Fic: The Summer Intern (cont.)
May. 29th, 2011 05:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalIt's finally letting me post this. Hurrah.
She took a deep breath, trying to slow her pounding heart, fighting the urge to glance over towards Nez to see if she’d been captured as well. “How did you find me?” she asked.
Greycoat smiled as two creo slavers pulled back their hoods, took her pistol and grabbed her by the arms. “I smelled you. It’s an advantage we vulps have over the furless. As much fear-sweat as you’re putting out I got your scent easy, despite the rain.”
Nan let herself relax a fraction as the slavers locked her wrists behind her in heavy steel cuffs. The cages containing the does were over ten meters away. It was impossible that Officer Greycoat could catch Nez’s scent from that distance in this terrible weather, unless he had the Holy Den Mother’s own nose. “My bad luck, then,” she said.
“My worse luck if you’d convinced the bucks to try and run and I had to detonate the joeys’ collars. Do you know how much you can get for a pre-pubescent, un-imprinted ferin out in the free territories?”
“Ten to twenty-five thousand credits,” Nan answered automatically. “Depending on whether they’re from a genetic line that has suppressed bion capabilities or not.”
“Ah, I forgot why you’re here. You know all about the ferin, don’t you?”
“Nobody know everything about them. But lots of people think they do,” she said, wondering furiously what Nez was doing right now. She could only pray her roommate had the good sense to flee back into the forest.
Greycoat frowned, then gestured with his pistol towards the cage of bucks. “Start pulling these guys out one-by-one and start snuff-hooding them and loading them into the cargo bay,” he told the slavers. “Our window in the picket line is going to appear in two hours, when the Voracious’ fighter patrols comes back aboard for maintenance. We want to be airborne and accelerating to superluminal by then.”
“What are ya gonna do with her?” one of the slaver asked.
Greycoat holstered his pistol, grabbing Nan by the rough of her neck, making her squeak in pain as he forced her to bend over. “I’m going to take her onboard and interrogate her,” he said with a leer, and began to frog march her aboard the ship through the detachable cargo section. He forced her up a narrow set of stairs and into a tiny compact cabin, throwing her onto its single bunk.
Nan rolled up onto her knees, her cracked tail bone sending sharp spikes of pain up her spine, scooting into a corner as far away from Greycoat as she could manage as he locked the door. “What are you going to do to me?” she asked, her voice scratchy with fear. What was Greycoat doing here? How far gone was he anyway? He’d already murdered a joey. What else might he be capable of?
Greycoat sat back in the cabin's single station chair, letting out a long sigh and relaxing, his silver contact lenses clearing to reveal his grey eyes. "We've only got a little while before they wonder what I'm really doing with you in here," he said. "Have you been able to contact the First One and let him know what's going here? I can't get past the com jamming without breaking cover."
"Wait a minute, you mean you're working undercover?" Nan gasped.
"Got it one. We've known that one of the big ferin breeding companies was looking for new stock ahead of the Ferin Protection Bill. There was a strong chance that they might try and land on Newspring despite the risks, so I infiltrated these slave raiders to try and find out who their main backer is."
"Oh, Goddess. I didn't think you could have really been part of a bunch of dirty slavers," she said. "They killed Freya!"
"I know," he said. "What about the others who were with you? The patrol that shot your flyer said there was a ferin and a wazagan that they'd missed."
Nan nodded. "Skyler and my roommate, Nez. We were all caught on the edge of the explosion. I got knocked over and broke my tail. Skyler took a pretty nasty head wound and..." She paused, gut wrenching in real fear again. He killed a joey. He killed a joey, probably right in front of its mother. Even a CP officer working under deep cover wouldn't do something like that. Nan started to shake, and it wasn't much of an act to let the tears wet the fur under her eyes. "He... he died a few minutes later. I don't know what happened to Nez. I wasn't able to find her."
"Really? And you took out those two idiots who decided to try and rape a doe. All by yourself? Unarmed?"
"Well, um, I managed to stun them when I dropped out the tree and get the doe's dampening collar off," Nan said. "She bion zapped them both and then ran away."
Greycoat opened a drawer in the cabin's desk and brought out the doe's broken collar. "You climbed a tree, with a broken tail bone, snapped one creo's neck and then tore this in half, both with your bare hands, then hauled their bodies up into a tree all by yourself? I've heard of hysterical strength, but that's bordering on ludicrous." He rested his paw on the butt of his pistol, eyes going silver again. "Let's try again. Where's your friend Nez?"
"I don't know," she repeated, feeling her mental footing slip out from under her.
"Where's Skyler?"
"I told you, he's dead," she said.
"Why are you lying to me?"
"Because you killed a little joey, and the Furrows, and Freya," she said, blinking tears out of her eyes.
He smiled again, one fang slipping out to hang over his lip. "I didn't touch the Furrows or Ranger Longwalk, those were my trigger happy friends' fault."
"But you killed the joey, didn't you? The buck in the cage said so," she said.
"It was just a joey. An expensive lesson, but it got the point across to the rest of the tree monkeys," he said, his voice as dead calm as it had been when he'd pretended to be her friend.
"You didn't have to do it."
"Yes I did," Greycoat said. "These tree monkeys really don't understand anything unless you demonstrate it directly."
"Stop calling them tree monkeys. The ferin are people!" she cried out.
"No," he said. "I'm a person. You're a person. A human, a creo, a galen, the rest of the Six Races are people. Ferin are not people, they're animals."
"How can you say that?" Nan asked. "You were born a noble. You've lived among ferin your entire life. You were the First One's intern. How could you ever see them as animals?"
Greycoat began laugh mirthlessly. "Read my file, did you? The First One is the reason why I know they're animals." He leaned forward. "Tell me something, Miss Clawstroke. What was the First One doing when you first met him?"
"Um, he was asleep in an apple tree," she answered.
He grunted. "He was sleeping when I first met him too. Not in an apple tree though, but in the conversation pit of his tree house. After I nearly broke my neck climbing up to the porch, I walked in, convinced I'd proven my determination to him, to find him curled up naked with two does and another buck, sleeping off a nice little orgy. The first words out of his mouth were, 'Hey, kid. Doncha got enough brains t' knock?'"
"I could see how that would be a bit awkward..." Nan began to say, but Greycoat wasn't through talking.
"That was my first realization of true nature of the ferin, and what kind of price Vulpine has paid to protect them." He stood up and began to pace the narrow length of the cabin. "I had spent my entire life trying to work for the common good. When I traveled to other worlds in the GSA with my parents, I saw how the common folk actually had a voice in their governments, instead of bending their necks to nobles who rule by birthright instead of merit. So I renounced my noble title and joined up with the Vulpine Democratic Movement. I thought I could help them to bring the message of freedom and self-determination to the common vulpine." He spat on the deck. "It fell on deaf ears. The average Commoner vulpine has the brains and will of a sheep. They'd rather be led by the nose than actually think for themselves. The ones who do show off usually ended up as leaders in the Service and were usually co-opted by marriage in the Farmer Nobles. So I gave up on them and turned towards the ferin."
Nan wondered where he was going with all of this. Certainly he seemed to have latched onto the old human canard that electing their leaders from a pool of candidates of questionable qualifications, rather than leaving it to people who had been literally trained from birth for the job. That was crazy enough, but it didn't account for his murderous actions so far. "You used to like that ferin," she said cautiously.
Greycoat shrugged. "Of course I liked the ferin. Everyone likes the ferin. They're designed to be likeable. They're small. They're childlike. They have those bloody huge eyes that look at you for guidance. And through no fault of their own they were twisted from common animals into walking, talking power plants and servants. They were deserving of pity, or at least I believed when I younger, and considerably more naive. And of course there was the story of Terinu, who had fought his slave upbringing as hard as he could and made a place for himself among our people and in turn fought for the right for all ferin to live in peace and harmony with the vulpine. A fine, uplifting story."
"I know that too. It's our history," Nan started to say.
Greycoat spun around, reaching across the bunk to grab her by the shoulders and shout into her face, spittle spraying her face fur. "It's a load of grass chaser vomit! That foul-mouthed, oversexed, under-educated, lower class creature dragged the rest of the ferin into the territory of the Vulpine Farmer Lords and have been leeching off us ever since! They have no culture, no creativity, no sense of order. Most of them are so lazy that they want nothing more than to stuff themselves fat with fruit and stay hidden in the woods while we let have of our space fleet orbit Newspring to protect them instead of protecting honest merchant vessels from pirates. The ones that do work are willing to work themselves to death practically, taking employment from honest commoners who don't have the option of running naked through the woods if things get too tough for them. They take everything and give nothing back!"
"They suffered horribly for thousands and thousands of years," Nan pointed out.
"They were made to suffer," Greycoat shot back. "They were made to serve. They're no better than a Terran dog, circling around their masters, doing tricks to beg for treats. They have no free will. They don't deserve any free will. They all belong in power cells like they're used outside Vulpine space, where no one is expected to nod and smile when they speak and pretend that their opinion matters. I've seen what their leader is like. They think he's some kind of god, but he's really poison upon all the vulpine, a worthless slave that tricked everyone into thinking he was a leader."
"That still doesn't explain..." Nan tried to say, but she was cut off again.
"I have spent my whole life trying to serve others. As a political activist, as a champion of the downtrodden, then as a Civil Protection officer. Well now I'm doing something for me. I was the one that had the knowledge of Newspring's defenses from my time as Terinu's intern. I was the one that came up with the plan to slip through it and find suitable troupes to grab and haul away to the outer systems. It was all my doing. And once I'm off world I'm going to collect a fat payment for my efforts and find a nice pleasure dome in the outer colonies to get drunk in."
"And murdering the Furrows and Ranger Freya. That was part of your plan too?" Nan demanded.
"A happy bonus," Greycoat informed her. "When I guided the slavers to that fruit thieving buck's troupe, they were clumsy and let about a half-dozen out of the trap. The ferin made a beeline to the Furrow's farm, probably to beg for help. The slavers had to shoot them before they could contact the authorities. Which was regrettable, but in the end I realized what an opportunity I was given."
"Opportunity?"
"Oh, yes," Greycoat said, as he began to pace again. "There's always been a small, sensible fraction of the Council of Farmer Lords who didn't really trust the ferin. Now that mistrust is proven in their minds by the murder of a pair of innocent bachelor farmers, by a troupe of trouble-making ferin who then disappear into the forest. Then another troupe begs for help from a ranger to locate their lost child. The ranger is vilely murdered, along with the First One's latest intern, a wazagan student doctor and an urbanized ferin, and that troupe disappears, like the other, never to be seen again. The properly paranoid will assume that there's a faction of ferin trying to start a terrorist war to secure their rights, possibly led by the old and corrupt First One."
"That's not true," Nan exclaimed.
"One thing I've learned as a CP is that something doesn't have to be true, for someone to believe it. Once the Council of Farmer Lords start seeing things that way, the ferin will no longer be welcome among the vulpine anymore." Greycoat smiled repellingly at her. "Unless they're properly leashed."
TBC
She took a deep breath, trying to slow her pounding heart, fighting the urge to glance over towards Nez to see if she’d been captured as well. “How did you find me?” she asked.
Greycoat smiled as two creo slavers pulled back their hoods, took her pistol and grabbed her by the arms. “I smelled you. It’s an advantage we vulps have over the furless. As much fear-sweat as you’re putting out I got your scent easy, despite the rain.”
Nan let herself relax a fraction as the slavers locked her wrists behind her in heavy steel cuffs. The cages containing the does were over ten meters away. It was impossible that Officer Greycoat could catch Nez’s scent from that distance in this terrible weather, unless he had the Holy Den Mother’s own nose. “My bad luck, then,” she said.
“My worse luck if you’d convinced the bucks to try and run and I had to detonate the joeys’ collars. Do you know how much you can get for a pre-pubescent, un-imprinted ferin out in the free territories?”
“Ten to twenty-five thousand credits,” Nan answered automatically. “Depending on whether they’re from a genetic line that has suppressed bion capabilities or not.”
“Ah, I forgot why you’re here. You know all about the ferin, don’t you?”
“Nobody know everything about them. But lots of people think they do,” she said, wondering furiously what Nez was doing right now. She could only pray her roommate had the good sense to flee back into the forest.
Greycoat frowned, then gestured with his pistol towards the cage of bucks. “Start pulling these guys out one-by-one and start snuff-hooding them and loading them into the cargo bay,” he told the slavers. “Our window in the picket line is going to appear in two hours, when the Voracious’ fighter patrols comes back aboard for maintenance. We want to be airborne and accelerating to superluminal by then.”
“What are ya gonna do with her?” one of the slaver asked.
Greycoat holstered his pistol, grabbing Nan by the rough of her neck, making her squeak in pain as he forced her to bend over. “I’m going to take her onboard and interrogate her,” he said with a leer, and began to frog march her aboard the ship through the detachable cargo section. He forced her up a narrow set of stairs and into a tiny compact cabin, throwing her onto its single bunk.
Nan rolled up onto her knees, her cracked tail bone sending sharp spikes of pain up her spine, scooting into a corner as far away from Greycoat as she could manage as he locked the door. “What are you going to do to me?” she asked, her voice scratchy with fear. What was Greycoat doing here? How far gone was he anyway? He’d already murdered a joey. What else might he be capable of?
Greycoat sat back in the cabin's single station chair, letting out a long sigh and relaxing, his silver contact lenses clearing to reveal his grey eyes. "We've only got a little while before they wonder what I'm really doing with you in here," he said. "Have you been able to contact the First One and let him know what's going here? I can't get past the com jamming without breaking cover."
"Wait a minute, you mean you're working undercover?" Nan gasped.
"Got it one. We've known that one of the big ferin breeding companies was looking for new stock ahead of the Ferin Protection Bill. There was a strong chance that they might try and land on Newspring despite the risks, so I infiltrated these slave raiders to try and find out who their main backer is."
"Oh, Goddess. I didn't think you could have really been part of a bunch of dirty slavers," she said. "They killed Freya!"
"I know," he said. "What about the others who were with you? The patrol that shot your flyer said there was a ferin and a wazagan that they'd missed."
Nan nodded. "Skyler and my roommate, Nez. We were all caught on the edge of the explosion. I got knocked over and broke my tail. Skyler took a pretty nasty head wound and..." She paused, gut wrenching in real fear again. He killed a joey. He killed a joey, probably right in front of its mother. Even a CP officer working under deep cover wouldn't do something like that. Nan started to shake, and it wasn't much of an act to let the tears wet the fur under her eyes. "He... he died a few minutes later. I don't know what happened to Nez. I wasn't able to find her."
"Really? And you took out those two idiots who decided to try and rape a doe. All by yourself? Unarmed?"
"Well, um, I managed to stun them when I dropped out the tree and get the doe's dampening collar off," Nan said. "She bion zapped them both and then ran away."
Greycoat opened a drawer in the cabin's desk and brought out the doe's broken collar. "You climbed a tree, with a broken tail bone, snapped one creo's neck and then tore this in half, both with your bare hands, then hauled their bodies up into a tree all by yourself? I've heard of hysterical strength, but that's bordering on ludicrous." He rested his paw on the butt of his pistol, eyes going silver again. "Let's try again. Where's your friend Nez?"
"I don't know," she repeated, feeling her mental footing slip out from under her.
"Where's Skyler?"
"I told you, he's dead," she said.
"Why are you lying to me?"
"Because you killed a little joey, and the Furrows, and Freya," she said, blinking tears out of her eyes.
He smiled again, one fang slipping out to hang over his lip. "I didn't touch the Furrows or Ranger Longwalk, those were my trigger happy friends' fault."
"But you killed the joey, didn't you? The buck in the cage said so," she said.
"It was just a joey. An expensive lesson, but it got the point across to the rest of the tree monkeys," he said, his voice as dead calm as it had been when he'd pretended to be her friend.
"You didn't have to do it."
"Yes I did," Greycoat said. "These tree monkeys really don't understand anything unless you demonstrate it directly."
"Stop calling them tree monkeys. The ferin are people!" she cried out.
"No," he said. "I'm a person. You're a person. A human, a creo, a galen, the rest of the Six Races are people. Ferin are not people, they're animals."
"How can you say that?" Nan asked. "You were born a noble. You've lived among ferin your entire life. You were the First One's intern. How could you ever see them as animals?"
Greycoat began laugh mirthlessly. "Read my file, did you? The First One is the reason why I know they're animals." He leaned forward. "Tell me something, Miss Clawstroke. What was the First One doing when you first met him?"
"Um, he was asleep in an apple tree," she answered.
He grunted. "He was sleeping when I first met him too. Not in an apple tree though, but in the conversation pit of his tree house. After I nearly broke my neck climbing up to the porch, I walked in, convinced I'd proven my determination to him, to find him curled up naked with two does and another buck, sleeping off a nice little orgy. The first words out of his mouth were, 'Hey, kid. Doncha got enough brains t' knock?'"
"I could see how that would be a bit awkward..." Nan began to say, but Greycoat wasn't through talking.
"That was my first realization of true nature of the ferin, and what kind of price Vulpine has paid to protect them." He stood up and began to pace the narrow length of the cabin. "I had spent my entire life trying to work for the common good. When I traveled to other worlds in the GSA with my parents, I saw how the common folk actually had a voice in their governments, instead of bending their necks to nobles who rule by birthright instead of merit. So I renounced my noble title and joined up with the Vulpine Democratic Movement. I thought I could help them to bring the message of freedom and self-determination to the common vulpine." He spat on the deck. "It fell on deaf ears. The average Commoner vulpine has the brains and will of a sheep. They'd rather be led by the nose than actually think for themselves. The ones who do show off usually ended up as leaders in the Service and were usually co-opted by marriage in the Farmer Nobles. So I gave up on them and turned towards the ferin."
Nan wondered where he was going with all of this. Certainly he seemed to have latched onto the old human canard that electing their leaders from a pool of candidates of questionable qualifications, rather than leaving it to people who had been literally trained from birth for the job. That was crazy enough, but it didn't account for his murderous actions so far. "You used to like that ferin," she said cautiously.
Greycoat shrugged. "Of course I liked the ferin. Everyone likes the ferin. They're designed to be likeable. They're small. They're childlike. They have those bloody huge eyes that look at you for guidance. And through no fault of their own they were twisted from common animals into walking, talking power plants and servants. They were deserving of pity, or at least I believed when I younger, and considerably more naive. And of course there was the story of Terinu, who had fought his slave upbringing as hard as he could and made a place for himself among our people and in turn fought for the right for all ferin to live in peace and harmony with the vulpine. A fine, uplifting story."
"I know that too. It's our history," Nan started to say.
Greycoat spun around, reaching across the bunk to grab her by the shoulders and shout into her face, spittle spraying her face fur. "It's a load of grass chaser vomit! That foul-mouthed, oversexed, under-educated, lower class creature dragged the rest of the ferin into the territory of the Vulpine Farmer Lords and have been leeching off us ever since! They have no culture, no creativity, no sense of order. Most of them are so lazy that they want nothing more than to stuff themselves fat with fruit and stay hidden in the woods while we let have of our space fleet orbit Newspring to protect them instead of protecting honest merchant vessels from pirates. The ones that do work are willing to work themselves to death practically, taking employment from honest commoners who don't have the option of running naked through the woods if things get too tough for them. They take everything and give nothing back!"
"They suffered horribly for thousands and thousands of years," Nan pointed out.
"They were made to suffer," Greycoat shot back. "They were made to serve. They're no better than a Terran dog, circling around their masters, doing tricks to beg for treats. They have no free will. They don't deserve any free will. They all belong in power cells like they're used outside Vulpine space, where no one is expected to nod and smile when they speak and pretend that their opinion matters. I've seen what their leader is like. They think he's some kind of god, but he's really poison upon all the vulpine, a worthless slave that tricked everyone into thinking he was a leader."
"That still doesn't explain..." Nan tried to say, but she was cut off again.
"I have spent my whole life trying to serve others. As a political activist, as a champion of the downtrodden, then as a Civil Protection officer. Well now I'm doing something for me. I was the one that had the knowledge of Newspring's defenses from my time as Terinu's intern. I was the one that came up with the plan to slip through it and find suitable troupes to grab and haul away to the outer systems. It was all my doing. And once I'm off world I'm going to collect a fat payment for my efforts and find a nice pleasure dome in the outer colonies to get drunk in."
"And murdering the Furrows and Ranger Freya. That was part of your plan too?" Nan demanded.
"A happy bonus," Greycoat informed her. "When I guided the slavers to that fruit thieving buck's troupe, they were clumsy and let about a half-dozen out of the trap. The ferin made a beeline to the Furrow's farm, probably to beg for help. The slavers had to shoot them before they could contact the authorities. Which was regrettable, but in the end I realized what an opportunity I was given."
"Opportunity?"
"Oh, yes," Greycoat said, as he began to pace again. "There's always been a small, sensible fraction of the Council of Farmer Lords who didn't really trust the ferin. Now that mistrust is proven in their minds by the murder of a pair of innocent bachelor farmers, by a troupe of trouble-making ferin who then disappear into the forest. Then another troupe begs for help from a ranger to locate their lost child. The ranger is vilely murdered, along with the First One's latest intern, a wazagan student doctor and an urbanized ferin, and that troupe disappears, like the other, never to be seen again. The properly paranoid will assume that there's a faction of ferin trying to start a terrorist war to secure their rights, possibly led by the old and corrupt First One."
"That's not true," Nan exclaimed.
"One thing I've learned as a CP is that something doesn't have to be true, for someone to believe it. Once the Council of Farmer Lords start seeing things that way, the ferin will no longer be welcome among the vulpine anymore." Greycoat smiled repellingly at her. "Unless they're properly leashed."
TBC
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-05-30 08:00 am (UTC)I hope he will not succeed...
mjkj
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Date: 2011-05-30 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-30 12:32 pm (UTC)