[Captain Indrix Jaen]
I would have gone insane in this cell if it weren’t for an analogue clock providing a promise of time still progressing. The rough concrete walls surrounding me were demoralizing, with the only detailing to break up the flat surfaces being patterned divots and a windowless metal sliding door. The dim orange glow emanating from a fixture embedded in the ceiling made seeing the far corners of the room a strenuous task, yet its inability to be shut off made sleeping an irritating endeavor.
This stagnant melancholy was interrupted by the sounds of pneumatic pistons releasing compressed gas paired with the scraping of the metal door along its frame. I strained my eyes at the clock to see if I really had lost my grip on time, but it was still hours before my next scheduled meal was supposed to arrive. A mixture of relief and dread fought its way through me before settling down on restrained optimism that my situation would finally be seeing a development.
A shorter, burly Grahtonian man in a factory-new guard outfit appeared on the other side of the door frame. Meals would normally be delivered by a pair of guards as a redundancy measure, but this man was completely alone. He spoke in a deep, rough voice, and he was more focused on the path to his side than on me.
“Follow me.”
I couldn’t think of a sound reason to refuse, nor could I see a positive result even if I had tried. Stepping out of the room was a jarring reminder of just how bleak this complex was. One side of the hall was lined with identical metal doors and their respective access terminals jutting out of the drab concrete. On the other side was a head-high metal pipe fence intermittently spaced with massive square pillars. Looking down through the fence, I saw rows upon rows of halls just like this one on the wall across the wide gap. I couldn’t lean forward enough past the fence to see the end of this array, but I had the feeling that the sparse, weak yellow-white lights would give the illusion of an endless abyss. This prison complex, which had been created by excavating the inside of an asteroid that had been caught in a solar orbit, was the largest prison in this sector of Grahtonian territory.
The guard led me into a gap in the concrete and onto an elevator. He slotted a key into one of the keyholes on the control panel and pressed floor buttons in a specific order, causing a ping to sound out as we started moving up. He stood to the side with his hands behind his back, looking straight forward to the wall across.
“Don’t bother memorizing the code. It changes.”
A few tense minutes passed before we reached our destination. The elevator doors opened up into a short hallway with a single wooden door at the end. The guard opened it and gestured for me to step through before closing it behind me without following in. This room was a complete change of pace compared to the rest of the complex. The walls were lined with wood paneling and it was pleasantly warm compared to the frigid air filling the numerous chasms of containment cells.
There was a Grahtonian woman on one end of the room covered in draping purple robes with moderate gold trims. The singular light overhead paired with the hood over her head cast a veil of shadow on her face, loosely concealing her identity. The horns jutting from the top of her head displayed elegance in simplicity rather than brazen flaunting, a recent trend among the high nobility. She motioned to a cushioned chair in front of her identical to the one she was sitting on and uttered a command.
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“Sit.”
She grabbed a paper folder from a small table next to her and flipped through a couple pages before speaking again.
“Indrix Jaen. A captain of great renown, relegated to emergency response just to have everything usurped, and then being jailed for taking action when others would not… It’s a shame, that which came to pass.”
She looked up from her folder and straight at me. I could see the subtle reflection of her eyes, those beads of cruelty and hunger shared by all of the nobility.
“But I value a soldier that can think for themselves. Speak freely, Indrix. We have a common goal, after all.
“That human, Dominique, caused quite a mess, hmm? He hit the old nobles where it really hurt, and now they don’t feel all too infallible anymore. The whole ordeal landed me with quite the sum to circulate, and actually cleaning up that mess would give me the purchase I’ve been after. That’s where you come in.”
Being a soldier in the Grahtonian army meant that you subjected yourself to the games of the nobles. Nobody ever told you this until you were too deep in to leave. I’ve heard the stories about nobles climbing their way up by secretly creating a mess just to clean it up themselves. If such schemes were ever revealed after they rose to power, they could simply smother the traces using their position. It was no mystery that the lives of foot soldiers and citizens were equivalent to bugs in their eyes. I wanted to take the easy path, to have blind faith in my orders, and simply execute anything asked of me with no question. But my mind had questions that craved answers.
“You…planned all of this?”
She leaned forward slightly, letting light shine onto the front of her face so that I could see her mouth. She had a thin smile of amusement on display.
“I simply capitalized on an opportunity. We had our eyes on that Moqango in the luxury prison long before humans showed up, and I just put the two together to see if any developments would sprout.
“Either way, the task is simple. I am going to provide you with a fleet of ships and you are going to clean up that human infestation. You were on track for admiral anyway. Do you think you can manage?”
That last question of hers rang around in my head. I’d been consumed by that very question since the beginning of my imprisonment; could I even manage to take him down given adequate firepower? The reality of the answer tormented me.
“That man, Dominique… He’s nigh unkillable in a fight. He pulled apart hundreds of men during an encirclement! The engine detonation on the ship when I tried firing the precision beam? That wasn’t a malfunction, it was an intentional attack by him! …The same thing happened during the initial encounter, when my ship’s shields were shut off moments before-”
My tangent was cut short when I noticed the smirk on the noble’s face. It sent chills down my back. What part of this could possibly be amusing for her, or is it some twisted enjoyment from watching my struggles?
“My, you are quite perceptive…”
She pulled a page from her folder and handed it to me. It was filled with ship logs from the time during the detonation, but they were…strange. Not anything someone would notice if they weren’t looking for something, but there were anomalies among the logs. Some were slightly out of order in their complementary execution, or certain stretches of time had just gone missing…
“The humans are working with a sentient, Indrix. Likely a young one, considering the sloppy work, but a sentient nonetheless. You will be given access to our own sentient alongside the fleet. Try not to lose it, hm?”