Thel 'Vadam

The first most common reason for officer death is during transport into system, the second is Artillery, the third is snipers and number four is fragging.

"Needle gun."

I looked at the wound.

"There are a lot of needle guns in enemy hands."

"Yes, but they rarely use that in combat."

I looked at the other wounds.

"The enemy has plasma weapons."

"Their noble caste uses them but I've seen enough wounds to know that their guns hit people in a way different from our own guns. Wounds tend to be smaller, with more effort on penetration, while we tend to go for power."

He leaned down and touched another body.

"This, for example? Definitely one of ours."

We walked through the empty space station, empty except for bodies.

"So what do we have?"

"Revolt... troops here turned on their commanding officers rather than go to war."

"Racial mix?"

"Mostly Drones."

I looked at the bodies.

"Drones?"

"Everyone has a limit, every species. the Unggoy broke first, it looks like the Yanme'e broke second. Really wondering when this war breaks us."

"The Sangheili founded the empire."

"Look at high command, see any Sangheili faces? We are being replaced and resentment is growing."

"We still have voices in the council."

"Voices that are being removed. The Jiralhanae are yes-men, more compliant."

"They aren't as good as us."

"This is correct. They don't have our culture of meritocracy, they don't respect talent, it's all about who you know and who your related to. The war suffers for it but they also know which boots to lick. Sooner or later our people will crack... If things keep up I think we will all crack."

"We will win this war."

"Empires have been destroyed by such 'victories' in the past, and the news from the front is getting worse."

"How?"

"The tech divide is shrinking. It used to take 3 commoner ships to kill one of ours then it became 2, these days the commoners are fighting us on an even level. If things keep as they are their technology will outpace ours."

"We have centuries on them."

"Harvest destroyed our best ships. We have been forced to use more primitive designs, easier to mass-produce, to stay in the war. I'm seeing more and more up-gunned civilian ships. Their tech is getting better, ours is getting worse. Sooner or later we will cross the threshold where one commoner ship can take two of ours, then three."

"We outnumber them."

"Naval warfare isn't like ground combat. Ships take more time to create, they take more time to crew, time to train and we keep sending them into the blender as soon as they come out instead of building up a backlog. That means the enemy has parity or numerical superiority while our taxes have already tripled to pay for all of it. We might be big, we might be old, but the people can only take so much of this before we break."

"Harvest-"

"It's been 5 cycles since Harvest, the clamoring for revenge is over more and more people just want this to end. Looks like the bug boys just snapped."

"So it's Mutiny."

"None of the attack patterns I see is a sign of Huey."

"We need to put out an alert."

"No... no, if we do a manhunt we might create martyrs. We need to handle this quietly, get police duties to mark them as pirates and handle it all without fanfare. Kill them quietly."

He knelt down and closed the eyes of a dead officer.

"I heard that they're thinking about having low caste wear explosive collars to prevent this."

"They tried that."

"And?"

"Huey figured out the signal, used it to rip our boys apart which killed more of our people than the fragging ever did."

He got up.

"So how did you end up in the service?"

"Homeworld discovered some relic, moved it, and there were flood spores. Entire planet had to be glassed."

I winced. that was very bad luck.

"Don't give me that look. I miss my family but it had to be done. The flood is evil, it is anathema."

He sighed.

"Really wish there was a cure for that shit though."

I looked away and tried to hold down my feelings of guilt.