by C. F. Harris
My dishonor was almost complete. Almost. My ship was still out there fighting the good fight judging from the way the deck rocked under us every few moments, my feet automatically adjusting to the task of walking through a ship in the middle of a battle, but there was still so much more that could go wrong here.
My wife was out there on that station. Even more dishonoring, if less terrifying, the empress was out there as well. This was supposed to be a state visit to a new world at the outskirts of our space, and now we were under attack from this human woman who’d bested me in hand to hand combat as surely as I’d bested her in ship to ship combat. I recognized the insignia on her armor. There was no doubt she was the commander.
We stepped up to a couple of human security guards. I expected them to take me into their custody, but to my surprise the human female gestured for me to follow her. The men working under her looked surprised at this, but they also seemed to know better than to question their commander. A sign of a good commander if there ever was one.
I found this creature walking before me singularly fascinating. Who was this woman to singlehandedly take me down in single combat? Who was this woman to do so well for herself when we attacked her ship? Who was this woman who was so exotic and intoxicating in only the way a human woman could be with her slightly tan skin and the way her skin refused to sparkle like a woman of my species?
More than anything I’d caught her scent and it was amazing. I found myself breathing deeper, risking the otherwise fetid stench of a human vessel, for a chance to inhale more of her scent. I found myself stirring down below in the “favorite piece of anatomy” that she’d threatened just moments ago.
This one was crafty and dangerous. Of that there was no doubt in my mind. She was one who would bear watching. I found myself drawn to her in a way I’d never been drawn to a human female before in my life, and I’d had plenty of opportunities to avail myself of human female companionship on some of the offworld pleasure houses where captive humans of low intelligence value were sometimes put to work.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
She hit a button and we stepped into a room where it was just the two of us. There was a massive transparent window on one side of the room that afforded me a view of my battered ship, the station beyond it, and the planet down below where the station was supposed to be delivering terraforming supplies. Those supplies, the dawn of a new world, was the reason the empress was out here. The reason my wife, part of her retinue, was out there on that station that was utterly defenseless.
“Tell me what you’re doing out here,” she said. “You Livisk don’t send a full battlecruiser out for something as simple as protecting a station on one of your illegal worlds. There’s something else going on here.
I bristled at the suggestion that this was an illegal colony world. How dare she!
“This world is fully within the territory of the Livisk Ascendency. I protest that you would insult my honor by insinuating that I would defend taking a world that didn’t belong to us!”
“Yeah, well you can forget about all the honor and stuff. We’re at war, remember? That means your people are inclined to take what you want, which has always been the case. It also means we’re inclined to blast you out of the sky if you try to do another interstellar land grab, which is what I intend to do.”
The deck rocked underneath me as the ship was hit with another blast from my ship. The humans must have figured out some way to get their weapons running again. My crew new better than to fire on a ship when there was a boarding party trying to take it.
I let out a low growl. “I suppose that’s true, but I can’t allow you to take that station, much less destroy it.”
I coiled myself and prepared to do battle. It went against everything that I believed. I’d be committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of my people. I’d been captured. I’d given this captivating human my surrender and now I would be violating it. It was true that after I was finished with her there would be no one but myself to remember that dishonorable betrayal, but that would be enough.
Still, when my wife and niece were placed on the balance against my honor I knew what would win every time. Our motto might be death before dishonor, but I knew there were some things that would lead me gladly down the path to that dishonor.
Only before I could strike at the human the deck rocked under us once more. This time it was accompanied by a blinding flash a moment later and the sound of metal rending filled my ears. When I looked up again I had difficulty hearing. The sound had overwhelmed my hearing.
There was also a hissing filling the room. I looked over to that terrifying sound. It was unmistakable. It was a sound that filled every spacefarer with even the smallest bit of sense with absolute terror. The sound of a bulkhead that had been torn open. Except in this case it appeared that it was that strange transparent material that had been torn open.
It was an extravagance that should have never been placed on a ship like this, and now the humans were paying the price for that extravagance.
I cast about for my human opponent. She was lying on a heap of twisted metal, unconscious. I knew I should take this opportunity to make my escape, but I couldn’t help myself. I was still captivated by that human’s beauty. I was still very much under her spell. It was wrong. I was bonded to my own wife even if the bond was fuzzy over this distance and the only thing I could feel was the terror hidden under a steely resolve, but I had to check on the human.
I told myself it was simply because she was a worthy opponent. That I couldn’t very well leave her to die. I almost believed that excuse too.
She was breathing when I looked at her. A bit of very heavy metal bulkhead had fallen on her, but it seemed the power armor she wore had done most of the work of saving her from being crushed under it. It was a good thing it hadn’t hit her just a little higher where her head was exposed. That was sloppy, taking off an important piece of her armor like that.
Unfortunately knowing that she was breathing was as far as I could take things. I wasn’t a healer. I certainly didn’t know anything about human anatomy. Besides, I had to escape this ship. This captain shouldn’t have told me that they intended to destroy the station and the budding colony on this world.
That meant I would have to destroy her ship and everyone on it. Herself included. No time for the honor of taking a ship deck by deck and winning glory for the empire. To save my wife and the emperor’s wife I would wipe this ship from the skies.
Odd that I would feel reluctance at doing that when it meant destroying the human. She had fought well, but she had to die.
I looked around the room. I didn’t have my communicator with me. I’d lost it somewhere in the fighting which hadn’t been a problem when I was with a group of my soldiers, but it was certainly a problem now. I also didn’t have my sword. I looked down to the human. She still had one of those special weapons designed to actually do some damage when they hit us. It had been quite the pain when humans finally realized their old energy weapons didn’t work.
Reluctantly I picked it up and hefted the weapon. It felt light, but I suppose it would have been quite heavy for a human. Though maybe not when they were in power armor. I blasted the door to the room when it became obvious they weren’t going to open automatically like they had when we walked in.
I stopped and spared one last glance for the human woman before I stepped out into the hall and blasted the two soldiers who’d taken my men from behind. From there it was easy enough to grab a new sword and a communicator off of the fallen corpses of my comrades. I said a quick prayer to the spirits of the fallen emperors to speed my men to the other side, then opened a line to all the men on the human ship as well as coordinating with the weapons officer on my own.
It was time to destroy before we were destroyed.
Moments stretched into an eternity. I recalled fighting my way through a group of humans who didn’t have that annoying power armor. Reaching a landing ship that h
ad bored into the side of the human ship. Gathering what was left of my men as we retreated. That hurt, retreating like that, but it was necessary. I wouldn’t waste men needlessly when I destroyed the ship.
“I want all our troops pulled out from that ship. They are intending to destroy the station. Repeat, they intend to destroy the station. This cannot happen,” I said as I coordinated with my men.
“Oh but General, I’m afraid it’s already going to happen,” a familiar voice came through over the communications.
My eyes went wide as someone broke through and I found myself looking at the human captain once more. Her face shimmered in the holographic projection for a moment, and as she appeared I felt the bond with my wife on the station change even as it grew stronger as I got closer to my ship which had moved in close to the station to provide better protection.
Fear. This communication must be going out at full power and overriding everything in the area. This captain wanted everyone to know what was about to happen.
“Fire everything you have at that ship!” I shouted into the commlink I still had open with my own ship.
“But general, we have multiple landing ships in the line of fire!”
That moment of hesitation was all it took. I thought I’d trained my officers well. I thought I’d conditioned them to follow orders without question. It would become the greatest shame of my life that the one time those orders weren’t followed immediately like a reflex was the one time that it most mattered, but by the time I realized what had happened it was too late.
The human ship lashed out at my own. I saw shadows passing between the ships and realized that they’d given up on the energy weapons we’d knocked out and were using pure mass accelerated to great speeds. Crude, but very effective. The first hit the ship at what I could only imagine was an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and it caused a massive explosion that caused me to turn away.
My own ship opened fire, but it was too late. The damage was already done. Unlike the energy weapons the humans favored in combat there was no stopping something like this once it got going. It was a weapon of mass destruction usually reserved for planetary bombardment, but it appeared this human captain was trickier than usual.
My ship did its own damage to the humans, but I could tell it was already over. The ship exploded in a blaze of glory, the souls of my men sent on to the spirits of emperors past.
“The first part of this business is over with,” the human said. Funny that I would still be captivated by her beauty even as I was terrified of what she was about to do. That terror overrode everything, and it fed into my link with my wife causing her to feel an equal amount of terror that filled me with shame that her last moments would be thinking of me afraid rather than fighting to the death.
“Bring the landing ships around!” I shouted into my commlink. “Ram the human ship! Do everything you can to protect the station!”
Perhaps I was about to die, but it would be a good death. The pilot of my ship turned it around in a great arc and I was afforded a view of the station and the human ship. Which also afforded me a view of more of those massive hunks of metal being released from the human ship as they used their mass drivers to accelerate them.
Directly into the station.
“The Livisk Ascendency will not colonize worlds in human space,” the human captain said, her voice lacking any emotion. “This is the penalty for thinking we don’t leave our rim systems defended.”
I felt helpless as the station went up in a massive explosion as all the oxygen was used up and various reactors blew, and then it was swallowed by that vacuum as soon as the fuel was used up leaving nothing but hunks of metal. It was over in moments.
I was filled with rage as we approached the human ship, but there was one final insult left. The ship turned and started limping away from us. It was obvious it was severely damaged, I could see the marks in their armor where we’d landed hit after hit and disabled most of their energy weapons, but it wasn’t so damaged that it couldn’t limp away from the battle.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Come back here and finish this fight!”
The human captain had never left her holographic projection. She finally showed some emotion other than anger and battle rage. She smiled and bared her teeth to me. That was supposed to be a pleasant expression for the humans, but on her it looked threatening.
“The problem with that is I’m not quite equipped to take on prisoners. Besides, something tells me you just failed royally with some important mission, and I figure it would be better for you to live with that dishonor and have to go back and report your failure to your emperor or whoever your boss is.”
I fell back in my seat as others looked at me then looked away. I wondered if they could feel the dishonor settling into their bones the way I did. I felt the loss of my wife as well as the loss of that link that we’d shared since the day we were first bonded. I felt the loss of my honor more acutely, though.
I’d hoped to die crashing into the human, or perhaps to die at the emperor’s hand when he learned of my failure. Now my humiliation was complete, though. My force was so trivial that the human wasn’t even going to bother killing us as was proper.
My world, my career, my life as I knew it, was over.
And yet all I could think was how impressed I was at this human woman with a warrior’s spirit who had bested me where countless other humans and Livisk had failed. Truly she was a warrior to be reckoned with. The humans would do well to promote her as high as possible, and the Ascendency would tremble before her.
I sank down and stared at the floor of the shuttle and contemplated the enormity of my shame. This would be impossibly difficult to explain to the emperor, but it had to be done.
3: Complacency
Talia:
Two years patrolling the outer rim of the solar system. Two years in the backwater of humanity. Two years of chasing down smugglers trying to enter the system without the appropriate paperwork and arresting the occasional ice miner who was skimming a little extra off the top of the company books.
Two years since I truly felt alive. I knew this was my punishment for losing the Alemeraine. I thought I’d snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with that battle, but it turned out returning to the spaceport with a ship that ends up getting written off as a total loss because of battle damage went a long way towards convincing the admiralty I wasn’t worthy of another command.
At least not a good one. I suppose it could’ve been worse, though. It wasn’t the garbage scow I’d originally thought I’d be stuck with.
I felt the steady hum of the ship pulsing through my command chair. I closed my eyes for a moment and allowed myself the brief indulgence of enjoying that sensation, even if it wasn’t the same as my old ship.
It was still a ship, and it felt like a lover’s caress even after several years in command. I might as well enjoy it. It was the only caress I was going to feel all the way out here on patrol at the edge of the Oort cloud making sure no Livisk with crazy ideas managed to get their ship into the home system. Not that any of them had tried in decades.
The loneliness of command and all that. Though on this ship I was more than happy to remain lonely. Not for the first time the thought of that strange alien passed through my mind. He usually did when I was feeling particularly lonely. Odd that I would think of him and not one of my numerous dalliances with a human officer, but there it was.
I sighed. He’d probably been executed long ago for failure. Supposedly they did that sort of thing in the Livisk stellar navy. I suppose next to that getting assigned to this ship was almost a good thing.
Almost.
I opened my eyes and was thrust back into a reality that was a little less than what command used to feel like. On second thought the summary execution might’ve been the better option.
Navigation Officer Olsen sat on the other side of the command center from his station in a deep conversation with Communications
Officer Nomura who was giggling and batting her eyelashes under the navigation officer’s attentions. That was the sort of thing they wouldn’t put up with in the Fleet proper, but of course floating around in a glorified cruiser that should’ve been mothballed before the Livisk war started was hardly the Fleet proper.
No, this wasn’t the fleet proper. At least not in the way I thought of it. We weren’t out running exploration missions in uncharted space. We weren’t dodging Livisk blockades to bring much needed supplies to colony worlds that had been cut off by orbital bombardment. We weren’t a massive battlecruiser slicing through the inky night between the stars looking for Livisk fleets to ambush and destroy before they did the same to us and ours.
That life was behind me now thanks to that encounter that I couldn’t get out of my head, though not because it had ruined my career. I shivered as I thought of that Livisk again. Why couldn’t I get him out of my head?
No, we were just a small borderline obsolete cruiser hanging out at the edge of the safest space known to man waiting for an attack that would most likely never come. No matter how bad the war went, our two civilizations were evenly enough matched that everyone knew there wasn’t any true existential threat to humanity.
“Lieutenant Olsen?”
He looked up at me and the irritation on his face would’ve gotten him sent to the brig on any other ship. The only problem was our crew complement was small enough that I couldn’t afford to get rid of critical officers. Something they knew just as much as they knew they’d pulled one of the cushier duties in the fleet.
Everyone on this bridge but me seemed to relish being this close to home. As though not being out there mixing it up with the Livisk was a privilege and not a career ending slap in the face.
“Yes captain?” he asked.
