thinking is hard.
but i spend so long trying.
The transition chamber equalized at last, having filled with highly pressurized water. The doors to the Dekora station slid open. Before the trio from the Shepherd, four creatures floated.
"Ibna, Olso, Gh'Tak -- welcome," they each heard in their headsets, "We are the Dekora. It is our pleasure to meet you at last, honored ancestors."
Olso heard Gh'Tak's voice translated from their biological radio waves, "Thank you, Dekora. It is an equal honor to greet such unimaginable descendants." She saw her eight-legged comrade swish their tentacles and move through the water as easily as a bird in flight. Her hooves, by comparison, did little to help her navigate this novel environment. Even under native gravity she couldn't swim.
She felt Ibna's thoughts then, "Use your jets! Goofball." She saw her begin to move forward, propelled by water-cycling contraptions strapped to her body. Olso followed suit.
The station's walls pulsed like a beating heart: magenta veins conveyed streams of unknown substances through them. The Dekora that had greeted them came in two varieties: a smaller pair all tentacles and eyes on stalks, and a larger pair -- larger even than Ibna and Olso -- that bore four massive and identical-looking limbs ending in a great nest of claws. They had no discernible eyes.
Gh'Tak began to move away from the group with one of the smaller and one of the larger Dekora before the translation reached Olso's ears:
"Gh'Tak, much has happened to the Dabulans since your time, not merely our having become the Dekora, and much has been forgotten too. We would like you to join with our neural nexus to bring us to parity."
"Of course. We are and will be of one mind."
"As for you Minots, there is a warehousing section that may be more appropriate for you. We have many things you may take, and many more for which might be traded. Please follow us."
"More appropriate?" Ibna signed clumsily in the water.
"Gravity. Air. Your vacsuits will not be necessary. Please follow us."
i pass cycles in a pen being readied. my keepers are smaller than me. they slide over living floors on seeping limbs. they push and prod and poke and force and hurt me like i cannot know what they do, but i do. the pain is so far away. hard to think about.
but i spend so long trying.
Olso asked, "What have you got in store?" Their hosts writhed through the water down one of many passageways branching out from the entry chamber.
"We will exchange manifests on arrival," she heard. Though there were two creatures before them, she was only speaking with one entity: the collective awareness of every Dekora of every form across the station. Among the Dabulans, this awareness resembled a high-speed democracy that could arrive at consensus on virtually any issue within milliseconds, even as each constituent contributed to the awareness as an individual. She wondered if it was the same among the Dekora -- was the voice a specialized entity somewhere else representing the awareness, or had they finally become nothing but the collective? Though the larger creature made no effort to acknowledge their guests, the smaller trained many of its eyes on them, tweaking their vantages in obvious study.
There was no airlock between them and the warehousing section. The water became thinner and a false gravity seemed to pull them toward the surface until at last Olso's hoof touched solid ground. The Dekora slithered down a hallway of pulsing flesh, now crimson more than the underwater purple. It hardened beneath each step she took before her hooves landed, anticipating her. This was no biotech; the station was another Dekora.
cycles pass and i grow. i cannot see beyond my cage but i know the smells of the living and the dead, the many like me born and trapped in this place and the generations before us made into glue and fat and gristle. the stench of history engulfs me. it is so hard not to mistake it for destiny. hard to think about.
but i spend so long trying.
The passageway opened up into a cavern bigger than the Shepherd's command forum by orders of magnitude, where organs many times the size of either of the Minots hung suspended by tendons and connected by tubules. The space glittered with bright nodules, illuminating the cavernous place with shadows that bounced with the station's heartbeat.
Ibna stopped beside Olso, held by the sight. "This must be the warehouse," she thought to Olso, "And all of those must be carrying materials. Not merely storing them, but processing them!" She pointed at one, a loop of flesh so dark it could only be discerned by the absence of light.
"Check your suit's scans. Do you see that radiation? The heat and pressure? That bloody spleen is a damn supercollider."
Her friend grunted. Ibna felt her discomfort.
"Something is off. I don't understand what." It was an ill scent on the plane where their thoughts travelled.
Their headsets buzzed, "We have connected to your command forum and manifests have been exchanged. We will begin transmitting basic materials while your leaders deliberate on terms for more complex goods. Please wait in the warehousing section." Their Dekora attendants had disappeared without a word, leaving them with nothing to do.
they take me from the pen but they are slow with my bonds. they are quick to die. i grind their mushy bodies beneath my hoof. i must focus. the living and the dead rot everywhere i look: in pens, on hooks, in pieces... that is why
i have spent so long trying
that i storm the only way i can. i ball everything i can feel into a charge, and i crash through doors and keepers and machines alike. their cries are so distant. a wall rushes toward me as i rush toward it, and then--
The scent was getting headier. Closer, until the nearest wall hardened to a dark grey and then burst open like stones shattering. Something distinctly furry crashed amid the rubble, bleeding and with broken horns.
A Minot! Grunting with fury and bleating with pain, they pawed their way forward limply on hands with three fingers rather than four. The stench had been death and now it poured from the hole in the wall. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands of minds cried out in terror and misery. The Dekora were breeding them. Eating them. Experimenting on them. Generations beyond number with no memory of themselves but an eternity of bondage.
A consensus emerged like a supernova, filling Ibna and Olso with resolve. Ibna ran to the fallen stranger and placed a transponder on their back before flexing her right hand in different positions to signal the Shepherd for emergency extraction. Olso rushed to the opening in the wall, which had already scabbed its wounds. She hoofed the ground and waited, watching for whoever might appear.
"Copy that crew," Golden Plumage, primary organizer on duty, reported over their headsets, "The Order is spooling up, T-minus 30 seconds to extraction for four targets."
Gh'Tak howled over comms, "WHAT? Four targets?! We are not finished!!"
Golden clicked and twittered in reply, "Emergency, comrade. We're pulling you out too. Ibna can explain, I'm sure."
One of the larger Dekora lumbered from the pit, gnashing and snarling as it slithered.
As it flung a limb like a wrecking ball, Olso ducked beneath it and swung her horns into the thing's center. The flesh gurgled around her horns, seeming to tighten on her, so she wrenched them out and nearly sundered the creature doing so. The bulk which remained emitted a low and rumbling groan. The gash left one limb hanging by only a few centimeters of leathery carapace. It fell off and scurried back into the darkness. Another giant lumbered forward as the other recovered, but by then it was too late.
One moment, the three Minots were there. Then, without a flash or a sound, they were gone.
They popped into existence in a receiving room at the edge of the command forum, a living enclosure grown from engineered oaks. The ceiling, infused with a glowing fungus, washed them in a familiar teal light. The stranger lay slumped on the floor; Ibna had begun applying first aid. Gh'Tak twisted between alarm and anger.
"What is that?!" the cephalopod exclaimed at the unconscious body.
"A Minot," Olso signed. "They escaped captivity."
Gh'Tak saw the black goo smattered across Olso's vacsuit and understood what had happened. "You attacked a Dekora?"
Olso nodded, then walked out of the chamber and into the forum, followed by a trembling Gh'Tak. A flock of small and colorful birds -- Harps -- swarmed past them into the room, hauling medical equipment in their talons. Before Olso and Gh'Tak lay the forum itself: a dozen descending concentric rings of consoles, hundreds of them, staffed by members of all eleven species aboard the Shepherd. Through this squeaking, cawing, hissing cacophony emerged every one of the ship's choices. At the center, around a holographic dais shifting with statistics and visualizations, sat the six organizers on executive duty.
"Olso, what the hell happened?" demanded K'trk, a spindly upright rodent, "The station has broken off its material transfers."
Hara, another Minot, understood at once what had come to pass. As Olso explained, he began querying the forum for escape vectors.
"We weren't finished!" Gh'Tak exploded. "We only achieved partial parity! We need what they have! How can we abandon this ally so quickly, when they are so pivotal?"
"No ally of mine," Hara huffed. He swiped something from his console onto the dais, "I submit this vector for execution." The vote was over in seconds, and with a queasiness they felt the propulsion drives fire. In an hour, they would pass through the warp gate at the edge of the system and into another thousands of light-years away.
As Gh'Tak continued their outrage, Golden Plumage chirped, "There will be time to sort this out, Gh'Tak, but what's done is done." Quelling their fury, the mollusk called for transportation back to the Dabulan habitat. A moment later, they were gone.
K'trk chortled with laughter, "So much for safe harbor. Should we charge weapons?"
"Not unless they start charging theirs," the small yellow bird replied. "Should we answer their hails?"
Messages flashed on the dais, demanding an explanation for the extraction. Nothing mentioned the violence that had passed or the Minot that had been taken; Olso imagined they wanted the altercation to remain secret.
"No," Hara signed. "There is nothing to say."
A tense moment passed, engulfed in anticipation as the dais beeped with the station's repeated hails. At last they stopped.
"They're charging weapons!" exclaimed Glek, a stout and slimy amphibian. "We've begun charging our incinerators. They're using some kind of plasma launchers. I detect six platforms."
A four-winged bird half the size of Ibna named Thess shook her head with unease, "Plasma? Will our energy shields affect that?"
K'trk laughed out loud with a chittering guffaw, "We'll find out, won't we? Target the platforms. Torch that wretched hive!"
The Shepherd was not built as a single craft but as a collection of structures bound at a distance by electro-magnetism, a disk of pieces swirling in union. The habitat ring encircled it, housing hundreds of thousands of people in artificial biomes modeled after the crew's home planet, glittering blue and green and yellow. At the center the command forum hung like a gem, and between them orbitted the constellations of the module layer: enormous angular drives hauling the craft through space, innumerable miniscule research pods containing specialized sensors and experiments, and the incinerator platforms they had salvaged from a titanic cruiser crippled by battle more than a million years ago.
The dark, cubical weapons shifted in space and pointed toward the Dekora station as it grew distant, turning bright orange as their coils prepared to project a sun's heat through the vacuum. A blinding beam emitted from each of the four, vaporizing as many of the plasma launchers. The two that remained opened fire, casting great bolts of blue toward the Shepherd. Modules moved and made a path for one to pass, but the other slammed into a research pod. It burst from the impact, scattering debris.
As they prepared to fire again, a squadron of fighter-craft disembarked from the station.
"Energy shields had no effect!" Glek reported anxiously. "And they've scrambled interceptors. Two dozen!"
"Determine their loadouts and target the remaining platforms," K'trk replied. He sat up in his seat, clawed hands steepled in his lap. "Calculate the least-essential research modules and prepare to use them as deflectors."
Thess squawked in shock. "But, our experiments!"
K'trk laughed. "Is that a veto?" His avian comrade shivered with consternation, but said nothing. "Then do it, and maybe we'll live."
Still laughing, he turned to Olso, "You picked a hell of a circumstance for this, Minot. Outgunned, outnumbered, under-supplied and ill-equipped on a boat never meant to fight! A dream come true for a Rak like me."
The forum shook violently as it moved to evade another bolt. On the dais, another module exploded.
"There will be time to discuss this later," Golden Plumage spoke up. The dais rendered the fighters like insects coming to overtake them. The incinerators fired again, searing the last two plasma launchers aboard the station just as they left weapons range -- but one remained operational.
"The fighters are loaded with fusion missiles," said Glek, "And no apparent shielding."
"Delightful! Prepare the shield emitters to block their fire, and capture them if they get too close."
The spindly fighters loosed their armaments all at once, filling space with bright bombs that hurtled toward the Shepherd. As they closed, a network of modules spun into action and projected targetted walls of force in their paths, against which they exploded harmlessly. The network turned its energies toward the crafts themselves and began to encase them in those same walls. The station kept firing, but now the captured ships acted as the Shepherd's protection. Its shield emitters moved them around like any other module, positioning them in each projectile's path. On impact, they popped.
Finally, as they approached the ancient warp gate, only two ships remained in their grasp. The structure, a gleaming block of indeterminable age and composition, acknowledged their hails by spreading a translucent film around them in space like a bubble. As it closed, the remaining fighters detonated unexpectedly. The crew had no time to assess the damage as the gateway flung them through a hole in time and space toward a distant galaxy.