her chest still.
His lung labored for another ten minutes.
His vision grew dark.
It would have been nice to see us liberate Datsot.
Then, Graers exhaled one last time, and he too went still forever.
---
MNS Oengro
Grionc awoke to a call to her quarters in the middle of the “night”. There was no real night in space, but Malgeir ships followed a regular twenty-five-hour cycle synchronized to Malgeiru Standard Time. “Hello?”
The other voice on the line was Vastae. “Fleet Commander, there’s been an unexpected… development in our interrogation of the Grass Eater captives. It’s a little above my pay grade.”
“Above your paygrade, Alpha Leader?” Grionc asked, groggily rubbing her eyes with the back of her paw. She mumbled an incoherent question as she hurriedly threw on her uniform, then focused up. “Alright, alright. I’m coming up to the bridge now.”
Upon her entrance, Vastae, with his fur slightly ruffled, was intensely focused on his console playing and replaying a video.
“What seems to be the problem, Captain?”
His eyes still glued to the screen, Vastae shifted his body aside to show her. “This was one of the Znosian Marines we picked up from a captured transport today.” His paws delicately manipulated the controls, allowing the recording to unfold on the screen.
---
In the dimly lit room, the captive, bound by heavy restraints around all four of her petite paws slumped across from the interrogator. Her youthful features masked by fatigue, the Grass Eater seemed barely more than a teenager. If she weren’t here to take his home and kill his family, he might even be a little sympathetic to her state.
The interrogator leaned forward, mustering some pity on his face. “I understand you’ve agreed to answer some of our questions in return for kind treatment towards your squad. I trust you’ve been satisfied by our arrangements, Four Whiskers,” prompted the interrogator gently.
She nodded, eyes barely lifted. “Fine, but we are only shipboard security. I don’t know much about spaceship fighting or fleet logistics or whatever you Navy people want to know.”
“That’s alright,” said the interrogator. “Let’s start with your name and where you’re from.”
She hesitated but told him her name, rank, and reluctantly she began to tell him where they were from. Her team was dispatched to Datsot, conquered days before her team’s arrival, to serve as a security buffer while their fleet attended to some undisclosed business in a distant sector.
She repeatedly clarified that her team had not been involved in any actual fighting yet. The interrogator knew from his experience that was something every captured prisoner would carefully repeat.
“Were you issued new equipment during your last resupply?” he asked.
She shook her head, her voice a mere whisper. “No equipment… but we did receive some new mandatory training.”
“New training for?” pressed the interrogator.
She sighed. “Like I said, our duties are inside the ship. Close quarters fighting. Boarding. There was a new ship model, and we had to… do boarding drills on it. The squad figured we must not have a blueprint of the inside because they made us run it dozens of times. Each time it was a completely different arrangement inside. It was… tricky because there were no visible bridges from the outside, so we had to blow our way in and fight our way through the interior of the ship each time instead of just coming in through the bridge window like we normally do for your ships.”
The interrogator leaned closer. “A different species’ ship?”
Her voice edged with a mixture of fear and exhaustion. “No doubt about it. Rumor is it’s from your… guardians.”
“You’re referring to the—” began the interrogator.
“The ones… that hide in the dark, even from you. Some call them phantoms,” interrupted the captive.
“You’re talking about the Schpriss?” he clarified, his fur subtly bristling in annoyance in spite of his training and focus.
Her snort, bitter and tired, cut through. “No, not the cowardly long-tails… We don’t even practice much with their ships because they usually give up before we even board anyway. This is… a different species. The Phantoms. Some even call them the Great Predators.” She said the last few words almost in a reverent whisper.
The interrogator looked puzzled. “Can you tell me anything else about these… Great Predators?”
“The only thing we’ve seen is one of their ships. It’s a black and curved… monolith. And they have this strange, dark gray marking on the stern, adjacent to the rear airlock.”
“Marking? Like your tail numbers? Can you please draw this marking for me,” the intrigued interrogator asked, sliding a datapad towards the captive as he gestured towards the camera.
This might be important.
---
“I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s definitely not Schprissian. Or any of the known species. Too simplistic and modular. Look at the repetition over there and there,” Grionc speculated, pointing at the datapad. “If anything, it almost looks like the Grass Eaters’ own writing system…”
---
TRNS Mississippi
Nobody on the bridge made a sound as the intercepted image decrypted onto the main screen, showing the crudely sketched but unmistakable letters:
TRNS NILE
