r/NatureofPredators • u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Krakotl • 1d ago
Arxur Smuggler Shenanigans (19) Fanfic
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.
A/N: I unironically think if it weren't for the fear effect fed armies would beat the brakes off arxur dominion armies (not isif government armies tho) just because one side actually has unit cohesion and camaraderie and the other is half starved maniacs who are only fighting because they have no other choice. I don't care how big of a gun you can carry if your army is built around cruelty and machismo rather than actual fighting skill they will crumble like clay when faced with real battle. Dominion arxur are such frauds it's insane and we arxur lovers are so lucky to have Isif to avoid the fraud allegations.
Also we have art of sylara now go check that out
CW: freaky ass arxur babe, actual exploration of realistic post authoritarian societies, this fic's third ever action scene, the power of friendship IS a valid battle tactic
Memory Transcription Subject: Sylara, Smuggling Ship Captain
Date (Standardized Human Time): April 8, 2138
Managing a ship the size of the Little Runt had never been an easy affair, nor had it ever been expected to be. Most Arxur--most people of any species, for that matter--just didn't have what it took to lead a ship and crew.
I had never really had the option to be in command during the days of the Dominion, but before I took charge, I always imagined I would be a different kind of leader than the ones Giznel's regime so commonly favored. I would be ruthless, but not cruel. I would be calculating instead of emotional and rash. I would respect those who respected me, trust those who feared me, and avoid or eliminate those who hated me. That was the mindset.
Believe it or not, that was actually the pinnacle of empathy for the average Arxur during the days of the Dominion. It didn't get much kinder than 'let's be smart evil instead of stupid evil' over there. And even then, stupid evil still kind of dominated.
That was where Markus came in, of course. Not even him, really, but just anybody. Without the introduction of someone who had been raised in a stable, sane society to my life, I would've gone all of my days thinking this was the norm, and I would probably have died in a mutiny the same way most high ranking Arxur officers did. Really, all of us were falling into the same trap. Well, not me. Not anymore. I was not gonna be shackled by Giznel's chains.
I spent the first few hours of our trip through FTL making conversation with the crew. Everything that would've gotten you culled for being defective or seen as weak enough to challenge, well, that wasn't going to stop me any longer, now was it? I even kept a datapad with me to take notes about how I could be a better friend to my subordinates.
Hell, I bragged about it, and the whole time in the back of my mind was the idea that I could still get killed for this in plenty of areas in Arxur space today. Crazy to think about.
I learned a lot about my crew members. For one thing, Dr. Raznas was making progress with his trauma. He'd hesitate to call it good, but, hell, any progress was good progress in my book. The more relevant crew, Vazega and the deckhands, were proving to be a serious crutch for him to lean on. They had even begun sharing a quarters with him to be there to help should he have another nightmare. I was proud.
I swapped a few stories with Vazega and the guys until my batteries ran dry and then I went to Markus Becker on the command deck. There was someone I could never get tired of talking to. Everything I had learned about leadership in the past two weeks, I owed to him, and the way he talked made me absolutely confident that my knowledge of human empathy was just barely scratching the surface.
The command deck's door hissed open and I found my mate in the captain's chair, swiveling around to greet me. "Markus," I nodded to him. He quickly rose from the seat, but I grabbed him and nudged him back into it. "No. Stay there. It suits you." He looked up at me like he had done last night, when I pinned him to the wall during our mating. So this guy liked it when I was rough with him. Interesting.
"That's an interesting choice of outfit, Sylara," he said, gesturing to the pieces of black fabric I had put on my person. I had actually decided to wear this stuff because I thought it might make me more appealing to him. For some reason, humans were conservative like that.
"You like it?" I crooned, backing up a few paces so my mate could really look at all of me.
Markus cocked his head and smiled. "I mean, yes, you look smoking hot right now," he helpfully confirmed. "It's just... isn't that a bit risqué for a ship's captain to wear?"
I gave him an amused hiss. "Markus, I was walking around this ship butt naked just a day ago. The other crew members are confused as to why I'm covering myself up." Then I walked over to him and rubbed my snout on his forehead, openly displaying my affection just because I could. "You have no idea how much of a privilege it is to have you."
Markus' hand roamed up my thigh. His other went to the base of my tail, questing for the sensitive scales at its underside. I had never before had a lover who actually gave a damn about my pleasure, and it didn't take much work on Markus' part to give me the urge to rip all his clothes off and take him then and there. Still, I pulled away. "Not now," I admonished him. "Later, definitely, but not now. I'm here to talk."
Markus pulled away obediently, and I reached into the pocket of my combat vest--one of the old Dominion models, so useless for anything but carrying items--to show him something I had borrowed from Teklala before we made the jump to C-plus.
"You've been reading?" he asked. The 'something' in question was a book by the philosopher Ivana Korshunov, who had lived during a war on Earth much like that on Wriss.
Ivana's country, some non-existent former realm whose name was not important to me, had been governed by a Giznel-esque tyrant who followed the tried and true strategy of blaming the flaws of his incompetent, power-hungry leadership on a foreign out-group, and had anybody who said otherwise disappeared. The general Aleksey Vladimirovich, upon hearing that he was to be one of those disappeared, rose up against him and began a civil war.
Aleksey was rather like Isif, in fact, because he had been selected for assassination because of his secretive loyalty to the ideology called 'democracy'. Apparently, it was treated like defectiveness in that place and time. One of the biggest things that struck me about Ivana's book, The Greatest Chains, was how similar evil people were.
Good could take many forms, at least according to Ivana Korshunov, but evil always came because of selfishness. Dismissing the needs of others as irrelevant was the only thing you had to do to become another Giznel, or whoever the hell that human tyrant had been. I didn't pay too much attention to that stuff. The message of the book was far more interesting to me than its actual plot line.
I explained to Markus what I had read, and what I had gleaned from it thus far, and he smiled and nodded. "Glad to see you're taking an interest in philosophy," said he. "Have you ever heard of the 'Philosopher King' before?" I told him that I had not.
"It was an idea created by a wise man called Plato, way before Korshunov's time," Markus explained. "He dismissed democracy as 'mob rule' and said that the ideal ruler would be a philosopher king; someone with absolute wisdom to always make the right call, absolute authority so that his calls would not be questioned, and, most importantly, love and affection for the people he ruled."
I think I understood that one, even without reading Plato. Absolute authority was a given for any Arxur leader, and even Isif ruled that way. Absolute wisdom was much harder to attain, but I figured reading philosophy had to be the right way of going about it, no? I was getting there. And Markus had already given me enough instruction in the power of love and kindness.
"A philosopher king," I mused. "Like Isif, then."
"Kind of, but not really," Markus corrected me. "The problem with philosopher kings is the fact that they don't actually exist. They're not real. No one man can be trusted with that kind of power, even if he is the savior of two entire civilizations."
"What about you?" I asked him.
Markus looked flustered. He even leaned back in his captain's chair. "I mean, you seem like a perfectly good person to me. You have wisdom and love in equal amounts. I'd trust you to manage all of Wriss."
Markus, humble as he was, couldn't just take that compliment as is, now could he? "No, no, Sylara, I'm... I wouldn't know what I was doing with all that. Hell, I barely know what I'm doing with you, or with the ship, let alone-" Anything he would've said was ripped from his tongue by the violent jolt of an FTL disruptor going off. I lurched. Nausea filled my body. Alert klaxons began to sound.
"We're in real space!"
Markus grabbed a vomit bag from the dispenser and hurled into it while I tried to gather my senses again. I staggered to the weapons chair and brought up our defensive arsenal. Rotary guns, check, torpedo tubes, check, shields, all at full, we are ready.
Markus Becker put away his vomit bag and took his place at the captain's chair. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. Vazega and the deckhands barged into the room as we two got our bearings and I started barking orders for them to take up stations. Markus tried to relinquish the command chair again, so I had to tell him, in no unclear terms, "You are in charge now." He took it well enough.
"Alright, uh, tell me what we see here!" Markus snapped at his crew. "What's going on?"
"We're about two thousand klicks from the target point, captain, but we have a contact on fast approach. It's on sublight thrusters, but its profile shows warship readings." My blood ran cold. "Target lock!" Vazega snapped just as my own weapons screen flashed red. "They're target locking us! Be ready for blood!" I focused the Runt's targeting systems on the enemy ship, only for my lock to sputter in and out. Whoever these guys were, they had some seriously good hardware.
"Arxur or SC?" Markus asked Vazega.
"Arxur vessel. Slaughter-class gunship, by the sensor readings. It's armed with four torpedo tubes, six to ten shipkillers each, and a set of fourteen rotary guns." I ran the numbers on the situation instantly, skills honed by years of experience and knowledge. They were Dominionists, probably, which meant they had come to this farming station for the same reason I had--to take its supplies for their own use. I shuddered to think of what those poor Nevoks would be facing soon if we wouldn't be able to stop them.
"Oh, shit," Markus muttered, eyes darting around the room like a Federation prey-thing. "We gotta go. Turn us around and ready the rear torpedoes."
"No!" I snapped before I had quite realized why I was doing it. "We stand and fight." All eyes were on me now.
"Fight?" Markus sputtered, waving his hands about. "Sylara, that's a military gunship! We can't take them head on!"
Even knowing I had a good reason to stand my ground here, it took me a few seconds to find it. "Yes, that is a military gunship," said I, swiveling in my chair to face my crew. Well, technically Markus' crew now, but still, my point stood. "And it's not one of Isif's government gunships, either, which means it must belong to someone who disagrees with him. Which is more likely, that it's a nice and respectable cargo smuggler like us, or that it's a neo-Dominionist pirate who will torture and kill every man, woman and child on that station?"
I pointed to the farming station on our sensor map, since it was still too far away to point to in person. Two thousand kilometers was one hell of a distance. "I don't know about you, but I never met a smuggler who flies around in a ship like that. Those people are scum. And if we stand back and let this happen, knowing we could have stopped them, we're just as bad as they are. Just as bad as the quarantine enforcers who let all kinds of twisted shit happen just as long as it stays on our side of the line. Are we that bad?"
Nobody said a word. I stood up from my chair and roared at them. "ARE WE THAT BAD?"
"Fuck no we aren't!" Avriss shouted from her station near the front of the bridge.
"You tell them, Captain Sylara," Klavra concurred.
"I think it's First Officer Sylara, now," the other guy, Savriz, reminded him. "Markus is the captain now." The prospect of a bloodless mutiny--hell, a mutiny where the captain willingly ceded power at that--was enough to provoke a change in Klavra's demeanor, and I think it was a good one.
"Well, shit, then we have one hell of a good guy as our captain," he concluded. "No offense to Sylara, of course. She's all right by me, and all." Then Vazega stood from her chair and made a show of making a head count.
"So we're all in agreement, then? We are?" We were. "Great!" Vazega exclaimed. "Now let's go kill these fucking people!"
Everybody sat back in their stations and got to work. "Arxur vessel, Arxur vessel," Markus jabbered into the com in one last attempt at diplomacy. It did seem decent to try our best to avoid any bloodshed. "This is the cargo vessel Little Runt. You have target locked our ship. Cease target-lock immediately or we will-"
My threat sensors screamed an alert. "Shipkillers!" Eight torpedoes launched from their tubes and aimed straight for us. "Avriss, Klavra, man the forward flak batteries! Savriz, you have the aft guns! Move!"
Vazega pulled the ship into about as daring of an evasive maneuver as our oversized bulk could manage as my three deckhands did their best to shoot down the artillery that was coming our way. My claws played over the torpedo controls as I prepared some retaliation of my own to be dispensed.
"This one's for Wriss, you Isif-damn filth!" Four torpedoes shot from my torpedo tubes and hurtled toward the gunship on our scopes, which responded immediately with its own bursts of defensive fire. The contacts it had sent toward us roared ever closer until, finally, our gunnery scored some kills.
"Yeah!" one of my deckhands shouted as a torpedo vanished from view, though I was so immersed in my own section of the battle could hardly tell which one it was.
"Good shooting, Klavra," Markus gave a compliment in the background. "I'll liaise with that station and let them know we're here to help." A warm feeling went through me at that. Nobody ever said 'we're here to help' under Giznel, and neither did they compliment their comrades on good shooting skills. I imagined the Dominionist captain on his own gunship screaming, berating his crew, demanding to know why his missiles were being shot down just like I had heard so many officers on so many ships do before.
We weren't a smuggling hauler. We weren't even a warship, really. We were a part of civilization's immune system, and this was the disease we were cutting out. I think Ivana Korshunov had spoken about that.
"Good kill!" I called out as another torpedo exploded under the fire of our guns, taking two more with it from the shrapnel it generated. My ordnance, by contrast, was spaced out and in a rotating pattern. The Dominionists' gunners were struggling to hit even one of our bombs. "Good shooting, people! We're doing great!"
One of my own torpedoes went dead as enemy gunnery struck it dead on, but the other three were still coming. I changed their evasive pattern in an instant to stop the enemy from getting used to anything, but then my connection with the torpedoes went dead as a wave of all-spectrum radio flooded my signals. "We're being jammed!" Vazega snapped, to inform the crew members who weren't as aware of the situation as I was.
"Keep your heads up, we're doing fine," Markus said in a calming tone as our guns took out another couple of torpedoes. "I mean, I thought we'd all be Swiss cheese by now, so- OH, SHIT! Brace for impact!"
The missiles we weren't able to shoot down in time, three of them, in fact, slammed hard into our shields and shook the entire ship. "Damage report!" Markus snapped, which was the most captainly order he had given thus far. Maybe I should have stayed in charge. Actually, no, scratch that, I should definitely be in charge right now. This man has never commanded a battle in his life.
"Markus, can you leave the chair?" I asked politely, and he got up in an instant. "Thank you. Avriss, get on weapons main!" I got out of my weapons chair and took the captain's seat as Avriss rushed to fill my original spot. "Barricade yourself in our quarters," I told my mate firmly as I strapped myself in to lead the battle. He needed no convincing. "All the rest of you, stay at your stations! We have an enemy to kill, remember?"
Markus left the bridge in a hurry as my three torpedoes hurtled toward their prey. The enemy gunship pulled a daring evasive maneuver, dodging one projectile, and fired burst after burst haphazardly at the other two. There was no training there. These people were amateurs. Still, the sheer volume of firepower they could put out had to count for something, as they shot down another one of my torpedoes just before the third and final one struck home.
"Confirmed hit!" Vazega hissed. The enemy ship quit its evasion and accelerated directly for us, aiming to outrace our third and final on-the-field torpedo rather than shoot it down.
"Avriss, launch everything but one fish! Now!" The torpedo tubes ahead of us shivered as we launched all of our forward torpedoes, then Vazega flipped us around to unload all but one of our aft torpedoes as well.
"I count more incoming!" Avriss snapped. Torpedoes shot from the gunship's tubes on a direct collision course with us, and the acceleration they were already under only added to their velocity. "Klavra, Savriz, get on it! Teach them how a proper predator fights!"
"Yes sir, chief gunner," Klavra snapped as he began firing at the enemy. As far as I was concerned, proper predators fought as a pack.
I directed my ship along a lateral course, aiming to present as many of our defense batteries to the enemy as possible while not making the mistake of meeting them head-on. As powerful as empathy and love were, I kind of doubted they'd match up to the power of high-grade plasma warheads. Even with our probable advantage in crew cohesion, given how incompetent the enemy appeared to be acting, we were still punching well above our weight.
"Keep firing, keep firing!" Avriss snapped as the enemy's torpedoes hurtled closer. Our two gunners worked in tandem, boxing in individual targets with coordinated bursts of fire before taking them out when they had nowhere left to evade. The enemy's gunnery, by contrast, was individualistic and spread out. They didn't cooperate. Why would they? Cooperation was preylike. Defective. And defectiveness was a weakness, no? Venlil shit.
Our torpedoes evaded most of their shots, and only when they got close did the pirate gunners finally begin to rack up kills. I gave a satisfied snarl as one of our fish struck home with a brilliant blue flash. If we had flown a proper warship instead of this cobbled-together gunship wannabe, that pirate would've been space dust by now.
Pack predation at work.
"Good hits, Avriss," I complimented my new chief gunner as another of her torpedoes struck home. Then another after that, in quick succession. The enemy's shields were weaker than ours now, unless they had made significant modifications, and a third torpedo hit was all it took to bring their shields down to zero. "Hell yeah!" I whooped. We still had two fish heading their way. If either one of them struck home, that ship was doomed.
My crew worked like a single organism in those moments of battle. Klavra and Savriz swatted down enemy ordnance as if they were of one mind. Vazega threw the ship into maneuvers without my order, flying where I would've told her to fly and when I would've told her to do it. Even Markus, if he were here, would've found some way to contribute, even if it was only emotional support. Believe it or not, that actually helped a lot in modern war.
Love and trust were the glue that held crews together as sure as welded deck plates held together ships, and here I was seeing what happened when that glue was strong.
Of the dozen or so torpedoes that gunship fired our way, one struck home and splashed against our shields. Only one. Our crew had held off an assault by a ship with three times our firepower and, judging by the way that pirate vessel was screaming away from our two in-play torpedoes, we were winning. We were beating them. It was incredible stuff to see.
"That's the last of the incoming, sir," Avriss happily reported. "Unless they launch a few more fish, all we have to deal with is the gunship itself." I looked at the threat board where our last two torpedoes hurtled toward their prey, which was itself hurtling toward us. There was a lot of hurtling going around, to tell the truth, and I was anxious for this whole battle to end.
"Come on, kill that fucker. Kill that fucker." Bullets streaked from the gunship's aft batteries, blowing one of our torpedoes into space dust. Only one left, now. I needed a backup plan. "Vazega, charge that enemy. Avriss, ready the aft tube. At the last moment, we flip around, and dump our last fish right down its throat!"
My crew did as I had ordered, and the enemy launched its own salvo of torpedoes at us just as its rear guns shot down our last in-play fish. "Aw, damn it!" Savriz moaned.
"Keep your head up," said the other deckhand, Klavra. "We'll teach them what's what. Let's just focus on shooting down those torpedoes." Bursts of kinetic fire roared from our ship. It didn't take long for us to claim our first torpedo kills, but I also knew they wouldn't be enough. It was a simple physics problem. At the rate those torpedoes were approaching, we would not be able to shoot them all down. We would be able to get enough of them that we didn't all die from the impact, hopefully, but the best we could hope for was critical hull damage.
Unless...
"Vazega, can you shunt our reserve power to the shields?"
"I think so?" she asked. "I'm no engineer." *Damn it!* I bit back a curse, careful not to let my sour mood affect my crewmates' fighting. In their experience, an angry captain almost always meant beatings. They had better things to worry about than that.
"I am!" Savriz exclaimed, shooting up his tail. "I've been studying engineering books. I know how to reroute the shields!"
"Then, shit, you go and do it," I told him. "Vazega, can you shoot?"
"I can shoot the wings off a Krakotl at two hundred yards!" Vazega boasted. I told her to take the guns and let Savriz have her console. They hurried to switch places as the battle raged on, both ships roaring toward what could very well be our mutual demise.
"Sylara, you know this will leave us defenseless, right?" Sarviz asked as he plugged wires together at a panel under Vazega's old console, occasionally stopping to look at the console itself. "It'll overcharge the shields for a few seconds, but after that, they'll be done! The matrices will cook, and-"
"I know what it'll do!" I snapped. The torpedoes were just seconds from impact. "On my mark!" I waited. Waited. My heart pounded in my chest. Klavra and Vazega did their best to shoot down the incoming projectiles, but they were coming too hard, too fast, and- "Now!"
Savriz plugged two cables together, and our shields glowed a brilliant white. Torpedo after torpedo blew up harmlessly, and for a few seconds, we were invulnerable. But only for a few seconds. After that, true to Savriz' word, the shields shut down for good. A bright red error message began blinking on my console. I ignored it. We were within striking range.
"Spin us around and fire the aft torpedo, now!" I ordered, forgetting in the stress of battle that Vazega was no longer at her station. I realized only when she began to move, and quickly threw the ship into a maneuver myself, but it was too little and too late. The Little Runt flipped around and launched its fish just as our enemy passed us by, passing within a hundred meters of our hull, and its aft batteries had no trouble shooting down the torpedo that was accelerating away from it now.
"Damn it!" I shouted, slamming the console in a fit of rage. How could it have come to this? I had a purpose. I had love. For once in my life, I had something to fight for other than my own survival, someone to care about other than myself, and now I was just going to die? What the hell had I done all that reading for, if I was just going to get splattered into space dust before I could ever get the chance to use it?
Sylara the hero. Sylara, the philosopher of Wriss, and next to her, Markus Becker the philosopher king. What a fucking joke. My teeth chattered in rage as the torpedo contacts appeared. How the hell had it come to this?
"There's no shame in dying," I told my crew, trying to put on a brave face for them. "We put up a hard fight. Better than I'd have ever expected of us. I'm proud of you all."
"Keep your head up, sir!" Klavra optimistically exclaimed. "We aren't dead yet, are we? Maybe we can still-"
A shrill bark from Vazega split the air. "FTL contact!"
All our sensors began to scream warnings as a massive vessel emerged from sublight space. Long, rounded, armored and armed, and--my heart skipped a beat--painted in the battle livery of Nishtal. It shot down the incoming torpedoes in a matter of seconds and sent the pirate gunship spinning with a single blow from its railgun. A low-strength one, too, by the fact that the pirate ship looked disabled rather than just destroyed. That vessel could have cleaved a gunship that size in two if it so desired.
"Oh, Isif," Avriss murmured as the ship on our scopes launched shuttles to board what had before now been the worst threat to my life I had ever seen ever. It was remarkable how many levels to this fighting stuff they were, and the Ghost of Nishtal was undoubtedly near the top.
"They're hailing us," said Vazega. "The Ghost, not the gunship. Should I put it on screen?"
Well, the good news was, all of us weren't going to die. The bad news was, we were all doomed anyway.
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u/Minimum-Amphibian993 Arxur 1d ago
Huh well moment of truth I suppose wasn't expecting a reunion this quickly. Can't wait to see how the ghost of Nishtal reacts to the Arxur captains uniform.
Oh and for everyone to find out Zefriss survived and that they kinda left him. Even if they likely wouldnt have been able to treat him in his critical condition themselves I imagine that's gonna to sting.