Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters 3 | 56 | Fire Suppression II
🕑 Added 2025-03-03 16:47:01 +0000 UTCDominion Design Bureau Laboratory 382, Znos-8
POV: Irtisl, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Five Whiskers)
Fire detected in main server room. All personnel, immediately evacuate the facility by descending order of importance and rank. Fire detected in the main server room…
The intercom blared out the urgent-sounding warning in a calm voice as Irtisl continued the struggle with her office door. The lock continued to refuse to budge.
Fire detected in main server room. Fire event in main server room approaching contingency threshold.
Irtisl had worked at the facility for eight years, and there were fire drills every hundred days. She knew exactly what the announcement meant. And despite the unfortunate events of today, she didn’t make it to Navy liaison with a Dominion-level Design Bureau lab by being a blubbering idiot.
Abandoning her efforts to wrestle with her locked door, she took a quick glance at the glass observation window next to it, estimating its thickness and strength in her mind. It was built to allow her to look into the server room, not to keep out intruders. At least, that was what she hoped as she wrapped her paws around her office stool.
“Arrrrghhhhh!” she screamed with effort. With a single heft, with strength she did not know she had, she hurled the stool at the glass, legs first.
Crash.
The sharp bottom prongs of her chair went straight through the window, piercing it. The safety glass didn’t shatter, merely cracked into spiderwebs, but the breach in its integrity forced it out of its flimsy frame. With another grunt, Irtisl pulled the chair out, the entire panel of safety glass coming out with its legs.
“Yes!”
The opening wasn’t big, but it was big enough to squeeze through. Without hesitation, she tossed the chair aside and hopped right through the opening, making her way for the server room exit without breaking pace.
It wasn’t far, only about twenty or so meters from her office. She hopped at it with the top speed of a sedentary office worker, reaching it in just two seconds. Her paws slammed against the open lever.
Locked. Again.
“Oh, of course!” she exclaimed angrily, giving the lever another angry shove. The sturdy, steel door ignored her.
The sign above the door mocked her with its contents, written in big, bold letters.
WHEN ALARM SOUNDS,
YOUR LIFE WAS FORFEITED.
As if in response to her third fruitless slam against the door lever, the siren over the intercom stopped abruptly. The calm intercom voice announced:
Main server room temperature threshold exceeded. Fire suppression contingency in progress.
Hisssssss.
Irtisl instinctively looked up towards the source of the sound in the ceiling vents. She couldn’t detect anything coming out of there.
Because… of course not.
To extinguish a fire without damaging the equipment, carbon dioxide is released to flood the room. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas, she recalled from her safety training. The only way to stop a release in progress is…
Finally remembering that obscure piece of trivia in her distant memory, Irtisl hopped at the emergency gas release cut-off valve in the back of the server room. It wasn’t ever supposed to be used to save lives, as mere lives were generally far less valuable to the Dominion than the expensive equipment in this room. But Irtisl was cognizant enough for her subconscious to realize that what she had in her head was now far more important than whatever research data was contained on these servers.
Plus, there was no actual fire in the room.
Her mind had realized that about ten seconds ago, but it wasn’t the most important thing on it at the moment.
Holding her breath to protect her lungs from the releasing gas, Irtisl reached the gas cut-off. She pulled the abort lever as hard as she could.
Hisssssssss.
The vents continued to hiss. She pulled the lever again.
Hisssssssss.
Irtisl examined down at the gas cut-off line, tracing it to… an exposed wire dangling uselessly from it.
She was not a particularly creative or critical-thinking individual for someone in her position, but Irtisl could add two and two. The apostates, the fake voice on the line, the locked doors, the false fire alarm, and now this.
Sabotage. Predator sabotage. She no longer had any doubts in her mind.
As her lungs gasped for air, Irtisl’s thoughts strayed to her bloodline. If she did one last thing right, perhaps there could still be redemption for them. Perhaps, even in her dying moments, she could still be of Service to her Dominion. Her mind made up, she hopped back through the hole she made earlier in her office window, using up the last bit of untainted oxygen left in her lungs.
Hisssssssssss.
Her lungs burnt, crying out for relief every breath; they expected oxygen and found nothing. Reaching her datapad, her vision blurred slightly as the lighter breathable air in the room was crowded out by the heavier non-flammable gas. But she was a lifelong office worker. She didn’t need perfect vision to type.
PREDATOR SABOTAGE, she jabbed onto the text program on her datapad even as she leaned against her office table in weakness.
CONTACT STATE SECURITY. HIGHEST PRIORITY.
DOMINION HATCHLING POOLS SABOTAGED.
With her dying words recorded and thus her final mission accomplished, that last bit of her strength and willpower left her. The growing haze in her mind squeezed out her ability to think, and her eyelids fluttered in exhaustion. Irtisl allowed her datapad to fall out of her loose grasp and clatter onto her office’s smooth, concrete floor.
Hisssssss.
As her vision dimmed, Irtisl had just enough energy left in her to frown as she watched the words she typed onto the datapad screen erase themselves, one-by-one.
“Huh?” she grunted in half-pain and half-confusion. She tried to pick the datapad up again, to do… something. But she no longer had the strength.
The words on her screen had wiped themselves, replaced by two simple lines of text, five words in large, high-contrast font:
NICE TRY, BUN.
NIGHT NIGHT.
Then, the taunt erased itself too.
Laying face-up on the floor half a meter away, her entirely blank datapad screen was the last thing Irtisl saw before she passed out forever.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Republic Senate Complex, Luna
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Fleet Admiral)
Amelia idly wondered how much of her and her fellow taxpayers’ hard-earned money were going to the fancy main holographic display currently active on the floor of the Navy Oversight Committee. Millions of credits, possibly.
The expensive high resolution lightshow managed to perfectly convey the distress of the figure on the screen.
“I am an orchard farmer,” the character was saying as she sobbed. She was a Znosian — by her estimate, about one or two years old — crying over the loss of her hydroponic fruit farm to an orbital strike. Unfortunately, her fruit farm was located a block away from a newly built heavy munitions plant deemed a high priority target by the targeting intelligences of the Republic Navy, a building that was — interestingly — kept just out of view of the video’s framing. “Just an orchard farmer!”
“Look! Look what they did!” She gestured out behind her animatedly, and the camera panned to a scene of ruined concrete and broken glass behind her. “Look what they did to my garden! It was my responsibility!”
A voice came from offscreen, its speaker unseen. “Farmer Siskashom, you have to leave. They’re going to hit it again. The evacuation order—”
“I’m not leaving! This is my orchard! I will rebuild!”
“You have to leave now! They just issued another warning! There is a second strike coming in twenty minutes. Come with us. You will be assigned a replacement assignment as soon as—”
“No! I’m not leaving! Go away! I would rather rejoin the Prophecy than leave my responsibility!”
“Come on, farmer. The directives are clear. Inefficiency is not permitted. You’re coming with us, one way or another.”
There was a quick and chaotic scuffle on screen as a figure hopped into the camera angle, grabbing at Farmer Siskashom.
“No! Yaaaaargh!”
“Ow! What the— She bit me! Get back here! You can’t—”
The farmer hopped off in another direction away from the video. “You can’t make me! You can’t make me leave! I’m not leaving! I’m not leaving!”
“You defective idiot—”
“Eh. Leave her, attendant.”
“But—”
“We’ve got a few hundred more people to evacuate today. Her life was forfeited the day she left the hatchling pools.”
The video went to black, and the dimmed lights in the chamber came back to full brightness. There was a long silence on the dais as the Senators fully digested the video and its implications.
Senator Seimur Eisson was the first to break the silence. He stared down the dais at Amelia. “I don’t see a fucking problem.”
One of the other Senators sighed. Several of the others rolled their eyes, and some refused to look his way.
Huh. Interesting.
Seimur didn’t budge. He looked around at his fellow Senators. “What? I don’t see the problem. They started this war, and the idiot said she’d rather die. That’s on her. Admiral, how many more of these are we showing today?”
Amelia cleared her throat lightly as she checked her notes. “That was the last one. They’re all roughly the same. There’s a few hundred of these videos we intercepted. We think they did manage to get these out of the system.”
Senator Blake Wald cut in before Seimur could. “Is there a chance that these propaganda videos are… I don’t know… staged or fake?”
“Some of them are,” Amelia said, nodding. “There are a few videos like that, where we’ve confirmed the identities of some of the participants being not what they said they were, and there are a few videos that were obviously made off-planet. And worse, there are a few falsely attributing the results of their own sabotage operations to us; in one particularly egregious incident, they blamed us for a massacre carried out by their local State Security governor. A vast majority of these videos, however, do appear to be genuine. Unfortunately.”
“But I thought we allowed them enough time to evacuate everyone they needed to!” Senator Wald said in exasperation.
“We did. From what we could tell, they got everyone they could. We intercepted transmissions from their officials saying they’re done, and then we waited for those people to get out of the blast zones. But it’s a chaotic war, and we don’t have people on the ground checking their work. Some people fall through the cracks. The strikes were good, but with that many targets… we estimate up to a thousand people were left behind on this planet alone. There is… a particularly gruesome video of a circle of Znosians praying as they burned to death inside a fuel storage depot they refused to evacuate.”
Seimur shrugged and cut in again. “So? Sounds a lot like their problem to me. I can’t believe we’re even entertaining these. My God, these people are almost as whiny as the Red Zoners! This is clearly just an attempt to get us to agree to not do to them exactly what they planned to do to all of us! If you ask me, the real problem was that we let any of them get away to begin with!”
“It is not my job to tell you how to feel about these, nor what the policy of the Republic should be,” Amelia said carefully. “But… if my guess about how they plan to use this is right, I have a feeling the citizens of the Republic won’t all share your views.”
“You’re talking about the tiny mob of idiots protesting about the war outside?” Seimur asked sarcastically. “Those people are here every week, Admiral. It’s Atlas; if they’re not going to complain about this, they’re going to complain about something else just as dumb. Let me tell you, we know how to deal with those kinds of people in my district.”
Amelia had no doubt he was telling the truth. Senator Seimur Eisson’s district was recently in the news for the lynching of an innocent former Saturnian dock worker… and the subsequent botched mistrial for the perpetrators before the case had to be moved to a Republic court in Olympus. They weren’t very big on the rule of law in the northern Martian plains these days.
What does it say about me that I agree with him on this?
“Enough, Senator Eisson,” Blake said. He turned to Amelia. “What’s the Navy’s plan to deal with this?”
“We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing. Our legal intelligences vetted every strike, and independent auditors reviewed their decision-making after the fact. Everything was done above-board and based on what we could have reasonably known at the time we launched it. That is all we can do. But this is a warning for you: the Buns know what they’re doing here. They’re making these videos to get their people to fight to the death. That it also stirs up sympathy for them amongst some of our people is a side benefit to them.”
Blake thought for a moment. “Understood, Fleet Admiral. I actually don’t totally disagree with Senator Eisson here—”
“Thank you!”
“Not entirely, at least. Most Republic citizens knew this was going to be a long, brutal war. We haven’t yet forgotten about the Battle of Sol. And even if it is fought so far away that they don’t feel it intuitively, most people understand that this is an existential war without comparison in the history of our Republic. And the Navy will continue to have — pardon the expression — a long leash to conduct this war as it sees fit. Just be aware that a long leash is still ultimately a leash.”
Amelia nodded. “Yes, Senator. I understand.”
“That said, we’ve uh— we’ve considered their truce proposal from last time.”
“Senator?”
“It is— parts of it are acceptable to us on principle. We will likely recommend it for a full vote in the Senate as soon as we review all the details.”
She consciously stopped her eyes from narrowing in skepticism. “Which… parts are acceptable?”
“We are not keen on a ceasefire, but rather, we want our allies’ worlds back under our control as soon as possible. It’s tens of billions of our allies’ people. If agreeing to an armistice is the only way to free them, then it needs to be fully considered. The conditions need to be worked through, but there is… the start of something we can possibly agree to here.”
“A truce? How long would we allow them to rebuild their fleets to come attack us with?”
“That will be up to you, Admiral. As you told their director, we are in no hurry to stop shooting at them, and every additional piece of damage we inflict on them drives up the leverage we have in eventual negotiations. So it depends on the outcome of the next phase of your— our campaign. But from now on, it would be wise to… orient the operations planning with that potential future constraint in mind.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Spaceport Sugihara, McMurdo System (25,000 Ls)
POV: Monvu, Malgeir (Civilian)
Monvu woke to the changing pitch of the ship’s inertial compensators. Despite his sensitive Malgeir ears, he was not one of those experienced spacers who claimed to be able to accurately determine the changing acceleration of a ship by the subtle shifts in the ambient noise they put out. In fact, this trip was the first time he’d travelled interstellar. But his two-month journey from recently-liberated Plorve had taught him that this meant they were now accelerating the other way.
He flexed and massaged his numb paws and looked around him. The flight was way over capacity. Just over four hundred Malgier were crammed into a small passenger liner designed to hold a third that. Its originally spacious seats had been stripped out, replaced with clans of war refugees huddled sitting on the worn carpeted floor. Entire cub litters were clutched in their dame’s paws, some constantly whimpering in discomfort. Monvu saw a few younger ones — not old enough to be conscripted into the meatgrinder at the front, but not young enough for passerbys to ask them where their sires and dames were — they leaned against the walls and their suitcases, trying to catch some sleep in the cacophony.
His stomach grumbled. It had been four days since they’d been fed. The chartered journey promised a destination, not inflight meals. He’d used the last of his meager credits splitting a small bag of Terran jerky with a young female passenger originally from Gruccud. Monvu let her have most of the bag; she looked like she needed it more than he did.
Before the war started, Monvu was a mathematician; he worked for the Federation government, calculating the monetary worth of dens in his district for the purposes of taxation and census.
After, he was a survivor.
Plorve was only under Znosian occupation for just over a year. The medium sized colony on Plorve-3, boasting 1.5 billion residents, was not considered an immediate priority for the occupiers. And it was close enough to the front that they were wary of investing too many resources to its full extermination. Plus, the Znosians needed some of the Malgeir there to operate their existing infrastructure to maintain their supply lines; by all accounts, the Federation Navy left in a hurry and left those in a perfectly serviceable state for the enemy when they blinked in and took over the system without much of a fight. Compared to the outlying planets like Gruccud, or worse, the Granti systems, Plorve was lucky.
Monvu only lost everyone in his immediate clan, all but two of his extended clan, and all but one friend and one annoying coworker.
There was nothing left for him there. After the fleets came in to liberate the place, he got out. He used all the government connections he had left to get on one of the overcrowded flights to the Federation core systems. From there, he hopped from system to system using his dwindling funds until he found himself on a flight for war refugees headed out of Malgeir territory, to the space of the new alien species that had helped save his people.
Though they knew little about the Terrans, and perhaps because of that, he knew there was something strange in the air. Something new.
As Monvu looked at the miserable conditions around him, he did not sense the fear he’d become used to. He saw something else: hope. Hope that tomorrow would be better than today. Hope that they weren’t all dreaming a bad dream. Hope that the Channel One newscaster wasn’t lying when he said that the Terrans offered safety for some, purpose for others, and belonging for all.
It really was too bad he was there to ruin it for them all.
Comments
Valdis Trautmanis
The edited video call, the fire suppression system activation, the messages on the pad... That looks like too much IT work for a couple of Bun freedom fighters. It almost looks like a Terran AI has infiltrated the BunNet. That's what Mark's team did when they got access to the spaceport servers on Grantor, didn't they?
M
A traitor? A psychopath? A bad boy!
