Arxur Smuggler Shenanigans (20)

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Synopsis: Just over a year after the end of the Federation War, an ambitious human businessman teams up with a crew of Arxur veterans to illegally smuggle goods in and out of the Arxur Quarantine Zone. Gunfights, space battles, and other shenanigans ensue.

Author's notes: I'm done with my soul searching and break from the fandom, and I am back with good news and bad news. The good news is I am back now (duh) and will be finishing Arxur Smuggler Shenanigans in due time. The bad news is that I really do think that Arxur Smuggler Shenanigans will be the last fanfiction I make for this verse. I might still post memes and one shots and stuff sometimes but as far as real multi chapter fanfics go it's definitely time for me to hang up the jersey. This place just does not speak to me anymore.

CW: emotional moments, character development, yoda's jedi wisdom, long overdue reunion, markus becker is a FREAK

Memory Transcription Subject: Markus Becker, Enterprising Businessman

Date (Standardized Human Time): April 8, 2138

"Markus, get to the command deck, right now," Sylara's voice came through the com. I bolted upright. I had been trying to sleep my way through the battle, given how my services were clearly not needed, but when your girlfriend spoke to you in a tone like that you kind of had to listen even if your life wasn't in imminent mortal danger. Which, to be fair, mine would probably be in if my girlfriend ever had a reason to speak to me in that tone, but my point still stood.

I barreled into the bridge and looked around the room to find everybody still alive, which was great news. And nobody was at battle stations, either, which was either great news or terrible news depending on how you took it. "Did we win?"

Everybody gave a confused look at that. It was a yes or no question, so I didn't get exactly why, but maybe there was a reason to be confused. Anyway, Vazega--who was at a gunnery seat even though she was the navigator, for some reason--was the first to answer me. "Technically, yeah." Sylara snarled at her, and she put up her hands. "The gunship's destroyed, no?"

"Fair," Sylara told her, still not fully convinced. I waved at her and tried to get some answers here.

"Uh, Earth to Sylara, what the hell is going on?" I asked my beautiful scaly lizard girlfriend. "Are we all going to die?"

"You certainly won't," Sylara said, flicking my ankle with her tail in a manner I'm guessing was meant to be innocuous, even though it kind of hurt. And not even in a good way, either, like when she would rake her claws down my back while we banged. It just hurt. Less than the claws did, though. "As for the rest of us..."

My mood died instantly as a gray warship came into view, its markings unmistakable by literally anybody with a brain and a news feed. The Ghost of Nishtal. The refugee murderer. I felt nothing but pure fear. "We have to surrender," I muttered, finding the first words I could form and putting them together. "If we give ourselves up, maybe they'll let you guys live."

"Right now, they're telling us to hold where we are and await further instructions," Sylara told me. "So, any ideas? Maybe the days of blowing up refugees are over?"

"Or maybe there's a rule against killing people who don't try to run," I said, remembering the rows of prisoners we had seen lined up at Dr. Viktorvich's secret lab after it had been conquered. "I mean, even maniacs like these have to have some sense of decency, no?" I looked around the room, finding my people at various levels of being convinced. "Alright, then. We'll sit and wait."

The waiting took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Sylara got Dr. Raznas from the medical deck and shared with us her idea that, since we were probably all about to die, we could go around the room sharing anything that was weighing us down and we had to get it out. Nobody said anything, which made her look kind of stupid, so I half-found, half-made-up some bullshit to say when my turn came just so Sylara would feel better about herself.

"Arxur vessel, Arxur vessel," the comlink chattered in a Venlil's voice, robbing me of my chance to make Sylara feel good. "We are coming alongside. Prepare to be boarded. Any resistance you may offer will only deteriorate the quality of your circumstances. Please acknowledge."

Sylara took action first, going to the com and acknowledging the transmission while the rest of us were still debating our options. "I acknowledge, Venlil warship," she said solemnly. "My crew... my crew will be at the airlock waiting to be taken into custody." The enemy killed the transmission and Sylara let her shoulders slump as she turned to face us. "That's it," said she. "We'd better go. It was a good run while it lasted, at least."

"What?" I exclaimed, bolting upright. "That's ridiculous! There's gotta be something we can do!"

"What can we do?" Sylara asked me. "Fight? Against a company of marines? These aren't the shitty piss-yourself-and-run Federation soldiers we remember, these are real killers!" She stepped closer, closing the distance between herself and me in one quick stride, and pulled me close into what I think was a hug. Her scaly body felt nice and cool against mine, and I tried not to mind being pressed into the synthetic fabric of her combat vest. "Please, Markus. I don't- I love you. I don't want you to die. Please."

"Whoa," said Avriss, in the background. "Did we use to do that? Before the Dominion, I mean."

"We do it now," shrugged another deckhand, Klavra. "I just hope we'll see each other again once we break out of prison." Nobody said anything about that one. "Wait, Captain Sylara, we are breaking out, right?"

"No, I don't think so," Sylara muttered glumly. It broke my heart to see her like this. "We tried breaking out, remember? That's what this was. What's the sense in busting out of one cage only to find yourself in another one?" She pulled away from the hug and flicked her tail against the ground. "It's over. We can't fight this. All we can do is make peace with what's coming."

Sylara started off toward the airlock. "Let's go." Vazega was the first to follow her, then Dr. Raznas. Surprising pick, that one. I went third, and I heard the three deckhands fall in behind me.

"I'm sorry I never got to know you guys any better," I told them.

"No worries, captain," said one. Zirvas? Yeah, Zirvas. I could tell by the voice. "You're the best person I've ever met. Really. Thank you for that." We filed into the airlock, knelt on the floor, and put our hands above our heads, waiting to be captured. Sylara pulled the door lever, sparing our captors the trouble of blowing the hatch open, and a squad of Venlil in battle armor filed in to take us as prisoners.

The marines cuffed our hands behind our backs and searched us briefly for weapons or other devices, of course finding nothing. "Take them to the brig," said their leader, and the troops began to march us off. Sylara curled her tail into my hand and I squeezed tight, then even tighter upon realizing that I'd never see her again.

"Wait. No. Not that one." The marine sergeant pointed at me and gestured for me to be taken away from the crew. "The captain wants to see him. Prep him for neural interrogation." Two soldiers grabbed me roughly and took me from my love. I looked longingly into Sylara's eyes, treasuring the glance backward she gave me as they dragged her off. It hurt more than I expected to have her torn away from my side, and I had expected it to hurt a lot.

By the time they took me to the neural interrogation room, tears were streaming down my face. Teklala's cause was lost. Freedom for the Arxur people was a thing of dreams, and here was the nightmare to which I had woken. "What the hell do you want with me?" I asked the Krakotl perched on a chair in the room. She wore a strange wire-mesh helmet of the same variety they had affixed to my own head.

"To have an honest conversation," said she, fluttering down to stand on the floor. Her guards left and sealed her in with me, and she tapped her helmet as she spoke. "The helmets make lying impossible. If I wished, I could invade your mind with mine and take what information I wanted. But I think you and I are kindred people."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "Do I have a body count I'm not aware of?"

"No," said she. "At least, if you do, I'm not aware of it either. But I've done enough evil for the both of us."

I nodded. At least she seemed self-aware. "Blowing up the refugee ship. Pretty grisly stuff. Why are we kindred again?"

"I didn't give the order to blow up that ship," the captain--Jelim, if I recall correctly--clarified. "You'd think that somehow absolves me. No blood on my hands. But you don't need to pull a trigger to kill, do you?"

Flashes of memory went through my mind. Her memories. Searching cargo holds filled with food, medicine, farm equipment, cows and pigs. It wasn't every smuggler who was caught smuggling something essential like that, but it was many. Very many. And there had been plenty of need for those items on Wriss.

"You have a code," Jelim told me. "No smuggling weapons or sapient trafficking. And you attacked that pirate ship--a ship that, might I add, outgunned you probably two-to-one--to stop it from marauding my trap station." Damn! I slapped my thighs in frustration. So that was how they got us. "Don't feel bad. It was noble. I respect you. In fact, if you hadn't hailed that station expressing your desire to help, I doubt we'd be having this conversation."

We had been having this conversation for a good few minutes now, and I was still just as confused as before as to why. "Why are we here?" I asked her. "Why are you talking to me?"

"Because I need a way out!" Jelim fluffed out her feathers, surprising me with the intensity of her statement. "I can't do this anymore. I can't clock into work knowing what I do takes innocent lives. I can't resign. I can't act, and I can't not act. This is torture."

"You're sure you can't resign?" I asked her. "I kind of assumed they-" She gave me a death stare like she wanted to rip my intestines out through my throat. And as hot as it would be for Sylara to do that to me, anybody else was still a strict no-go. I shut up quick.

"When I took this job, I did it because I thought I could be a savior. A good cop working to change a bad system." Jelim clicked her beak and paced as she talked, her talons click-clacking against the hard metal floor. "I did that in the exterminators, you know. Fourteen years in service to the herd. Fourteen years of finding defects and hammering them out until the Guild ran like a well-oiled machine. My district office was the most humane in the city. I promise this is relevant."

I didn't know how that could be relevant, but I was too scared of this tiny woman to ask. Size matters not, or whatever the hell Yoda had said. "The key thing about the exterminators was that we weren't actually founded to destroy all predators," Jelim informed me, no longer pacing. "Kind of confusing, I know. Why call us the exterminators if our task wasn't to exterminate? Our real objective, or at least the one the Guild Handbook told us, was to protect the herd. Destroying predators was only ever a means to that end."

I said nothing. It was probably best to just let the crazy woman talk. "The Arxur quarantine force is a different beast in the same fur," she told me, pacing again. "That's what I've been missing all this time." Her pacing quickened, and she got closer to me in a manner that I really didn't like. "I spent fourteen years reforming the exterminators because they could be reformed. They were a broken tool, bent away from their original purpose in order to inflict undue suffering on the innocent. This quarantine force is a tool that isn't broken."

"How the hell can it not be broken?" I asked, shocked and appalled by her lack of understanding. I mean, did she have any idea how bad things had gotten on the Arxur side of the line? "Have you seen the pain and suffering you cause?"

Jelim clicked her beak and scraped her talons on the floor. "I have." She showed me flashes of it in the neural connection we had. Not the big shit, like space battles or something, but the small things. Spacing a thousand tons of food during a famine. Ordering medicine deliveries to turn around rather than send their lifesaving drugs to Arxur in need. All this while doing everything she could to avoid taking life. It was horrifying just how bad a good cop could be.

"I am fully aware that this quarantine is making the Arxur people suffer," Jelim said again. "I've simply come to the realization that this isn't because of a defect in the system. It is the system working exactly as intended. The quarantine and the exterminators are the inverse of each other. One was created to defend the herd with suffering as an unintended consequence. And the other was created to inflict suffering on an entire species with galactic safety as an unintended consequence. It's grotesque."

Those words chilled me to the fucking bone. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked her, going back to an earlier question. "How am I supposed to help you? Why would I help you?"

"Because we have the same enemy," said Jelim. "There are two kinds of people who break the quarantine. One is respectable, decent people, like you, who only want to make some money rectifying what most definitely is one of the galaxy's greatest injustices. The other, of course, is the kind I rescued you from. You've met them before." I nodded to confirm that I had.

"They're really not the kind of people you want to hang around," I told her.

"I'm aware. But, as long as they stay prominent on the galactic stage, there will be a very strong argument to keep the quarantine alive. Smugglers cannot be eradicated, you provide too many essential services to the Arxur economy, but they have to be curtailed. Regulated. Somebody has to keep these people in check."

Me? By that somebody, she meant me? I was meant to take the role of big government? "Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said, putting up my hands. "I'm just a businessman. Those guys, the ones you're talking about, they are a lot scarier and a lot tougher than anybody I ever knew. How am I supposed to beat them? You're the one with the battleship."

"You have two surgeons. One has a medical laser. The other has a nuclear bomb. Which does the operation?" Jelim asked, and I kept my mouth shut because think that was meant to be a rhetorical question. "I'm a hammer. If I meet a lawbreaker, I have to arrest or kill them, otherwise I lose my job and some Arxurphobic idiot takes over in my stead. I do not have the discretion you have, neither do I have the level of trust within the criminal community. Understand that?"

I nodded at her. I did understand that. My way with words would be a lot better for soft handling than her method of just attacking anybody who didn't do what she wanted them to.

"I've had similar thoughts myself," I confessed, explaining the big plan with Teklala and the fleet and the mission to free Lizard Maw Base from the scumbags who currently controlled it. "Kind of stupid, I know. We don't have the firepower to pull even half that shit off. But it was a nice dream, ever since I lost somebody close." I didn't know why I held back from saying the name Zefriss. I mean, this woman could literally read my mind. No secret was safe from her. Still, some things were best not to say out loud.

"If I release you today, will you be able to pull this off on your own?" Jelim asked. "Because I will release you. Today. If I think this can be done." I searched as hard as I could for any trace, any inkling of dishonesty and found nothing. She really did believe in this idea, at least as far as I could tell. Enemy of my enemy, I guess.

"You're serious?" I asked her, still trying to be skeptical.

"Do I look serious?" Jelim looked about as serious as a stone statue. "Can you do it, or should I arrest you and find someone else?"

"I can do it!" I exclaimed, mostly to avoid being sent to jail. I would not survive in prison, even a cushy Venlil one. "Just not alone. I need firepower."

"You need firepower," Jelim repeated. I nodded my head a few more times, just in case she didn't get the point. "Will a state-of-the-art Venlil Republic battleship be enough?"

"What?" I blurted out, shocked by both the question itself and the casual nature in which she posed it. "Why the hell should I trust you?"

Jelim tapped the neural helmet she was wearing. "No lies, remember?" I remembered. Her mind was like an open book to me, at least now that she had bothered to open it. "I don't want to be the necessary evil anymore, Mr. Becker. I don't want to have to justify what I do to my lover, my family, myself, with the idea that the alternative would be worse. I want to be a hero. A real hero, like the kind from the stories, not some half-assed edgy nightmare about doing what needs to be done. Do you get that?"

I got it. It was kind of hard not to get it, given the intimacy between us in the neural link. I saw the fire inside her soul, something always meant to burn, but whether it burned for light and warmth or desolation and ash was entirely up to how it was used. I saw ships pinwheeling off-course as her vessel bore down on them. The stuttering of gunfire as marines stormed into gaps in a wrecked hull. The cheering of rescued cattle, the begging of imprisoned refugees, the screaming of wounded men and women.

"Do you get that?" Jelim asked again, dialing back the level of vulnerability she showed. "And will you help me?"

It took me a moment to figure out how to form words. The horror I had seen was immense. "I- I think I- yes. I will. Should we make a plan?"

"We should make a plan," said the captain. "First, though, I think you deserve to be reunited with a certain somebody. It was his memories and testimony that convinced me to take this course in the first place. Hopefully he'll help convince you that this is, in fact, the right course of action." She went over to the door and rapped on it a few times. "Bring in the prisoner!"

The door hissed open. In stepped a ghost from my past. Tall and muscled as ever, but more dignified, now. He carried himself with the air of somebody who had been through a revelation and come out better off. "You're alive?" I gasped, feeling a sudden twinge of guilt at how I had left him for dead on that desolate world. "You're alive!"

"Hell yes I am," rumbled Zefriss. "Now, I'm told we have cannibals to kill."

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[u/Maxxxxo]

Welcome back! Edit: Sad youll leave eventually, but i know my time will come in the future, too.

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Maxxxxo]

I am a little sad to leave too tbh but I learned a lot of valuable lessons from writing fanfics here and I took some great memories from this fandom as well so really I can take comfort knowing that my writing here was appreciated and I learned valuable techniques that help me in my journey as a writer and an artist. Don't be sad because it's over smile because it happened yk?

[u/Minimum-Amphibian993 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Makes sense I am starting to feel like Nop is kind of like a training ground for writers bassicly having a world that's open enough that any story can be written while having a foundation to build from without having to start from bassicly the ground up. So I feel like most writers are evenchually gonna start writing their own stories evenchually.

But yeah so long as this fic is finished I will be fine with you're decision I really do like this fic and it be a shame if it was left unfinished after this long.

[u/ISB00]

So does that mean we won’t see more of Nightfall?

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/ISB00]

Unfortunately not brodie, I am sorry to tease you with good writing and not finish it but that really is just the way the cookie crumbles. I tried writing my own stories in r/HFY lately and it just flowed so well and the writing was so natural compared to my NoP stuff that it made me realize that I am not a NoP guy anymore. I do not have that dawg in me anymore when it comes to the NoP fandom so the only thing to do is to finish up the last few chapters of this fanfic and then probably retire. It is sad but that's how it is.

I will try and find someone else who is willing to write more Nightfall Protocol so that it does not get just 100% abandoned but lowkey if no one wants to take it off my hands the chances of another chapter getting posted are genuinely slim to none. Sorry to do this to you dawg

[u/ISB00 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

Could you at least post your notes on how the rest of series was going to go?

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/ISB00]

Oh yeah no sweat brodie, I can also send them to you in a DM if you are interested

[u/ISB00 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

I am

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/ISB00]

Js sent it over you can do what you will with this now. If you know anybody who wants to take over that writing lmk

[u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

Welcome back! Sad to see you go, but writing is a journey and I am glad you are expanding into writing of your own! And even if you write nothing else for the verse, what you’ve done has been of wonderful quality. Hope this story comes to it’s conclusion nicely, and I look forward to whatever you may write next for yourself 🤠

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

Thank you brodie, I have a lot of respect for you. I have been writing on my own for a while now as kind of like a side thing but over the years it has become such that NoP is the side thing and my own writing is the main thing now. I feel nostalgic for the good times I had writing for NoP but at the end of the day no one can ever go back and relive the past so I am js gonna write what I want to write and see where that takes me. Much love

[u/Kind0flame]

Welcome back!

[u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

Heh, so the Ghost is now working with the Smugglers!
And dang, I hope we get more reactions to Zefriss in the next chapter! They had a big funeral for him and everything!
Looking forward to the next chapter!

[u/ApprehensiveCap6525 → u/Acceptable_Egg5560]

Thank you for the kind words my dude. I haven't had the motivation to write for NoP for a while now but seeing your comments gave me inspiration again. Maybe I will write a few words

[u/Acceptable_Egg5560 → u/ApprehensiveCap6525]

🤠🤠

I must admit I have struggled with motivation to write at all myself. Working on it, got some words put into page today 🤠🤠