POV: Bertel, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Five Whiskers)

  Base Commander Six Whiskers Korchaj pulled up a chair next to Bertel and Krasht. “Rewind and show that part again,” he insisted.

  She did as he asked, showing him the curious — and somewhat horrifying — segment of gun camera footage from their Light Skyfang. And as the footage played, the youthful Korchaj squinted into the screen. “Are you sure that’s one of ours?”

  “Who else could it be?” Bertel asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe some… gang of loose Lesser Predators?”

  “Predators don’t hop around like that. And compare his height to the window and doors next to him,” Bertel pointed out in the footage. “That’s a predator building. That’s clearly too small to be one of them. This is a Znosian profile…”

  Korchaj leaned back. “I think you’re seeing things— just things you expect to see, Bertel. I read in your record, there was an incident where you took responsibility for accidentally killing other Servants of the Prophecy back in one of your former duty stations—”

  “I— I—” she stuttered. “No! Look at the video. It’s right there!”

  “All I see is a blurry blob,” he complained. “That could be anyone. Maybe it’s just a smaller than average Lesser—”

  “Six Whiskers Korchaj,” Krasht cut in, pointing his paw at the screen in agreement with Bertel. “I see what she sees. That is obviously one of ours.”

  He leaned in again, watching the segment of the hopping Znosian figure play again and again for a quiet minute. When Bertel was about to ask whether they should bring someone else in to figure it out — maybe another Skyfang gunner — Korchaj sighed.

  “Maybe they are Znosian,” Korchaj relented. “But why? No one else has taken responsibility for anything like this recently. And why are they shooting at our people… during an armistice no less? None of this makes any sense!”

  Bertel and Krasht looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously.

  Korchaj looked deep in thought for a moment, then asked Bertel, “Have you shown this to anyone else?”

  “No. Just Krasht and now you. Should I report this to—”

  “No!” Korchaj said, just a little too forcefully. “No,” he said in a lower tone. “We— we can’t tell anyone yet!”

  “Why not?” Bertel asked. “Wouldn’t that make it easier for people to take responsibility? Now that they know more about what’s going on out there?”

  “Forget responsibility! We— we just can’t.”

  “You’re not making a lot of sense, Six Whiskers.”

  Korchaj lowered his voice even more. “It’s— it’s— Bertel, do you know what happened in Znos?”

  “What happened?”

  “There are some rumors— there are rumors that the predators have taken the home world and destroyed the Navy moon.”

  Bertel frowned. “Surely that is just predator lies. Aren’t we still getting orders from Znos-4?”

  “Yes, but that’s not what worries me,” Korchaj hissed. “There was a rumor out of Znos…”

  “Six Whiskers, you know the predators… they lie and cheat and they make fake voices on the radio every day.”

  Korchaj hesitated, but repeated more forcibly, “There was a rumor out of Znos: when the predators took the Navy moon, there were mass executions. Tens of thousands of Marine officers taken prisoner near the frontline where the predators landed. They were just gunned down in cold blood, one by one, then row by row. They say that there were so many dead… they had to use the gigantic underground city tunnelers to bury their corpses.”

  “Predator savagery!” Bertel said angrily. “Another reason that we can’t—”

  “No, not predators,” Korchaj whispered. “The rumor— it was said— it was said they were killed by State Security. Our own State Security.”

  “What?!”

  “It’s true. That’s what the villagers nearby said! Before they evacuated the Navy moon, State Security officers took every single one of the Marines in those units prisoner. They marched them all to the forest right next to where the battle was lost. And they shot them all. Tens of thousands of them, I tell you…”

  “That’s clearly predator propaganda!”

  Korchaj shook his head. “No, I— I heard this from some State Security officers downtown who were discussing it. These rumors are genuine.”

  “But this is— Why would—”

  Korchaj was insistent. “They say— they say it was because there were some… deserters on Znos-4-C.”

  “Deserters?”

  “Defects who fled the battlefield without a fight.”

  “That— that is one of our options?!”

  “Of course not! That’s why they were defects. Anyway, there were a few deserters there on Znos-4-C. And when they were discovered, their entire division was liquidated.”

  “But— but— but what about the people who did nothing— people who were not responsible?!” Bertel scratched her head in confusion. “Surely that is a waste of resources!”

  “I don’t know,” Korchaj shrugged. “But what I do know is… if this footage…” He pointed at her screen again. “If this is reported, what do you think happens to us?”

  “We would— surely we would— I don’t know,” Bertel said. “What would happen to us?”

  “They’d kill us for sure.”

  Bertel stared at him for a second, then remembered her prayers. “Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy—”

  “But Four Whiskers,” the young Korchaj said with a tinge of desperation. “I don’t want to die! I’m too young to die!”

  “None of us are too young to give our lives to the Prophecy,” she admonished, then remembered her station. “Respectfully, Six Whiskers.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “And like you said, this is a waste! An inefficient waste!”

  “It— it does seem that way,” Bertel agreed reluctantly.

  “And what you saw in that video… it could be some— it could be some kind of terrible mistake,” Korchaj said. “Maybe some unit misinterpreted orders. Or it— it could be anything!”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes, that is— that is a possibility.”

  Not very likely, but a possibility, she admitted to herself.

  “So… we must not create— some kind of potential for such a terrible misunderstanding,” the young base commander said slowly. “We must not report this as anything out of the ordinary.”

  Bertel and Krasht looked at each other, not knowing what to say.

  “It is an order from me, if that makes you feel any better about it,” Korchaj added.

  “Yes, Six Whiskers,” they replied dutifully.

  “And there’s more… This footage — you need to delete it.”

  “Delete the footage? From my gun camera?!”

  “Yeah, is there some way to corrupt the footage… without allowing for recovery?” Korchaj asked as he snuck a quick glance around nervously.

  Krasht spoke up. “It’s— it’s never done deliberately… But all video footage not specifically saved for review is automatically overwritten on the Light Skyfang’s computer after six hours of operation.”

  “Then, you know best what to do,” Korchaj said.

  “What do I know to do?” Krasht asked, his face scrunched up in utter confusion.

  Korchaj sighed in exasperation. “Overwrite the footage… by leaving your computer on or whatever…”

  “Yes, Six Whiskers…”

  POV: Plodvi, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Six Whiskers)

  The meeting space was a military tent in the heart of the temporary shelters camp. There were plans for the evacuated spacers to be moved to new ships once they could be brought back into the Znosian system, but the Dominion Navy was still occupied with the fallout from the loss of its command centers on Znos-4-C, and the new deployments were not a high priority.

  Which suited Plodvi just fine.

  There were far fewer internal security controls in a surface base than a Navy ship. Despite the cramped quarters, there were fewer people looking over his shoulders at every turn, and the drastic shift in responsibilities for everyone meant that there were gaps in monitoring coverage… everywhere. Unfamiliar faces everywhere. New procedures that commanders were still adapting to or being retrained to follow. There was even the potential that they could bring in non-Navy personnel from outside the base into the camp with the haphazardly created system of supply.

  The first meetings were just six people. Plodvi. Rirkhni. Hobbsia. And three new recruits from their former squadron. All Navy. All young, free-thinking Znosians who had been asking all the wrong questions that would get them and their bloodlines liquidated if they were discovered.

  It wasn’t a serious military unit, but at some point, Plodvi knew that they had crossed the barrier from apostates to schismatics. Though the official punishment for both was roughly the same, they had done more than talk. There was action.

  This was the start of a rebellion.

  “But you can’t start a rebellion with just six people!” Rirkhni objected. Between him and Hobbsia, he had been the more idealistic one of the two, but when it came down to the wire, he was beginning to have his doubts.

  “We can’t win with just six,” Hobbsia corrected. “But this is just the beginning. We’ll get more.”

  “You’re both right,” Plodvi cut in to prevent further argument. “We need more. And not just numbers. All of us, we were trained for technical roles. We were supposed to operate life support and computer systems — none of us knows the first thing about combat. I barely even know how to shoot a rifle!”

  “Maybe— maybe the Great Predators know someone?” Hobbsia suggested. “We can call that Hersh guy and see if they—”

  Plodvi shook his head. “No. Think about it. They almost certainly have defectors in higher rank, people who were actually trained to do these things — to lead people into combat. Those people are their real sources. But they would never reveal the identities of those people to us.”

  “So what do we do?” Rirkhni asked. “We can’t just… go up and try to recruit one of the ship masters or Marine chiefs! If they don’t agree, and they report us to State Security, we are all dead!”

  “I don’t know,” Plodvi admitted. “But we have thinking brains. And now that we have a target, we can work the problem. The objective is simple: find someone with lots of whiskers and the right training and breeding, and convert them to our cause. Work the problem.”

  “Right,” Rirkhni muttered. “What could possibly go wrong with that?”

  POV: Torsad, Grantor (City Mayor)

  As her assistant poked his head into the door of her office, Torsad tried not to yawn. She very much understood the weight of leadership on her hefty shoulders. She appreciated the necessity of the new bureaucracy that had been created in the vacuum left by the Grass Eaters. And she knew first-hand just how important the job is.

  But she wished it was someone else doing it. Someone… more suited to the task of sitting behind a table and signing a bunch of documents. She was a fighter, not an administrator, no matter how much her people insisted she could do her best work here.

  To be fair to her new position as city mayor, that wasn’t her entire job. She had to attend meetings, to mediate between various parties with conflicting priorities and interests, to… she almost fell asleep just thinking about it all.

  “Yes? What is the matter?” Torsad looked slightly impatiently at the young assistant she hired, a cub who increasingly handled her more mundane workload. She knew she couldn’t do it all without him, but she was right in the middle of reading some— what was it again?

  Her assistant cleared his throat. “Your special— special friend from home is here to see you. Do you want me to tell him to come back—”

  She stood up behind her desk, her annoyances evaporated. “Insunt? Where is he?”

  “Torsad!” Insunt’s large frame barged into her room. It was really odd how he could move without making noise. Habit from the days of the Underground, probably. “Or should I say…” he added slyly, “City mayor!”

  “Come here!” She gave him a massive bear hug. “Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you!”

  “Hope I’m not taking you away from something important or—”

  “No, not at all!” she declared as she pulled up a heavily reinforced chair for him. “Please… take a seat, Insunt. Tell me… tell me of how it is out there. Out there you know…”

  “Secretly conducting covert missions against the Grass Eaters?” Insunt winked.

  She chuckled heartily. “Well, that’s your words, not mine. I am a respectable official of the Granti species now, who strictly follows the armistice rules and conditions set forth by the treaties that our government and people have agreed to.”

  “And me, on the other hand,” Insunt smiled. “I simply do your dirty work.”

  “The fun work.”

  “The fun work,” he agreed.

  “Well, out with it: how is it going… outside the box?”

  “Oh, there’s this and that. Our school project: it is going… oh how do our Grass Eater friends put it… it is going swimmingly.”

  “Swimmingly,” she repeated while arching an eyebrow. That was a newly imported expression, one that the Granti took on without objection. Of all the predator species in the known galaxy, the Granti were known for being the most biologically adept at swimming.

  “Yeah, we’ve doubled the number of mixed species battalions in the city to twelve. We had a trial run against a random convoy near the northern residential zone. Worked out spectacularly. If there’s one thing these guys can do, it’s follow orders, even if it’s orders to retreat. No bloodlust at all! They make excellent covering troops for our—”

  “Shhhhh,” Torsad said, putting a claw up to her lips to shush him as she gestured at the door to the garden outside. “Let’s take a walk, somewhere without ears, shall we?”

  POV: Krasht, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Five Whiskers)

  Krasht waited until it was dark. He walked to the small building — a hut, really — at the outer edge of the logistics base.

  There was a single officer on duty there. She looked up at him, expressionlessly, when he knocked on the door.

  “Come in, Five Whiskers. And take a seat,” she gestured across the wooden desk. It was stacked tall with documents. Which was not unusual. This was a logistics base, and while he was out there flying an expensive machine that rained death on the enemies of the Dominion, he always kept in mind that much of the job that needed to be done back at base was making sure that all the correct numbers were on the correct pages.

  “Yes, officer,” Krasht said, plopping himself down on the stool opposite of her.

  “What is the matter, Five Whiskers?” the officer asked as she generously began to pour him a cup of tea from the warm pitcher on her table. “It’s a rather odd time to come here. Emergency?”

  He shook his head. “No, not exactly an emergency. I just like to be timely with my reporting.”

  “That is a good trait for a Marine officer to have.” She beamed at him. “Now, what is the matter, Five Whiskers?”

  Krasht took a deep breath, and began, “I would like to report a serious dereliction of responsibility, accompanied by a knowing attempt to cover up— to cover up a terrible— a terrible discovery—”

  The officer did not visibly react. Instead, she carefully slid the entire pitcher of tea over to his side of the table, took a piece of paper from the top of a pristine stack, and clicked her pen. “Drink up, Five Whiskers, and let’s start from the very beginning. I want to hear everything. The security of the state demands nothing less.”