“Gahn! We are not leaving her there after everything she’s done for us!”

  “This has been nothing but a catastrophic disaster! We need to minimize our losses and head home now! It’s in their hands now!”

  “‘It’?! ‘It?!’ ‘It’ is a person! I can’t have it in my conscience knowing we just condemned her!”

  “You can either make the hard and right decision, or go with the one that feels good. I won’t be risking the lives and livelihoods of my troops any further! We don’t have the capacity to get her out! We’re leaving!”

  “Tell me how we’ll leave, then! Look how many holes just got blasted in your ship. They’ll see us before we can even limp out of here. When are you going to get it in your head that they don’t want witnesses?!”

  “You dare talk to me like that?! You think we’re what they want?! They got what they wanted! And we got what we wanted, to get this off our hands! What more do you want?!”

  “Fine! Care about what you want! Want to play selfish? Want to know your ticket out of here? It’s her! There’s no way you’re making it out of this system alive, playing by the rules when they’re after you like that! If we don’t get her out, we don’t stand a chance in any fight!”

  “So let’s say we succeed in taking that risk then. What then? You saw what happened on Qiaou? More lives could be at stake, Vertan! We’ll be on the run and it won’t help with protecting any further peace!”

  “And why would that be our fault? Why do we bear that responsibility? Focus on what we’re responsible for right now! Our mission was to negotiate the safe repatriation of Lym to her homeworld! As long as she’s held captive out there, this shit is not off of our hands!”

  Gahn slams the table angrily at Vertan’s last statement before quickly recollecting himself. Somehow, he hated that Vertan turned out to be right this time. He knows as a member of his rank, he has to act according to such a degree of honor. But he hated that it had to have come from Vertan, he hated that of all the sources this issue could have derived from, it was his friend from childhood who always struggled to stay out of trouble. The cosmos may as well mock him with such insults in this situation.

  “Or, we can bleed out here until we run out of air,” Vertan continued. “We can try running out of here without insurance. We don’t have very many options.”

  Gahn looks back up at Vertan, barely able to meet him in the eye. It should be his fault. It should be! Vertan is always as he is. But Gahn can’t deny that he himself has been the officer leading the charge thus far. The handling of such a responsibility nonetheless falls back on his shoulders.

  “I’m going to regroup what we have,” he finally stated. “We’ll plan and strategize around what we can do.”

  Vertan exhaled a deep sigh of relief. Underneath the solemn and stoic expression, he found himself deeply worried and concerned for Lym’s wellbeing, and an unshakeable guilt for what had thus far occurred. Suddenly, he found himself regretting all of their past conflicts.

  Gahn moves over to angrily send out communications on a hidden line.

  *****

  Lym endured hours of excruciating pain as she is restrained, contained, and ultimately transferred through the inner workings and facilities of the planet. The place was surprisingly disorienting even to her, though she reasoned that her thinking must not be entirely clear when enduring such suffering. She has since been continually hit with various wavelengths of these agonizing beams, shockwaves, in addition to being chained by the shifting, searing material. Her robes have since been forcefully removed, and on her now bare body, open wounds would briefly betray various struggling mechanical parts underneath before quickly trying to sew itself shut, only for a new cut to open elsewhere.

  And yet, surprisingly enough, this is not the most painful part of the experience for her. For the first time, she felt something within her that seemed to be overwhelmingly despairing, and in denial of the current circumstances.

  But it made no logical sense. Even being there during her final mission with her brother Aru, she distinctly remembered that there was not, (what would one call it?) the same sense of grief that she is feeling now.

  Grief.

  So the feeling is grief.

  It at first seemed nonsensical. Millennia of experience together, how could she have possibly not grieved her brother’s fate as much? It was illogical. Irrational!

  Perhaps, something made sense within that. Perhaps, in already being condemned to the then-inevitable beforehand, she was allowed to make peace with that fact. And knowing her cultural background, there was at least some kind of subconscious expectation that she would eventually rejoin her brother, even if in death.

  But here, Lym couldn’t help but grieve intensely despairingly for Vertan.

  Somehow, in spite of the countless millennia of war, death, and destruction, she found herself in denial over the fate of a single individual.

  He has to be alive. He has to be! She couldn’t tell whether they shot off into space safely, but she has to believe in it. Yes, of course, there were all the other matters to do with finding her gunship and making her way back home, yet those didn’t feel as heavy. Vertan cannot be dead. He can’t! Not the one person who has shown her a glimpse into something so different.

  A distressful aura suddenly bears down upon her, as her vision continues to swim.

  They must have entered some kind of laboratory now. Some sort of facility made for highly secretive experimentations. But it wasn’t this fact that shook her. Rather, there was an almost familiar language to some of the lab subjects, whether they ranged between weapons, or biologically grown limbs and organs.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The place felt deeply, deeply haunted, and for a moment, she could feel the presence of her people moaning out to her from the walls.

  Arriving within a massive chamber, the instruments lining the walls immediately reached out to latch onto her, binding her in place from a hundred different directions, increasing her agony tenfold. Yet still, it was clear that they wanted to keep her alive, and so, alive she was kept.

  Multiple layers worth of thick, heavy doors shut closed, and from behind a hidden place, she could sense people watchfully observing her.

  *****

  Given the damage sustained, it was thus safer for everyone to move from the flagship onto the other surviving ships. The flagship’s backup systems can only sustain environmental equilibrium for so long before giving out. To their shock, only a handful remain relatively unscathed from the battle.

  “Our options are very limited here,”says Gahn. “I know some of us prefer otherwise, but I still believe our safest bet is gathering everybody onto one ship and quietly making our way out of here.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Zviedal,” began one of Gahn’s subordinates named Kliar. “Should we actually attempt to retrieve the subject, how will we know where to locate her?”

  “This conversation has been long-winded already,” another subordinate named Pilri comments tiredly. “There’s no saving the subject. You said it yourself that hidden under that world’s surface, it’s too much for any of us to handle—”

  “Well, don’t we still have her navigation device on the research vessel?” Vertan asks. “That’s how we’ll locate her, that’s—”

  “Yeah, right, as if any of us has figured out how to use it in any meaningful way,” remarks another subordinate, named Rion. He rubs his eyes for a moment. “Even suppose that we do locate the subject, what do you expect us to realistically do?”

  “You try and talk about realism under a clearly unrealistic situation?!” Vertan exclaims. “Are you serious? That ain’t fair! What part of anything to do with them is remotely realistic—”

  “Alright, alright, let’s put it under a fair democratic vote then what we plan on doing,” says Gahn. “So that we all have equal say, sound good? I will even ignore my rank for the moment for this case so that I can properly hear everyone out. Those in favor of Vertan’s plan, raise your hand.”

  Except for Vertan’s arm, nobody raises their hand.

  “Those in favor of mine?”

  Everyone except for Vertan raises their hand.

  “So, we have reached our consensus,” declares Gahn. “This issue is—”

  Suddenly, a knock at the door.

  “What is it?” Gahn grumbles, coming to open the door.

  “Um, something has been waiting to meet you,” answered Aolia.

  As Aolia stepped aside, everyone in the room was shocked to see before them, Lym’s suit, as it walked into the room. It moved with an eerie quietness, if not heaviness, due to sustained damage.

  “What?!” exclaimed Gahn. “What is that?! How did—”

  But before he could finish, the suit calmly produced the navigator in its hand, bringing it into clear view, before placing it into a slot in its left arm. A holographic map of the planet comes into display, and upon automatically zooming in, the icons for both Lym and the gunship display on different parts of the planet.

  The suit’s right arm lifted up with both grace and robotic precision, and pointed towards one of the symbols, which brightened and shifted shape and color.

  “Lym,” its synthetic voice answered. It then repeated the process for the other icon. “Vessel.”

  Everyone for a moment stood in amazement at the autonomous suit. It too, stood still, whilst still holding out its left arm, displaying the glowing map. Not far from their position, indicators for other unknown objects fly by, likely Coalition vessels in search of them.

  “So,” Vertan finally answers. “You wanted to ask what we can realistically do. Here’s our solution. If you were paying any attention earlier, it was this guy right here that helped us get out alive in the first place.”

  “That,” stammered Kliar. “That thing?”

  “Oh, no, I recognize it now,” said Gahn, almost tiredly. “The subject was wearing it. Looks like the two can work separately.”

  “However,” says Pilri. “We all saw what happened earlier. If anything, we still have less than what we started with. Mr. Zviedal, how do you expect us to achieve this operation given that we were all almost done for, back there?”

  “We gave ourselves to them on a silver platter that time,” answered Vertan. “And I know that they’re too arrogant to think we’ll attempt any surprises.”

  *****

  Various tests immediately went underway on Lym, many of which were excruciatingly painful to her. She could feel that in some of the pipes that had violated her skin, her blood was slowly siphoned out. Simultaneously, a different generic fluid was pumped into her at the same rate, and her body quickly and hungrily metabolizes it immediately into her system.

  The robbery of her genetic code continued to be carried out in systematic order.

  A brief break between the constant influx of experimentations saw the arrival of General Hiau in the chamber. Given her authority and physical power, it was not hard to understand that she is perhaps the only individual there able to take on such a risk. Lym could make out that Hiau was talking into a hidden earpiece.

  “Good to see the resources at hand are of use. How far along until completion? 99.78%? Is that last 0.22% really that challenging to accomplish? Hm. I see. Well, very good; carry on. At 100%, we would be able to reliably replicate their genome and beat them at their own game. This mess will be over with—”

  Suddenly, Lym lets out a cry of pain.

  Immediately turning around, General Hiau assesses the situation, before coming to the conclusion that the situation was almost amusingly curious. Approaching Lym, Hiau peers down upon the broken woman.

  “So,” General Hiau comments. “It does feel pain.”

  “Of course I do,” Lym seethes, her teeth almost gnashing.

  General Hiau raises an eyebrow in surprise.

  “Such impressive mimicking capabilities,” she commented. “It knows how to speak our language.”

  “Is this what this is?” Lym seethes once more. “You can’t even address me as a person? What do you believe in?”

  “I believe in the good and progress that I will be bringing to the stars, demonic scum,” Hiau replied, clearly offended. With a barely restrained hatred, one of her four arms grabs Lym by the throat with crushing strength, lifting her into the air.

  “Decades of bringing destruction to countless innocents amongst the cosmos!” she angrily shouted. “You disgusting vermin never should have crawled out of your decrepit planet! The suffering you have caused—”

  “Vermin?!” Lym managed to choke out. “We are Happians! We are people, proud and strong!”

  Managing to take in a breath, with a mighty blow, Lym blows a ferocious gust of wind at General Hiau, causing her to fly back and slam into the opposite wall. Hiau’s eyes are filled with fury, simultaneously as they are filled with awe, fear, and confusion.

  “We are Happians!” Lym shouted out again, her voice carrying itself through the facility. “We are people, proud and strong!”