Act 2
"Very well. You may keep the conn, Commander." Zhen'var had a pensive look on her face as she moved to stand behind her chair.
"Understood, Captain." A moment later his omnitool chimed. Since they were holding their parasite craft in reserve, here so far from home, not wanting to give away their full strength, Commander Imra had taken secondary command.
"They are on an intercept course," Lieutenant Richards confirmed. "Not a single one of the ships is identical. I think they're all armed merchants, but some show very high power-mass ratios. It's also going to be fifteen minutes until they're in weapons range."
Daria had reached tactical and took over, the Dorei's fingers skittering over the board as she completed a review of the situation. "Charge on cannon banks good, shields nominal, Sir."
"I'm going to go to Condition Red in another five minutes, Captain," Will rested his hands on the granite. It was comfortably warm; he had discovered Zhen'var's heater setting under it. "Ops, do we have a visual?"
Richards tightened her baseball cap lower on her head and shifted the controls. "Yessir. Bringing it on." Following the principle of directives, not orders, the answer to Will's question was not simply a yes or no, but a solution to the implied, or desired, outcome.
The image that came on the screen was of a rag-tag collection of interplanetary ships. Some rusted, some were relatively new, all were heavily modified, many with massive additional thrust-blocks.
"Do we have mass assessments on them?" Will asked, frowning. They looked like a rag-tag band of pirates, really. One could see where the guns had been added.
"Yes, Sir; they're all under seven hundred kilotons."
Will nodded and looked at his chrono. It was time. He flipped the control over to the outmost setting. The bridge lights went red and the klaxon howled. "Condition Red, General Quarters! All hands, man your battlestations! Set MC ZEBRA throughout the ship!"
"Captain has the deck." Zhen'var spoke softly, stepping forward as the klaxons sounded. Combat was in the offing, and she would be the one to give the order.
"I stand relieved, Ma'am." Will rose and stepped to the side chair. All the presumptive enemy ships were still thrusting toward them. Behind him, Elia assumed her position at Ops, having arrived from sleep just in time for the closing of the bulkhead hatches and spacetight doors.
"Three fighter squadrons on Ready Five, the rest of the wing is standing to ready ten and will be there in six minutes," Elia reported. "All compartments secure, full military power available, all weapons charged and ready. With Commander Imra at Secondary Control, we have the Heermann at Alert Ten under Goodenough."
"Begin escalation of force procedures." Zhen'var moved to sit, strapping herself in. Shout, show, shove, shoot to warn, shoot to kill. Divine, but they are going to take it to the last.
"We have already cleared the first S. De-accelerate rapidly to show our ability to dictate the terms of engagement," Will told Violeta.
Violeta keyed in the commands for a complex set of manoeuvres while violently de-accelerating. As planned, the ship didn't feel it internally, but as they reduced from their ballistic trajectory, they opened the time to weapons range with the prospective enemy and showed that they weren't a dead, unresponsive barge, but a responsive and handy cruiser. The enemy responded by coming about to correct for the engagement parabolic.
"Second S down… they're continuing to present a hostile posture. Continue warning them off and set course directly for them. Warn them that we have the right to transit this open space," Elia explained. This was, to the Alliance, interstellar space and anyone could be in it, though she felt this immense system was treated as one whole by those who lived in it.
"Shove?" Violeta asked.
"We'll do it literally if we come into tractor range before they open fire," Will answered. It was a truly by the book interpretation of the book for a starship. But they were far from home, and wanted to give every opportunity to de-escalate. "Captain, they really don't seem like a regular military force. They're not holding formation and there's no sign of communications yet."
"We still haven't cracked the encoding of the high band network comms in this system through hyperspace. They might be using that to communicate," Elia speculated, "but we're not going to have enough time to make sure. Tactical," she addressed Daria, "plan on it being a ruse d'guerre."
"Understood, Ops. Approaching tractor range in one minute."
"Expect the worst." Zhen'var interjected. "This looks like a charging horde."
"It does, doesn't it?" Will stared at the image, continuously updated to the changing size with distance, deceptively making it look like the ships weren't gaining on them. Enough of that. It's bad for tactical picture. "Ops, get us something better."
Elia brought up a three-d rectified tactical plot on the viewscreen instead. "Fifteen seconds. They're holding fire or they don't have the range, Captain."
"Standing by with tractor beam…" Daria sang out. "We'll bump the largest. Ops, brace for impact."
"Sound collision," Elia noted and activated the controls. Five sharp blasts cut through the intercom.
"And… Pushing." Violeta activated the tractor beam with steadily ramping force. Tractor beams were not meant to be used against onrushing objects regularly, but Zhen'var had insisted on drilling to use the tractor beam as a weapon in its own right, and in particular as a less-than-lethal weapon for a starship. The issue was the shock this could cause to the using vessel, which would after all have to accept the change in momentum.
But the Huáscar was much larger than her target. The cruiser shuddered and bucked beneath them, and the engines screamed to briefly counterbalance the surge of momentum against their course. The target went flying, bodily pushed back and tumbling out of the loose, disordered formation of the other sixteen ships.
"Shove," Elia murmured. Ahead of them, the remaining sixteen vessels still came on, and despite the lack of a coherent formation, the seventeenth brought her engines up to full power and boosted hard to catch up, as if completely unaffected by the blow. As she did, though, the others started to spread out in an englobing manoeuvre.
"Warning shots, expect this not to work, we may be moving quickly to firing in earnest." Zhen'var's voice cracked out as she tightened her restraints.
Daria quickly planned an impressive barrage, and sent the guns to peak recharge while they were not being fired upon. She activated the pattern and sent fire from the main and secondary batteries lancing around the ships in a display designed to shock and awe them with coordination, precision, and the energy in the beams. It was far more than just warning shots, it was a deadly warning of just what the Huáscar's batteries could do.
Every single one of the unknown ships went to full thrust, coiling back in like a flower closing back up. As they did, they opened fire.
"Tactical, you are fire free, helm, evasive action!" The Captain watched the repeaters as the weapons flared. Are they suicidal?
The Huáscar's ship's power flickered. Elia's face turned baleful as she leaned down toward her console. "Very precise weapons fire. Directed EMP burst packets-those weapons are intended to disable, not destroy. I'm adjusting the shields to compensate to avoid those pinpoint surges."
Violeta was spinning the Huáscar through a series of tight snap-rolls to try and evade the incoming fire, but the swarm stayed with them, their weapons never missing against such a massive target. They were optimised to engage much smaller ships and that made the Huáscar a sitting duck… Except for the fact that the energy shields were like nothing they had encountered. The EMP weapons were directly draining them, but the sheer power of the naqia reactors fronting them made this no easy challenge.
Daria chose to open fire with energy weapons only. They were far, far from home, and if this entire system went hot against them, they needed to conserve torpedoes except for the direst of emergencies. She selected the full banks of Model 1 and 2 Plasma Cannon and Pulse Emitters and directed the fire of fifty-four energy weapons against the biting globe of gnats which surrounded them.
Daria didn't waste time diverting fire among many different targets, either. She used the computers to concentrate the batteries on one per primary arc, and then opened fire. The eruption of pulses and bolts of plasma cannon fire at relatively short ranges turned the space around the Huáscar into a continuous sheet of energy. As it did, three of Daria's four targets failed to evade.
The ships struck were carved viscerally by the concentration of fire. Mostly converted merchantmen and without shields, they had no resistance. Flames from the venting atmosphere igniting under the enormous heat of the plasma rippled along shattered hulls and bulkheads and in one case a reactor detonated outright, completely destroying the hulk.
"Shields holding at ninety percent, Captain," Elia reported. "Captain, one of the largest just kicked her engines to full burn-collision course!"
"They are trying to board. Ops, helm, evade!" This makes no sense…!
A second ship thrust forward as the second was caught with tractors. She was going much too fast than even to board. Daria opened fire with every weapon that could bear to port, including torpedoes this time. The first ship, caught in the tractor beams by Elia, was bracketed in tremendous explosions, and despite being larger than the ships destroyed before, and better protected, perhaps a real warship, started to come apart as forty torpedoes detonated along her flanks.
The second ship was taken by the energy weapons in a massive bracketing of fire which ripped down her flanks, but even as a burning ruin she plunged on. Venting vapourised hull plating turned to plasma and atmosphere burning as flame before it dissipated into space, the ruin carried on and bodily slammed into the shields of the Huáscar. The shock through the hull, striking on the lower part of the shields, was transmitted by the generators and sent her rolling to port on her beam ends as a massive explosion of the reactor overcharging in the wreck and detonating with the fusion of her fuel supplies spread along the shields, the energy barrier distorting the explosion down the length of the cruiser, and catching on the curve of the shields bucking her back up to level as Violeta fought to keep her under control.
Daria grimaced as she rocked against the straps in her chair, and the batteries were firing again, she managed to destroy another to starboard as these two had gone in, and now there were only eleven… And moments later only eight as again her heavy guns spoke.
"Primary and secondary shields have failed, Captain! The EMP bursts are now severely disrupting cohesion of the remaining shield layer," Elia reported crisply. She didn't bother to report the casualties or the damage to the primary shield generators' mountings, Nah'dur and Anna would respectively handle those and they weren't important to Zhen'var's tactical picture at the moment.
"Helm, get us some distance if possible. Colonel, stand to, the order is repel boarders. Weapons, do your best to keep them off. We are facing suicidal fanatics."
"Marines standing by to repel boarders," Fei'nur's voice echoed.
"Tac, watch those ones coming in close," Will called as he looked at the tactical plot. They swooped in, and Daria only nailed two of them. The massive batteries of the Huáscar were still sufficient to send them straight to hell at point-blank range.
The other two opened fire with plasma cutters, mining ship equipment for chopping up asteroids… Point-blank, but enormously powerful because of their limited range and recycling energy configuration, they tore at the Huáscar's deranged shields as they de-accelerated only tens of meters from the hull.
This is about to get far worse. "Evasive!"
"Helm, break to port!" Elia called as she shifted controls. Violeta instinctually followed her, because it seemed like Elia had a plan, even though that brought them even closer to the two ships, as the shields suddenly surged with over-power through the tertiary generators and the shields slammed into the active plasma cutters, driving a massive energy feedback into the systems of the two small attackers. As they did, there were two enormous explosions along the port aft quarter, shaking the Huáscar like a bone in the mouth of a dog as both of them detonated from the impact and energy feedback tearing their thin hulls to pieces.
"We were going to lose the shields no matter what, Captain, better to take them with the generators," Elia justified herself simply.
"Ops, stand by to transport," Daria called out, her ears flexing as she hastily began arming sequences. "Captain, we can finish this before they board." The starboard cannons finished another as the rest concentrated to port. "Stand by to transport torpedoes aboard." Just like against the Daleks…
"On it!" Elia answered. This was Crew Resource Management at its finest, as Violeta kept the ship shifting through her manoeuvres. They didn't need orders to act. Zhen'var's little Intent revolution was actually bearing fruit.
"Torpedoes armed. Mark!" Daria called out.
Elia activated the transporters remotely and then watched the confirmation lights go green. "Fire in the hole!"
Daria pushed the remote detonation override. The attacking swarm vanished in bright white flashes of energy from within. Clouds of debris and plasma were overcome by the spreading light of reactors detonating and exploding and the spreading energy of the torpedoes. As it faded, only the two largest remaining ships were still extant, both of them with big gashes in their sides, tumbling and disabled without main power.
The battle, as sharp as it had been, was abruptly over.
"Local tactical picture?" Zhen'var's hands clenched her armrests tightly. "If clear, stand down for damage control."
"Two cripples, all other ships destroyed," Elia confirmed. "No ships detected in local sensor range. Permission to lead one of the boarding parties, Captain? There are survivors on both hulks." She reduced the ship to Condition Yellow - damage control stations - MC Zebra still set to permit isolation of damage.
"Let the marines go first, but I can take one of the prize crews and Commander Saumarez the other," Abebech offered from secondary control.
"Permission is granted. Full protective measures, medical and tactical, Colonel. No-one sane acts as they have."
"Understood. One platoon against target should be sufficient to suppress even fanatical resistance," Fei'nur answered back. "Full armour and rebreathers."
"The life-forms do read as human," Elia noted cooly as she rose to report to Transporter 1 and handed Ops back over to Lieutenant Richards.
"Then let us find out just who has attacked us…" Zhen'var would say, as Elia entered the lift.
Of all the things that Bikie might have expected on boarding the crippled enemy ship, the abrupt full-throated attack on his platoon took them all and doubled it. They held nothing back; they were hideously scarred, sore-covered monsters in a mixture of rags and armours, with skin dirtied and blackened, screaming hideous screams. And they attacked to capture. With a moment, his command squad was in a fight for its life.
"SHOVEL, this is BIKIE, Platoon Hotel Company A, under heavy attack!" His gun screamed with pulse fire and he went silent for a moment. "They're fanatics who keep attacking with incoherent screams even when half of them has been blown off!"
"SHOVEL copies." Fei'nur turned to her command team. "Send in the mines first, clear the TZs, full weapons release. Deploy heavy squads, now."
Autonomous mines were sent forward into the mass to detonate, giving time for each ship to be reinforced by a squad of marines in power armour. Their heavy weapons chopped through a mass which could not get purchase on them, though it was instantly a fight in melee conditions despite the initial clearing, so fast were they on them.
Abebech's voice came over the comms. "Shovel, this is Ray-ban. I believe Leather and I can be of material assistance to getting prisoners and intel in this circumstance."
"If you wish to go into that, Commander, let me at least get them out of melee with my Marines!"
Down in the transporter room, Elia, listening to the conversation, grimaced. She was sure to some extent that Abebech was right, speaking from another transporter closer to secondary control (the ship was still buttoned down), but even in armour with a carbine and rebreather she questioned facing down these man-beasts. Still, she understood what Abebech meant. They could telepathically disable the enemy.
"Your discretion, Colonel," Abebech replied mildly.
"Stand by, you'll have five seconds. Bikie, call for the Mha'dorn as soon as you have a TZ for them."
"Rought. On it, Shovel." He waved his hand forward. "Squad, move out! Provide covering fire for the parms!"
Using the power armoured squad as the frontal force, his command squad provided rifle fire at range around them, risky in the confined space but needed. The energy weapons scoured the hull but did not bunch through, and that was good, because the buckled plates were as thin and weak as hell, and they were using their bottles due to reduced oxygen as it was, beyond the risk of disease.
Behind them, three more of his squads bunched up around their heavy weapons to keep the ground they'd already gained.
Covering and fire in turn, the squad of Power Armour, split into two teams of four each, rolled down the two corridors. Occupying them shoulder to shoulder, they fired pulse cannon in fire boxes down the corridor, slaughtering their attackers and pinning them in place.
As they advanced, they used special shaped charges to open the bulkheads between them for intercommunication. The rifles behind them did precision shots whenever they had an opening. Discipline began to tell on lunatic fanaticism, even as again and again attackers flung themselves onto the close-combat nano filament blades of the power armour. When they reached the next set of cross-corridors, they halted.
"All right, Shovel, this is Bikie. We've got the TZ open and clear. They can't handle a disciplined power armour advance."
On the second ship, the effort was duplicated, even if the different configuration meant that a main internal lift was being used as the secure point; the rocket thrusters on the power armour suits letting them jump from floor to floor to secure it. Lieutenant Ke'ter confirmed her position ready a moment later, as well.
"Ray-Ban, Leather, teleporting in five, four, three, two, one, mark." Fei'nur's voice was clipped and sharp as she tried to coordinate this unexpectedly difficult pair of boarding actions.
Both women, on hearing the plan and Fei'nur's interpretation of it, had only been able to steel themselves and be ready for imminent combat. The Dilgar Battlemaster's objective was overwhelming speed and total disorientation for their enemies.
The moment the two went in, the wounded were beamed out, transferred directly to sickbay. Nah'dur had everything ready for them and went to work stabilising and evaluating immediately.
Fei'nur would be following shortly, as soon as she could be in the fray without having to use her blades herself. "Keep pushing forward, Marines! Commanders, these are worse than Drazi!"
The reinforcement squads were simply overwhelming the enemy with raw numbers in small ships that were not heavily crewed-and had taken casualties-to begin with. It was also a truism that any force of barbarians could not stand against troops in regular order, and now with more than a full company deployed they had two hundred personnel on the ships.
Communicating by omnitool, Abebech and Elia had agreed that main engineering on each ship was their principle objective, and they'd peeled off squads in that direction. It was obvious to both women that the main threat was of a detonation of the reactor, even though both ships had lost power and their fusion bottles weren't actively fusing.
The markings on the corridors of the ships, though in poor condition, were legible, a strange mix of English and Chinese that was still obvious enough to point them toward engineering spaces in ships that showed, as they moved through them, increasing scenes of horror. Human and animal bones were everywhere, piled into strange decorations, skulls hanging from ropes, pelts and human skins displayed as trophies and as simple piles of blankets for sleeping.
Even the Dilgar found it to be… disconcerting, and any hesitation the boarders felt was long since gone.
Everyone, that was, except for Abebech Imra. She coolly advanced at the head of the squad, several times shooting down their attackers with quick off-angle shots that showed how precise of a fighter and killer she was. She gazed through her sunglasses a few times at the vicious, barbaric artwork and then carried on.
At main engineering on the ship she was boarding, the ship's crew tried one more rush as the Alliance marines burned through the defending bulkhead doors. Breaching was always a dangerous activity, and Abebech ordered the Dilgar corporal back. "It's quite all right. I'll mind it," she answered. The timer on the breaching charge reached zero and it exploded. The door collapsed inward, and Abebech turned, utterly unconcerned, just in time for the surge of attackers to reach her, stepping over their fallen comrades who had been knocked down by the falling blast door.
The squad stared as she picked one up by the neck with a whipcord motion of one of her gloved hands that was almost too fast to track. It screamed hideously and clawed at her, but Abebech continued to lift it, easily two feet off the ground, her black leather clad hand compressing like so much of a hydraulic vise until the struggling began to stop. Behind them, the others pressed in, just to halt abruptly. Vibrating in place, they dropped their knives and cudgels and began to fall, trying to resist with their muscles and unable, to their knees. Twelve of them.
"Secure prisoners," Abebech snapped. She cocked her arm back and then flung the struggling former human flying through the air over his telepathically disabled comrades to slam into the far bulkhead of the engineering spaces with a sickening crack.
The Marines didn't hesitate after hearing that tone of voice from Commander Imra, and they pushed in to truss up prisoners, hand and foot, and get muzzles on the same.
Abebech brushed off her gloves and then adjusted her sunglasses. "I'm going to the bridge."
"We'll get you an escort, ma'am." the Dilgar Marine NCO near her growled, marking off four armed figures. "Even if I'm not sure you need it, Commander."
"That will do. Thank you." A trace of a smile touched her lips. "My only concern is for Commander Saumarez and the other ship."
At that moment, Elia was finding herself in the fight of her life. Pressing on to engineering on the first ship, she had found herself under full assault by a large group of the monstrous not-humans. She had been trained for this! Rigorously drilled to use her telepathic abilities in combat.
She was strong enough that as a skilled telepath she could make real use of them too. Groups of the Reavers would rush her, seeking to take her, to rape her, to maim her, to kill her, to plunder all that she was and eat her. She would shut down their motor functions, and the Marines with her would exploit. Again, and again. Her pistol fired over and over-it was almost automatic-and she p'heard the scream of the open-shut door, for even these beasts had souls.
But the sheer horror that she was experiencing was distracting her. These creatures contained the memories of a human, memories in which every kind of nightmare and atrocity had been inflicted upon the old and young alike, on captured soldiers and little children. Nothing was spared, except for the rude structure of order that their dominance fights imposed on their society. And yet, inside, they were still human beings.
The problem with the fight, why it was a fight for her life, was the sickness she felt with each contact with their minds. Skin perpetually green and flushed clammy with cold sweat, she tried to keep from screwing up again, and again. And each time she had to enter their minds, to disable or outright in a few cases to destroy, while withdrawing in time, in the midst of the frenzy of fire, to keep from being in contact with the monstrosity of their souls as they died. The idea of doing a necroscan on one of these creatures revolted her more the longer she was in contact with them.
Around her, the Marines advanced to seize Engineering. She shifted to help take the bridge. The fighting began to die down. There was a blur of weapons fire, of Marines coming to give orders. "Yes, follow the Chinese symbols for sector eight there," she'd tell one Dilgar, "and reinforce Zeta Platoon." But the words barely wrote to her memory. Finally, Elia dropped to her knees and threw up on the deck below the bridge. The overwhelming feeling of sickness and horror pounded into her until the entire blurry parade of fighting seemed like a picture that someone had dumped black paint over.
There was a confused sense of something happening, as a figure dropped to a knee beside her, a hand clapping firmly on her shoulder, a mental shout, met with an audible, hissed whisper. "El'sau. El'sau!"
El'sau, Elia, looked up and blinked widely. A steady, determined face looked back. A Dilgar face. "...Fei'nur?"
The grizzled old Colonel leaned in close. "Are you all right? These monsters have to be hard on a Mha'dorn." She was already fishing through a pack on her hip.
"They kill, maim, rape, eat everyone, from the old to the young, perhaps if you're very lucky in that order," Elia rasped. "Their victims call them Reavers and they call themselves the Fearless."
Fei'nur simply continued to take the hypospray out and pressed it into Elia's neck, before putting a hand on her shoulder. It was a struggle for Fei'nur to feel compassion toward humans, but with El'sau it was easier than all the others, even Ka'var.
The drug began to work immediately on her brain, and with a look of ready thanks, El'sau extended her gloved hand to Fei'nur. "Thank you. Gods, thank you."
Fei'nur took it, and squeezed. "I doubt you want the flask right now. Afterwards, at least. As soon as you're ready to go, El'sau. These monsters have to be put down, if we won't get anything from it, I'm not going to worry about taking any."
"I already must have helped take at least thirty prisoners. We scarcely need more. They're on the bridge? The rest of the ship is clear?"
A quick check of Fei'nur's tactical display led to El'sau getting a nod of affirmation in response.
"Well, if we've got them isolated, I suggest we do one better. We do take prisoners. The easy way, Colonel." She activated her omnitool. "Leftenant Richards, this is Leather."
"Ma'am?"
"Beam every single life sign on the top deck of the ship directly into active cells in the brig." There was a particularly savage look on Elia's face. "The only thing I hate more than keeping them alive right now is the idea of playing fair with them, Colonel. They're all in one place, no need for target differentiation."
"Do it. And alert Medical. This is not normal. Full isolation protocols in the brig, Lieutenant." Fei'nur added.
"Full isolation protocols in the brig," Richards confirmed. Rumours were already spreading like wildfire and concern was in her voice.
"Don't worry, Leftenant, we're quite all right," Elia assured her.
"Understood. Transports complete, Commander."
Elia nodded. "Go ahead and breach the bridge entrance at your leisure, Ma'am," she said to Fei'nur. Her omnitool crackled with noise. "Rayban to White, we have our prize."
Elia tapped off her omnitool as Fei'nur had returned from giving the order to her breaching team. "Colonel… I don't think Commander Imra was fazed in the slightest. She sounds as calm as a peach. And she's a stronger telepath than I am." Elia was quietly shaking her head.
"Long experience, I think. I'll let you know when I have the bridge, Commander." Standing, Fei'nur stalked ahead, to lead her Marines through the last bulkhead.
Somewhat more than three hours later, the senior officers had gathered in Conference Suite 1. Daria had the conn for the meeting. Elia was sitting quietly at the table, pouring cream over a scone and drinking her tea. She had an intensely blank expression on her face. Across from her, Abebech was quietly sipping a demitasse of coffee. The two women didn't look at each other, but they didn't seem tense, either.
Nah'dur paced by the holo-projector like a nervous bundle of energy. She barely stopped when Zhen'var and Will arrived, but she did stop completely when Fei'nur arrived. Still wearing her medical coat, she looked like so much of a professor.
"Good afternoon, everyone. Can anyone provide some more information on just what or whom we have encountered, please?"
Just as Nah'dur was about to start, the doors opened again. Commander Poniatowska came in with Chief Dugan following her. She was in her engineering overhauls, streaked with grease, and so was he. The only way to tell the officer apart from the Chief was that she had taken the time to toss her Engineer's vest on; they both had coffee. "Sorry for being late, Captain. I was responsible for detaining Chief Dugan. We had to finish jacking one of the shield generators off the shock mountings and replacing them. It took a bit longer than I expected when I said it could make it. Full shield power has now been restored."
"Excellent, I am glad to hear it. Be seated, please. I am hoping to get some more information on just who or what has attacked us."
Nah'dur began to raise her hand, but Elia spoke first, and Nah'dur paused and slowly lowered her hand. "Captain," Elia said, "They're called Reavers. They terrorise the planetary systems of 'The Verse' with rape, plunder, cannibalism and murder."
"They thought we were a new kind of Government battleship coming to intrude upon their territory. They suffered grievous losses some months ago in a hard-fought engagement with a large Government fleet which they almost defeated, when beforehand they had been ignored by the Government, which is strong in the inner systems, as they terrorised the outer systems," Abebech added after a moment of uneasy silence. "After the destruction of this group, there are very few left. When the Government won its doubtful contest, it made sure none escaped."
"So there is some central government, with very weak control over the outer systems, and these are… cannibal… pirate monsters." She slowly blinked. "There being very few is a clearly good thing, then."
"Ahh, but Captain," Nah'dur addressed Zhen'var directly, "They're not natural cannibal-pirate-monsters. The moment one of them arrived I had it transported to sickbay in one of my isolation chambers and got to work. I already have an answer."
"Do… go on, Surgeon-Commander."
"Their brains were exposed to a hydrochlorate chemical of a unique composition I haven't seen before," Nah'dur said, bringing up a set of chemical charts on the holoprojector and stuffing her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. "As it happens, this is a very complicated chemical which, when crossing the blood-brain barrier, destroys most of the brain pathways that are triggered by chemical release from the adrenal glands. In short, it should in principle make most humans cease to function and die within a period of days or weeks. All well and good!"
"However, the individuals in question-once I saw what had happened to the first I took samples from the others, which we're keeping sedated by direct neural-electrical inhibition, since nothing else will work-are all sociopathic, or at least have the genes for it. Those neural pathways were unaffected and in fact the chemical remains permanently concentrated in those areas of the brain, serving as a sort of saline distribution channel for adrenaline. In short, it's like all normal emotional impulses are destroyed and the subject is receiving injections of continuous synthetic adrenaline into the centres of the brain primarily responsible, with their genes, for narcissism and dehumanisation of other sapients. Really, the only curious thing is why someone went around exposing a large population to exotic hydrochlorates for no good reason. Or for completely daft reasons, anyway. I can't think of any good ones."
"By how they act, Surgeon-Commander, they are likely amongst the first victims, and whomever ordered it would likely prefer that it never be known.
"Some of them are turned by the others by absolutely hideous tortures I don't want to repeat," Elia interjected. "How does that fit?"
"Probably by ritualised cannibalism," Nah'dur answered promptly. "There are many cultures which engage in ritualised cannibalism of their own dead, if they chose someone to become one of them-perhaps they can smell humans who have sociopathic tendencies, pheremonally-then they could begin the conversion process, and end it with an initiation ritual, for instance, which requires eating the brains of their own fallen. Their society certainly results in a high turnover rate, no need to murder their own, the wastage from, well, reaving, would be quite enough! But it's certainly not contagious in the conventional sense."
Elia looked nauseated. "She's not wrong, Captain. In fact, I think she's right. I saw far too much of them, inside of them."
"I saw as well," Abebech confirmed simply.
"I… see. This system is… horrifying. Will, I am very glad this does not appear to be some mirror of your people."
"Well, what is this Government?" Will was frowning. "I mean, we don't have any history of such a thing in Cyrannus. In my Cyrannus. But what is this government? We have evidence of the use of descendants of English and Chinese?"
"Correct, Commander," Elia agreed. "I'm not sure. Some of the … converted … Reavers might, though."
"OH! Speaking of which," Nah'dur leaned forward on the table. "I actually think we can stabilise them. I mean, they do communicate, and have enough of a hierarchy to control starships. They're still sapient. A Mha'dorn should be able to reprogram their personality to make them respond to adrenal signalling differently, perhaps as panic for instance, and then we can control the panic with normal anti-anxiety medication. We might actually be able to make one of them into a communicating being again, and then interrogate it. I'd like to try it, Captain."
A few of Zhen'var's officers were given each other looks ranging from confused to mildly concerned across the table at that point. Arterus in particular looked rather baleful. Elia's lips were firmly pursed, though.
"That Mha'dorn must volunteer with full knowledge of the risk, and I want you to assemble an ad-hoc REC to review before proceeding, Surgeon-Commander. You are flirting with things on the edge… Commander, you have something to offer?"
"Well, actually, as uncomfortable as it makes me, I think she's right. I could p'hear their deaths just like anyone else's, I could p'hear the screams of their minds and see them go … beyond, just like a healthy, normal person," Elia explained. "Commander Imra?" Elia looked across the table for support. She had never gotten it before, and many people at the table were a little uncomfortable at the description of the lived telepathic experience.
Abebech leaned in and set her cup down. She'd changed to a pair of long white gloves. "Commander Saumarez is correct," she said, surprising Elia most of all as she continued. "Their minds are those of the living, the essence of their reality is much the same. The Surgeon-Commander's proposal is, quite frankly, the first time anyone has proposed a cure, in the minds of those I have seen. Even if her youth means she presents it in a way that comes off awkwardly, the intention can only be described as good. I am not really sure it is worth living after you have done such things, even when you cannot help it; but unless the Surgeon-Commander is allowed to try, we might as well shoot them all, for their own sakes. They are living beings, and they deserve more compassion than Nazis, for their crimes were committed under profound mental impairment."
"Have our Mental Hygienist on stand-by, then. If the REC comes back positive, which I think it will, you may proceed, Surgeon-Commander. That was good, original thinking."
"Thank you, Captain! I'll be right about it!"
Lar'shan leaned in from his seat at the table. "Captain. The government that did this… Organization, agency, terrorist group, whatever we have. We're going to find them, aren't we?"
"That is the goal, Wing Commander. We are our own little island of the Alliance here, and Divine, but anyone who ignored this, much less condoned or caused it?" Disdain coloured her voice as Zhen'var spoke, eyes flashing with restrained anger.
"So Say We All!" Will declared, standing up. One by one, and then in unison, the others rose, and repeated it. "So Say We All!" After months of gelling together, all alone in the night, the Huáscar's officers spoke with one voice.
And then the bridge comm trilled. "Captain, this is Lieutenant Seldayiv," Daria's voice came over the comm, crisp but urgent. "There's a ship heading for us, a small, fast merchant type, on a course at a transect to those of the attackers."
"Move to intercept. I want answers from someone who has not been turned into a mad, psychopathic cannibal."