Mortal Protection Services X.DB: Displayed in Bronze
"We should totally answer it." I told Ingamar over the captain's comm line. "If there's a chance we can talk it into submission somehow, I'd rather do that."
"Jimmi, I'll bet you my left and right nut that the SCOURGE isn't gonna get talked into a peace agreement." He shot back.
"I expect you'll get to keep your balls, brother, but I'm gonna answer the hail. Just in case." I turned to Jimtarng. "Open comm channels, let's see what the Scourge has to say... I guess."
A static heavy mess appeared onscreen, and a moment later resolved into the shape of the woman that had had a metal peg leg, from the scourge trap. Like it had made a fresh, slightly better copy to talk with us. This one did not have a prosthetic leg, but she did have a big, uncanny smile on her face that didn't touch her eyes. Behind her was what looked like a wall of moist, pulsing, flesh.
"Hello there." I went with a strong, general-esque, opener.
"Hello." She looked... a little less Hapsburgish this time than the last time. "Why did you bomb the ship?"
"What ship?"
"The ship. Where you met me. Why bomb it?" She seemed to think for a moment, and followed up with, "Also how did you do that?"
"If you mean implode the planet? I'm not sure yet. Still trying to wrap my head around the physics of it myself." I replied. "Turns out that even with the blueprint, and one of the designers of that weapon to explain it, I still don't fully understand it. I'm Jimmi, who... are you?"
"Marta. So learning is hard for you too?"
"No, not normally, most people consider me pretty smart. And No. You aren't Marta. Maybe Marta was a woman you ate, and reproduced somehow... but you are not Marta."
She cocked her head at me, and blinked, like she didn't understand. Behind her, a tentacle grew out of the wall and stuck onto the back of her neck. Her voice changed, grew deeper, scratchier, and overlaid with other voices, "We are not Marta, but Marta is of us, as are the others you met."
"You got a name? Something you'd prefer to be called? Other than Marta?"
"Your people call me the Scourge." The sclera of Marta's eyes started slowly turning black.
"We sure do, but I'm asking if you have another name, your own name?"
The tentacle from the wall started wrapping around the Marta body, "Hungry."
"Your name is hungry, or you are hungry?"
"Always Hungry." The tentacle started to dissolve the body with startling efficiency.
"So, the Scourge it is. Why are you hailing Scourge?"
"The machines that make the best food, we cannot make them work." Marta's head and neck was all that remained attached to the thick, wriggling tentacle. "We need to be more like you. Show us how to work them."
"I see. One moment, please." I signaled Jimtarng to cut the audio to the scourge. "Ingamar, you've been listening, yes?"
"Yes."
"What the fuck does it mean machines that make the best food?"
"I dunno dude, but keep it talking. Seems to take an awful lot of its focus to talk to us. Most of the large flesh ships we were tracking in the system have stop doing active stuff the whole time you're talking. Also, we tracked the location of the call to a large metallic structure on the meat wrapped 4th world. Normally it would have dissolved that into something else by now."
I nodded and signaled Jimtarng to put us back on with the Scourge.
"So, having trouble producing enough food huh? Well, we're pretty good at food." I tried to smile at the mostly gaian looking head on a tentacle I was talking to. "Maybe we can help?"
"Yes, help." The tentacle only held the head still while it was talking, and I noticed she'd stopped blinking entirely. "Come to where this signal originates. Teach."
"Why would we do that? You're just going to try to eat us again."
"Hungry."
"Yeah, we know."
"Flesh, too hungry. Marta, not too hungry."
"Well if it is just Marta, and no flesh, then maybe we would come teach you a thing or two."
The sensor station lit up with alerts and flashing lights. I didn't even have to ask, and they put the 4th world up, splitscreen with the tentacle horror.
The view our stealth sensor probe provided showed the twenty kilometer thick skin on the surface of the planet had started to peel itself off, toward the side of the planet the sun was facing. Ingamar was pushing the button on his captain's chair that made the little button on mine light up red, which I ignored for a moment longer.
"I will leave Martas, and food maker machine. You teach the Martas."
"Yeah, we'll come in when it's just the Marta and the building on that planet." Holy fucking guacamole, I had negotiated a ceasefire with the fucking Scourge! "Now, if you'll excuse me a moment, I need to talk with the other ship in our little fleet, to make sure he understands not to attack."
"It is not also you?"
"Hah, that's complicated for he and I, but no. We are normally all individuals... You have killed many."
"We are only one."
"Sure are, now, if you'll excuse me. We'll wait until the flesh has gone to come teach Marta.
Jimtarng closed comms with the scourge and opened up the split screen view of Ingamar.
"So you want me to bronze'em? Put'em in a pretty little display case for you?"
How his bridge crew didn't lose their minds laughing, I'll never know, because mine did and so did I.
Our laughter was settled by the Scourge's activity on half our screen. The flesh on the sunward side of the planet started flinging masses out into space. Those chunks of meat were emitting massive energy signals, like we might see in the Vaggigablaster charging up.
"I think maybe we'll wait on the ball bronzing ceremony, brother." Wow, it feels like Dilt's in the room with me after having heard myself say that out loud. Strange.
"Yeah... lets see how this plays out before we doing anything testy."
The masses the scourge had thrown up into space formed a set of huge calamari rings in high orbit to catch and accelerate the next masses further.
"That looks like a rail gun, or a particle accelerator." Someone on Ingamar's bridge said.
"Easy everyone. It's pointing away from us." I replied.
"Should we just want to drop out of warp far out, and wait?" My brother asked.
"Yes, actually. that's a good idea."
We dropped out of warp, but kept our eyes on the planet as all that mass left. We kept our metaphorical heads on a swivel, too. There were subspace fleshmines around, no doubt.
"The scourge is hailing us again," Jimtarng said. "Audio only."
"Well, put it on I guess."
"The masses approaching are to collect the otherspace eyes. Do not attack." Marta's voice was no where to be found in the chorus of voices that spoke for the scourge now. Before I even replied, all the ship-sized and configured flesh masses in the system turned and started coming our way.
"As long as they don't attack or try to touch us, it shouldn't be an issue." I replied, and the Scourge cut comms.
"Sensors to maximum," I said, "I want a very clear picture of how it clears its own minefields. Ingamar-"
"Yeah, I'll keep all our guns hot and ready just in case it starts to fuck around. Fingers OFF the triggers boys and girls, until we call for the dakka-dakka."
Surreal as it was, we didn't flinch or fire when a single Scourge frigate approached within two AU of us at low warp. The rest had spread out into the star system, mostly along the primary orbital plane, then stopped and dropped their warp bubbles. In realspace, they all transmitted a signal - that we recorded - and every subspace mine within several light minutes started making their way inward at warp two-ish. When they got close, a few hundred kilometers, they'd drop out of warp and slam into the calling ship hard enough that they'd punch a hole in our hulls doing the same thing.
Was the scourge trying to intimidate us, or was it just intimidating?
While we waited for the subspace fleshmines to all come home, an unsettling pink meat moon had started forming at the L1 lagrange point between the planet and its host star. Also forming at L1, was gargantuan ring.
When it finished settling into its ring shape, it started emitting a signal into subspace, then a sort of subspace lens formed in the aperture. Slowly, it built in intensity until it hit a crescendo and stopped energizing.
We watched as mountain sized masses were pulled off the new gigameatball moon with what looked like tractor beam organs on the ring. It passed the mountainous masses through the ring at relatively low speeds, wrapped them in a warp factor 8 bubble, aimed back toward the next closest scourge star system, and fired.
The mine collector tripled in mass before it flew back to the ring launcher, industriously evacuating piece after piece. We waited a whole hour while the Scourge evacuated itself.
I have, in a way, witnessed more than fifteen hundred years of history. I can sort of remember a lot of it, if I take the time to think about it. Nothing in that vast experience quite prepared me for watching a planet skin itself and shoot all the meat into warp bubbles. Chunk after chunk after chunk of meat blooped away in a flash.
At the end it scooped up the last pieces of meat it had left on the surface, save the Martas, and then all the launch rings in orbit and the bubble ring got together and reshaped into a more common battleship shape, and warped away.
I poked my captain's console, "Ingamar, I have an absolutely terrible idea. The kind of thing people mocked captains in old fiction for. Lets go down there ourselves."
"Yeah... I had the same awful idea..." He made some sort of hand sign behind his back, "Let's do it. I'll meet you in orbit. Last one there has to fly the shuttle."
They cut the comm line, and we saw onscreen as the Amish Papacies extended her Oars.
"Hey, what! Helm, get us moving, we better beat them there. I don't wanna be the rotten egg, I mean fly the shuttle."
So... I flew us down in the shuttle. We weren't even halfway to the planet when Ingamar hailed us to announce that he was there. The Sapphic Asemia could use some those oars and rowers.
We landed ten meters from the building with a dozen of Ingamar's meanest, murderinest marines, kept on a short leash by Tina Berlin.
The Scourge had taken the atmosphere with it, for the most part anyway. There was still some very very thin air on the surface, not breathable. We were all suited up in EVA rated human style battle rattle. I hated it, but it had to admit was far more protective than the FAP suits. On the other hand, the building seemed airtight on scans, and possessed of proper airlocks and life support systems, and I was here as a diplomat, why did I have to wear the powered armor murder suit too?
I recognized the building, it was subspace interface material breeder of very recent FAP design, meaning the Scourge had either moved it across its volumes, or faithfully recreated it here. Either way held terrible implications for the more recent biological advances it had made during our little coldwar.
Ingamar and I walked up to the airlock door, or escort close behind, and pushed the open button on the outer panel, and it dutifully opened.
"Well, In we go." I said, and walked inside. It lit up like a FAP facilty ought to at the presence of gaians. The last of us that was entering entered the airlock, and we pushed the close button. A couple of marines had waited outside with the shuttle.
Air, perfectly clean and breathable, filled the airlock. When we were just about to one atmosphere the intercom chimed on and Marta's cheerful voice said, "Well you folks sure got here fast, we ain't even had time to make tea yet."
Posted Nov 20, 2025, 1:33 AM UTC