The Six-eyed Beast
Copyright© 2025 by BenLepp
Prologue: Swansong for the Tel’neo
May 15th, 2261
The shock wave threw both blast doors into the bridge, cutting down the rearmost workstations along with anyone working on them, notably the senior tactical officer, who had up until that moment counted down the time to impact and inadvertently his own demise.
Although the force fields deployed just a fraction of a second later, first a flash, then a flaming heatwave rolled into the bridge and a myriad of fine splinters peppered the remaining officers on deck. Some – such as the captain in the center of the bridge – were protected by the large chairs attached to their stations ‒ encompassing them almost fully ‒ whilst those sitting perpendicular to the path of the oncoming shrapnel along both sides of the bridge were cut down like tress hit by an avalanche. The large view screen bowward flickered and lost most of its panels – some turning off, some now showing a still image – but no one was giving them any attention at this point anyways. All remaining eyes were peeled on their respective workstations and their various displays, each remaining officer trying to stay on top of the situation as much as was still possible, quickly taking over responsibilities from those who had just been mauled by the shrapnel and the heavy stained blast doors now resting against the surprisingly strong back railing. Midshipman Anthony Basil took over for tactical. He could not really remember the order of responsibilities when taking over: Although they had rehearsed on who continues what in case personnel was lost or unable to perform their duties, most of the junior crew had just read off a list geared towards them in a way only they could see the screen – the infamous privacy screen setting their instructors considered to be the main reason crews were dumbing down in recent years. The general consensus among the youngsters, however, was that if that many were lost, there were no longer any real duties to perform in an orderly manner anyways and they would already be busy running to the escape pods.
- Ion spool 2 offline, we’re losing acceleration. Flash ready.
Basil had been lucky, his – now former - science and sensors station was on the lowest level of the bridge diagonally next to the helm pit and the ones further to the rear had taken the brunt of the abuse, but this was of no comfort to him as he was watching the red triangle on his display line up for another shot. He did see the dark red, stationary spots on his station, the displayed units moving below and through them but preferred not to look for the source of the splatter.
- Engineering – how far are you with that pod?
Captain Moanteli Zul was now almost ducking in his chair. He had been asked by the chief just days earlier if he wanted a larger chair, since Horons were fairly tall with long necks, cylindrical heads and extremities that easily wrapped around their torso twice (their preferred sleeping position if no suitable tree stump or the like was available). He had politely declined, stating that the FSLV’s policy of taking the average of all member’s measurements for their ship’s interiors was more than just a symbolic act, it was a daily reminder for him and his crew that collaboration between species required sacrificing some comfort for the greater good of unity and cohesion among the Fleet’s servants. Now he was reconsidering for but a moment until his shock wore off and his priorities became clearer.
- Engineering?
- Launching shuttlepod...
Zul didn’t recognize the creaky voice answering him from below, a worrying sign since he was very familiar with the most senior officers down in engineering. The midshipman to his left started yelling.
- Incoming! Vector...
- Drop the mine, Basil!
Basil was much more worried about the incoming projectile than about their previous plan with the mine, but luckily, the tactical display from the ill-fated officer had carried over the whole setup, so he simply slapped through the orange holographic circle hovering above his interface, momentarily distorting the whole colorful display of range, speed, vectors, friend-foe-coding and type of object. Back in the day, when holographic interfaces where introduced, crews complained about the lack of feedback, but were ignored until technology evolved to a point where holographic feedback became available by feeding soft shocks into the hands and fingers of the user. Again, the crews complained of numbness and twitching fingers after long shifts and again, they were ignored until holo-displays no longer had to shock them for feedback but actually became somewhat physical entities. Currently, crews were complaining that forceful use of the system led to the temporary distortions Basil just created (and tended to use the classic liquid displays behind the holos), but RND had not commented on the issue before the Rogelein Incident sparked the current conflict, which moved this item far down the list of priorities.
The whole ship shuddered as two weighty items left the hull, one through the minechute, one through the hangar, and now, the remaining five crew on deck watched the still functional panels on the view screen, showing the rear of the ship pulling a streak of hot gasses and ejecting the odd debris whilst the swaying cylindrical mine departed at high speed, followed by the shuttlepod turning and ramping up power in the ISE. Both were soon approached by a green meteor going in the opposite direction.
They had already dropped their HEMs in the early stage of the pursuit and the first enemy hits had taken out two of the four FFR reactors so replacing even the fairly simple HEMs had not been possible due to a lack of energy – it was sorely needed in the engines. They had also lost all sternward weaponry, but their frigate with its laughable firepower in the bow had even more useless weaponry in any other part of the hull, so this hadn’t even been commented on by the bridge crew. What they did have left was an FRM ‒ commonly called a flash, a fusion-reaction mine capable of generating a short-lived but incredibly bright and fast-expanding irradiating explosion to not only temporarily overload any visual sensors (or biological sensors such as unlucky eyeballs) but also to fry active guidance systems and trackers if they were not physically shielded from the intense radiation burst. This tech had been around in the fleet for decades by this point but it was simple and effective: If your enemy dropped a flash, you could either save your sensitive equipment by closing the blinds or risk having to rely on secondary or redundant systems after it went off and fried your systems. There were numerous historical and not so distant cases of cat and mouse being played ‒ where one ship would drop a flash and the other ship would retreat all sensors into the shell or cover them up, only to realize that the flash would not go off. As soon as the pursuer switched back to active tracking, the pursued had the option of igniting the flash in a delayed manner, resulting in a temporary advantage. Thus, ships would often switch their trackers on and off during an engagement as long as a live flash was rotating nearby (and positioned in the general direction of sensitive tech), hoping to catch the right moment.
In this instance, however, the SFC Tel’neo had sequentially dropped four HEMs at their pursuers (the Chipperoo class frigate was always expected to run in an engagement, so it was quickly equipped with mines in a hasty afterthought), destroying one of the pursuing Oopid gunships in the process. Therefore, the remaining two ships never realized the change in tactics despite the delay between the first four drops and the last drop (the mines looking alike) and proceeded to train their secondaries onto the oncoming threat, ready to blast it when it came into range.
Almost none of the remaining Tel’neo crew ever found out if their idea would work since the green meteor had arrived. The second direct hit came in lower, between the third deck and its upper support deck and detonated somewhere below. The resulting expansion threw the second deck as well as its support deck up into the command deck and virtually split the survivable area of the Tel’neo into two disconnected habitats, loosely held together by the remaining structure. A major part of the hull shattered outwards into space as the keel – the main beam structuring the ship ‒ cracked, but to the officers on the bridge, it felt like the keel came up through the floor.
Strangely, there was no sound. At least to the three survivors, whose eardrums had not been able to process the rapid pressure increase. Basil came to, standing in a brightly lit room. He recognized some of the equipment in front of him as belonging to the familiar line of clinically clean black and blue smoothly edged designs in the Senatorial Fleet, but it was clearly not the layout of the Tel’neo. To him, it felt like thinking of a core memory, adapted and modified over time as the human brain tends to play with often recalled events. But it wasn’t. It was familiar and at the same time new to him. And it felt important, oh so important, just like Basil’s friends had described their wedding ceremony or the birth of a child. There was someone with him, standing close to his right. As he tried to look around, his vision did not follow his intended movements. He was a passenger in his own eyes, watching himself watching something. Momentarily, the visible area shifted slightly downwards and to the right and he saw an artificial-looking hand reach out to the dark hair of a woman standing next to him. His focus narrowed as the hand which was his own and not his own reached the thick hair with the back of the fingers ‒ as if correcting how her shoulder-length hair fell over her collar. A golden pin forming the letter R shone through in-between the hazel strands, attached to said collar. As the fingers pushed the hair aside, starting near her throat, the final letters O and N were uncovered some distance from the letter R. Basil would have loved to see the rest of the letters, but his hand would not follow his commands, instead, it was passing through the hair, reaching for the back of her neck, the fingers bending into an inward grabbing motion, his arm now covering the view onto the letters. Strangely, although he knew his peripheral vision clearly showed a face intently looking at him from wide dark eyes, all he could really make sense of was a soft, rounded jawline and an earring that extended into a small, silver chain now swaying, disturbed by his hand passing through it. Then, as if a camera had changed focus, his glance went past her head, revealing a tall, slender man some distance away. There was nothing immediately remarkable about him, he was standing there in the same unfamiliar black uniform the woman was wearing, looking at him in a very uninvolved fashion, like watching people pass him by in a park. But somehow, Basil knew this man was not supposed to be there, or supposed to be somewhere else, like a smudge on an oil painting. As Basil was still trying to understand where he was and what he was looking at, the mirror shattered and it all went dark.
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