The Requiem of Steel

by David Adams

  “Compare and contrast with a simpler APDS round that pierces the armour results in extremely high-velocity fragments flying inside the target after piercing the armour. The uranium one works on the same principle, just that the fragments are so small as to be dust—which is on fire. The fleshy people inside are liquefied; you can go in with a hose and wash out the enemy crew.

  “A Human thought of that. Somewhere, in a lab, a Human sat down and thought, ‘You know, this will really ruin someone’s day.’ That’s just how we are. We are territorial hunter-killer pack apes, and the strongest of us, the most brutal of us, those are the ones who forged our destiny.” She paused, considering. “But, then again, we went to the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. So maybe we aren’t that clever, after all.”

  [“So you are beasts. Beasts with music, and stories, and moving pictures of Bugs Bunny.”]

  “Basically.” Liao’s anger swelled within her, and it escaped in her words. “And while you have the ships to enforce your will, the Toralii seem to lack this… quintessential Human quality. You don’t think like we do. Your weapons are simple, effective, and reliable, but you’ve been the biggest and the baddest gang on the block for too long, and you’ve lost whatever innovative spirit you once had. We’ve captured some of your ships, your constructs, and I imagine the survivors of my people are hard at work copying them. Improving them. Soon you’ll see improved versions of your ships facing you, with Human crews and Human weapons and Human innovations, then we’ll see who’s keeping who prisoner.”

  Yarri sat silent, glaring at her across the table, the woman’s tail slowly lashing behind her. [“You stole our ships?”]

  “Finders keepers. Ancient Human tradition.”

  Yarri did not laugh. [“What kind of ships? Civilian transports? Military vessels? Cruisers you recovered from the battle of Velsharn?”]

  Suddenly, Liao realised she had made a terrible mistake. The fact that Humans had not one, but two of their ships was highly sensitive information. She straightened her back. “Ships. That’s all I can tell you.”

  She could see the gears turning in Yarri’s head. [“The Humans want you back,”] she said, seemingly almost as much to herself as to Liao. [“They will have their eyes upon this place… especially now they know where it is. A cruiser is too complicated to learn to operate quickly, and its loss would be noticed by Command Most High, but there are millions of civilian craft. It would have to be a transport; a smaller ship, nothing significant…”]

  “Maybe,” Liao bluffed, “I was just trying to trick you.”

  Yarri’s attention turned back to Liao, green eyes glinting. [“Warbringer Avaran underestimated your people before; I will not make the same mistake. Even if this is a deception, I will not take the risk.”] She touched her throat, and something glowed beneath her fur. [“Command, on my authority, immediately engage and destroy every civilian ship in this sector of space. Send teams to inspect the wreckage and report their findings to me. If any escape, log their classification and serial number and have those vessels annihilated the moment they are spotted in Alliance space.”]

  Yarri closed the link. She and Liao sat in silence, staring each other down.

  Liao spoke first. “Your action will kill many Toralii today.”

  [“Many,”] Yarri echoed, her face a stoic mask. [“They are dying as we speak. Our guns will find them and blast them into nothingness. Their loss will make resupply… difficult. Civilian freighters will be wary of this sector, but the Alliance is vast. The events of today will not escape Kor’vakkar, and if they do, will be easy to poison with misinformation.”]

  “You speak of your own people with such casual disregard.”

  [“The Alliance is vast,”] Yarri repeated.

  More silence. More angry staring contests. Finally, Yarri receiving a communication; the piece on her ear flashed a light purple, breaking Liao’s stare.

  Yarri pointed upward. [“You see?”] The ceiling lit up and transformed. Amidst an image of space, inky black and surrounded by stars, five fast-moving dots chasing another dot.

  Liao had seen such things before. She did not understand why the Toralii built their screens in such a manner. Looking up hurt her neck. “What am I looking at?”

  [“My efforts have borne fruit.”] Her matter-of-fact statement sent a shock through Liao’s spine. [“A ship was identified. Small. A loner, cut off from the rest. A single strike craft.”]

  By the way the ship ducked and moved, Liao guessed it was a Wasp. “Just destroy them already,” she spat, bitterness creeping into her throat. “Or is making me watch part of the plan?”

  [“The plan is to leave the pilot’s fate in your hands.”]

  The screen zoomed, and the image became clearer. It was a Wasp, damaged. Several still-glowing holes punched in its hull, it dodged another wave of incoming fire.

  [“Tell me what I want to know, and your pilot will be spared. Her ship will be chased until it runs out of fuel, its pilot will be retrieved and interred with the rest of you, and the metal of her craft reclaimed at salvage.”] Yarri tapped her wrist patiently. The Wasp spun as it dodged, barely, another wave of Toralii plasma. [“Or she can die.”]

  “She?”

  [“Your pilot is brave. Her comrades, less so. Her mothership is retreating to a jump point. To try and protect it, she opened communications with us. We thought she had intended to surrender, to beg for mercy, but we were wrong.”] Yarri nodded to a bulkhead—Liao presumed the gesture meant something to someone—and a static-tainted voice filled the air.

  “Come on, you furball cunts! Who taught you how to shoot?” Liao recognised the voice. Lieutenant Rachel “Shaba” Kollek. The fierce Israeli pilot was one of the crew of the Rubens.

  [“Her fate is in your hands. Decide.”]

  Liao hesitated. She knew Kollek. Captain Williams would be devastated if she didn’t make it back. The odds were overwhelming. As she watched, the Wasp flipped around, loosing one of its missiles. It struck home, blowing the pursuing craft into white-hot sparks. Yarri didn’t react to its loss.

  “I can’t,” Liao said. She had no idea where the fleet was. None of them did. “I actually can’t. I don’t have what you want.”

  [“You mean you won’t.”] Yarri folded her hands in front of her. [“You have the power. All we require is small—your promise of cooperation. We are not asking you for military secrets: we do not care about them. None of your weapons threaten us, and so few of your species remain. All we ask is that the resistance aboard this station no longer have your support.”]

  Liao slammed her hand onto the table, standing up. “Resistance?” She practically spat the word. “You’ve kept me in isolation for days, with nothing but your piece-of-shit voice and fire for company, ever since the escape! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about the location of the Human fleet, and I don’t know anything about any resistance, let alone how to stop it!” She leaned across the table. “I. Can’t. Help. You. Commandant Yarri, you are wasting your time here.”

  [“Then I suppose,”] Yarri said, each word like a little stone on her chest, [“I cannot help you, either.”] She touched her neck. [“Destroy the strike craft.”]

  The swarm of dots descended like teeth, bright flashes leaping from them to the lone Wasp. It dodged most of them. The rest tore it into pieces. From the wreckage, a tiny streak—the size of a hair even on the screen that stretched across the ceiling—grew out, flaring out after a few moments. An ejection seat.

  [“Another of your Human inventions?”] Yarri asked, although there was some twist in her voice. Liao knew the Toralii woman knew what an ejection seat was. [“Amusing. A device that throws the pilot into the void, hoping for rescue… although one might ask exactly what this pilot was expecting would happen.”] Once more, Yarri touched her neck. [“Show me her face.”]

  The camera zoomed in. Shaba’s floating ejection seat, her helmet painted white with two red eyes atop it, filled the
ceiling. The image polarized, seeing through her visor. Liao saw the fierce determination of a warrior there, but there was fear, as well. Fear of death.

  [“Warbringer Savash, target your weapons on the ejected Human pilot. Bring your craft up to her; force her to look down the barrel of your plasma emitters. Make her know what is about to happen.”]

  The image became clearer. Shaba’s eyes focused on the camera. She could see the ship. She knew what was about to happen.

  “Wait,” Liao said, her voice cracking. “Fine. I’ll tell… I’ll tell the people involved that I’m not part of it. I won’t oppose it, but I won’t support it, either. I’ll be a neutral party.”

  [“And what about the location of your fleet?”]

  How could she possibly give up information she didn’t have? How did she know the Toralii would not simply kill Shaba, as they had done to their own prisoners?

  “If you return this pilot to the Humans,” Liao said, “I will tell you where the fleet is.” Strength returned to her tone. “But if she dies, or you do not keep her safety sacred, then you might as well shoot me, too.”

  [“Either situation would be agreeable to me, but I have been ordered to locate your fleet. Warbringer, hold your fire. Dispatch a craft to bring her in.”]

  Thank you,” Liao said, taking in a breath. “I promise, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  [“Do not be mistaken.”] Yarri smiled grimly. [“This is not a good action. If any more of your Human friends are out there, they will be dead in moments. Assuming they are not already. You caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and pledged to help your enemies. Even if you are lying to me… there can be no good that comes of today.”]

  “I learnt, at least, that you will go to any lengths to get what you want.”

  Yarri stood slowly, sliding back the chair. The legs squeaked as they dragged across the deck. [“A lesson learnt hard is a lesson learnt well.”]

  Rage bubbled within her. “You really are a vicious one—you know that, Yarri? Well, let me tell you this. You can treat me like a dog. You can treat all of us like dogs, threatening us, burning us, torturing us. But humans have a saying.” Liao leaned forward and sneered at her counterpart. “Every dog has its day.”

  The ceiling winked out. [“Yours is not today.”] Yarri gestured to the guards to take Liao away.

  “Back to my cell?” she quipped. “Great. I could use a break.”

  [“No.”] Yarri straightened her back. [“Not there. We are moving you.”]

  Moving her? To a new cell? “What’s wrong with my cell?”

  Yarri’s face betrayed little emotion. [“This facility is compromised. We would have to move you regardless, once we secured transportation away from the facility for you and your people. However… Captain Liao, you have promised to cooperate with us, so in truth, there is no longer any reason to keep you here. You are being moved to a place where you can relay your information in more… comfortable circumstances.”]

  Liao did not believe that for a moment. She said nothing.

  [“Goodbye, Captain Liao. I doubt we will speak again.”]

  The Toralii sedated her when they moved her. A device was placed on the stump of her arm, where the prosthetic attachments led directly into her nervous system, and with a powerful shock similar to the immobilisation weapon that had stunned her on Qadeem, Liao was out like a light.

  This time, though, she felt it.

  She felt herself being moved onto a stretcher—or something that functioned the same—then being put into a ship. The details of her transit were almost completely lost to her. She only had brief feelings, notions indistinguishable from dreams, where she could feel vague sensations. Nothing that she could ever tell another living soul and claim it as the truth.

  When she woke up, she was on another world. Light streamed in through a large, floor-to-ceiling window that occupied the lion’s share of one wall. The remainder of the cell was three steel walls, a writing desk, and a bed, which she occupied.

  She sat up and realised, suddenly, she had a second elbow. Her prosthetic arm had been returned and attached. She flexed the fingers experimentally. Strong, but not as strong as she remembered.

  There was one feature of the arm she was certain they would not return. The built-in plasma pistol. She flexed that muscle for the first time in months, trying to extend it… a thin bar of metal slid open on her wrist.

  Nothing. Nothing of course. The slot was empty.

  She pulled the sheets off her, and they disintegrated, folding up beside the bed like feathers on a bird. Liao slid off the bed, momentarily unbalanced by the weight of her reattached prosthetic. It would take some adjusting.

  [“I hope you like it.”] Kest’s voice, broadcast through some kind of speaker system, echoed around the room. [“I tried to recreate the same model that you had when you came in.”]

  Despite the circumstances, Liao felt a little bit of the caution drain out of her. “What are you doing here? Where am I?”

  [“You are on New Evarel,”] Kest said, with more than a hint of pride in his voice, [“It is a planet deep within Alliance space. Originally settled by survivors of the cataclysm that took our homeworld, this planet—and its administrative government—are what many of us consider to be our homeworld. Our new homeworld.”]

  She moved over to the window and, holding her prosthetic fingers up to block the glare, looked out. A vast city stretched out before her, a field of steel towers that stretched up so high that the star—a fierce, slightly blue light—was almost swallowed by them. It was sunset. Instead of a golden hue, as one might expect on Earth, or even Velsharn, the star cast the sky in a strange aquamarine glow. Aircraft, some as small as cars, others larger than a battlecruiser, drifted in orderly lines across the sky. Thousands of them.

  [“May I come in?”]

  Liao didn’t honestly think she had much of a choice. “Of course, Kest.”

  The wall opposite the window swung open. Kest stepped through, a wide, happy smile on his face. [“Good afternoon. Welcome to our world.”]

  She didn’t know what to say. Thank you? That seemed too trite. Instead, she decided to focus on the important issues rather than pleasantries. “Why am I here? Why are you here?”

  [“Commandant Yarri’s job is over. You’ve offered to help us. Accordingly, she has remained behind at Zar’krun, shoring up its defences for the inevitable second attack by the Humans. You, on the other hand, are here to fulfil your promise.”] The vestiges of a darkness came over his tone. [“You should know, Captain Liao, that the rest of the prisoners—along with personnel captured during your rescue attempt—have been bought here, as well. If you do not comply, or the information you provide is false, they will be the ones to pay the price, and their suffering will be… significant.”]

  How, exactly, she was going to avoid that fate would be a problem for the future. She could not have her people suffer, but even if she did know the answers to the Toralii’s questions, she had a duty to resist interrogation, to the Humans who still lived on Velsharn, who had risked everything, including their lives, to save her.

  “And what are you here for?”

  [“The Archeological and Xenological Society has more questions for you, and now that we are out of Yarri’s jurisdiction, we can be much more civil about this.”]

  If civility was a comfortable bed and a spacious room with a view, perhaps the Toralii were not nearly as advanced as they thought. Nevertheless, she had to concede that it was an improvement. “The same criteria applies. No secrets, nothing that might hurt the surviving Humans.”

  [“Maybe,”] he said, perhaps anticipating this response, [“you can ask me questions instead.”]

  She paused for a time. “Why did you burn Earth?”

  [“Because Earth doesn’t matter.”] He folded his small hands in front of him. [“Not in the scheme of things.”]

  Liao scowled, turning her eyes to the sprawling city out the window. “It mattered to us. It m
attered to me. You have a funny way of getting me to help you.”

  [“I am merely being honest.”] Kest reached into a pouch and withdrew a thin sliver of material. He unrolled it, and it lit up. [“Here. You should see this.”] He twisted it around, showing it to her. It was a photograph of Earth, surrounded by information in the Telvan dialect of Toralii. [“This is a biological survey of Earth, conducted in the moments before the first shot was fired. This is the most comprehensive, and most definitive, study of your planet ever performed. The last one.”]

  She didn’t really want to look at it, but felt strangely compelled to. It was dated in Toralii; she converted it in her head. October 28th, 2038 AD. The last day. She scrolled through the report. One picture leapt out at her. The view showed northern Europe; the oceans were so blue, as dark as ink, contrasting vividly with the shockingly green of the rest of the continent. So green and lush and rich and full of life. All gone, now.

  [“The critical thing,”] Kest said, pointing to one section of the display, [“is right here. The flora report: three trillion trees on Earth.”] He smiled wistfully. [“Similar flora are found on almost all life-sustaining planets in the galaxy we have discovered. Each, according to this report, was not only a living part of your planet’s biosphere, but it provided homes for arboreal animals, to bark- and root-based parasites, its seeds fed birds, its leaves fell and rotted and fed the soil… it was, in a way, its own mini biosphere. To a beast that lived in its branches, the tree might have been all it knew.

  [“Yet who weeps for a tree? Certainly not you. Industrial logging cleared large portions of your planet’s forests. Tree by tree by tree. Many were replaced, of course—your species is more prudent than most give you credit for, and you soon grew to realise, I imagine, that you were plundering your planet’s lungs. But still. Some forests were never replaced. So many trees destroyed. Innumerable. Each unique. Each its own little life sphere. Gone.”] He took in a deep breath. [“There are one hundred billion stars in the galaxy. At the time the Toralii fleets burned it down, there were more trees on Earth than stars in the sky. To you it was everything. To us, it was an obstacle we cleared away.”]