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Grass Eaters 3 | 14 | Underground IV
🕑 Added 2024-11-25 16:47:00 +0000 UTCIntercity Highway 5, Grantor-3
POV: Torsad, Grantor Underground (Cell Leader)
“Cell Leader, I can’t see anything,” Torsad heard her lieutenant complain as his shovel bounced off a hard rock in the soil. “What are we doing out here, digging at this time of night anyway?”
It was just past midnight, and the two of them were out in the middle of nowhere, scooping dirt with a pair of shovels next to an asphalt-paved road. They’d both gotten very good at manual digging. Plenty of practice. But unlike her lieutenant, Torsad wore a pair of night vision goggles on her head, which made things easier. They were recently liberated from a Znosian Marine who didn’t need them anymore.
“Because,” Torsad grunted as she dug, “dig in the day… die.”
She heard him sigh. “And how is it you get night vision?”
Torsad turned, the four tubes on her head swiveling to face him. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Nine Packets Insunt.”
“Fine. I’m just saying… I’ve got a new source at the spaceport,” Insunt said, coming up from the roadside dig site to take a break. “They say they can swipe me a crate of those Znosian night vision goggles. Grass Eater Marines just leave them lying around sometimes.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“They’re not tracked, they guarantee it.”
“It’s not just the tracking chips.” Torsad gritted her teeth as she explained the concept for what felt like the third time after she’d heard it, “It’s risk and reward. We don’t need their night vision goggles. If we need to do a real night mission, then we’ll get the equipment we need to do the job from above. We are not an army, and certainly not a high-speed special operations unit.”
“A special what?” She saw Insunt shrug. “Alright, alright. I’m just saying. If we ever need more goggles, I can get them. For if this digging in the dark things becomes a habit. I just don’t understand why we’re digging here and not in the city. They barely come out here. If we want to kill Grass Eaters, there’s plenty of them to blow up in the city.”
“Because… killing Grass Eaters is easy. And they just make more of them,” Torsad said. “But one of the critical chemical supplies for their hatchling pools comes from the next city over. By truck, every two weeks. Much harder to make more of those.”
He gestured at their pile of concave copper cylinders. “Ah, is that why we’re using these weird pipe designs?”
“Yes, their trucks are now armored after one of our cells shot up their last major shipment,” Torsad explained. “These will make short work of them. We blow up the armored trucks and the supplies. Kill two prey with one stone.”
“Two prey with… one stone. Another one of those Underground Wisdom sayings?” Insunt asked.
Torsad grunted the affirmative, grabbing one of the explosive-formed projectile mines and emplacing it in the hole with the concave end pointing the right way. She stood back a meter to admire her work in her night vision goggles.
Her lieutenant came up to stand next to her, squinting at the shapes in the dark. “Looks fine to me. Now we just bury it?”
“Yes. Then,” Torsad pointed at the dozen other explosives they’d carted all the way out here, “bury one of these every five meters.”
Insunt groaned. “All of them?”
“You want to carry them back?”
“No, that’s alright,” Insunt grumbled as he measured five meters with his pace and began digging anew. “How are we going to detonate these? Don’t we need to come out here and wait for the trucks to pass?”
“Not unless you want to carry a hero-bomb with you on the mission,” Torsad replied. “We blow up a Grass Eater convoy this far out of the city, whoever triggers it will never make it to cover before their rotary wing comes out to check. And that’s if we get the entire convoy. If we don’t, those guys will run us down first.”
“How else will we detonate—”
Torsad sighed, as if annoyed having to explain everything. “I have one of the smart chips with a camera device so we don’t need to come out here to blow it up.”
“Smart chip?” his eyes widened. “The ones with the digital abominations that can think for themselves? I’ve only heard of other cells using them, and I thought that was just Grass Eater propaganda.”
“Yes, Nine Packets. Didn’t you hear? We are all abominations now. Predator abominations. But if you want to save me the expensive chip, you are free to volunteer in its place instead.”
“No, no, I’m okay,” Insunt said hurriedly.
Granti were a lot stronger than any of the alien species in the known galaxy, but even with their natural strength, it took them another three hours to dig all the holes they needed to hide all the anti-armor mines. Another couple of hours, and the Grantor star was about to come up.
“Alright, can we head back now?”
“One more thing,” Torsad said as she opened the last sack they carried out there. She took out one of the rock-colored devices rolled up in tape and handed it to her lieutenant. “Put these next to the mines. Shallow holes are fine for these.”
“Antipersonnel explosives?” he asked, inspecting one up close in the dark. “What are these for? I thought we were just killing trucks.”
“We blow up trucks. They come back here to investigate. Then, we blow up the investigators.” Torsad gestured at the mines they dug into the soil.
“Two prey with one stone, huh?”
“Three.”
“Three?”
“Then they will send out people to collect bodies and evidence for responsibility assignment. And we kill them too. But,” she shrugged, “that last step is in the city. We don’t have to worry about that tonight.”
“Huh. City fighting. Should I get us some guns from the local armory? We’ve got a couple guys who have insider access.”
Torsad gritted her teeth and shook her head. Insunt was a reliable lieutenant, but he really needed to start reading those manuals they were getting from above. “No. No guns,” she replied.
“No… guns?”
“How many times have you shot one of their rifles?” Torsad asked, extending the edge of her patience as she put another antipersonnel mine in place.
“Once… twice?” Insunt answered after a moment.
“Think you can outshoot one of the Grass Eater Marines?”
“Maybe? I’ll need some more practice but—”
“What about one of their Light Longclaws? Think you can out-shoot that?”
“Are you saying we should steal heavier weapons from the Grass—”
“Nine Packets, we are an underground cell, not an army. If we fight like an army, we lose. If we give our cell members guns, they will stick around shooting until the enemy kills them. Or worse, captured.”
Insunt thought about the logic for a moment before hesitantly nodding. “Fine, no guns.”
“Explosives, we will steal. You set them. You leave them. You’re gone by the time they go boom. It either works, or it doesn’t. You don’t need to be around to find out.”
“Cold and efficient,” he said after a moment. “Is this how Grass Eaters think? Maybe after eating so much grass for years out of desperation, we have turned more into them.”
“If that was the case, Nine Packets, then it clearly didn’t work on you.”
“Yes, Cell Leader, I take full responsibility—”
“Don’t start again. Dig.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Grantor City Safehouse India, Grantor-3
POV: Torsad, Grantor Underground (Cell Leader)
“Cell Leader Torsad, you have done well,” Guinspiu praised, handing her a full bag of protein packets. “The Grass Eaters will be reeling from this attack for weeks. Your cell deserves every bit of this for all your hard work.”
“Thank you, General.”
“There is one more thing,” Guinspiu said slowly to Torsad. “There is a… secret to our Underground that you are not privy to yet.”
Torsad nodded. “That makes sense. The less I know, the less I can give away when I inevitably get captured.”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“No, General, I understand completely. This is what happens to those in my line of work. People like me, we don’t get to live to see the end of the occupation. That’s not how things work. I died when I killed and buried that three whiskers; I am just living on borrowed time.”
Guinspiu shook her head. “It’s more than that, Torsad. I can reveal this one more secret to you. And your cell will be assigned to an important mission.”
“I will do as you command. If you want us to carry the hero-bomb into the mission as some of the other cells have, we will happily do so.”
“The sacrifice I ask… it is more personal than that. It’s greater. Even I haven’t undertaken it.”
“Greater than a remote kill switch?” Torsad wondered aloud. “I doubt it. Whatever the sacrifice is, I will bear it.”
“It has to do with… your personal autonomy.”
Torsad barked a short laugh. “Autonomy? What autonomy, General? We go in and out of a work camp with a two-month survival rate of zero, in an occupation which we all know the result of. Whatever this sacrifice is, I will take it on if that will help us complete a mission.”
“Thank you, Torsad,” Guinspiu said quietly. She handed Torsad an injector. “This will put you to sleep for the neurosurgery. When you’re ready, sit down by the fire, inject it into your thigh, and count down from one hundred.”
Torsad bounced to the fire, sat down cross-legged, and stuck the syringe into her fur without a second thought.
One hundred… ninety-nine… ninety-eight…
For some reason, the last image in her head before she fell asleep was of her old neighbor Sossui as he jumped headfirst into the corrosive cauldron of hatchling nutrient.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Torsad woke up with a headache. That was not strange or unusual at all. One of the effects of too little protein was sometimes headaches in the morning. It hadn’t happened to her recently with her now steady supply of protein packets, but she wasn’t overly perturbed.
Her throat was dry. She tried to make a sound, but nothing came out.
A paw handed her a bottle of water. She accepted the bottle thankfully and chugged the whole bottle.
Then, she noticed the paw was not a paw. It was a soft, dexterous…
“What in the galaxy?!” she exclaimed, tumbling out of her strange bed and staring at the trio of short aliens looking at her. A few of their instruments clattered to the floor.
“Good morning, Torsad,” one of them said to her.
“What… what are you?”
“Humans from the Terran Republic. No, we’re not vegetarians. We eat meat. And we have been bankrolling your whole Underground operation for a few months. Now, take a minute to absorb all this, preferably without pointing those sharp claws of yours at us.”
Torsad stumbled around until she found a bench she could sit on.
The alien continued, “Tell us what you’re thinking, Cell Leader Torsad.”
“Huh. Interesting. Well, everything all makes sense.”
“That’s… not the reaction I was expecting,” the alien said, apparently taken aback.
“I always suspected Guinspiu was getting her information and goods from somewhere else. I thought it was the Malgeir or the Schpriss. But in hindsight, those were pretty stupid guesses, huh? A new alien species makes sense, even if you’re obviously lying about the meat stuff. Your people are clearly Grass Eaters. Even I could tell immediately. And what confirms it for me is the way we’re being run: competently, like the Grass Eaters would if they did this.”
“Huh.”
“Did I say something wrong?” Torsad asked.
The alien still looked surprised. “Not really, actually. I think we understand each other pretty well. We really do eat meat though.”
“Okay. Well,” Torsad said, nodding her head, “You gave me a second chance to fight the Grass Eaters— the Znosians, I guess, since you’re also… Anyway, I’ll take it. It’s obviously not their diet I take issue with.”
“It’s not?”
“No, most of our people eat some grass now. I eat grass sometimes. We have to, to survive. I’d be a hypocrite if I thought any less of you because of you eating grass. And I don’t like being a hypocrite. You helped us. So I trust you… for now.”
“That’s good.”
“You will help us— Why can’t I stop talking? I don’t normally talk this much.”
“Because…” the alien said, “I gave you a direct order to say what you’re thinking. Part of the brain chip thing, sorry. You can stop that now, Cell Leader Torsad.”
Torsad nodded, now finding herself able to keep her mouth shut.
“By the way, we’re not just Grass Eaters 1, 2, and 3. We have names. I’m Mark. Those are Kara and John.”
She nodded again.
“Alright, good to finally meet you Torsad. We’ve implanted a device in your brain that gives us full control of it. It allows us to give you orders, to read your mind, and to blow you up, which we’ll only do if you’re compromised. It allows us to maintain control over our secrecy, and it was the condition for your knowledge of us. Unfortunately, we haven’t perfected Granti neuroscience enough to be able to wipe your memory of us, or we’d give you that option. Maybe in a few years… Anyway, it’s only fair that since you’ve taken this step voluntarily, you’re fully read into the program. Do you have any questions for us?” Mark asked, gesturing to the trio.
Torsad thought for a moment, then pointed at her head with a claw. “You have full control of my brain, right? Presumably through some digital sentience abomination like the chips you give us for some missions.”
“Yes, there is an intelligence chip in your head now.”
“Fine. That’s fine. If I am captured, can I request that it doesn’t kill me immediately?” Torsad asked eagerly.
Mark shook his head. “Unfortunately, we can’t allow our secrets to—”
“Oh no, it can kill me… eventually. I just want it to burn out my pain receptors or something, so I can watch and laugh at the Grass Eaters pissing themselves as all their interrogation methods fail for a couple of days before you blow up my head in their faces at the right time. Can you do that for me?”
“You know… I think we’re going to work very well together, Cell Leader Torsad,” Mark said as the three aliens grinned at her in unison. “And… funnily enough, not the first operative we’ve had request that one, so the protocols are there. Definitely the first alien one though.”
“Good. Now, what’s this mission we’re doing?”
“How much do you know about Znosian hatchling pools, Cell Leader?”
Comments
Alric Malicorne
Grass Eaters : Clone Wars
Spooker
🤔🤔🤔
jrharper42
Would be pretty funny if humanity started growing their own Znosians.
