The Six-Eyed Beast
Copyright© 2025 by BenLepp
Chapter 35: At the Crossroads
March 1st, 2279
Earlier on the same, very eventful day, a few more conversations were had, as it could not to be avoided for everyone to adjust their plans.
Commander Nasz, still bearing the golden letters SFC RUBICON on her collar, had been quietly removed from the Rubicon’s brig earlier in the morning, shortly after docking at Hangar 46. Ensign Ellip had filled in for Mellir obviously, and refused to listen to Nasz to be allowed one last conversation with Basil, who was simply unavailable, as it was still before noon and no one expected the captain to be awake, which was the correct assumption. So, Nasz found herself in yet another brig, this time the general prisoner cells on Kappa 3, awaiting her first hearing for badly injuring another crew member. She had already spoken to a lawyer, who told her that the reason WHY she shot the crew member could, unfortunately, not be taken into account as the whole mission was declared to never have happened by the relevant Senate Committee. Her shooting Mellir, however, was deemed unconnected to the mission, which left her in the unfortunate legal position that she was accused of shooting a comrade-at-arms in the face without being able to explain why. Nasz’ plan was simple, she would just keep mentioning the mission in court until someone in the Senate would get nervous and declare that the shooting also never happened. The cell she was held in also had other involuntary guests, some drunks picked up by security (a fate Basil would evade by pure chance later that day), some smugglers, even some pirates still awaiting trial. The pirates were giving her collar angry glances, but left her alone. After a while, Nasz realized they had to be Sullt, Sullit and Mak, pirates caught by the Rubicon before her arrival and still apparently waiting for their hearing, which explained why they hated the name on her collar, but didn’t talk to her, since they could not figure out how she was connected to their fate, never having seen her face. Directly next to Nasz sat an unremarkable human, also in fleet uniform, but devoid of any insignia. Nasz thought to herself that this was a good idea, being in prison with enemies of the League and all, and started to remove her rank insignia and the ship’s name as well.
- You can leave the stripes on, Commander Nasz.
Another human, another conversation with humans. Nasz wasn’t in the mood and ignored him.
- I mean it, commander. Commander NASZ.
Yes, he knew her name but she’d worked on Kappa 3 for a few years, first in crew organization then in internal affairs, many knew her name.
- What an unfortunate incident, I’d say you’re paying the price for trying to do the right thing.
Annoyed, tired, and very much in doubt about her future career, which was important to Catanians, she finally turned to look at the plain human.
- What do you want, human?
- I’d like to make your day, if possible.
- And how could you possibly do that, fellow prisoner?
Nasz was fearing she had encountered one of those who were interested in testing the compatibility of their reproduction organs, a growing trend in the League, as curiosity about their counterparts was simply a result of locking them all together in confined spaces, leading to daring new practices and frustrated medical personnel.
- Would you like to walk out of here?
The plain human was sounding more and more like he was trying to compare organs, and Nasz was definitely not up for this.
- I don’t know how I can get this into your tiny, underdeveloped monkey brain, human, but I am not in the slightest interested in you, your people, or your interests.
The plain human looked confused, and even slightly insulted.
- Commander, you seem to have misunderstood. I apologize for my indirect approach. Let me try again: Would you like a new position as XO?
Nasz’ fins twitched, wanting to stand up straight, but the Catanian officer took too much pride in her self-control, quickly suppressing the reflex.
- Which ship?
The plain human made sure the other prisoners were far enough away not to hear the conversation.
- SFC Styx.
- Never heard of it. Which class?
- Styx-class.
- Never heard of it. I find it hard to lend credence to your claim, you soft-skinned...
- I presume you could also call them the Rubicon-class, but that would be against our regulations.
First Rubicon, then regulations. The fins were up finally.
- I would need to know more.
- Absolutely, but can we finally walk out of here? It smells like pirates in here.
- It does indeed.
The security guard they passed on the way out through the formerly locked door looked through them, not acknowledging their presence at all, but the uninvolved prisoners, especially the three pirates, were much impressed at two of their inmates just getting up and opening the door. Sullt, Sullit, and Mak would look at each other for a while and then try the same just a minute later, much to the amusement of the guard, as the door did not swing open for them, Sullt bumping into the door, Sullit into Sullt, and Mak into Sullit, starting a brawl amongst the three brothers, which at least kept the rest of the present entertained for a while, since the guard was on his own (his colleague taking a sudden break just five minutes earlier) and not allowed to step into the cell alone, so he just let the prisoner fight go on, even recording it secretly for their department’s amusement.
Far, far away, on a comfortable liner, Marcus Ellington, the thus far unappreciated Exobiologist of the Rubicon was sinking deeper into the autochair, watching the stars slowly appear towards the liner and then suddenly disappear behind it, as their light was slower than the FTL liner. Autochairs were a simple but genius design, scanning whatever sat on them and then slowly figuring out how said being wanted to sit, reacting to every movement and updating its database on said being until it stopped the minimal movements one made when something was uncomfortable, which for Ellington meant he had slept most of the time the first few days. He was known to his fellow crew members for exactly that: sleeping. But they were young and inexperienced, for what they saw as a lazy and obnoxious aging human was actually a very depressed aging human, trying and failing desperately to fit in somehow. Marcus Ellington wasn’t at all lazy, he simply had no strength left after his old life fell apart, having been a researcher and lecturer at the Herzog Academy just 18 months before, a stable and distinguished seasoned scientist enjoying the fruits of many years of hard academic work. But when his wife died, he had been completely blindsided by the loss of stability he had relied on for so long. She had been ill for some years with a degenerative disorder some races developed for unknown reasons from FTL travels, simply called FTL-DUUC, which stood for “Faster-than-Light Disease of Unknown Underlying Cause” and it was also referred to as DOOM, for there was no cure, just many competing measures to slow it down, such as synthetic body parts, implants, and gene modifications. She had been one of the luckier ones, presenting with a slow progression, but during the course of just three months, it accelerated and when she finally took her last breath, Marcus Ellington also took the last painless breath of his life, the pinching stab in his chest never leaving his side again, as if the Grim Reaper had left his bony hand around his heart as a cruel reminder of his never-ending presence.
At first, Ellington thought he was dealing well with it, but his friends and colleagues – a reliable bunch collected over years of friendly conversations, always a good wine around – noticed this was not the case at all. Whatever had been wrong with Marcus Ellington as he was born, a loving marriage had kept the lid on it. First, he lost weight as he hated eating alone, then he cared less for his appearance or health and finally, he turned to the wine, but without the friends around. He was unable to finish his papers, frequently skipped lectures, leaving frustrated students in the first row and happy students in the back rows. After a few months, he was put on leave from the Academy, the embarrassment of which pushed him deeper into his hole, angrily sending worried friends away until he simply upped and left for the fleet, deciding a new start was what he needed.
A younger Ellington and a young Basil had actually crossed paths at the Academy, as Basil himself was quitting the Academy in an overdramatic response to having his little heart broken to join the newborn war, Ellington – back then an assistant to Basil’s Head of Department – asked to have a final conversation with the student throwing away the very future Ellington would have for a while. The conversation was short, a red-hot Basil just wanting his papers to apply to the fleet and Ellington failing in slowing down the racing mind of the young idiot. Both of them forgot the conversation quickly, as the League was soon in a fight for its very life, but running off to join the fleet was a sidenote left in Ellington’s mind, unaware that he would serve under the young idiot in a strange turn of fate, which was made less strange by the fact that humans at that time could only apply to Herzog, narrowing the pool of fates.
Both regretted their choice soon after it was made at their differing paths in life, Basil for his own reasons and Ellington simply because he took his broken soul with him, barely passing basic training and only being made Lieutenant in Science due to his frankly excessive knowledge of alien lifeforms. As he applied to any ship he could, it was the Rubicon taking him in together with Korolev, just because they were close and Nocks needed the task to be done. As the story of the Rubicon developed, Ellington remained unchanged, his only success being that he had sworn off the wine and started an intense workout routine when joining the Fleet, leaving a physically fit and mentally shattered man. None of his conversations with the crew went well, the Marines simply making jokes at his expense after befriending him in the gym they had set up aboard and trying him out as a backup in simulations. The rest of the crew was too busy having their own fears, and Ellington’s tendency to brute-force his way into conversations didn’t help much, so he relied on Korolev, who retreated from everyone more and more, on the trail of her bigger picture and weary of her surroundings.
Now, Ellington had been sent away on a fact-finding mission and he knew it was simply about getting rid of him, Nasz quickly closing in on the weakest member of the crew, ever the Catanian micromanager. He was supposed to gather intel on the Gill Plague – and why there was absolutely no development aside from the quarantine zone conforming to the Fleet’s availability. As Korolev had stated just before the RND test – Ellington already far away on the first of six consecutive liners he was taking – after all known forms of disease transmission were ruled out, the scientific debate fizzled out and the media reports referred to the quarantine zone simply as a matter of fact, just like the borders the League had agreed upon with their neighbors. But Korolev came through for her former colleague in surveying Indi, sending him a message that put the whole thing into a perspective, a theoretical perspective, but a perspective. And Marcus Ellington felt a sudden spark of excitement long thought lost forever, being sent on a vital mission by accident, but he was going there nonetheless. The Gill Plague, according to Korolev, had been actively introduced to cause a quarantine zone allowing for some kind of research taking place in peace, and Ellington was heading as close as he legally could, to Procyon 3. Procyon 3 was one of the Fringe’s hubs towards the quarantine zone and since it was not in the core sectors – as were some of the seven sectors under quarantine – it was likely the leakiest of all the major planets, allowing Ellington some chance to start asking questions.
He had zero starting points, zero help, and if Korolev was right, he was up against someone who was advanced in technology and keen on keeping their secrets secret. But they were up against a man with frankly nothing at all to lose, on his only chance to prove his worth, first of all to himself, to his wife who was with him at all times and then to the youngsters on the Rubicon. He would find out what was going on in the quarantine zone, and if it was the last thing he did, it simply was to be. Ellington started to think of a story, why an Exobiologist would come to help out against the Gill Plague, officially retired from the Fleet and the Rubicon and applied to some of the many aid organizations working on Procyon 3 to get supplies to the afflicted in the zone. An old dog might not learn new tricks, but that was mostly due to the fact that old dogs already knew the game and didn’t have to. Ellington chuckled at the last thought, as he did like sleeping as much as old dogs did. His grin reflected in the window above the pacing stars, as he would use all that had worked against him recently to his advantage, let them underestimate him all they want.
Basil meanwhile was having another dream or side effect of several people having access to his body. Just after he laid down to sleep off his drunk state, Nocks in her quarters actually got around to programming a simple routine that would solve the quarrel around Basil’s medcomp. All three of them would get accurate data to ensure that none of Basil’s organs failed during vital missions – his heart already being a replacement, due to another long story – but the medcomp would always average out what Basil was doing against what Boddins was doing, to allow the captain to dose up and down as needed for missions and to allow Boddins to countermand the excesses Basil was expected to try. This coding arrived at Basil’s medcomp shortly after he fell asleep, cleaned out the antitranspirants that were still only half-removed from his bloodstream, filtered out the alcohol as requested earlier by Basil himself, but it also gave Basil his vision-inducing sleeping aid, because he had tried and failed to give that order a day earlier, it was still in the queue. Boddins was fast asleep at that point too and would only realize a day later that Nocks had altered the deal once more, as she had done with Mellir’s implants. It surely seemed like Nocks and Boddins would have an open conversation soon, but for the meantime, it meant that Basil changed stimulants whilst asleep, which led to a strange, strange dream where he himself was drifting outside time and space, seeing universes appear, age, and collapse in bubbles, hearing every happy moment and seeing every sorrow ever had in said universes, as if he was an all-knowing God, which he liked. He decided to go into one of the dying universes, and from the perspective of those within, there were still billions of years left on the clock for their universe, so they were doing the usual, gathering what was desired, putting their name into history books of varying reach and making sure their specific species’ next generation looked a bit like them. Sometimes, they got drunk in a billion bars to choose from within their plane of existence, and one of those bars caught the attention of the visiting God, since it was on a planet that had broken up, sitting atop one of the rocks, in a fog so thick only the bright beams of the establishment could break, giving the place beautiful privacy in the many tunnels, and a light show looking down at a fractured planet. As the all-knowing God walked into this bar, just having a look around and enjoying the never-before seen alien spectacle, he spotted a table seating two aliens in something that was either a uniform or their sports gear, being on the same team in any case. What peaked the all-knowing God’s interest was that they were drinking from human skulls. Relying on the knowledge that he would surely be invisible to the lower lifeforms, the all-knowing God sat down beside them.
The aliens were huge, having to hunch over the foggy table in the tight corner they had chosen, and they were unusual to say the least. They were made from tiny triangles, constantly adapting their position when one of them moved. When one of them drank from the large human skulls almost as tall as the sitting all-knowing God, it would simply be pulled inside a hole in their body, the fluids streaming upwards in sips, disappearing behind the triangles. Whatever they were drinking smelt like wet ash and looked much like the lightshow outside, frequently hitting parts of the smacked planet, lighting up a dead city or two. There were no faces or limbs in these creatures, just shapes adapting to a strange play, likely having meaning for them not unlike facial expressions or body language. Even their uniforms were made out of smaller units of said triangles quickly covering them once their body had morphed. Strangely enough, the all-knowing God could, as an all-knowing God would, understand them, and very well at that. One of them morphed towards the hole in the rock, allowing for a view onto a dead and obviously war-torn city.
- I used to walk these levels.
The other being turned towards the city, but quickly back to the drink in a skull.
- Nothing remains forever, only the memory for a while.
- Until they do it again, erasing the memory to make space for a new one. A cycle.
- Have you heard the story of the Six-Eyed Beast? A Talenter told me right there, on this corner down there, where the crack starts.
- I have not. Does it have much meaning or was it just another bit stolen from the time this planet had?
- It fought the cycle, for a while, far away from here in another web of stories.
- What did it achieve?
- The cycle broke it, not they themselves the cycle.
- As I said, stolen time.