Humanity Endures

Part 7 - Last Stand | Chapter 9

The lack of intact ships, if it were true, however, did present a problem; as Velan and his crew members made their way towards what remained of the station's manufacturing quadrant, Velan pondered various ways by which they might be able to circumvent the lack of vessels, though worryingly, no viable ideas immediately came to mind. Of course, Dentor's engineering prowess would likely make him a far more reliable source of ideas and inspiration than Velan ever could be; with Dentor, the humans had a chance, though they would have to wait in order to see how much of a chance this really was. According to Parivahn, there were still roughly five hundred people aboard the station, only a quarter of which were military, and all of whom were likely to suspect Velan, his crew, and now even Parivahn himself, as alien; the high number of civilians was due to the station having taken in a number of refugees, and this news pleased Velan — refugees wouldn't be armed with anything more than basic weapons at most, and as such they posed little threat to him. With his enforcers leading his formation, Velan intended to do what he had done with the station's first and likely only line of defence — incapacitate them and then convince them that he was human later — but as he progressed through the ominous, endless network of corridors and hallways that sprawled out before him, being constantly flanked on both sides by hyperspheres that had been physically damaged beyond all hope of repair, Velan couldn't help but feel a nagging uncertainty behind every decision he made. All the rooms his host entered and scouted out were home to only corpses of varying age; some were still warm, whereas some had been lying there for almost a dozen hours. As there were only some five hundred people left aboard the station, and most of these were mentally shaken civilians, there were simply not enough people to clean up the thousands of mangled bodies that were the only persistent sight throughout the station; for every inch of ground that Velan walked past, he felt the desire to lose his lunch intensify, despite the fact that neither he nor anyone else amongst his crew had eaten any form of lunch since they had breached into the Kalithihar system so long ago.

Velan did not suspect an ambush by a station whose crew were terrified of him and his suspected alienness; a lack of typical human activity would only go further to convince them of falsehood, and as such, while his crew marched through the bleak, desolate halls of the station, Velan allowed his crew's discipline to fall, letting it decompress somewhat, or at least cease its exhaustive, drug-induced alertness. The hushed whisperings of hesitant chatter, barely audible against the deafening clank of metal boots against a metal floor, soon grew to a moderate drone of conversation as multiple such discussions sprang up amongst his crew members and his new Kalithiharian "recruits" — though the Kalithiharians and Iselviah may have initially thought themselves the senior force in the partnership, Velan's overriding command of them, due to his experience at Light's End, had done much to change this dynamic. Regardless of commander, however, the newfound comrades began sharing sorrow, mourning lost friends, making new ones, and comparing how many aliens each of them had killed. Unsurprisingly, Korthekar dominated in the latter conversation; as Velan walked, he was suddenly startled when Korthekar, his booming voice reverberating throughout the halls as he gradually grew intoxicated by conversation, boasted loudly, "And did you slay two thousand of those filth?"

A wicked chuckle emanating from the titan a moment later drew concerned looks from all nearby.

"You didn't even kill two hundred of them? I shouldn't be surprised!" Korthekar laughed, patting the back of the marine he was talking to with enough force to send an unprepared man to the floor. However, as the predictably loud conversation returned to the topic of the fallen, Korthekar had a surprising amount to share; at one point, he practically delivered a eulogy for Jilszen, and he continued to bemoan the loss of so many others as the human formation proceeded towards the industrial core of the station.

Velan was surprised: he had expected the signature haughtiness of Kalithiharians, and the general dislike of the world and its people, to interfere with such social activity, and yet, not only did either of these come up rarely, but when they did they were most often as part of a joke — shared ordeals, and shared loss, it seemed, did much to bind people together. When Velan finished that thought, by pure, delightful coincidence, a somewhat-familiar voice piped up from behind him.