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Grass Eaters 3 | 52 | Accountability
🕑 Added 2025-02-21 16:47:01 +0000 UTCAtlas Naval Command, Luna
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Fleet Admiral)
Amelia tried her hardest not to glare at the covert operative on her screen. Kara was sitting in a dimly lit basement bunker, somewhere in occupied Grantor.
She was barely successful.
“I’m sorry for your loss, operative,” Amelia said.
“Thank you, Admiral. The director— Mark was the best of us. He saved my life.”
“I’m sure he did,” she said smoothly. “And this might be a bad time, but I need to know one thing: before he passed, did the director pass on any information on current and recent active operations in your office to you?”
Kara looked blankly back at her. “Director Mark shared information with me on a need-to-know basis. There were some plans he didn’t share with me, and some I didn’t share with him.”
“But these ops are documented somewhere? These are all documented somewhere, right?”
Kara frowned. “We have extensive internal accountability measures, yes, Admiral. I’m not sure what you’re asking about, so—”
“Kara, what do you personally know about… sarin?”
Amelia wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light or she saw a twitch on Kara’s facial features. “Sarin?” Kara replied. “Schedule 1 chemical weapon substance banned by the Republic since its founding. The TRO helped the Navy track down and destroy a shipment of it back in the last Resistance campaign. That was… about twenty years ago, I think? That was all on the public record. Why?”
“So you wouldn’t happen to know if there was a deliberate and covert Terran Reconnaissance Office plot to manufacture a batch of strictly banned chemical weapons from an illegally modified industrial organic printer, formerly owned by the Resistance, that disappeared from an evidence storage unit at Neu-Nuremberg a few years ago? And you wouldn’t happen to know about a shipment of these chemical weapons straight from Luna to our allies on Datsot on one of my ships?”
“Strange accusations, Admiral. And I’m exhausted… can I look into this another—”
“And if I were to have a few operators track down a certain TRO-trained defense unit on Datsot, I wouldn’t be talking to a platoon of local militia possessing suspiciously familiar-looking CBRN gear, who admit they treated and held prisoners who were exhibiting all the textbook signs of nerve gas exposure?”
Kara sighed. “Well, if that all happened, I’m sure there was—”
“God dammit, Kara!” she shouted. “What the fuck were you people thinking?!”
The operative looked right back into her camera, unblinkingly. “We are thinking, Admiral, about winning the war.”
“Winning the war?! Winning the war?! What do you think I’m doing?!” Amelia screamed.
“The best you can, I’m sure. But there’s more than one way to—”
“There was no purpose to this! None! Winning the war, my ass!”
Kara’s face remained expressionless. “On the contrary, Admiral, it is absolutely vital to the war effort and our study of the enemy. If we did such a thing.”
“Oh yeah?” Amelia’s voice was dripping with contempt and sarcasm. “Tell me what you learned! Go on! What did we learn about a two-century old weapon? And actual field use?! Field fucking use?! What did you learn that you couldn’t have in a computer simulation? Or hell, even an extrasolar biolab with one of our million or so captured prisoners!”
Kara didn’t answer for a moment and just stared blankly at the camera. When it passed, she sat back up. “I’m afraid that’s need-to-know, Admiral.”
“I’m the Supreme Allied Commander of the Grand Coalition. You better believe I need to know.”
Amelia heard Kara make a few adjustment to her terminal, and her console beeped, acknowledging receipt of a file from the operative. She opened it to begin reading, her frown deepening with every line.
After a few minutes of reading, Kara began, “So, as you can see, this project—”
“Did you clowns really name this plan the Long-Term Solution to the Znosian Issue?”
“I didn’t pick the name…”
“Kara, you do realize— do you ever wake up thinking: hm, maybe we are the bad guys? Or look on your forearm, and wonder, gee, how did that weird-looking tattoo of an angry skull get there?” Amelia asked sarcastically.
Kara looked straight into the camera. “Amelia, I don’t wake up thinking we are the bad guys. I wake up knowing we are the bad guys. What we do, we do for the survival of our species, and when this war is over—”
“Bullshit! Spare me that sin-eater crap! And did you guys really think nobody would find out? That if you covered your digital tracks enough you could get everyone to forget what they’d seen and done?! That nobody in this whole… three-species affair would talk?! No… I think you wanted people to know. I think you wanted people to know what you did! I think you wanted to brag about this, to show the Republic that we couldn’t win the war without you and your shady antics in the long term.”
“It can’t,” Kara said. “You know these enemies we face, Amelia, and you know the Republic. You know the nature of humanity. We can’t win this war. Not your way. You heard what the Buns themselves said. They’re going to wait us out, to tire us out. And they’re going to be successful eventually.”
Amelia shook her head resolutely. “You don’t know that. You can’t. You’ve been down there on Grantor. You don’t know what we know. We’ve got a solid strategy—”
“—which looks great until first contact with the enemy—”
“And we are well-equipped to deal with whatever problems come our way now that we’ve got a Federation-level shipyard up and running, with our initiative keeping them on the back foot. We could have done it all, the right way. Our way. This— this abomination you people have done, we didn’t need this.”
Kara sat back in her chair and shrugged. “Maybe not. But our work… it’s already done. And I guess we’ll never know whether we did. If we win.”
Amelia sat for a minute in silence before she slumped into her chair, her forehead in her palms. “And now, I’m going to do my job. The job that the people of the Republic have entrusted me with.”
Kara tilted her head. “I understand.”
Amelia hardened her expression as she looked back up. “I’ve handed all the evidence we’ve gathered to a Republic special prosecutor. My guess is… when the investigation completes, they will find you guilty of grave crimes. Just possession and manufacturing alone… Your office will disavow you, as usual — at least that is my guess. And you’ll get an arrest warrant, a lawyer, and—”
Kara nodded. “I’ll accept that. We already decided at the start: we won’t be fugitives from our own people. I’ll come quietly.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Grantor City Safehouse India, Grantor-3
POV: Torsad, Grantor Underground (Department Leader)
“You’re leaving now?!” Torsad gaped at the duo of Terran operatives with their packed bags. “So close to our complete liberation?!”
Kara smiled at her sadly. “You don’t need us anymore, Torsad. You hear that outside?”
They paused in silence for a moment, drinking in the sound of chaotic shouting and talking outside. Somewhere distant, in the city, there was the sound of sporadic gunfire. An Underground action cell east of the city exchanging fire with a crowd of Znosian Marines, or maybe the Marines shooting at nothing. Both were equally likely.
“What do you mean?” Torsad asked.
“The people outside. That’s not us. Those aren’t our guns. That’s you. This is your people. We did what we came here to do.”
“But we’re not finished! The Znosians are still in control of downtown and they’ve got their bases on the outskirts still. My people are barely able to fight them to a standstill using the new things you’ve taught us!”
Kara put an arm around the tall Granti’s waist in support. “No, Torsad. You’re not done. Not by far. And the real hard work comes after. It’s about what happens after the Grass Eaters leave. We can give you a hand with that, but… if we do, you’ll hate us for it.”
“What if the Znosians beat us? What if they take us down after you leave?”
Kara shrugged. “They can’t.”
“They can’t?”
“They can’t. Not because of some slogan on a poster, or all that spirit crap. Yes, your people have chosen defiance over extinction, but that’s not it.”
“Right, it’s not about how much we want it,” Torsad nodded, citing the portion of the text she’d read from the Terrans. “Artillery trumps anger.”
Kara nodded. “It’s not even about the surplus weapons we’ve made for you. It’s about what we set up here. The networks. The systems.”
“Us.”
“Yes, you. The Underground. A whole institution of determined people, willing to fight for themselves. By training. By communicating. By innovating. Getting better. And that… the Znosians don’t have the tools to beat. Not here. Not on your own home planet.”
Torsad looked longingly at her. “Yes, that is all great. But don’t you want to see this to the end with us? Just stay a little longer?”
“You know we can’t, Torsad.”
“You said your people ordered you back for— for crimes you’ve committed. Whatever you did, we can— we can shelter you. Hide you amongst our people. We’re very good at that now. Nobody will tell them. We’ll say the Grass Eaters killed you too, with your director. We’ve got a whole planet to hide you. They’ll never find you here!“
“Probably not,” Kara conceded. “We’re pretty good at hiding ourselves. But I don’t want that. We did the right thing. I’ll face our own people. I’ll explain to them what we did. And one day, one day — in a few decades, maybe in a few centuries — maybe they will understand what we did and why we did it. Some of them, maybe.”
“What about— the machines you took down here with you. Are you going to pack them up and—”
“What machines?” Kara asked.
“The ones that are now printing out new equipment for us, like the one that makes the radios and control chips and—”
Kara’s face broke into a wide grin. “Oh, you mean the ones that were lost to a State Security Unit Zero raid?”
Torsad was confused for a moment. “Lost to a— what? They didn’t— Oh! Yes, nasty raid. They destroyed everything!”
Kara winked at her. “I’m sure wherever those printers ended up, they’re being put to good use.”
Torsad encircled her with both her big arms, closing the operative into a big hug. “Thank you, human. For everything.”
“No need to thank me yet. Your job’s not finished. Just don’t go crazy and make us come back and regret this in a couple decades, alright?” Kara smiled into her belly.
She let go of Kara and frowned. “Make you regret? Why would— why would we do that?”
“No— no reason. Just… some institutional memory.”
“Well, we won’t do that. We’ll do everything right, as you taught us.”
“Then you have a good chance.”
“A good chance,” Torsad repeated. “Well, that’s all we can really ask.”
Kara gave her a reassuring smile and squeeze on the paw. “Good luck, Torsad.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Torsad looked down in dismay.
Six Whiskers Skhork returned her stare. He did not look any happier than she was feeling.
“So… I guess I’m stuck here with you now,” she said after a while.
“I’m the one who’s stuck here, you monster!”
“If I didn’t promise Mark I’d take care of you if anything happened to him…” she muttered darkly.
Skhork didn’t say anything in reply, just stared out the window quietly for a good minute.
The lull was interrupted by a rumble in his stomach. He tugged on Torsad’s paw, who was still staring at the walls in melancholy.
“What?!” she snapped at him.
“I’m hungry…”
“What? That’s not my problem!”
“Do you— do you know how to make roasted baby carrots?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: “John”, Terran Reconnaissance Office
John brushed the Grantor dust off his rucksack as he set it aside into the corner of the shuttle. He buckled himself into the shuttle jumpseat, giving the restraints a good, hard tug to ensure their security.
“Ready to go, John?” Kara asked in the seat opposite of him.
He gave her a thumbs up, and she hit the button to trigger the startup sequence. The shuttle began rumbling with the startup sequence as it ran down its pre-flight checklist autonomously.
John turned to her as he switched on his headset. “Kara, what if she’s right? The admiral. What if what you did was unnecessary?”
“What? It wasn’t.”
John turned away from her uncomfortably. “And why didn’t you read me in? At the time?”
“You know why, John. It was strictly need-to-know.”
“I’m on the Project! I’m here, carrying it out. You didn’t think I might need to know—”
“Yeah, the other portion of it. The one you’ll be able to tell your grandkids about proudly one day. You didn’t need to know about every wild idea we were trying. To save humanity. And not even just us. Even them — they’ll thank us for it one day!”
“And the director?”
Kara tilted her head. “He guessed. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to lay the blame on a dead man. Or credit.”
“The gas. It wasn’t— we didn’t even get—”
“Yeah, but we couldn’t have known that particular idea wouldn’t work out. That was the point of the experiment, to figure out if we could get what we wanted with an aerosolized agent. We try all the ideas. That’s what we do. And when one of the ideas works out, as it did, we don’t place blame on all the ones that didn’t.”
“And we couldn’t have gotten that with a computer simulation?!”
Kara shrugged. “We did a simulation. We did many. Some of the simulations said it might work if we used enough of it with our modern modifications to the delivery system, but… field use showed it turned out to be far less effective than we thought. Not enough potency. The effect was too weak for the ones away from the release point.”
“There was no other way to find that out?!”
“The laws are strict. Other forms of experimentation would have been illegal too anyway. This was the simplest way to be sure.”
John opened his mouth in surprise. “We chose this path because— because it was mildly more expedient?!”
“We do that all the time! And you know that! We are the vanguard of humanity. Everything we do— we live on a knife’s edge. Every step we take could bring us off the cliff; every moment could be our last. Take your implants. If you are half a millisecond slower in a firefight, you might not get shot today. You might not even get shot ninety-nine percent of the time. But it only takes one. It only ever takes one. For our whole species. That’s something even our enemy understands: every inefficiency we incur, it might not lead to the end, but it is the acceptance of it that leads to ultimate failure. We had no choice!”
John considered her explanation for a minute before finding it wholly unsatisfactory. He shook his head. “Kara, she was right. We screwed up. What we did — it crossed the line.”
She fixed her gaze on him. “What line, John? Our people must survive. That is my line. My only line.”
“If you really do believe that, then maybe the war is lost,” John sighed.
Kara looked at him defiantly. “Not the one for our survival.”
“Not to the aliens. To the Resistance. To ourselves. And what was it for? A failed experiment stolen from the dustbin of history.”
“The Republic was built atop failed experiments.”
“The Republic was built so people stopped doing what you did.”
“What’s gotten into you?!”
When he replied, it was solemn. “I don’t mind what we did here on Grantor. I don’t mind our covert war against the Znosians. I’m proud of it, even. The mind control stuff… that’s a little gross, but it is war, and it is a necessary evil. But there is a line. There has to be… This has to be about more than survival. And your failed project… When you joined the TRO, was that what you thought we were? When the director recruited you? Did you think you’d be violating the rules written into the Charter, woven into the very fabric of the Republic, without a second thought?”
“The— the—”
“And what bothers me most is not that we made a few artillery shells for a chemistry experiment. It’s that we just moved on and forgot about it. Like it was just another thing we did. I think what bothers me most… is the thought that eventually someone is going to go through everything we did — before and after that sarin attack — and they’ll have to figure out just what we did that was right or necessary and what was not.”
“They always do that. Historians have combed through and second-guessed every victorious battle, every successful operation since the dawn of time. We aren’t the heroes of a fairy tale. We don’t get medals, only stars on the wall if we screw up—”
“No, we aren’t. We aren’t heroes. But what if we make the Republic an accomplice to our evil? What if we are the Republic? What then is the purpose of our oaths? What then are we protecting?”
“Humanity.”
“And what of your humanity?”
She scoffed and looked away without an answer for him. But as she did, John saw something in her eyes. As he replayed the moment from his implants, he wasn’t sure if there was an involuntary twitch of her facial muscles or just a trick of the light. Maybe some expression of mild regret. Or humility.
Or am I the crazy one?
Comments
Brian Davis
I honestly consider the BRAIN WASHING to be more concerning than the sarin gas.
ColonelCodfish
In an existential war of extinction? No. Definitely not.
ColonelCodfish
Yeah. Save the idealism for peace-time, idiot.
AnAbsoluteVillain
“If you really do believe that, then maybe the war is lost,” John sighed. What a punchable statement.
Ark
"Are we the baddies?"
EclipseDragon96
Or maybe this is how they took control.
EclipseDragon96
Maybe this is how State security was born.
