u/LordsOfJoop

Shackled, a bloodied nose, an arm both in a sling and wearing cuffs, it stood in front of the assembly, proud and strange. Clear, smooth skin, a shaven scalp, bright, fierce eyes, and it couldn't stop smiling, blood oozing from its split lips.

The minister of state security's appointed prosecutor, well-used to defiant subjects, raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Human," he said, glowering from his podium to the raised dais holding the court's full focus, a cage of warped gravity fields forming a brutal punishment in their own right; anything that tried to stand would be in immense pain, and yet there it stood, that human, glaring back at him with a cold, bright gaze. "You mean to say that the ships that we found in orbit are empty?"

The human, dismissively spitting out half of a broken tooth, coughed out a slur ignored by the court's speech translation circuits, replacing it with a soft buzzing sound. "I said that Earth and its colonies have thousands of heroes, and that each and every time that your people have met them, a hero was all that was standing. Over and over, you refuse to learn that lesson. So, the ships were sent to you." The human looked at the faces half-hidden by the dim lights of the half-kilometer wide court, their robes concealing their faces and body contours; soon enough, those anonymous voters would register their verdicts on any given normal day of proceedings - thus ensuring swift, dispassionate, state-mandated justice.

The appointed prosecutor, Minister Xedilve, gestured to the crowd, some of whom were murmuring and milling in place. Someone used the words "strangle" before being silenced. The speaker raised his voice artificially, elevating his tone before replying to the captured human.

"Time and time again," he said. "We have expanded our territory in areas claimed by the so-called dominions of the human empires. We have achieved those goals and our martyrs inspire further recruits to join the military, and all that ever happened was more and more battles. You humans have no idea of how to wage a war, and certainly not to win any." He gestured to the skies overhead, the faint, glistening lights of the fifty-six captured human vessels, all devoid of armaments and armor, simply built to haul personnel - personnel which was never found, it seems. "You came here to buy from our slave markets, did you not? To enlist them to fight in your losing wars."

The human shook its head, slowly oozing more blood from a widened grin.

"Oh, far from it, Minister Xedilve," it said. "Far from it. Take the stories that your people never cared to learn. And now, now I can tell them." It looked to the crowd, defiance in its tone. "Four years ago, at the battle of the Dni Cluster, you sent a eighty-five ground units, twenty-six heads to each, just to seize a colony on Demeter's World." A massacre, and a brutal one. "The hero of Demeter's World sent their heads back, along with their rifles and boots. And the warning: do not return, by order of the hero of Demeter's World!"

The crowd began to shout, and someone in it moaned out the words, "crushed," followed by being silenced.

Minister Xedilve shouted at the prisoner, moving close to the cage, pointing at them, spittle flying from his mouth, sizzling and warping as the droplets were forced into oblivion. "I should carve your tongue from your filthy mouth!" he screamed. "Good people died on that world!"

The human went silent and whispered. "No, they didn't." Then the human leaned close to the bars, staring back at Minister Xedilve, breathing heavily; not from fear - some twisted version of arousal. "The good people survived. The rotten little beasts got their rotten little heads cut off, and all of them were weeping, and their last minutes were filled with tears of regret and shame. The last acts that they were forced to commit would make you all beg to cremate their heads." The worst of all fates: to be burnt to a crisp, reduced to ashes, lost to the families of the survivors.

Twelve thousand people gasped and recoiled from this most horrid of all admissions.

Minister Xedilve paled, shaking, and whispered in return.

"You'll beg to die, human," he said. "I'll argue for an extended torture for you, mind and body. Decades of it. See if I don't."

The human rolled its eyes, then mimicked the human act of masturbation.

"Shall I tell of the fates of what befell those who invaded the mining moons at Baker Point? The hero who sent back a hundred-fifteen pairs of hands, and the warning: do not return." It laughed. "And the feet from Pilot Point, and the eyes in jars, stacked by the thousands, for that disastrous fleet of your marines when they tried to invade Mars itself!" The human practically danced. "You just don't get it!"

As it laughed, Minister Xedilve shrank the cage and a chunk of the human's shoulder was erased, turned into a black-red mist, and the human stopped laughing. With a fresh, cauterized wound, it turned not to face him, and rather to the crowd. A glare, the laugh now dead, no more smiles. In that crowd, someone whispered, "stabbed," and was hushed by their neighbors.

Minister Xedilve stood behind the cage, his tone cold and clinical, speaking more to her than to the crowd.

"And you have no heroes on this world," he said. "None at all."

The human, exhaling, rolled its neck, a cracking sound audible, the bones aligning.

"Absolutely correct," it said. "No heroes. We didn't bring any heroes to this world."

Out in the crowd, someone ripped off their robes. Standing tall and proud, a human with a pair of guns, their eyes bright and fierce. Across from them, two more humans disrobed in a literal sense, each carrying a broad, sharp axe. Another pair, these armed with sledgehammers, grinned their excited states. Over a thousand of them were scattered throughout the crowd, and someone screamed.

The humans began to swing and chop and smash, all to the chorus of screams, terror and blood raining down as the only safe place to stand was on the dais and in a cage. Everywhere else was being slammed, carved, beaten to death in steady, well-practiced manners. They sang as they worked, and it was not joy, it was labor. They performed their tasks in a little more than thirteen minutes, finally finished as they stood in a circle around the dais, staring at Minister Xedilve and his prisoner.

Some had fallen to valiant foes, even unarmed, and some would die from their wounds later. Those who could help each other stand did so, and as many as could hold a chunk of a corpse, also did so. One at a time, they threw the gory remains at the dais, letting them splat, slap, and slide, forming heaps and piles, all of them oozing life, terrified expressions on severed heads, hands clenching invisible strands of hope, feet that failed to escape.

The force field turned off and the prisoner looked to Minister Xedilve, nudging his face to look up and up, eyes meeting tear-streaked eyes.

"When they ask," the human said. "You tell them. Tell them that from now on, we won't ever let them see our heroes. From now on, it'll just be the monsters. The hero killers. Each world surrendered some of their monsters, and it was us who cut your people apart while they were alive. Heroes just cut them down instead."

The human walked away, proud and surrounded by an ocean of monsters.

"The age of heroes is no more, Minister Xedilve, and the defense rests."

The ships stayed in orbit, empty and abandoned, and their world began to scream.

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"Whatever it is, it's maintaining both a stable lead on us and matching our heading," the navigator said, their eyebrows furrowed with concern. "Every move we make, it makes just a millisecond either ahead or behind of us, keeping us in its slipstream."

The command deck of the ship, a wide and spread-out affair with a dozen stations, all of them staffed with experts from across multiple species, joined in on the examination of the viewfinder's reading - the massive sheet of flexible display lights that made up the screen for their ship, showing a single object approximately thirteen meters long, six wide, and three deep - an oblong box, hauling metaphoric ass through the cosmos, linked to the massive pirate vessel's forward compression wake.

The captain, a ninety-year veteran of the void, scowled as she leaned against her command console, a cigar flickering to its death as her clawed fingers made deep dents into it. Smoke curled up her face, exhaled through both sets of her nostrils, her eyes glossy with contempt.

"Other than 'it's of human design,'" she spat, "What can you tell me about the damned thing?"

The communications officer, a newly-promoted ensign, gestured for attention, almost regretting it as the captain took notice of his slight form. "Captain," he said, his voice almost stable. "It's broadcasting some sort of audio files, it's on a ninety-six second loop." He seemed somewhere between ashamed and proud, the discovery finally in circulation; disrupting a captain while they plotted was rarely a survival-rich choice for anyone serving aboard a pirate vessel.

Taking a mild interest, the captain knelt down to look at the upraised face of the communications officer, the sunken pit his workstation and home; most of the crew serving aboard the ship found themselves without anywhere to sleep, usually sticking to their position and keeping it as clean as possible - few captains could countenance a dirty ship, even a pirate.

"What is the content of this message, ensign?" she asked, peering at him in curiosity; he was a recent acquisition, moved up from the slave pens aboard the lower deck, elevated after the sudden death of the previous communications officer; the wet, angry smear was still on part of the ceiling, unreachable by the mopping team, despite their best efforts. The captain's backhand had managed to decapitate the lithe form of the ensign in question, splattering the forward quarter with a lot of the rest of the corpse. Her strength rivaled most powered equipment for the loading bays.

The ensign, giving a quick, fearful salute, pressed a few keys on their terminal, bringing up the audio file, letting it play through their workstation's speakers.

After a brief warble as the acoustics were filtered properly, the message began.

"Attention, attention, inbound vessel," it said, a cold, clinical voice devoid of gender and race identifiers; humans made frequent use of such software to disguise their crew's number and identity. "You are soon to breach the Terran border zone and enter The Graveyard. You are hereby advised to reverse course immediately or face the wrath of the Terran defense grid." There was a pause, then it began again. "Your vessel is beautiful, do not make this become ugly. Velocitas Eradico. Message ends."

The communications officer braced for the inbound slap, and found that there was nothing to happen. Blinking in surprise, he looked up at a thoughtful, concerned captain.

"Thank you, ensign," she said, then tapped her chin, eyes on the monitor, examining the box as it continued to lead the ship further into what was apparently the dominion of the Terrans; they had a long, storied history of defending their territory, although nobody had yet determined how it had managed to do so after the last three centuries of incursions. All that was left of inbound invaders were long, curled lines of stardust, all aimed at the humans' home planet, a spherical zone of death approximately nine hundred AU across at the narrowest point.

Gesturing to her security team, the captain gave new orders.

"I want that thing seized and stashed in our cargo bay immediately," she said, then claimed her throne-like seat, one leg curled up on a hassock formed from a fleet commander who once stood tall before her, proud and defiant. Now, his upturned face hosted her boot heel, eyes and mouth wide in a depiction of the last moments of terror which so defined his life's end.

The security team then went into action, spinning up attack drones, repurposed surveying equipment with crudely-affixed guns and welding torches; perfect for slamming into an enemy, carving holes into them by one means or another, easily able to take a ship from active to captive in mere moments.

Within ninety seconds, the collective bundle of eighteen drones were stuck behind the still-present box, connected by thin, angry cords, slapping into one another. Something happened so quickly, it was lost in the slipstream of liquid neon lights as the distance to the Terran hegemony grew shorter and shorter still.

"What just happened," the captain said, not phrasing it as a question. It was a defiant sentiment, expressed in cool, dispassionate rage. "Tell me."

Gritting her teeth, she flashed her eyes at the security team, one of them being pushed out in front of their fellows, a sacrificial offering; such behavior extended the lives of their team, such as it was, and was a defining characteristic of the opportunists who populated the group.

"Sir," began the sacrifice, clutching a crushed beverage container, shaking from collar to ankle. "Respectfully, it appears to have fired boarding lines at the drones. Eighteen drones, eighteen strikes." He glanced to the screen, wincing hard. "It looks like it has seven or eight firing ports on its aft nacelle. We didn't see them until they were firing, captain."

The captain, her touch gentle, reached out to stroke the face of the ensign, his face relaxing as he felt that dissonant sensation. Without breaking eye contact with the rest of the team, she wrapped her fingers around his throat, then squeezed them together, his eyes bulging out before veins began to pop beneath his skin, his vertebrae shattering with an audible crushing noise. His corpse hit the floor as she stood over the rest of the security team.

Pointing her bloodied finger at the first officer within her reach, she glared at them.

"You're promoted," she said. "Do whatever it takes to wreck that vessel. I want it destroyed. You have six minutes to develop a solution or I repaint the deck." She then kicked the corpse of the most-recent victim, shattering its rib cage and forcing a splash of blood out of its jaws and across the deck.

She stomped away, her aura one of anger beyond most living memory.

As the time counted down, the communications officer once more drew attention to the captain, a look of absolute panic on his face.

"Captain," he said, gesturing to his terminal. "The message has switched to a live broadcast."

With no shift in tone, she spoke. "Put on, ensign," before lighting her new cigar, the blood still oozing from her fingers and staining the casing of it.

The voice of the machine emanated from the command deck's collective audio network.

"Vessel unknown," it began. "You have officially breached the final marker of the Terran border zone and are now inside of the Graveyard. My task is to ensure that you can not leave. You will not leave. You, the crew of the inbound vessel, have my profoundest sympathies - you did not invite this upon yourselves." There was a pause. "Velocitas Eradico."

The captain spoke, smoke emanating from her lips with each syllable.

"Mister or missus 'Velocitas Eradico'," she said. "This is one of the finest ships of the line, captained by one mean, old bitch who has forgotten more war than you've ever seen, and I have burnt smaller planets than you've visited. We have warheads to spare, and all that you've seen was the 'keep the target alive' versions. If you want to play hard, let's do that. Message ends."

She then gestured to her security team, motioning a brusque command: "Fire every non-nuclear warhead at that damned thing. We'll clean it off of the hull when we stop."

A flash on the monitor went out, and the world stopped making any sort of sense.

Stuck in the middle of the camera that fed imagery to the command deck was a grappling hook. Seconds later, there were several hundred more, scattered across the ship's hull, stuck in with a distant "pok" sounds, a staccato rhythm inspiring fear. Those were the noises all ships' crews feared: boarding measures, used to stick one ship to another, meant to tighten and bind, allowing raiders to flood passageways and ducts, forcing open hatches and exposing personnel to all manner of brutality.

"If you fire," the voice said, now sounding much less cold, much more human. "You burn yourself."

The slipstream then began to change hue, moving from the dull, muted orange-gray to the brighter, angrier reds; an increase in speed. Against all probability, something was dragging them into a new class of acceleration, something a single percentage of their overall size. No human ship could control that much power without lethally irradiating the crew.

"What is happening," the captain said, looking around for an explanation. The navigator spoke, gesturing frantically to their station. "We're moving from point-one C to point five-eight, captain!" The ship was now moving faster than anything their culture had ever experienced or built. The distance being covered was enormous, their last vestiges of safe navigation rapidly vanishing.

The view shifted, a screen unfurling from the rear of the leading object, showing a human face, coated in layers of ancient scars and surgical marks; below the collar, there was nothing except for a mechanical trunk, fusing them into a black and red striped box. With a cold, dead glare, it spoke, gender lost to time and angry at fresh crimes.

"Behold, the Graveyard," it said, casting its eyes from side to side. "Your new home."

As it began to smile, they could see the rot behind its teeth; the ancient, withered gums, the tongue worn down from years of neglect and disuse, the scalp gone to flake and worse, a body-free corpse from the neck up, built into a high-speed coffin.

A few moments later and the slipstream died, vanishing as the lead vessel broke into a thousand thousand pieces, scattering itself across their hull. The trailing lines broke, burnt up in the mad dash forward, a wisp of smoke curling behind the ship as red shifted to orange-gray and finally to black, the void once more all that they could see.

All around them, nothingness.

The navigator, his shock complete, spoke and broke the silence.

"Our fuel reserve," he began. "It was drained in course corrections, keeping us from.. from burning up behind it." The coffin had forced them to exhaust every drop of fuel, the automated system meant to keep them intact proving effective - and all too good at its task.

"How much battery reserve do we have, ensign?"

A logistics officer spoke, absent all decorum.

"A week, maybe two," she said softly. "Air, food and water for twice that."

Outside, there was silence and nothing, then a soft, gentle ping.

The communications officer stiffened, automatically keying up the signal, sharing it with the command deck.

"Attention, newcomer," the voice said. "This is the Kilashi Viceroy, seeking assistance. We have no fuel and limited water. We can trade all manner of weapons and defensive measures for anything available. Reasonable rates. All offers considered."

Another ping sounded.

Then another.

Then another.

The captain sat in her chair, staring at the screen, slowly puffing on her cigar, smoke lazily chasing itself into the ceiling.

All around them, whistles in the darkness.

"Thirty-five thousand of them and all that they did was stare at me."

The speaker was holding court in the corner of the mezzanine for a dingy, low-watt bar, almost forgotten by the tourist trade except as a cautionary tale, kept scrubbed clean by well-aimed bribes to the local law.

Six heads turned in response to the boast, some in curiosity, some to join in on the joke; a long, hard trek back to the safety of the pirate world, an enclave hammered out of the space lanes through generations of trickery, deceit, and sheer violence in careful application; the penalty, of course, being paid over the years to follow - it was becoming civilized.

The year before someone had set up an actual utility corporation, providing metered energy to paying clients, the days of harnessed off-brand and stolen nuclear generators now far behind almost all of them.

There were few places to be proud and in rebellion once the rebellion was televised.

The five cohorts at the table, a Z-shaped affair designed to give everyone a corner seat, marketed to the specific strata of lowlife that the bar catered to, regarded the speaker with interest as he continued his screed.

"This damned charter will be the death of us," he mused. A signer of the civility decree, it established that the planet, Murrow's World, would join the Unity League as an applicant and remain in moderate scrutiny until either another planetary group stepped up to support them or they were expelled for cause; bribes were already in motion with vast fortunes to be made once the planet's own commission was accepted as the de-facto leadership. "If one of theirs is dead at our hands, we have to agree to go visit their dry little ball of dirt, say that we are sorry, and accept their weird little trinkets as a gift." He snorted, then tossed the still-wrapped box on the table, nudging it aside as he grabbed his third drink of the afternoon.

His species, the Dni, were barely above most acts of cruelty and piracy by default, with very few positive examples found, despite their best efforts in marketing and refurbishing their cultural reputation. Most chose to lean into it, celebrating their role and function as scum, because the scum of every world can always find steady labor.

His compatriots, being a bear-like trio known as Cargen-Ell, exchanged a glance before murmuring between one another, carefully looking to the box on the table, then to the speaker again.

The eldest of the three, the maternal figure of their proto-family, addressed him directly.

"What do you mean, 'dry little ball of dirt'?" She gestured to her matched pair of sons. "When we had to visit, maybe six cycles ago, it was pouring down rain, and all we saw was about four or five hundred of them." She shook her head, gesturing with her own cup of high-test booze. "It was on some island, what was it called.. Hawaii? Yes, that. Amazing volcanoes." The three then smiled amicably, nodding in agreement; their race, well-used to high temperatures, had dozens of colonies smeared on worlds with high volcanic activity, and were proud to live on a private moon with ample lava fields - they hired seismologists by the ton and shipped them at considerable expense just to ensure it fit their criteria.

The other pair, a set of insectile warriors of the Harza homeworld, their multifaceted eyes glittering in the neon haze, waved their claws at the trio, clicking into their translators.

"Our own journey was to one of their jungles, where we received a most wonderful gift of seeds," it said, smiling in its own exotic way. "We apologized for the original incident and were greeted by the ten surviving family members of the deceased. We still speak on the anniversary." The other, its mate, lightly touched a battered, burnt set of dog-tags, clicking on the metallic texture with a somber manner.

The original speaker, clearing his throat, spat on a passing server, ignoring their cry of dismay as he addressed the other five at his table. "Yes, yes, and we've all heard that particular story," he said, grumbling before almost spilling his cup, flagging down an un-spat-upon server to see his drink refilled. "Be that as it may, I know what I saw and what I saw was a vast field of absolute damned cowards."

Behind and around the table, more and more of the clientele began to signal for their check, or simply to disengage from socializing. An exodus in all directions was at its genesis.

"Cowards?" the insectile warrior said, as-yet-unspeaking. "Those are the most brave warriors that we have ever seen. One of theirs stood in front of a dozen Grell, armed with only their own severed arm, and up until they were decapitated, had a literal fighting chance."

The trio adjacent to them nodded in agreement, one of them adding, "A technician, barely out of their engineering school, held fast a class six reactor as it melted down, and only fell because they were hit with about forty thousand cycles' worth of radiation at once. She was buried in a ball of lead a meter across." The table went quiet. That story was in high circulation in worlds with unregulated nuclear power as a mainstay; that class of reactor were notorious for their lethality and near-criminal availability. A release of as little as six hundred cycles' worth of power could cost someone half of their lifespan. Forty thousand would qualify as generational trauma.

The original speaker, knocking his cup to the tiled floor, grimaced before snarling at this cadre. "Still," he shouted. "All of them, cowards, every single last one of them." He rolled his eyes, casting all four of his hands up to the ceiling in exasperation. "Everywhere that I looked, all I saw were faces streaked in tears. Thousands of them, it was echoing. Pathetic, mewling little children." Again, he spat.

This time, it wasn't on the floor.

It landed on a boot.

Eyes tracked up, and up, and up, and still there was more to see.

Grey pants, the armor of the working class, reinforced stitching and plates of exotic materials to safeguard the wearer. Ancient stains, some mechanical and others biological.

A belt with a dizzying array of tools, some of them shiny, all of them in good condition, a canteen affixed with a magnetic strap in the position of a deep-core spacer, the miners who split asteroids and harnessed the sun as a weapon.

A torso, broad and thick, adorned with work crew patches like overlapping scales, a creature which had seen labor on a dozen worlds, scores of stations, a league of places without charter nor writ, the law only what could be extracted by the strong.

An unsmiling face, scarred and old, a sign of weathered skin that had tasted grit on planets with atmospheres from thin to acidic.

Cold, dead eyes, dry and focused.

Without moving, it made its presence felt with a single word.

"Him."

The other five ejected away from the table in all directions like living fragmentation and the tall figure seated himself, glaring at the creature which was holding court only moments ago.

As the room emptied further, the man spoke.

"Do you know what those folk have in common?" he said, reaching out to place a narrow, tall bottle of amber fluid in front of the speaker, nodding at it: the bottle would be safe, and the label was of a shared style of alcohol - humans could drink almost anything.

The Dni said nothing, there was nothing to say. Trying to outrun a human who seemed to be unarmed, one of their elders, was suicidal. There were very few stories of anyone who survived meeting them once the bar was emptied. Those who did always regretted it.

"They prayed for rain," he said softly. "When the charter is breached as it applies to death, the penalty we asked for, always and always, is that the offender meets with the family of the dead, and a gift is given." The man smiled, his eyes a little less dead. "The Cargen-El, they showed remorse and paid, even though the family never asked for a single credit, and the money bought a fine stone for the family. The Cargen-El have never returned, although they do write."

Turning to face the space emptied by the pair of warrior insects. "The Harzans felt grief before they ever arrived, and the family knew that woman's death was never on purpose. They were paid with seeds, to share a favorite plant with their home-world. To remind them of their crime and their responsibilities." He nodded solemnly.

Then he nudged the unopened box.

"The day that the Cargen-El arrived," he said, his eyes colder than ever. "It was during a rain storm, one the family paid the weather service to have happen." Then he gestured to the place occupied by the then-absent Harzan. "In the Amazon, rain falls almost constantly, so their arrival was easily scheduled." He paused. "Both of those groups knew to pray for rain anyways."

The Dni swallowed nervously, then said, "Why would it matter? Rain means nothing. It was a desert, that.. Mojave place. When could it ever rain?"

The man nodded solemnly.

"The more who are present at someone's arrival, the bigger the family, and the stronger the message to be sent. You, though, privately celebrated the deaths of that family in your territory." The man nudged the box again. "It's time that you open it."

With clay-like fingers, the Dni began to unwrap the box, his breathing irregular, heartbeats like twinned jackhammers. Eventually, the small oblong box was opened and the contents revealed.

"A.. primitive chronometer?" he asked, then held it up, his tone confused. "It doesn't work, it's full on one side already."

The man was already holding the revolver before he spoke.

"It's called an hourglass," he said. "Time's up now."

The gun spoke and nobody else followed.

As the man walked outside, the clouds had already began to split and the world's skies shined a little less bright, distant sirens began closing in quickly.

A passing citizen, all smiles, warmly greeted the human and said, "Best to be careful," in a cheerful tone. "It looks like rain."

The human stopped in mid-stride, tipped their hat, and said, "It looks like a good day for it."

He walked into the world and the tears on his cheek were concealed, lost in the rain that nobody had prayed for and everyone got.