The Six-eyed Beast
Copyright© 2025 by BenLepp
Chapter 1: A Walk on Kappa 3
January 10th, 2279
Although it was but a soft rumble going through the liner, Basil shot up in his seat, immediately wide awake. Anyone who has ever been on a ship that disintegrated would forever associate the rumbling and creaking of large metallic objects with nothing but pure dread.
We’ve docked.
He looked up to see the gangway quickly filling with busy feet, everyone rushing to get out of the line transport and onto Kappa Station 3 as soon as possible. He preferred to remain seated, but to his dismay, the elderly Catanian lady to his left was already standing next to him, staring him down. He got up, let her pass and sat down again, avoiding eye contact. He was easily angered these days and was trying his darndest to avoid a conversation with anyone who was an obvious idiot.
The crowd pushed forward like a herd of cattle. Soon, only a few patient souls remained and calmly collected their belongings from the hatches below their seats. Basil was not carrying much; he was still using the same black duffel bag they had given him when he left Xi 1 for the SFC Santa María two years ago. He had expected to accumulate more random items after becoming a crew member of the María, but two years on he still had not done so. In Covert Operations, known simply as CO, he had never been in one place for a long time, mostly due to the unpleasantness of the affairs CO was involved in, making it unsafe to stay after an operation had concluded. And on the María, he failed to make a home in several aspects.
Now, he was walking down the pylon, trotting along in the crowds that departed arriving ships. There must have been at least 5 large liners and a dozen smaller vessels docked at this moment. Almost everyone was walking in the same direction towards the circular docking ring of Kappa 3, which itself was connected to the absolutely massive center section that would have looked like an egg standing on its pointy side, were it not for the protruding comms and sensor arrays on both ends of the egg and the fact that eggs don’t have giant hangar doors along their shell, looking like hungry fish mouths swallowing smaller vessels.
When enough people walk the same direction on a hard surface, they tend to sync up the rhythm of their feet, despite being unaware of it and members of at least two dozen different races he could make out. There were even some Horons, easily spotted by their long necks sticking out of the crowd but he preferred to not dwell on that for too long, as it reminded him of captain Zul. Ultimately, the docking ring was reached and he got in line for a tube pod. He had originally planned to walk to the experimental division’s offices to soak in the life on Kappa 3, but he was already running late due to the liner’s detour when the quarantine zone was extended.
The line moved ahead rapidly as one pod after the other departed through the myriads of tubes leading into the center section of Kappa 3. It was almost like a factory line, hundreds of people standing in dozens of lines, only to take a good step forward every 15 seconds or so. He was now second in line, but the eccentrically clad man in front of him had difficulties marking his destination. Basil gave it another minute and then stepped forward.
- May I lend a hand?
The eccentric kept rotating the floor plan of reactor deck 5. Surely, his destination lay elsewhere.
- Ah, these things. We used to have voice control back in the day, you know ... But those new members and their mumbly languages...
- Where do you need to go, sir?
Basil was trying the respect route.
- I got some business with the guys running sector 72 trade, you know, these Kelbings.
- The Kelbings?
Basil had tilted his head backwards realizing his mistake in opening a conversation and was looking towards the level above, lucky people quickly departing in their oval pods.
- You mean the Quelnik?
- Yeah, yea ... Sector 72. They won’t let our goods in you know. Need to talk them down a bit.
- May I?
Basil stepped forward, the eccentric mustering him from the side. He closed the floorplan and tapped the giant square reading VOICE CONTROL.
- Quelnik representative offices.
The system opened another floorplan and marked a tube exit and some further directions on it.
- There you go.
The eccentric was still eyeing his uniform. The Senatorial Fleet had tried to rebrand several years back when the committee on public opinion had come to the conclusion their light grey jumpsuit combos were no longer conveying the image of a strong, united fleet ready for the challenges of the decade. Originally, the crews were happy to get an upgrade, but the design committee had tried to address all needs laid out on a very long list and arrived at a true monster of a uniform adapted to all possible environments and comfortable in none of them. Now, Basil was stuck with a stiff, thick black uniform with blue inlays, his collar still bearing the name SFC SANTA MARÍA on the left in golden letters along with his rank insignia on the right side, identifying him as a commander first grade with 5 full stripes. At least he didn’t have to wear the endosuit off-duty.
- You’re with the fleet?
Basil was unsure how to answer, his first instinct was to say he was an actor here to film one of those dreadful recruitment commercials with happy families waving at each other from ship’s windows but he was also well-aware of the sickly, pale and tired face sticking out of the black straight jacket so he would then have to either convince the eccentric or admit the joke, both options prolonging the interaction. Behind them, people were politely stepping aside into the other lines, apart from a small alien completely lost in some sort of headgear device.
- I am.
- You seen some action?
- Haven’t. Mostly logistics.
Logistics is awesome. Nobody gives a fuck and they all go away.
- My daughter has. She’s half a damn robot now, got wiped clean off her station. They sent a science frigate to the line! Lions led by donkeys; I tell you. What a horrible universe!
Basil again decided to play an NPC.
- I’m sorry to hear that. Hope your trip goes well.
Basil was generally pointing his arm at the open door behind the eccentric, revealing the comfy 6-seater pod waiting to get him to ruin a random Quelnik’s day.
- Commander, eh. Logistics is the safe route I see. Must be proud.
Listen here you comically-dressed, trash-trading Plebeian...
Basil just stood there, arm still extended to the doorway, trying to look unmoved. A few seconds passed until the eccentric felt the awkwardness of the moment and uneasy due to their difference in size and decided to get abord the pod. Basil smiled, activated the interface on his wrist implant and reported suspicious activity in pod 30592, possibly terrorist intentions.
When he finally entered his own pod and sat down on his way to the experimental division’s headquarters – or at least the general area – Basil had his implant open the full display. Any implants were voluntary in the fleet, but only in the sense that you had to sign a declaration to have them voluntarily implanted, the open secret was that you’d not move up much in the fleet if you stayed vanilla. Having been with Covert Operations, Basil was riddled with implants. Some were of medical necessity, replacing vital organs, parts of which were likely still stuck to his former workplace on the SFC Tel’neo or whatever remained of the ill-fated vessel, some were of general nature, such as the replacement of the radius bone of the non-dominant arm to insert the pop-up display they all used for comms, personal connections, “entertainment”, and data storage and again some were uniquely geared towards his work in CO, such as the brain implants that allowed him to move certain memories out of the human brain and into an encrypted environment. In case of capture, any operative would be a useless interrogation target since they had the added ability to lock themselves out of their own storage and only CO headquarters could unlock it afterwards. This had the benefit of providing CO with operatives that rarely let sensitive data slip – a problem that had plagued them in the bright era, since need-to-know rarely works with humans and the likes stuck together for months on a listening post and willing to talk about almost anything to alleviate the boredom of observation stints. It did, however, have several downsides, one being that rescuing captured operatives was not seen as a priority but the major issue being that opposing sides would simply get rid of any prisoners they took after a simple pat-down and search.
In this instance, Basil was just doing research. Since it had become a habit, it was a fully automated process. First, the script searched the official bulletins, news reports and non-official sources for any new ship names that ended on -ON ‒ and having the letter R somewhere before that, with at least three to five letters in-between and an unknown number of letters before that. It also extended an almost infinite-seeming list with all known words matching said description. Then, it went over to any news on changing of naming conventions for the Senatorial Fleet that could provide a hint on the ship and person he was looking for. Naming conventions in the fleet were nothing but a monstrosity of bureaucracy and diplomacy. With 45 member states of the Senatorial League – most of them themselves encompassing several races on dozens of worlds speaking a plethora of different languages – competition to get a ship named after something your specific community was proud of was tough. Currently, they were pumping out as many ships as they could, but the public list of proposed names already waiting to be painted or projected onto a hull could encompass most known moons. And oh, so many of them ended on -ON, there even was a language somewhere in sector 11 where their equivalent of nouns exclusively ended on -ON simply as a grammatical feature. Anything also containing – or starting with – an R was a suspect. And then there were transliterations and different opinions on how to write names, places, concepts, and events correctly. Then again, it was sometimes accepted that a captain named his or her or their own ship according to their own culture and preferences which had the benefit of cutting down on arguments on names but added to the pressure to equally distribute commands between member states, contributing in different ways to the same standardized fleet – only the Axxi didn’t seem too interested in being captains. However, equal distributions had led to some truly baffling examples where people had been made captain without the relevant experience or character, resulting in some entertaining and some less entertaining incidents.
His pod stopped, reversed and took another tube. Security was apparently arresting someone ahead.
Basil had spent the past 18 years checking every ship sporting a fitting name. His immediate focus were two ships, the Marathon and the Paragon. But – contrary to what the name initially suggested ‒ there simply were no human women abord and that hadn’t changed, Basil keeping up with any transfers. Another ship, the Suritzon, had been lost 61 years earlier in a strange accident, but he had been able to rule out any of the humans abord. He was out of ideas how to narrow his search. There were currently an estimated 34 billion humans buzzing around the Milky Way, eagerly reproducing ever since genetic engineering and cheaper robots helped to alleviate the less desirable aspects of parenthood. There were some issues with earlier models but by his time, they were largely considered safe and public opinion was shaped by whole generations growing up liking their robot parents slightly more than their human parents.
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