[center][b][i]Samarra, Cizra Su-lah[/i][/b][/center]
Nostalgia threatened to manifest as tears as she plucked her coffee cup from her desk, a place ineffably imprinted on her heart and on the white slab in the form of a brown ring. Commonplace though it was, the act felt bittersweet, for it was, for her, its final performance. Resolute, she dismissed her memories, for she knew within minutes of her departure even the ring would be gone; expunged by process and bureaucracy. [i]I’ll cry later[/i], she affirmed, then steadied her nerves, exhaled, and inspected her keepsake. While her eyesight lacked the keenness of youth, her mind retained its edge; she did not need to see her mug to know, after countless washings, that it no longer boasted a vibrant red gloss and the embossed skull lingered on as only a vague blotch.

No other trinkets cluttered her workspace. Enclosed by the drab walls of her cubicle were only a white slab, which served as her desk; her console, for the last seventy-eight years her only aperture into the broader universe; a bin, a translucent plastic affair delivered by sanitation drones soon after she arrived for her shift, empty, for she possessed nothing to fill it; and a large binder prepared for the Av’sti.

[i]“Is there anyone you would like to say farewell to?”[/i]—apologetically, from behind, the voice of her supervisor penetrated her reverie; a new hire, only twenty-three years employed.

Two prehensile tails elevated JAS-397 until she peered above her cubicle. Artificial lights desaturated the cruelly-ordered environment, glinted harshly off the metal frames, but went unnoticed. Unmoored by personal bonds, her gaze drifted in a perfunctory and futile survey until she lost track of time and place.

[i]“Well?”[/i] urged the voice.

It occurred to her, wearily, that she didn’t know anyone. All of her friends were gone, most of them discovered lifeless at their work stations. Experience, fear, and cynicism dispelled her desire to form new friendships. It was too dangerous. Everyone informed for the inquisition. All too often, workers vanished; particularly the gregarious; especially the gossips. Whether they were actually auditors, she wasn’t sure; it might have all been theater—a sick manipulation.

Still, reality stung. In her mind reverberated the emptiness of her career, but landed hallow in her heart, poisoned by the toxicity of her former work environment.

It was simply too dangerous to care.

[i]“No,”[/i] she replied, her voice wistful—husky. After a final glance, an effort to engrave the moment onto her core, she lowered herself to her paws and plucked the binder from her slab. Then, as she turned to leave, she caught sight of herself. On the bin’s vaguely reflective surface she saw her face—flat, like a mask with dull black ovals where eyes ought to be and mouthless ever since the zar-Taliļ Incident.

Reflexively, she repulsed the memory. After decades of service, her discretion was absolute. To them, that didn’t matter. They took her voice—her mouth. Life was a luxury she retained only due to the value of her future testimony. 

[i]“It is time to go,”[/i] her supervisor sympathized.

Androgynous, brief, and porcine, it pointed her down the hall, followed her to an elevator, but declined to accompany her aboard. When the doors opened, a massive kukull confronted her. Despite its stature and course appearance, its aura soothed and a firm, yet gentle, touch managed to calm her nervous spirit. Silently they watched as the numbers on the elevator register went up, far higher than ever before permitted to her or, she speculated, anyone of her caste. Inexplicably, she felt honored. More than that, she felt nervous with expectation and noticed not the surgical collar, suffused from the kukull’s excess substance, as it encircled her neck.

Many hours of corridors, stairways, and doorways paraded by; many creatures, a few she suspected might even be Cizran, caught her attention until, in her frenetic desire to observe and internalize everything, she focused her gaze on another. Finally, she arrived in a room with an exquisite Ganeshan statue, whiter and purer than any of the architecture that surrounded it.

The kukull paused, reduced, temporarily, to a mountain of debris. JAS-397 almost didn’t notice, given the silence of its collapse. Instead, she peered in astonishment at the statue as it undulated and directed itself toward her.

[i]“I am Nirak mul-Siyé,”[/i] the statue intoned with words that flowed over JAS-397 as intimately as a loose gown. [i]“You are the auditor who reviewed the Dira var-sha’s admiralty and personal communications at the time of the zar-Taliļ Incident. We have concluded that you will not live long enough to provide useful testimony at the trials related to that incident. As such, you are to be placed in suspended animation until you are needed as a witness. Place your documents on the floor and proceed to cryo-suspension. My kukull will guide you there.”[/i]

Stupefied, JAS-397 lifted a paw to her face, but was further amazed to feel beneath her fingertip the thin line of a mouth for the first time in decades. 

[i]“You will need that for your testimony,”[/i] the Cizran observed, as if the auditor’s mind was completely exposed. JAS-397 believed such well within Nirak’s capabilities, given how her own physiology was altered with little more than a thought. 

Green tears coursed in twin rivulets down her flat white face, but she cared little about what any might think of her emotional display. For the first time in decades, the flame of happiness burned in her bosom. Without delay, she eagerly complied with Nirak’s request. The kukull resumed its role as guide. More corridors, streets, and structures blurred to a solid, but mostly unnoticed, phantasmagoria as she was escorted through the halls and boulevards of Samarra. Her first time seeing it, the city was beautiful, replete with architectural marvels and gardens as far as her limited vision allowed. Finally, her sojourn ended, and she entered a chamber full of translucent vessels almost as variegated in size as manifold in number. Within them she beheld the faint outlines of hundreds of different species. All too soon, she occupied her own. The container closed, cold air fogged the interior, something pierced the side of her neck. Then, instead of blissful rest, her worst memory awakened and paralysis abruptly censored her scream.

For her testimony to be fully utilized, they wanted her to remember every detail.

[center] . . . [/center]
Beckoned by a callous will, darkness strangled her cry and aroused, through a nebula of unnatural and fitful slumber, memories she, for years, struggled to repel. Garishly visceral and, in a way that utterly unnerved her, more real than real, she relived them in a cruelly awakened existential clarity that her mind was barely equipped to parse. Nightmares that recurred over the decades, they, in this grand finale, were bolstered by knowledge gleaned in her career as an auditor, such that even the smallest detail loomed rife with nuance and pregnant with unsolved intrigue.

JAS-397 was justifiably excited, as work ushered in her second once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a mere decade after her first. When she resumed her audit routine in the aftermath of Silexies’ unauthorized prisoner release, she assumed she was done with excitement forever. Instead, she stood, pale face lit by a magnetically-levitated console. Behind her, her tails nervously twitched and belied her stoicism—even as they indicated to her colleagues the criticality of the work on which she embarked. Her coworkers never learned that this was not merely a routine review nor an ordinary validation of protocol, but, instead, a top secret investigation into potential Cizran malfeasance.

Methodically, she analyzed what she knew or, more accurately, suspected. Interrogation of the former warden’s cronies exposed his plot to obtain a heretical text. Desperate to secure lenience, he invented a co-conspirator in the person of Admiral Nenegin zar-Taliļ. Circumstantial evidence in zar-Taliļ’s unexplained possession and subsequent transfer of the tome to Gereza certainly merited an audit. That was her role—to seek out evidence of conspiracy. Future recall tinged the facts, and she peered down the whirlpool of time to where the Admiral’s actions were judged as negligence that culminated in several lost konul harvests, an overturned Liars assessment that devastated the career of his protégé, and ultimately crescendoed in his ignoble discharge from public service.

Quite the fiasco. 

Officially, [i]‘exceedingly poor judgment’[/i] was the verdict rendered by the Si’ab and Noama for the admiral’s forced retirement. Were it not for an exemplary military record and familial connections, the consequence of his decisions, which remained inexplicable, would have terminated in a quiet sankul banishment. As Cizran war hero, she suspected his preference for that over his public evisceration in the Ja’Regia. 

With fastidious dedication, she collated information pertinent to her superiors. While she observed no evidence of criminality, those in power gleaned from it what was convenient. However, she believed bureaucracy always prevailed and fixated her mind on the data feeds. In fixed-width block letters, she observed the feed summaries culminated from extensive log filtration. As she parsed them, information flooded her synapses. More than saw, she felt the emphatically-transcribed contents synchronize with her soul. 

Nenegin’s inner mind, exposed in the memory transcripts of his admiralty logs, crystallized within her consciousness. He regretted his desire for personal involvement in the fate of Kilamara’s surreptitious visitors and was concerned for both his legacy and the safety of his away fleet. Especially in the interval where contact between the Dira var-sha and the Zara vi-Pol ceased. Once it resumed, Nenegin and The Liars encouraged Ezkshi to unleash the totality of her vessel’s destructive capabilities on the Aptosites. Cizran High Command disagreed and, in their report, concluded that the fleet should have remained hidden as the Bahá-cizr was sufficient to annihilate the enemy, additional strength mere hubris, and the outcome ultimately disadvantaged the Empire in potential future embroilments. 

Nenegin further recognized that while the partial harvest of Kilamara and his response to the Vepsis Dol’s distress signal were perhaps serendipitous, they were inadequate. Still, he reflected, what were the odds that, after decades of mundane idleness, an incursion would occur at the exact moment of his departure; that Aredemos would, through idiocy, inflict genocide on his own race and homeworld; and that he, admiral of the fleet in patrol of that sector, would be absent?

He knew it didn’t matter.

He was not at his post. That is what mattered.

Inevitable as a somnambulist coerced into lockstep with caliginous night terrors of their own design, her consciousness descended into the final data feed. Initially, it imposed mere visual theater—an ante room of the Vepsis Dol. Unadorned, the vault-like entrance to the huge vessel was silent, still, and gray; a dreary environ with few creature comforts, not unlike her sparse work habitat numerous levels beneath the Hall of Records. 

Other senses awakened. Her focus on mere appearance became less important. Instead, in diametric opposition to her self-perception, she, for the first time, felt burgeon within herself raw power and undeniable poise. It emanated effortlessly from zar-Taliļ, through the feed, and into her core. Stoic and composed as he seemed externally and unreadable as the false eyes grafted in the apertures of his basalt mask appeared, internally his mind churned in a tangle of distraction and worry. Even the task at hand he pushed aside in favor of an internal dialog, as he was fully confident in the adroitness of his mechanics and aptitude of his honor guard to restore the transport vessel to proper function. As they worked, he pondered the queer events and chaos that stirred inexplicably in his wake. It felt, to him, as though an inexorable fate teased him and tempted him onward to disaster; one impossible to mitigate even were he able to observe its approach.

As if executed by his milieu, two presences suddenly vanished from his awareness. Merely a tinge at the corner of his mind, they nevertheless snapped him back to the present. His guards, gone. Reactively, he queried their biosignatures, but they did not manifest within his techo-empathic compass. Exasperated, he activated ship-wide comms. 

[i]“Where are units c-x9 and c-x12?”[/i]

[i]“Ambushed, Sir,”[/i] quavered, in his mind, the voice of his lieutenant, [i]“We’re trying to contai—aaaah!”[/i]

Fully alert, Nenegin shifted his mind-state to the video feed of his away team and synchronized his surveillance augmentation with the ship’s security system. Everywhere, it seemed, bodies and their siphoned screams reverberated off the walls, reduced to mounds of gore. In one chamber, he saw a sanguine mass of sinew, shrouded in a brume of black flecks, as it writhed through the vanes of an air duct and into the ventilation system to affect its egress. Those who yet expressed life were too far gone to merit aid and choked their last words out into a miasma of spores that permeated the passageways in the wake of the [b][i]thing[/i][/b].

Nenegin detected it through one security camera after another as it slunk and churned its way around the vessel. Eventually, it dripped like raw sewage through an exhaust vent in the ceiling of the medical ward. Below, an arachnid patient in temporary bio-stasis convulsed in helpless tactile horror, its lidless eyes seized in dread preternatural. A quick cross-reference of the manifest confirmed the unfortunate as Ulu’gol, an artisan whose plight brought him to Q’ab and, finally, here. Atop its paralyzed prey, the mass coagulated along the dorsal joint of Ulu’gol’s carapace, leered down, and erupted with maniacal laughter. [i]“Ulu-ulu-ulu-uluuuuuuu—”[/i] it cackled as its physique clarified. Intensity mounted, then its being vibrated erratic until suddenly it seized and flopped to the floor beside the stasis pedestal in a viscous puddle.

A moment later, it was back on the move.

[i]“Units, search for survivors and avoid engagement with any threats,”[/i] Nenegin ordered.

It took a mere moment to skim the ship’s recent errata and confirm the layout, another to activate the automatic quarantine protocol—which hermetically sealed every zone and inhibited gas and liquid flow—then he was in pursuit. Semi-translucent halls and bulkheads blurred in a kaleidoscopic array of colorful zone indicators embedded in the floors, ignored in favor of the spectral signature he developed ad-hoc to associate with his prey. Ominously quiet, his trek went nearly unimpeded, his only obstructions the bodies of his soldiers and his only distractions their plaintive cries for relief. Moments swelled to minutes, but he eventually cornered the thing in a cargo hold. In retrospect, he felt lured there—its twisted intelligence enjoined, in some ultramundane fashion, to his own ironic fate. Across the chamber idled, unaware of danger, two synths and a kukull—Tob “Boomslang” Ydrian and Eti Naris, he confirmed.

Guards and soldiers were expendable, but at least one of the unaware trio he was required to safeguard for the inquisition. Unless—there was another passenger unaccounted for. A political servant of Plangó Felho'Te-vesztø charged, as indicated by the manifest, with heresy.

Xo’pil, an Azot.

[i]So this is the product of Plango’s crimes against the Well,[/i] Nenegin inwardly sneered.

Too late, he understood. It lurched down from the ceiling where it clandestinely clung and latched itself on to his mask. A whirlwind of howls beat against his crystalline exoskull. The psionic pulse with which he countered did little, if anything at all, to dissuade its onslaught. Instead, the thing—Xo’pil, he was certain—scraped and gnawed at his armor while its shrieks filled the gaps in the milliseconds betwixt its physical assault. Nenegin improvised, his chemistry altered, and his exterior slickened with oil that gushed from newly-formed pores. His chitin glowed white-hot, and the oil ignited. This, for the while, was effective. Xo’pil recoiled, gathered itself on the floor away from him, a weave of exposed muscle and storm of spores, then dashed away.

[i]“Get off the ship,”[/i] Nenegin instructed the two synths, who gazed on slack-jawed and shocked, [i]“yellow line. Now!”[/i] then was back on the hunt. 

The aura of its seared flesh he followed easily enough. It teased him deeper into the Vepsis Dol, through propulsion, engineering, and finally into the sankul chamber. With only one way in or out, Nenegin sealed it and himself within. 

Eventually, he emerged, victorious but damaged. What transpired in the interval was beyond his ability to frame in words the Av’sti believed and beyond JAS-397’s capacity to observe. It broke her as assuredly as it wounded him. As a precaution, he remained on the Vepsis Dol and sanitized every micro-angstrom of the vessel. He sanitized every molecule of his being. After over a dozen rounds and a hundred sweeps, he remained unsatisfied that the thing was eradicated. 

Eventually, his power to make that decision was revoked—an incredulous high command demanded his return to Cizra Su-lahn.

[center] . . . [/center]
[center][b][i]Station X-b, Gereza[/i][/b][/center]
Thoroughly and uneventfully processed by Gereza civility enforcement drones, Kirri was ushered to a transport vessel and shuttled from the penitentiary to Station X-b, a large and dated spaceport in orbit around the prison planet that served as something between a halfway house and a melting pot. There in the hangar, his bonds dissipated in a nanite fog. Most of them, anyway. The civility-enforcement programming to his neuro-pathways remained intact, but would decay over the course of a year. Such was standard rehabilitation protocol, but was further beneficial as with it Kirri could comprehend the languages of the local species.

Around him, the hangar was a churn of chaos, a veritable tent city rife with kiosks, haggling, and raised voices. Occupied by riffraff with nowhere else to go, refugees, ex-cons, and people who were finally free of enslavement and wanted to get as far from Cizra Su-lahn as feasible, it was the perfect place to disappear into or come into power, relatively speaking.

If he played his cards right and fell into the right company, Kirri would be fine.

[center] . . . [/center]
[center][b][i]La Cantina, Eqiko-4[/i][/b][/center]
Boomslang and Eti-Naris perched atop stools in a dive bar on planet in the outer rim of the Su-laria Galaxy while their kukull friend hulked outside. No doubt it was stargazing, as it was its wont. They, meanwhile, enjoyed pints of MILK and quietly discussed future plans. 

Mostly scrap metal, the establishment was quite worn, filled with fumes, suspicious characters, and soft voices. The only thing in good shape appeared to be the large wall screen behind the bar that projected a century-old documentary on Cizran Imperialism. They mostly ignored it, although some bits filtered into their consciousness. Extremely nationalistic, the documentary extolled the greatness of the Cizran Empire and its manifold conquests. At the moment, it was on their most recent, the Aptosite’s doomed invasion and subsequent rout. Disclosed was public domain knowledge of the Bahá-cizr’s capabilities and how it, alone, eliminated the threat without the necessity of an active response; how it, so briefly, debilitated the Cradle of Life and reduced to ashes the enemy’s galactic web. Mentioned also were the ruined careers of those who misappropriated Empire resources and reduced an exquisitely perfunctory victory into a gaudy and supercilious overexposure of power.

[i]“Hey, look, we know a celebrity,”[/i] Eti opined, a claw pointed at the screen. To a narrative of his poor judgment, it displayed the simultaneous demolition of statues of Admiral Nenegin zar-Talil located in the Cizran Fleet Academy and the shipyards of Zo.

Boomslang rolled his eyes and replied, [i]“Yeah, a bright shining star. You really piled on the misfortune, too.”[/i]

Eti nodded wistfully, [i]“Yes, but it got us our freedom and it got me my ship. Free and clear. The news of Ec-shavar’s death didn’t hurt either. I mean, yes, I lost the estate to a greedy comer-up, but would you change anything?”[/i]

[i]“You mean go back to being property? Hell no,”[/i] Boomslang snorted and, in exclamation, slammed his pint down on the bar.

[center]. . .[/center][center]. .[/center][center].[/center]
Tsathoskr and Ua, Plango and Ec-shavar, Nenegin and Silexies, Zeptir and Snil, Aredemos and Kaan—all came and went, egos confident, for a sharp glint in the corridor of time, of their personal dominion over the cosmos, but in the end bureaucracy endured and demonstrated that in the Cizran Empire it was no god's sky.
[center][h3]THE END[/h3][/center]