anorthodox: January 2011

"Captain, the caravan is passing through the jungle in sector S5W9." said the young and ambitious officer.
"Keep all sensors locked on them and their surroundings. Don't miss anything. If the fat guy farts, I want to know about it. Well, maybe not literally." joked the not so young and disillusioned Captain rather twitchily.

He finds himself attracted to powerful, older women. She finds herself attracted to younger, subordinate males. A match made in heaven. Or rather, interplanetary space.

"He's so cute when he calls me 'Captain', if only he was a bit dumber." she catches herself thinking.
"Run full diagnostics on everything. Twice. I want everything running better than perfectly. We cannot fuck this up." she says, revealing the source of her anxiety.

The ship is an S-class cruiser. S stands for shit. The only things keeping this spaceship together are a genius mechanic and the space fairies. Nothing will run 'better than perfectly'. The people who sent them here were arrogant.
"Captain?"
"Yes?"
"We've received orders to open a live feed of updated sensor reports."
"See to it. We are the 'eye in the sky'."
"Yes ma'am."

The people who sent them here are the United Planets Ltd. A bunch of manipulating arrogant corpocrat bastards. In the nicest possible way. The ship was drafted during the Upper Spiral War, the owner died in the war, the ship became UP property. Everything legislated in infinite wisdom. It is sent here on escort and recon duties.

"Captain, the report feed is live."
"Bring it up on a side-screen please, I'd like to double-check." she says knowing full well that this is beneath her duties. She's hoping that the crew can't tell how stressed she is.
"Certainly."

He is so well trained she would probably be turned on if she weren't about to have an aneurysm. Well, one that the nanotechnites wouldn't prevent anyway.

"Lieutenant, have the AI check that everyone down there was also on the Atlas."

The Atlas is the tradeship they are escorting. Tradeship is a euphemism, the Atlas is actually a slave-carrier. Against the hull of the Atlas are smashed the hopes of those that believed that in the age of faster-than-light space travel, there would be no ignorance.The owner/captain of the Atlas and galactic division manager of UP Human Resources, Xenon, is in the center of the caravan, down on the planet's surface. He's the big, fat, ugly dot.

"Bring up full visible spectrum, infra-red and make sure we can see everyone, all the time. The fuckers in UP may be too arrogant to acknowledge this people's ability to defend themselves, but I'm not." mumbles the captain with an almost imperceptible streak of panic in her voice. She can feel something is wrong. "Have the AI filter everything with everything it has, if there's someone down there other than the UP fucks and their entourage, we need to know so we can warn them in time."

The screens are lit up with roughly thirty blobs of various shapes and sizes, this is a multi-species mission after all, seen from several different angles and in a variety of wavelengths. Continuous reports are fed to all of the escort ships' AIs from the neural prosthetics of the caravan members as per standard mission protocol. The blobs are the slaver Xenon and his entourage of bodyguards, mercenaries and general lackeys.

"What's wrong with this picture?" the captain thinks to herself. "Why is everything so quiet?" she mumbles.
"Pardon ma'am?"
"This is a goddamn jungle right? Where are the fucking animals?"
"Nowhere apparently."
"What?"
"The AI just finished a scan of its sensory information for lifeforms in the vicinity..." says the lieutenant coyly.
"And?"
"Nothing for at least two miles around the caravan ma'am."
"What? Fuck. I knew there was something wrong. Fuck!" control visibly slipping away from the captain.

The tribe watches silently as the slavers pass through them. The sight of the obscenely obese slaver and his extravagantly armed entourage sicken them. But they don't even twitch. Surrounded by the rainforest's thick foliage, and covered head to toe in their Dense Matter armor, they are invisible.

"Captain, should I inform the caravan?"
"And tell them what? 'Lookout! There's nothing around you!'"
"Even so, we have to let them know."
"Fine, whatever..."
"I don't even like the bastard, I hope something bad does happen to him." the captain grumbles inwardly.

First heartbeat, the guards and goons at the back of the caravan have the breath knocked out of their lungs, or whatever respiratory organ natural selection has deemed them worthy to carry. It will never return.

"Lieutenant? Why has the back third of the caravan stopped moving?"

Second heartbeat, the attack spreads through the caravan violently. Arms and legs constrict and clamp around air passages and vital fluid vessels. Bones and exoskeletons are crushed, internal organs pulverised. Bodies are twisted beyond recognition, even on their own home-planet, into parodies of their former selves.

"Lieutenant! What's happening? Talk to me!"

Third heartbeat, the tribe, like flickering shadows in the corner of one's eye, complete the attack. Some of the finest UP mercenary personnel lies brutally broken in a grisly variety of ways. The slaver Xenon stands stunned in the middle. He didn't see them move. Nobody did. Maybe they'll show up when they play the recordings in slow motion. Maybe.

"Lieutenant!"
"They're all dead..."
"What?"
"No vital signs from the entire caravan apart from Xenon."

He is left for last. The tribe drags him into the thick vegetation. Perhaps, dragging doesn't best describe the motion. He is flung into the jungle. The probes assigned to Xenon helplessly observe. The slaver is strung up. Dark shadows dart back and forth all around him. Xenon's screams are recorded and fed live to the Atlas and all its escorting vessels. They will give some UP executives a couple of sleepless nights but not much more. The shadows stop. They've disappeared entirely, swallowed by the darkness that spat them out only heartbeats ago. Xenon is hanging upside down, being drained of his bodily fluids through innumerable cuts, lacerations, gashes and slashes. The one from ear to ear finished him, though not before a sufficient amount of suffering was recorded by his neuromesh and transmitted back to the ships above.

"No vital signs from Xenon, Captain..."
"We are so fucked..."