Dark Fate, Chapter 182 (Patreon)

Chapter 182 – Mission

(Main Bridge, CRN Mercurial, Interstellar Space)

Captain Griboyedov Ivan Tikhonovich took a breath as the ‘stitch-shock’ faded, and looked at the clock. One minute. Same as the last trip. He’d heard that the Admiral’s more powerful race made it so he suffered the stitch-shock for almost five minutes. Even that was a small number, on the face of things, but an eternity if you were set upon immediately after stitching into a system. Thankfully, most systems were simply too large and not densely populated enough to have dedicated fortifications overlooking every stitch point in the system.

Of course, that didn’t matter so much, for this jump. Using the information provided to them by the Systems Commonwealth, they had jumped to a point roughly a light-year from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky when you were on Earth. After discussion with the captains of the other ships, this star had been chosen as the test ground for their infiltration tactic. The Incux were in the system, on rocky planets that were impossible to detect with the limited technology they had on Earth, before the System.

Their goal was to stitch to a point outside the system, and then use the warp drives (he knew there was a technical name for them, but they were close enough to Star Trek drives that everyone used that name) to get into the system at an angle that would cause the bow-wave of their warp bubbles to be less visible to anyone in the system. He didn’t understand all the science of it, but one of the engineers had described it to him by using naval vessels as an example. It was easier to spot the water being displaced by a ship when you were looking at it head-on than it was if you were to the side.

Once they got to Sirius (hopefully undetected), they could use stealth to maneuver as they wished. According to the Commonwealth Navy’s intelligence, there were four ‘inhabited’ worlds in Sirius, if you could call an Incux infestation ‘habitation’. None of them were ‘cattle’ worlds, but this first stop was to determine whether their tactics would work, before going to the more critical systems, which would likely be more heavily defended. After all, the Incux may be ravenous semi-hivemind creatures, but they weren’t idiots. He had to assume that their cattle worlds were defended.

Captain Griboyedov looked at the plot, with nothing but the five points representing the task force under his overall command. That was different from the last time they’d deployed. The King had been in charge, wearing an Admiral’s hat. Now, he was the one making the calls, and not just for his ship.

Four Hellspawn-type Oscuns-class corvettes were with his Mercurial. The Demon’s Roar was an old friend at this point, having been through the fire with them last time. Now, though, she had sisters with her, the Invader, Promise, and Vulture. The new ships were out of their trials, but were still unblooded.

“Captain, all ships reporting in. Good stitch, no casualties.”

He took a breath, and nodded. “Very well. Give me fleet-wide and ship-wide, if you please.”

“At once, Sir.”

(Pilot Lounge, CRN Mercurial, Interstellar Space)

“This is Captain Griboyedov, on the Mercurial to all members of Third Fleet. We are now officially underway on our first mission as the Special Operations Group of the Ceres Royal Navy. For those of you who fought with us at Ulora, I am glad to have you back. For those who are here on your first mission, I have the utmost confidence that you will do your duty splendidly.”

Slave-Squadron Leader Isis ‘Goddess’ Saliba perked up as the Captain started addressing the fleet. She and the rest of the pilots from Angel Squadron were here in the Pilot Lounge, which everyone just called the ready room. They were the alert squadron, ready to scramble if, for some reason, the fleet got jumped coming out of the stitch.

“Quiet down, girls,” she called out. “Let’s listen to what the Captain has to say.”

“By now, I am sure everyone is well aware of our mission, and what it entails. But, just in case there has been a catastrophic failure in the fleet’s gossip network, I will formally announce it now. Our task is to penetrate deep into Incux territory, and hit them as hard as we can.”

“Here it comes,” muttered Flight Lieutenant Grace ‘Bookworm’ Austin, XO of Angel Squadron.

Everyone knew what the scuttlebutt said about this mission. The Incux were obligate carnivores, and they liked to eat their meat raw, and preferably still alive. For some reason, they liked sapient creatures above all others, but would eat anything they could get their claws on. Because they ‘grew’ all their ships, soldiers, and even ‘factories’, they didn’t have as much of a logistics chain to tear apart. Taking out their facilities would hurt them, sure, but even glassing a planet’s surface with more pulse torpedoes than they could count would only be a temporary setback if any queens or facilities survived underground. The Incux were a nightmare enemy for any conventional force.

Which meant that, to fight them, you had to find ways to hurt them, that would actually slow their attacks. Unfortunately, there was only one part of their logistics that could easily be hampered. They still needed to eat, and they didn’t always have all the food they needed at the front lines. Which meant the food needed to be brought in from elsewhere.

“However, we do not have the forces necessary to send entire worlds back to the stone age. To attempt such a thing would be to throw away the lives of everyone in this fleet for no gain, and neither I nor the King would ever condone such an action. While we may spend your lives, we will never do so foolishly, or on a task with no chance of success.

“Therefore, we will be targeting the one weak spot in the Incux war machine: their food. Our ultimate targets are the so-called ‘cattle worlds’, that the Incux use to raise sapient beings like livestock. We will not be targeting the shipping centers or things like that. Such facilities can easily be replaced by the Incux. Instead, we will target the one resource they have which cannot be easily replaced. We will target the ‘herds’ directly.”

The muttering in the room grew grim. “Belay that shit!” Goddess snapped. “We all knew what the score was when we heard about this mission. You’ve all heard what the Incux do to the worlds they take. How many lives are at stake.”

(Bridge, CRN Invader, Interstellar Space)

Captain Tara Cox felt her blood go cold. She had been briefed on Operation Slaughterhouse. All the officers had been. It was part of the planning, so that they could come up with the proper tactics. Adding in Mercurial’s air wing and Demon’s Roar for extra guns didn’t change that. She knew this had been coming. And it still made her feel sick.

“I know that many of you are questioning this mission. Wondering at how evil it sounds. I will not lie to you. We will be slaughtering defenseless people by the hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions. I will not try and reduce them to inhuman ‘livestock’ in an attempt to shirk the guilt of what we must do. That is the way of the coward, and there are no cowards in the Ceres Royal Navy. No matter what we do, we will own our actions, not run from them.”

Captain Griboyedov sighed. “I will not say that you should put aside your ill feelings, or be happy with our mission. In fact, anyone who does find joy in what we must do should seek counseling immediately. This is not a joyous occasion. It is a grim necessity.”

Cox nodded her head. Originally from Ireland, she’d had family members in the North who had done things that they weren’t exactly proud of for a cause they believed in. Doing the things that must be done, and all that. But they’d still been carrying the weight of those deeds, even years later. The ones who hadn’t ended up ‘accidentally’ stepping out in front of a lorry, that is.

(Bridge, CRN Promise, Interstellar Space)

Captain Sumisu Yoichi took a moment to look around his bridge. The crew of the Promise was multiethnic, as well as multiracial. He was a Lesser Incubus, and from Japan, but just on this shift there was an American Elf, a Bolivian Orc, and two dwarves, one Canadian and the other German. All of them looked like he felt, like they would rather be doing almost anything else, and it was only duty that kept them here.

“But before you go on thinking about what we are about to do, I want to tell you what we are delivering these innocent souls from, and why we must do it this way. In short, it is because we are weak. Oh, I know that we have strength that was the stuff of science-fiction movies just a couple years ago, but we are still too weak to do what must be done without sacrifices.

“To pull from the Americans’ comic books, Superman is able to do the things that he does without killing or making sacrifices because of his great power. Invulnerable, super-strong, and able to fly at great speeds, amongst other things, he does not need to worry about his own safety most of the time, which is why he can act as a paragon of goodness and justice and so on.

“But we are not Superman. We have weapons that put us beyond what a normal human can do, but that does not mean that we are invulnerable. That we cannot be killed. That our friends and loved ones cannot be killed. So, to protect them, and ourselves, we must bloody our hands, because there is no Superman that will come in and save the day for us. That is what it means to be a member of the Ceres Royal Navy.”

Sumisu nodded as he saw a grim resolve grow in his bridge crew. They were weak, but they still had the strength to fight, to make a difference. They still had the strength to protect those they left at home.

(Bridge, CRN Demon’s Roar, Interstellar Space)

Captain Alma Hernandez nodded slowly at Captain Griboyedov’s words. She’d seen what the Incux were doing at Ulara, same as the rest on the ship. And she’d heard from the crew of the Neverending Duty and Light’s Hope about the state of the war in general. To give the Commonwealth a chance to turn the tide, they needed to do something big. With their current strength, there was only one thing that they could do that would be big enough. If they could stomach doing it.

“And what of those we will set out to kill? They are born in forced breeding centers. Children never know their parents, but are raised in a creche. From the day they can walk, they are forced to tend the crops that feed them. Until the day that they, like all those around them, are eventually ‘harvested’ by the Incux, and shipped to different parts of their empire to be devoured alive.

“That is not all. Commonwealth Naval Intelligence has managed to infiltrate the ‘cattle worlds’, and discovered that the slaves there have no language, no education. They have basic tool use, but it is mimicry rather than any kind of skill. And anyone that shows signs of being too influential, or too clever, is harvested, encouraging those that remain to remain ignorant, unable to communicate save by crude gestures. This has led to a general regression in their intelligence, making the slaves little smarter than animals.”

Hernandez shuddered at the thought. The ‘forced breeding centers’ were bad enough. But having been systematically robbed of language and culture to the point where your intellect diminished to the point of barely being more than a beast? That was true horror. And the only thing that awaited them would be getting eaten alive. They were doing these poor souls a favor.

(Bridge, CRN Vulture, Interstellar Space)

Captain Andrew Grant was from Canada. The joke was that Canadians were all niceness and fun with maple syrup and the like. And the joke wasn’t entirely wrong, most of the time. However, the other joke was that Canada had a tendency to be the reason new war crimes were put on the books, when they had reason to be upset. He blamed having to deal with the geese every year. With role models like that, it was only natural that they would have some ‘anger issues’.

Still, he wasn’t under any illusions. What they were going to be doing was definitely one of those things that even the most kill-happy tin pot dictator would call war crimes. The only reason they weren’t, technically, war crimes in this case was because Ceres wasn’t part of any national treaties, and those treaties hadn’t been updated to include aliens yet.

“We will be killing millions trapped in a horrific situation, rescuing them from a terrible fate in the only way we can. At the same time, we will deliver a blow to the Incux that will force their war fleets to grind to a halt, as they begin needing to feed on each other to keep from starving. This will save the lives of trillions in Commonwealth space, as well as all the billions back in Sol. We bloody our hands and darken our souls, to give them the chance they need to turn the tide of a war where defeat means a fate worse than death, not just for us, but for all the generations that come after!

“But first, we must ensure that we are ready, and that our tactics work. We are here, near the Sirius system, to test our stealth systems, and ensure that our weapons will be effective. There are Incux military installations in this system. They will make fine targets for Third Fleet’s first live-fire exercise. All ships, prepare for warp, using the stealth approach previously discussed. It is time to teach the Incux what fear is like. Griboyedov, out.”

Captain Grant smiled, since he could clearly hear that his was not the only voice cheering at the end.