Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters 3 | 90 | Reinforcements II
🕑 Added 2025-05-21 15:47:01 +0000 UTCAtlas Naval Command, Luna
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Fleet Admiral)
“What fresh horrors are they up to now?” Amelia sighed.
The heavily monitored activities of the former SRN in Spofke were usually the last item on her daily briefings, and usually her least favorite part. Sixty percent of it was a minor treaty violation or another, but it wasn’t like the Republic had the resources or political will to prosecute another war at the moment.
Samantha pointed to a well-worn Republic Marine helmet on the table in front of her. “Want a look in this?”
“This? What is this, a Mark III Marine helmet?”
“Mark II. A little before my time, but I’m sure you recognize it given your—”
“Get to the point. Presumably the SRN got their dirty hands on a few of these when we decommissioned them a couple of decades ago.”
“Yup, and one of our people inside got us a sample of what they’re using now. Here, put it on,” Samantha said, adjusting the straps as she helped Amelia into the helmet. It smelled… worn.
“Alright. What does it do that it’s not supposed to?” Amelia asked impatiently as its screen flickered to life.
“You’ll see.” Samantha said. She connected a control device to some exposed wiring on the helmet.
Whirrrr.
As the display’s new programming came online, red and green outlines appeared around everyone in the command room, tracing them as they moved about. Information about their vitals, collected by its infrared and thermal sensors, appeared next to each.
“Big deal.” Amelia snorted. “So they managed to jailbreak the sensor systems. This isn’t exactly FTL science. I’m pretty sure we don’t even enforce the export restrictions on these old sensor chips anymore—”
“That’s not all. Wait.” Samantha flicked a few more controls on her device, and the visuals on the screen changed dramatically.
Since the dawn of warfare, one unfortunate reality that generals and war planners had consistently realized was how difficult it was to get human beings to kill another.
Most people had a perfectly rational, evolved sense of extreme disgust at killing their fellow human. One that became a crippling burden in combat. Through the ages, many methods of reducing this obstacle were tried. Units were drilled together, instilled with an intense sense of camaraderie, and constantly reminded of the stakes. Soldiers could be trained to shoot at human-shaped silhouettes, breaking down their instinctual aversion with the then-new science of the mind. And as the range of combat increased, so too did the sophistication of the psychological techniques, taught to help distance the trigger-puller from the trigger-pulling.
When the technology became available, more and more duties of war were brought away from the frontline and into air-conditioned shacks half a world away. Enemy combatants would be given impromptu trials by professional lawyers who ran down a vetted checklist, determining whether someone lived or died in a process no different from whether they got a mortgage loan… before someone else finally pressed a button and watched the targets explode from a high-definition camera in the clouds. More distance. More separation of duties.
Eventually, the human lawyers were replaced by cold, calculating digital intelligences programmed to obey the rules of war (most of the time), and the images shown to the button pusher were automatically sanitized by computer programs to reduce instances of post traumatic related symptoms.
Until no one needed to press the button at all.
But sometimes, wars still needed to be fought by troops. Real human troops. And as artificial intelligence became ubiquitous, somebody inevitably asked, why should our troops have to be subject to the horrors of war at all?
With a simple application of artificial intelligence, the most primitive of human activity was once more… modernized. It was trivial to simply use augmented reality to replace the imagery of live human beings and other targets in Marine helmet armor with fakes like… this.
Through Amelia’s helmet screen, Samantha had turned into something else. Something… very much inhuman. There were six glowing red eyes crammed into the image of her face. Her brown wavy hair gave way to a scaly scalp, her mouth became a massive drooling maw the size of a soda can, and her limbs became floating tentacles. The features were almost cartoonish, but the intelligence chip in the helmet made it look almost realistic against the backdrop of the command center.
“Gross,” Amelia scowled as she removed the helmet. “And very illegal.”
A few years after this technology was implemented, some time around a Red Zone flare up, it became rather clear to leadership in the Republic that — on top of its other obvious drawbacks — displaying a population of mostly noncombatants as literal alien monsters in the helmets of peacekeeper Marines in an insurgency conflict was not exactly a great idea. Even if it did drastically reduce instances of veterans killing themselves after deployments. It was banned — or rather, withheld from most troops except in special circumstances.
But the software was still there, and obviously the SRN had found a way to get around the authorization locks.
“They’ve made… improvements,” Samantha said sourly.
“Great.” Amelia sighed. “What improvements?”
“Well, modifications, more like. They fitted some of these for their converted Bun troops, and…”
“Let me guess, they’ve made it easier for their Buns to shoot at the other Buns.”
“Got it in one! They made the helmets show other hostile Buns as… well, ugly predators like us. Trivial stuff, really. Obviously, their puppet Buns know consciously they’re shooting at other Buns, but… this still makes it easier. In other words, a qualitative advantage.”
“Gross,” Amelia repeated, shaking her head as she took the helmet off and placed it back on the table. “But at least they’re not using them to shoot up one of our movie theaters this time… I guess my bar for Resistance morality is pretty low these days.”
“Yeah, well, you wanted to know what they’ve been up to. This.”
“Great. Just great.” She sighed as she sat down in her chair. “What about their continental bridge project? Where are they on that?”
“Oh, they abandoned that one last week. Not enough Znosian slaves to make it work in a reasonable amount of time,” Samantha replied, pulling the reconnaissance satellite footage of the construction site on the main screen of the command center.
She arched an eyebrow. “Not enough? The Buns — don’t they have…”
“Well, to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Given enough time, they can get it done… eventually. But that project is a total loser. Nowhere near worth the effort or investment, by the assessment of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Really, if they wanted to move in and conquer the northern continent in the next ten years, they should start building a navy.”
“Like a—”
“One with boats, yes… Remember, this is still the Resistance. They’re moderately experienced in blowing things up, but they’re completely lost when it comes to… state-building.”
“Oh well, at least… the more they learn, the more they moderate.”
Which was what leaders in the Republic hoped.
Not like they can get much worse, really.
Which was also what leaders in the Republic hoped.
Samantha continued, “Oh… and uh, a couple of them— they’ve started their own Znosian breeding program.”
“Znosian… breeding program,” Amelia repeated incredulously. “Do I need to worry—”
“Nope. It’s exactly as mind-bogglingly stupid as it sounds.”
Amelia stared at her for a moment before sighing. “Well, it can’t be much dumber than our Znosian breeding program.”
“That’s… totally not the same. We’re just feeding their hatchlings extra nutrients in the—”
“Did you know? Did you know the TRO figured out cures for five out of six of the most common Znosian cancers?!” Amelia fumed. “That they spent twenty million credits rewriting the Dominion’s traffic system software to reduce accident rates… for the State Security officers they didn’t plan to kill?”
Samantha grinned. “Ah, yeah. Hersh told me all about that. They needed some way to make it look like things were going fine on their end. They siphoned a bunch of their new shipyards’ construction resources to build safety railings and emergency stop sensors and such for workplaces in Znos. He said they prevented a hundred times more industrial accidents than the Republic Office of Occupational Safety last year. And their AI published a paper on a new standard for hand and paw detection for automated saws…”
“Hand and paw detection… I’m just relieved they’re misappropriating another species’ public resources for once…”
“Well, they did also dip pretty heavily into our R&D budget for—”
Amelia didn’t feel the need to think about that again. She already swore she’d claw back every credit they stole from the Navy’s budget after the war was over. “Alright. Forget it. Anything else on the SRN front?”
Samantha put down the modified helmet. “That was all the news from Spofke. Again, the biggest concern is the same since last week: they’ve essentially kidnapped the ten whiskers in charge of the Grand Fleet. They call her a guest, of course, and her treatment isn’t as bad as how they abuse their prisoners. But our sources inside the SRN say… let’s just say leaving is not exactly an option for her.”
“They’re still trying to… figure out how to take a bigger and bigger bite out of that fleet?”
“A large bite, if they can’t get all of it. Ten Whiskers Telnokt is still making regular check-ins with her fleet. And her people are following her orders to the letter. The Bun fleet has been prohibited from deploying reconnaissance assets, obviously, and the Ace is moving her ships and batteries around covertly while planetarily occluded so when the shooting starts—”
“I see. And Telnokt’s people are still following her outdated orders, of course.”
“That’s the Bun Navy for you. Our worst-case scenario planning is… the Ace manages to take the entire Znosian fleet intact.”
“We certainly can’t have that.”
“I’m not too worried. Most likely scenario is they eventually botch the whole negotiation up and start shooting at each other. But even if that happens, the Ace will probably win, and there will be plenty they can salvage from the wrecks. Ship parts, officers, crews. Normally, we wouldn’t have a problem with them killing each other, but…”
“Yeah, the armistice agreement. We’re supposed to guarantee their safety until they’re back in Znos. Of course, we can always plead ignorance or incompetence, but…”
“That’s not who we are?” Samantha suggested.
“Not all of us, at least. And I have some personal plans for that Znosian Grand Fleet that requires them to be in contiguous pieces. When is Carla going to arrive in Spofke?”
Samantha cleared her throat as she checked a screen. “Rear Admiral Bauernschmidt just checked in at the preceding blink limit. She should arrive in the system in fifty hours. We’ve briefed the squadron leaders already in the sector; our Alligators in the First Expeditionary Fleet, currently shadowing the Znosian ships, will fall under her command when she blinks in.”
“Good,” she sighed, this time in mild relief. “May we have peace… and, if not, we’ll simply have to settle for victory.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
SRNS My Other Ship, Spofke-4 (1,000 km)
POV: Telnokt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
“Here, try some of our cruelty-free cheese sticks. I promise… you’ll never go back to your ration and gruel,” the Ace offered the flustered Telnokt across the table.
“Please, Ace, I’ve been away from my fleet for almost two weeks. Can I at least return… temporarily to consult with my people?” she pleaded as she took an experimental bite out of the fried snack. It… wasn’t half bad, but her face made a grimace for show. She couldn’t allow the predators to know that everything they’d fed her in the past week — all of it was better than anything she’d ever tasted in her life. She begged, “Please, Ace, allow me to go back just for a while. I will— I will come back here voluntarily when I take care of things on our end.”
“Nonsense!” The Ace rolled her eyes. “Your people can take care of themselves. You spoke to them on the radio just before lunch!”
Telnokt declined to mention her growing suspicion that the predators were either modifying her transmissions in real time or straight up fabricating the entire conversation with their digital technology, even with the secret keywords she’d arranged with her captain. The longer it went on, she knew, the less effective her hastily instituted countermeasures were. “But— but this has been—”
“And… we have so much more to discuss. Say… Flopsy, you’ve heard about what’s been happening back in your Dominion recently right?”
“What’s happening in our Dominion?” she asked, confused by the sudden topic change. “What? Why?”
“Oh, so you haven’t heard?” the Ace asked infuriatingly.
“Heard what?”
“Terrible stuff. Real tragic news,” the human said with not a hint of actual sympathy on her face. “The Rep word for it is… social unrest.”
“Unrest?! Social unrest?!” Telnokt exclaimed. “How?”
“I believe the word your people used on the FTL radio is… schism.”
Ohhhh!
Telnokt had indeed heard something about that on her journey toward this system. She’d dismissed it as more blatant predator propaganda.
A schism in the Dominion? Ridiculous.
“Oh… you mean on your— on your radio, where they talk about— about—” She desperately searched her memory to find an inoffensive synonym for total bullshit.
The Ace casually waved her hand. “Yes, yes. Like you, we dismissed it as Rep propaganda. At first. Then, the refugees from our neighboring system started arriving a couple of weeks ago.”
“Refugees?! Like… predators escaping a battle?”
“Predators? No, these were your people.”
“What?!”
“Yup. From our neighboring Zishskish system. Apparently their planetary governor is resisting, but the Navy eight whiskers in orbit had a different idea. And then there was a small fluffle that disagreed, and they had some kind of skirmish over the planet. Dozens of missile destroyers being blown up. And then fighting on the ground. There’s like three different factions? Or was it four? Her story keeps changing; I’m not sure she even knows for sure.”
“No… that can’t be…”
“That’s what I said,” the Ace said, munching on a fresh corn on the cob. She passed the remainder of the plate to Telnokt. “Here, Flopsy, try some more of that. It’s not healthy to have too much, but don’t worry, the way things are going in your Dominion, this won’t be what you’ll die of.”
Telnokt grabbed one and absentmindedly copied the Ace, scraping her buck teeth on the corn before inhaling the sweet starch. How did these abominations come up with such delicious foods? She barely remembered to make a disgusted face before she asked the Ace, “That’s what you said. And then?”
“Then, more and more of them refugees arrived here. At first, we thought it was an elaborate ruse by either your people or the Reps. But there were really a lot of them, and they all had similar stories under interrogation. It does appear like they’re telling the truth,” the Ace admitted. “And last week, an official representative from the Zishskish planetary governor arrived.”
“A representative of the planetary governor…”
“Yeah, crazy, right? Anyway, she’s requesting we send troops into her system to intervene in the conflict. Funny, I think she mistook us for the Reps.”
Telnokt had been… guest… here long enough to realize that “the Reps” would have been much preferable for her to deal with. From even the distorted accounts of the Ace, her offshoot sect of predators seemed much less reasonable than the same-species rivals they spoke of in equally hateful and fearful tones. “Requesting— requesting your intervention in— in our schism?!”
“Yeah. Right?” The Ace followed her declaration with a loud roar of laughter, mirrored by the other predators at the table. “Intervention in your civil war! Oh, that’s too good!”
Telnokt desperately asked, “That’s— that’s really what she said?”
There was a gleam of avarice in the Ace’s eye. “Well, she’s sent three or four messengers so far? And now she’s including offers for reward. Which… makes sense. She’s got a whole star system to lose and everything to gain. And with how serious that last offer of payment was, I’m beginning to think some of you can speak my language quite well.”
“And…” Telnokt prompted nervously. “Are you? Going to help her?”
“You know what, Flopsy? I am considering it. I really am. Based on how her last messenger put it, the fighting’s deadlocked in orbit and pretty even on the ground too. So I’m sure the value of her offers will go up. And when they do, hehe, we might have some surplus premium hardware they’ll be very interested in. Far as I’m concerned, we are the most advanced arms dealer this side of McMurdo, and why should the Reps get to have all the fun?”
“I— I— how is that possible? A schism in the Dominion?!” Telnokt was almost locked in stunned disbelief.
“Tell you what, stay with us a couple more days. I’m sure she’ll send another messenger soon, and when she does, I’ll bring them here, and you can talk to the messenger yourself. We’ll even allow you to send them back to your fleet for interrogation, if you wish to confirm their authenticity,” the Ace offered magnanimously.
Schism! If the predator isn’t lying…
Telnokt felt a sense of urgency she hadn’t felt since boarding the predator’s ship. She pleaded, “Ace, if what you’re saying is true, it is imperative that you allow me to return to my fleet so we can—”
The Ace’s smile grew even wider. “Ah, yes. Imperative. Now, we’re getting somewhere with the negotiation, Flopsy, aren’t we?”
Telnokt took one glance at the expression on the greedy predator’s face, and she knew the price of “toll” had gone up yet again.
Comments
Valdis Trautmanis
With the schism and multi-faction civil war in full swing, Amelia doesn't realy need to worry about the pirates breaking the treaty. It's not like the Dominion is in the position to do anything about it
EclipseDragon96
Allow them to grow a fleet is not good.
