---Bottle---
---Jyulbul’s perspective---
---[2687 Terran Calendar/26 years BF]---
I thought I knew what fear was when the Front broke…
I thought I knew what fear was when a Terran fleet appeared in orbit close enough to see with the naked eye…
I thought I knew what fear was when the drop pods began to rain from the sky and every city on the planet rang with the sound of guns firing and shells bursting…
I was so wrong!
Looking at the thick set man roar in a way that makes even his comrades cower away from him in clear terror, his pupils wildly fluctuating between pinprick specks and so wide they make his steely grey irises seem black, his teeth bared in a rictus grimace, appearing as a twisted mockery of his species’ smile… looking at this man, I know what fear is.
In his right hand the Terran hefts a roaring plasma[scimitar], a refined combination of ruthless deathworlder design and advanced gardenworlder technology, that he’s swinging more like a club!
I’m going to die in this room… I just hope he kills me quickly!
Then, I see something that I can’t make sense of.
That one armed, one legged Captain is walking, calmly, toward his much bigger, much bulkier subordinate.
The rabid man raises his cruel, curved sword over his head to bring it down on his superior, certainly killing him.
Why did the Captain so recklessly walk toward one so clearly out of his mind!? Did he also…?
At that moment, the psychotic man brings down the screaming weapon… on nothing!
The Captain simply stepped aside and (with unbelievable agility) grasped the deranged one’s wrist with his bionic hand and swung himself under his arm, causing it to twist in such a way as to audibly break! This results in the other man dropping the blade which sinks, point first, into the floor halfway to its hilt before it cools down enough to no longer be capable of melting the plascrete!
The demented Terran barely seems to notice that his arm has been broken but does, nonetheless, seem very intent on reaching the one currently using his own physiology against him.
Forcing the larger one to the floor by kicking out the back of his knee, the smaller man releases his hand from the other’s wrist and raises it to strike him in the back of the head!
The punch is as robotically efficient as the hand that delivered it and causes his head to knock into the hard floor. It’s followed up by a barrage of identical punches.
The delirious Terran’s face gets progressively bloodier, but his wild thrashing continues.
“You. go. to. sleep. now. Soldier.” says the Captain, between his strikes, somehow still managing to sound calm, in spite of himself!
After more precisely efficient punches than I was able to count, the large man goes limp and the short, svelte, handsome one relents, drawing back up to his feet.
He scans the room, face unreadable.
“Huapaya, Rodríguez, Díaz, Etxeberria, Cuautli… my office… now!” announces the man, not raising his voice, not screaming, not even growling, yet, somehow, burning with more concentrated menace than I would have believed possible before this very moment!
The five soldiers he named quickly scuttle from the room.
“Xicum, Hernández, Morales, Garcia…!” he snaps, his voice louder but much less threatening than before… not that that’s a low bar!
“¿¡Sí, Señor!?” answer the soldiers in unison, snapping to attention while looking extremely concerned!
“Get Pvt Hill to the medical room and cuff him to his bed… Now!”
“¡Sí, Señor! ¡En seguida, Señor!” responds one of the four, relief obvious as they start to heave Hill to his feet and begin hauling the large, unconscious man toward the medbay.
The short, slim Terran man and I are now the only ones left in the (thoroughly destroyed) cafeteria.
He takes a deep inhale and exhale before turning to me, all of his cold fury gone, and saying “I cannot apologise enough, Liaison! Are you hurt?” with all of the soft spoken sweetness I’ve come to expect of him.
Trying to convince myself that that swooping in my stomach is just the residual nerves, from the life threatening situation I was just rescued from, and nothing… else… I answer “No… Sir… I’m fine…”
I begin to pick myself up from where I tripped but he’s already at my side, offering me his biological hand.
I hesitate a moment, remembering what I just saw him do with his other one, but then smile and take it.
He effortlessly pulls me to my feet, allowing me to brace my hooves against the leg I know to be mechanical (even if that fact is currently concealed by durasteel). My heart races!
“I’m incredibly sorry to ask this of you right now, Liaison, but, given that you are the nearest contact with the Thruljor authorities… and the fact that you witnessed the incident, would you mind accompanying me to my office… to see what my idiotic subordinates have to say for themselves?”
My mind runs wild when the gorgeous Terran invites me to his office… until he adds that last part, reminding me that this will not be a social call!
“Of course… Sir.” I answer, carefully.
He smiles and says “Thank you… Oh, and… you don’t need to call me ‘Sir’… ‘Vásquez’ works fine… or ‘Ramón’… if you feel like being friendly with a man you just watched beat someone half to death(!)” regretfully.
“Alright… Ramón…” I smile “…lead the way.”
---later---
“Did I say ‘my office and make yourselves comfortable’, you stupid bastards?” snarls the Captain upon entering his office and seeing his subordinates seated at various points around the room.
They jump to their feet (revealing him to be the shortest among them, at only 180cm or so) and sheepishly line up in front of his desk.
He strides past them, snagging one of the recently occupied chairs and spinning it around to face the opposite way.
He takes his seat and gestures for me to take the one that he just moved to the side of his desk.
I sit and he begins “So… which one of you wastes of a uniform wants to explain to me what, exactly, just happened?!” with a growl.
[Cpl] Huapaya steps forward “Lo que pasó, Señor, fue que…”
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His superior holds up a hand and says “Stop.” and the man instantly falls silent.
Ramón opens one of his desk draws by means of an electronic lock (the key to which seems to be in his bionic), withdraws a small disc, approximately [3cm] in diameter, and says “Put this on. I want our Local Liaison to hear this!”
Huapaya looks at me, uncertainly, before saying “¿Es una buena idea, Señor? ¿No podría ser esto malo para la imagen de Terra?”
“The time to worry about the ramifications for our image was before you allowed a squadmember to go on a rampage through the mess, Corporal.” shoots back the Captain, icily “As bad as you just made us look, attempting a coverup of your idiocy will make us look worse. ‘Transparency’ is the word of the day so; pick. up. the. translator.”
Reluctantly, the Corporal does as instructed, picking up the disc and placing it against his temple.
After a moment of Huapaya recovering from the shudders, the Captain curtly commands “Speak.”
Huapaya begins “What happened, Sir, was that LCpl Snow recently ended her relationship with Pvt Hill… he’s been fairly miserable since then…”
Here Huapaya stops for a moment until Ramón irritably prompts “I’m pretty sure breakups don’t cause delirious, psychotic rampages, Corporal, so I’m guessing there’s more to this little story?”
“Err… Yes, Sir… We were out on patrol the other day and he found an in tact bottle in a bombed out shop… he used the app on his holo to translate the text and found it was alcohol…”
“Where is this bottle now?!” cuts in the Captain, immediately, raising his voice from the level monotone which was much better at conveying furious disgust.
Flinching slightly, Huapaya answers “Err… Probably still lying on the floor of our billet, Sir?”
Pointing at a tall and slender [Pvt], Ramón barks “Etxeberria, secure that bottle and bring it here! Run! Do not stop for anyone! I don’t care if you have to run past Kemp or Ndiaye themselves! Tell them it’s an emergency! Go! NOW!”
Etxeberria nods and sprints from the room.
We wait several minutes in cold silence.
When he returns, bottle in hand, I can feel the vapours burning my lungs from across the room!
The [Private] steps forward and places the bottle on the desk.
Ramón slides it to me and says “Can I just get you to confirm what this is? I can’t read the label.”
I pick up the noxious bottle and turn it over, scanning for relevant information a moment before declaring “This can’t be what the [Private] drank!”
“Why?” asks Ramón, immediately.
“Well… this is 35%abv! It’s a disinfectant! It’s meant for sterilising objects and surfaces! Even if he is Terran, Hill would be dead if he’d drunk this!”
Ramón looks relieved and says “35%abv is safe for us to consume… So long as it’s ethanol. There’s no methanol in it, is there?”
I check “Not that I can see on the label.”
“Good. I thought we might have a second, unaccounted for bottle for a moment… And we don’t need to worry about Gral going blind… unless I damaged his occipital lobe!” he says (relieved) before turning to Huapaya and, back to his disdainful fury, asks “So… then what happened, Corporal?”
“Well… Sir… we’ve been dry for months now and he seemed really excited about it… obviously, we all mentioned the psychosis but… err… he, very confidently, told us that it didn’t affect Denisovans like it did Sapiens… that, for them, it was more like a… erm… a high… Sir… Díaz also suggested that, to get alcohol that pure, it would have to have been distilled a few times… we thought the chances of the toxin actually making it over with the alcohol, through distillation, were fairly slim. I should have confiscated or reported it, Sir, but… well… I didn’t. I allowed him to keep it…”
Glaring at Huapaya, Ramón splays his mechanical fingers ceilingward in a querying gesture and asks “Tell me, Corporal… did you or any of your squadmates gain an advanced qualification in xenochemistry while I wasn’t looking(?)”
Huapaya shakes his head and straightforwardly answers “No, Sir.”
“Hmmm… what about one in Human biology(?) Toxicology(?)”
Again, Huapaya answers “No, Sir.”
“Is that so(?) What about Díaz(?) Did she have any qualification relating to the manufacture of distilled [untranslatable word: ‘spirits’. Meaning.: concentrated alcohol, meant mainly for drinking](?)”
“No, Sir.” answers Huapaya, sombrely.
“Well… you must have had something(?) You must have had… some reason you thought it advisable to allow a man taller than the average Sapiens and twice as strong as the average soldier to keep a looted (oh, yes! Don’t think that slipped by me!) bottle of a substance that all planetside Terrans are expressly forbidden from consuming, purchasing or possessing(!) A substance that, in the best case scenario, would still have had a mind altering effect on a man with access to firearms and plasmaweaponry(!) You can’t have just gambled not only Hill’s life but your own and those of everyone else on the base on unsubstantiated (and, as it turns out, false) rumours and hunches because you wanted to be kind to a subordinate undergoing relationship blues, can you(!?) You couldn’t have been so stupid and reckless(!)”
Huapaya says nothing.
Ramón stands and places his fingertips on the desk.
“We are occupying this planet.” he states, seething “We do not need to give these people any more reasons to hate us. We just finished fighting a War with them…!”
“¡Una Guerra que ellos comenzaron!” mutters Cuautli.
“And a War we finished!” snaps back Ramón “When you are carrying a weapon, wearing durasteel with the Terran emblem on the shoulder or even just being Terran on this planet, you are Terra! When you loot, people will think ‘Terrans are looters’! When you rampage, people will think ‘Terrans are rampagers’! When you act with callous disregard for the lives of those around you that’s what they will think of all of us!… It’s not realistic that the War might recommence any time soon but I’m not interested in my grandchildren becoming casualties of the ‘Second Galactic War’, in 50 years time, because of the festering resentment brought about by episodes like this! Do. You. Understand!?”
“¡Sí, Señor!” answer the five, only one of whom I can comprehend.
“Good!... Now… with that said…” he turns to me and I’m momentarily terrified into thinking I’m about to be the next object of his ire before he kindly and wearily asks “Ms Jyulbul… I assume you will have to report this incident?”
I’m past the point of being incredulous at the unorthodox way Terrans treat conquered peoples… Occupiers of any other species would have ordered me to keep my mouth shut or face summary execution (or may have summarily executed me preemptively!) and they certainly wouldn’t have left any semblance of local power structure (like law enforcement) in tact for me to report to!
I clear my throat and answer “I believe this does fall within the scope of incidents that I’m obliged to report… but, given that there was no [malice aforethought] behind it… I think I will be able to keep the public relations backlash to a minimum.”
With a relieved sigh and a nod, the handsome man answers “Terra is in your debt, Miss… As for you lot…” he turns back to his subordinates “…Huapaya, effective immediately you are demoted to Private. While I ponder what further disciplinary action to take, all five of you are to run a hundred laps of the Parade Ground. Don’t even think of trying to cheat and stop after less, I’ll have someone watching you. Now, get out of my sight!”
As they go, one of the [Privates] says under his breath “¡Ella muge como una vaca! *muu**muu**muu*” seeming to be doing a bad impression of the sound of Thrulji.
The other four chuckle.
“Rodríguez!” shouts Ramón, furiously “Congratulations! You just earned ANOTHER hundred laps for everyone!”
The five groan but don’t argue as they file out.
The man leans, exhaustedly, against the back of his chair (reinforced to be able to take the weight of a Human in durasteel) and gives a long, vocalised sigh, his eyes closed and a beatifically sexy expression on his tired face.
“How did you know?” I ask.
“I’m sorry?” he says, opening his eyes and looking to me.
“You took one glance around the room and immediately identified that those five knew something. How?”
He smiles “Oh, that… I’m what’s called a Truth Wizard…”
“[Truth Wizard]?” I ask, mildly amused by my translator’s explanation of the term.
“That’s the word for it, I didn’t make it up!” he chuckles “It just means I’m very good at reading people’s intentions from their facial expressions and bodylanguage… it’s why they didn’t try lying to me, they knew it wouldn’t have worked and would have made me angrier than I already was!”
“Angrier than…? I don’t believe that’s possible(!)” I quip, amused.
He laughs “You might be right!”
---[2691 Terran Calendar/22 years BF---
I sit at my desk in the Station, trying to finish my reports.
They are… incredibly boring!
My mind wanders, as it regularly has for the last few years, to that dashing, handsome Captain who was my main contact in the occupation forces for the first year or so…
Missing two limbs and… yet… more of a man than any other I’ve ever encountered!
I recall attending his going away party, once he’d moved up the waiting list for getting his arm and leg regenerated, he’d been accepted to a university to study criminology and had his discharge approved.
I recall, with some bitterness, all the times I made my attraction to him plain and got politely but firmly turned down.
He used the fact that he was an occupier and that entering into a relationship with a local would be an abuse of power as an excuse, to spare my feelings, but… I’m fairly sure he just wasn’t interested.
“Jyulbul!” shouts Chief Buthjor from across the room.
“Yes, Chief?” I answer, leaning back and looking over my shoulder.
“I’ve just got an application from a graduate Terran for a job in the Guard…”
“A Terran? A Terran wants to work… here?” I ask, slightly incredulously.
“Yes… and he’s provided you as a professional reference.”
I give a perplexed frown “What was his name?”