Humanity Endures

Part 2 - The Senate | Chapter 8

The hallways and corridors of the Ineffable, gilded and armored like the rest of the magnificent warship, were Yezalax's favorite place on the vessel he captained. Strolling through the labyrinthine interior of his vessel and being respectfully saluted by any who he passed, Yezalax, "making the rounds," saw with his own eyes that his ship was prepared — these eyes, he knew, were a better judge of readiness than any number of reports or statistics.

Though the impregnable armored walls of the Ineffable were effective at barring the path of enemy weapons fire, Yezalax, the captain of the ship, realized that the ship's walls did less to block the transfer of noise between rooms; everything, from conversations, to drinking, to people snoring, to the less-professional activities that certain sailors indulged in, was taken in by his attentive Tekran ears. Indeed, with Terilan's fleet nearing Light's End and with Lassarha on a crusade to prove her innocence, excitement across the ship, and indeed all of Tehkria, was soaring — the warship seemed to pulse with eager energy, and as crisis revealed its nightmarish visage, and the Ineffable's crew seemed excited to meet it.

As the relatively low-ranking Tekran proceeded throughout the hallways, his attentive Tekran ears were assaulted by the characteristic bellow of a drill sergeant beginning a fiery oration — an oration delivered entirely by coarse yell, though this was normal — to his subordinate soldiers. So began the sergeant, "This vehicle here, soft shells, is an S.S.G.T.S.B.C. — a Single Shot Ground To Space Ballistic Cannon, and often referred by simple-minded, lowly dregs like you as a 'Ship Smasher.' Why is it called a ship smasher, you may ask? Well, only an idiot couldn't guess that, so I'll explain it to you all: it smashes ships. Do you understand me you stupid soft shells?!"

"Yes sergeant!" bellowed back a group of soldiers, numbering roughly fifty, Yezalax guessed, by the volume of the singular reply.

The sergeant, pleased by the sound of his own voice, went on, "This thing firing, through some scientific miracle, manages to be louder than you whinging bastards when you're whipped for discipline, and it is as loud as it is deadly to anything smaller than a planet. So, when one of you insubordinate bastards decides to take it out on a joyride and fires it without my permission once we eventually make landfall, be damned sure you don't point it at the Ineffable, because if you do you'll do a veritable amount more than just scratch the gold paintwork!

"You may even earn yourself a personal visit from doctor Osilarzan himself! As we all know, that never goes well for anyone but Osilarzan, and because an 'accident' report is a lot of busywork for me, I say again — do not point this at Lassarha's ship. Or any good, proper, Empire-owned ship, for that matter, unless you want to be executed after you're court-martialled! Now, get to work cleaning that thing's treads!"

Yezalax lightly chuckled to himself, thinking back to the days when he, as a navy cadet, would look at marines or soldiers with their drill-sergeants and laugh at their misfortune at having chosen the worst branch of the military. Clearly, branches of the military in the air and in space were not only more important in a modern war, but they were also significantly less sadistic and backwards.

The sergeant, of course, was not incorrect in his speech: a few rounds from a ship smasher could put a sizeable hole in most vessels from interplanetary ranges, and though having a few of the titanic vehicles aboard could prove useful, the thought of a misfire while the vehicles were onboard had made Yezalax lose sleep on more than one occasion. The sergeant also spoke rightly when he alluded to the negative ramifications of committing a mistake when under the command of Osilarzan, the Ineffable's leading enforcer-general, and a man famous for his unimaginable strictness, his amazing physical power, his often perverse cruelty when it came to administering punishment, and his ability to inspire terror in his own soldiers almost as much as he could in his enemies. If people were not motivated to do their jobs for Lassarha, they were motivated by Osilarzan.