From within the Ambassador’s Light Corvette, it looked like an invasion.
A swarm. Wings of Fighters all about, somehow not impacting each other, clustered about the enormous, black Inhibitor. Right next to it flew the Super Capital class Carrier, a ship big enough to construct an entire fleet, but unable to build Super Capital ships of its own, filled to the brim with bloodthirsty ground soldiers.
“All right, guys! Check your belts, we’re nearing the planet!”
The speaker checked his belt. There was a war on. He sighed quietly, then sighed again and started hyperventilating.
“Group one. We’re under fire! Fuel low!”
“Group five is relieving you. Move to the Carrier.”
“Group one docking with Carrier initiated.”
“Group five weapons ready. Initiating attack.”
The flashes of the turrets could be seen from the Corvette. Time and time again a sphere of light would soar from the ground to the sky and either be omitted by one of the ships, or explode against it, knocking the formation apart. The ships would reconcile, however, and renew fire. Only one more fell.
The Carrier and the Inhibitor were drawing closer to the crash site, the swarm grew thicker with each passing minute. The fire burned the ground, turned buildings to ruin and lives to ash.
The speaker trembled in his seat.
“We’re nearing the capital, just pray they don’t hit us now.”
As if on cue, their escort opened fire.
The sound of the turrets, although close and loud, seemed distant. The insulation of the hull muffled them. To the speaker, though, it felt like sitting in a cardboard box in the middle of a house fire.
It was that haunting calm before the storm.
The world slowed to a crawl.
The light of the turrets, their sound, the engines of their ship, of the escorting ships.
A hit shook the world and lit the skies.
“What are you doing out there, escort?!” the pilot shouted.
“One ship’s retreating, had to fall back before being shot down,” came the response. “It looks like the whole darn nation’s against us!”
“We should survive one hit, but no more,” said the pilot. “We’re very close, just a bit longer. Don’t fall apart, Clawy, don’t you dare fall apart on me now!”
Another hit shook them, lit the skies, made the Corvette lose some of its hull. Gradually it fell apart, screws, parts of the hull, windows, all soaring in the air behind them. Still, the pilot was thankful the ship didn’t explode. Their escort opened fire once again, this time not stopping. Thunder, thunder, thunder as the machine guns fired.
The speaker didn’t look out the window. He didn’t want to see.
“Check your seats! We’re in for a crash landing!”
The Corvette plunged into the earth, kicking up dirt in its wake. The two hits it took rendered it hardly mobile, but didn’t manage to tear its hull apart fully. The speaker unlocked his belt, but remained unmoving.
“Want this war to end quickly?” the advisor slapped his colleague’s cheek. “Then move out of here!”
The speaker stood up and followed. Everything was distant.
The war was somewhere else. As if someone wrote a book about ships crashing, about blood and crushed bodies beneath their ship. In that book, soldiers dismounted a Corvette, two of them fell to the ground, holes in their chests.The inkstained paper told a story of bloodstained feathers, of arrows that flew and pierced, of claws that tore and rent. Of a time when Griffin wouldn’t stop short of killing another Griffin.
Someone wrote of a mighty fortress with its front gates tainted with blood. Of the King who hid in the fortress, of his eyes shrunk in fear. Of his soldiers who with no remorse killed their brethren, piled their corpses and burnt them to ash.
“Do you have magicians like they do?” someone asked.
“Not as many, but we do,” someone else answered.
“Vaporise our ship,” someone ordered. “Turn every last piece of it into atoms. Do it now before the enemy gets the schematics.”
“Will be done.”
“And take him to a room, let him have some rest. He doesn’t seem to take it all too lightly.”
“Of course, you two, lead him to a room.”
In the far, far away land, a Kushan ambassador unit’s speaker was dragged across the castle’s corridors by his arm. Once in a while an echo of an explosion would be heard from the distance. Sometimes a scream would spill across the halls, having broken through an open window. And in that frightening, far away that land, the air was tense, impossible to breathe, choking speaker.
But once that speaker reached a room, he was at peace. Sturdy walls protected him from the outside. From the explosions, from the screams, from the war. The world here was dully, eerily white, as white were the walls, the ceiling, the bed and the curtains on it, the shelves were made of bright wood.
And here, the world was finally quiet.
“We need permissions,” said the advisor, looking at the Griffin King with imposing gaze. “Everything we’re doing must be legal, as in, us taking the downed ships over, and landing in your country, perhaps permanently.”
“Permanently?” The King asked, baffled. “But surely there’s no need to! That would stir this war up even more. Surely we can solve this matter pea–“ A sterner gaze from the advisor shut him up.
He pointed at a firefight below the castle, thankfully won by the loyalists as of now. “Look out the bloody window! It’s a civil war, and if we don’t help you, you’re going down. To preserve peace you must spill the blood of those who desire war, to say it poetically.”
The King avoided looking out the window. He sighed sadly and nodded. “What permissions do you need?”
“For landing on your soil, for providing you military help in the field, and for taking our downed ships. Also, we’ll need a strategy of political engagement for the situation we’re having. Namely, we’ll need to condemn these rebels as traitors, to have them imprisoned and rotting in the darkest dungeons.
“But not killing them. Killing will give us nothing. The catch is, we’ll imprison them on our ships. There we’ll convert them.”
“Convert them? The whole nation?” The King’s gaze, if somewhat hopeful, turned into a disbelieving one.
The advisor chuckled. “Not the whole nation. Just the leaders. Not the aristocracy, though, the people’s leaders: the priests, the charismatic factory workers, the Griffins of renaissance. We’ll build our own following.”
“But there’s so many of them. To think that they don’t have a single group leading them! How can they coordinate?”
“Sir! We could not establish a contact with the Mothership. The equipment’s damaged,” the second engineer from the ambassador unit reported.
The advisor grit a swear between his teeth. “Wonderful! Delightful!” he said. “Get the Griffins around and have them build some makeshift comms array. Double time!”
“Yes sir!” The engineer ran off with his colleague and followed the nearest Griffin guard through the castle.
“Now, diplomatic matters.” The advisor turned back to the Griffin King. “We’ll need to show ourselves as the righteous ones before the Council. Otherwise we’ll risk having the powers that be against us, and that’s something we don’t want... yet,” he added quietly to himself.
“Haven’t we already made that clear on the Council meeting? Don’t they all support us?”
The advisor grinned and chuckled disrespectfully. “People have the nature of standing for the ‘oppressed.’ We’re having the textbook democracy issue: the majority wanting something inherently bad. The problem is that sometimes the majority is plain stupid, as simple as that. No one wants to pay taxes, but everyone wants to live in a country funded by these taxes.”
“But aren’t we giving these insurgents exactly what they want? They want war, conflict, death and glory. Aren’t we giving it all to them?”
The advisor smiled indulgently, a dangerous shine in his eyes. “Oh, are we? The glory shall be drained out of their achievements, and whatever victories they claim, we’ll turn into defeats. They’ll beg to end this war. We’ll turn them all into bloody pacifists!”
The King trembled slightly. “Ver-ry well. Um, I believe, that, uh, we should go on to signing the permissions.”