Spacedock, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Fourthmonth, 1634 PTS
As the ship prepared to dock with the small, isolated station, Deumak reviewed his orders. The task should be simple. Meet with the puny vassal force they had backed here, and retrieve an alien relic, believed to contain a Shade. Return the relic to a research facility in the Drieltor system.
This should be a simple mission, he thought. The actual work should take less than a day, unless the locals were particularly incompetent. He could spend another week relaxing around the station before returning to cold sleep for the long voyage back.
Indeed, this was to be one of the easiest missions he had taken so far. However, the cost was paid not in effort or risk, but in years. When he returned home, nearly three entire decades would have passed.
Idly, Deumak wondered whether New Keretakan would even be recognizable by the time he returned. His contemporaries would likely all be dead or promoted, and he might even have grandnieces and grandnephews that were his own age. It might take weeks to years for him to readjust.
He sighed in annoyance, tapping the ground with one leg and wishing he had been granted the option to refuse the task. But that was just how the Epon operated: strict and hierarchical. As he had no spouse or children, he had been chosen for the mission, and was sent out less than a day after the order came through.
Still, what was done was done. In effect, he had some time to take a paid vacation, and he intended to enjoy it. In this line of work, it was best to take small victories wherever they could be found. Perhaps he would leave some new lineages of children in this backwater. The women here would undoubtedly be highly impressed by him, a man from the true center of Celan culture. A place much more respectable than this dump.
There was a loud hiss of air as the ship clunked into position by the airlock. Deumak’s ears popped from the pressure shift, equalizing between ship and station. Finally, the airlock hatch slid open, bringing with it the foul stench of a Staiven space habitat. Deumak wrinkled his sensory apertures in disgust. He suspected he would only fully adjust to the stench by the time he was preparing to leave again.
It was a common issue, or so he had heard. Particularly for planets, as each world with a breathable atmosphere tended to have its own unique scent. Deumak had never been to any planet, but he felt that Staive was likely the least pleasant to visit. He had a sensitive sensory organ, after all. He didn’t have a high opinion of the Staiven in general, either. Being blind was no excuse for such poor aesthetic sense, and he felt they had to be nose-blind too, given the thick scent of their bodily emanations.
He glanced outside the ship, getting his first glimpse of Tseludia Station. As expected, it looked unpleasant. The fact that they willingly lived here lowered his opinion of the vassal organization he was to meet with. Despondently, he made his way towards the airlock hatch, legs tapping their way across the tightly corrugated metal surface. He couldn’t wait to be done with this shithole of a station.
The ship’s captain passed him, heading to speak with the port official, and Deumak hung back a bit, waiting his turn. He had been briefed on the Staiven customs process, as comically lax as he found it to be.
A glint of light on the wall across from the airlock caught his eye, and Deumak squinted at it, bored enough to be curious. It seemed to be a camera. Was this something new that this station was attempting, to acquire pictures of new arrivals?
Before he could finish considering the matter, the world erupted into blinding white flame with a resounding boom. Deumak’s world was consumed by the flare, unable to even formulate a thought of surprise before he was annihilated completely by the blast, along with all those around him, the ship itself thrown off its docking point with the station.
The resulting rush of escaping air tore trash from where it lay around the nearby dock, even sucking an unfortunate passerby into space before one of the small robots that crawled around the station’s exterior sealed the gap. Within thirty seconds the suction had ceased, and the docks almost seemed to return to a state of normalcy aside from the fearful screams of those nearby. All that was left to mark the previous existence of a docking point at that location was a large set of scorch marks and a white sheet that was bound tightly to the interior of a jagged hole.
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Spacedock, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Fourthmonth, 1634 PTS
Kalthen had been filled with pent up energy, feeling like a pressure bomb ready to explode. He missed the role of piloting an enforcer, of being able to fight himself, to express his nervous energy through violence. Had he been a Seiyal he had long thought he might have made a good martial artist. Such idle fantasies would not help him in the current situation, however.
He had believed that the bomb would be more than enough, but Triezal had insisted on bringing their entire force, as if four enforcers and almost a hundred soldiers would be necessary to kill just one person. It seemed overkill to Kalthen, but Triezal had been adamant about the matter. He refused to explain his reasoning, other than to say that it was ‘just in case.’ Kalthen trusted his friend enough for the matter to scare him. What possible sort of person would warrant such a response?
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The enforcers had been hidden behind fronts owned by the organization around the nearby portion of the dock, the soldiers disguised and pretending to relax in various stores and restaurants. There were far more Celans here than usual, something that he knew many of their enemies would notice, particularly in the aftermath of what was to come.
As this was a matter of survival, Kalthen was more than willing to put off that issue for later.
He glanced down to check the countdown estimate he had set up. One more minute before the ship was to dock with the station. The anticipation continued to eat away at him.
He and Triezal had actually set up further down, near the exit to the spacedock and entrance to the dome, where the stacks were located. It was near enough to keep an eye on events, but far enough away there was no risk of being caught in the crossfire if the troops needed to be sent in.
Neither he nor Triezal had spoken for several minutes, and Kalthen felt no desire to. The nerves continued to strain at his cognition, burdening him further and further. If he spoke, he felt like he might ramble aimlessly and distract the two of them. They simply watched a small, unobtrusive camera that had been secretly set up on the wall across from the docking point of the Epon ship. It only showed the airlock hatch at the moment, but they needed to be ready and paying attention for when it lifted.
It felt like it took forever for it to finally do so, each moment stretching out in a spiral of flattened, warped eternity. Kalthen did not dare glance away, ready to see the representative that everyone so feared.
When the airlock finally opened in a silent motion, the pressure already fully equalized, Kalthen was surprised when he saw the people standing behind it. Be it the uniformed Jobu man who seemed to be either the ship’s captain or an adjunct, or the haughty looking Korlove man beside him. Neither had the bearing he had expected from their target. He turned to Triezal, wishing to see the other man’s reaction.
“That’s him,” said Triezal, a deep sense of relief evident on his face.
Kalthen could tell that a weight seemed to have been taken off of his friend.
“I recognize him from New Keretakan. His name is Deumak. He was another of the magisters who worked there with me,” he continued. “Would certainly have been one of the options for this task. We were lucky.”
Kalthen was suddenly taken aback, worried that his friend would be unable to kill a former colleague.
“If you need me to-” he tried to say, cut off by Triezal, who tapped a glyph on the surface of his slate.
Kalthen’s words were drowned by an explosion that shook the very ground beneath them. He could almost feel his bones rattle inside of himself. His first thought was that perhaps they had set up too close to the epicenter of the blast. Perhaps he should visit a hospital within the next few weeks to check for any cellular damage left by the radiation.
The day before, they had used threats and money to deal with a Staiven station maintenance technician, placing a very small nuclear warhead at the docking point the ship was scheduled to use. Just in case, one had also been placed at the backup docking point that would have been used had something gone wrong with this one.
Kalthen had questioned why they needed to wait and see who the representative was before killing them, but Triezal had insisted. He suspected it had to do with what scared Triezal enough to insist on bringing their full complement of troops to the docks for this.
As the shockwave passed and the rush of air ceased, Triezal turned to him with a wide smile on his face.
“That should be it, little brother! It’ll take at least a decade for the information to get back and for them to send another. We’ll have to lay low after this, but it’s worth it.”
Kalthen nodded vigorously, the reality beginning to sink in, his face breaking out into a smile of his own. It was really over. There was no more threat of Epon reprisal for their failure, not for an extremely long time. Even if they weren’t able to lie and trick the next representative to come, perhaps they could kill that one as well. It wasn’t a tactic that would work forever, but even an additional decade or two in which to live seemed like an eternity compared to the imminent mortality that had been hanging over his head for weeks.
He laughed, slapping his friend on the back.
“We did it. We’re finally safe.”
He paused, remembering how his mother, uncle, and the Leader were all unaware of the plan.
“From the Epon, at least,” he continued nervously.
Triezal clapped him on the shoulder with a soft smile.
“We can deal with other problems later. For now, we can enjoy our success.”
Kalthen nodded reluctantly, and glanced around, realizing that their surroundings were steadily emptying as civilians fled from the blast’s source. A wise habit for those who wished to survive on the station. Few events in the underworld were complete in just one blast like this. It was time for them to take their leave before they stood out.
Tactical Nuclear Weapons: [Considered a rather primitive technology, the basic concept behind the workings of a nuclear warhead are comprehended by even many Canvasians. While more advanced races such as Celans and Staiven have far more advanced weapons, the cost and size to yield ratios on such warhead as quite affordable at lower scales, and so they still see use. Of course, this is an illegal technology for all but the Pantheonic Government. This fact has yet to stop any underworld organizations from constructing and utilizing them, and more than ten are confiscated by the Justice Office every year. Larger scale warheads are luckily able to be detected due to the radioactive output of larger masses of fissile materials. Fusion warheads, meanwhile, do not see much use even among the very few underworld organizations capable of constructing them, as the Justice Office is significantly more harsh against offenders of that nature.]