---Revanchism---
---Victor’s Perspective---
“Pick it up!” I say incredulously at Mouse, who’s just dropped her dead firearm on the ground in front of her.
“Don’t separate yourself from your firearm just because it’s useless currently! Pick it up and put it back in the holster I gave you!”
Fuck!
Maybe I should have put her last in succession?!
She’s so smart that I forget how thoroughly bookish her intelligence is!
I holster my shotgun at my back and hear that, ever so satisfying, analogue *click* of it locking into place.
I draw my plasma-falchion. I should have nearly a metre of edge, superheated to thousands of degrees… I click the ignition… what I have is a lump of metal(!)… I test the edge… a sharpish lump of metal(!)
Then I hear a mass of sibilance and gutturals coming from behind me… Fuck! Hassi doesn’t speak English! Of course she doesn’t! She only encountered Terrans weeks ago… even a Human couldn’t learn a language quite that fast! Plus, she’d probably learn Hindi if she were going to learn anything.
We lucked out that everyone else speaks my first language. I know it’s the closest thing to a Terran lingua franca there is but not every Terran speaks it!
“You three!” I say addressing those who aren’t SOs but do speak English “New plan: Find somethin’ you’re happy usin’ as a bludgeon. I think there’re some railing posts in that crate over there. Just get somethin’ you’re happier with than bare hands! When you’re done rearming, I want Mage and Mouse guardin’ Starboard side door and Cookie and Hassi on Port! You’re gonna take anyone that gets past me, Samus and Tuun. Don’t let even one get into the ship!”
Turning to Hassi I try to remember enough Galactic Basic to say “Follow friends find thing for hit. Go Krish after.” while backing it up with Human adapted Galactic Basic Sign Language… she seems to understand…
“Samus! You’re taking point! I want you in the middle of the room, controlling the space with that greatsword! I’ll be backing you up to your right, Tuun will take your left.” Samus draws 150cm of blade from her hip and stands it next to herself in the middle of the room. The pommel is the same height as her head!
Tuun draws her four, 30cm daggers in a single, lightning fast, impossibly smooth motion and takes up position to Samus’s left.
This will all probably be very academic! If even one person comes out of that ramp with an analogue firearm…
Everyone only just manages to get to their assigned positions when we’re clamped and the boarding ramp proboscis starts extending. That definitely wasn’t an original component of that ship!
It parts the polymer of the boarding ramp plastically. Atmo containment fields spring to life around it. Strange, I always imagined that it would shatter before it warped like that… suppose it would be a bad idea to make a ramp of shattering material.
The proboscis senses that it has penetrated and comes to rest against the floor of the Loading Bay.
There are a few moments of nothing but the sound of slow, thudding footsteps coming down that boarding ramp.
“To all aboard…” says a disgusting but strangely familiar voice with that strange accent of the Terran Starborn, that sounds as if it’s from everywhere and nowhere “…this is the Captain of the Cleaved Flesh. This ship is now property of The Revanchists! If you are Human, join us or die! If you are subHuman, surrender and you might live long enough to see the inside of a market… if I don’t think you look tasty(!)”
Then 199cm of green tinged, pig nosed, tusked Terran comes out of the ramp, righting himself from the differing angles of the grav plating.
He wields what looks like an 80cm meat cleaver. Fuck it looks heavy!
He has one red iris, one black, crimson hair with black patches and curtains of mottled flesh where he should have ears.
He might have been a handsome man, once, before he did that to himself!
“Jax Karvin… ‘the Butcher’… if I’m not mistaken! You’ve come up in the world! You seem to have gone from applyin’ for an SO position aboard this ship, with very obviously forged credentials, to havin’ a ship of your own! Don’t suppose you’ve just dropped in for a cuppa(?) I might be amenable, as a Son of Albion(!)”
Jax squints at me for a moment, fifteen similarly repulsive individuals streaming in behind him… no analogues, no one who’s anywhere near as threatening as he is.
“Cor blimey! Weww if i’ ain’ li’uw Vicky! Ah fought Ah noo dis ship! Smaww galaxy!” he says, in a mockery of my estuarine twang. He sounds worse than Dick van Dyke being a cockney chimney sweep!
“Not small enough, if it’s allowed someone like you to hide in it! But, then again, I suppose it is small enough to let me run into you twice, against 743 trillion to 1 odds of any person I meet, bein’ you!”
He shakes his head “No! The odds of any person you meet being me are 1 to 2.16 trillion…”
I get that he’s only counting Humans but “Your count’s a little behind, Terrans passed 2.2 trillion recently!”
“Only if you count cavemen!” he spits, angrily, to the muttered agreement of his crew “If you only count true blooded, natural Humans; no cavemen, no test-tube halfbreeds, no robots, no catgirls or dogmen and certainly no subHumans… it’s 2.16 trillion.”
Fucking christ! This guy is like the radical extreme of the kids I went to school with! All of them, who seemed to think that having lost family in the War made them, and their suffering, unique… as if almost every Human didn’t share the experience! The ones who used expressions like ‘xeno scum’ and whined that we should have killed more of them (20 trillion families getting a KIA/MIA notice, for their loved one away at war, was just not enough… apparently!). The ones who’d speak to the Neanderthal in class with mocking caveman voices when she got the best marks. The ones who’d bitterly whinge about how we could have had the galaxy but Miyazaki turned it down… as if it was her choice to make… as if we’d’ve known what to do with what we were being offered! No they just had to drool over the things they’d make their slave xenos do and ignore the history class we were in, that would’ve told them exactly why what they wanted was a terrible idea!
This guy, is like one of those boys who’s gained 40cm, 100kg of mostly muscle, porcine body modifications and not grown up, even a jot!
“If you’re so proud of bein’ a true blue Homo sapiens, why have you made yourself look like that? Even I struggled to identify your species, when we first met.”
“This?!” he gestures at his mods “This is us as the subHumans see us! This is what we’re meant to be! This is the Space Orc!”
I’d laugh but something tells me he’d find any reaction better than no reaction.
I give him no reaction, save a placid, unimpressed stare.
“And… the reason you didn’t come at us with analogues, after you disabled our digital weaponry? You’d’ve given us no choice but to surrender… from the looks of it you came expectin’ a mêlée battle! What would you’ve done if we’d been packin’ analogues ourselves?”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
He frowns, in mock hurt “We needed to give you a chance! We aren’t interested in doing what the subHumans did to kill 70 billion of the chosen people! We don’t want to lean on a tech edge! If you’d been Human enough to bring analogues you would have deserved to win! We, however, would prefer to win by strength of arms!”
He flexes his, unnervingly thick, cleaver wielding arm and I roll my eyes.
“That’s not what ‘strength of arms’ means. That’s the exact opposite! The ‘arms’, in that phrase, refers to weaponry, not manipulator limbs! What you mean is that you ain’t interested in a fight you might lose! If you’d attacked a ship with Terrans with analogues, you planned to surrender without a fight… and you’re dressin’ it up as good sportsmanship!”
He scowls.
“So where’d you get the ship…?” I ask, stalling… what am I stalling for? We are the cavalry! No help’s coming!
“Yeah… after someone tipped off the authorities, on Gateway, to the means by which we’d been acquiring our lunches… we were forced to downsize our ambitions! You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who the bloodtraitor who sold us out would be… would you?...”
I shrug. I know he knows it was me but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“…so, I took a job on this ship...” he thumbs behind him “…where the subHumans had no clever Human, making decisions for them! I snuck my crewmates on board as ‘luggage’ and we overtook it once we were out at space! I took it to the same place I now sell all my merchandise and got it modified for the price of everything valuable on board, that we didn’t need, and the crew we hadn’t yet supped on!”
“You’re slavers.” I state, in obvious disgust.
“And why not!? Is it not justice that lessers serve their betters? That the weak exist at the pleasure of the strong!?”
“It isn’t.” I say, disdainfully.
He’s openly confessing to slaving and cannibalism… or eating sapients… (there really needs to be a word for eating sapients that carries the same impact as ‘cannibalism’!)… it’s nauseating!
“So, I’m guessing, from the announcement you made as you made your, oh so flamboyant, entrance and everything you’ve said since, that there’s no scenario in which we just transfer you everything valuable aboard and we can both be on our way?” seriously, why am I stalling!?
I hate the idea of paying their Danegeld… but I hate the idea of fighting (and probably loosing) more! If they say they’ll be satisfied with money or valuable equipment, then the choice will be clear.
“You guess correctly!” declares the pigman.
“You see, the ship itself will be our biggest ever haul, when we sell it to our favourite scrapper who knows not to ask questions… and…” he leers at Tuun and Hassi “…if these two cuties are anything like representative of the selection of subHumans aboard… well… we’ll probably make up half again as much as from the ship! Plus…” he gestures at the Humans present “You five got a choice!… Join us or die!”
“None of us are interested!” I snarl.
I don’t need to do a straw poll, I know that no one on this side of the room is going to cross the aisle.
“Shame!...” he smiles around his tusks “…you’ve chosen death… You three!” he gestures at the three who I’ve assessed to be the most threatening “You’re with me! We’re going to pay back Vicky here for the quick escape we had to make on Gateway! You two!” he gestures at the ones who look least threatening “Take the smurf! Try to avoid killing her… if you can help it! Everyone else… get blondie!” he gestures at Samus.
I try to avoid giving any indication of how relieved I am by his huge underestimation of Tuun… and I mentally implore her to have the sense to not instantly dispatch the weaklings who’ve been sent after her… play with them a bit… feign weakness… let the others settle their attention on me and Samus! If she dispatches them in 2 seconds flat, everyone will notice and Samus won’t be able to do enough crowd control to help!
I can’t worry too much about my subordinates, though! I’ve got to trust that everyone else is doing their job and focus on doing mine!
Don’t hesitate!
The four men advance, giving Samus’s greatsword about 110cm more clearance than they really need to… that’s the idea… bottleneck them…
They don’t come at me one at a time, like in the films… there’s enough room for three of them, abreast, to lunge at me so that’s exactly what they do.
I hop back out of the hell, that is the arc of their weapons, and into the heaven beyond.
My sabre whips to amputate the hand of the leftmost one, he wails for a brief moment before I flash my blade across his throat… he’s not surviving that!…
Jax is hanging back… he seems to think himself a King sending the pawns in first.
The two survivors scowl, square their shoulders and reposition.
My peripheral awareness is telling me that the arc of Samus’s greatsword is doing its job of holding the ten assigned to her at bay.
I don’t need to check to know that Tuun is at no danger from the two she’s been set against. Though, it would be nice to have a moment to check whether she’s moved on to flanking the main group… just a glance?
No! Victor Taylor! Head! IN! THE! FIGHT!
Now is not the time to be worrying about your girlfriend!
If you die, everyone dies!... Or worse…
The two come in for another overhead slash… they’re not particularly skilled…
I meet the edge of the right one’s blade, parrying it, and use the momentum, transferred into mine, to deflect into the left one’s waist. I pull my blade towards me and some combination, of blood loss and shock, causes him to keel over.
The final pawn hesitates for just a moment… which is enough for me to cut off his foot and then sever his carotid artery.
Jax looks disgusted by his minions’ failure and advances with that ridiculous cleaver held in guard.
His weapon flashes… I try to parry but… that strength! That momentum! That edge comes far too close!
Over the next few moments, the process repeats. His blade streaks across my focus and it’s all I can do to avoid it… no… it’s more than I can do. He nicks me with that edge… first a little but… having probed he seems to work out how to attack for best effect.
Fuck! He’s better than me! I’ve spent 9 years resting on the laurels of being the ship's one and only Terran! Sure, a gymrat Terran is impressive in nonTerran company but… this guy has more experience! This guy has obviously spent a lot longer than me, actually fighting! There’s no substitute for experience!
His cleaver flashes…
My left hand… isn’t…
It’s gone… there’s no hand there… there should be a hand there!
Fuck… there’s so much blood… why is everything going blurry…
I’m on the ground…
This pigfaced man is going to be the last thing I ever see…
Then, something black, white and grey… hits him in the face…
And the main group get knocked over… by a dark blue… massive… something…
What the fuck?
---Tcakqaal’s perspective---
*Crack* *Boom* is the sound of the door shearing through, being flung across the balcony and impacting the safety railing. It didn’t stand up long to a (1/3 tonne) of mirkbeast with a hall length runup, who’s been told that her daddy is in trouble.
For all the help it did, the less than a hundredth mass contributed by the R’qali clinging to her back, might as well not have been there!
I look back to see Sam guarding the Commonroom full of mirklets. Then, in a flash, he’s gone!
This speed!
It’s no faster than I can divebomb! Why is it so much more unnerving to go this fast on the ground!?
We streak down the Access Stairways.
Deck 4.
Deck 3.
Akaros! How are [+300kg] of deathworlder moving so silently! I know her niche is stealth ambush but… at this speed!?
Deck 2.
Wait! “Where are we going, Fluffy?! Why aren’t we going down?! This is Deck 2! The fight is on Deck 0!”
“Plan having! You flying, yes?”
“Yes, I fly but…” oh, by the Mother! I think I know what her plan is.
Just as comprehension dawns, Fluffy impacts the Deck 2 Loading Bay door, crumpling it.
The effort barely arrests her momentum. She streaks across the walkway and launches herself [3 metres] into the air. I release my grip.
I look down [13 metres], scanning the scene.
Tuun is furiously laying into the side of a mass of Terrans, effortlessly weaving through their attacks to deliver her own pinpoint accurate stabs… at least… I assume…?
Arran is hefting a blade, around 4 times my mass, at the front of the same group. That’s slow enough for me to see, at least.
The ground level doors are guarded by the deputised Triple Ms.
And, on the far side of the room… a strangely familiar monster, advances on Victor… with a substantial blade with no point on it. My poor boy is missing his hand!
The plan is forgotten as I tuck in my wings to put myself between that monster and my Victor!
I dive beak first, until the very last moment.
My talons whip forward, in an exhibition of the instincts I have for picking fruit in flight… only… instead of sinking into the juicy flesh of a ripe oklafruit… they gash through the thin flesh sitting over a deathworld dense skull.
My right leg breaks and both the monster and I shriek in pain as I hit the ground.
The monster’s attention is now entirely on me!
Yes! That’s right! Hurt me! Don’t hurt my Victor!!!
I look up into the livid face of the monster advancing on me. His remaining eye is crimson red… the other is a gouged mess of red blood, buried in talonmarks.
He stoops over me and I try to fend him off with my talons but… one set is blunted, from impact with his skull, and attached to a broken leg. The other is barely any more help, scratching feebly at the skin of his arm.
Contemptuously, he slashes my left two eyes out, cutting my visual field in half. Losing the eyes is less important than the fact that he dislodges my translator… [FUCK]!!! My translator! The reason I dived into hell! The plan!!!
“Viik…ta! Gaaans waaaak!” The guns work, Victor! Arran! Tuun! Shoot these [fuckers]! Save us!
The monster sneers at my broken leg… before that cleaver slices it off.
“Gaans waak! Viikta!”
The tusked devil raises his blade, this time to end my life.
“VIIKTA!”
His head is suddenly half a head… I register an associated *BOOM* only after the fact.
The… thing slumps, limp and lifeless, collapsing to my side… would it have been more merciful if he’d crushed me?
There’s so much pain…!
I look to my Victor.
He’s pale and wan!
His left arm ends in a stump, gushing vivid red blood on the deck.
His right ends in a hand precariously holding a gun that is definitely not meant to be wielded that way!
My boy is alive… my ship should be safe… that’s something I did… before the end…
Darkness falls…