Chapter Seventy-Three - Imprisoned

With little to do but stare as the Accord fleet ambled by and looped around Mars, Day found herself somewhat bored. She was itching to get back into the action, to continue building and expanding and exploring, but that was impossible as long as the enemy was so close.

That led her mind to wander to something she hadn’t explored yet and that was a lot more local. The prisoners.

The Weeping of Mothers and Dawn had kept them alive so far. There had been one death, but it seemed as if it was caused by, of all things, an allergic reaction to some of the plant matter they’d been reconstituting into an edible paste. The Weeping of Mothers had been providing the plants from her own little garden.

In the end, they discovered that it wasn’t so much the plants that caused the illness as it was a fungal growth that had started in a mulcher. An unforeseen consequence of keeping organics alive, which was a surprisingly involved and difficult task.

They needed to be entertained, they needed food and water and occasionally mild medical care. Then the exercise requirements came in. Most of the aliens were Accord species, and there was some evidence of either eugenics-like species-wide tailoring, or some mild genetic modifications. In either case, they were well-suited to survival in low-G environments. Better than humans had ever been, and that was before most of them gained implants.

Unlike humanity, the muscles of the Accord type B and C aliens--The type B, with their sharklike bodies, and the type C, with their insectile, almost mosquito-like bodies--didn’t atrophy when not in use, though they did need to keep moving in order to keep healthy. The type A Accord, who seemed to be made of a plant-like substance, didn’t have muscles to worry about, and also seemed perfectly content to sit in a cell all day under a UV light. They were the quietest, and easiest prisoners to maintain.

The shark-like aliens weren’t so easy. They kept bashing walls down, kicking at serving drones, and hiding utensils as weapons beneath their mattresses. They also had a tendency to attack each other fairly often.

From Dawn’s observational logs, they had a species-wide propensity to form small cliques along a few different lines. Initially it was according to whomever was on a ship together, then the divide changed to work along with whomever was part of the Accord military before their turn towards scavenging work, and more recently, the divide was along clan lines, though there was also some intermixing.

It was interesting to see the social hierarchy form and dissolve over time. One subject, Anatrick of clan Wen, was once a corvette captain for the Accord, which afforded him a decent amount of respect, and he was a captain onboard one of the scavenger corvettes as well, but his clan, clan Wen, was quite small, and there were only two others in the prison who shared an affiliation with that clan.

That meant that his position in the hierarchy was at once quite high, and also quite low.

Which part of a prisoner’s past mattered most seemed to change based on whims and as the results of intimidation and scuffles, with different members earning rank for themselves through their actions and those of their respective clans and cliques.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The insectile Accord, fortunately, were far less complex. They seemed at once more individualistic, forming no direct attachments, and also more community-minded. They’d work together whenever it suited them, and they were often willing and ready to hear each other out.

Despite their physical frailty compared to the other Accord species, they formed a large, determined block around a few key members who were elected to their position of leadership through a rather democratic process.

They still caused some trouble. A number of them had broken into panels and the prison’s wiring, and a few had connected their personal augmentations to the prison’s systems, as if trying to hack into them. So far to no success, but the attempts at electronic subterfuge didn’t stop.

Day looked at the fourth alien type. Currently designated as Accord type D, but they called themselves Niam’s. They were a quadrupedal, mammalian race, not too terribly dissimilar from humanity, at least in some ways. They were only a hundred to a hundred and twenty centimetres tall, with four prehensile legs and a pair of small arms ending in strange hands that could rotate three hundred and sixty degrees.

They were mostly solitary, not really working together, or with the others, and their positions in the scavenger fleet seemed to be spread out, from captain to janitor.

Day started to search through the archives of the various interrogations Dawn had run. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly. Some of the prisoners were tight-lipped, others were willing to recount their entire life stories.

They painted strange and conflicting stories of life in the Accord. The society was heavily stratified, with each race occupying a few different classes within the confusing hierarchy they had. There was only so high an individual could rise, but almost any of them could rise. Their governance was clear, but also opaque. The government was a monolith that did as it wanted, but whose motivations were obscure and confusing. Around that, the Accord spread out, a conflicting society of mercantilism and clan politics.

The Accord had several colonies, several areas that they ruled over only in name, and more areas where the Accord’s rule was ironclad.

She noticed that one question was recurring: why did the Accord come to Sol?

The answers, unfortunately, were mixed. Because humans were a threat--which was foolish. Because the humans had attacked the Accord first--another lie. Because the humans were terrible beings who needed to be culled--likely untrue, if what she determined about their moral system was true.

One answer rang more true than others, and this one only came from a few of them, often those who seemed more aware of things that weren’t necessarily any of their business. They whispered that the reason Sol was invaded was entirely financial. Not for Sol’s resources, which weren’t all that impressive compared to other systems, but because the Accord military needed the funding.

And funding required war, war which they were lacking in this time of peace.

Day wasn’t sure what to do with that answer, but she suspected that one day soon, they’d be providing the Accord with all the war they could handle and more.

***