The Reaper Chronicles

Blood for Blood

    Dashay awoke to a hard pounding in his skull and the vague sense that he was suffocating--there was something squishy and heavy over his face that was making it difficult to breath. The young pirate tried to displace whatever it was and found rather quickly that it wasn't simply his head being covered. It felt like somebody had dropped a lead drape over his entire body. He moved his arms slowly, painfully, up to his face. The exertion caused him to suck harder at air that wasn't there, setting fire to his lungs. He wrestled with whatever it was atop of him for an agonizing minute before finally being able to free himself by rolling it to one side. He sat up quickly, gasping for air, and took a quick look at his surroundings. It made him wish he'd settled for suffocation instead.

    That "lead drape" had not been a drape at all. Rather it was the massive corpse of Daedric, his crew's weapons specialist. All around the lone, surviving, pirate were the mangled corpses of men he'd bonded, befriended, and come to respect. "No." Dashay said. His voice sounded hoarse in his throat. It came out choked, barely over a whisper. The action of moving his mouth to create the sound made him realize that his face felt odd. Absentmindedly, Dashay reached up to scratch at his cheek while his wide eyes took in the awful scene. His hand came down orange and sticky, coated in drying Incarth blood.

    Blood. Dashay thought. Suddenly a bright recollection of every pillage and plundering ran through the young man's mind. He'd always felt that one day there might be a reckoning for all that his crew had done. He knew that a lot of what they had done was wrong. But this, Dashay thought as he looked at the blood on his palm. This seemed to be a bit much. Their pirate troop had only killed when others would absolutely refuse to part with their Federation goods. The Federation was the reason they had all been forced into piratry in the first place. When they had come into the Incarthid's section of the galaxy, they had promised his people peace, prosperity. They had shown them marvelous technologies and given them promises of help in advancing their own--for a price of but a little labor. But it was their "help" that had made his people reliant on them. Sure everything went smoothly at first but soon his people's economy and currency were tied in with the federation's. Then said galactic government began to ask for more labor in exchange for fewer intellectual gains. When his people began to realize what was happening, they quit their deal with this new and advanced government. Then the taxes began. They became almost unbearable. To work an honest living one would have to struggle endlessly to barely feed a small family. When his people refused to pay taxes, the Federation would remove their "protection" and "bandits" would attack their planets and outposts, laying waste to millions.

    The Incarthid people became trapped; and when people are trapped they do what they need to to survive. They only ever hit Federation supply posts. It was to take back what had been glutted from the efforts of his people. Sure they were "advanced" now, but at what cost? Dashay was sure that if the ancient Incarthid had known the cost from the start they never would have accepted the Federation's "help". At least that was what Goob believed.

    Goob. The captain. Oh no. The young pirate rolled another corpse off of his legs--Delvin--he recognized, before standing up. Or at least Dashay tried to stand up. Pain shot through the front of his lower left leg and he fell on his rear. Something had torn through the front of his pants and bruised his leg, leaving large, swollen, circular welts on his skin. Dashay knew the bone was badly bruised if not broken underneath. Nevertheless the boy steeled himself and stood up, keeping his weight on his good leg. It didn't help much because being upright forced the blood down into his injured leg either way. He could feel his pulse thumping in it and suddenly his head didn't hurt so much in comparison. The moments where he had to apply his weight ever so briefly to his injured leg were abominable to say the least, but Dashay was worried that the captain might be even worse off, and it was with that thought that he steeled himself against the pain.