Memory Transcription Subject: Lieutenant Sifal, Arxur Dominion Fleet
Date [standardized human time]: December 19, 2136
It was getting steamy in the engine room, and sparks flew between me and my new apprentice engineer. She was a new transfer from the Orso Space Guard, a stunning example of her species’ power and curiosity, and as I’d guided her through my personalized process of troubleshooting a faulty engine, tensions between us had been growing thick and intimate.
“Oh Sifal, the stars know I want to, but we mustn’t!” she said, averting my gaze. She swooned, the back of a massive clawed paw daintily placed atop her forehead. “I’m a married woman. I have a cub back at home! Our love is forbidden!”
I stepped closer to my apprentice, admiring her delicate fangs. “All love is forbidden to the Arxur,” I said, my voice a deep and breathy contralto. “If I’m to be damned, then I’d be damned in your arms.”
“Oh, Sifal!” She held out only a moment longer before she, too, gave into temptation. She exposed her brown-furred neck to me, a sign of submission among her people. But it wasn’t her neck I desired, but the warmth of her broad fluffy--
My chest erupted in pain, and I coughed myself awake.
“That’s enough sleep for you,” growled the Captain, rubbing the pain of impact out of his knuckles after he’d scuffed them on my scales and ribcage. “You can sleep when my fucking engine’s back online.”
I groaned, and rolled out of my cot. Another bruise to add to my new collection. Better than scars, at least.
We were adrift in deep space, about an hour of FTL outside of Mileau, though the battle itself had ended six days ago. Our bomber, the Bloodless, had finally been bloodied, clipped by a Kolshian railgun of all things. I’d been wise to suspect that they were stronger than they’d looked. My quick and dirty engine patch had been just enough to let us limp away from the system alive before the drive core gave out for good. I was going to need a far more elaborate fix to get us back to the rendezvous point for the fleet, a task made far more difficult by the lack of spare parts, as well as by the Captain having nothing better to do with his time than try to “help”.
“Any bright ideas today, Lieutenant, or just more of the same?” the Sadistic Asshole growled. He had a name, but in my own head, I could call him what I liked.
Outside of my head, I’d discovered recently that if you modulated your tone of voice just right, most Arxur didn’t have the social skills necessary to realize when you were fucking with them. More sleep would have been the best stress relief, but this was a close second.
“Well,” I said, carefully keeping my tone unreadable, “most FTL tech ultimately draws on Kolshian designs. We could hail them, see if they’re willing to help troubleshoot. Maybe they’ll even be neighborly and offer us a spare drive core.”
Captain Dumbass considered that suggestion for a full eleven seconds before discarding it. A new record! “No, it wouldn’t work,” he said. “After we finish betraying and killing all of the Kolshians, I’d still have to kill anyone else who saw me talking to the prey. Then I might not have enough troops left to fly the ship.” Prophet’s Mercy, that was his objection? This new Kolshian armada had beaten us to a pulp, and he was so confident about surviving a second skirmish that his biggest concern was having to kill too many of his own troops afterwards to save face?
That delusional fucking… I shook my head. Had to focus. I structured my thoughts into a plan for the day, and the plan came easily. In a way, it was nice to be back in my element in the engine room, instead of having my entire worldview demolished every few minutes, but I’d been at this for nearly a week. Even my more romantic dreams were starting to include troubleshooting checklists for engine maintenance.
First item on the list today was to respool the drive coil wiring and see if that helped get the compression field strength back up. That’d at least be a relaxing few hours of mindless hand motions.
I managed about five minutes--barely gotten my tools back out, really--before the Captain got bored of silence. “Explain what that part even does,” he growled. “And speak plainly, this time!”
I sighed. “This coil of wire makes invisible hands that grab the energy so it stays put. If they squeeze the energy hard enough, the rest of the engine starts going. The invisible hands are too weak right now, though, so I’m trying to make sure they’re not injured.”
The Jackass growled again. I don’t think he actually had other tones of voice. “Maybe the hands are getting weak from hunger,” he grumbled. Rations were running low, but that was a problem for the rest of us, not for his fat ass.
I rubbed my eyes. “My thoughts exactly,” I said dryly. “That’s why if this doesn’t work, the next four or so things I’m going to check involve making sure the magic hands are being fed.” Measure and adjust the output of the voltage balancer, check the resistor arrays for performance degradation, drain and cycle the photon capacitor banks, drain and cycle the regular capacitor banks… All enormously time-consuming and tedious work. I was exhausted and needed a break, but nothing was going to happen until I fixed the engine.
So anyway, long before I fixed the engine, something wonderful happened. First Officer Vriss, the subject of my more plausible romantic dreams--why did my head keep going back to hyper-intelligent bears?--barged into the engine room at a dead sprint. “Captain,” he said, panting, “We just received word from the Chief Hunter. You need to hear this.”
The Captain punched him in the face hard enough to send his younger second sprawling, and it took most of my restraint not to just try to murder the bastard on the spot with a rotary saw to the back of the neck. “I told you to keep the comms turned off! No contacting the fleet about our failure!”
Vriss gritted his teeth as he got back up. “It was… an incoming message, you--” he started, before biting off the rest of the sentence. I would have gone with “you psychotic jackass”, but there was plenty of room for creativity.
“Out with it, then,” growled the Captain.
Vriss looked to me and hesitated. I probably wasn’t technically meant to hear this message, but I’d spent the last month and a half hard at work earning the First Officer’s trust. After my recent promotion, I’d approached him under the guise of seeking his guidance in cross-training as a tactical officer. Thanks to my secret stash of Terran war manuals, I came off as an innovative prodigy, or at the very least better-read than would be expected of a novice. We met twice-weekly to exchange ideas, and it felt like we were both starting to really enjoy each other’s company.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
All told, if the Captain told him to get on with it, even in front of me, Vriss probably didn’t mind getting on with it. “Chief Hunter Isif just sent out a fleetwide communique accusing Betterment of mismanaging the war and encouraging famine.” Vriss’s cold eyes had a fire in them like I’d never seen before. “He’s calling for open rebellion. He’s promising limitless food to any Arxur pledging themselves to his banner.”
“Oh fucking FINALLY!” I blurted out, despite myself. The Captain’s head whipped around. Thinking quickly, I sheepishly pointed towards a bolt I’d gotten loose, trying to play off my outburst as unrelated and poorly-timed.
The wheels churned in the Captain’s head for a moment as he stared at me, and then the pretentious ass promptly went back to forgetting I was there. Or perhaps he’d already made a mental note to kill me once the drive was working again. The Captain wasn’t a fan of witnesses, evidently. He turned back towards his First Officer. “Delete the message,” he growled. “Update our navigation path to the nearest sector that still understands the importance of submission towards one’s betters.”
Vriss’s jaw dropped. “But Captain, it’s… the accusation holds water.”
“You dare question your betters?” he growled. “Know your place. Betterment has its reasons.”
Vriss shook his head, incredulous. “But the food crisis, why wouldn’t we--”
The Captain’s growling grew louder. “I eat well enough. If you’re hungry, then fucking work harder. You can start by obeying my orders.”
Vriss’s eyes slipped past the Captain and met mine, looking for something. Reassurance, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted someone else to make a decision this big.
Now that I’d learned how to read people, my chats with Vriss had made my suspicions of him abundantly clear: Vriss had the same empathic heart that I had, and he’d suffered under Betterment’s regime just as I had. In my case, I’d found some solace in stoicism; I endured the pain by not letting any of my feelings get to me. “Your feelings are wrong, and you’re a bad person for having them,” as my aunt used to say, and then she’d claw at me to drive the lessons home. I still had a scar on my left forearm from one of her harsher “lessons”.
For Vriss, though, it was the rigidity of the system we lived in that helped him cope. He didn’t have to grapple with the guilt of being a caring person if he wasn’t a person at all, just a rank insignia following orders and protocol. If he was going to break free of that system, he needed a push.
I met Vriss’s gaze. I stretched and rolled the wrist that I was using to hold a wrench. And I nodded.
Vriss squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then rallied. “I can’t do that, Captain,” he said, as a certain expression darkened his face with the promise of violence.
The Captain reared up at him. “Give me a fucking reason, worm!” he roared. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to gut you ever since you ratted me out to Isif over not coddling every fucking whelp on this ship that needed to be put in their place. So go right ahead! I’ll crush you, and then I’ll crush that traitor Isif, too!”
“So be it,” said Vriss, crouching down into a lunge. “Chief Hunter’s orders.”
I readied myself to find an opening to jump to his aid, but the window passed instantly. I was reminded of something David had said, way back when, about weight classes making a fight fair. That lean muscled look I found so comely in Vriss worked against him when he was trying to overpower a veteran brawler who was a head taller and dozens of kilos bulkier. All that hoarded food had worked to the Captain’s advantage.
The First Officer lunged, and the Captain just scooped him up out of the air like a fleeing Venlil and swung him around into a headlock. Vriss’s eyes, wide, met mine again as the Captain began the slow process of choking the life out of him.
“Watch, Sifal,” the Captain taunted. “Maybe you’ll learn something about squeezing.”
Vriss looked at me, scrabbling at the Captain’s steely grip, desperate for help, but there was nothing I could do. Not by strength alone. But I was smarter than the Captain, and I’d learned how to use cunning and empathy to overcome strength. I just needed Vriss to trust me.
Gambling it all on two Arxur trusting each other. What a world we live in.
Carefully, precisely tuning the tone of my voice, I matched Vriss’s gaze, and I whispered three perfectly chosen words. “Close your eyes.”
The Captain’s grin widened. He thought I’d accepted the inevitability of his strength. I’d told Vriss to give up, to just close his eyes and let the end take him.
Vriss, near tears, and the color beginning to drain from his face, squeezed his eyes shut. Facing down his last moments, he trusted me. He placed his final hopes in me, in the faith that I was planning something.
I was.
This whole exchange was happening in my engine room, after all. This was my lair. I knew every square centimeter of spacetime-rending circuitry better than the scale patterns on the face of my own mother. I knew what to do, and I knew what not to do.
Without looking, without even turning around, I reached towards the nearest photon capacitor bank with my wrench, and I touched it in exactly the wrong place. The circuit shorted, the whole bank discharged violently, and for the briefest moment, the engine room shined brighter than every star in the sky.
For me, I was seeing spots just from the reflection off of the walls behind them--my back would probably be sunburned tomorrow--but for the Captain, it was quite literally blinding. He screamed, and let Vriss go as he clawed at his ruined eyes.
David, I found my opening.
I pounced past the Captain, grabbing his right arm in my maw as I whipped around him, restraining him as best I could. I dug my claws into his underbelly, throwing my whole body weight, such as it was, into a bear hug from behind. The Captain, still roaring in agony, reached across with his left claws, raking them across my right forearm. I growled in pain, but I was used to pain. I held fast.
Vriss coughed, and rose to his feet, dazed. Once he had blood flowing in his neck again, he recognized his opening: with the Captain clawing at me, the bastard's own neck was wide open. Vriss tore a massive bite-sized chunk out of the Captain’s throat, and spat it dismissively onto the floor. The sadistic fuck slowly stopped thrashing as he bled out. I dropped him, and he lay still.
Vriss and I both sank down to the floor and sat, panting, just taking a moment to stare at each other across the lifeless body of our former commanding officer. His blood was on our hands, as well as our faces.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Vriss asked, a note of nervous laughter making his voice tremble.
My eyes flitted to the engine control panels behind him. It was making the most beautiful sounds in the world. Photon capacitor bank it was, I noted.
“Engine output nominal,” I said, “Captain Vriss.”
He sprawled back against the floor, still catching his breath. “Yeah…” he said. “Yeah, that’s… that’s good to hear. Where do we go from here, I wonder?”
I let my tail swish excitedly. “I think… the Chief Hunter gave us our orders,” I said, exuberant. I dared one last bit of ambition. “And if I may be so bold, Captain, I think you’ve been training a promising candidate for your new First Officer.”
Captain Vriss laughed joyously, and it was music to my ears. He sat back up, and looked at me with an exceedingly fond smile. “Yeah,” he said, admiring me truly. “I think this is the beginning of a very productive partnership, First Officer Sifal.”
There was still work to be done, as there always was. The body needed to be cleaned up, the troops needed to be informed of the change in command, and I needed to bandage up the open gash in my right forearm. It would leave a new scar to match the old one on my left, but this one, I would wear forever as a mark of pride.