Another chapter, another content warning. There's some pretty heavy stuff ahead. Reader discretion is advised.
In the most remote corner of one of the many star clusters that make up the Batarian Hegemony, there is a star system that does not exist. Or at least, that's what any government official would tell you. Unofficially, the greatest crime against sapience in the modern galaxy is being undertaken here, each and every day.
The tyrants of the Hegemony had run into a problem, and its name was Courage. It was the only batarian virtue that their propaganda machine had allowed to remain. Granted, they had twisted it into a barbaric, violent, brutish thing. It was but a pale imitation of the moral and intellectual courage of the great prophets and philosophers of batariankind's murdered past, but it was courage nonetheless.
In the past, mere death had been a suitable tool against those who would stand against the Hegemony. Yet, Courage made itself known, and made its home within the indomitable spirits of a brave few. These few had the courage to speak out loudly and publicly, to expose crimes and deceptions of the Hegemony. They died for it, publicly and painfully, of course.
This, naturally, did little to improve public morale, and many expensive and difficult acts of suppression had to be undertaken to quiet the unrest. Courage, the casual disregard for death that the Hegemony had encouraged in its subjects, was now a weapon to be used against them. How can any tyrant ever hope to oppress a culture that laughs at death? The Dinlat, the secret police, had a solution.
Genfelthir. The Underworld. A miserable ball of wet, freezing mud orbiting a dim red dwarf.
At first glance it may seem a familiar sight to any student of sapient history: a place of pain and death, where enemies of the state are sent to be out of the public eye. However, a closer look reveals the truth. Other such places bind themselves up in the delusions of their makers. They are but "temporary measures" that will surely go away once Our People finally step forward into progress, or backwards into past greatness, or when the last of the dissidents who are not Enlightened as We have been are removed.
Genfelthir is different. It harbors no grand delusion, no noble cause, no lies. Within it lies only pure, merciless honesty. Because the architects of Genfelthir had only one purpose: to create a fate that can truly be called worse than death.
Genfelthir is an engine, designed with expert care to produce misery in one's fellow batarian. It is a manufactured nightmare, a rumor to be whispered with terror in every home, tavern, and alley where would-be dissidents gather. It is a stain on all sapient life, a gravestone for the desiccated corpse of batarian culture, and a monument to the depths to which the cursed species has sunk. It is a gaping wound in the galaxy itself.
It is also under attack.
Within the wreckage of the meagre orbital defenses of Genfelthir, five ships drift. Four of them are in pairs, one pair being the Samar and her partner Cyclone, the other pair being the Salamis and Wildfire, another mixed pair of interceptors that had met with them at a tertiary rendezvous point to combine their strength. The fifth is an elderly Batarian destroyer. The four interceptors burn to take themselves into a high orbit, where they can monitor for enemy ships. The destroyer instead burns to lower her orbit, taking herself into the atmosphere for what may very well be the first (and last) time ever. Crammed within her hull is something close to a full battalion of rangers, suited up and ready for war.
In the CIC of the destroyer, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Li commands the entire ground component of the operation. His more senior peer, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Foswell commands the space element, Samar being left in the capable hands of its Executive Officer, Lieutenant Lisa Smith. As the destroyer is set ablaze by the friction of Genfelthir's atmosphere, Colonel Li speaks.
"Now's the part where we find out if you're wrong." he says to his companion, a contradictory example of a Batarian aristocrat by the name of Onatheer. The batarian gives an amused grin of razor sharp teeth back.
"I doubt you'd live long enough to say 'I told you so'. I've said it before and I'll say it again, they're barely going to have air defenses at all, nevermind anything that could bring down a destroyer. We're in the middle of nowhere, at a secret location, and any would-be rogue or warlord that dared to target this place would have the entire Dinlat out for his head for the rest of his life. They don't need defenses." he said.
"That doesn't mean they don't have them."
"You are only able to say that because you do not know the Dinlat as I do. They have the entire population completely terrified of them, and they damn well know it. Air defenses would be an insult to them. It would imply that they haven't utterly broken the batarian spirit."
"Well," said Tim's other companion, Senior Chief Ranger Amancio Paulo, "I can't speak for the batarian spirit, but the human spirit is out for a fight."
Tim cracked a smile at that, and then gave a resigned shrug to his batarian ally.
Many minutes passed, and the battered old destroyer creaked and groaned as it made its way along its assigned. While destroyers might have been the only other class of warship than a frigate that could truly fly in atmosphere, they certainly weren't comfortable there. If a frigate was sluggish in atmosphere, a destroyer was positively ponderous.
Nevertheless, the old ship made its way toward its destination. Or, perhaps, "target" would be the more descriptive word.
Within what passed for an operations room on Genfelthir, the utterly baffled form of the prison commander could be seen pacing. While the attack was a surprise, its purpose was something the commander could not for the life of him discern. Genfelthir was a batarian prison. There wasn't a single alien present within its walls, humans included. The only aliens in Hegemony space were slaves, and Genfelthir was a place of punishment for freedmen, not slaves. For those among free society who had committed a crime so vile that death or slavery were too good for them: the crime of treason. Not against any mere government or military, but against batarian civilization itself.
He may not understand their motives, but he knew that his fate would be sealed should he fail in his defense. He could not falter for even a moment.
"Sir, the enemy ship...it's-...it isn't slowing down..." his sensors officer cried.
The commander faltered.
Gazishafet felt the sensation of crying once again, but no tears came. She had long ago run out. Her voice had given out long ago too, so when the electro lash struck again, the most she could muster was a wheeze. She heard the crackling as the creature behind her drew the whip towards itself to bring it down again.
For twelve of the sixteen days that made up what was the batarian equivalent of a month, the damned of Genfelthir worked. For thirty of the forty sections of the batarian day, they either broke bricks into gravel, or pressed gravel into bricks. For the last ten sections, they collapse onto the floor of their solitary cell and sleep a restless sleep, only to rise and begin again.
The last four days of the batarian month, the "Coal Days' as they were traditionally called, were the closest batarian equivalent to the human weekend. They were meant to be a time for freedmen and artisans to rest. Staunch traditionalists, the Dinlat dutifully followed this rule, and all the freedmen of Ginfelthir were returned to their cells to rest. Yet, there is no rest for the damned.
Upon each Coal night, guards prowl up and down the cells, invisible through the opaque doors, but their steps very much audible. Like clockwork, these guards will inevitably stop at one of the doors. Whether random or of their choosing the result is the same. They open the door, and take their pleasure or deliver their punishments. Sometimes many sets of Coal Days can pass for one of the damned without interruption, and they might be lulled into a false sense of safety. Only to be dragged from their sleep one night and reminded that they left safety behind at the gates.
Other prisoners meet a fate similar to Gazishafet, spending night after night after night after night after night aft-
The whip struck again and Gazishafet wheezed again. She had lost count of how many Coal nights she had spent with the creature behind her. They had all blurred together once he had taken up the lash. She had faced many tormenters during the-
gods and goddesses how long has it been how long has it been how long has it been howlonghasitbeenhowlo
-she had spent here, but she much preferred them to the present company. The pleasures they had taken and punishments they had given had been as varied as they were painful, but they all had done one thing this creature hadn't.
They fucking said something.
The creature had never once uttered a single sound. On the first night it had entered her cell, she had been somewhat relieved to see him holding the lash. It would hurt, yes-
gods it would hurt oh gods how can something hurt so much I should be used to it how am I not used to it from feeling it over and over and over and overandoverandover
-but it was a simple, familiar pain. He'd swing it, she would scream, and that would be the end of it. Then he had come again the next night, and the next, and the third, and the fourth, and then her line partner at work had wondered (with his eyes, the damned were forbidden to speak unless spoken to) why lifting her tool caused such pain. The Coal days had come again, and again he had claimed her sleep, and it was then that she noticed the complete, utter silence. Not a word, not a grunt, not even a heavy breath. Nothing. Nothing but whoosh smack crackle crackle crackle whoosh smack crackle crackle crackle as he cracked the whip and drew it back to him. Not a mark was left on her, the whip was designed to inflict pain, not damage. The doctor that roughly examined her on the first of the sixteen days every month never found any injury.
It was a merciless tool, more ruthless then even a proper scourge, whose spikes might have at least caused her to bleed and granted her-
but she was already dead, her soul languishing in the underworld. There would be no release, no end, never never never nevernevernever
-The rhythm of the whip was so familiar to her by now that any interruption of it was so loud it made her ears ring. When the whip stopped and she was suddenly greeted with deafening silence, she knew something was wrong. It was too early. She dared to glance at the creature, and saw that it had its finger to its ear, listening to its comm. It then pressed a button, making her chains slack and sending her to the floor in the process. Then it turned to leave.
What the hell was going on?
She heard a loud crash, and the ground shook, and the creature-no, the guard-stumbled and fell onto his back. Her veins pumping with adrenaline from the torture, she was on her feet first. For the scarcest instant, she stared at the cr-guard as he lay upon his back, and her mind froze.
Why was she even here again? She could scarce rem-
The Tunnel. That's what they'd called it. They would be The Tunnel that would take slaves out of the Hegemony to freedom. She had joined it, so young and free and alive. Alien slaves were their prime targets. Get them out. Tell them to let the galaxy know. Let it know that the batarian species still had a soul, ragged, beaten, and tattered though it may be. That the Hegemony was no den of cartoon villains, no joke to be ignored. That it was tyranny of the highest order, cruelty of the worst sort. That every moment it continued to exist was a stain upon sapient life, and condemned billions to unimaginable suffering.
They had thought themselves so clever. She had thought herself so clever. But the secret codes and dead drops and spy vid nonsense meant nothing when the Dinlat came for them. For her. And she was reminded that she was just a little girl, and she bawled just like one as they interrogated her and unleashed cruelties and assaults upon her that she knew of intellectually but could never imagine how painful and terrible it would truly be. Then she had died and gone to Genfelthir. She was dead. Dead. Dead dead dead dead-
The cool embers of the batarian spirit flared for just a moment, and she drew up her foot and brought it down on the guard's wind pipe. She finally heard him make a noise as he gurgled and sputtered, clutching his throat with one hand and shakily pawing at her with the other. She kept stomping until he finally returned to his silence.
She peeped out the door for a scant second, and, seeing guards scurrying around, she ducked back in. Plans were formed in her mind and then discarded as she tried to find a way to capitalize on this opportunity. What would likely be her only opportunity to get out of here-
Alive. To get out of here alive. I'm Alive! alive alive alive alive-
Alive.
There were no windows in Genfelthir, by design. So only a scant few guards posted on the outside could see the distant light in the night sky as the destroyer approached.
The prison was a huge complex, and its main gates were very large.
Imposingly large.
Large enough to fit the front of a destroyer in, for example.
The elderly destroyer came in for its first landing, crashing through the massive gates. Doors opened and guards came rushing into the entrance hall, weapons trained on the protruding nose of the ship. Silence reigned for just a moment, and then a pop of air, and the fall of a ramp echoed through the entrance hall. Out of the front of the destroyer, a full battalion of United Nations Rangers poured into the prison, slinging highly accurate bullets from their weapons and the ancient, wordless, bellowing war cry of humanity from their lips. Crew-served weapons mounted at the top of the ramp spat death and fire over their heads in support, and the wall of humanity crashed into the waiting guards.
After a stunned second, the batarian guards countercharged, shooting and howling the ancient baritone battle cry of the batarian warrior.
In a battle that lasted scarcely two minutes, mankind and batariankind clashed in some of the most brutal fighting of the war thus far. The two sides fought in ruthless close quarters combat, with no cover to speak of. Embedded in the center of the formation, Tim fired volley after volley in support of the frontline. There was no clever maneuver or command to give for this stage of the operation, just superior numbers and training pitted against a surprised and unprepared foe. So, for now, the commander of the operation was just another rifle.
Many plans had been drawn up and discarded for the raid. Clever insertion plans and sneaky maneuvers were ultimately set aside in favor of an all-out blitz. In every victory earned thus far by humanity they had taken an unrelenting offensive, keeping their enemy disorganized and on the back foot. It was this tactic that was being employed now.
As the outnumbered batarians broke and fled back through the doorways and corridors they had come through, they were pursued by platoons of rangers who had rapidly regrouped and fanned out to begin the next phase of the relentlessly-drilled plan. Tim and his HQ platoon hunkered down and set up a command post outside the destroyer. From here, Tim could direct the operation, and the spot would also serve as a fall-back point. With corpses-many batarian, some human-strewn across the hall, the HQ platoon dug in.
Gazishafet braced one foot on her target and the other against the ground, and then pulled with all of her strength. She was rewarded with a wet pop and a finger. A key. She peeked out of her cell again, and noticed that most of the scurrying guards had scurried away. She exited her cell, wiped the blood off of her new finger, and began pressing it against the locks of her surrounding cells. The occupants were paralyzed with fear as they heard the foots steps approaching their doors, but when no one came they began to peer out cautiously, curiosity getting the better of them as they wondered what could've possibly broken the iron-clad routine of Genfelthir.
To her surprise, Gazishafet saw her line partner exit out of one of the cells. He walked over to her and she heard his voice for the first time.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"I have no idea, but this is our only chance to get out of here." she said
He was surprised at that, but took it in stride. "Alright, I'm with you." Gazishafet smiled. She didn't, couldn't, really know her line partner, but somehow she'd always believed him to be a good man. She was glad her hunch had proven correct. She handed off the finger, and it was passed around among the prisoners of the cell block as they began to let each other out.
He turned to the other prisoners surrounding them. "Who else is with us?"
"Don't go! It's a trick!" A voice called out from a nearby cell. All heads turned to see a woman standing inside of her cell, shaking with fear.
Gazishafet laughed, long and uproariously, for the first time in gods knew how long. When she was finished, she met the many sets of eyes that were staring at her, and then turned to look at the woman still in her cell.
"What possible reason could they have to trick us? What pain or punishment does this inflict on us that they can't deliver in a hundred other, much less risky, ways? What do you think, that they're trying to give us false hope so they can torment us by tearing it away? We all learned that hope is a lie the moment we passed through those gates. I'm not asking you to hope for a miracle to come, I'm asking for you to follow me and make your own miracles." She turned around to face the other occupants of the now entirely-freed cell block. The coals of the fire that had once burned in a young freedom fighter began to heat up once again, and she found herself speaking quicker.
"This hell in which we live, that we call "Hegemony" is a hell of our own making." she strode over to a familiar corpse and kicked it. "It is not demons or spirits that do the unspeakable acts that go on here, it is flesh and blood. Batarians. Just like us. It was batarians who built this place, built the Hegemony, and it is batarians who must tear them down. We can't expect the gods to rescue us from a prison of our own making. So, I'm asking you to follow me. We may die. Or, we might actually make it out of here." Either way..." she walked over to another prisoner and snatched the finger from him. "we'll be free."
To say that her speech filled her audience's hearts with hope and inspiration would be a mischaracterization. It wasn't cheers or applause that she was met with, it was grim nods of agreement or stoic silence. Any being who endured a place like Genfelthir for long enough would develop a different relationship with death than a normal being. While some among the crowd were like Gazishafet, a bright-eyed rebel who'd had the misfortune to be taken alive, most were just ordinary people. Laborers, artisans, students, teachers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters. The only thing that they had in common was that they had learned the truth: Their civilization was a sham. The largest prison in the galaxy, built upon billions of innocent corpses, holding freedman and slave alike in chains either literal or metaphorical.
They were all people who had discovered the corpse of batarian culture and civilization, shamelessly murdered by the Hegemony, and replaced with an abomination that spit upon their ancient culture and tread upon their sacred grounds even as it exploited them for its own purposes. They were in Genfelthir because they had seen the nightmare in which the batarian species was trapped. And because they had decided to do something about it.
A batarian who stood against the Hegemony was a being who was very familiar with impossible tasks. So, the grim determination that filled the broken spirits of the damned who heard Gazishafet's words was a familiar sensation.
For some, however, there simply wasn't a spirit left to fill.
"Nononononono...they'll hurt us. Hurt us. Please...please." The woman who had objected was sitting on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. She was not the only one who had been lost to Genfelthir. Several more of the damned in the cell block were in similar states, clutching themselves, shaking and muttering. While most in the block felt pity for them, they did not let it distract them from the task at hand. They followed their new leader, to freedom.
One way or the other.
Amancio shoulder checked a guard as he came around the corner, turning it into a dive and roll that had him landing behind cover. Batarians opened fire from the other end of the narrow hallway, and Amancio's recent dance partner was getting up. He was stopped as Maja came around the corner, seizing the batarian from behind and stabbing him through the neck with her knife. She ducked back out of the hallway as his corpse fell.
As batarian bullets flew overhead and the rest of his platoon took up positions around the hallway, Amancio sighed. Everything he knew about CQB tactics had gone out the window because of kinetic barriers. It completely changes the combat dynamic when targets aren't dropped in a handful of shots. On the one hand, it enabled him to make maneuvers like the one he had just done, which could've seen him seriously wounded from any stray shots without his new barriers.
On the other hand, the dramatic rise in survivability that barriers gave meant that Maja had had to expose herself to get in close for a barrier-ignoring stab, rather than risk being caught with her pants down as her rifle failed to pierce the target's barriers quickly enough. What really made things difficult wasn't really the barriers themselves, but the gap between the humans and batarians on that front. Ranger armor was excellent, for humanity's tech level, but it hadn't been designed with barriers in mind. While it had been theorized, there simply hadn't been a power source portable enough to be practical. Barriers were for vehicles and aircraft, not infantry. Then the quarians had shown up, and introduced humanity to power storage tech centuries ahead of their own.
Still lacking the manufacturing industry necessary to make infantry barriers en-masse, the armor for this mission had been hand made by quarian engineers, integrating their barrier generators into the rangers' armored suits. The suits weren't built to handle the kind of power output needed for military-grade barriers, so (as Amancio understood it), they were essentially protected by higher-grade civilian barriers. It was better than nothing, but the gap was still noticeable.
Human barriers would stop direct hits from handguns and submachine guns, and glancing shots from rifles. His Dinlat enemies, in their military-grade hard suits, had barriers that took several direct hits from a battle rifle and sustained fire from handguns to take down. It forced Amancio into a tactical mindset that went completely against his years of experience and previous training. The constant drilling prior to and during the operation meant he was still a competent fighter in this new battlespace, but it took a conscious effort on his part not to fall into old habits and training.
Having faced mostly irregulars and glorified security guards up to this point, Amancio finally found himself up against proper batarian soldiers. The Dinlat men almost certainly had no combat experience, but they were still superiorly equipped and competently trained, and that was more than enough to be a serious threat.
Which was why he had adjusted his tactics.
"Bring up the rockets, covering fire!" he shouted. The Amancio from the other era would've considered it a gross misuse of recourses to expend so many rockets on one and a half fireteams of enemies who weren't even in an entrenched position. The Amancio of the current era considered it a bargain. Being very aware of the gap in their infantry tech, human war planners had resurrected several old ideas that were now seeing new life on the battlefield. One was an old tool called a "Rocket Propelled Grenade". Against its old prey, the tank, it was useless on the modern battlefield, being incinerated by modern point defenses.
Against infantry? It was still very potent indeed.
Amancio's rangers laid down covering fire as a volley of rockets went out. The cheap, unguided high explosives soared over the batarians' heads and detonated behind them, the blast bringing down their barriers and the heat scorching their expensive armor. Before they could even begin to recover, the rangers were on them, pushing up to their enemy's cover and taking shots at their stunned enemy. Overwhelmed and outnumbered, the remaining batarians dropped their weapons and threw up their hands. The rangers seized them and zip tied their hands behind their backs.
"Alright people, you know the drill. Two rangers take these assholes back to base, the rest of you sweep the area." Amancio called out. His rangers moved to obey.
As he looked around the area, he found nothing of interest at the end of the hallway, save for more offices. Amancio stared at the batarian corpses on the ground and grimaced. He hoped when his bullet found him, he didn't die defending an office.
He turned back to his rangers, and they set about the by-now familiar task of clearing the rest of the area. His troops were pushing far in, and if the rough idea of the facility's floor plan they'd received from their batarian ally was accurate, they were getting close to the main cell blocks.
The unfortunate guard on duty had considered himself a lucky man to be tasked with keeping an eye on the prisoners of his assigned cell block while the rest of his colleagues went out to join the fight.
As he watched the shiv exit his abdomen for the dozenth time, he couldn't help but have second thoughts.
He went limp in the arms of his victims, who had tackled him and held him down, keeping his hands from his weapons as some of his other victims attacked him with improvised knives and clubs. His killers moved away, and Gazishafet examined his corpse, marveling at their good fortune. Guards didn't carry guns on their person, for fear of them being seized in a riot. This one, however, had been armed with a sidearm. Likely a precaution taken due to the attack, which was what Gazishafet had become convinced this disturbance was. Taking the pistol in her hands, she held it with an unfamiliar grip. Rebel she may have been, but her weapons had not been the shooting kind.
As the rest of the rioters poured into the room to gawk at the corpse, her line partner held out his hand for the weapon. "Give it to me. I used to be in the army. I can shoot straight."
Had she been a human, Gazishafet might have raised her eyebrows at the surprising new information. Being a batarian, she did her specie's equivalent of raised eyebrows when she opened her lower set of eyes as wide as she could. "There's an interesting story there, I take it?" She said, placing the weapon in his hand.
He smiled, and took the pistol. He gripped it like a professional, testing its weight, before lowering it to a rest position. "Maybe I'll tell it to you some day." he said, still smiling.
A lean male prisoner was fiddling with the guard's console, muttering to himself. "Should be...here!" He turned to Gazishafet. "I just got access to the controls for the main doors to this cell block. If I open them, the prison control room will almost certainly notice. What's the plan?"
He looked at her expectantly. Gazishafet was distressed to see that the other occupants of the room were doing the same. For all her fiery rhetoric, she hadn't actually had any sort of plan. She hadn't really expected forty complete strangers to listen to her, so she had figured that they'd move as a mob. As far as riots go, this one had been surprisingly calm.
Well, no sense letting it go to waste. She tried to look all of her fellow prisoners in the eye as she spoke. "It's fair to say we're well past the point where we can just go back to our cells with our tails between our legs. We're committed now, so that means we have to succeed. I say we crack open that door, fight our way out, and then break open the other cell blocks."
Her line partner interjected: "We're not exactly armed to the teeth here. I can't fight off a squad of armed guards with one pistol."
Gazishafet nodded. "You're right, but I don't think we'll have to worry about that. I have a hunch that this is some kind of raid or attack. If I'm right, then the guards will be distracted. It's not like we have other options, anyways." There were begrudging nods of agreement from the other occupants of the room at that.
A few minutes later, the rebel prisoners were gathered around the main door of the cell block, waiting for the timer the lean prisoner had set for the door to open. Without any preamble, the big doors abruptly slid open, and the prisoners rushed through as a crowd. At the head of the crowd was Gazishafet's line partner, pistol in the low ready position, and wearing the former guard's barrier belt. The main building of the prison was through the doors, and there were no guards to be seen. The group made their way to the entrance of the next cell block, walking on eggshells. Gazishafet looked at her lean compatriot as he kneeled at the door's controls. "Can you get it open?"
He snorted. "I have no idea, but I'm probably the only one in this group who's able to try." He began tapping at the console.
Gazishafet's line partner was guarding the crowd's rear with a selection of the braver members of the group. He called out to her. "I've got an armed group coming around the corner."
Panic gripped Gazishafet, but then something gave her pause. "What do you mean 'armed group'? Are they guards?" She turned to look the same direction, and was very confused by what she saw. She looked at her line partner. His gaze hadn't left them, but she couldn't help but notice that he was very pointedly not aiming his weapon at them.
He spoke, his eyes still trained on the group. "I have no idea, but nobody make any sudden moves."
Amancio had gained a vague impression of Genfelthir from the batarian crew of the destroyer he'd rode in on. From what he could gather, the place seemed like the twisted offspring of Auschwitz and Vorkuta. The sort of place that would fill any civilized being with righteous indignation and disgust. The sort of place you'd read about in a history book and think to yourself, "How could those people have let this happen?" It was the sort of thing that was supposed to be relegated to the barbaric past of one's species. Amancio knew different, of course. Any seasoned ranger would laugh at the notion that cruelty and inhumanity were a thing of the past. Such notions died the moment one laid eyes upon a gaggle of filthy, starving children in the cargo hold of a trafficker. One walk through the remains of a settlement in the aftermath of a pirate raid, one whiff of the stench, was enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that humanity had ascended beyond its most foul impulses.
Some rangers became withdrawn and jaded at such experiences. For Amancio, it only made him want to fight harder. In his view, he fought not for the UN, or even humanity, but for civilization itself. He had seen what sapient beings were capable of, when not bound or protected by the rule of law. Naïve as this view may be, and as flawed as civilizations could be, he still believed in this, with all his heart. It was what made him pick up the rifle and don his armor, no matter how hard it got.
Meeting aliens who were just as cruel and flawed as his own species had been reassuring, in a twisted sort of way. The war for civilization had to be fought in every species, it seemed.
Which was why the sight of the hollow creatures before him disturbed Amancio on a level he had not thought possible.
They were not the emaciated skeletons or filthy, starving wretches that similar institutions had produced throughout the history of thinking beings. They were clean, well fed, and of apparently good health. It was the way they looked at him that shook Amancio to his core. Here he was, with a squad of completely alien soldiers training weapons on them, and they didn't react at all. They almost seemed...bored. Except such a word didn't do it justice. To call them bored would imply that they cared enough to react at all. Amancio had seen the sort of bravado in the face of death that compelled someone to act as if they didn't care. This was not that. In those other such cases, there was that barely perceptible tension, that primal fear, that made it clear that such individuals did, indeed, care.
What Amancio was looking at was beings who had been completely eroded. Emptied out husks who seemed to find nothing to fear in death. It was like looking into a gaping wound that had been cleansed with a hot iron.
And it made him falter.
For it was not barbarian clans or pirate gangs or other enemies of civilization who had produced the empty things that gazed at him now. It was civilization.
A civilization could bring peace, prosperity, justice, and the rule of law to beings who had only known the oppression of warlords and tyrants. Civilization in the modern era fed people on an unfathomable scale, had ushered in an era of peace unthinkable in past eras. It had brought education to billions, created a world of wonder and discovery, and given humanity the stars themselves. A civilization such as this was the most precious thing imaginable, something Amancio was willing to die protecting.
But Civilizations are powerful tools. The same attributes that help them to enable miracles also help them to enable evil of the most unimaginable sort. It was then that it clicked for Amancio, as if pieces that had been waiting for years had finally fallen into place. His fight to preserve civilization was not just against those who would tear it down, it was also against those who would corrupt it into a machine of evil and oppression.
Normally, Amancio was a stickler for protocol. As a senior NCO, that was his job. Seeing the people before him made him throw such things to the wind, for just a moment. Slowly, he placed his rifle on the ground and began to approach them. In yet another breach of protocol, he took off his helmet. He had no idea what he would say, how he could reach these people, but he had to try. He had to make the case for civilization to people who had seen it brought to its most terrible possible extent.
Gazishafet watched the thing as it continued to approach, hands open and in front of it, its alien visage clear. She noticed the others in the crowd looking at her with a barely perceptible question in their eyes. Her line partner did not take his eyes off the stranger, but he also made no attempt to speak. Gazishafet sighed internally. Looks like I'm speaking for us.
She steppe out in front of the crowd, looked the creature in its alien eyes, and spoke. "Who are you?"
The alien paused, and then started as if it remembered something. It activated an omni tool, and began fiddling with it. Gazishafet's eye's widened at the sight. She hadn't seen an omni tool in...however long it had been since she'd been imprisoned. Guards were forbidden from having an omni tool on their person when around the prisoners, so this was the first omni tool she'd seen in...a long time. She didn't remember them lookin like that. Evidently I've been in here long enough for the omni tools to change. Not to mention missing out on a new species, apparently. This thought made her want to start crying or scream at the top of her lungs, or perhaps both, but she restrained herself with a horrific effort and kept her gaze fixed on the alien.
Whatever it was doing had apparently been successful, as the alien stopped fiddling with the omni tool and began speaking into. She heard some utterly foreign sounds coming from its mouth, which the omni tool translated into the batarian Common Tongue a fraction of a second later.
"I am Chief Ranger Amancio Paulo of the United Nations Rangers. May I have your name?"
She blinked several times, frozen there for a moment. Then she spoke. "I am...Gazishafet." It had taken her mouth a distressingly long time to remember how to form the sounds of her own name. She hadn't said her own name in...
Feeling herself being pulled into a place she wasn't sure she'd come back from, Gazishafet clawed her way back to reality and spoke again. "Why are you here?"
Amancio paused, as if unsure what to say. Then, he gave her a grin so toothy it was almost batarian. "A prison break."
In the control room of Genfelthir, the prison commander was looking intently at the map of Genfelthir displayed on his screen. He was no tactical genius, but he'd still been to a military academy. He could see a tactical opportunity when it presented itself. He grinned as he looked at the blue dots on the display denoting the locations of human units. They were quite scattered in their effort to sweep the entire facility. He gave the order.
"Activate riot protocol."
Heavy blast doors slammed shut over every major threshold in Genfelthir. Squads of troops, batarian and human alike, were cut off from each other across the entire prison. The commander smiled as he saw it unfold on his map display. He'd been tempted to activate the protocol the moment the doors had been breached, but he'd had the tactical forethought to wait. The doors wouldn't hold off any organized foe with proper equipment for long, but it could force his enemies into a position where he could defeat them in detail. He'd held two platoons of troops in reserve for just this moment. As he was about to call them up, one of his subordinates called out to him.
"Sir, the officer overseeing cell block 114 has not answered his comms, and the main door to the block has been opened!"
The commander cursed, looking for a long moment at the display. Time was of absolute importance right now. The doors would only divide the enemy troops for a limited amount of time. Still, the commander was neither blind nor stupid. He knew their was a squad of human troops that had made their way into the main facility, and there was a chance that they had breached cell block 114. He could not leave an enemy in his rear while he went on the offensive, especially an enemy that was likely trying to start a prison riot.
"Deploy our reserves to the area! Liquidate the entire cell block."
Amancio wasn't the panicking sort, but his heart rate had definitely increased when the doors had slammed shut. The lean batarian that had been fiddling at the door controls had jumped back and cursed as the blast doors slammed in front of him. He turned to look at Gazishafet, their apparent leader, and spoke.
"Those things are almost certainly have their own wired network. No way I'm getting any of these open now."
Gazishafet turned to Amancio. "Well, it's your prison break. What's the plan?"
Amancio almost laughed at how abruptly she had skipped over any more talk of who he was or what exactly he was doing here. No looking a gift horse in the mouth, it seemed. Amancio glanced at the blast doors.
"We don't have anything heavy enough to blow those things down. We could cut through them, maybe, but that would take a long time. We might be able to blow the walls around it, but we've only got enough explosives to do that once or twice, and if they have any sense they've almost certainly blocked off more doors than just the ones in this area." He glanced around, chewing the inside of his cheek.
"I suppose we'll have to find their control room and open them back up from there."
Gazishafet nodded. "We're coming with you."
"You've got one handgun between the lot of you. You'll just get yourselves killed."
She nodded again. "Probably, but we'll also get ourselves killed standing around waiting for you."
This time Amancio did laugh. "I suppose. Hell, I wouldn't have any idea where to find a control room anyway."
The male who had been holding a handgun walked over to the far wall and laid his hand against it. "The central command bunker is on the other side of this wall. Or at least, the entrance is. It's underground."
Amancio raised an eyebrow. "That's...convenient. Why would the put their command center in the middle of the cellblocks?"
The batarian shrugged. "I only know it's there from eavesdropping on the guards. If I had to guess, the central location makes it easier to fall back to or coordinate troops from in the event of a riot. In theory, the prisoners could seize the entire facility, but they'd still be unable to get in the bunker. Shivs don't make good bunker busters."
Amancio shrugged. "Guess we're blowing the wall then."
He sent a pair of rangers to the wall, and they set up a breaching charge. He bade the batarians to back up out of the line of fire, and then he stacked up with the rest of his rangers. They detonated the charge, and came pouring into the room to discover...an office. The rangers swept the building for enemies, finding it to be completely empty. It had screens up on the walls and on the desks, displaying video feed of sections of the prison. Amancio grimaced when he saw rangers in combat on several of the screens.
"Damnit, I thought they'd just hit the panic button, but the bastards had to have planned this. They probably have a force coming in right now to defeat us in detail." he said.
Amancio bolted out of through the hole in the wall, and whirled to face his newfound batarian friends. "It's safe to come in now. We have to find that entrance. The whole operation could go down in flames if we don't stop this now. They have to know we're here, so we need to move."
The batarians rushed to follow him in, and one of his rangers spoke to him. "We think we've found it, sir."
Amancio cursed when he saw it. The entrance was a huge hunk of steel, likely many centimeters thick. There was no way they were breaching that with explosives. His rangers dug beneath the floor was a layer of steel almost as thick. Amancio turned to Maja. "We'll have to cut through. Can you do it with the laser cutter?"
The woman shrugged. "With our old batteries? Not a chance. With these new quarian ones? It's possible."
Amancio nodded. "We have to try." He turned to the rest of his squad. "In the meantime, we dig in. I want the main entrance to this office covered, and the hole we breached. Let's move!"
As his rangers rushed to obey, Amancio turned to Gazishafet. "Your people will have to hide in the office. Not as much room as I'd like, but it'll have to do. Make sure they stay away from Maja when she's using the laser cutter, or they'll be blinded." he paused, cursing, "Damn, it'll hurt not to have her on the trigger while she's doing that."
"Let us help. I'm sure a few of us can handle a gun, and the rest of us can still try and help any way we can." Gazishafet said.
Amancio grimaced. Handing out weapons to random civilians was practically a mortal sin to any professional soldier. On the other hand, he was completely desperate. He turned to the male with the gun.
"I can tell you know your way around a weapon. Go ask around the group. Anyone who has experience with a gun, you bring them to me. As for you, Gazishafet, the best thing everyone else can do is keep their heads down and stay out of our way. If they have any sense, their reinforcements are already on the way, so move."
They rushed off, and Amancio sighed and went about the business of organizing a defense.
The sound of Maja cutting away at the bunker wall could be heard in the background as Amancio sat in cover beside his troops. He'd scrounged up a fireteam's worth of batarians from the escapees. They all seemed to be former soldiers of one sort or another, and they'd all held the requisitioned batarian guns he'd given them with varying degrees of familiarity. They had on low-grade barrier belts that had also been scavenged from guards. He had them in cover, waiting as a reserve unit. The rest of the escapees huddle together laying prone on the floor within a pile of desks they'd stacked. Amancio doubted it would be adequate protection, but it was the best he had to offer. He knew for a fact that a wave of enemy reinforcements was coming, because he could watch them on the security cameras.
They'd likely come through the main entrance, as they could simply have the control center open it for them. Which was why he had most of his troops positioned to have firing lines on the main entrance, though he still kept a pair guarding the hole in the wall.
He watched the batarians approach. He counted a lot of them, probably more than one platoon's worth. More than he was certain his rangers could handle. He watched the batarians stack up outside the door. He closed his eyes, said a prayer, breathed in deep, and opened his eyes. As the door flew open, Amancio exhaled and sent a perfect burst of fire into the first enemy he saw. The batarian's barriers flared and he dove for cover behind a structural pillar, as he'd had his rangers and the escapeesmove the desks and other furniture away to deprive the enemy of as much cover as possible.
A hail of gunfire came out from the rangers as the batarians rushed to any cover they could find. The rangers had been drilling to fire in pairs when in a prepared position like this. One ranger would pick a target, and the other would back it up. This way there was always enough fire on a target to ensure the kill even with barriers. The tactic proved effective as several batarians dropped dead from the combined fire. Funneled through a relatively narrow point, with minimal cover on the other side, there was little that the batarians could do to fight back effectively in the opening moments.
From behind him, Amancio heard shots from the pair of rangers he had assigned to the breaching hole. The enemy was attempting to attack the room through there as well, it seemed. Amancio waved to the batarian male, who he had placed in charge of the other batarian fighters. Amancio held up two fingers, and then gestured to the pair of rangers guarding the breaching hole. The man nodded in acknowledgement, and then he and another batarian rushed towards the pair of rangers.
Heh, leading from the front. Not bad.
Amancio fired off another burst of rounds, his partner firing a follow-up shot at the same target, and the batarian doubled over as his barriers buckled and he was pierced by the rounds. Amancio heard a scream from beside him as his partner was hit by return fire. The heavy rounds breached the barriers and scrambled his brains inside his helmet. Amancio didn't miss a beat, sending return fire to where the shots were coming from before ducking back into cover as a few potshots dinged off of his barriers. He waved over the three other batarians waiting in reserve as he heard another ranger fall, this time only a wound rather than a fatality. The batarians rushed forward, barriers flaring as potshots were stopped by their barriers. They crashed into cover, giving their barriers a moment to recharge before popping back out and opening fire. One of them had a sniper round tear straight through his barriers and into his skull, and he collapsed dead.
"Kill that son of a bitch!" Amancio yelled over his comms, and he was answered with a flurry of rounds from the squad's designated marksman as they killed the batarian sniper.
"Maja, how's it coming?" Amancio asked
"As quickly as can be expected. I'm about halfway there, give or take." she said.
Amancio cursed as he saw the barriers of one of the rangers guarding the breaching hold buckle as he was gunned down.
"It's turning into a war of attrition out here, and we don't have the numbers to win it!" he said.
"I can't make the torch go any faster, chief."
"Yeah...I know, sorry."
Amancio popped out of cover and fired, one of his rangers sending a follow-up shot. The target fell, and Amancio ducked into cover as rounds sailed over his head. His greatest fear wasn't that he'd run out of troops, it was that the enemy would get desperate enough to go for an all out charge. They'd take grievous casualties, but with their superior barriers they might win. Fortunately, for all their reputation of fanaticism, the Dinlat did not seem to lack in basic self preservation, and had forgone that tactic. Still, all it would take is someone in their brass giving the order from the safety of the bunker for that to change.
Bullets flew, rangers and batarians fell, and Amancio fought. He was beginning to fear they'd lost when he'd heard Maja's voice.
"I'm almost through, chief! Just a few more seconds."
Amancio didn't wait for her to finish, rushing to her side, just in time to hear the chunk of metal Maja had cut out crash into the floor of the bunker below. Maja rolled back as bullets flew out of the hole she had created. Amancio didn't have enough troops to pull anyone off the line. It would have to be just him and Maja. He looked at her and nodded. She tossed a concussion grenade down the whole. The instant it detonated, she was leaping into the hole, Amancio following close behind her.
Gazishafet was growing very tired of cowering within the makeshift fort of steel desks with her fellow escapees. She might not have been able to handle a gun, but it still rankled her to have been rendered a non combatant. To be close enough to freedom to taste it, only to have to sit still and rely on others to get it for her? It was maddening. So, when she saw Amancio and Maja dive into the bunker, she stared after them for what felt like an eternity, her mind racing. Amazingly, she found herself climbing out of the desk fort and sprinting after them. There were only two of them. They might need help. It was a ridiculous notion that she would be of any use, but she had to do something. Anything was preferable to sitting around and waiting for a lucky bullet to find her. So, when she reached the hole, she jumped.
When Amancio landed, Maja was already dispatching the two stunned guards who had fired up through the hole at her. After killing them, she began moving through the bunker, Amancio backing her up. They'd apparently cut into some kind of storage closet. As they tried to exit, they were greeted by a hail of gunfire and forced to duck back into the closet. Another concussion grenade went out, and Amancio and Maja immediately followed it, death spitting from their rifles. There were half a dozen of them, and they fell easily compared to the previous two, as they lacked armor, wearing only a barrier belt. Evidently the only properly equipped troops had been guarding the hole being cut in the bunker.
The fight had happened in a hallway. On the far side, a ladder could be seen, likely what was used to traverse the bunker's actual entrance. On the near side, where the enemies had been, there was a big door.
I'll bet a week's pay that's the entrance to the control room. Amancio thought.
He nodded to Maja. She nodded back, taking out the last set of breaching charges. As the pair moved to breach the door, they were surprised when it flew open and a hail of gunfire was sent their way. The ranger ducked out of the way to the sides of the doorway, taking cover. The two rangers returned fire, only to discover that there were no batarians to be seen. Out of concussion grenades, Maja entered cautiously, Amancio covering her. A pair of batarians bolted out, their barriers keeping them alive long enough for them to each tackle a ranger to the ground, wrestling with them. In a desperate struggle, the two sets of enemies grappled with each other. Amancio watched as Maja was overpowered by the stronger batarian, helpless to save her. He fought and struggled desperately as he watched the batarian choke her, but it was all he could do to keep from being overpowered himself. As he heard Maja's strangled cries become ever more quiet over his comms, her assailant was suddenly tackled to the ground by, of all people, Gazishafet.
The batarian woman bellowed as she stabbed the other batarian with her shiv repeatedly. Still gasping for air, Maja stumbled over to Amancio and trained her weapon on the batarian. In the heat of the fight, the batarian hadn't noticed his fellow's demise. But, when he felt a rifle pressed against his head, he froze, and then threw up his hands.
Amancio stood up, dragging the batarian by his shirt collar. "Is there anyone else in the control room?"
"N-no. It was just me and the commander left." came the stumbling reply.
"Commander?" Amancio asked. He then turned to see Maja dragging Gazishafet off of the bleeding form of the batarian who was apparently the commander. Amancio rushed over to him.
"Order your men to stand down! I can get you medical attention!"
The batarian commander looked at the human, and his pain-wracked brain struggled to process it. If he refused, there was a good chance his men would carry the day. But, he would die. If he gave the order to stand down, then the battle was lost, but he might live. Shiv wounds were nasty, but they weren't certain death. It was worth a try. For all their talk of fanatic devotion to the Hegemony, the reality was that you didn't rise high in the organization without a keen sense for your own self-interest. So, it would come as no surprise when the commander spoke into his comm.
"Attention all troops, the battle is lost, stand down."
It was surprisingly quiet in the aftermath of the fight, as the rangers rounded up prisoners and began moving to open up the other cell blocks. Lacking anything useful to do, Gazishafet found herself sitting cross-legged on the ground. She sat next to her line partner-bah, I can't believe how much of a fool I am.
She turned to face him. "This is going to sound stupid, but it just now occurs to me that I never asked your name. I feel like an idiot."
Her partner smiled. "In all fairness, I never asked yours either, I had to learn it from you talking to the human. Politeness falls by the wayside when you're forbidden to speak for the majority of the time."
"..And?"
"What?"
"What's your name?"
"Oh! See what I mean? My name is Nelzik."
Gazishafet smiled. "Nice to meet you, Nelzik."
He smiled back. "And you, Gazishafet."
For these damned who had been given salvation, the fight was over. For now.
Well, this was a bitch and a half to write. I want to thank everyone for their patience. I've been caught up in moving to a new place and starting my new job, so my writing hobby had fallen by the wayside. I wanted the first chapter after my hiatus to be worth the wait, which is why this was the longest chapter yet, and also the most difficult to write by far. No matter how long the gap between chapters is, be aware that I have no intention whatsoever of leaving it unfinished. I have a good idea of where this story is going, and I know how this first 'book' ,if you will, will end. As always, thank you very much for reading, and please share your thoughts in the comments.
