It took Rapier about thirty seconds to comprehend what had just happened. The great fireball ahead of him sputtered and faded to a dull brown, but kept expanding, engulfing the three remaining Janissary craft for a moment before the cloud finally began to dissipate. Then, the Tethylen quivered slightly as the vaporized remains of the epicenter of the blast howled past it. It was a gust of wind in the vacuum of space; the fundamental wrongness of this occurrence wasn’t lost on Rapier. As the rest of the bridge staff recovered from their shock and returned to their stations, Rapier just started walking.
In a daze, Rapier shambled back to his console and collapsed in his chair, looking on as the last remnants of the explosion faded away. Only then did it hit him.
All at once, Rapier’s antennae folded back against his neck and he lunged forward, pressing his hands against the cold reinforced glass that separated the bridge from the void outside. His eyes were wide with shock and grief. “Ulo!” he cried, pounding on the window. There had to be something he could do. He turned back towards the inside of the bridge and ran like never before for the radar officer’s console, forcing the officer from his chair again and scanning it for something, anything, any trace of the friend who had kept him alive and sane through all of this.
Of the craft that Ulo had been aboard, no debris larger than Rapier’s hand remained. He was gone.
Rapier’s legs felt weak. He lowered himself to the ground, where he sat with his head in his hands. “Ulo,” he whimpered softly, “Ulo, I’m so, so sorry.”
Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault, Rapier,” Wakizashi said, “he couldn’t have known, and neither could you.”
“I should have,” Rapier exhaled. Wakizashi put her hand underneath his mandibles and gently turned his head to face her. Her expression was conciliatory, but there was a strange gleam in her eye.
“Yes, Rapier, you should have, but we Broodmatrons have learned that you cannot expect every order to be followed. Should’ve, could’ve, and would’ve only rarely align, so you do what’s best and what pleases your superiors; such is life.”
Rapier took a deep breath as he thought of this. For a few moments, he lapsed back into lucidity. “We need to turn around.”
“What?”
“If humans have such powerful weapons, they’ll kill us all if we fight them. We have to regroup and think of something.”
Wakizashi’s face scrunched up and her eyes turned beady, like she had just eaten something rotten. The air stank of disappointment. “Rapier, if they had access to such weapons, they would’ve ended this war far earlier. What happened here was a lucky shot, a hit to a reactor or a magazine. Don’t be foolish.”
Rapier could feel the anger pheromones exuding from his body. Something rotten and evil was rising up within him. “Fusion reactors don’t explode, Viceroy, and no magazine could store enough munitions to create a blast that large.”
“Rapier, don’t succumb to folly again,” Wakizashi had a warning tone in her voice, “you know how last time ended.”
“Don’t threaten me, Viceroy,” Rapier growled back, “you know how last time ended.”
For a moment, the two stared each other down, and Rapier weighed his chances if he tried lunging at her. They weren’t good, but the aim wouldn’t be to subdue her. It would just be to give him time to run.
Then, without warning, the communicator started up its broadcast again with a loud electronic whine. Rapier and Wakizashi both looked over to see the hologram of the human woman again, her smile just as cheerful. For a moment, Rapier’s hatred was redirected at her grin, which seemed so psychotic now that Rapier knew of what she spoke.
“Our sensors register that our strike package has successfully detonated. At the moment, a number of you may be experiencing a phenomenon known as ‘flash blindness.’ Don’t worry; this condition is temporary in most cases, and our research into your biology shows that Poslushi eyes repair visual damage very quickly. In fact, some of you may be regaining your sight at this very moment.
“Now, regarding the possibility of additional deployment. At the moment, assets capable of deploying these weapons are massing on and around Novoarkhangelsk. If you would like to avoid the total destruction of your fleet, all combat vessel crews are required to surrender to boarding, disarmament, and internment until this war comes to an end. As a gesture of goodwill, we will allow all non-combat craft to return to Poslush space.”
Then, the woman leaned forward, towards the camera. “Please do respond at your earliest convenience,” she enunciated, “we wouldn’t want any miscommunication.”
“See?” Rapier gestured to the woman as she flickered away.
“Rapier, we both know you aren’t that stupid. You can’t possibly be falling for the folly of mankind a second time! Do you not remember the men who died by your ignorant hand?”
Now, she’d struck a nerve with Rapier. Slowly, he stood. With Wakizashi crouched like she was, the two came eye to eye, so close that Rapier could feel her breath on his neck.. “What?” Rapier asked, venom in his words. Everyone was watching their standoff; not a word was spoken for fear of starting something even worse.
“Do you remember Cutter? Ollex? You lost them, yes, you, because you cannot understand that these… these things are animals, Rapier, nothing more! They’re not like you and me; they’d tear us apart if they could, but they can’t! And now that our victory is at hand, you will be there to sabotage us like the unlerm, degenerated, fraternizing, native-fucking beast-person that you are!”
For a moment, it had seemed like Rapier could contain the intense vitriol boiling up within him, but that moment had long since passed. “I renounce you,” he spat.
It seemed that Rapier, in turn, had struck a nerve. “You have no idea–”
“I renounce you!” Rapier cut her off, “I renounce my ship, I renounce my duties, and I renounce this rotten nation until a time when people like you can never take power again, you ignorant–”
Rapier couldn’t quite remember what happened next. One moment, he was speaking, and the next, Wakizashi’s hands were wrapped tightly around him as she slammed him down from her shoulder headfirst into the floor. A blinding flash of nauseating pain set every nerve in his body ablaze, and then all went dark.
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When he came to a few seconds later, he was lying on his belly, Wakizashi straddling his back. With one hand, she forced his face into the ground. He could taste blood on the floor, and he could feel it as it coursed from an enormous crack in his exoskeleton, running down his head to drip-drip-drip into the growing puddle that he was forced to lie in. The pain set his mind ablaze; he could barely move.
It was a miracle that he was still alive.
As he stirred slightly, Wakizashi’s grip on his head tightened. Her voice possessed an animalistic purr as she spoke that set Rapier’s skin quivering and the adrenaline pumping through his body. “You’ve disobeyed me for the last time, boy.” she growled. Rapier could hear her abdomen folding backwards, her stinger emerging from its sheath to finish off his free will once and for all. “It’s time for me to fix you.”
What she hadn’t realized was that Rapier’s hands had slowly, quietly wrapped themselves around her ankles, his thumbs digging into the chinks and underneath the chitin of her shins. When he ripped downwards, the exoskeleton covering the front of her lower legs came free with a sickening crack, dangling loosely. Wakizashi screamed, her voice high and intense, and fell off of Rapier clutching her legs. Rapier took the opportunity to struggle to his feet, turning around to see Wakizashi on the ground, trying to staunch her bleeding. The sheer hatred in her eyes as she looked at him drove him to take a step back unconsciously, but he could see her gaze clouding over from the pain.
“Kill…” she hissed, saliva burbling from her mandibles, “that… mongrel…” Then, without much fuss, she keeled over and passed out.
And yet no one moved.
Rapier looked around the room frantically for anyone who would follow her order. The officers remained in their seats, and the marines stationed at the doors continued to hold up their rifles impartially.
“Is anyone with me? We’ll leave and sit this one out, I promise.” he asked breathlessly. Venerable Ancestor, he was dizzy.
“There’s no justifying what you’ve done, Rapier,” the executive officer began bluntly, “but there’s no justifying what she did either. Go give yourself to the enemy, but bring no one down with you.”
Rapier bowed his head. His second-in-command had a fair point. “I’ll see you on the other side, men.”
Then, without another word, he left, steadying himself on the walls on the way to the shuttle bay. Blood continued to drip from his scalp, leaving a white trail behind him leading back to the bridge. Rapier was reasonably sure that shuttles possessed a modicum of medical supplies for the event that they were to be used as makeshift ambulances, and as he found the bay, with its craft all dangling from the cruiser on long umbilical tubes, his suspicion was confirmed. Slipping into one, he saw that the craft, a bottle-shaped thing with two triangular wings, indeed had a small compartment in one of the walls marked with the standardized blue sigil that denoted medicine in Poslushi military iconography. With shaking hands, Rapier pulled the cabinet open and retrieved a packet of gauze from the rows of tiny bottles and instruments, wrapping the bandage around his head to try to stop the bleeding.
When Rapier had finally finished staining the ground he walked on, he shuffled over to the shuttle’s cockpit and took inventory of his surroundings. The placement of switches, dials, interfaces, and other assorted controls around the small area was vaguely familiar to him; he had piloted a similar craft as part of a fast-insert team during the Recivilization of Omen. “Let’s see if I remember how these work,” he said to no one in particular. Thankfully, most of the controls were labeled in some way or another.
With a press of a button, the rear airlock slid closed with a hiss, and with another, the umbilical came apart from the shuttle, returning to its stowed position in the bay’s gantries and leaving the little spacecraft to slowly drift away from the ship. For a few seconds, Rapier looked for the master ignition, and found it just above where his left hand rested, placed in a small alcove so that he couldn’t accidentally hit it if he raised his arm. He flipped it upward and the shuttle began to quiver ever so slightly, a rising whine emanating from the onboard reactor as it spooled up. Rapier gently pulled the joystick to the right and the shuttle turned with it, coming to face retrograde with their orbit. Then, he pushed the throttle forward and the shuttle shot forth, pressing him back into his seat hard. They weren’t that far from the surface; the descent wouldn’t be long.
The craft darted backwards, flying into, and then through, the sparsely-placed fleet behind them. It was just one shuttle, almost identical to the ones that the great supply barges used to ferry goods to the combat craft. Nobody suspected a thing as Rapier descended towards the velvety firmament that divided Novoarkhangelsk’s upper atmosphere and the ceaseless nothing beyond.
As the first flames of reentry plasma began to lick at the canopy, Rapier gently turned the radio dial to a frequency he knew was commonly used by humans for unencrypted traffic. He couldn’t broadcast quite yet through the plasma shroud, but it was best to be prepared. The shuttle rattled heavily for a few minutes; this was the most arduous part of the journey. Rapier held the joystick steady through the descent. Once upon a time, he had witnessed a less-experienced pilot send a shuttle into a tumble while undergoing atmospheric entry in an exercise. In an instant, the shuttle had disintegrated and the lives of seven Soldier Caste were lost; Rapier had no intention of making the same mistakes.
As the plasma finally waned, Rapier could see again as he blazed down into the rolling white snow clouds of the upper troposphere. Seeing the opportunity, Rapier pressed down the transmission button and began to speak.
“To human forces. I come bearing a white flag, as you say. Please do not fire upon me.” he said calmly. For a few seconds, no one responded, and Rapier feared that the end of him would come quite similarly to how it came to Ulo. Then, a heavily accented male voice rang out over the radio. “Incoming craft, land at the following coordinates and prepare to be boarded.”
“Yes, sir.” Rapier said as the numbers began to print out on another screen. At the same time, the shuttle broke through the cloud cover, revealing a flat white ice sheet streaked with red iron oxide sand where the glacial landscape cracked. Rapier pulled on the stick and drove the shuttle into a glide, heading towards an airbase on the very horizon. As he approached, he could see the defense turrets around the installation swiveling into place, the racks of missiles ready to blow Rapier out of the sky if he tried anything.
Rapier eased up on the throttle and the craft slowed down for its final approach. Rapier had heard that the Coalition was very gracious to its prisoners, especially in comparison to the Combine. However, he had also heard that Rossiya had undergone something of a political revolution in recent days, and an officer clique significantly less sympathetic with the Poslushi had ascended to the helm. Hopefully, they still followed their own laws.
Rapier saw a collection of men grouping up around a single shuttle pad and assumed that it was his own welcoming party. Gently, Rapier eased the shuttle into vertical transit and descended to touch down somewhat haphazardly, a little more off-center with the pad than he’d like, with a loud metal screech. Only when he flicked the master ignition off did he realize that he’d forgotten to extend his landing gear. In fact, now that he thought of it, wasn’t he supposed to turn on his radar at some point during the flight? His head hurt…
As the airlock slid open, a voice drifted in from outside. “Vykhodite s podniatymy rukami!” a man barked. Rapier hadn’t the foggiest what he meant, but he could probably assume. His hands in the air, Rapier rose from his seat, stumbling towards the door. His sight was blurring, and the stinging cold blowing in did him no favors. He could feel something warm running down his face; the gauze had soaked through.
“My name… is Rapier of the Idrisat Brood. I am here to…” Rapier stammered, trying to remember what he had to say. “I am here to ssss…”
Why was he here, exactly? All he could think of was the incessant, drumming pain in his head. Why had he come? Who were these people? Why was he supposed to fight them? They would probably be quite nice if there wasn’t a war.
Why was the floor getting closer?
And then Rapier hit the ground facefirst, and had no more questions.