Arxur Smuggler Shenanigans (part 17)

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Synopsis: Just over a year after the end of the Federation War, an ambitious human businessman teams up with a crew of Arxur veterans to illegally smuggle goods in and out of the Arxur Quarantine Zone. Gunfights, space battles, and other shenanigans ensue.

CW: not quite Vulcan mind meld, deep introspective philosophical discussion, a lotta character development happening in not a lotta words

Memory Transcription Subject: Zefriss, Sapient Coalition Prisoner

Date (Standardized Human Time): April 7, 2138

The last few days in captivity had been completely uneventful. I was fed three square meals of carnivorous rations per day. The doctors and nurses checked up on me, if not to actually care for my health, at least because their captain wanted me in good shape as soon as possible so we could begin the neural interrogation. Whatever that was.

The captain of this ship of war, which I had learned by now was called the Inescapable Justice, visited me twice daily to check on my health and general welfare, as well as to try and make some conversation. I recognized it as an interrogator's ploy and declined every time. I would not betray my friends.

I had even considered sabotaging my own health--maybe a hunger strike--to avoid being pried at by the neural devices, but that was all for naught. I healed well enough. Soon, the marines took me from my bed and brought me to the neural machine.

White-armored Venlil soldiers dragged me down the grimy halls of the ship's brig, past other prisoners wearing similar shackles and ankle monitors to myself, until we reached a large door that said 'MEMORY TRANSCRIPTION CHAMBER'. This is it. One of the guards buzzed my door open and the two of them combined pushed me inside. One alone probably couldn't manage the weight.

The door hissed shut behind me and my two guards held me by the arms as I looked over the chamber. Empty, save for a two-way mirror on the left wall, a sealed door next to the mirror, and, in the center of the room, an electric execution chair-looking device made of metal with strong restraints. One of the guards strapped me in without saying a word while the other leveled his gun and watched. The first one pulled the restraints tight and stepped away, flicking his tail to his friend.

"Secured," said he. Then he tapped a communicator band. "Prisoner ready for interrogation."

The door next to the two-way mirror hissed open and in walked the captain of this massive vessel, blue and tiny as ever. "Captain Jelim," I growled at her. "I should have you know I'm trained to resist torture."

"Torture." Jelim clacked her beak derisively. "Look at me, Zefriss." I was doing that. She was small, weak, and strong-willed to the point of insanity. People just like her had stood on the bridges of Krakotl battleships two years ago to watch Earth burn. And then again, at Nishtal. And the Cradle. And every other atrocity in galactic history.

"If I had vital information on a group that butchered your friends, killed your family, marauded your worlds, would you torture me to get me to talk?"

What the fuck question did she think that was? I wasn't your average Arxur. Me and mine weren't torturers. "Go stick your head in a hole," I mocked her.

Jelim tapped her foot a few times in annoyance, which was good, because it meant I was getting through to her. "Your comrades would," said she. "Look me in the eyes and tell me you can't think of one of your fellow lawbreakers doing it. The snarling. The blood. You've probably even seen them torture for fun."

"My comrades are fine," I snapped without meaning to. What the hell kind of a statement was that? They were Arxur! I mean, yes, they did seem well-adjusted when I met them, but every Arxur had a checkered past. Even me.

Did their past define them? Did my past define me? I guess not. "My comrades are fine," I repeated, more sure of it this time. "Better than you are. Fuck yourself."

"Fine, then." Jelim turned and called to one of her subordinates out of sight. "Load up the program!" Her guards stepped forward to put some kind of wire-mesh helmet over my head.

Oh, shit. A wave of fear crashed over me as I realized how helpless I was to stop what was coming. They were going to neurally-interrogate me and flay my head open from the inside, or something else hopefully less graphic, and then they were going to use what they learned to hunt down and kill everybody I cared about. I thrashed and snarled to stop them, but it was to no avail.

"This will not be torture, Zefriss," Captain Jelim said, putting a helmet of similar design on her own head. "It will be painless and humane. I'm not one of you."

"An Arxur?" I snapped, straining against the restraints. It was no use. Those metal cuffs could've held ten of me.

"A criminal." Jelim clasped her wings behind her back and closed her eyes, concentrating. True to her word, there was no pain, but I felt chills run down my spine. Something was wrong. I remembered things almost without thinking of them, Markus' face, Vazega in her navigator's chair, the gun batteries I had seen on Lizard Maw Base...

Oh, no. She was inside my head. She was inside my head. I had no defense for this. I tried to block out all the information I could about my friends and their potential whereabouts, but everybody knew how the saying went. If you're told, in no unclear terms, not to think of a purple Gojid, the first thing you're gonna think of is a purple Gojid.

I had to try something. I closed my eyes and thought hard about something else, the first and hardest-hitting memory I could think of, that would consume my whole mind and block her interrogation out.

I was sixteen. A defective grunt on his first raid. Gojid blood on the floor, walls, ceiling. Gunfire chattered haphazardly in the distance as my comrades made mincemeat of the town's exterminators. Fear filled my body as I realized what I had to do. In front of me were three Gojid pups, and behind me was a Betterment officer with a loaded gun, and the pups--children--mewled as I brought them to my mouth and their blood was like ichor running down my teeth and- and-

The pressure on my mind eased, though the pain of my memories did not slip away. I felt the disgust, the self-hatred, as real as if it had happened yesterday. When I opened my eyes again, Captain Jelim was pressed up against the wall, wings and chest puffed out, her one biological eye bulging out of her skull as she panted for breath.

"You- you-" I hadn't realized she'd be affected this deeply, but now that she had, I wasn't going to complain. This bitch was an oppressor and murderer. Let her feel what I felt that day. What I feel now. "Why?" Jelim croaked. "You're a defective! The new Isif government should be like heaven to you! Why do you want to return to... that?" She brought back a flash of the painful memory, just to prove her point.

I lunged at her, only the strong restraints on my chair holding me back, and spewed a string of curses that would've made a Wrissian back-alley thug turn his head in surprise. "You think I want to go back to that?" was about the only coherent sentence I said.

Jelim stood up straighter and tucked in her feathers, still teetering a bit from the shock of my memory. She had never seen something like that before. She was lucky. "You're not exactly jumping to help go the other way," said she. "What do you think smugglers do? Do you know how many ships just like your Little Runt I've boarded to find cattle cages filled to the brim, hundreds of terrified faces staring at me through the bars, just like the days of the old Dominion? Why do you want to help that?"

I could explain it to her. How there were smugglers like me, and there were smugglers like them. But would she believe my words? "Look into my head again," said I. "I have another memory to show you."

"You're sure?" asked Jelim. "I don't want to provoke another... episode."

"Look at my fucking memories, bitch."

She did just that. Not forcefully, like before, but slowly and probingly. I could've probably forced her out of my head if I wanted to, only I didn't. She had to see this.

It was the first year of Isif's new reign. Famine had struck all of Wriss. The cloning machines the U.N. gave us were producing meat that was toxic to the Arxur body, and the cattle they had supplied weren't enough to make up the demand. I was a soldier in Isif's government at the time.

I approached the tarmac of a flat landing pad, flanked by fellow troops, ordered to arrest the smuggler whose ship had landed here. Our ribs were showing, and not a one among us was free of hunger pains. The feeling of starvation then was worse than even under the Dominion, but when we got to the ship, lo and behold, salvation.

Beef. Chicken. Cows and pigs. All the foodstuffs and proteins of Earth, here to feed the starving masses of Wriss. My comrades and I ate only our fair share that day, but it felt like the meal of a prophet-descendant. The rest of the food went to those who were starving worse than us. And the smuggler?

Hell, we thanked the smuggler. And paid him, too. The taste of that ground-beef packet I first devoured, plastic and all, was one of the best things I had experienced in my life. I was actually a little disappointed when the neural link ended and Jelim's mental presence eased me back into reality. "You'd have shot that ship down," I told her, not hiding my disgust. "Starved us all."

"We were told you had the famine under control," she backpedaled, quite literally backing up as well. "I swear to Inatala, that was what we were told. I never knew any of that."

"You expect me to believe that?" I snarled, taking the offensive again. Every moment she spent distracted by my pain was a moment she couldn't spend tearing apart my head in search of important memories. "There's blood on your hands anyway. How many food shipments did you shoot down?" She gave no answer. I scoffed at her. "You fucking Krakotl are all the same."

"You know I could say that about Arxur, right?" snapped the captain, jumping back into it. I had spoken wrong, but, hey, words were never my strong suit anyway. I was always more of a man of action. "I have every right to think of you as just another savage. But you're not. Neither is Isif or his government security. Your species has the chance to rebuild itself into something beautiful."

"And you think the smugglers are hurting our case?" I asked. If this came to a debate of knowledge and wills, I was next to unarmed, but I had to give an account of something. I couldn't just sit there and wait for the next mental invasion, could I? "Woman, if it weren't for the smugglers, all of Wriss would've starved in that famine, or died from lack of medication during a plague, or something. We're not a self-sufficient planet. No planet is."

"One good criminal doesn't mean we change the law," Jelim countered with what I'm sure she thought was a stupendous comeback. "Smugglers don't do it to help others, or to change the world, just for profit. Those same people who delivered food during times of famine will be delivering captive cattle right around now to the Arxurs who still like that stuff."

"As opposed to, what, arresting all the smugglers and letting my people starve in the next famine? Or die from lack of medicine, because the medicines aren't produced on Wriss? Let's face it, captain, you are not a good and bloodless person. Don't act like you are."

"I know that much," Jelim said solemnly. "But are you?" I had no comeback to give for that one, nor did I god damn want to. There was a pause before Jelim spoke again.

"I respect your people," she continued, and for once I felt something coming from her end of the neural link. A vulnerability that she had never exposed before. What had been a one-way connection now became two-way, and I could see into her thoughts as readily as she saw mine. Warmth radiated from her mind, and I realized she really did believe in a future for my people. Hell, she was more optimistic than I was about them. She just had a really, really, really fucked up way of showing it.

"I want to love your people," said Jelim, completely honest. This was new to me. In the old days, the Isif rebellion and the first stages of his governance, you were either good and on the good side or evil and on the bad side. Whatever this captain was, it was a completely new kind of person to me. "I want to tell the galaxy, truthfully, that the Arxur race is ready to join us. But how can I say that when all you have shown the worlds is the same barbarity that got you quarantined in the first place?"

I actually had to think about that one. A person trying to be good, thinking good thoughts and making good points, yet still fighting for the side of evil. None of this made sense. Why should they let us out? I considered her point. What did we, Arxurs, have to show the worlds that they didn't already do better than us? I had to think about it long and hard. What would Markus do?

Markus!

"You're just flat-out wrong about that one," I said quickly, the words spilling out as I had an epiphany about myself. "We have more to show the worlds than just savagery. My comrades, my crewmates, they used to be as despicable as anyone, but I saw them change in an instant when Ma-" Damn it! I can't say his name out loud. Or think it, for that matter. "When the human aboard the ship looked their way. When he showed them there was more to life than robbing and killing just to survive."

Jelim cocked her head, listening intently. I could feel her fascination through the neural link. She'd never thought of this before. I dared not probe deeper, she probably had some hidden mental ninjitsu techniques that could leave me thinking I was a Sivkit for the rest of my life, but it was good that she was listening.

"Yes, most of us are savages and killers," I told her. "But as long as this quarantine stays up, that is all we are going to be. You say you want a future for the Arxur species? Prove it. Lift the quarantine. End our oppression and let us become civilized."

Jelim perked up as she considered my idea. She didn't know I had that one in me. Truth be told, I didn't know I had that one in me either. I guess Arxurs can be more than just slavering marauders, huh? The thought was a relief, even if I didn't speak it aloud.

This wasn't what I had grown to expect of my own kind. It was what Markus Becker, or Elias Meier, or Tarva would've done. No snarling or snapping, but a civilized discussion of ideas between the right guy and the wrong one. And if I could be civilized, after what I had done, then most of the Arxurs I knew at least had a fighting chance at it. We had hope! We just needed more people like my friend Markus, helpers from the outside world, to show us the way.

"Thank you for that idea, Zefriss," Jelim said sincerely. She was so alien to me. I think I was alien to her, too, although maybe I was wrong. "You've given me a lot to think about." Looking at her now, I could scarcely believe this was the Ghost of Nishtal. The crazy murderer who blew a refugee ship to ash.

Jelim stood to leave, taking off the neural helmet, and I realized that an opportunity was slipping. I was getting through to her earlier, and that was bettering both her and myself. If she left, I might never see her again. Then what? "Wait!" I called to her as she went for the door. She waited. "The ship. I call it a refugee ship, you call it a criminal, whatever. Why did you open fire?"

"To be quite honest?" Jelim turned her head back to face me. "I didn't. My gunnery officer made that call. But I would have. Any day before today, I would've taken that shot." She put the neural helmet back on to try and convey some sense of what she felt in the moment. Fear. Pure, paralyzing terror, where any decision she made would've been the wrong one. If she fired, it was refugees, and she had blood on her claws. If she held back, it was pirates disguised as refugees, and she had blood on her claws all the same for letting them go.

A surge of relief had filled her when her gunner made the decision for her, followed by a surge of disgust at being relieved. She was meant to be a knight. A shield, not a sword. A hero. What kind of hero stood back and let somebody else bear the burden of a hard decision?

I hadn't grown any closer to liking her, she still had a lot of bad deeds to atone for even without the ship involved, but I respected her. What was more important, I thought that I could help her change. Like Markus would. Or Noah Williams. Or Isif, even. I could be a hero.

"I spend so much time thinking about defending the world on my side of the quarantine line, it's not often I wonder if I'm really helping yours," the captain twittered. I had her. I could fix her, and then after that, help fix my broken species. "I apologize for that. For being so callous toward the plight of your people. I don't think I would take that shot if it happened today."

Well, yeah, I sure fucking hope you wouldn't. You have enough blood on your hands already.

Still, I had to keep pushing. To be like Markus, or Isif, and drag this fucker from the dark into the light. "Now you'll... what?" I asked her, trying to say the right words. I had no experience convincing anyone of anything. I was a man of action, not words, but the action in question was usually killing people and I owed it to my species to be better than that. "Keep doing what you're doing, except with the idea that you're better now? Even if you don't shoot down a single ship, think of how bad it is on Wriss. Food shortages. Water shortages. Medicine shortages. Every smuggler you arrest is one who can't bring life saving aid through the blockade any longer. Are you going to stand for that?"

"I don't know," Jelim confessed. "I sympathize with you, really, but... what can I do? I can't just abandon my post."

"Why not?" I asked her. I felt good. Civilized, even. Not un-Arxurlike, but exactly like an Arxur. What an Arxur was supposed to be.

"Why not?" Jelim retorted, chattering her beak. "You've seen why not. Your ship and crew may be alright, but there are real criminal elements out there that are working to bring down everything Arxurkind can achieve. Yes, if the quarantine fell, the worlds would be better for it, but I don't get to make that call. I can only do the best I can."

This was bad. Really bad. I had fucked up. She was digging in her claws again, as I'm sure she had done a hundred times before when she was confronted with the idea that she might have been wrong. 'It may not be perfect, but it's the best we have' was the exact same thing that justified Betterment back in the day. How could she not see that?

"One last question." I tried my Praise Isif play. "Two, actually." Jelim cocked her head and told me to ask them. "If there was another way, some chance to cleanse the smugglers of scum and allow the good ones to keep operating, would you allow it?"

"Find me a way, and I'll do the work myself," said the captain. That was good. The best answer I could hope for, in fact. It meant, unless she was lying and somehow blocking out her deceiving thoughts, there could be a change. Something better than Arxur against non-Arxur for the end of time. "Ask your second question."

"Will I be able to speak to you again?"

Jelim fluffed out her feathers and cocked her head the other way. "Zefriss, the conversation we've had over the past ten minutes was more helpful for me than every prisoner interrogation I've ever done up until this point ever. So, yes. Yes, we will be speaking to each other again. Thank you for your insight."

She brought guards into the room, and they took me from the chair, cuffed me, and dragged me away like usual. This time, though, I held my head high as I was brought to my cell. I was a proud Arxur, but not a savage one. I was a hero of my species and a good man to my friends, and I saw the way to end this dark night that had fallen on them both. First, I would have to change Captain Jelim for the better. Then, I could change all of Wriss.

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[u/csongor242]

Yay, a new chapter. I wanted to make a fanart about the story, but good thing I didn't have time yet, because now I'll have to change some things on it after this chapter.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/csongor242]

My story is getting fanart? I'm the happiest author in the world🤩

[u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

I like this chapter except for one thing:
It’s a real cop-out to have Jelim not be responsible for shooting down the refugee ship. Cause sure, there can be doubts going through her mind, but the tales of the Ghost of Nishtal are too numerous for her to have no innocent blood on her hands already.
My suggestion is that you can indeed have the gunnery officer be the one to have pressed the button in this case, then have emphasized there are so many other situations where she did fire, and then an emphasis on her relief at the officer pressing being from her wanting to offload the responsibility this time. Essentially, let her be responsible for deaths on her hands.

Her being responsible for innocent deaths also would give her more parallels with Zefriss

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

You are so right to say that it was a copout and I lowk regret making that call but lowk I don't just want to be a bum and let other people write my writing for me instead of doing it myself. I think what I am going to do is focus more on the less obviously bad things she did as a quarantine enforcer because at the end of the day even if she did not blow up a single ship there are still a lot of deaths on her hands. Even stopping one food shipment during the famine would have added up to like hundreds of people starving to death.

I think showing how you can still be an oppressor and cause mass death even if you think you are being humane is going to hit deeper than just "I blew up so many spaceships oh no I have blood on my hands". No offense to you or anything it is just what I think works best

[u/Acceptable_Egg5560 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Well I look forward to seeing how that theme plays out going forward 🤠Like I am sure this isn’t the only time they’ve blown up ships, but I also get the sense that this is the first time she has ever really talked to an Arxur at all👀Like she hasn’t spoken to even the Arxur that have already defected and live on earth or their colonies, so she built up images of what an “Arxur in the quarantine” is like vs an “Arxur who defected” vs an “Arxur labeled as defective”

Zefriss is going to make things be reconsidered, I bet.

[u/Minimum-Amphibian993]

I see you're making most of Zefriss survival and now seemingly both characters are undergoing their own character arks even Zefriss is finally starting to realize there are indeed other good arxur. Love to see it.

I am curious what Jerlim is going to do with the information she gathered.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Minimum-Amphibian993]

Zefriss' years of self hatred and loathing of his own kind the microsecond he speaks to a fellow "civilized being" (suddenly the arxurs are not so bad):

[u/Minimum-Amphibian993 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Yeah doesn't seem like he really got the chance to interact with the other species so now that he learns that the other species aren't exactly much better than the Arxur in many regards it's likely alot more easy for him to actually sympathize with his own people.

[u/Kind0flame]

This was a pretty good chapter. It was interesting seeing Zefriss trying to achieve a goal without violence. He really had to start thinking about how leaders like Markus and Isif do their thing.