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Grass Eaters 3 | 40 | Recalled I
🕑 Added 2025-01-24 16:47:01 +0000 UTCZNS 1687, Znos-4-C (40,000 km)
POV: Plodvi, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Six Whiskers)
Plodvi’s new job was simple.
Four-hour watch. Nap time. Then another four hours. Dinner. Assignment of responsibility. Bed. And repeat.
As a six whiskers in the ship’s computer room, he was in charge of a small squad of technicians monitoring the automated life support. That involved the riveting task of staring at a dashboard screen for hours at a time until something changed color in the wrong place. Luckily for him, he didn’t have to actually do that; he was just in charge of three other spacers who did that.
And when things broke, as they rarely did, Plodvi’s team would have to fix it. Not himself personally. Another one of his technicians was trained for that. He mostly just watched.
Every once in a while — on a strict schedule, there would be mandatory maintenance. He didn’t have to do that either. His job was mostly standing around watching other people do their jobs, and taking responsibility for errors when they occurred.
Which was not very often. His people were well-bred and well-trained.
As it turned out, his job was pretty boring. But that was nothing new for Plodvi. His entire education was boring, most of it anyway. At first, he’d tried to get out of it, but after his hatchling teachers made very public examples of some of the other poor students who also openly found their lessons dull, Plodvi had learned to hide just how little effort he was spending on his lessons.
The official lessons, anyway.
The extra materials he was reading on the side — supplementally — back when he was in hatchling school: they were far more interesting. He missed those books.
Instead, Plodvi found his attention drifting on the job. There really wasn’t much to do. And focusing his brain on… pretty much nothing — for hours at a time — that was not easy, even with the practice he’d had over the years.
So he strayed.
The datapad Plodvi had access to was strictly monitored; after all, he was controlling the air and water of an entire ship. There wasn’t much he could do on it that wasn’t either related to his dull job, and he suspected that if he tried to push its limits, the Digital Guide on it would report him to his supervisor. Or worse.
Plodvi physically strayed. The ship’s life support modules were physically located in the core of the ship, near its rear. As its supervisor, spending extra time there — there were dozens of perfectly innocuous reasons. He was merely being diligent. Nobody would get their whiskers twisted if they saw him there alone, where he was beginning to spend most of his waking time.
Plodvi loved to simply sit there, tracing his eyes up and down the pipes snaking openly across the module, through various complex hydraulics and electrical systems. He studied and guessed at their functionality. When the datapad showed low pressure in a system, the gauges on this pipe would be arranged in a certain way. When he ordered his technicians to service a certain module, they would open that panel.
He began to experiment. He could make certain gauges respond to his commands overriding certain settings on the datapad programs he had access to. Of course, he was careful to only make minor adjustments. After all, he was in control of the entire ship’s air and water systems. One minor mistake, and his bloodline would potentially be paying for it until its pruning.
Then, there were the ducts. Figuring them out — what each did, why and when they activated — it was like solving a grand puzzle, one of those in those forbidden books he’d read back in hatchling school. And Plodvi realized that if he turned the temperature down in the adjacent server room — just slightly, there was a series of ducts he could lie on and feel the coolness on his back — it felt incredible.
After another grueling day of doing absolutely nothing useful, Plodvi came down to the life support module to refresh himself. He activated the cooling system for the server room as usual before hopping onto his favorite vent. He felt the air pumps activate through vibrations in his whiskers, the cold sensation spreading through his large, fluffy ears as he pressed them against the metal.
That was the first time he heard the voices coming from them.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dominion State Security HQ, Znos-4
POV: Sprabr, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Eleven Whiskers)
Sprabr barely had time to clean up from his lengthy journey to Znos before he was summoned to State Security.
He’d had a lot of time to think on the way from Grantor. Being relieved of command of the Grand Fleet wasn’t a good sign. But it wasn’t like they were going to execute him for apostasy or some other crime. Not yet, at least. If they were, he would have simply been summoned to their headquarters on Grantor and given a two-minute trial to record his last statements before they hauled him out back for liquidation. The Director wouldn’t have bothered to have him run the blockade all the way back, losing three precious ships on the way.
At least, that’s what he hoped. It was always possible she simply wanted to shoot him herself.
Sprabr waited patiently in the austere halls outside Svatken’s office. He’d been here before. All those long, secretive planning sessions before the disastrous invasion of Sol. Him trying to get her to reconsider — hinting, begging. And as expected, when it failed, not only did he get no credit for it, his unspoken punishment for being right was having to take responsibility for its fallout.
He stared at her attendant sitting at the desk guarding the door to her office.
Fstrofcho. That was his name.
Fstrofcho stared right back at him with his dull red eyes. Sprabr didn’t try to play a hatchling’s game with him, competing to see who could stare the longest before they had to blink. That would be juvenile, and he suspected Fstrofcho had been specifically bred to win that game.
He looked away. “Who is Director Svatken meeting with?” Sprabr asked.
“That is a matter of State Security, Eleven Whiskers,” Fstrofcho replied in a monotone.
Sprabr ventured a guess. “Is she interviewing prospective replacements for me on Grantor?”
“That is a matter of State Security, Eleven Whiskers.”
“Fine. How much longer is this wait going to be?”
“That is a matter of State Security, Eleven Whiskers.”
“That is a matter of State Security,” Sprabr mimicked. “Is that the only sentence you know?”
Fstrofcho continued staring expressionlessly. “No.”
Sprabr sighed. “You State Security folks — you keep all these secrets from us in contravention of proper customs and rules. And all this refusal to take responsibility, even when it is obvious whose fault things are. That makes me wonder… are your people even Znosian?!”
“That, Eleven Whiskers, is also a matter of State Security.”
He could almost swear the little critter was enjoying this.
Svatken was done with… whatever she was working on, only a few minutes later.
“You may enter now, Eleven Whiskers.”
With one last annoyed glance at Fstrofcho, Sprabr strode into the office as its doors opened.
Svatken didn’t even look up from behind her desk as he entered. She merely gestured at one of the stools in front of her. “Take a seat, Eleven Whiskers.”
She was in a sour mood, he could tell. Sprabr complied wordlessly, watching her operate her datapad, waiting for her to speak up again.
Svatken looked up after a couple more minutes. “There is some bad news, Eleven Whiskers. Discovered during your trip back here.”
He didn’t say anything.
She continued, “Our shipyard at Fsuzve-4 was hit this morning. The orbitals were a total loss, including the incomplete experimental spaceframes.” She looked at him expectantly, waiting for his input.
“What about its moon?” Sprabr asked, recalling that defense sector. “The new munitions plant for our new missiles and—”
“They hit that too. Total loss. The predators were… very thorough.”
“Has anyone taken responsibility?” he asked automatically.
“Yes, the eight whiskers in charge of the orbital defense fluffle did. Her ships and system sensors didn’t even see the enemy ships before they attacked.”
“Before they attacked? What about after?”
“Ah, so you are listening carefully. Yes, our new sensors did produce discernible readings when the predator ships opened their weapons bays. For a split second. Not enough to help us stop the attacks… but it’s something to start with.” She shrugged.
“Nothing that will help us stop this pack of loose abominations running around in our star systems,” Sprabr said bitterly.
“That is a result of the failed defenses at the Slow Predator— at the pre-war borders of the Dominion,” she said. “Those commanders have taken responsibility.”
It’s the result of two years of the Dominion’s failure to respond appropriately to the emergence of the Great Predators, Sprabr wanted to say. Instead, he replied, “Have you decided on which fluffles of ships we should send to take them down?”
“None of them.”
Sprabr blinked in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“Our ships can’t do anything against them,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Any we throw against them will be a waste. According to the analysis of our Digital Guides, ships in this fleet are simply in our territory to blow up as many objectives of opportunity as they can. And when they run out of munitions, they will go home.”
“And on what basis did your Digital Guides summarize that this is their objective?”
“We’ve completed interrogation of the Great Predator prisoners. It took time, but they broke. Well, a few of them. The rest of them appear to be in some kind of unresponsive, vegetative state.”
“In… catatonic shock? Like us?”
She shot him a dirty glare. “No, not like us!”
“Right. Of course not. Anyway, I thought the prisoners previously said they were only here for one system. Which one was it… Spofke?”
“There are two groups of them. The one we captured, their plan is to capture and occupy Spofke. But there is another one, and that group has at least one of their larger munition ships. That ship they like to keep one system behind their vanguard, because it is too big to hide on radar. They guard it with their other ships so we can’t get to them.”
“Two separate groups of Great Predators. Interesting.” Sprabr leaned in closer. “And what is the purpose of that other group? The one with the munition ship.”
“Our prisoners are… unsure. The mission was kept from them. They lie to each other like all predators do. But they speculate that the other group is here for revenge. In their speculation, two of them said it would probably look like what they referred to as a Free Zone oppression campaign on steroids.”
“A… what? What does that look like?”
“They will destroy as many of our military sites as they can until they get tired or run out of resources.”
“So— so we’ll— we’ll just allow them—”
Svatken stared at him coldly. “We’re not allowing anything. We just can’t do anything else because your Grand Fleet failed to do its job in the first place.”
Sprabr gritted his teeth as he took the accusation. He thought about protesting her decision to not send ships, but he couldn’t find any reason to dispute it. In fact, if he’d been given more time to think about the problem, he suspected that was probably the recommendation he’d also give.
If anyone was asking.
Which they were not.
“Hm… not sending any ships to respond… that’s… probably not the worst idea,” he admitted. “As you said, whatever their objectives, they’ll run out of munitions and resources sooner or later and go home… Who— uh— who came up with that idea?”
“One of my new analysts,” she said, looking annoyed that he knew it wasn’t hers. “She’s one of those savant hatchlings. Just under a year old. I snatched her out of a hatchling school before the Navy could take her for the original job she was bred for, or recycled as a defect.”
“What was she bred for?” he asked out of pure curiosity.
“Coolant maintenance technician.”
“This— this level of strategic insight. It would indeed have been a waste of resources to allow her to continue on her originally planned career path.”
Svatken beamed with pride. “Perhaps you will see her in my chair one day.”
If I live that long.
“If you aren’t planning to send ships out to fight the Great Predators, then what do you need me back in Znos for?”
“To keep you safe, of course.”
“Safe?” he echoed, barely keeping his skepticism from his voice.
“Grantor is a war zone. Much of the Dominion is now vulnerable to the Great Predators. And there is nowhere safer in the galaxy than Znos.”
He tilted his head. “That is… probably true. But I am an eleven whiskers of the Dominion Navy. I am responsible for accepting some level of risk, so that we can fight a war effectively. That is my job.”
“And you think you’ve done a good job of that?” she snorted. “You’ve proven hardly any better than any idiot with a Digital Guide.”
“At least I can— I am trying—” he sputtered.
Svatken regarded him with another cool expression. “You have been listed as a potential bargaining chip. For trade with the Great Predators when they get tired of this revenge campaign and go home.”
“What?! We’re still taking that abomination of an offer seriously?!”
“Of course,” she said imperiously. “Their offer looks better every orbital shipyard of ours they wreck. And if we’re going to hand you over, we can’t be having you know all the vital information about the defense of Grantor and the Dominion. They will undoubtedly extract those secrets out of your mind before they serve you up for dinner.”
“I’m here on Znos so— so I won’t know anything important when you hand me over to the predators,” he said, jaw open.
“Exactly.”
“But… what about Grantor? What if it falls without me?!”
“Don’t worry about that. Grantor is doing just fine without you. Better, in fact, since you left.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It is a stronghold system. We have millions of troops on it, and we’re breeding more every day. It can hold forever. And that… is what you will tell your captors when— if we hand you over to the Great Predators.”
Comments
xxm1rvxx
It’s starting, soon the eleven whiskers will betray the dominion
Josh Delgado42
Thanks for the chapter!
