u/BlackOmegaPsi

Characters from my new short fic - former UN soldier Aras Sahin and Collective Raid Leader Erza aka “Smiley”

always like to get down to “paper” what characters look like.

Erza, Arxur Collective Raid Leader

[Date (standardized SC-Time)]: May 8, 2137

---

I never thought I would watch an alien moonrise with the same melancholy that I did when I left Wriss to my first raid.

Then it was the fear of what I’d experience. Now, it’s the sadness of leaving experiences behind.

I had seen moons light up the night sky on many a planet, and never regarded them as anything, but dead rock. However the Earth’s lonely silver satellite gazes down on me with the sorrow of a hatchling mourning their un-hatched sibling.

Sorrow. Yes, that’s the feeling. If I’m honest with myself, I’d have to admit that I don’t want to leave. Unlike the Wrissan two moons, Variss and Kes, Earth’s Luna was alone, and so was I. Unsurprising that we had become quite good friends. Partners in crime.

But when was life about what I wanted?

What any of us wanted?

Turning my head back to the camp, I see the prefabs’ windows begin to glow warm with light as dusk falls down around us. The air grows cooler, carrying with it the chattering of humans and the more familiar chuffs and growls of fellow Hunters. I can hear laughter in all of these voices, a joyous anticipation of a feast to come - and the spines on my back and tail stand up from the dread that fills me more and more with every passing second.

Claws scrape against claws as I flex them, mentally revving myself for the “battle” to come.

I’d rather - I’d rather try to bust a bunker on Khoa armed with nothing, but a blade, then walk in there and tell them that we-…!

A sound catches my attention. The faint rustle of leaves under the steps of an unrefined hunter, crisp against the low drone of terran insects.

Despite everything, when I see what figure begins to knit itself from the thickening dark of the young night, as it barrels clumsily through the knee-tall grass towards me, I feel my lower jaw starting to itch with a smile. Another bit of evidence that humans are terrible ambush hunters.

After I hear his approach, it takes Aras quite a while to cross all the way from the camp to my little meditation spot. That limp of his hobbles him still, making him slower than he was a year ago… but it’s not like we’ve been doing much combat operations lately anyway.

“Smiley!” He cries out even before reaching me and then stops, hands on knees, catching his breath. Then takes up again. “Ooof, phew. Been looking everywhere for you. Why did you… pff-uh…The feast is gonna start any minute now!”

Finally, he reaches me. In the moonlight, Aras’s peculiarly smooth, scale-less skin appears paler than usual, the shaved dark fur on his cheeks hollowing them out to an almost skull-like visage. Deep-set eyes dart around in that typically human, hyperactive way, until they settle on me, and he shoots his right hand out, waiting for the habitual slap in return. I, of course, as expected of me by terran custom, deliver it - much to his delight.

“I am saying a farwell to Earth. Trying to remember the smells… the night. Everything”.

“Shit. So you are leaving? That’s final?” Aras’s voice drops almost to a hush, the patches of fur above his eyes bunching together in what I’ve learned to be an upset scowl.

With a short grunt, I detach the holopad from my forearm and hand it over to him. The War Council’s orders are doubled into Terran Common and he skims over the text, his eyes narrowing with each passing moment. Eventually, his small human fangs bare in a disgusted grimace.

“I assume you can’t tell them to stuff it?” He sees that I don’t understand what or whom the War Council should be stuffing, sighs and continues. “That you’re not going?”

“No. I’m the Raid Leader. I have to return.”

Without further words, he hands the holopad back and as I affix it to my bracer, I see his clawless fingers curl up to form small bony clubs. “Fists”, the terrans call them. He’s angry, but Aras is no stranger to anger. My gaze slips to brown-green fatigues that he wears, the webbing for tools over his chest where the dirty ears of a furry toy poke from one of the pockets.

Anger? No, rage. I can taste how it builds within him, and then, in one blink, solidifies into determination.

“That’s why you’re here? Listen, I’ll help, I can still pull some of my leftover strings with the MENA UN command, I…”

“You needn’t bother, Aras. It’s all decided. I’m just trying to get in the right mind to tell others that we’re going.”, I interrupt him with a cautious flick of my tail.

His shoulders slump, “fists” relax. A half-hearted grin lights his face up.

“Yeah, ha-aa. I bet they wouldn’t take the news well”, then, just as quicky as that smile appears, it fades, like blood soaking into sand. “Oh shit. No. They definitely wouldn’t like it.”

I nod.

”Walk with me, Aras”.

The hillside peaks with a large, lone tree on its top. I’ve never seen such a big tree on Wriss. Its main trunk is so thick I have trouble fully encircling it with my arms, and its branches are sprawled far and wide, providing ample shade on sunny days.

Stopping right by the tree, I look down at Camp Varosha. From this vantage point, the scattered prefabs and the small landing strip with the two shuttles parked on it, appear tiny and insignificant.

Compared to the scale of the war, perhaps it is.

But to me it was the whole world.

Swallowing down the woe, I turn my snout towards the tree’s canopy. Aras once said that it’s an “olive” tree, and that its branches and leaves represent peace for Terrans.

What a repugnantly leaf-licker thing to imagine, I thought back then, but now, for some reason, it doesn’t sound absurd.

I rap my claws on the tree trunk.

“This is Betterment”. Then I reach to the closest branch and pluck a small black fruit, the olive, from it, demonstrating it to the silent and somber human. “ And this, this is the Prophet-Descendant. We pulled him, knocked him down. But will the tree die because of it, Aras?”

He takes it out of my hand, bites into the hard flesh… grimaces and throws away. Spits on the ground. Well, that’s more like it. Humans and their stubborn desire to put inedible things in their mouths!

“Ugh, gross. But…”, wiping his mouth, he looks back at me. “No. Not even when all of the olives fall down. That just means they’re ripe. Your point, though?”

In reply, I kneel down, and, using my claws as a rake, run them through the soil.

“Roots. What feeds the tree, what gives it stability. You have to kill the roots for this whole giant thing to whither and die, and Betterment’s roots…” I snap my jaws in irritation and get back on my feed. “Betterment’s roots are definitely not her, on Terra. They’re on Wriss. And they run deep”

Aras doesn’t say anything for a while. He stares at me, eyes as black and hard as the olive that I’ve just held in my claws, expression as blank as humans can get. Then sits down, back pressed into the tree, face turned back to the camp.

“I understand. It’s just… I heard Wriss is bad. Like, real bad. Bad bad.”

With the last “bad” I hear his voice waver.

“It is the site of a civil war. Arxur die”, I admit and settle nearby, curling my tail neatly around myself. “But you’re not asking about that, do you?”.

“Yeah. More like, how life is… was… under Betterment? Like, you told me before it’s pretty shit, but then, why’re you so…” His hands trace some vague shape in the air and, turning his head back, peers at me intently. “So non-chalant about it? I thought you’d be livid.”

I truly am not. I curl my tail tighter to myself, feeling myself suddenly very exposed to that dark, wet glare.

“Because that’s not the whole truth. The other part of it is that Wriss is beautiful - not like Earth, no. In its own way, which I love. I love it and it’s my home.”

“I love Earth too”, I want to say, but right when I open my maw again, Aras issues a low whistle of amusement.

“Smiley! You actually love something!”, he exclaims with mocking jubilation, but the next second his voice regains the deeper tones I’ve come to associate with seriousness. “Sorry, continue.”

For a moment, I hesitate. It’s not wise for a Raid Leader like me to bare the underbelly scales like that.

But then, to whom, but not Aras?

I’ve seen him during our trek through the settlement of Izhtan-Bul. Terrans love to hide their nature, they wrap themselves in delusions and lies most of the time, as I’ve learned - an adaptation, perhaps, to their more communal nature. Yet, at times of great strife, you can see what's beneath all of that pretense. I saw Aras in all his purity, all the pain transformed into fury, into a predatory instinct just as sharp and honed as ours.

I can still smell the blood on our hands, the warmth we shared… Aras deserves nothing less, not after what he had gone through - or after what we have gone through together. He deserves my truth.

I nestle more comfortably into the damp soil, turning now fully towards him. He too, perks, ever the empathetic ape.

“I was hatched to a high-blooded family. Raised by my mother, my father, not a communal hatchery. Got a good education. I applied cruelty, not had it applied to me. This means I… Ah, see, Aras, the Wriss I know and experienced isn’t the Wriss a defective runt like say, Ozuf, knows. You understand what I mean?”

To my surprise, he nods - and quite enthusiastically so.

“You’re one of the elite, right? Betterment believer or something. I figured you were.”

I cock my head as the translator does its thing. Elite? A member of a privileged caste? Amusing, I didn’t know humans too had split themselves into different groups like that and understood the significance of belonging to them.

Maybe they even had defectives, for all their outward disgust over the concept?

“Yes. Perhaps? So, Wriss - it can be a beautiful place. Architecture, art, culture. Admittedly, remnants of them that have not yet been swallowed by Betterment.”

“And cattle farms.”

“And cattle farms. It is not a mudhole, though unfortunately for many fighting in the Collective it’s all that ever was, and…” my tongue flicks out in embarrassment. “It’s not their fault for thinking so. That was their experience. That is Betterment.”

I pause. The next words that I say are the truth, but oh, ancestors, are they hard to say! They're heavier than a punishing lash and they cement the end… the end of this feverish dream.

“My duty is to be with Wriss during her reckoning.”

“I see.”

For a few moments - minutes - we just sit under the tree. The sea in the distance rolls over the shore with a monotone, rhythmic hammering, the insects ring in the grass, and I know that if I am not careful, it could lull me to sleep. The leaves move above us in obedience to the light wind. l I feel for the soil beneath my hands. Still full of residual warmth, of the barely perceptible movement of tiny creatures in that handful…

“If I can’t stay, I want to bring some of Earth home”, I tell Aras as the dirt runs through my fingers. He watches it sift, pupils following the trickle like a hunter - their prey. Silent, pensive.

”I want to bring you home” - another thing I’d never say, so instead, I get up and allow Aras to pick a few dry leaves out of my forehead scutes.

“Come on, or we’d be late”, he mumbles and, fighting his limp, starts to descend down the hill.

---

As we reach the camp’s prefabs, the wonderful smells spilled through the night’s air get stronger and stronger. The rich aroma of various meats, roasted just slightly to bring out the pleasant, charred bitterness, fills up my nostrils and pulls me forward with a promise of a full belly.

However, I’d rather not join this feast.

How fast times change… a few months ago the smell of freshly cooked flesh would’ve sent me into a desperate sprint towards it, but now, knowing I can have a bite at my leisure, I do not hurry.

In fact, my steps become slower and slower. The tail droops and drags, its weight anchoring me in place, and Aras, who kept a bit ahead, stops and turns, noticing my growing hesitation as we’re about to enter the largest of the pre-fabricated, capsule-like structures - Camp Varosha’s mess.

“Smiley?”

Sometimes I hate how finely attuned humans can be to what’s around them.

“Yes, I’m coming.”

I look at the sprawled, one-story structure, teeming inside with voices, smells and… dreams and hopes. There’s a string of lights stretched over the entrance and a sprayed “here be dragons” sign above the door.

It was a terran’s idea, the sign. Someone, not Aras, but - was it Misha? Hm… - had explained that this is how unknown territory was marked during mankind’s early civilized days. Unknown places guarded by legendary reptilian creatures, who’s visage, if one applied enough imagination, resembled our own.

Many Arxur didn’t understand the meaning of it, due to their place in the order of things, but I appreciated the allegory.

Camp Varosha was set up right after the Extermination Fleet had been repelled from Earth by the Chief Hunter’s fleet. This island, Saip-ruus, was relatively unharmed by the antimatter bombing, unlike the humans’ cities on the nearby mainland - and also free from Exterminator presence. The local airport strip could receive our larger landers with the relief forces, and Varosha became a logistics hub for both our shuttles and the human’s aircraft to fly out rescue and combat missions in the area.

In time, after these events had set in motion the destruction of Betterment and, in honesty, all of way of life, it had transcended its original purpose. Became a haven and a supply node for our rebellion and those that wanted to help it, even as the walls of the Sapient Coalition went up all around us.

Aras and I walk in to see the mess in its usual chaotic, bubbling state. It’s supposed to be a space for eating, but somehow it’s also a storage for a new shipment of generators, a repair station for drones, a chicken coop and there’s even two human-styled bunk beds. The faded blue of UN pelts mesh with the grey-green of our bare scales.

The main floorspace is taken up by tables and seating, all mis-matched and on its last breath, but still somehow holding our weight. Not unlike us.

On one of the walls I spot a large sheet of paper depicting a crudely drawn Arxur head in, for some reason, a terran cap, that’s being kicked by human boots and Arxur feet until it’s all black and blue.

“Good riddance, Betterment scum!” it says in both scripts and I pause, studying it.

The purpose is clear. To insult and inspire. A part of me appreciates it, but a part recoils.

I was Betterment. As many had been. I had believed in it for so many years, and even though the delusions dissipated years before we made contact with humans, some of its claws still remain in me… in the form of those good people that Betterment had at its behest, but didn’t deserve.

Many were caught in the crossfire. Many were cut down by it. This picture… who will remember them as anything but a carved notched on a rifle?

“Neat, huh? It’s one of nurses, Rachelle, she drew it, when she heard the new about Giznel. It’s a caricature. We uh, draw things about people we don’t like”, Aras points out when he sees me staring at it. “What do you think?”

“He’s not dead.” I hiss.

“In due time?” He lightly touches me on the forearm, and my tail stills, scutes flushing flat to the spine.

I feel the need to say something, to argue that the wretch shouldn’t become a martyr, but Aras has already turned away from me, tugged on by one of the “helicopter” pilots. He beams:

“Oh hi, Mark, listen, I wanted to ask you about last week’s shipment of antibio-…”

Before I can elaborate on Giznel, Aras is whisked away.

Now truly alone, I slither between the tables. Every step forces me to watch what I’m about to destroy.

Two raiders and two former UN staff are playing some human table game, roars and yelps punctuating every move, but the genuine comradery among them is unmistakeable, infectious and bright to my senses.

Further on, Hunter Gherizha is slumped by a wall, engrossed in music while her terran squadmate tries to adjust the headphones on her head, a gentle smile playing on his face.

Logistics specialist Adrianos is hunched over a computer terminal with one of the younger defectives - a former cannon fodder runt by the name Salyth. The youngling seems to work under the human’s instruction, his claws clacking on a keyboard with caution borne from experienced violence. And beside them, Sergeant Driskoll and Erthiss’s group of young smooth-scutes occupy two whole tables as they argue Betterment theology for the hundredth time…

At the back, the grill is throwing smoke and flame up to the prefab’s roof, while people - Arxur and humans alike - pulse around it, busy with preparing the different dishes that everyone so looked forward to. Hunter Tizhal is breaking down an ungulate carcass that a human butcher helps hold steady and splayed.

Closer to the grill, I notice Commander Lee. He sees me watching and waves, motioning to come over with a thin, spindly hand.

”He’s not a Commander anymore”, a voice inside me that always keeps track of rank and hierarchy, says. I swat it aside as I move towards Lee, through the strange synchronicity of it all. Through the comfort we so quickly got used to. Tailed and tailless, working together, rubbing shoulders, arguing, preservering. For a common goal. First Earth, now - Wriss.

Because, Sapient Coalition or not, Wriss needs medicine. It needs heated blankets, children’s toys, water filters, generators, various electronic controllers, comms… everything that was manufactured by the state that no longer truly exists.

After it happened to them, these humans understand it.

It isn’t always so. To this day many humans on Earth feel apprehensive of camps like Varosha. Even after the Extermination fleet, even after Aafa - solely because of what we did to the Feds for the centuries before.

No amount of explaining would change that, unfortunately. I remember those very first days on Earth, the dirty looks, the jabs and insults our raiding pack had received after being dropped to the smoldering ruins of the terran cities for search and rescue operations.

“Baby-eaters”. “Monsters”. “Murderers”. They’d say that while, as I’ve learned later, eradicating entire species of their native lifeforms to sate their hunger - or after subjecting each other to wars that would’ve made the ones we suffered through on Wriss a hatchling’s play.

I was never in the position to argue. The fight I almost got into with Aras’s pack leader when I decided to share my ration with the humans, had taught me well that very few wanted to truly hear our perspective. Instead, they seemed to revel in their hostility.

On the other claw, no such people are left here, at Camp Varosha. Only those who believed in us and the Collective’s cause, stayed. Not an insignificant number did.

So, in a way, I’d be taking their hopes and dreams as well.

Before I reach Lee, a dark form blocks the way, towering over me.

With confident ease Enforcer Grizak pushes me aside, into a nook between some stacked water containers and looms over me, eyes full of sly and malicious fire.

“Raid Leader Erza. Bit late you are, don’t you think?” he slowly licks some grease off his hand’s claws and then bobs his head in a manner which in more formal circles would’ve been seen as an outright rank challenge. “Something stalled you?”

I cross my arms over my chest, tail swishing behind me in a show of impatience. I allow myself only a slightly displeased growl, because Grizak is the head of our operation’s security forces, the one who reigns over all the other fighters and smugglers. Antagonizing him now…

“You’re in my way, Grizak”, I say plainly and take a step forward with a hopefully menacing click of the feetclaws. He doesn’t budge, putting his broad, scarred chest between me and the rest of the mess, tail flicking in playful menace.

All this feeding certainly helped him, but even back during the battle in Izhtan-Bul I saw him easily cut a Gojid in half with his tliskis.

His neck shoots forward, putting his snout right to mine as we stare each other down.

“I know what’s up, Erza”, he holds my unblinking gaze with ease, pupil as thin as the tip of a freshly sharpened blade, eyebrow ridges slanted to the snout. “And I don’t advise you to tell the rest of the pack. We’re not leaving.”

Grizak knows? But how? The War Council… Of course, it’s quite their way of doing things, twisting into confusing coils, applying redundance. I would’ve chuckled, if it didn’t look like an admission of defeat. I don’t flinch, don’t show my surprise, but my tail sways like a cursed beacon of distress, and I force the strokes to be sharper, furious and not “confused.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will defy your orders. The rest of the security pack as well. How will you enforce your will if there’s no one to rip into the disobedient bellies at your command?”

He’s, of course, right. Power is defined by the ability to impart violence with impunity, and without Griznak and his tail-crunchers, all I have is words.

“So you’re effectively throwing a mutiny?” Now my fangs are fully bare as I bubble with cold fury, our snouts almost rubbing against each other. Any more and we’re going to clash, right here and there, like starved runts over a bone…

But the word “mutiny”, for some reason makes him jerk back as if I had insulted his nestlings.

“Mutiny? No! Everyone wants to continue our work here!”, he gnashes heatedly. “All for Collective’s victory, for Isif…”

“But not on Wriss!”, I spit, glancing quickly around to see if anyone had caught on to our conversation.

Grizak takes another step back, his tail stilling and voice low.

“Enough people are fighting on Wriss. We’re doing more here than we could do elsewhere. Terran ammunition sites aren’t bombed, for one - and we can deliver the ordnance!”

The problem is that Grizak is correct. But the Council is right too. I open my maw to counter him when Commander Lee stands up, now openly gesturing for me to come over right as the mess starts to calm down and people take their seats.

Snorting out a long breath through his nostrils, Grizak slides to the side to let me through and I walk to my spot, scanning for Aras amongst the so similar-looking humans.

The argument is still fresh on my fangs. If I hadn’t convinced Aras, how do I convince more than thirty other Arxur? My claw reaches to my chest-piece, tracing the sticker with a yellow smiling face that Captain Ozman had sticked to the armor after the humans saw that I tried mimicking their facial expressions.

I had convinced humans of many things. Why can’t I do the same with my own kin, then?

“Attention, friends, Earthlings and Wrissans!”

Lee chinks a thin knife on a glass in his hand, and, as the noise of a hundred people dies down, clears his throat.

“Today’s feast is special - it marks a point in the war that we’ve all been waiting for! The disgraced Prophet-Descendant Giznel, one who conspired with the Kol-Sul enemy against Arxur and humans alike, one who kept the people of Wriss starved and suffering, has officially left the High Palace in Laznel and, according to reports, fled the system entirely, with Collective fighters on his tail!”

Tails slap the ground and smooth hands clap at the announcement, and Lee goes down with a controlled tight grin that doesn’t truly reach his black eyes, if I understand anything about terrans.

Someone bellows “death to the traitor!”, Christoforou, the camp’s utilities supervisor, murmurs “should’ve gotten the Shaza treatment”, and electrified, vicious joy spreads through the air as the mess cooks roll out the food.

I lower myself onto a bench beside Lee… and wait.

Wait until stomachs are full and tempers are low.

Ancestors, help me.

[NEXT]

A/N: So. A bit of a canon-compliant work from me, ha? It needs tp be said that “The Duty Commanding Us” is in a way inspired by u/JulianSkies ’s [Those Who Stay] (https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureofPredators/comments/1t220bg/those_who_stay_chapter_1_choices_we_make/). I found the premise of the dilemmas the Earth-based Collective rebels facing as the Sapient Coalition demanded the forcing of Arxur out and the needs of their own war mounting, to be extremely interesting, but found the direction the author took to be disappointing for the interest that had piqued.

Plus, it was good way to write about some of the character I came up when drawing this picture.

So, as usual, when I don’t get something, I write it myself. Enjoy this two-parter oneshot, and tell me what you think of it!

Some stuff from discord convos - formal wear in u/Scrappyvamp’s Scorch Directive AU, specifically the United Dominion.

So tried to imagine what my two main characters, Dril and Sazha from Balance of Vengeance, would wear for a non-military formal event. Came up with a more dressed-up getup for a female Arxur incorporating materials made out of Fed folks and a plaid suit for Dril, who’s lifelong lack of wealth and personal belongings made him a big fan of posh suits.

In case you wonder, the lizzor isn’t short, it’s Dril that’s 8 feet tall

Two best lizards from Thawed

Finally finished a sketch I had lying around

Thawed, one of the GOATest wholesome fics, hasn’t a proper MC cast fanart pic. I rectify.

Arthur, Mixsel, Izra and Jammek going in to get a snapshot of their little found family

First | Previous | [Next]

Part II

Part I

---

“… usher in the era of a truly United Dominion. Where every Arxur, Terran and any other being that wishes to join us, will be able to fight for the right of the people of the Galaxy to chart their own path - and carve their piece of the coming victory! We will no longer allow caste or scale color or species to divide us in our relentless march forward! The new hierarchy would be built based on one’s claw and tooth, brain and brawn! On what they can offer to the people of the United Dominion, instead of resting on laurels of old blood and conquests long gone...”

Even watching the speech the second time, I’m still swept by it.

Under the Dominion’s banners, under the blazing Wrissan sky, sharp fangs barred and claws gripping the pupiter, Meier looks more of a Prophet than Giznel ever was - or that’s just human-to-human solidarity.

I always believed our cause, but the feeling in my chest is new, clear and welcome. I know I can follow him.

To the grave, if needed.

To the grave most likely.

The Generalissimus did it. Chief Hunter Isif, standing behind Meier like a paternal shadow, did it. They felled the beast that once appeared invincible. The Betterment is exposed, fractured, disintegrating before our eyes, and that means… does it mean that what I did was, indeed, meaningful? That it counted for this day to come? That all the blood spilled, all the death…

“Now, the last obstacle to such a future, the Federation’s poisoned thorn in the side of the Dominion that festered for centuries, has finally been pulled out. The Yotul Ascendancy already stands with us as proof that we are more than the placement of eyes and the shape of teeth, and I tell it to everyone who listens - you too, can be more. More than what you were born as, more than what you were told you would be.”

Jazhif too, is moved, I can see it.

For a different reason, of course. As he lies strapped to the stretcher, immobilized and hastily sewn up, tremors of rage pass through his bulk from the snout and right down to the tip of the restrained tail. I ordered him to be patched just enough to last a few hours, and I wonder if he understands that his time has already run out.

With his red eyes wide-open and bleeding nostrils fluttering from incredulous fury, I can see that the speech hurts him even more than his wounds do.

The broadcast drone shifts its camera to show thousands of zealots, scions and even members of Abidence kneeling to the new Chief-Hunter and the Generalissimus.

This is a throne taken by strength. I find it ironic that it’s the deeply-ingrained Betterment dogmas that would force Betterment followers to accept the new order. No challenger rose up and so the coup is fully legitimate by the Dominion’s own standards.

“It’s… it’s fake. S-s-sssome construct”, the former Overseer croaks in effort to conceal his deflated tone.

I can only snort at such nonsense.

”Like I’d waste time pulling a prank on a slab of dead meat.”

This admission brings a spark of defiance back to the dulled red of Jazhif’s eyes

”Then why show it to me? This means nothing to me - my loyalty is forever to the true Prophet and not some half-runt traitor and his pet monkey uplift!”, he sneers through a futile attempt to lift off the gurney. “It wouldn’t take long until this so-called rebellion is crushed and all your heads roll down the Temple’s…-“

I lean in to him, fangs barred. To his credit, he barely flinches and, if stares could kill, I would’ve already melted under his glare like under a blast from a heavy Yulpa flamer.

“Nobody is coming, Jazhif. Nobody!”, I hiss vehemently. “Your “Betterment” - a lie forced on you by the Federation preyshits, as it turns out - just cracked like a rotten egg!”

“Really? You’re a fucking Terran! Primitive, limited, artificial!” His jaws part wider in a mock grin that he powers through the breathlessness of a shot lung. “What do you know of Betterment, of any of it?!”

I know it’s his despair talking, know it all too well. Anger covering up utter terror. It’s… ironic. I look at my hands.

“I gave the United Dominion everything… Some small things”, I wiggle the stump of my pinkie finger in the Overseer’s directions. “Some… hm, bigger than the whole world. Believe me, if Betterment did anything, but burn through the best of us, through the people we need to win this stars-cursed war, I’d be the first in line to enlist into Abidence as a human Enforcer!”

I jerk my chin towards the paused holo projection.

“As to why, hrm. Well, I figured this would hurt.”

At that, the brow ridge scales that form the wounded Arxur’s scowl relax, as a shadow of… not understanding, no, but familiarity, darkens the flame in his eyes. A broken, self-deprecating rattle escapes his still-parted jaws.

Laughter.

“I have to admit… you could’ve made a good Arxur, ape.”

”I’ll take it as a compliment.”

He then studies me for a bit, a calm overtaking the pain-seized features for a moment when he seems to reach some sort of conclusion.

“Still, we never should’ve let you skinbags join”, the hiss that comes out of the alien lizard’s maw is laced with venom, the only sort he got left now. “You taint everything with your arrogance, with weakness… If not for this accursed alliance, Betterment would have-!”

“No, that's bullshit. Even when you came to save us, we saw that your whole civilization was on its last legs. Even someone like me knew damn well that this Betterment charade was a rock tied around your neck - and then, our neck! Sure, your fury and resilience helped ignite our fight for survival, but… We are just as necessary to your survival now.”

“Fucking. Cloaca. Slime.”

“Oh really? So why did the majority of Arxur side with Isif? I’ll tell you why. Because Betterment was never for them. It was for a pack of elites, maybe for you, but not for them! You fed them scraps and demanded full compliance!” I stab a finger at him in accusation. “Look at the mighty United Dominion, where food rationing and shortages are still not uncommon, while Terra struggles to provide… But the zealots of Abidence always have a Rainbow Platter to go around, don’t they?”

Jazif ogles me in contemptuous silence as another blood trickle starts out of his right nostril. I, however, cannot stop until I give this piece of scaled shit a taste of my mind.

“But the United Dominion is for them. Chief Hunter Isif is for them. Generalissimus Meier is for them. They saw us give them hope and do things you’ve never thought of. Comradery. Trust. Abundance instead of Abidence. A life beyond circling their caste’s drain-pipe. That’s how it will be. No more Betterment lard-tails like you, Jazhif.”

“You’ve wool for a brain, Terran. This is the nature of power - there’s no place for crowds on the top. Only the strongest”, he gulps, tongue flicking out with visible effort. “The fittest have the strength to climb… and hold… that power. To take the spoils.”

“Maybe. But in the end, you have none of the power. And I do.”

I roll closer, to his very stretcher, taking in every greying scale, every visible pulse of the large artery on the side of his neck. Savor every detail of him dying.

“So now that you know that nobody’s coming for you, not planetside, not from Wriss - how about you make yourself useful and tell me something about, say, Abidence covert ops? Something Terran Command Milint doesn’t know already? I know you’re privvy…”

”I will not tell you anything.”

It doesn’t take an interrogations expert to catch the finality in his tone. I know it’s useless torturing anything out of him. Oh well, formally I tried.

I nod and reach to the side of the wheelchair, picking up the Overseer’s tliskis blade and lifting it to show him.

This, as I expected, gets through him. When I run and clattder my claws along the blane’s length, the grimace that his bony snout contorts into seems to nearly snap its very bones. I hear teeth and claws grind upon each other with such tensile strength that I’m sure some are breaking.

“Don’t! Keep your filthy claws away from it! I will tear your fucking heart and feed it to you, you fucking mite, you puddle of tilfish dung, you…!”

But I pointedly admire the craftsmanship some more while the Arxur thrashes madly in his restraints, blood seeping through the hastily applied bandages.

“You know, I thought it’d be poetic justice to behead you right now with your ancestor’s sword, the very one you made me kill Ruzha with, but then,” I twist the sword around to let it catch the overhead lights and put it back on the floor. It will have to wait for its turn. “I realized you didn’t suffer like him yet.”

Next, out comes my combat knife. I demonstrate the dull blackened sheen of the blade to the hyperventilating Arxur, for they will become close acquaintances very soon.

“For that I suppose simple Terran steel would be adequate. A Betterment zealot is supposed to be much more resolute than a light-scale defective, hm-mm? Let’s see if it truly is so. ”

Finally, the full meaning of my words dawns on Jazhif and the once-powerful Overseer strains so hard that the plastic binding cuts deep into the scales of his forearms. But we both know he’s not going anywhere. He’s all mine, here and now. Jones cannot stop me, nobody can.

A profound sense of satisfaction, along with a flood of saliva, warms the back of my throat.

For a moment, I feel disgust at my own inclinations, but it quickly dissipates as I remember how this tliskis blade in my hand fought against Ruzha’s neck. What this writhing sack of leather made me do.

Old habits die hard, a voice in the back of my head says.

I have to agree. Certainly harder and longer than any man - or man-space-lizard - does.

---

It’s quite amazing, the speed with which the crew tore down anything reminiscent of Jazhif out of his former personal quarters to make room for a new honcho.

Not even a day after the mutiny passes until a new pecking order is festablished, and according to it I am now the temporary Senior Overseer of the Prophet’s Talon… which all things considered, is in dire need of a new name.

But all that will come later. Now I stare blankly at the equally blank, scrubbed down bulkhead of the three by three room.

No more book shelfs, trophy racks, trinkets or knacks to remind of the person that once occupied this space. “Sic transit gloria mundi”, as Nassar would say. But here, only a large circular rest-nest, which Arxur consider to be proper beds as compared to the more human-friendly bunks, remains.

They also left the desk - now just a vast expanse of brushed steel with a bulb of the holo-terminal poking from the center of it. I idly wonder where the Arxur’s books went. Into the incinerator? A shame if so…

An empty food tray perches at the desk’s edge, thanks to a Neophyte that was mindful to bring me a bite from the mess. As I munched on it, I examined the “meat patty” inside and found it to be the usual Soylent Fed mush.

So much for not eating sapients anymore. Change in that regard will definitely take a while. I need to recover fast anyway.

As I was eating, Johnes called to congratulate me. Flattering when one considered that she took the time for it while she was on Wriss and dealing with the fallout of the coup.

“You don’t look half-bad for someone taking the sort of beating that you claim you did. Command is pleased that the losses are low and the optics with the new Wrissan powers are relatively fine, despite what you did to Jazhif. Plus, I look good for choosing you for this mission.”

In the holocall, Jones seemed to be half-sunk into a car seat, light and shadow rolling across her face as her transport glided through a tunnel.

At the mention of Jazhif, I reached a hand into the jumpsuit’s pocket and felt for the smooth surface of an Arxur fang. Never took trophies, but this one wasn't for me - it’s for Ruzha.

“Listen… when you’re back on Earth, I’ll see what I can do for you. We care for our own, Major.”

The sly curve to her lips did a bad job of hiding the double meaning of her words, and I tensed despite being a thousand light-years away from her.

“If the brass wants to shower me with commendations, they can do so on Mars”, I snipped curtly. Jones’s eyes narrowed - no in anger, but playful sarcasm.

“Nobody implied showering, though I think I can arrange that.”

“My station is on Mars”, I ignored the heavy-handed wordplay in a dry, curt tone. I knew what she wanted, and was determined not to give it to her.

“As you wish. But you can’t be stuck on Ghanith forever. Jazhif had friends, family, a whole bloodline. Some of them are loose, with knees unbent to the new order”, she cocked her head with all the curiosity of a cat watching a mouse squirm in its paws. “Need to get back to the Protectorate, Abaurre. Otherwise, your luck will eventually run out.”

Luck, huh. If you say so, Cora.

Back to the Terran Protectorate… what for? I’m not exactly where I need to be, but at least here I am useful. The war rages on, and it’s not like there’s something - or someone - waiting for me there.

Despite being pumped full of painkillers, the sharp stab of pain to the side makes me double over and collapse into the human-fitted chair at the desk.

For a moment, I feel colder and lonelier than ever. I can imagine Mira’s hands wrapping around my neck. The gentle touch and teasing whispers, asking if I needed a kiss to make it “all better”.

No cuts or bruises or broken bones hurt when she was around. No anguish lurked in the dark corners of the mind when she laughed, even if at my expense.

A treacherous moisture develops in the corner of my left eye.

These goddam tears, again, like in the airlock. They’re nothing, but a drop that’s lost in the endless torrent of our collective despair. They came and went, leaving me not relieved and redeemed, but hollow… Confused.

I hurry to wipe the drop away with an index claw, and, noticing how chipped it is, reach for my bag where the grooming kit lies unpacked.

Filing the claws, running the strip of metal over the deep bloodstains again and again, puts me in a trance-like state. The focus and the simple, repetitive motions block out the melancholy I’ve been feeling ever since the station fully fell in our hands.

And it works so well, that I barely notice the door chime with a request to enter.

“Open hatch”, still engrossed in my manicure, I order the door open and only when I hear more than two pairs of Arxur feet drag in, do I lift my eyes to the visitors and put the file down.

”What’s this?” Dumb question, but I ask it nonetheless as I’m faced with a quartet of blood-soaked and nearly fainting prisoners: a Mazic, Gojid, Krakotl and even a Tilfish, locked between the towering frames of Kraniz and Hiznal.

The latter, a light-scaled and scrawny Arxur, for a moment looks almost scared by the question, but then quickly regains composure and steps forward, his tail doing a polite swish-n-curl around his feet.

“Um, Hunter-Exalted… Senior Overseer, that is, my apologies, [I see you persist]! We ah, were clearing the bodies in engineering, and these uhsssh… um… we found them trying to play dead meat after the siege and essh…“

“These four survived the breach shootout,” Stepping forward, Kraniz helps his friend as he stumbles through his announcement. “We, well, mostly Hunter-Ascendant Sazha, assumed it would be your judgement on what to do with them, Senior Overseer.”

Good question. They shouldn’t have survived.

But they did, and I grit my teeth in frustration. I’ve already got my hands full with the piling administrative tasks, and now there’s preyscum still alive on my station, demanding to be dealt with.

Somewhat stumped by this development, I nonetheless observe them - and in return, averting their eyes away from mine, they exchange glances amongst themselves.

Even without knowing the finer aspects of the Fed species’ body language, I understand it’s an attempt at building resolve in a moment of reckoning. The Krakotl reaches a plucked, disgustingly bare arm-wing over to the Tilfish and the smaller alien grabs onto it with its fore-feelers.

Touching display, but it won’t necessarily save you…

“It is my judgement.” I breath out with some residual pain, and leaning back in the chair, beckon the Feddies with a claw. “You, come forward. And you two, stop hovering over them. You what, think they’re a danger to us?”

In all honesty, a well-trained Mazic or Takkan can go one-vs-one with a trained Atrox all on their own. But the Broken Tusk (huh, so he survived), is a pale echo of what a Mazic grunt can be in his prime. And he’s also not in a Juggernaut exo-rig.

The rest are starved and hurt. The bugger is even missing one of his upper arms at the “shoulder”, the wound already self- sealed by a pale membrane. Was it the fight or someone got a snack before the mutiny broke loose?

”Did they kill any loyalists during the breach?”

“I don’t know if these exact ones did, but all of them? Yes, they shot at least four. Made our job easier. Your decision to use them as a bullet sponge was uh, exquisite, Senior Overseer. You’d be pleased to know that none of the actual breaching team got seriously hurt.”

“Hrm. Congratulations are in order then. To me - and to them.”

Kraniz chuffs contentedly, his maw sharp and taut with hunger. Between the Arxur and me, the Feds don’t look re-assured, and I don’t blame them.

They see a monster in me, of course. Teeth that tear flesh; claws that grab them to drag out of the station’s cattle-pen and onto the butcher’s block; ruins of their colonies and cities, families torn apart.

But I, too, see monsters. The countryside of my hometown bathed in fire as I’m riding in the back of a truck, held in Arxur claws. Bags with corpses stacked in Riyadh’s cargo bay after the siege of the Cradle. Flames that sear flesh, melt armor into skin. Families torn apart.

You can’t reason with a monster if you yourself aren’t one. On other hand, does that mean that monsters can find rapprochement between each other, some form of understanding built on nothing, but the common ground of their depravity?

Maybe. Maybe I should try that.

Weeks ago, I pointed a finger at their friend, to be taken and eaten. I ate him. And then another. And another. Because I deserved to live more than them. Perhaps I’m right, but, perhaps, some Takkan back on the Pakex colony thought just the same as he stepped on Malik’s head when he tried to crawl away.

I recall my friend’s face, fraction of a second before that happened - disbelief and denial. My own reflection in the door of that airlock, contorted with the mortal fear from the realization that nothing in my life came to make sense or have value, right before it all ends.

I see the same terror of looming obliteration frozen on the snouts of these hapless fucks.

Isn’t it strange that underneath all this blood, beneath this sweet intoxicating veil of vengeance, we all have this face in the end?

Predator, prey, doesn’t matter. Everybody running out of time to fix their mistakes.

I intertwine my fingers, using the gesture to conceal a light tremor to the hands. They’re all with me, hundreds of deaths of my people that I’ve witnessed myself or oversaw later in reports. Their weight tangible, their call undeniable.

Or so I tell myself to drown out the silence.

“What’s to be of us, Terran, then?” The Mazic rumbles warily, calling me back out of my thoughts. “Bullet… or blade?”

Horrid, ugly deaths, at times. What would it serve to add these four to the pile? Would it serve anything? Just another stain.

“Of you, right. As the current Overseer of this station, I’ve decided that your debt to the United Dominion is…” I shift in the seat, then quickly snap my gaze towards Kraniz and nod, signalling that I’ve made a decision and it’s final. “Partially repaid. So you are to be transferred back to your homeworlds for further procedures with the local Dominion administrations.”

The Krakotl’s pupil seizes into a tiny dot, the Porcie bristles with the remaining quills, but it’s the Mazic that reacts first, growing out his slump to a once formidable height, shoulders rolling out as he towers over the others.

“H-how… Khoa has fallen?” he bellows hoarsely. “Has it? How else would you be able to send me back - to the ruins, then?!”

I wave a dismissing hand.

“No.”

“And Nishtal-“

“It will fall soon”, I cut through the Krakotl’s squawk with a cruel smirk and point a claw at him and the Mazic. “You and you. You will likely be relocated to Venlil Prime. No details now, it’s beneath my station. Could be Leirn.”

My finger moves to the Gojid and he withers like a gun has been pointed at him.

“You will be sent to the Cradle or one of the Gojid colonies under our control.”

“Cradle? But we were told the C-Cradle was destroyed… glassed!” The Porcie’s eyes boggle out the sides of his skull in shock.

“No. Not even close”, my smirk fades away - a shame the Cradle only got occupied, as in my opinion it deserved the Scorch Directive no less than Grenelka. So many good men lost... “It’s part of the United Dominion now, but its heliosphere borders are locked and infonet connections to the greater Fednet severed.”

Watching the Porcie process the fact that his homeworld survived, Hiznal can’t contain a loud condescending scoff.

“Prey-brained shits think we’d waste goods so readily!”

“And you…” my attention finally turns to the diminutive Tilfish. It chirps in agitation, the peculiar pupils of its faceted eyes shifting away from the other prisoners and onto me as it visibly trembles from antenna to the tip of its abdomen.

“I’m not from Silis!” a creaking screech lets loose from its open mandibles.

“Of course you aren’t.” I smirk. “Silis is a planet-wide bioreactor that serves us now.”

“What does it mean? I don’t understand… I don’t understand!”

It probably truly doesn’t understand.

How old is it, even? Four, five years? The Tilfish Ambassadorship used their species’ unique reproductive cycle to bolster the Federation’s military to a stupid degree for centuries.

All the population the Ambassadorship couldn’t sustain was funneled off-world into the bigger Federation. Leased out for the agricultural sector, for construction labor and, of course, war. Cheap and expendable.

Unfortunately, when we took over Silis, several Hive Ambassadors with some of their retinue and citizens managed to escape and now the same cycle is repeated in half a dozen other colonies.

Perhaps, I should pity the creature. It was molded to be this from its infancy, no more a willing participant than a gun hot off a production line. No guidance, no self-actualization, no care had been provided to them. T

They’re taught to talk, read and operate some basic machinery and weapons. Then, equipped with the Fed equivalent of shitsticks, they get thrown into the grinder in enough numbers to stall and potentially whittle us down.

How is that different from Essil or Ruzha… or you?

We had a choice. Did we, though? The thought tries to claw in, but I shake my head in resistance.

“It means you won’t be sent to Silis”, I tell the child soldier. “ Venlil Prime’s gravity is too much for your kind, so… Colia. They’d help fix the damage, too.”

I gesture to its missing limb and it instinctively hugs the rest of its feelers closer to its body. By my side, Kraniz’s tongue flicks about in anxious doubt, the sickle-like claws of his free, left hand, flex as he listens to me. Hiznal’s tail taps a rapid rhythm on the ground.

They don’t fully agree. True, it goes against the United Dominion practice. The only Feds that survive the Armada are either those who surrender voluntarily or those who are interesting to Milintel.

But, new times are upon us, just like the Generalissimus said. And what else did he say back then, when the Scorch Directive had been issued on Grenelka? That a true victory, one the doesn’t spiral a war into another cycle, but breaks it, is a victory that is just.

I can try and believe that. Grenelka was just… but so, perhaps, is my choice.

“Senior Overseer, are you sure?”, Kraniz’s fear of my authority and his newfound confidence are clearly fighting among each other, evident by the way his voice breaks mid-sentence. He squints, eyes turning into thin emerald slits. “We can end it fast.”

“No need. Secure them and move them to the brig, in a separate cell from the loyalists.”

There’s no way to tell if this is a good idea, and if I’m honest with myself, I don’t fully know where I’m going with this decision.

The approach simply feels right. The United Dominion changes its course, so it’s also expected of me?

There's no way to tell, since nothing about the moment is how I imagined it to be. Not like the picture I’ve painted to Zakwe back on the Izhali colony, where I implied that the change would be gradual, thoroughly planned out and dependent on people like me walking the halls of Dominion power.

I thought I’d be sitting in my own office, issuing decrees and forming policies that would affect the lives of millions without ever seeing them.

Not helm an ancient space-station with a bloody rip in my belly, in the dirt and grime, lording over the fates of a few former ship-cattle.

Yet, in some way, the moment arrived, and I’m… am I even ready?

I’m letting these Feds walk with their lives.

The small procession is halfway out the door, when Broken Tusk stops, much to Tekhef’s dismay. He turns his head to focus one eye on me, and then steps forward, like he’s tormented by a lethal curiosity that just won’t let its claws off him.

“Why, Terran? Why this, “ he waves a stumpy long arm towards the entrance. “Why don’t you simply…”

He trails off, surprisingly not having the balls - or his species equivalent of - to say the words “kill us”, like voicing them would make me reconsider.

It doesn’t. Maybe he thinks it’s out of respect for their supposed bravery or help? No. And I don’t intend on humoring the Mazic, until the answer that slips from my mouth surprises me more than him.

“Mercy.”

---

Mercy… as they leave my quarters I run a claw over my lips. The word sticks, uncomfortable and wrong in the context of the last few hours. It stains my skin and I pick more at the dry flakes, trying to peel the still-clinging taste away.

The former Overseer’s room is dark, calming my eyes. The air is stuffy. It feels like a sarcophagus, those tombs in Egypt that miraculously survived the Glassing.

It’s exactly the place I should be in.

Mercy. I hesitate for a second, then, overtaken by deathly exhaustion, climb into the nest-rest.

Jazhif slumbered here, and using it is like taking a trophy. Especially since instead of the utilitarian, synthetic-fiber blankets you’d find on the Armada ships, the Arxur’s bowl-like bed is filled with opulent fur throws.

Lush and glossy, silky and rough, spotted, striped, faded… Each one - a Fed’s life.

Despite the insufficient gravity, I try to relax my body, rock on the ebbing waves of painkiller-induced apathy. As I’m exploring the clashing textures of the pelts around, the cold fur and feathers start to warm up when the heating pads beneath them activate automatically.

But this heat is artificial. The bed is empty. Again.

Was it empty for Jazhif, I wonder? He had his whole clan, at least… one that supposedly will try to hunt me down in revenge.

And I’ve none of my own that would protect me.

No blood, no kin. Come and go like a nightmare, leaving nothing after myself, but a film of terror-borne sweat and the weight of sorrow on the heart.

I run my fingers, claws and fingertips, across some short and incredibly dense fur. Don't recognize the species, but it matters not. What does is that its softness is accusatory, almost repulsive.

I bury my damp face in it. Breathe in the smell of dust, alien oils and the accompanying death, then curl up as tight as I can and close my eyes.

Mercy.

Will there be a time when someone considers me worthy of it?

First | Previous | Next

---

Location: “The Prophet’s Talon” void station, Ghanith system, Wrissan Domain space

Drawing rapid gulps of breath after the airlock re-pressurizes, I throw the helmet to the floor and stumble toward the medkit storage.

A small voice in the back of my head tries to cheer for the fact that I’ve survived the spacewalk. The louder, more cynical part of me knows that it’s hardly a victory and that I’m at the last bit of my rope. No more than an inch left to hold on to.

Can barely move, can barely think.

I peel off the vacsuit and get hit with the stench of oxidized iron. All the blood that leaked from the wound and floated in the suit, now soaks my clothes through and through.

Not only clothes. Hair, face, ears... I rub it out of my eyes and off the mouth quickly, and rush to tear the medkit storage open.

Fingers don’t obey me, so what should’ve taken me seconds to apply the medipatches, takes minutes because I drop them over and over again. Finally, they seem to stick and hold.

The amount of blood is… concerning, and my heart chugs on like an engine with an empty tank.

How much blood did I lose? How long until I collapse? The serum made me sturdier than most, but everyone has their limit, and…

I slide my hand to the sheath on my thigh and draw out the combat kabar knife. Alright. I have one last scrap in my gas tank, but if I manage to tackle a Hunter-Guard and take their weapon, maybe there’ll be even less security for the Neophytes to deal with.

Desperately fighting the desire to just sit down and get my final sleep, I pull the manual hatch release lever and, as the doors loudly hiss open, peek out.

Empty. Just a half-lit tube of the deck-corridor.

I switch the grip on my blade to reverse, fingers flexing on the slippery, sweat and blood-slicked handle, and cautiously creep forward, flattening myself against the curved wall.

Have I ever been to the command bridge? No, Jazhif never took me there. I scan the slate-grey walls, trying to find some pointer in the mess of the exposed insulation and piping, but nothing’s there.

No holopad means no navigation around deck. The only clue I have about where I’m going is that twenty or thirty meters ahead the corridor intersects with another passage. There I’ll have to decide - left or right, and make peace with the cho-…!

”… hadn’t reported for half an hour already.”

Voices! Hiding in an empty tube is useless, and I freeze in deathly anticipation as I prepare to face whoever is going to appear.

“So they’re dead?” Shit, it’s Jazhif! His tinny, grating voice penetrates the bulkhead from the right of the corridors’ junction so well that I don’t even need the enhanced Atrox hearing to make out the words he hisses.

“No sign of them, might as well be…”

“Prophet-damned ape!”

And that’s Enazh and Tahrith!

”There’s three airlocks on the command deck, technically he could’ve entered any of them. That is, if he’s even alive?”

“I’d rather see the body!” Jazhif snarls louder than before. They’re approaching. How many? I tense, trying to determine how many footsteps I hear, but my focus keeps falling apart.

”He could be just floating away in space, Senior Overseer.”

“Then use the station’s proximity scanners and search for an ape-shaped object, you dolts!”

“Uh… we can’t, Senior Overseer. The bridge is still inaccessible, the cursed scale-mold somehow hacked into the security turrets and we already lost two men there.”

Wait, what? The bridge - what’s with the bridge…?

“So what do you think, Sazha? If it weren’t for your sloppy shooting… and there I thought Iron Fangs were amongst the strongest scions!”

There’s a brief pause, after which I hear the unmistakable scorn in the voice of a being I once considered my friend.

“Sloppy? The Terran is dead. If not now, it’s a matter of time until it bleeds out.”

“Could’ve shot him in the head!”

“Their heads are small, haven’t you noticed? One tiny jerk - and you miss. You’d know that if you actually ever did your duty in the Armada or the raiding fleet”, the scolding chuff she gives reverberates all the way to my corridor. “Give me grace. I was under its command for almost a decade, I wanted to see it squirm a bit.”

The contempt in Sazha’s voice feels like a claw shoved and twisting right in the bullet-wound.

I swallow another clot of blood that climbs up the throat. If it’s the very last thing I do, I’ll fucking kill her. Gut her open, forget the knife, if I have to put my claws and fangs to work, all the better! I won’t survive it either, but dying with the taste of that treacherous lizard’s blood on my lips will be a good send-off.

A measure of solace, at least.

The next heartbeat the Arxur take the turn and come into view. There’s six of them - Jazhif, the ever-present duo of Enazh and Tahrith, two Hunter-Guards and… Sazha.

We lock eyes for a moment and I see their pupils dilate, filling the red and yellow expanses with the black ink of murderous focus.

The guns in their claws rise and turn in my direction, slow and steady as my perception sharpens for the last time; as knees bend to gather and release the final bit of energy I got.

Nowhere to hide or run, and all I can do is calculate how fast I will reach the Arxur while bullets tear chunks out of me. Who I will stab first - Jazhif or Sazha, which unfortunately hangs slightly behind the Hunter-Guards.

My vision tunnels. Breathing comes in sputtering, erratic wheezes. Legs are barely cooperative.

End of the line.

Weirdly, what are to be my last moments are bereft of any strong emotions. I just move with a singular, simple urge - to reach and kill what I can.

I’ll need ten, fifteen steps. Can I take a dozen more high-caliber slugs before I reach them? I have to. Sprint and then jump, the microgravity will do the rest…

Shots ring. I hear them, but they’re distant and muted. As I lunge, I expect the rounds to connect with my body, maiming flesh, mangling bone… cut and throw me mid-stride with the force of the impact.

But nothing touches me. Instead, as I skim along the wall, I see the Arxurs’ heads, one by one, violently rupture and disappear in clouds of gore and skull bits.

Their legs give out, and the bodies start to fall, crumble and dance the last throes of convulsing limbs and tails - and so does my pounce peter out in an ungraceful stagger when I realize that the only Arxur left standing is Sazha.

Separated by some five-odd meters we stop in indecision - knife in my hand, smoking gun in hers.

Why did I never notice how tall and big she actually is? Six feet of corded muscle under the scales and those claws…

“Luka?!”

I grip the blade harder, blinking furiously to make her silhouette out in the rapidly darkening corridor. Embers of eyes blaze, inset into the shadowed snout like she's some apparition from hell

A revenant that came to drag me to the underworld.

“Y-you…”

I stubbornly take a step forward, and get to say exactly that much, because the next moment darkness envelopes me. Turns my body weightless. Non-existent.

The light doesn’t come back.

There’s nothing in this void with me.

No parting memory, no profound thought. Just a cold and bitter, all-permeating grief.

---

”I’ve always wanted to operate on a Terran”, the old Arxur hisses with excitement as he’s priming a cauterizing laser. “Fascinating, simply fascinating!”

I’ve so many painkillers in my system that all I feel is some warmth and the comforting blanket of numbness that’s spread over every inch of my body.

The Zurilian tech, spotless and gleaming, beeps around us, and once again I sing silent praises to the occupation effort on Colia. Had we not gotten the meddie-teddies under our thumb, this already bloody war would’ve gotten far more grimmer.

And, most importantly, I'd be dead.

“Knock yourself out, doc”, I slur through an un-cooperative tongue between my teeth. “Just remember I gotta be on my feet in under an… uh… hour.”

“Senior Bonemender”, the pale-scuted old Arxur murmurs a correction and smoke wafts up into his dessicated snout as he cauterizes the edges of the wound that he’s working on. “And that’s too optimistic of a timeframe.”

“You’ve got no other options. It’s an order.”

He grumbles something in reply, but I don’t pay attention anymore. More interesting things exist and right by my side, no less. There, an arm’s length away, covered in tubes and catheters, Jazhif’s unconscious bulk lies zipped to gurney. A tube is pushed down his throat, assisting him in breathing.

The Arxur’s sorry state doesn’t stop me from feeling such a deep hatred that if I could, I’d hop off the autodoc and finish the job with the nearest tool I could grab.

Just wait for it, buddy. When I’m done with this mess, we’ll have a talk. A real intimate one.

I’m pulled out of murderous fantasies by a screech of a rolled-in metal chair-perch. The lights above dim a bit as a looming shadow announces Sazha’s arrival. It must’ve been her who ordered the Bonemender to keep Jazhif alive.

Sitting down when the Arxur doctor leaves to wash his claws, she leans forward. As her gaze slides to my freshly operated torso, her nostrils flare with a loud and forceful breath, pupils round from instinctive focus.

She’s anxious, I can tell even in my addled state. Tail tip’s moping the floor, slit-like pupils seek out something in my face, claws roll and clack over each other. I stare back and the silence between us stretches and stretches into discomfort and awkwardness.

When I regained consciousness in the autodoc capsule right in the middle of an emergency surgery, she was standing over me, screaming through the thick glass that it had all been a ruse and the station is now under our control.

There and then I had to believe her, because otherwise waking up didn’t make any sense at all.

Now, though? I’m not going to break the ice first. She’s got a lot of explaining to do.

“[I see you emerge], Luka”, Sazha says finally.

If I didn’t know better, I would’ve assumed there’s a guilty scowl hiding among those spiked brow ridges of hers.

“That you do. [See you emerge]”, I clip.

“I… Alright, yes, I shot you. On purpose. So that the guards or Jazhif wouldn’t get to you first. I shot you in a place where I knew, hsshm, you wouldn’t die.”

“That I figured. But see, I lost so many quarts of blood as a result that it’s a… confident statement on your part”, I can’t hide my sarcasm, not from her. “But why? You didn’t just shoot me preemptively, you were with them.”

She looks at her claws, then back at me, tongue flicking incessantly between the half-barred fangs. I can tell that Sazha’s anxious, a rare sight in an Arxur of her heritage and capability.

“Enazh, he - he slipped yesterday that they know Ruzha’s a Collective operative and plan on grabbing him. I realized that he’d spill everything about us and naturally tried to take the narrative in my own claws.”

I prop myself on the elbows some, feeling the fabric that the Bonemender threw over me, slip as I begin to shiver not just from the surrounding cold, but a rising fury. In her own claws?

“What? Why didn’t you tell me, then?! You knew that they were after Ruzha and let him die like that? Let me kill him?”

“Because there was no time! Jazhif was already suspicious because of Ruzha, and us trying to move on them in haste, without proper planning, would’ve been exposed at the very second we tried to! All the security was already reinforced, if you hadn’t noticed!” The flap of skin beneath her jaw vibrates from the combative growl that accompanies her words. “No, I… I did what I could. Played a disgruntled double agent, one asking Abidence for forgiveness and trying to return back Betterment. Earned the trust and…”

“You also told them about Milintel?”

Somehow, this feels worse than having her shoot me and my face must’ve formed into something so horrible that Sazha, this murderous mass of black-scaled muscle and claws, throws her hands up in defense from the butt-naked old me.

“Yes?! I know people like Jazhif. Their arrogance, their place in the hierarchy, the need to show off. I knew that he’d try something like that execution - and that it would set a perfect stage for chaos, just like what we wanted!”

“The risk alone-…” I begin, but her tail smashes that line of thought aside with a loud slap on the floor.

“The station is ours, if you hadn’t figured! When you fled the mess, it drew a lot of Hunter-Guards out, and I covertly passed the access authorization token key to Kraniz. The remembered every lesson, Luka - took over the armory, the guard quarters, comms, the bridge. All I needed was to be alone with Jazhif and his cronies, and have their backs turned firmly my way. The rest - well, you saw.”

“You gambled with my life, Sazha”, I growl quietly. “With your life as well. Not to speak of the Neophytes. How many did we lose?”

The muscles of the Arxur’s snout tighten under the pebble-like miniscule scales, but then she kicks her snout up proudly.

“Eleven from the Collective. Some of the Neophytes that weren’t aware of the mutiny sided with the Overseer, so seven of them got killed when they tried to stop us. Almost two dozen dead on the loyalist side.”

I sit in stunned silence for a while, while Sazha’s eyes glow brighter with concern. She scoots closer and closer, until her huge head almost bumps into mine.

“Luka, do you understand that we accomplished the mission? We took a whole void station with minimal losses. It’s… even by Betterment standards, it’s something! And I kept Jazhif for you.”, she glances towards the gurney.

She’s right. It is a big accomplishment. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted - to be able to claim such a victory, to use it as another stepping stone in the ladder I thought I’d climb. But I didn’t climb it, in the end, did I?

Ruzha’s skinned tail stands vividly before my inner eye, and my hands clench into fists, the fog of painkillers clearing from a pressure that quickly builds inside my head, my chest…

“How could you possibly know that I wouldn’t be killed once I bolted? That I won’t get shot by the guards like a dozen time over after I ran, fucking…” Anger clogs my throat. “If there wasn’t a human-grade vacsuit in the airlock, I’d… I thought you betrayed me!”

Sazha kicks her head back, neck muscles flaring almost like a cobra’s hood.

“I knew because I know you! You’re like those terran insects - the ones that survived the Glassing. You always survive.”

My jaw hangs open, the anger swept away by the sheer ridiculousness of the statement.

“You just co-compared me to a roach?!”

“Yes, it’s a good analogy, because it’s correct and even flattering… Why are you acting like I insulted your forebears?”

I have no response to that, and the awkward silence stretches, with only the beeps of the autodoc and the droning of other medical equipment puncturing it.

Sazha observes me some more, then snaps her jaws with a determination I’ve seen from her on the battlefield.

“I didn’t tell you much about my past. Guess it’s time then. So - I had an older brother. Name’s Crozith. He was… special. Best egg of the clutch, that’s for sure. Pride of my parents, of our whole bloodline”, her hissing gains an uncharacteristic warmth, eyes slitted, lost in recollection. “And we were inseparable - until, of course, he was given over to the Betterment, the Young Scions. We played together, wrecked havoc together, earned our first scars together. Until he died. Officially in a raid, defending a shuttle takeoff from a Takkan Exterminator squad. Exemplary, as always.”

The Arxur’s body tenses like she’s about to either pounce or run.

“I waited and waited for him to come back to the home-nest. We lived not far away from the city’s spaceport, and every military shuttle that would land, I’d track and then sit and wait for someone to come. Silly hope. One day, someone finally came…”

I nod, knowing the end of the story.

”And just like that, I had no brother, and was thrust to be the next pride of the Selnith bloodline. To be an Iron Fang.”

The corners of Sazha’s mouth slightly curve, the thin reptilian lips forming a sardonic smirk that many Arxur have come to pick up from us.

“I didn’t know what to expect of Terrans when the war started. And you know how bitter I was about the leadership assessment. I thought… hsshm, different things about humans, not all of them flattering”, she lets out a low, amused chuff. “Alright, none of them flattering. But… oh, scalemold and mites, I’m not good with words…”

I don’t interrupt and wait as the lizard-woman runs claws across her snout in a feeble attempt of shielding, battling what I assume to be embarrassment.

“I knew I didn’t shoot you to death, and you are like your terran insects, Luka, and yet, when I saw you in that corridor - looking like shit, but alive, it was like Crozith came home.”

What can I say to that sort of thing? That I remember it all? The bullying, calling me “monke”; the slaps up the head with a tail; the teasing about my personal exploits; bringing my every decision as a commander into question like she knew better?

But also… rations not eaten and passed to me when higher-ups weren’t looking. The calming weight of her tail draped over me. Her cover fire behind my shoulder, and claws holding my shaking hand not long ago. Confident, flowing strength that could ground me and also carry a spare k-dog battery because I’d often forget them.

And how I can forget the roaring laughter that she’d break into after making a joke at my expense.

Sometimes, you need nothing else, but for someone to just be beside you, to smooth your rough edges a bit.

Sazha was at my side, no argument there. Longer than any other Arxur, longer than any human.

“You know I have no family”, I half-ask, half-state, casting a glance at her from under the brow. “And Malik, Arzosh, Nguyen, Essil… they’re dead. Mira is dead.”

Kezef isn’t, but she’s too far away to count, just like Nassar.

“You planned to build a nest with her?”

Did I? Even though I always suspected it would end somewhat how it did end. With one of us dead.

“Yeah, you can say that. In any case, you were the only close person I had… left. And when I thought that you had betrayed me, that you’d wiped your tail-end with my trust, that I…”

I can’t bring myself to tell Sazha about what kind of thoughts visited me in the airlock. It’d be unfair to place such a burden on anyone. I turn my eyes down, to my chest and stomach, gripping at the gauze… and gasp in surprise when something brushes along my cheek.

Dry and prickly, warm breath blowing into the face.

Scales and scutes bump against my forehead, scraping the skin.

It lasts only a second, this brief nuzzle. I wish… I wish it could stay longer, this fleeting sense of support. So I could grasp at something else, but the increasingly ephemerous duty to Terra and the Dominion.

Then Sazha’s snout retracts, so that she can look at me again.

“You can trust me, Luka. You always could, from that first assessment fight. So I ask you - are you alright? Not just your body, but… “ she scratches her chin and then twirls a claw at my face. “Your snout is strange. I don’t know this Terran expression, but I don't think it’s a happy one. ”

Rubbing the bridge of my nose, I can only sigh in exasperation - and tell the truth. For a change.

“I… no, I’m not ok. And come to think of it, I never was. The whole galaxy isn't ok.”

I fall back and put hands on my face to shield my eyes from the robosurgeon’s bright lights. It’s rewarding to be so open with Sazha… even literally so, as she put a goddamn hole in me. But also, to have her show that vulnerable underbelly which Arxur never do.

“It doesn’t matter, though. Not now. We still got a war to win. “Get in the fucking robot, Shinji””, I drawl between the fingers.

“What robot and what shinji?”

“I don’t know. Shinji is a name, I think. It’s a phrase one of our instructors on Tharsis would always say in those training missions, before Retribution. Lots of guys fresh from boot didn’t want to drop from orbit, because armor neural connection sucked then and there's also the whole “falling down and probably dying to Fed fire” thing”. Recalling it feels like ancient history, like something that happened to another man. “And he’d used to say it to mean, I think, that no matter how much you don’t want to do something, your sense of duty prevails. Or should prevail, in theory”.

“I think I know that sentiment well.”

“Sure you do, I’d be surprised there isn’t a Dogma on stoic acceptance.”

“Dogmas… what’s the thing you Terrans say? Ah, they “don’t mean shit starting yesterday.”

Something in her tone - an uncanny mix of happy and livid notes - perks me up and I rise to look at her again.

“Huh? What does that mean?”

All the solemnity is gone from her features. Sazha looks triumphant, her scales somehow radiant as she brings her forearm forward and taps on the in-built holopad, activating a projection.

It can’t be that this disaster of a mission made her this excited.

“Oh Luka, we missed something big.”

---

As I wheel down the corridor, with Tekhef and Vurosh flanking me and four other Neophytes trailing behind, I think back to the broadcast from Laznel City.

Huh. So, it’s over. His Supreme Savageness, Prophet-Descendant Giznel is dead, slain by Chief Hunter Isif right at the seat of his power. Killed as a traitor, a coward and a Federation pawn.

I’m sure it’s somehow Jones’s doing. Can imagine her thin fingers choking the neck of a champagne bottle back on Earth in celebration of Wriss falling into the grasp of the Collective.

No, not the Collective. It was a tool, a name for the rebellion. Now only the United Dominion exists, once again- and its rightful leaders.

Milint’s dirty fingers are all over this, even if it was the duel and the bombshell holocall that sealed the Prophet-Descendant’s fate.

What’s more, Betterment seems to have been surgically decapitated in sync all over the Dominion, from the Terran Protectorate to the Wrissan colony worlds. Now the timeframe that me and Sazha were given to hijack the station makes sense. We were a part of a plan we knew nothing about.

Makes one wonder what’s going on Ghanith below us, after the interplanetary communications having been cut for two days.

I’ve no doubt that in time Abidence will mount a resistance, maybe even a counterattack. But at this moment the initiative is evidently on the side of Generalissimus Meier and Chief Hunter Isif.

I can easily imagine sycophants lining up to grovel at their feet, quick to declare loyalty and support - but still am surprised by how smooth the coup went. Wriss bending the knee to the killer of Giznel in a couple of days shows how much of a paper tiger Betterment was. The majority of Arxur must’ve abhorred it with all their gut, since there’s still no news about colony secession or major uprisings.

That’s… that’s bound to spark hope for the future.

But, truth be said, I’m not sure I can process the enormity of it all yet. Too tired and injured to grapple with the consequences of this epochal moment.

For us on the Prophet's Talon it means only one thing: we’re safe from a planetside or out-of-system attack. Which leaves us to freely mop the trash here on the station.

However, there’s one tiny problem. Turns out that Sazha declared total victory a bit too preemptively. Four surviving Mentors, eight Hunter-Guards and about ten of the engineering crew had sealed themselves in the drive chamber and now try to hold the station ransom.

”You don’t think they’re really going to overload the reactor?” Vurosh mumbles over the clomping noise of his mag-soles. Beanstalk-like and lithe, he feels just at home in the tight space of the station as he pushes my wheelchair through the cramped life-support deck corridor.

“They’re bluffing. They want guarantees that they’re not going to be killed if they surrender or are taken alive.”

“And we’re planning to take them alive?” there’s naked discontent in Tekhef’s hissing. True to Betterment dogmas, surrender is an admission of weakness in his eyes in such matters.

“The engineers, yes - perhaps, if they’re complying at gunpoint as hostages. The rest?” I shrug. “No, we can waste them."

Vurosh issues a loud sigh of relief, but Tekhef doesn’t seem to be fully convinced in my plan. He huffs and puffs, more from irritation than from having to duck under the pipes every meter or so.

“But Mentor… Hunter-Exalted, I don’t understand - why do we need the animals? They’re prey, they’re…”

I stop my wheelchair and whip around to look the brutish black-scaled arxur directly in the eye. If what’s happening with the United Dominion this very minute, all the promised changes, has any chance to stick for longer than a week, we need to start clearing things now.

“No, stop it. They’re not animals, Tekhef. They’re people, sapients. And you always knew that”, I say, each new word cut cleanly from the last. “They’re horrible people, the enemy, but not… not animals. Let’s accept that truth, hm? Nobody’s going to punish you for that here.”

Seeing him freeze in place, stunned by my sudden outburst, I think that maybe it’s not the fear of punishment that’s at play here.

Maybe he truly believes that Feddies are some sort of biorobots. That glint of belief in his reddish-brown eyes is hard to mistake.

Ah, the bliss of ignorance. The urge to ascribe evil to an animal, while in reality it is sapience itself that pushes us to act so brutally and cruelly.

No surprises there, as Tekhef is a Neophyte, after all. Brought up on anti-prey propaganda, but unaware of what goes down on the battlefields beyond the fanfare of Fed-bashing reports one would get in the Prophet’s Herald.

He hadn’t seen Krakotl indulge in sadistic and pointless aerial hunts for the survivors of the Glassing on Terra.

Hadn’t listened to a Harchen sniper team’s comms as they discussed how and who to wound from a Tracker team, so that their comrades would rush to help and could be shot like fish in a barrel.

Hadn’t entered a camp on Grenelka overrun by Yulpan chantry guard, seen the ritualistically splayed and vivisected bodies of Arxur and humans, some tortured so expertly that they lived right until we found them - as nothing, but skinned, yet breathing, cadavers.

Or take the Gojid, the Porcies. They’re no joke, despite how many we’ve killed already throughout the trek into Fed space and how many jokes about “tastes like pork” you can make when you eat their fallen. Gojids are well armed, armored and thick-headed enough to pursue their objectives without the constant routs and operational chaos that Tilfish and Venlil were prone to.

So much so that during the fight for the Cradle, the Armada’s Ground Forces were often pushed back by their assault troops, even forced to leave already taken settlements, and…

I still can recall that scent in my nightmares.

Not just of burned flesh, because you quickly get used to that when fighting Exterminators. But a scaled up, black stench, sweet and bitter altogether, clogging your nostrils and lungs like tar. During the maneuvers and retreats, taking back our fallen wasn’t always possible due to strained logistics, and Porcies would stack the bodies of our fellow soldier into piles to then gleefully set them on fire.

Burned away the “predator scourge” for the glory of the Great Protector.

These pyres would smolder for days, while the entrenched ‘jids set up loudspeakers and invited us to eat the charred remains of our brothers and sisters, “because you must be so hungry, corpse-eaters!”. They’d taunt us over the battlefields of their ravaged cities by referring to us as “fertilizer”.

That was all something that no non-sapient animal would do. Every Arxur on Crimson Retribution’s strike-teams or later in my “Scythes”, no matter how Betterment-crazed, knows that in their heart of hearts.

“As to why we need them… you’ll see in an [interval].”

---

The cattlepen stinks of dread and sewage.

There’s nineteen Feddies standing at attention, and I feel a pang of elation when I see that the prisoners aren’t as lethargic as they’ve been the last time I visited this miserable place.

Perhaps all of the commotion, the alarms blaring and security running around, has livened them up.

That’s good. I need them to be, well, alive.

Dirty, matted and soiled, they press onto each other, teeming by the hold’s railings when the hatch hisses open in anticipation of a possible rescue. The first Arxur stepping through, however, deflates any hope that they might’ve harbored.

A chorus of yelps and curses rises at our arrival and dies out almost immediately when they spot me, wheelchaired as I am.

Driving right up to the enclosure, I use Jazhif’s tliskis blade as a crutch to help me get out of the wheelchair. Pain and blood surge to soak the post-surgery padding on my stomach when I straighten out, however I manage to keep myself from wincing.

I cannot project anything, but complete control and strength.

Which I do. The way they immediately shrink in my shadow sets my teeth on edge. The part of me that usually revels in such displays of well-deserved fear, rears back from its recent quiet - and I don’t know what to make of it.

Without clothes, covered only in patchy fur and fuzz, the look downright feral. I see where Tekhef gets his ideas. In the opening days of the war, before the Feddies started wearing fullbody soft armor and plate, their nakedness made slaughtering them easier. Strange how the mind works… You don’t consider what's essentially a bizarre overgrown turkey to be truly sapient, even if it carries a grenade bandolier and operates a state-of-the-art HUD visor - unless it also wears pants.

I put a hand on the barrier, and a trio of mangy, half-plucked Krakotl quickly shuffle away as if expecting me to lunge at them right on the spot.

I scan the pen and clear my throat.

On ships like Crimson Retribution and here, on the Prophet’s Talon, would-be-soylent isn’t really talked to. There’s an unspoken agreement that once a prisoner is shoved into the box, their personhood… matters no more.

And so I have no idea how to address them. The words that finalt leave my mouth are stilted and strange.

“A-khm. My name is Hunter-Exalted Luka Abaurre of the United Dominion Terran Command. Some of you might recognize me.”

Nineteen pairs of wet eyes, their pupils round, rectangular and faceted, watch me intently. There’s some offset hatred in those observations, but mainly it’s wariness and distrust.

“Yeah, you took Skanik…” someone mutters after a couple of seconds. “And Trivti.”

“By the Great Pro-…!”

“I did”, All by itself, my upper lip curls into a displeased scowl as I cut off a Gojid’s whimper. Does he have to remind me. “But now I come here to announce that this station is claimed in the name of the legitimate new leadership of the United Dominion, with Betterment followers… mostly removed from their positions.”

Of course, there’s no applause or cheer, just slow blinking as they work through this information, fear and confusion etched into their snouts.

Right, they’re rank and file Feds, wholly ignorant on how the United Dominion works. Thrown at us to die and kill, with no way of knowing what any of what I said means.

I cough and make a second attempt.

“You’re under new management. New rules. In particular, the most relevant for you - prisoners will no longer be used as food.”

Now that stirs them. Barks rise into the frigid air alongside wafts of breath.

“Bushel of speh. New management… you're still Arxur and Terrans! Still monsters!”

“Right, Nellet, it’s all brahking pred-shit deception!”, a Mazic with a broken tusk at the back of the pen rises and trumpets with bitter derision. “Came to toy with us? You sick, depraved parasite, kill us or leave!”

Talking back is punished, you can’t let them… once, on Provider Pack duty I was stuffing what I thought to have been an unconscious, concussed Venlil scout into a crate and he suddenly came to - pleaded, brought up his mother, his family and I hesitated, I couldn’t… - until a bullet meant for my skull zinged! off the helmet and made me work faster.

My hands curl into fists to keep claws at bay.

“Silence unless you’re spoken to!” raising my voice acts as a tub of iceold water being dunked on them. After all, predators' command is absolute unless a prisoner wants to lose an appendage or two.

The residue of my mental collapse still lingers, but now, with pain locked behind a wall of numbness and Sazha’s betrayal no longer clawi, the newly-felt remorse loses its sharpness and brightness.

The revelation on the scale of misery I’ve wrought… it recedes, hides back into some dark cavern in my chest.

I won’t eat people, of course not, but the enemy is still the enemy. Can’t fight a war without killing, without suffering, victory isn’t bloodless and the enemy should bleed instead of you, so these fucking…

I half-close my eyes to calm myself down.

“No deception. Things will be different now”, to emphasize the point, Vurosh by my side slams his tail into the ground. “However, with your status as cattle revoked, another law comes into place. You all are here because, being former Federation military, you have committed crimes against the United Dominion and are marked for execution.”

A sick-looking Gojid with snot running down his nose sways and almost falls, in the last moment catching himself on the railing. Shocking news, huh.

“Then do it, predator! You think anyone here fears you?!”, despite the order to shut up, a Harchen hisses while its skin slowly pulses with dark spots, broadcasting his helpless and instinctual attempts to blend in. I notice bite marks on the rigid “frill” that grows from the back of its head.

“By the stars, do it brahking now!”

This little act of defiance lights up the rest of the prisoners, and the desire to wring the reptile’s thin neck off the shoulders and feel the bones crack under my fingers is intoxicatingly potent.

Bleats and suppressed shouts rise in support of the scrappy xeno. It’s clearly a challenge. As was clear with that first Venlil exo pilot, they are so burned out by the terror of expectations, that death alone doesn’t really scare them anymore.

Unfortunately for them, I count on it. Not dignifying the Harchen with a response, I motion for Hazhil and Zhus to come forward and set two crates right down before the enclosure.

Tekhef and I take the lids off to reveal the contents: Ravager light assault rifles taken right from the Hunter-Guards armory.

This acts like a good jab of adrenaline for the Feddies. They stretch their necks out to see better from the corner they’ve squeezed themselves into. I pull one of the guns out to demonstrate.

“There’s a proposal for you lot. A critical part of the station is still held by holed-in Betterment loyalists. We need them gone. In case your translators got faulty, the deal is simple - you aid us in getting rid of our common enemy, you get a shot at not dying like cattle.”

I touch the crate with the tip of my magboot.

“Take these and meet death on your own terms. Soldiers should have the opportunity to go down fighting.”

In the following silence I can almost hear the gears turning within their furred and feathered heads as the idea sinks in.

”And how do… how do you think we can?” To my side, the semi-bald Krakotl squeaks like a rusty hinge. “We’re not fit for it, not in any f-fighting condition!”

“Doesn’t matter. You will be the tip of our assault.”

”S-so… we are m-meat… shields”, the avian staggers back, aghast.

What a perceptive character! I would’ve applauded such shrewdness if not for the gun in my hands getting in the way.

“Would you prefer to be *just” meat, then?” I ask, an unkind smile blooming on my face.

“N-no…”

While the majority of the prisoners gaze at the weapons with dumbfounded expressions, the nearest Porcie seems to actually consider it. Beady eyes dart between all six of us, and then he taps a claw on the railing.

With an irritated hiss Tekhef pulls the gate slightly away, allowing the pincushion to reach a paw into the crate and grab a Ravager.

His movements, as he takes the weapon and feels it in his claws, are confident despite the occasional shover. Former soldier, as expected.

It takes a single blink on my part for a sudden flash of determination to light up the sunken-in, rodent-like features of the Gojid. His curved index claw loops on the trigger and the barrel begins to rise in my direction… butbefore it can settle properly, a single shot cracks from behind.

The Porcie drops down, half his head missing and dripping off the bulkhead.

The rest of the prisoners, desensitized by weeks of abuse, barely flinch even as they’re splattered by indigo-blue brain matter and fragments of quills.

The gun that falls out of the dead Gojid’s claws lands right by Tekhef’s feet. He picks it up, detaches the magazine and demonstrates the empty ammo pack to the prisoners.

“Cattle really thought we’d hand them weapons loaded with live ammo, hrrrmph…” The Arxur chuffs darkly as he lowers his own gun. “Pathetic.”

“Anyone else thinking they’re smarter than a United Dominion officer?” I ask in a cold tone, peeling lips off my fangs to demonstrate the gravity of the situation. “I can order all of you skinned alive right here, if you truly consider yourself useless to us.”

A few moments of shuffling pass before the Mazic wipes his trunk-like snout, nods in resignation, and pushes through to take a Ravager. Being almost as tall as me, he flares his ears and attempts to hold my stare, but withers right away when I truly focus on the collection of skin folds and wrinkles he’d call his “face”.

“We’ll do it. Right, herd?” He half-turns, waiting for the ear flicks, tail swishes and nods of affirmation, then back to me, with his round expressionless eyes now pointed to the floor. “Show where to shoot, butcher.”

“Wha-what if we survive?” Someone pips up.

“You won’t” is what I want to say. Sadly, there is no reason to tank their non-existent morale further.

“Don’t bother yourself with that”, I reply with a habitual sneer, and, finally lowering myself back to the wheelchair, call Tekhef. “You’re commanding the breach, Tek.”

While Tekhef manages to keep tongue flicks behind his teeth, his huge tail ruins the ruse with fast, excited swishes. Neophytes don’t usually get promoted to action without earning a few scars from their instructors and commanders, so this is new territory for him.

“I… - it’s an honor, but why me, Hunter-Exalted? Out of us all only you and Hunter-Ascendant Sazha are actual soldiers!”

“Funny that. It was she who commended your efforts during the fight in the mess and then when taking the bridge. Seems like Betterment’s actually good for something, eh?”

“Yes, Hunter-Exalted”, he dips his snout in gratitude. “I’ll do my best.”

Wheeling away to the hatch, I glance at the cattlepen again: the prisoners grab the guns under the Neophytes’ watch with an air of a resigned acceptance.

I think I’m doing something correct here. At least as much as I’m capable of, with all the unspoken and unacted upon hate still running molten-hot beneath my skin. It is better to let them die in combat instead of slaughtering them on the spot.

Has to be.