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Grass Eaters 3 | 58 | Huddled Masses II
🕑 Added 2025-03-07 16:47:01 +0000 UTCSpaceport Sugihara, McMurdo System (25,000 Ls)
POV: Monvu, Malgeir (Detainee)
“Why don’t you tell me the story of how you got here… with four Znosian plasma-incendiary bombs embedded in between the third and fourth ribs in your chest?”
“How— how did you know?” Monvu asked with a mouth drier than a southern Plorve desert.
“We’ve known since you entered Republic space,” the Malgeir officer replied casually. She gestured around her and then at his chest. “The Republic has been fighting things like that for eighty years. As it turns out, that makes you pretty good at it.”
“Then you’ll know they’re seeing and hearing all this,” he said, gesturing to his luggage where his datapad was. “And we’re both dead. Along with everyone on this station.”
She chuckled lightly. “Actually, no, they think your shuttle has delayed docking due to a solar flare. You think the Terrans kept their existence secret for over a decade without being able to control every FTL signal that enters and exits its territory?”
Monvu felt a wave of relief, then fear, wash over him.
The officer continued, “So… what do the Grass Eaters have over you?”
“My mate,” he replied simply as he slumped down into his chair. “When she went into the camps, they— they apparently shipped her off to Grantor, for some kind of experiment. And— and—”
“And when they evacuated Plorve, they put the bombs in you and told you if you don’t do what they say, they’ll kill her?”
“Worse,” Monvu replied dejectedly. “They’re going to kill her anyway. I know that. But they promised far more pain if I don’t do what they say. They showed me a video…”
“That video, do you have it?”
“It’s on my datapad. I’ve seen it a hundred times.” He bent down to unzip his luggage for his datapad.
“No need,” she interrupted him as she swiped on her own. “I’ll access it from here.”
He watched as she played it, a shadow flitting over her face as she watched without saying anything.
“I see,” she said after a moment, looking up at him.
“So… you see why. Why I had to do this…”
“It’s fake.”
“What?”
“The video. It’s a fake.”
“How do you know?” he demanded.
“We have a list of every radio transmission they made in and out of Plorve around the time the video was made. This wasn’t in there,” she said simply as she continued staring at the text on her tablet.
“You don’t know that… They could have transmitted it physically or by—”
“But… we do have a packet burst out of the State Security office near Argost two years ago, containing a list of suspected Plorve Resistance prisoners killed during interrogation,” the officer said softly as she looked up at him. “She was on it.”
Monvu sat there, just staring at her face quietly for a good minute.
“According to our own files, she probably was working for the local resistance. But she never gave them what they wanted. Instead, two of their Marines walked into a landmine trap on a bad tip from her.”
Hearing that, he whimpered.
His whimpering turned into a strangled sob.
Then, a full howl. “Awwwooooooooooooooooooooooo.”
He wasn’t sure whether it was grief or relief or pride he felt.
The officer let him howl.
It was… cathartic. Letting it all out. After years. Not knowing whether she was alive. Finding out she was, but being kept by the Grass Eaters. Being made a bomb and choosing to betray his people. Hoping they’d fulfill their end of the deal and kill her quicker…
And now, closure.
As he ran out of breath, he slumped his head down on the table, the energy that’d kept him walking and talking all these months — it all left his body in a moment. The patient officer waited for him to recover.
“What now?” he asked her a few minutes later when he regained enough energy to talk.
“Now, we go through your past few months. Every detail, every person you talked to, every face you can think of, every conversation you’ve had with one of them,” she said.
“I don’t— I don’t know if I remember everything,” he said weakly. “But I’ll— I’ll try my best.”
The robot walked up to the officer and handed her a device. It looked like a headset.
She smiled gently at him as she fitted the strange-looking device over his head. “I know you will. Just a few questions. Then, we can get those nasty bombs out of you.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Rural District 990, Datsot-3
POV: Eupprio, Malgeir (Executive)
“Where are they?” Eupprio asked as she looked around the abandoned warehouse impatiently. “I know they’re not known for being professionals, but making us wait twenty minutes?!”
Fleguipu looked at her datapad and shrugged. “He says they’re still on the way. Bad traffic.”
“Bad traffic?!” she repeated incredulously. “If this wasn’t a billion credit deal…”
“Just another five minutes,” Fleguipu said, trying to soothe her. “I’m sure they’ll be here any—”
“Ma’am, this doesn’t feel right,” Abe cut in from behind her. “This location, the delay, something’s off.”
“Of course everything’s all off. It’s the Datsot fuel cartel! But we can’t afford a delay in the supply—”
“No, ma’am. It’s not that. Why did they pick this spot for a meeting, this far outside the city?”
“The Federation government doesn’t have the resources to go after them right now, but it’s not like they can rent a office downtown and hold meetings there. And frankly, I don’t care. What I do mind is we took a six-hour flight all the way down here, not to mention the half-hour ride from the spaceport, and they can’t even bother to show up on time!”
“And bad traffic?! Here?”
“They’re obviously lying about that. Probably just forgot. Or maybe they had someone else they had to extort.”
“Something just feels… off about all this,” Abe said uneasily.
She took a look at his face and saw he was serious. Actually, Abe was always serious, but now, he was more serious than usual. She sighed. “Fine. Let’s get out of here.”
Fleguipu protested, “Eupprio! We need their—”
“Yeah, we do. But next time they want to get paid, tell them to invest in teleconferencing equipment. I’m not flying down here for this again!”
As they neared the vehicle, Abe halted, his gaze fixed on a lone motorcyclist perched beneath the flickering haze of midday. He raised his arm and pointed, his voice low. “Wait, who’s that?”
The figure sat motionless on the bike, about fifty yards away. The rider’s posture looked rigid, almost unnatural.
Eupprio’s implant helpfully outlined the figure in her vision as she squinted at where he’s pointing. “Huh? Why?”
“They’re wearing a helmet.”
She glanced again. “Yeah. And?”
“Nobody in this part of the world wears a motorcycle helmet.”
As she contemplated the absurdity of his statement, the motorcyclist sped off, peeling away in a swirl of dust and kicked-up pebbles. “There. She’s gone. Can we go now?”
Abe’s face darkened. His eyes flicked between the empty road and their vehicle. His hand slid toward his holstered weapon. “Something’s not right.”
Eupprio exhaled, more tired than frustrated. “You’ve said. And I’ve agreed. Let’s get out of here.”
“No. Something is— If this is— Why would they do it late out here and not—” As he watched her reach for her car door handle, his eyes opened wide with dread. “No! Get away from the vehicle!”
“Hmm?”
Abe surged forward, snatched her paw, and hauled her aside unceremoniously. Gravel dug into her feet as they stumbled backward, his grip tightening until her knuckles whitened.
“Really, Abe? I can walk on my own—”
Booooooooooooom.
A towering fireball tore the vehicle apart. Heat slammed into them. The shockwave knocked both to the ground, rattling Eupprio’s teeth. Her ears rang. Abe sprawled over her, limbs splayed awkwardly.
Eupprio groaned in pain as she picked her snout up from the dirt. She turned her head and spat out dust. With a slight shove, she moved Abe off of him. He was lighter than he seemed. “You alright, Abe?”
No answer.
She looked at his unconscious body next to her. A cut above his eye bled. She saw his chest move up and down.
Still alive. For now.
“Fleguipu?”
She realized that her ears were still ringing even as she turned around. To her relief, Fleguipu slowly climbed to her paws, and she read her friend’s lips even as her hearing slowly returned to her. “I’m okay. I’m okay. Is Abe—”
Eupprio thought fast. As fast as she could in her slightly groggy state. “We need to get him to a hospital now. Call a chopper! There’s a Marine base twenty kilometers from here, and we pay their bills.”
“On it,” Fleguipu replied as she hastily pulled out her datapad. Miraculously, it seemed to have survived the explosion.
Eupprio stumbled to her feet and looked around. Broken glass and charred metal littered the street near them.
“They’ll need somewhere to land,” she muttered to herself.
Then, as she looked up, out of the corner of her eye, she saw three— no, four motorcycles, a few blocks down the road. And interestingly, they seemed to be heading to her. Towards where her car just exploded. On an abandoned street in a shady part of town. And they each had a passenger on the back. Huh, and it looked like the riders were each holding… some kind of long barrel…
Oh, that’s a weapon.
It took her concussed head a couple seconds to piece it all together.
Her implant figured it out before she did.
Hostile threats to your life, detected. Self defense weapon, available. Do you need the full range of my assistance?
“Sure, call the Marines and tell them we’ve got trouble—”
Taking over.
“Huh?” she asked, still dazed.
She felt her right paw, without a conscious thought, reach down into her hidden holster with the fluidity of someone who was much more clear-headed than she was in her current state. Her arm snapped up, and in a single motion, disabled the safety to her Hyperion-30 handgun while activating its sophisticated electronic sights.
It was a restricted export device from Sol, and she wasn’t supposed to have it, but Eupprio wasn’t supposed to have a lot of things. The weapon’s holographic display highlighted the eight targets on four vehicles, each in red outlines directly projected into her vision, prompting her to use the auto-aiming system built into the device. The mini-inertial generators in the modified Terran weapon were designed to augment operators without exoskeletons or heavy Marine armor. The automatic aiming functionality could snap the barrel of the weapon towards an identified target faster than any organic reflexes.
Her implant ignored the module entirely.
Surgically implanted two centimeters beneath her thick silvery scalp fur, the chip required extensive modifications to work with her Malgeir biology—an interesting challenge for the delightful owner of a certain gray market parlor over Titan. But the intelligence core of the pre-owned chip itself was not made in the Red Zone. It was designed and manufactured on Mars by none other than the ubiquitous Raytech Corporation. As Eupprio found out pretty quickly in her dealings with the humans, the horizontally-integrated conglomerate had its fingers in just about every pie in Sol, selling everything from children’s toys to furniture to intelligence chips.
But, for Raytech, brain implant chips were their side project. A non-trivial hundred-billion credit side project, but a side project nonetheless.
Raytech’s real passion was in making things that kill people.
Her officially “demilitarized” implant was no exception. The relevant reaction speed of an average human was about 250 milliseconds. As a high energy species, the reaction speed of an average Malgeir clocked in at a blazing 100 milliseconds. Beating that by… about 100 milliseconds, Eupprio’s implant generated a firing solution before the neural signals from her retina reached her upper occipital lobe.
Contact. Armed shooters, motorized. 128 meters. 1 o’clock. Engaging.
The implant’s message for her was more a courtesy warning than anything else.
Like a passenger in her own body, she felt her gun-bearing arm extend away from her towards the oncoming motorcyclists. Her right feet slid half a meter to the right, bracing her in a perfectly pre-optimized single-pawed shooting stance that would impress an Olympic shooting medalist, and the rest of her chest turned to present a minimal target for the enemy. Before the muzzle flashed, she saw in slow motion the wide-mouthed snarl of one of the red-outlined hostiles as he brought his own weapon to bear.
Brrrt.
Eupprio didn’t feel a single milligram of the recoil as her claws squeezed the trigger to let loose a burst of kinetic rounds. But she did feel her arm shift exactly 3.4 centimeters to her right, her trigger claw contracting again as it did.
Brrrt.
And shift again.
Brrrrt.
The implant calculated that the probability she would experience any return fire from the distant target before the query became irrelevant was just under 0.5%, but it was not zero. It was an unacceptable risk that needed to be mitigated — and a level of attention to detail that she paid a handsome sum of credits for. Eupprio felt her entire body swing to her right by another half-meter to present a non-stationary target for the remaining hostile. For an inexperienced shooter, this could have been a fatal mistake that compromised the stability of her next burst, but it didn’t pose a technical challenge for either her weapon’s gyrostability module or her brain chip that directed and anticipated the motion.
Brrrrrrrrt.
The four motorcycles toppled over, their riders splattering onto the asphalt near-simultaneously.
Eupprio blinked as she exercised control over her limbs once again, staring at her own weapon in her paws in brief confusion. “What… the hell?”
Threats in vicinity, eliminated. Host control, restored after 245 milliseconds.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Comments
Krzychu0304
Is this about me?
DeWhit
Just because the humans are following ROE and, for the most part, the Geneva conventions, does not mean they are fighting fair…that has been proven many times🤣
Spooker
Today, one of my readers (on the regular chapters) complained, asking why the human characters are concerned about fairness in war. Every time that happens, I wonder whether I must be writing this incredibly wrong. The humans in Grass Eaters care about fighting fair? News to me.
Spooker
She is one of the richest individual in this part of the galaxy, making warships for two species fighting for their survival. Surely there will be no consequences to this attempted murder.
ColonelCodfish
Reported for aimbot
Eric E
i wonder what the response to the end part will be, if any.
Valdis Trautmanis
Hehe, Eupprio's chanelling Major Kusanagi 😅
