#Babylon-HFY

[inbabylontheywept]

Want Better Things

“You thought that was a bioweapon?” 

The translator broke down for a second as the creature did a sort of broken exhale. Connotations were all that came through. Vague implications. Pity, the software flashed. Disgust. Anger.

A pause as it decided.  

Sadism. 

Valta was already backing away. The final decision didn’t change his behavior, it just made the hall feel far, far too short. 

“I didn’t order it deployed. I didn’t make it.” 

The thing was staring at him, and he couldn’t look away. The two eyes moved in such perfect tandem that he didn’t think it was conscious. It only had binocular vision because it only needed binocular vision. Always the predator, never the prey. 

And now it was moving in on him. 

“Oh, but what if you had? Then I could tell you all the things that were wrong with it.” 

One of its hands - a sprawling, five fingered  spindly thing - traced carelessly along the station's walls. 

“No incubation period. Symptoms arrive within 40 minutes of exposure. No time to spread undetected. Minimum should be one week. Embarrassingly low.” 

The pressure the thing was putting on the wall increased, the gentle glide turning into a buzzing scratch. Humans were strong, but not strong enough to cut through metal like this. The suit had to be powered and clawed. 

“Spread through contact. Limited waterborne. No airborne. Intended mechanism of infection is viral load being put on hands from scratching, and then passed into the environment. Pathetically inefficient.” 

The translator was working, but the thing was overeunounciating each word. The meaning was being passed along by a clean, helpful voice in his suit, even as the sound was being passed on through the environmental speakers. And the sound was dreadful - clicks of ceramized bone jarring against each other, wet muscles modulating air into something sharp and rasping. 

“Mechanism of death? Lysis overload. Could be dangerous if it was transmitted into the lungs, but since the initial load tends to be dermal all we wind up with-”

It took its helmet off. 

It took its helmet off. 

It took its helmet off it took its helmet off it took its helmet off in a biozone it - 

It looked a little pink, actually. A little scratchy. It lifted a delicate, taloned hand and rubbed its face against it for a moment before finishing. 

“-is a rash.”

Valta’s prey drive had glued him to the spot. It was too close. The stupid, stupid part of his brain that still thought he was grazing on Duranga hoped that if he stood still long enough, it might not notice him. 

The human paused a moment before continuing. 

“Do you know why they sent me? Alphonse Ericsen, PhD, MD, civilian doctor, here to speak with you?”

Valta’s snout twitched. The suit translated the gesture for him. 

“No.” 

“Because one of our grunts is a dumb fuck,” the human said simply. “And he spent two days fighting on your station with his helmet off. He got infected that way and brought back your stupid, itchy plague to our carrier ship, and now we’ve all spent the last 8 hours scratching ourselves raw. But the jokes on you, because when we were treating that guy you know what we found? That he was in the asymptomatic phase of a COVID infection. So if this-”

It gestured to its pink face with a snarl. 

“-is your idea of a bioweapon, then COVID is going to be your apocalypse. But if you work with me, and shut everything the fuck down for the next three or four months, I might be able to save most of you.” 

Valta unstuck at that. He’d spent weeks down here, worrying about nothing more than the next skirmish. Now he was looking at a genuine existential threat. 

“...What? Why would you help us? We wanted you to die. All of you. I wanted-”

The human cut him off with an exasperated wave of his hand. 

“You wanted something stupid. Doesn’t mean I have to join you. Best I can do to fix you is keep you alive and hope that you feel ashamed later. That, I genuinely look forward to. Now come on, you’re going to be the one explaining to all your friends what’s at stake here. My bedside manner is so bad that they limited my patients to virology slides and USMC marines. I think that’s actually one rung below the guys that just dissect cadavers.” 

Valta would’ve made an amused hum at that, but something already felt scratchy inside his throat. 

[xenosgirlvents]

I'll be honest, what the heck does 40K offer to anyone who doesn't want raging racist xenophobes winning constantly? Nothing, which is why I'd just stick to other space stories involving big scary robots and aliens. I understand the distaste, sort of.

Personally I find lots of different elements in it compelling. I LOVE the Eldar mythology system and emotive metaphorical philosophy which drives their existence.

I love Orks/Orcs/Orruks in almos all settings, I can’t quite explain why since its been with me since childhood, but few (if any) scifi setting offers me Greenskinz.

I think its an enormous pity that the ‘xenophobia good! racism good! HFY!’ messages have become the domiant ones, I really do, but I do still love parts of the setting.

With that said I can completely understand not enjoying it. I’m too stubborn to stop, I fear, but also the truth is that very few settings in scifi don’t portray humans as superior to other races. Starcraft doesn’t, and Babylon 5 doesn‘t, but that‘s about it. Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Destiny, the vast majority of scifi always portrays humans as ‘more special‘ and ‘inherently better’ than all other races.

I mean I hate it, I really wish we could break such an immature mould of needing to feel we are superior to our own imaginary creations. But yeah, I wish I could go to other scifi settings but a combination of my stubborness and a lack of settings which don’t, similar to 40k, empower the idea that humans always must be the best ever, means I struggle to.

But I can understand not enjoying it, and I do understand what you mean. As I’ve said I’m idiotically stubborn. 

[inbabylontheywept]

"I will solve you if I must."

Arkinot knew what humans looked like. They were half his size, soft, pink, and easily bullied. He knew this because he’d spent the last two weeks terrifying a team of human diplomats sent to negotiate trade deals. It was something of a science to him at this point: Small but weak species sends in their diplomats, he spends a week or two terrifying them in close quarters, then he offers them some dogshit trade deals in exchange for getting to leave early. They take the deal, he gets richer, and in a manner of speaking, the universe becomes a better place. Being a coward was the kind of thing that really should be taxed, and he liked to think of his negotiation style as exactly that: A coward tax.

Still, that was far dominating his thoughts at the moment. The conundrum his brain was struggling to untangle was that he knew what a human looked like, and the thing in front of him was not a human. It wore human robes, but underneath the robes, it appeared to be a tank that someone had glued several monitors to. Maybe even an antennae of some kind. It was such a chaotic jumble that it was almost funny. The one part of it that really seemed to be going too far was the badge sewn into the front designating it as an official diplomat.

He stepped a few feet closer to inspect the possible art piece. He barely had begun to reach his hand forward to lift the tent sized robe when a mechanical claw pushed forward and clasped around his arm, painless but implacable.

“What the fuck-”

He didn’t hear the voice from the thing, nor did he hear it in his mind, as he’d felt with some of the telepathic races. The voice of this abomination felt like it was being physically projected directly inside his own ear, as if its mouth was just a fraction of a centimeter away from his ear drum.

“Arkinot.”

He threw up. The words weren’t loud but they seemed to have some kind of disproportionate effect on his balancing organs. The world was sent spinning and he could barely tell up from down. A second bolt of pain blossomed, this time from the back of his head. It took him a good moment to realize that he’d fallen flat on his back. He didn’t know a simple sound could cause so much damage.

And then it continued.

“You make threats you have no ability to back up. You will learn.”

Even with his senses scrambled, he could feel something cold and metallic pressed into his hand. He was too incoherent to guess what.

He wasn’t sure if the voice retracted from his ear out of pity, or because it knew that it had proved its point, but he was grateful to hear the rest of the message without feeling like someone was trying to jam stakes into his brain.

“A copy has already been sent to your high command. Your ‘diplomacy’ has already been bypassed. This is simply a personal education on the nature of human violence. Summon me when you understand.”

He rolled over to see the thing lurching down the hall. Even in his disoriented state, he could see something human in it, something imperceptibly satisfied with the message it had delivered. Part of him wondered if there was some small lump of flesh buried deep inside that horror, or if it was just mind made metal, an engram with form.

Perhaps sensing his gaze, it paused. It didn’t turn around, but he doubted that its vision was as limited as eyes were. The voice projected forward again, mercifully short of his ear, but still too close for comfort. He could almost imagine the hot breath of it bouncing off his face, mere millimeters away from his face.

“I will know when you are done. Do not make me find you.”

---

It had taken him half an hour to work up the will to pull himself up from his pool of stale vomit, and another ten minutes to stagger back to his cabin. He’d needed to lean against the wall for the entire walk back. He was genuinely concerned that his balance had been permanently damaged.

He did his first inspection of the object he’d been gifted. It was, technically, a data slate, but that was somewhat akin to calling a reactor a steam engine. The specs on it didn’t even make sense to him. What the hell was an exaHz? What was a Bekenstein limit? How could storage be at 137% of it? Couldn’t be much of a limit if it went over 100.

The device seemed to recognize it was being inspected and raised a query of its own.

User: Arkinot?

He nodded dumbly. The slate whirred for a few seconds, genuinely struggling to process what it was about to do.

And then it began.

---

Arkinot stumbled out of the room seventeen hours later. He wasn’t terrified. He’d run out of the emotional energy needed to feel fear after the first two hours of calm, methodical instruction presented to him by the dataslate.

He had learned about the nature of human violence. It was no hot blooded slaughter, no prayer of eternal vengeance. It was an industrial event to them, something to be mass produced until the market flooded over and peace became the new commodity of choice.

And they could do that. Easily. He’d seen blueprints for factories that built factories that built factories. Replicating swarms of mining bots.

The smallest time vs. production curve he’d seen was for their assault cruisers, and it was still a fourth order polynomial. If for some reason they needed to wage war for over a year, they could feasibly consume more than 30% of the mass of their first three industrial worlds.

And they had more than forty left in reserve.

He’d assume earlier that he was arguing from a position of strength because they didn’t have an active armada. He realized that the reason they hadn’t bothered was because they’d be able to produce one as large as his entire species fleet in under 48 hours.

His balance was back. He barely noticed. He followed the same path he had before, noticed in an offhanded way that the vomit had been cleaned. The human diplomat must have called that in. He certainly hadn’t.

He was now in the human section of the station, and while he could sense a wariness in the steps of the pink things around him, it was hardly the full blown fear he’d managed to instill just 24 hours before. They knew that they’d managed to summon a stronger predator than him.

He knew it too.

The door that he’d been summoned to was a repurposed garage. He supposed nothing else would fit someone so large. He knocked twice on the corrugated steel before it began to roll up.

The robes were gone. Still no visible flesh, but at least with all the machinery in sight he had a better idea of what he was looking at. He still didn't see any pink skin there, but he didn't have to when he could see rack after rack of eletroneural interfaces.

So there was a brain in there. A human brain. Probably very little else.

A faint twitch of its insectoid legs gave away its impatience. Ah. So it was waiting for him to speak.

“You didn’t need… Damn. How large was that presentation?”

The voice was almost offhanded in its response.

“208 yottabytes.”

Arkinot’s brain skipped over the scale of that number. It was absurdly massive. Apparently, everything that the humans really put their minds to turned absurdly massive.

“You didn’t need 208 yottabytes to say that you could kick our asses.”

The faint twitching gave away, replaced by an uncanny stillness. It wasn’t the frozen stiffness of a robot, it was the tense, rigid posture of someone showing a considerable amount of restraint.

“No. You certainly didn’t when you said that to us. What I needed 208 yottabytes for was showing you how I would ‘kick your asses.’ It is worth considering how much scarier that is than your empty words.”

There was a brief noise, like rustling through the speaker, and he realized that the machine had done the purely auditory equivalent of taking a breath. The action was somehow more unsettling than the purely mechanical affect he’d seen before. It made him realize just how close any of the other soft pink things running around the halls were to becoming something like this, something that could crush him with a thought.

His thoughts were interrupted by the man-machine’s closing words, tired but dangerous.

“Do not threaten our diplomats again. It is their job to be patient. It is my job to solve problems. I will solve you if I must.”

That same tired voice spoke again, millimeters from his ear.

“Now, don't let me detain you.”

He did what any sane sapient would do.

He ran.

[inbabylontheywept]

New Master Post

Thought I'd redo my old master post. Last one got massive and unwiedly.

Pronouns are he/him. I'm a 28 year old electrical engineer that works in a classified site. Used to be a Mormon. Got better. Married. Writes as a hobby.

Here are tags for searching through my works. Just click the correspondong tag at the bottom, and you'll find more of what you're looking for.

Babylon-Lore Life stories, anecdotes, etc.

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Babylon-Shitpost Some stuff is also just shitposts. I don't judge.

[inbabylontheywept]

"I think we underestimated the human population by eight or nine orders of magnitude."

The war room was reeling. The human population had been estimated in the mere hundred billion range. They should barely have had enough of an economy to field two light cruisers, least of all the goddamn armada that was ravaging the inner worlds. After the alpha strike, the human flotilla should’ve been completely crippled. Instead the number of ships they were fielding kept growing.

Tan-Hauser was the first target struck by a human attack, and they reported seventeen craft before they lost comms. Attican was hit just three days after that, but their reports already showed numbers above ninety. Any doubts that the fleet was growing were eliminated when Outpost Batan reported 1,217 FTL pings two days before the loss of Kira.

The number reported was so big it was written off as a sensor malfunction. Twenty-five billion souls lost, all because nobody in the war room could face reality.

They were going to face it now. The Kirarian in front of them was the primary sensor engineer for the Batan outpost, a specialist with more expertise in analyzing space lanes than warships. He’d been up for at least the last two days, poring over the sensor data, and only now was ready to begin to share his findings.

From the pain in his multifaceted eyes, it was clear he was still reeling from the loss of his homeworld.

Seeing that he had the room’s attention, he began to speak. The translation units each member of the war council had implanted experienced a moment of lag as they struggled to convert the almost musical tonal humming of the Kirarian tongue to more common galactic speech.

"The simplest data that can be analyzed from an FTL ping is the distance that the ship traveled before dropping to sublight. The contracted space in front of the craft traps small particles, even light itself for a short period, compressing its wavelength and then releasing it when the field disengages."

The war room nodded along. The explanation was mildly technical, but anyone that had traveled on an FTL shuttle before knew the hazards of exiting FTL directly in front of your home destination. Blasting your home station with a wave of alpha, beta, and ultraviolet rays was hardly a warm welcome.

The engineer continued.

“The… issue with this is that we’re used to the majority of the ping being in the UV spectrum. We aren’t entirely sure what the spectrum of the signals we got from the ships were because Batan station can only detect up into the low gamma range, but that’s still what the majority of the human’s FTL pings were detected in. That’s at least ten billion times the frequency that we’re used to. Since the frequency of the burst can be roughly modeled by multiplying the mean radiation per unit distance by the length of the path, that implies one of two things: That the human ships are either traveling through areas with ten billion times the standard background flux, or that they are traveling extragalactic distances.”

The engineer paused for a few seconds at that statement. The pain of loss still shone in his gemstone eyes, but something more immediate was beginning to take center stage: Fear.

“Because the craft is essentially throwing… well, normally it would be the next three or four days worth of cosmic background radiation at you. In our case it’s more like several decades. But because it’s just giving you an advance on your normal cosmic background radiation, you can track the void in the next several days' worth of background noise to determine the ship's approach vector. The 1,217 crafts that arrived weren’t coming from the same spot. There were actually hundreds of converging vectors, but more importantly…”

He trailed off, a small 3D model of the local space appearing in the center of the holo table. A spiked ball of vectors protruded from the galactic disk, each piercing cleanly through his former homeworld.

His voice cracked a little, the hum turning into a hiss. The translator tech paused a moment too, struggling to convey the subtle emotional cues into the message.

“They’re all coming off the galactic disk. That doesn’t just mean that we’re surrounded, that doesn’t just mean that we’re outnumbered… It means that each attack that we’ve seen up to this point is from an entirely separate group. What we’ve been mistaking for fleets, I believe, are simply the beginning trickles of their exploratory forces. Each of the sites that they’ve targeted hasn’t been of significant strategic importance; they’ve just been sites with unusually strong output signals. I think they’re just using our transmission stations as makeshift beacons for their FTL jumps." He took a deep breath to steady himself before providing his final thought. "I think we underestimated the size of the human population by eight or nine orders of magnitude.”

There was a heavy silence in the war room as that last sentence was processed. The engineer was already out the door before he heard the panic begin to set in.

Part of him felt a little guilty. It would’ve probably been kinder for them to go out not knowing what was about to hit them. Still, it wasn’t often you could force people with this much power to realize that they’d just lost everything.

There was a bitter satisfaction in that.

[inbabylontheywept]

The Vengabus is Coming

Alakan pinched the bridge of his nose. On one hand, certain death. On the other hand, human bullshit.

He weighed the options carefully. His self-respect fought tooth and claw with his will to live.

The will to live won. It was a near thing, but internal battles were winner take all.

“Fuck it. We need armor. Send them in.”

---

The radio crackled. It was a quiet sound, but still a welcome reprieve to the blisteringing swarm of beams from the nearby laser gatling. Alakan fished it out of his front pocket, raising it near his ear eagerly.

“Callsign ‘Ape-Mode’, do you copy? What is your ETA? We’re pinned down bad up here, if they can get a second angle set up we’re toast. ”

The speaker crackled again. There was a sound like a horn on the other end. Maybe an alarm?

“Callsign Ape-Mode, is your vehicle intact?”

There was no verbal response back, but a faint chanting could be heard in the background, just beyond the range of his hearing. Alakan cranked the volume knob to max, desperate for any possible information about when the armor would arrive. Instead, he seemed to catch the opening part of some kind of human war ritual.

“We like to party! We like, we like to party! We like to party! We like, we like to party! We like to party! We like-”

Then the radio cut off abruptly.

He took several deep breaths before pinching his nose again.

Fucking humans.

---

The Vengabus is coming! And everybody's jumping! New York to-

The chanting was back, almost incomprehensibly loud. The gatlings were earsplitting on their own, but the human war chant made them seem like whispers in a library. The noise was so loud that identifying the source was almost impossible. It seemed to be coming from all sides at once, a hulking wall of sound. He reached down to shut off his comm only to find it was already off.

Oh. They must be here then. That would explain the unwarranted assault on his earholes. He took a peek over the edge of his foxhole and froze.

Even by the standards of human bullshit, this was egregious.

The tank itself was standard DFP issue. The bright yellow paint job and makeshift stop sign definitely were not. And the speakers looked borderline illegal. Strands of copper wire poked from each of the generator sized boxes strapped, welded, and glued to random points all over the chassis. The conductor feeding each of the abominations seemed to be repurposed twinkle lights, cutting zigzags between each box before drawing into the hatch.

The gatlings stopped, evidently as taken aback as everyone else on the battlefield. The moment of relative peace was replaced by insane furor as every gun on the opposite side of the canyon seemed to realize that there was a big juicy target barreling towards them.

The tank took the swarm of beams like a champion. Faint clouds of yellow smoke trailed behind the racing vehicle as its makeshift paint job was incinerated, but that was probably a blessing in disguise. The wall of noise fell down several notches as one of the gatlings made a point of targeting the ear splitting speakers.

The tank had been content enough to just absorb enemy ammo as it barreled its way to the middle of the battle, but this was a personal affront. The railgun on the top of the vehicle locked on to the offending turret and began dropping ferroslugs. The first was more than enough to obliterate its hated foe, the other three were just to desecrate the memory. Each shot had the unfortunate side effect of distorting the noise coming out of the speakers, the voices going up like chipmunks with every thump of the MAC.

The wheels of steel are turning! And traffic lights are burning! So if you like to party, get on and move your body! The Vengabus is coming!

A kinetic slug slammed into the road just behind it. If the tank had been going anything less than max speed, it would’ve been splattered. Any sane tank operator would’ve launched their smoke cover, changed course, and avoided the slugs by serpentining.

These were not sane tank operators. The hatches for the smoke cover opened, but instead of smoke grenades getting flung from the hydraulic catapult, out flew hundreds and hundreds of gleaming chemlights. The laser gatling atop the main cannon opened fire, not at any enemy, but simply while spinning in circles at maximum speed.

None of this should have done a damn thing, but the effect was amazing. The lights, the noise, and now the laser effects-the enemy had been trained for what to do in a warzone, but they had no fucking idea what to do at a disco. All it took was one of them to break ranks, and the rest followed suit. Alakan watched in awe as the troop of 80 enemy combatants bolted up the far side of the valley, casually pursued by the still smoldering Venga-Tank, chipperly screaming out its war cry as the recording device on the inside hit a well planned loop.

The Vengabus is coming! The Vengabus is coming! The Vengabus is coming! The Vengabus is coming! The Vengabus is coming! The Vengabus is coming!

The noise, blessedly, faded to black as both made it over the hill.

He climbed carefully out of his foxhole, wiping the dirt from his palms onto the front of his pants when he was done. One of the newer soldiers jogged up to him, as baffled as he’d ever been.

“What… What the hell just happened?”

Alakan shrugged.

“Trust me, they don’t know either. Fucking humans.”

[inbabylontheywept]

Like Sharks

Scip was a brilliant engineer, a visionary, but even he struggled to comprehend the scale of the wreckage in front of him.

A single human ship. One. It had taken three of their eight super carriers and an amazing amount of luck to take it down.

Tip to tail, it was more than fifteen kilometers long. The crew space barely held five pilots.

The rest was just engine.

He’d been given as much background as the council itself had. He’d seen the battle footage. This abomination was bigger than their largest station, but it had still danced around the battlefield with all the grace of dust in the wind. If its weapon systems were fully operational, there would be no one left to speak of it. The fact that it had done all of this with nothing but short range PDC was terrifying. In ship on ship combat, it was like chasing down a sniper just to gut him with a knife.

Then repeating it, three times in a row.

Intellectually, he knew the ship was dead. People had already scoured the main cabin, pulled all of the frozen corpses out. He knew that. But deep down, he couldn’t truly believe it. There was a persistent hum that he could still hear emanating out from the craft, the muffled roar of the gravitational anomaly trapped in the engine. He’d been told that he’d be able to hear it the entire time he was within seven light seconds of the wreck, even in pure vacuum. It wasn’t air making the hum, it was space time itself, rippling as the caged beast pluck, pluck, plucked away from inside its gaol. He shuddered, imagining those ripples traveling out to pluck, pluck, pluck away at his ear.

“That’s how they’ve been doing it, you know.”

He turned around to look at the man who’d spoken. Elj? He was one of the few survivors of the battle. Everyone in the carriers was dead, and fewer than half of the people left stranded in their fighters made it long enough for the rescue craft to arrive.

Scip raised an eyebrow. Doing what?

“Getting around our lines. We’ve been blocking off all the hyperspace lanes between wormholes. Patrolling the infrastructure. We thought they were sneaking around us somehow.”

Elf nodded towards the wreck.

“No sneaking. Just… moving. They don’t rip their way through the void like we do. They swim in it.”

Scip shrugged mutely. He knew. That much had already been given to him. The knowledge was changing the upper brasses tactics, but not by much. It just wasn’t possible to guard choke points anymore. There weren’t any. The humans had designed their ships so that they could attack at any time, in any place, and leave without anyone knowing where they went. They’d built their ships like sharks, and even looking at it, even having it in front of him, he didn’t think he’d be able to figure out how to defend against them.

He spoke abruptly, clearing thick silence from the air.

"You know we're fucked, right?"

Elj laughed, and laughed, and laughed. When the mirth subsided, he put a warm hand on Scip's shoulder.

"Aye. But it's good to hear it from you too."

[inbabylontheywept]

Someone had to go first.

In an odd first, I forgot to post this HFY story here until after it was voiced by BirbletonVA. Their channel actually did such an insanely good job that I would actually strongly recommend listening to it over reading it. Nonetheless, the text is provided below.

Please like and subscribe to their channel if you like their work.

The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, and told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.

“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”

“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.

“I did,” he said. “But someone had to go first.”

That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.

“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”

I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.

“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”

I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.

“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”

I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.

---

Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.

After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.

He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.

The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now. That was an eternity during a siege.

The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, burning trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine, should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.

Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.

A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:

Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.

Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s dueterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned through orbit.

The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to kill the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and got burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, traded as the cost of moving the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.

---

The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.

It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.

Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.

“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-

“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry. If there’s one thing you can trust, it’s that this bird is going to come down gentle.”

He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.

I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.

But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.

I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.

“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”

“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”

I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough as it was.

---

The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside, and to say it was gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.

“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.

“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.

We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.

“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.

“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”

“Good,” he said.

I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.

It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.

[inbabylontheywept]

That isn't a ship, it's a cannon with FTL

Aggral Thrawn’s gut was a grotesque thing to behold: Soft and distended, covered with a coarse layering of fur, a fat purple worm of a scar crossing over it’s almost spherical circumference. So vicious was the scar that even gazing upon it brought unwanted imagery of the fat ape-like creature screaming in pain, both arms working as a dam to keep the tidal wave of bloody guts from spilling out of its three-fingered fists

Yet, for all its grotesque horror, he trusted it. That same gut that had almost gotten him killed so many years before had worked hard to save him again and again after. It was what had brought him from mere gangpress, to quartermaster, all the way to the captain of his own pirate vessel.

And right now, it was telling him to call off the attack. The readings he was getting from the craft ahead made no sense. The crew space was too small, the energy readings were off the charts, and there was something almost military about it. Yet, as he looked over the hull, he couldn’t spot a single weapon. Nothing about it made sense.

The crew had enough in the larders to pass on a ship this sturdy. Even as ships on either side of him pulled forward, eager to be the first to raid the craft, he aborted the ram sequence to watch from a distance.

The crew was disappointed. It’d been too long since they’d had a good, solid fight, but they knew better than to second guess Aggral’s gut. It had earned its place as the ship’s oracle by rite of blood, and was to be respected accordingly.

---

There were only four crew aboard the USSN PMAC: Dalton Dial, in charge of weapon systems, Elizabeth Harris, in charge of navigation, and the Pratchett siblings, who worked together to keep the fifth generation fusion reactor that powered the whole abomination within some semblance of working order.

The Pratchett siblings’ love of the reactor (which they had affectionately named “Sun-Son”) was rivaled only by their hatred of the rest of the craft. Elizabeth and Dalton had more mixed feelings on the matter. Elizabeth considered the ship “Perhaps a little ridiculous on paper, but a work of military genius,” while Dalton lauded the idea as “Literally the coming of the Messiah, the only thing I prayed for my whole adulthood, and the answer to that prayer manifest, just for me, to bring me back to the flock.”

Their mixed feelings could be explained away just by describing the craft concept:

The PMAC was not a ship. It was the largest possible gun that could still be attached to an Alcubierre drive, with just enough manpower to steer, aim, and maintain the thing for long term patrols.

The prototype MAC that the life-support, thrusters, and reactor had been constructed around hadn’t even been built with space in mind. It was originally designed as a ground-to-orbit defense weapon. If it wasn’t for the capacitor bank the ship would’ve needed almost a minute between each shot to get enough power, even with the fifth generation reactor. Luckily, it could start out each battle with enough charge to fire off a salvo of four before needing to begin recharging for its next launch.

It had just such a salvo prepared for the pirate ambush that their military grade scanners had picked up minutes earlier.

Dalton was not taking the delay very well.

“With all due respect mam, I’ve had a lock on all three for almost a minute now. I could just fire and claim that I sneezed. The Pratchetts would back me up on this. Right guys?”

Emily Pratchett snorted.

“Why is it that when the weaponsmaster says ‘with all due respect’ he always means ‘fuck you for giving my stupidly giant gun blue balls?”

Thom Pratchett shrugged.

“Maybe he’d say it less if you weren’t so eager to translate it to the navigator for him.”

Elizabeth was slightly amused by the conversation. It was hard to keep things particularly formal while on a crew this small. Still, she was waiting for something. She’d gotten permission from the brass to take a new approach to fighting with the ship.

They’d proven it could win battles. Now, it was time to establish shock and awe. And as it currently stood, dead men told no tales.

Thus, they needed more living ones. And as she watched two pirate ships pull forward, with one hanging back, she knew just who’d live to pass on this particular legend. ---

Aggral watched the ships advance on his HUD, the blips crossing the thousands of kilometers between them and the strange ship in seconds. For a moment he felt regret. Was he making a mistake? Was this going to be what led to some upstart in the crew thinking they could do things better than him?

Then, the world went mad.

The power readings on the strange ship spiked. Hard. He’d thought that the baseline levels were outrageous, but they must’ve had some sort of absurd capacitor bank to expel that much energy that fast. The twin prongs that made up most of the length of the ship gave off some sort of EMP that fried the electronics of the Viscera, his sister ship, cutting off their radio traffic. His crew scrambled to find some way to regain contact when Gods of the Dead, forgive me my sins, and and forget me my debts, the actual weapon went off. The EMP hadn’t even been the attack, it had just been a side effect.

He hadn’t seen a weapon because he’d been looking for one on the hull, some kind of guardian laser, or a missile pod. He hadn’t even conceived that the whole goddamn vehicle could be the weapon. But what kind of weapon would charge up like that? A laser would just fire over a sustained period. What would need a burst like-

He stopped midthought as it hit him: A railgun.

He stopped again as it hit them: The kinetic charge would have to have been moving at almost 0.8c for it to just ignore the evasive maneuvers like that. The ferroslug itself wasn’t detected by any of their defense measures aboard, but the thermal readings of the Viscera made every infared sensor aboard scream in horror. Contact with whatever slug had hit it must’ve reduced the whole thing to plasma. It was almost inconceivable.

He was already screaming out the full retreat call when the ship fired twice in rapid succession at the Rictus, which was still recovering from what had just happened to its partner. The first shot was dead through the center. The second hit some target a few dozen meters off to the side.

A direct hit on an escape pod. Apparently, the captain had tried to save himself. Even in the mortal terror that he felt at that moment, Aggral could take a grim satisfaction at that second shot. To leave all the men that followed you to their deaths was a cowardice that he could not bear to consider. He would rather die.

And now, he was going to. Jump was fifteen seconds away, and the console was telling him that the ship was pinged. They knew where he was, they had him in their crosshairs, and they were going to pull the trigger.

He traced a finger over the purple scar absentmindedly. This was it. He’d been living on borrowed time since that first wound, and now he was to meet his ancestors.

He was ready.

---

Dalton was wincing, even as he maintained his ping on the ship. He knew that Elizabeth was just doing her job, but even by his admittedly bloodthirsty standards, there was something fucked up about keeping a ship in ping like this. It was like forcing someone to look you in the eyes before you slit their throat. Way too personal for his tastes.

Elizabeth was keeping an eye on the craft, making sure that no escape pods were jettisoning. Part of her was hoping that some would, but whatever other faults these pirates had, they were loyal to each other at least. As the ultraviolet scanners gave the telltale flair of redshift, she told Dalton to turn off the ping.

To say he was relieved was an understatement. In the middle of a firefight, he couldn’t question Elizabeth’s orders, but for the first time in a long time, he’d been afraid to pull the trigger. Now he didn’t have to.

He almost slid out of his chair as he asked the question that had been on his mind since the engagement began.

“Mam, what the hell was that?”

Elizabeth smiled warmly at her very surprised crew even as her words came out, cold as ice.

“A message.”

---

Thanks for reading this far! I'm moving my previous works from reddit to here. If you follow me, more will come. If you're impatient, you can skip to the source and read things at https://www.reddit.com/user/InBabylonTheyWept/

[inbabylontheywept]

Burning Bridges

“I am Kalrose, commander of the Second Armada of the Akaviri. We are on our way to a peacekeeping operation in the Pegasus cluster. Humanity is not our enemy, but it will be if you continue to detain us in your piss puddle agrarian star system. Step away from the FTL launcher and no one will die. Remain in front and we will plow through your craft. Either way you will not stop us.”

The human freighter acting as a makeshift gate in front of the launcher did not move. If anything, it centered itself more, in order to better face the Akaviri flagship head on.

Then it broadcasted back.

“Your ‘peacekeeping mission’ in the Pegasus cluster is a genocide. We will not stand back and let you commit this atrocity. We may not have the men or the ships to destroy your fleet, but we don’t need to destroy your fleet in order to keep you from reaching the battlefield. Our piss puddle’s name is ‘Zion.’ In time, you will call it ‘Home.’”

Kalrose barely had time to ponder the nature of that threat when the launcher fired up. The EM readings on his ship went mad, and in that brief fraction of a second, he realized he’d miscalculated. Gravely.

He didn’t know how many thousands of safety protocols had been bypassed, but the amount of power flowing to the gravitational core in the center of the launcher was easily nine times larger than the maximum rating. A micro singularity formed within the space lens, and cladding ripped itself off the hull before spiraling at near light speeds around the artificial black hole.

Kalrose had always imagined such a catastrophe as something like a fireball, reds and oranges, lots of shrapnel and clanging. Upon seeing it in person, he realized how foolish that was.

Red glows were for pokers left in hot coals. This was, for one brief moment, a star fueled on steel. It was never going to be orange.

It could only be white.

The accretion disk condensed further, the energy of the reactions happening near it somehow fueling the gravitational anomaly at the center. His comm system moved into a death scream as the material’s blackbody radiation moved past the x-ray spectrum, pure friction converting the material to energy more efficiently than even a fusion reactor could manage. The heat generated finally caused a full structural collapse, the spine of the station melting enough to wrap the whole barrel of the launcher around the spiraling singularity, twirling it in loops like thread around a spool. The reaction was accelerating now, even without electricity being able to fuel the gravitational collapse, the radiation pressure alone managing to hold the system in a highly fragile state of tensegrity. He recognized the feedback loop that was happening, radiation fueling gravity, gravity fueling radiation, on and on until-

There was no air for noise in space, but he could almost imagine the roar that the expanding cloud of ionized metal should have made as it blew past. There it was. The end of the loop. It had run out of matter to feed on, so without a balance to the compressive force it expanded outwards.

He was fortunate that the explosion was violent enough to atomize the particles. Even a fragment the size of a grain of sand would’ve been enough to take down his flagship. As a lone ion, it could be deflected by the same magnetic field that kept the crew safe during FTL jumps.

He stared numbly at the monitor.

One third of the Akaviri fleet, stranded in a farming system. Not even a shot fired.

He realized that the comm system’s scream had been replaced with the quiet pulse of an incoming broadcast. He accepted it without question, too lost to even be angry.

“Take your time recovering your senses. When you’re ready, just send us a message back. We’re going to need every hand we can on the harvest. There’s no one out there we can reach for help after this. It’s just...Us.”

[inbabylontheywept]

Healing+Lightning=

Wizard Launcher

Avalahn was already halfway through the anti-lightning sigil when he realized that the hedge wizard's spell was continuing. Surprising. Dual element spells were rare enough amongst polished circle elves. For a backwood self-taught like the human in front of him, they were signs of a prodigy.

Still, it was hardly worth worrying about for someone with his centuries of experience. He simply relooped his hand instead of closing his fist, preparing himself to charge his sigil with a second element in turn.

Or, so he thought. His almost bored counterspelling was replaced by consternation.

The first spell he’d identified clearly enough. Aerothurgy of the third ring, a lightning blast designed to cripple warriors by overdrawing their muscles. Atypical for wizard duels, but perhaps the hedge wizard was trying to avoid lethal options. He would be disappointed if he expected the same courtesy from Avalahn himself.

But the second spell, he’d never seen used in a duel before. It was a biomancy spell, but far more intricate than the lightning spell. At least sixth ring. He’d seen something like it used to reattach severed tendons.

Why would he try to heal me, right after harming me?

The hedge wizard maintained focus as he traced the last symbols through the air, completing the cast. Avalahn closed his fist and finished his sigil, protected from the lightning part of the attack. If there was a look of trepidation on the hedge wizard’s face as he finished, Avalahn assumed it was fear from fighting a superior mage.

He assumed wrong.

There was a sound like the rigging of a ship tearing loose, like a mighty cord breaking under unimaginable strain. The hedge wizard howled in pain, but more important than that, he flew. Avalahn had no time to cast a physical barrier. He’d been prepared for lightning and thunder, not for the filthy half-feral man to cross the thirty foot gap between them in half a second. His brain was still trying to process how healing plus lightning resulted in a wizard launcher.

The wizard slammed into him at waist level, a dagger sharp shoulder aimed perfectly at his diaphragm. The sound he made as every fragment of air left his body was similar to the noise a rat would make while getting run over by an oxcart.

The two bounded down the road, a knot of limbs and robes. Avalahn may have been caught unprepared for the dive tackle, but he wasn't completely useless in a scrap. His reflexes were still top notch, and even when he couldn’t tell up from down, he could still cast a ward against blows.

The hedge wizard was definitely slower and smaller than Avalahn himself was, but if nothing else he was in his element. Avalahn managed to throw a few sharp elbows into his ribs, but when the scramble stopped the human was the one on top.

The sigil was not focused enough to full stop the first blow, but it softened it. His head still bounced back against the grass, but it was hardly the crushing blow that the hermit had clearly hoped for. The second blow was also warded, but still went hard enough to draw a trickle of blood from one nostril. He tracked the recoiled fist of the human wizard and was surprised to see a large rock clutched in its palm. He must’ve snatched it off the path some point during the tumble.

Clever little bastard.

He did have an ace of his own, a little trick built into every ward he cast. Wrapped in all of his defensive casts he always threw in an energy trap, a way to turn the enemy's strength against them.

Between the tumbling and the punches, the physical ward was practically shimmering with built up charge.

He released it with a snarl. The hedge had no time to react, one second he was trying to pummel Avalahn to death with a rock, the next he was physically thrown ten feet back. If he’d landed on his back, Avalahn would’ve had enough time to finish him off with an ice spear, but the stupid, grimy, wicked little beast landed on both feet and charged foward like a bull.

Centuries of knowledge, analyzed in fractions of a second. Spells, wards, sigils, none could be cast before the human crossed the gap.

Only one choice.

He swung a haymaker at the humans jaw. His mind worked faster than his arm could alter course and he watched in slow motion horror as the human twisted his head and ducked, taking the blow on the forehead instead of the chin.

Avalahn’s punch had more power than sense behind it, and decades of sedentary life had made him soft. He barely had time to wince at the boxer's fracture he gave himself before he felt the little man’s arms wrap around him, surprisingly from behind. He must’ve managed to slide under his leg.

As he reached down to break the vice grip that the human had, he realized that the humans fingers were twitching the same lightning spell that they had before. He’d been too busy fighting for his life to process what the hell that opening move was, but in that split second, he realized what was about to happen.

The human didn’t use lightning spells to attack directly. He used them on himself, as a way to overload his muscles and gain a temporary and painful burst of superstrength.

The healing was just used to fix whatever horrible damage he did to his own muscles in that moment.

The twitching stopped and he knew that the convocation was complete. He could only sit in silent horror as he felt every muscle in the humans body bunch together in one powerful pulse.

The arms around his waist crushed together like a vice, harm enough to snap at least two of his lower ribs. He felt his feet lift off the ground as the muscles in the humans back pulled taut, saw the ground rush up to meet him as he was flung carelessly over the human’s shoulder.

It wasn’t a clean knockout. It was a filthy, vicious, visceral knockout, and in the human’s eyes, that was far better.

The hedge wizard spent a few seconds on the ground, quietly contemplating his choice to pull every muscle from his hamstrings to his shoulders. He didn’t have enough mana to fix himself right as rain, but he could work up enough to at least get himself onto his feet again. He took a moment to drag the unconscious elf into the shade under a tree before rummaging around the finely tooled leather bag the traveler had brought. There was a bag of candied nuts that he helped himself to, as well as a small bottle of brandy, but the rest he left be. He liked his creature comforts, but he wasn’t a bandit. He’d just wanted to make a point about what happened to people that tried to barge through his woods, only to threaten violence when told to leave. He couldn’t tolerate bullies, but he especially couldn’t tolerate bullies blessed with magic.

Still, he felt a little bad for his petty theft, and slightly impressed with the physicality of the fight. He hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before fishing through the pack again, this time pulling out a quill and some parchment. Using one of the hardbacks in the bag as a desk, he wrote a small note to leave on the unconscious elf's lap.

Nyce heighmayker. You can travil thru, provyded you bary your shits. When you retern to your Very Fancy Sercil, try to reed a book on how NOT to get suplecksed. Haha!

Syned,

Tom Bug

Ps. Your desent enuf for a book wizard. I gess you can stop by agen, if you behayv. Bet your frends are pricks tho. Tell them to stay away or I will kill them with a rok.

[inbabylontheywept]

"R&D? More like R&Deez Nuts"

In a future where intelligent life had managed to break the chains of death, disease, and famine, it had yet to escape the iron grasp of bullshit corporate team building exercises.

Luckily for the R&D division of TLOB Enterprises, they had a human. His name was Earl, and he surpassed even immunity to bullshit, literally gaining strength from it like some sort of coprophilic vampire. It was almost as disgusting as it was fascinating, but the novelty of it was charming enough to keep things in the green.

The specific brand of bullshit the group was dealing with on that particular day was a “team-building laser-tag battle” pitting the three main divisions of the orbital branch against each other: Accounting, Sales, and Innovations.

To be frank, it didn’t seem like a very fair fight. Accounting was the largest branch by far at twenty-seven heads. Sales lagged behind this a great deal with seventeen members, still absolutely dwarfing R&D’s mere four.

The rules of the game were explained by a cheery corporate speaker, aided by pictures presented in something that was dishearteningly close to a power-point program.

First, each player would be given an infrared phaser, and a tag suit. The suit itself was surprisingly high tech for a toy, freezing limbs if they got hit, and paralyzing the person entirely if they were struck somewhere vital. After receiving their gear the three groups would retreat back to their offices and strategize for the next fifteen minutes. When the time was up, the station would begin to decrease its spin, lowering gravity from a comfortable one-point-two G's down to zero. The match would then proceed in the low gravity environment until two teams were eliminated, with its end being signalled by the return of gravity.

“Any questions?” the speaker finished, chromatophores flashing a nervous pink as the room remained silent.

“Haha, I’m gonna take that as a sign that I did a good job of explaining things! Alright everyone, back to your offices! And remember: We’re all part of a greater whole!”

Brisinj smirked, jagged teeth on full display. There was a moment of slow motion horror as Shiloh, Earl, and Valrose all realized that he was about to “whisper” something under his breath.

Brisinj’s equivalent of whispering was still more than enough to be heard across the room.

“Hard to. Be greater hole than. Sales. Even if. Hole is. Asshole.”

As seventeen heads swiveled towards him in disbelief he did the only thing he could that would make the situation worse.

He made eye contact with them and kept going

“BET THEY FART. LIKE. AN AIRLOCK. OPENING.”

Spittle foamed between the gaps of his jagged teeth as he forced air between them, the hiss he made literally filling the room.

And it just kept going.

And going.

And going.

Disgust morphed into disbelief as Brisinj continued to make the noise, eyes bulging, face flushed, before his lungs mercifully gave out and the hiss died with an artfully strangled gurgle.

Earl couldn’t help it. He guffawed. Shiloh’s disappointed and betrayed expression broke his heart, but he couldn’t help it. That final gurgle had been a masterpiece.

Valrose was the one that wound up taking the initiative, his hydraulic musculature giving him the strength to gently manhandle the cackling duo out of the room. Shiloh tried his best to give an apologetic wave as he followed the pseudo-crustacean out of the room, but the raucous laughter of three people behind him scorched that bridge like a leaf on the sun.

With a defeated sigh he ran to catch up to his coworkers.

---

“So… What do you think the odds are that sales decides to storm our little lab first?” Shiloh asked.

“Oh, 100%,” Earl replied offhandedly, his attention focused on rummaging through an old toolbox.

“Those are chances,” Valrose corrected, “Odds would be zero to one. But yeah, they’re definitely hitting here first.”

“I. WOULD BE. OFFENDED. IF THEY. DIDN’T.” Brisinj intoned at his standard just-below-deafening volume, “THAT HISS. WAS. PERFECT.”

Shiloh ran his claws over his scalp.

“Shit. They’re gonna slaughter us.”

Earl seemed to have found the tool he was looking for and was now rummaging through the LED drawer, gathering a collection of bulbs that he seemed promising to him. His tone was amused, even if he didn’t look up long enough for his facial expression to be read.

“Calm down. Slaughter is for real wars. Worst thing that happens here is they paralyze us and draw dicks on our faces.”

“That’s still not pleasant!” Shiloh protested.

No one argued that point.

The silence stretched on for a minute or so longer. Earl gathered his collection of bulbs before moving to the power testing lab, leaving the other three in the quiet. Valrose gave in first and pushed himself up, claws failing wildly as he got his four legs beneath him.

“So what are we gonna do? What’s our grand plan to avoid having to pretend to be dead for the next hour while the sales bastards make us into doodle boards?”

Shiloh shrugged.

“Make them work for it I guess? We could start by moving our shelving units, trying to funnel them through a choke point. Could give ourselves some cover while we were at it.”

Earl chimed in from the power lab.

“I got an idea, but I’m gonna be a little dramatic about it and make you wait to see it. Just uh… Cluster em’. The more of em’ you can pack together, the better. Even if it means making some cover on their side of the room.”

There was a slight sideways pulls as the station’s retro-thrusters activated, the rotation of the great craft gently pulling to a complete stop.

The game was starting, and Earl still hadn’t made his way back from the power lab. Brisinj was not pleased with this.

“HEY. EARL. DONE YET?”

Earl’s voice came back a few seconds later, strained but chipper.

“Almost!”

They could hear banging on the walls, the telltale sound of people launching themselves down halls in the zero gravity environment.

The noises were getting closer.

“So, uh, how ‘almost’ is that almost?” Valrose asked, his casual tone betrayed by the nervous twiddling of his manipulator claws, “Cuz I’m hearing a lot of boots hitting the walls and four wouldn’t be enough to hold them off, least of all three.”

Even without a person around to witness it, Earl still shrugged before answering.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing: Four ain’t enough. Only way we’re winning this if I can get this party trick in working order, so just... Hold the line. Alright?”

Valrose clutched his pistol tighter, still feeling exposed in the pillbox he’d made from old shelving units and cardboard. Brisinj wasn’t pleased with Earl’s absence, but even that nuisance wasn’t enough to ruin the joy he felt at even this imitation of a fight. Shiloh just kept his sights on the lone entrance to the lab, hoping he could get the timing of his first shot right.

He did.

There was the black flash of a sales rep rocketing down the hall. He landed on all fours, limbs splayed like a tree frog, when Shiloh’s beam hit him in the back. He’d been too busy absorbing the shock of impact to begin his secondary launch, and as all four limbs froze at once from the registered vital shot there was nothing he could do but await his doom.

Apparently, doom chose to wear a grey suit that day. Another sale’s colleague had been following close behind him, and simply lacked the time to change direction. With no way to change course he slammed into his paralyzed comrade with a muffled swear, the two sent spinning into the open space of the research lab.

Brisinj picked the flailing survivor off with a casual snipe. His species was adapted for hunting and he didn’t even need to use the sights of the gun, firing from the hip like an old Western. The flailing stopped, but the accusing glare remained.

The second batch of sales workers seemed to have learned from the first, recognizing the challenges of rushing the choke point. There was the sound of scuffling in the hall as they struggled to position themselves in the 3D space before the first wave launched themselves out of the blind corner.

There were five of them, and they weren’t just smarter than the frontrunners, they seemed more physically capable. There was another sharp-toothed biped of the same species as Brisinj, and the two quickly locked themselves in a duel. Brisinj’s stationary position gave him an advantage in accuracy, but the speed that the other one was moving at made him hard to hit.

Brisinj let out an involuntary hiss as one of the shots hit him in the arm. His opponent’s eyes narrowed in fury at the sound, and the moment of distraction was enough for Brisinj to swap the gun to his functioning hand and take out one of his opponent’s legs.

Unable to position his landing well, the clerk hit the next wall and glanced off, spinning. Valrose took a careful shot at his chest and the flailing of limbs stopped, giving him the appearance of a shuriken as he whirled off in the direction of the power lab.

Still, his efforts gave four of his comrades enough time to get to cover unharried. As they began to fire at the entrenched trio, they gave more of their friends time to get through the door and set up.

Valrose was able to put up the best fight here. His head barely poked out of the pillbox, the only part of him truly exposed when he fired was whatever arm happened to be holding his pistol. He simply ran through them like an assembly line, one pincer passing the pistol off to the next as his arms took hit after hit.

He managed to get a chest shot against an upper levels sales manager, but the real gains of his strategy were in the way he took fire off the other two. Brisinj’s sharpshooter accuracy had gone down to mortal levels after swapping to his non-dominant arm, but he was still able to get two cocky reptilians through the chest when they tried to leap for better positions. Shiloh himself seemed content to take limb shots, whittling the sales team down slowly. His reptilian comrades weren’t particularly good shots, but they made up for it with their default ambidexterity. It was the real sharpshooters, the mammalian bipeds and greys, that suffered the most from losing their dominant limbs. For a moment, it looked like they could manage to hold their positions indefinitely.

The moment couldn’t last.

Two shooters made a bullrush for Valrose. The first, a reptilian, was taken out easily, but Brisinj only managed to get the second’s leg before he dove in through the entrance slot. There was a muffled curse before Valrose was evicted from the box, limbs splayed.

A chest shot.

Shit.

The pillbox was positioned behind both Brisinj and Shiloh. Having it captured didn’t just mean that they’d lost their main distraction, it meant that they were about to get caught in a crossfire.

Shiloh may not have had the quickest body, but he had a lightning mind. Before Valrose was even shoved out of the slot he was launching himself out of cover. He had his knees bent in front of him like a shield, sacrificing them midflight. If he’d been aiming for a wall, he’d have hit the ground frozen, unable to push off, but he knew better: There was a water pipe hanging off the wall he could swing around like a gymnast on, repositioning his trajectory on a beeline for the power lab.

Brisinj himself realized a half second later what he needed to do, but his superior speed made up the difference nicely. He dug his clawed fingertips into the carpet, weaving serpentine down the hall, more of a climbing motion than anything else. It was working beautifully, beams of infrared traced all the places he would’ve been if he’d been foolish enough to move in a straight line. He’d almost made it the full length of the hall before a lucky shot grazed his hand, the remaining arm locking tight. Dropping the last pretense of strategy, he simply kicked as hard as he could off the wall, launching himself towards the door he’d just barely seen Shiloh disappear behind.

It worked. He barreled into the lab, just barely managing to twist enough to land feet first on the wall instead of bouncing around the room like a 140 kilo rubber bullet.

“EARL! THEY GOT. VAL. ARE YOU. DONE. YET?”

Earl turned around, a wild grin on his face. He’d built… something. There was a breadboard covered in crudely soldered chemical batteries, a handful of resistors, and most importantly, an LED. A matte black cone of plastic was wrapped around the top bulb, focusing the light from a radial burst to a much more concentrated cone.

Brisinj was good at circuits, but the whole thing was so rushed and messy he could barely tell where the on switch was. Shiloh, on the other hand, seemed to understand immediately.

“Does that LED emit in the same wavelength as the pistols?” he demanded, almost gleeful at the prospect.

“Close! We’ll see if it’s close enough to fool the sensors.”

There was no time for self-congratulating speeches. The sales team had begun to follow them down the halls, eager to finish what they’d started.

Earl braced himself by the doorway. Behind him laid his wounded teammates...before him laid destiny.

And what human would he be, if he had not laid with destiny?

He launched himself across the room, body parallel to the ground even as he fired the cone down the hallway. He didn’t have the expert precision of Brisinj, or the fast thinking of Shiloh, but he married both in a way that lent itself beautifully to movement. He only needed to be good at dodging, his homemade infrared blaster was basically miss proof.

It was a massacre. The infrared cannon froze everything in its massive, continuous cone, combining the best traits of both a machine-gun and a flamethrower. You couldn’t pray for a better room clearing device. Earl was able to clear out the entire corridor with a flick of his wrist, paralyzed salesmen drifting through the zero-gravity environment like frozen corpses after a hull breach. There was something eerily beautiful to the scene.

The effect was ruined somewhat when the drifting “corpses” started whining about rules and blatant cheating, but Earl was far too busy not listening to them to bother listening to them.

Using the floating bodies as jump-off points, he rocketed down the hall, the cone making a gentle figure-eight sweep as it cleared every point in his field of vision. Limbs froze at awkward angles, as people tried to fire from behind cover and those that tried to move for a better vantage point, desperate to make sense of the chaos, found themselves cast adrift.

It took him a little under four seconds to wipe out the remnants of sales. It took him longer than that to spot Valrose, buried as he was under a pile of four clerks.

It only took him one bounding leap to reach his friend, and two great heaving pulls to send the clerks flying off into space. Val was currently face down, and he took a moment to steel himself before turning his friend over.

No.

They’d got him. There were four dicks on his face, each from a different species, with a level of anatomical detail that Earl found both frightening and educational.

Huh. So that’s what they look like.

Val’s expression was as inscrutable as any shrimp’s, and his casual tone wasn’t helping.

“Give it to me straight Earl: How bad is it?”

Earl placed a gentle hand on Val’s shoulder. They were both men here. He deserved the truth.

“Val… There are four dicks on your face. Like, full on dicks. Dicks with veins kind of dicks.”

Val’s face twitched a little, but he kept that calm, stable tone that everyone on the station knew him for.

“I see. Earl, could I ask you a slight favor?”

It was probably the result of seeing too many cheesy war movies, but Earl didn’t think he could refuse a comrade that had, in a way, given it all in pursuit of duty.

“Anything man. Just name it.”

The temperature seemed to drop, so cold was Val’s response.

“Avenge me.”

---

R&D solved its vengeance problem the same way it solved all of its problems: By breaking its solution down into easily replicable steps and then moving on to mass production.

It took Earl only a minute to print out a halfway decent penis stamp, time that Shiloh and Brisinj spent figuring out how to act as the other’s limbs. They were far from graceful, but they could get by. With no time to lose they began clumsily navigating the open spaces, moving from body to body, a flurry of stamping, jumping, and laughter.

Earl himself spent his time getting situated in the pillbox. He wasn’t sure if he could beat the onslaught of accounting, but it was worth a shot. Even in the worst case, his goal could be to just buy time for Val’s vengeance.

There was time for two people to get stamped before the first accountant poked his head around the corner. Earl recognized his face, even if he didn’t know his name. He was a fellow intern, green as a sapling. A quick pulse of the blaster was all it took to turn him into a statue, a fate he seemed surprisingly at peace with. Even as a casualty he continued to relay information to his teammates. It seemed that he’d been chosen specifically as a sacrifice.

“Alright everyone, you’re not gonna believe this, but the lab boys actually managed to eliminate everyone in sales.”

Even muffled by the blind corner, there was still an audible wave of surprised hums. It seemed that they’d massed just out of sight, taking the slow and steady approach. Classic accountant move. Their patience and general willingness to strategize didn’t bode well for R&D.

The intern spent a few more seconds analyzing the room before relaying back even more info.

“They’re uh… they’re graffitiing the sales branch with genitalia. I can see Val, it looks like he’s been out for a while. They’ve got Brisinj and Shiloh helping each other out, but they’re both missing the use of two limbs, they’re not very combat effective. The only one that seems intact is Earl, and he’s got a little fort made at the end of the room. Hi Earl!”

Earl gave him a little wave. This was… oddly amicable. If he could pull this bit out longer, it would be a lot simpler than fighting.

“Hey! Sorry, I forgot your name. Always been bad with names. Who are you again?”

The paralyzed accountant didn’t seem very bothered by this.

“I’m Velen! The thing in your hand isn’t a phaser, so I’m assuming you made your own weapon?”

Earl’s eyes widened in alarm. Huh. Well, that element of surprise burned out real fast.

“Eh… Well… Yeah.”

He was already tucking the weapon away, but it was too late, Velen was already passing on more recon.

“Earl’s made a phaser! Lots of batteries and a large LED! It’s got a cone shaped barrel, probably covers a wide area continuously. Anyone got any ideas on how to handle that?”

Earl couldn’t hear the voices too well, but there were suggestions of various shields, ranging from using a wall of interns, to coffee tables. The winning suggestion came from a reptilian voice, recognizable by its faint lisping accent, identical to Shiloh’s.

“...I think there’s a large mirror hanging up in the lobby? We might be able to reflect the beam back at him.”

Earl considered this. If he waited here, there would be the substantial delay of them traveling down to the main docking area, then traveling back, then making their slow and steady charge. He didn’t have a good counter to it, but it would at least be a slow style of victory.

Alternatively. He could charge, right now. He might get shot immediately, he might win, hell, he might do neither and just succeed in delaying the inevitable a little more staunchly.

What the hell. He still had some fight left in him.

He braced his legs on the back of his pillbox, blasting himself out of the narrow entrance slot like an ICBM leaving a submarine.

Velen startled a little before continuing his play-by-play.

“He’s pretty fast! Hey, he’s making a run for the hall. You guys might want to pull back a little, or you’ll end up like me.”

There was the ominous banging of twenty-five points of shoes bouncing off the walls before Earl even rounded the corner. He froze, unsure of what to do, when he heard that same, old reptile speak.

“Not bad! After what happened on your colony world I thought you’d be taking things slow. War of attrition. Glad to see that you’ll gamble on victory!”

Earl launched down the hall towards the voice. The lizard that he saw was old, older than Shiloh. He’d braced himself at the edge of another blind corner, shooting a wink before launching out of line of sight.

Earl followed in hot pursuit, gun held on in front of him. The lizard was damn fast, always just a few steps ahead. Panting, he rounded a corner just in time to see a green tail whirl into the bathroom.

He grinned.

The little guy was fast, but he’d cornered himself there. Earl pushed quickly, eager to catch the lizard before he realized his mistake.

He rocketed in through the door, blaster on, and immediately realized that the lizard wasn’t the one screwing up. He was.

Mirrors.

He froze as the reflective surfaces in the room bounced the beam back at him. He drifted silently through the empty space, hoisted by his own petard, before he saw a familiar spiky head pop up from one of the stalls. Now that paralysis wasn’t on the line, the lizard’s movements were a lot more relaxed.

Earl spoke first. It was really all he could do, frozen as he was.

“I don’t actually know your name, but may I just say that you pulled this off beautifully?”

The lizard grinned.

“Ha! I’m Petrunko. I’ll take that compliment, today was probably the most I’ve used my brain in the last ten years.”

Earl tried to shrug, the suit reducing the movement to a neck twitch. He laughed at himself for trying, the excitement of the last few minutes wearing off, leaving him happy and tired.

“You sound like my boss. Get too good at your job and it gets boring, huh?”

Petrunko wiggled his hand a little, the surprisingly universal sign for kinda.

“Your job doesn’t really change, but your view of what you’re a part of does. Imagine if one of your cells became self-aware and you’ve got a good idea of what my life is like.”

Earl winced. That sounded like an existential nightmare.

Petrunko caught the expression and held up his three fingered hands placatingly.

“Whatever panic your ego has right now about feeling small and insignificant will be replaced when you get older. You’ll want to be part of something bigger than yourself. Give it time.”

Earl grinned at that. The advice was good but beyond that…

“Psh. Went from sounding like my boss to sounding like my dad.”

Petrunko crossed his arms, more amused than annoyed at the jab.

“Wonder what your dad would say about your little art project back there. Those canvases are a bit pricey for dick stencils.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, we only defaced two of them before your nerd squad showed up.”

Petrunko laughed. The noise was only cut off when a distant hum began, the ion thrusters on the hull giving some faint warning that the station was about to begun rotating again. Apparently, the other accountants apparently had seized the opportunity to finish off Brisinj and Shiloh.

The game was over. Earl felt himself gently falling to the ground, arms and legs suddenly free to move once more. Petrunko offered him a hand up, and he took it gratefully.

“Hopefully your friends got a few more with the delay you bought them. Sales has always been hard to get along with, but they’ve been mean bastards for the last four years."

Earl dusted himself off before offering a handshake. Petrunko clearly wasn’t familiar with the gesture, but he got the hang of it quickly.

“What’s it mean?”

Earl paused, processing. He was still getting used to explaining body language, to expressing so much in only words.

“It’s got a couple of meanings, but right now it means ‘You beat me, and earned my respect.’”

Petrunko concentrated for a moment, clearly trying to commit it to memory.

“I like that. I hope I get the chance to shake your hand next time, Earl.”

Earl had a moment of startling clarity: He’d just made a friend. A good one too, it seemed.

“Well, we’ll see if I can earn it. In the meantime, we should go check the other science boys. I’m curious to see how they’ve managed without me.”

Petrunko shrugged.

“I’d point out the strangeness of the newest person here trying to mother people with three, four times his expertise but… I do want to see what they managed in your absence. Come on, let’s go.”

And together they left, walking down the halls that just moments before they'd flown through.

In the companionable peace of things after the battle, Earl had one final thought:

I can't believe I wrote this off as bullshit. --- This is a loose sequel to this post: https://www.tumblr.com/inbabylontheywept/721036534229434368/so-whats-the-biggest-gun-youve-ever-made?source=share But it's not required reading. The shorts I wrote in this world aren't part of an overarching larger story, they're just borrowing characters and setting. I think the rule I'm going to follow is that hard-series get reblogs, general settings will just get notes like this at the end, showing what pieces they're attached to. I might change that later, I'm still figuring out optimal ways to use the site. Tumblr is pretty odd.

[inbabylontheywept]

Hold Your Breath and Burn

Seventeen hours.

Seventeen hours of sitting in his ruined craft, waiting for the carrier to send someone out to save his sorry ass. Seventeen hours of praying that he’d get out before the waste heat from his scrammed piece of shit reactor officially crossed the line from wring-out-your-underwear to meat-falls-off-the-bone. Seventeen hours of praying he was gonna make it.

And now with one blip of radio noise he knew he was gonna die.

Honestly, it was almost a relief.

He punched in a message through the QRAM system.

Hunter-Seeker nearby. Just caught an IFF ping. Being used as bait. Abort rescue.

A drop of sweat rolled down his nose as he waited for a response. He considered letting it drop to the floor. No need to draw this out any more than he already had.

The computer chirped at him. He almost hadn’t expected a response. Any time spent on him would essentially be wasted.

It was oddly comforting to know that they were willing to waste time on a dead man. Helped him feel less like a casualty on a spreadsheet. There was something human about knowing that someone would waste time on you.

He checked the message.

I’m sorry.

He shrugged. What else could be said? He was sorry too. Dying sucked. He’d bitched a lot about living, but honestly, it was starting to look like a pretty great deal.

He cut his self-pity short before it could even grow roots.

He leaned over the QRAM, suddenly tired.

Now what?

There was a longer pause. No sweat dribbled down his nose. He was glad for the reprieve, even if he knew what it signaled.

Hunt-Seekers are dangerous threats.

An obvious statement. Borderline cagey. Something about it made his hackles rise. He waited to see if another message would arrive.

One did.

Would you be willing to make one more sacrifice for mankind?

Ah.

He mulled the question over. Considered every reason he should say no. Considered every way to say no.

Will it hurt?

There was no pause in the response to this. The immediacy was frightening. He’d hoped there’d be something couched in there, but the straightforwardness moved him.

Yes.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. He wasn’t dead yet.

So be it.

---

The plan was surprisingly simple. Completely unsurvivable, but simple.

First, he would vent the cabin. He had an emergency O2 tank that would last for approximately three minutes. The safest speed that the cabin could be vented at was a little under fifteen minutes. That wasn’t possible, so they’d have to rush the job and see how he made it. The goal was to take exactly as long as the tank would last, and then hold his breath for the last part, because it would, in theory, be very short.

Step two would be overriding the reactor scram. The boric acid would be pumped directly into space, and the reactor would flair up to 1200 F. That was actually the primary reason they needed to vent the atmosphere first: To cool the interior cabin enough that the reactor wouldn’t simply incinerate him in the first five seconds.

Lastly, he would activate a mini-jump. If he was lucky, the Hunter-Seeker would only detect the exit blast, and warp to the end of his FTL cone. It would then drift through space, lost and confused, for at least several seconds. He’d use those last few moments to consider his life up to that point. Then, the reactor would run out of built up xenon.

The rest would be physics.

Are you ready?

The operator's final message hung in the air. Was he ready? Could anyone be ready for this?

Yes.

Pull the trigger. I'm gonna be the first person in two-hundred years to give Oppenheimer a hug on my first day in hell.

---

Another blossom of crimson splattered across his vision as the pressure gauge crept below zero point two atmospheres. He had no idea what the depressurization was doing to his body, but it hurt like hell. The vac-suit was clinging to his body like saran wrap now, damn near tight enough to break a rib, and it still wasn’t done.

He snuck another peek at the pressure gauge.

Zero point zero five.

He went to suck another shaky breath from the tank and found nothing left. His vision was already fading in at the corners. This was even harder than he’d thought.

He stared at the gauge and willed the last bit of air away.

Zero.

Finally.

He leaned across the console and hit the override on the reactor core.

---

The reactor did not roar to life. There was no air to carry the sound, no messenger in this void save light. And the message that light carried was not thunder, no roaring in the canyons, but heat and pain. The energy didn’t flow out of the reactor like it did in air, it was an immediate, searing, flash of agony.

He couldn’t tell if the vacsuit was melting into his skin, or if his skin was melting into the suit, but he could feel a dreadful wetness across his back, the one part of his body exposed to the war god slinging him through space. He barely noticed the sensation of warping, barely noticed the first hesitant blip that appeared on his LADAR screen.

But barely was still enough.

It worked. The stupid son-of-a-bitch had fallen for it. The Hunter-Seeker set a destination at the end of his warp cone and jumped blind. It was catastrophically lazy, and even as his lungs burned from lack of air, even as his back burned with the blowtorch heat of a dying reactor, he knew that he’d won. There was nothing left to do now but wait.

He looked through the display that pretended to be a window to the outside. Imagined the stars, beautiful and gleaming, suspended over the vastness of space. He saw the faint white shine of the reactor reflected across that glossy screen, felt that half numb pain of fire across his entire back, and imagined that last bit of xenon trapped inside, fading away, lost in the sea of neutrons. Fading, fading… gone.

He could almost swear that the flash of light began right there, right as he imagined it would. He died then, ripped apart on a level that few can scarcely imagine, but for one brief moment before death took him, his underwear was dry in the same elegantly understated sense that space is cold and stars are warm. Four hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium going supercritical is a magical thing.

The Hunter-Seeker never had its moment to look death in the face. All it knew was that in the space where a carrier should have been, it was alone. And then it too was gone. In the space where it used to be, where it had been, there was little more than echoes of fire and heat.

And then those too faded to black.

[inbabylontheywept]

Dale of the Dales: Part 1

The Dales were home to the hillfolk, a happy people, but also the only group shorter than the gnomes. Commander Alfonse Sprocket had been prepared to discuss the surrender of Honnillee with someone quite a bit… shorter.

“Welcome, welcome, how do you do? I’m Dale Chesher, named after these self-same lands, yessiree. Something to drink?”

The situation was so surreal that he didn’t fight against the warm mug of tan liquid forced into his hand. He took a sip and winced: The tea was far too sweet, syrupy even.

Alfonse hadn’t actually met a human before this moment. Apparently, they didn’t take to the altitude of Gnicaea very well. Most of the trade the two cultures experienced came second hand from the dwarves, who were friendly enough, but prone to exaggeration. When he’d heard the dwarves talking about the scale of a human, he’d written it off as a cultural tendency to lionize their friends.

Apparently, he had failed to give his fellow mountain-folk appropriate credit. The man in front of him was easily twice his height, and thrice his breadth.

“You’re the mayor of this town?”

Dale shrugged.

“We got maybe a hundred folk down here in Honnillee, we ain’t nearly so formal as that. If someone needs to be in charge for a spell, we let em’, but it ain’t a lifelong deal. Titles go to yer head like cheese goes to yer thighs, that’s a Chesherism, free-a-charge.”

He swept a hand towards the dining room, cutting off the Commander from further interrogations.

“If you got any more questions, it’d be easier to ask them sittin’ down. If the Gods wanted me to spend my life standin’, they wouldn’t have given me such a soft ass, that’s a second Chesherism for ya. Our folk don’t dine much together, more’s the pity, so we’ve got two options so far as the table’s concerned: We got a booster chair you could use to sit at my very own personal dining set, carried all the way from the Malantai, or I could sit criss-cross-applesauce here at a table that the Midford’s lend me for the evenin’, bless their teenie-tiny hearts hearts. You’re the guest; choice is yours. ”

The avalanche of words was hard to keep up with. Worse, the man didn’t even seem to be doing it on purpose: His face was placid, almost serene, and his every movement had a sort of lazy-summer-sluggishness to it.

He could do this all night. Alfonse, on the other hand, could feel his strength draining with every moment he wore his ceremonial armor. He was supposed to come here armed to the teeth, plated in silver, an angel of war in a land of peace. He was supposed to be terrifying.

Craning his head almost forty-five degrees up just to make eye contact did not make him feel very terrifying.

Less than thrilled by the prospect of craning his neck the whole night, he weighed his options: He could accept the use of the booster seat, which would put him at eye level, although he wasn’t sure how he would manage to get up there. Perhaps a ladder would be produced? Or, if none were sturdy enough to handle him in full armor, perhaps a ramp?

Alternatively, he could use the standard size table, which would leave him with an aching neck to match everything else.

Easy choice.

“I would like to use your dining set, Master Chesher. The craftsmanship is remarka-”

He was cut off mid-sentence as Dale casually scooped him up, crossing the entire room in three easy strides before dropping him casually into the chair. The indignity of it was almost as infuriating as the casual display of strength was intimidating.

Almost.

Fear held his temper in, but it did little to curb other emotions. His mouth was desperate to say something about what had just happened, and the odd lingering smells in the upholstery of the seat gave it an outlet.

“I...Why does my chair reek of boiled peas?”

Dale shrugged, slightly embarrassed.

“Ah, well, normally this here seat is used by babs still sprouting their fangs. Boiled peas and carrots are delicacies for em’, but you know how it is when you’re feeding a ween, they wind up wearing as much as they eat! And they eat a good deal sir, a very good deal, humans don’t get this big by being dainty-like. Been a long time since I’ve had any runnin’ around the house though. Miss my little scamps.”

Ah. So this was a child’s chair. He hadn’t counted on that. He deflated in his chair before forcing himself up right again, consoling himself.

Ah hell, it wasn’t like the shock and awe had been working well anyway.

“I see. Well, Master Chesher, are you ready to discuss the details of your hamlet’s surrender?”

Dale winced.

“My boy, I done told you: I ain’t a mayor and Honnillee ain’t mine. It ain’t anyone’s. Only people with any claim to the ground near here at them that’s buried underneath it, there’s a third Chesherism for ya.”

“I am not a ‘boy’, and we’ve heard this claim from the hill-folk before. All that you’ve said is both well known, and highly contrary to how Gnicaea sees things. This document isn’t going to write itself Master Chesher, so if you would quit stalling and-”

Dale exploded up, his chair miraculously keeping its balance even as it slid across the room and slammed into the wall.

“It’s called hospitality, Alfonse, and you may not get our ways but under this roof you sure as sin are gonna respect em’! Now this is how our evenin’ is gonna go: We’re gonna eat our vittles like civilized-folk cuz I’m an old godsdamned widower and I baked you a shepard’s pie with the late wife’s recipe, first time I done touched an oven in ten years, and I cried into it thinkin’ about her, so you owe me big for that, you hear? Then, we’re gonna have two drinks apiece out on the porch because it is a nice summer evenin’ and a man can be too sober for a thing just as easily as he can be too drunk, and you sir strike me as a man that’s been two drinks too sober since he was born. We get those done, evenin’s yours. And if you even think about talkin’ any more business before those’re done, I swear, I swear, I’m gonna hang your shiny metal ass off that chandelier over there and leave you there until the sun doth rise or my house doth burn, whichever comes first. Are we clear?”

Alfonse blinked once, twice, three times. He’d been in the military a long time, climbed his way from boot camp all the way to the top. He’d been happy enough when he reached a rank where he didn’t get reamed on the daily, but it’d been so long that he’d dealt with anything besides excessive ass-kissing that he didn’t know what to do. To be honest, it was actually pretty damn refreshing.

He realized that Dale was still waiting for him to speak.

“Crystal clear, Dale. Just got one question for you.”

The human glared at him, suspicious as he’d ever been.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Does it get any easier?”

Dale’s face twisted up in confusion.

“Does what get any easier? Bein’ an old grump? Every damn day.”

Alfonse scratched the back of his head. Yeah, that hadn’t been a very clear question.

“No. Being a widower.”

There was a pause as Dale searched his face for any sign of lying, even a hint of manipulation.

He couldn’t find any, and the suspicion gave way into a begrudging sympathy.

“Ah. No. You just get stronger. Gimme a moment, this’ll be easier to talk about while eatin’ pie.”

Alfonse nodded, watching as the giant left. He was surprised at how empty the room felt without him. They’d barely been talking for two minutes, and he already felt closer to this stranger than he’d felt with anyone back home in years.

He had a moment to think back on how the dwarves described humans, beyond just their height, and couldn’t help but marvel at the accuracy. To think that this was the one thing you could trust a dwarf to be honest about. What was the phrase that he’d heard at the tavern, all those years ago...

Humans bond with strangers like they’re friends, friends like they're family, and family more than life.

He wondered where he stood on that list. It'd been a while since he'd had a friend.

[inbabylontheywept]

The Thunder God of Honnillee

Delvin feels like the world is ending.

It isn’t just the fear of seeing his father collapse in the fields. It’s the guilt, the knowledge that he was the reason his father couldn’t eat full portions. The knowledge that this man, this good man, had been trying to run on a farm while living on half rations because he’d made the foolish decision to adopt the giant freak that had washed ashore all those years ago.

The physician pokes his head out of the barn door and Delvin isn’t too proud to find himself sprinting towards the man. He’d already been kicked out of the barn for hovering. Patience was not his strong suit.

His mom is there first, and while the conversation stops as he gets closer, his hearing is sharp enough to catch the tail end of what is being said.

“-nobody would blame you. Feeding anyone that big would-”

He isn’t even sure what solution was being offered, but he’s relieved to see his mom shaking her head against it. He rushes to her side and she hugs him tight, the top of her head just a few centimeters away from his shoulder. The tears had stopped hours ago, but somehow this embrace drew a few more out from him.

The physician tips his hat and leaves. Delvin doesn’t need his mom’s help, he simply scoops his father up from the ground and carries him back to the house. It’s a testament to how poorly the older man is faring that he doesn’t complain.

The next day when the sun rises, his father stays in bed while he is the one that gets up to tend to the farm. He wouldn’t realize it for a few more months, but his childhood had ended the day before.

---

Delvin feels strong.

He doesn’t have to strain against the plow anymore. It isn’t easy by any means, but it’s hard in the same way that picking stones and pulling teats is hard. The fact that any other four people in the village wouldn’t have been able to pull it off doesn’t phase him.

It has been a long time since he’s measured his strength against anyone else. He knows he isn’t just the strongest man in Honnillee, but the strongest man in all of the havlin dales. It’s little more than a mild curiosity to him at this point. The idea of taking pride in it seemed like taking credit for nature’s design. He certainly hadn’t worked to be this huge. In fact, there was a time he would’ve given anything to be smaller.

The memory of that time has him scanning the fields for his father. He’s happy enough to see the old man taking a nap under the shade of a cherry tree. His endurance had shrunk proportional to the gut he’d developed.

He’s heard some of the other farm families express envy for the work he’s able to do for his father. He wishes he could explain to them the kind of work his father did for him.

The memory of that time drives him to keep pulling the plow forward, just a few more rows. More food for the larders.

It is good to be strong. Better than the alternative.

---

Delvin feels rage.

He wants to spring the ambush already, but he’s waiting for the signal. He’s trembling with anticipation, and it's forcing him to clutch his makeshift armor tight to his body to keep it from jangling.

He’s almost impressed with the slyness of the goblins. Even when they didn’t know they were being watched, they crept like shadows through the valley. He wondered if this was how they crept when they found his father sleeping in the fields. He wonders if-

The horn blows.

His armor is crude. Pots and pans, burnished to an almost incandescent gleam. They’re decent protection, but almost as important as their ability to deflect strikes is the terror that the strike in hordes below.

The sun catches him as he breaks through the shade patch into the afternoon soon, and in that moment, he is lightning.

As he gets into his rhythm, each step slams the pans together, the effect magnified by the sloping walls of the vale. The goblins have learned to fear that noise, learned to fear the thunder in the hills.

The panic has already begun to set it by the time he hits their front line. They formed their standard shield wall because it was all that they knew how to do. It didn’t even slow him down.

The first shield that he hit toppled over flat onto the goblin behind it, and the crushing stomp he gave as he plowed forward splattered goblin out the sides like a brick dropped on a rat.

He couldn’t tell if the roaring in his ears was his blood or his voice. His eyes could see the path his massive claymore took through the ranks of the horde, but his arms could barely feel the feedback. It felt like he was swinging on air, whiffing every hit.

As the roaring noise increased, he realized it was, indeed, his voice. He saw a particularly brave goblin duck in close, thinking that proximity would defeat the reach advantage of the blade. All it took was one kick to the chest to send him sprawling, and a second stomp on the neck to make the body go limp.

He finally gets the feedback that he’s looking for. The claymore falls from his hands as he simply plucks a nearby goblin off the ground. His roar is so loud that it hurts his own ears, forces the goblins nearby to turn their focus on him. They swivel just in time to watch him raise the goblin he grabbed over his head before snapping it in half over his leg.

The battlefield actually freezes for one brief moment as he drops the broken chunk of flesh triumphantly.

He hears a second horn, but it’s not one that he recognizes. Goblin make?

They flee from around him.

His world is silent now. Cold. He takes a moment to look down and sees the half dozen arrows protruding from his chest.

When did those happen?

There is no one alive that he can keep him from keeling over. He hopes someone is close enough to hear his final words.

“Bury me with my father.”

---

Two graves, one large and crude, one small and ornate, overlook the edge of the Snakewind valley.

The first one reads, “Here lies the strongest man that Honnillee ever produced.”

The second one reads, “And here lies his son.”