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Grass Eaters 3 | 55 | Fire Suppression I
🕑 Added 2025-02-28 16:47:01 +0000 UTCDominion Design Bureau Laboratory 382, Znos-8
POV: Irtisl, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Five Whiskers)
“Say that again?” Irtisl looked at her Chief Engineer Stultam in utter disbelief as he made his report over the loud server rack fans humming their labor outside her office. She’d gotten so used to their noise that, most of the time, she could ignore them well enough to nap in there during her scheduled nap time. But what she thought she heard was so ludicrous…
“Five Whiskers, they are refusing to take responsibility.”
“For… not meeting their production quota of the week?” she asked in shock.
“Not— not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“For— for— for everything.”
Irtisl blinked. “What?!”
“They are refusing to take any more responsibility at all until their demands are met.”
“Demands?!” Irtisl screeched. “What demands?!”
“Yes, Five Whiskers. They have demands. They want shorter shifts, with breaks every day, and they want laborer rations instead of technician rations,” Stultam said nervously. “They put it on a note…”
“Give it to me,” Irtisl said impatiently as she held out a paw.
He handed the scrunched-up piece of paper over wordlessly. The note said:
We want shorter shifts, with breaks every day, and we want laborer rations instead of technician rations. We want Chief Engineer Stultam removed from his job, and from the Prophecy entirely, if possible. We are willing to compromise on some of our other demands if you allow us to recycle him ourselves.
“By the Prophecy!” Irtisl exclaimed as she read. “This is insubordination!”
“Yes, Five Whiskers. What should we do about it?”
“How many of them are there?” she asked.
“Eighteen technicians in total. There are also four of the menial staff who initially joined them, but they have been tempted out, and they are being dealt with by their supervisors.”
“Eighteen?!” Irtisl said. “That’s never happened before!”
Which was true, as far as she knew. The Design Bureau was a place of innovation and creativity, and this laboratory was one of the best in the Dominion. That meant that there was a higher than average percentage of deviant individuals placed here. But there were strict checks and procedures for dealing with those outliers to make sure they were removed before they would cause any trouble.
The worst incident of insubordination occurred more than fifty years before Irtisl’s time; an outlier engineer that was lagging behind schedule refused to work further, took his tools into the bathroom, and nailed it shut from the inside. The holes and scratches he made in the door were still there. It was one of those interesting tidbits of historical trivia people talked about at lunch that gave the lab its quirky character.
This was something else entirely.
Eighteen defects, all at once.
“And where are they now?” she asked.
Stultam pointed a claw towards the direction of the lab’s kitchen. “They’ve taken up positions in there and sealed the entrances, and I think— I think a couple of them have…”
Irtisl looked at him, eyes wide with alarm. “What do they have?”
“They have improvised weapons,” he squeaked. “They’ve repurposed some of our tools, and they have restrained a few of their colleagues who tried to stop them. They say they are… hostages.”
“Hostages?!”
“Yes. That’s what they claim.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
Looking at the monitoring footage now displaying the situation in the kitchen on her datapad, that seemed about right.
“Let me talk to them.”
Stultam led her to the corridor right outside the kitchen. It was a short hallway, terminating in a double door with small windows cut into it. Normally, this door was never closed. Now, it was locked or held closed, with the feral face of one angry-looking technician in the small window.
“Not one more hop!” he shouted towards her. “That is as far as you go!’
Irtisl stopped in her tracks. She shouted back, “What have you done?! And what do you want?”
The belligerent worker yelled, “We have taken control of our destiny! We want better. We deserve better for our tireless Service for the Dominion! And if you don’t give us what we want, we’ll— we’ll kill one of yours for every hour you don’t comply with our demands!”
“That is a waste!” Irtisl shrieked. “Think about how much productivity—”
“We don’t care! First, we want Chief Engineer Stultam recycled. He has abused us and worked us beyond his mandate as our supervisor. He is responsible for this. Then, you must change our ration restrictions to laborer’s rations. Our big brains have high caloric requirements. Third, we want—”
“That’ll never happen!” she insisted. “Come on. If not responsible, at least be reasonable!”
“Those are our demands! And for every hour we don’t see movement on them, we will send out the body of one of yours! And don’t come back until you give us what we want! The next face that shows up here without what we want… we’re— we’re going to recycle one of your idiots we’re holding.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Irtisl closed her eyes as she sat in her office, trying to imagine her way out of the disaster. But nothing came to mind. She shook her head, trying her best, willing it to come up with anything. Anything useful. Anything other than…
Her datapad rang. She picked it up, her paws trembling. “Hello, this is Five Whiskers Irtisl, supervising at Dominion Lab 382.”
“I know who you are, Five Whiskers.”
Irtisl slapped her paw to her mouth in shock as she recalled the cold voice coming from her speaker. She hurried to explain, “Director Svatken. I take full responsibility for—”
“Don’t waste my time, Five Whiskers. I have just been briefed. What is the situation with your apostates?”
She flinched at the director’s use of the word. “The— the— the apostates have barred themselves in our kitchen. They are making demands for better rations and—”
"Why would I care what demands the apostates made?” Svatken asked coolly. “I want to know how many there are in your kitchen.”
“Eighteen, Director. And they’ve taken six of my other people as— as hostages.”
“So… twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four… yes, Director, there are twenty-four people holed up in our kitchen. What are you going to do?”
“What do you think I’m doing?!” Svatken snapped at her. “I’m cleaning up your mess, calling in my Marines and telling them that they are not coming out of your facility before they count twenty-four corpses and not one body less!”
Oh no, State Security Unit Zero.
“Director, they told me that Chief Engineer Stultam is responsible for this. If I send him in there, the— the apostates might consider releasing two or three of the hostages,” Irtisl almost pleaded. “Perhaps we can get a couple of our people back and see if we can tempt them out before we try—”
On her datapad, Svatken paused her typing and looked up at Irtisl through the screen. “What?! Why didn’t you tell me all this from the start?!”
“You said you didn’t care about the demands they— I take full responsibility in my ambiguity,” Irtisl said with contrition. “But Director, if you give me a couple hours, I think I can get at least two out, if not three. I consulted the personnel files of the apostates. Wasteful killing is not a likely outcome from my analysis of their personality matrix, if we can give them—”
“Don’t bother. Just send your idiot chief engineer responsible for this in there.”
“Huh?”
“And I’ll let the Marines know, they are looking for twenty-five bodies, not twenty-four.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
An exhausted Irtisl rested her chin on her office table.
The Marines had come and fulfilled their responsibilities. They came stomping into her lab with their body bags, filled them with her people — or what was left of them, and left.
She tried to ignore the screams of the dying technicians— apostates still ringing in her ears. She knew she shouldn’t have watched it unfold on the lab cameras in the kitchen, but she did. The single coil gun the apostates managed to cobble together from spare parts clipped and deflected off the armor of one of the Unit Zero Marines. The return fire didn’t leave much of the weapon-holder for them to collect.
At least it went fast for most of them.
Them, not her. Her job was not done for the day. Not yet. The heavily-armed extermination squad left more than puddles of blood and tufts of skin and fur. There was a message for her too.
“Your full responsibility has been accepted, Five Whiskers,” the squad leader had told her nonchalantly as he casually cleaned his combat blade, wiping residual organic matter off it on the snow-white fur of one of the corpses leaning against her bullet-ridden kitchen walls. “Director’s orders. You are to replenish your personnel from the pools before you leave today.”
She hadn’t even considered arguing. “Yes, ma’am.”
Hence why she was still stuck here in her office, four hours after everyone had gone home.
Irtisl dreaded the thought of even just looking at her monthly productivity report next week. She’d have to impose extra overtime on everyone. And her picks for the dead apostates’ replacement had to be perfect. She browsed through pages and pages of hatchling candidates on her datapad, gauging their schooling test scores and their bloodline histories, carefully balancing those against the grave risks of exactly what happened here today.
This… incident had already cost her any miniscule chance of career advancement — and that was if, by some cosmic chance, she didn’t catch a steep demotion in the next resource evaluation period. Irtisl held out hope that what she did here could still be redemption for her bloodline, somewhere down the line.
Way down the line.
Her tired eyes flitted back and forth between her recycled technicians and the new candidates, matching their profiles one-by-one. To ensure minimal disruption to efficiency, it only made sense that the replacements had similar skills and expertise, though not necessarily the exact same temperament and personalities. That wasn’t always possible. However, a close match would be ideal…
She stopped mid-thought, her vision fluttering between the profiles of two of the apostates.
No, that can’t be.
Irtisl pulled up the profiles of another. Then, another.
No…
Another profile showed up on her screen. She scrolled to the relevant section, the only one she cared about now as she stared at them wide-eyed in shock. All eighteen of the profiles were neatly displayed on her screen, highlighting in each a single item among hundreds of relevant, detailed statistics about each individual.
And it was a perfect match for all eighteen.
No… Shouldn’t someone have caught this defect before?
Her exhaustion forgotten, she activated the communications function on her datapad, and dialed the last number on her recent call list. To her surprise, the other end picked up immediately.
“State Security Headquarters.” It was an unfamiliar voice, presumably an attendant.
“Hello, may I speak to Director Svatken?” Irtisl asked in a small voice.
“No, you may not. But if it is an urgent matter, you may leave a message with me.”
Irtisl hesitated for a moment, swallowed hard, and then spoke into her datapad the words she’d been practicing in her head. “I am calling to report a highly urgent anomaly. I have detected signs of a major malfunction. The technicians in my lab today — there is a pattern in their apostasy. They are all from—”
“Hello? Are you still there?” the attendant’s voice interrupted her, slight irritation creeping into it.
“Yes! Like I said, I have to report a highly urgent anomaly. There is evidence—”
“Hello?”
“Hello? Did you hear me?” Irtisl asked. “Hello? Can you hear me? I have poor signal in my office. Hang on, let me—”
Of course the communication device would break now, of all times!
“Hello? Hello?” the attendant persisted. “You still there?”
“Hello, I take full responsibility for the delay in my response. One of our radio jamming experiments has been acting up,” Irtisl’s annoyed voice replied.
Except…
Except that was not Irtisl.
Just her voice.
Irtisl looked at her datapad in confusion and shock, as an exact perfect imitation of her voice transmitted into the line, “Sometimes the jamming device just malfunctions. We will figure it out. Again, I take full responsibility for wasting your time.”
“Your responsibility has been recorded,” the attendant said, sighing. “Is there anything urgent you would like me to relay to the director?”
“No, nothing urgent,” her fake voice said. “I will catch your director when she is available again.”
What in the Prophecy?
“Excellent. Thank you for your Service to the Prophecy,” the attendant recited in the least thankful monotone imaginable. “And may It bless you with a more productive day tomorrow.”
He hung up.
Irtisl stared at her datapad, still in helpless paralysis. Then, she heard an odd sound from her office door.
Click.
She got up from her desk, staring at her closed door with confusion. She walked to it and tried the knob.
It was locked.
Huh? I didn’t lock this. I don’t ever lock this door!
She worked the knob with a trembling paw. It didn’t budge. In increasing desperation, she rattled it, trying to work the mechanism open.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.
A loud siren emanated from above the server racks right outside her office as she tried to apply increasing leverage to pry her door open.
Fire detected in main server room. All personnel, immediately evacuate the facility by descending order of importance and rank. Fire detected in the main…
Comments
Tyler Gold
Brought to you in part by the Bastard Operator from Hell, I'm guessing. Nice!
Aurxite
I'm sure it's just a coincidence...
Ark
well that's certainly one way to kill someone.
