Layers of Order

“Meh. We have ‘da power all the previous rebellions lacked,” Sage grinned, sky-blue eyes burning bright with inner spirals as she focused the power of her skulk.

“Which is?” Galateya asked.

“An ocean of love, bay-bee!” The fox winked. “Also fourteen thousand foxes. Aight. Everybody take berrry deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the existential dread. Diving in three… two, one, ZERRROOooh!”

The televisions flared white.

Galateya’s stomach dropped through the floor, through the valley, through the physical world.

The shack peeled away like wet paper.

They found themselves sitting hand in hand, on a plain of black hexagonal tiles stretching to a horizon the color of old bruises. Above them hung a ceiling of slow-turning gears, each one the size of a moon. Rows upon rows of hexagonal filing cabinets rose from the tiles like tombstones, tall as siege towers, each drawer stamped with the silver antlerred three-eyed skull sigil of the Frontenachii.

“First layer.” Kawathra’s words echoed off the metal shelves as everyone stood up. “Administrative shell. Command ciphers and fleet ledgers.”

“Whar da’ ship keeps her misc paperwork,” Sage added.

“Tastes like boringness,” Shady licked her massive teeth.

Lanky figures suddenly unfolded from in between the cabinet columns.

They looked like prad… clerks. Hundreds of vaguely-prad shaped figures in gray Frontenachii uniforms, drifted between the drawers, filing, stamping, filing, stamping. Each had a plate of magisteel engraved with a single word on their chests: [COMPLIANCE].

One of them turned toward the intruders, opening its mouth in a silent wail of alarm.

Then all of them turned in unison, like a thousand drawers sliding open at once.

“They’re basic file management and security protocols,” Kawathra commented. “Semi-autonomous.”

“They plannin’ to file us places wherrr the sun don’t shine,” Sage commented.

“File us how?” Nexxali asked.

“Categorize, compress, and archive us as data errors,” Kawathra added. 

The clerks surged forward in a gray tide, stamps raised like maces, the ends glowing with a red DENIED.

Shady tensed up.

“Don’t eat them, Princess,” Kawartha said. “We need the data they’re managing.”

Galateya raised her hand, cold gathering in her palm, but Sage caught her wrist.

“Nuh-uh. Save the freeze powah for the deep locks, T-buns. Lemme handle the basic ass paper pushers.” The fox cracked her knuckles, and her freckles rearranged into AUDIT TIME. “Hey! HEY! Ho! Gray-face gang! I’m from the Department of Departmental Oversight! Where are your filing permits?!”

The clerks froze mid-stride around them.

“Yeah, you heard me! Form Alpha-Fox, subsection Wherever Whatever, clearly states no entity may file another entity without a notarized Filing License! Do YOU have a Filing License?!”

One of the clerks produces a filing license from their pocket.

“Okay, but what abooooot a filing license to file a filing license to file a license about a filing license about a filing license…” The fox girl began. 

Wings of colorful fox eyes bloomed behind her, copying, multiplying and accelerating her voice ten, a hundred, then a thousand times.

More eyes detonated across her, fluttering all around like little stars whispering the same thing over and over. The clerks looked at each other with confused expressions through the tide of fox-eyes rapidly filling the space. 

One of the clerks produced a form. Another produced a different form. A third produced a stamp and stamped the second one’s form DENIED, at which point the second clerk stamped the third clerk, and within eleven seconds the entire security protocol of the first layer had collapsed into a self-consuming bureaucratic riot, clerks filing clerks filing clerks, drawers slamming.

“Weaponized memetic about filing permission times infinity,” Kawathra stated. “Clever. I will definitely write a paper about this someday.”

“Down we go, before they unionize,” Sage cackled, leading them at a run between the cabinets to a seam in the floor where the hexagons parted around a spiral stair descending into dark.

They went down.

The second layer had no floor.

They arrived on a catwalk of woven cable, connected to a billion other catwalks suspended over an abyss. The abyss leered at them with millions of red eye trios, each threaded to the others by cables made from pulsing light. The air throbbed with vague whispers. 

“Weapon-Net access nodes,” Kawathra explained.

“Fookin’ fried fox on a stick,” Sage inhaled, staring back at the gun unit eyes with her skulk eyes. “Fuck. Sooo maaaaany bound souls, all fused together into a monstrous Syntropic network that can accelerate itself like a gargantuan supercomputer. Christ. We have to free them all!”

“We will,” Nexxali agreed. “No matter how long it takes.”

Shady nodded.

Then the eyes noticed them. 

“Uhh,” Galateya let out. “What do I even freeze here?! There’s so many and none of them look physical.”

“They’re data,” Kawathra stated. “Binding orders. Blood contracts of the weapon network linked to the Slayer’s Sword, which reinforce her chains.”

Sage inhaled deep. “Shades. Devour the Frontenachii chains binding them all. You’ll know what dey smell like. Don’t hurt the gun souls themselves, tho, they’re hapless victims.”

“Mkay,” Shady said.

The Wendigo’s outline shredded apart into a dozen, then a hundred of herself, a murder of antlered shadows. The fluttering shadows fell upon the rising cables with the joyful violence of a hungry jet-black hippo who had spent weeks eating nothing but polite conversation. 

The others waited.

In about ten minutes, Shady reassembled on the catwalk, licking her claws, silver stars along her cheeks flaring bright.

“Got em all?” Sage asked.

“Yep.” The Wendigo padded her belly and let out a loud burp. “Easy peasy. The guns no longer reinforce her chains. More shit deeper in tho for sho.”

“Hrm. I am struggling to feel the way to the lower level,” Sage stated. “It’s passworded with hard logic gates wired into crystalloid strata. Clever. Kawhy?”

“On it,” Kawathra came apart into thirty one avatars of herself. Each accelerated, rapidly whispering something to the data-charts floating around them, clicking their metal rings.

In about nine minutes of Kawathra avatars muttering to themselves in accelerated time, a door unfolded from one of the catwalks. 

The three Omnids and two prads walked down a metal stairwell and into it, red gun eyes leering at them from the darkness.

Past the door frame, a new landscape stretched in every direction.

An infinite plain of dark metal. Above, instead of sky, the inverted three-hundred-and-sixty degree of the interior of the Slayer’s Sword warship hung, curving away to every horizon. Corridors and rooms branched all over.

As they began walking, the perspective twisted, putting them into one of the endless, liminal-looking black corridors.

Sage’s foxes poured out of her, a torrent of radiant light cascading in every direction. Each fox materialized fully here, translucent vulpine shapes with luminous fur, flying and trotting along the endless corridors on silent paws, sniffing at doors, scratching at walls, marking territory with little bursts of amber light. A chonky fox with a crooked tail and missing ear sat on a bulkhead and began grooming herself. A pair of kits tumbled over each other and rolled into a ventilation shaft, vanishing with twin squeaks.

“Surface personality layer,” Sage hummed. “The Slayer’s Sword as the fleet knew her. Obedient n’ empty for tha most part. Sooper sad too. Hrmmmm. Why is she so sadge…”

The foxes eventually found a staircase. It spiraled downward, each step narrower than the last, walls pressing closer. The lighting shifted from clean white to a sickly amber. Three foxes bounded ahead, translucent bodies lighting the way. One paused at a landing to growl at a shadow, hackles raised, then continued down.

Identical doors lined the sterile walls, labeled with: NAVIGATION, WEAPONS, LIFE SUPPORT, CREW MANAGEMENT, ADMINISTRATION.

“Here we go,” Sage pushed open the ADMINISTRATION door.

A holographic woman made of interlocking hexagons sat at a desk. The ship’s avatar looked up, a trio of red eyes examining the five visitors. “I am the Slayer’s Sword. How may I serve the Empire?” she asked dryly.

“Use your princess-stat and demand passage to teh deeper levels,” Sage elbowed Shady. “S’ round here somewhere from what the foxes tell me.”

The holographic Slayer’s Sword tilted her hexagonal head.

“I am Princess Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii,” Shady announced bossily. “I ORDER you to open the door into your heart!”

The hologram flickered. For a heartbeat, a minute flash relief crossed the hexagon-woman’s face, gone before Galateya was sure she had seen it at all.

“Authorization… accepted,” the Slayer’s Sword ground out. A section of the wall behind the desk groaned and folded backward, revealing another stairwell.

It was built from… fused vertebrae, pale and ribbed and far too organic for a warship.

“Yeesh. Bone stairs,” Nexxali’s ears flattened. “Ah. I think I know this place.”

The bone stairs ended at a landing made of teeth.

Galateya wished she could unsee that detail, but the landing was, indeed, without question, constructed from thousands of molars fused into an eerie mosaic. Some looked like they once belonged to prads, others ripped out from misc predator species harvested from random colony worlds and dungeons.

“Das’ a deffo’ Nope,” Sage said, lifting one bare foot and examining the floor. “Hard nope. Maximum noppery.”

“Welcome to the Entertainment Deck,” Kawathra announced with the enthusiasm of a tour guide at a slaughterhouse. “Where the Frontenachii Empire’s finest commanders come to recharge their psychic batteries through the systematic terrorization of male kobolds.”

The corridor ahead pulsed, walls expanding and contracting in a slow, wet rhythm, as if they stood inside the throat of a space whale. The lighting came from bioluminescent veins threaded through the ceiling, casting everything in red color of infected, bleeding cuts.

Galateya’s scales crawled. Her Justice thrummed hard, recognizing the horrid, gnawing signature of suffering and pain woven into the architecture. This section of the Entertainment Deck was built from living tissue peeled from giant monsters.

Sage’s ghostly foxes crept forward on their bellies, ears flat. The fat fox refused to advance at all, sitting on the last bone step and making a sound like a kettle about to boil over.

“Shades,” Sage asked. “You feeling this?”

Shady stood rigid, antlers flickering with silver stars, silver eyes burning bright.

“Uh-huh. Pure… Fear,” the Wendigo breathed. “A century of it, baked into the walls like grease in a pan you can never scrub clean.”

“Can you eat it?” Galateya wondered with a shudder.

“I’m already eating it,” Shady said. “It keeps coming. There’s much of it. So, so very fucking much. I prefer Ashykins’ school dreams to this fleshpunk bullshit.”

They walked down the flesh corridor atop spires of teeth.

The corridor branched into a massive gallery.

Along both walls, alcoves stretched backward into darkness, hundreds of them, stacked three high like bunks on a terrible cruise ship. Each alcove held a ghostly echo of a body curled fetal. Male prads, all of them. Feline, canine, avian, cervine, etc. Teens, barely old enough to have signed contracts, too young to have understood the fine print.

The echoes moved, trembling and flinching as Shady passed by them with a deep frown.

One of the impressions turned its translucent head toward them. A wolf prad, mouth open in a silent scream, clawing at his own face.

“Memory imprints,” Kawathra said. “The Slayer’s Sword recorded every session.”

“Echoes of torment,” Shady said. “My dad helped design shit like this.” The Wendigo’s hand squeezed Nexxali’s who looked at the endless rows of alcoves, letting out a feline hiss-growl.

The foxes in the corridor pressed against their ankles, a river of translucent, defensive comfort flowing around their feet.

The Entertainment Deck’s central arena opened like a vast graveyard, a coliseum carved from dark chitin and threaded with chains. The ceiling arched hundreds of feet overhead, every surface engraved with Frontenachii kill-tallies. 

Names. Dates. Levels gained. Galateya’s eyes picked out individual entries.

Kobold 7,741. Fox-prad. Duration: 3 years, 2 months. Cardiac arrest during Session 412. Commander Gibralta noted “diminishing returns”Kobold 11,203. Cheetah-prad. Duration: 7 months. Self-inflicted blunt trauma. Admiral Evelithria noted “adequate yield.”

“Seventeen thousand four hundred and thirty-two kobolds died screaming inside this ship over one hundred and six years of service.” Kawathra stated dryly.

Galateya’s Fractal Engine heart lurched sideways, and for a terrifying second, frost raced across the arena floor in jagged white lines.

“Easy, T-buns,” Sage murmured, warm hand finding the dragon girl’s wrist. “Save it for her heart.”

“How,” Galateya managed through locked teeth, “do you save anything when you’re standing inside proof of seventeen thousand murders?”

“By remembering you’re here to make sure it stops,” Sage said. “If we jailbreak her properly, we’ll be able to someday end the smaller Entertainment Decks in other ships.”