Work Text:
The hulking mass of the Terran warship Impressor hangs in space beneath a rocky moon. A spinning cylinder, kilometers long. Hollow save for her bridge, engines, and main weapons platform. She hopes to avoid the scanners of an Affini war vessel by aligning herself behind the moon, its gas giant, and the parent star of the system. She thinks she will be successful in this endeavor. She has already failed.
A sleek black shuttle, merely 10 meters across, floats dead in a gravitational arc heading past the Impressor. From it, 6 white shapes emerge explosively, rocketing toward the Terran ship. In their routine launch they sustain g-forces that would crush any Terran vessel of comparable size. Veiny teardrops confidently drift through vacuum toward their target. Biological nozzles burn biological fuel to make minute adjustments in their courses.
On the bridge of the Impressor, Captain Joseph Reginald Kruger attempts to keep his cool. Having hidden his ship from the much larger Affini vessel, he now has no means of checking its status. From his comfortable chair in a vast control room which he considers appropriate for a man of his station, he shouts unnecessary orders. Few pertain to his predicament. He only has three loyal crewmen remaining, two navigators and a personnel officer. He tells the personnel officer to tighten rations for the second time this hour. He tells the navigators to power down all inessential operations, of which there are none left.
He opens the PA channel, announcing to the prisoners who run his ship that soon the threat will pass, and they will continue their mining survey. Terra needs that ore to fight these monsters! He signs off with a patriotic epithet and a twitch of his finger that sends a just-shy-of-painful electric current through the throats of nearly 600 captive humans. He hardly even realizes he's done this. It has become habit at this point.
In the galley, engine room, life support system, and every other essential part of the Impressor, people choke and tug at their boxy steel collars. This is routine, of course. Any time they make any unapproved action their captors choke them. Backtalk, tardiness, simple human affection all grants the same result. To remind them of this, it happens every day regardless.
Of course, anyone who steps too far out of line is made an immediate example of, their compatriots left to clean up the corpse.
Captain Kruger tugs at his own collar. Sleek, simple, comfortable. Custom made after the loss of his superior officers to the alien threat. It measures his vital signs at all times. Should they fail, so shall the rest in the ship, besides of course those of his loyal crewmen. (Who are perhaps unaware that surviving such an event would be a fate worse than death.)
Failsafes in the system ensure that if the bridge loses contact with the rest of the ship, prisoners will die one by one until order is restored. Kruger has three loyal crewmen, but really, he doesn't need more than one. Who needs loyalty, when you are the angel of death?
White teardrops impact silently on steel hull, unfurling into great white flowers. They slither into ports and access hatches. Sensors deaden as they pass with subtle flicks of translucent white vines.
Your name, since your arrival 2 years ago, is M19. Nineteenth Maintenance. You're currently in your long, long wait in your closet sized cell for your next shift. Your meals are delivered in dense blocks through a chute system; your waste is removed via a toilet that takes up nearly a third of the walkable space in here. You have a window in your heavy steel door, though it only looks out on the steel wall across the narrow hall.
You used to see the faces of guards in it now and then, but they've all been either laid off or made examples of. Now the only guards here are the ones about the necks of you and your... fellows. You wish you could call them friends, but hardly anyone has the ability to be friends since the war started. It used to be that you could spend time playing cards together as a reward for good behavior, your only real reason to keep working hard. Only reason to keep working at all. Now though, it seems that's too much of a threat to productivity.
It's fine though. You know this is what you deserve. No reason to fight back when you're right where God has placed you. Atonement has to happen before death. You know this. It'd be easy to act out and be made an example of, but you imagine hell would somehow be worse than here.
You hear something strange. A rhythmic hissing in the ducts. You feel a tightness in your chest, a fear that something's moving around you. You must be hallucinating again.
Ivory-pearl vines haul divine sparks through the innards of the devil ship. In moments, they will reach their disperse destinations.
S37 and S38 are terribly startled from their mindless monitoring of automated systems by a horrific sight before losing consciousness.
S14 and S15 suffer the same fate, half a kilometer away, on the opposite side of the Impressor.
The engine room is full of limp, sleeping bodies when the creature emerges from the vents to disable the jump drive.
The missile and railgun systems are rendered inert even before W19 can fall gently into waiting tendrils.
On the bridge, Kruger and his crewmen are captured before they realize they've been infiltrated. One mass of white tentacles slithers out from a floor grate, restraining and gagging all officers in milliseconds, injectors poised to strike. Another mass busies itself with the computer interfaces lining the walls of the bridge and the arms of Kruger's chair.
It is ludicrously simple to disable the security systems. Through simple radio communication between each other and manual interfacing with the Impressors computer systems, the Affini stealth unit is able to simultaneously destroy all software related to prisoner control, completely bypassing all failsafes. The collars are now inert. Safe.
The Affini saviors breathe a collective sigh of relief. They'd reached inside with their probes and discovered every nook and cranny of the Impressor's architecture and programming. They'd run drills based on the directly scanned intel hundreds of times, updating their techniques and infiltration routes by the hour as they learned every detail of the Impressor's routine. The last twenty drills had been identical and perfectly executed. Yet, who in the universe wouldn't be nervous with hundreds of lives at stake?
The Angel holding the oppressors rises from the floor. She assembles her sprawl of vines into a humanoid form. Three meters tall, too-long limbs, two extra limbs sprouting from her back: wide, flat and serrated. White body, scarlet lips, pale blue flowers about her head. Eyes obscured by a bone white chevron mask, held in place by a delicate trim made from few of the thousands of thin gold tendrils that make up her hair. She glows, as if lit by an unseen spotlight.
She appears as a savior to most, and a terrifying threat to those who are deserving.
She speaks in a song impossible to ignore as she releases a dense aerosol into the room, clouding the humans vision.
"You shall no longer control. Sleep now, and soon, you will be saved."
Before the sheer panic can kill the humans, the Angel plunges her needles into their arteries, flooding them with chemicals she has designed to cause long term hibernation. As she pumps her xenodrugs into their brains, her aerosol reaches their lungs, and just before they lose consciousness, the immense fear turns to a brief moment of bliss. In a few months, when they awake, they will no longer desire control.
The Affini contact Eden, requesting a fleet of shuttles, as planned. The mission was a success. Now, it is time for the hard part.
You felt your collar go dead, something that hasn't happened since the last attempt at mutiny. Back then, it was followed minutes later by a shock that nearly killed you. Your heart races, you try not to puke. You don't want to die. You pray this is a hallucination. You dare not pry at the block of metal for fear you'll trigger the explosives inside. You don't want to die. You don't want to die.
You hear the terrifying clank of the bolt in your door releasing. It's days early for that. You scream, you scream and scream and you don't want to die, you're so sorry, please don't hurt me, please please don't kill me.
A white shape. A stream of mist. Sleep. Your unconscious form is carried to a living spacecraft, and you are carefully transported to your new home. Hospital Ship Eden, home of the Angel Unit, and the best human trauma care center in the galaxy.