There doesn't seem to be any wide-spread reaction to her doomed charge. People are by and large just not looking up into the sky, there is quite a considerable population of seagulls, not many people saw her and registered something out of the ordinary.

There is, however, a lookout with a basic telescope over there, who has handed it off to a second orc and appears to be accreting some kind of argument of other, even more fancily dressed orcs, while pointing at the sky.

Her impeller can cover... Maybe five meters radius if she thins it out. Arrows and swords, not railgun rounds. Though it would really fuck with people inside of it. She could. Kill. The slaving murderers. With her railgun and the eight all-purpose Spike missiles stored somewhere in corespace.

Could she though? Can she mentally convert a man, if a grey skinned one, into the grey and silver targets she blows up with the simulators?

She doesn't have a commanding officer. No support units. No Army chopper to call in infantry guys she can support or anything like that, and nobody to tell her 'cleared to engage'.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

The Valkyrie Core has a lot of processing power and sort of learns to use it in ways you want. For her, that's awareness. She skims the cloudbank again and watches the ground, the reactions, tagging commanders and trying to see if the situation is going to blow up as she agonizes between a charge and inaction.

The argument goes on for a few minutes, but it becomes clear the lookout is losing momentum. Eventually someone who appears, from demeanour, to be in charge of the lot of them shows up to the meeting, scatters everyone back to what they were doing before, casually slaps the sentry in the face hard enough to make them stagger back but not to noticeably impair their further actions, and sends them back to their post.

The command structure is a bit complicated - it seems like there is likely more than one operational unit in the area, likely at least one each attached to the two large ships and at least three competing interests on the ground - but they seem to have kindly marked themselves out in order of importance by how much gold, gemstones, and similar are worked into their clothing and strewn around them in jewellery.

Some of the less gaudily decorated orcs are eventually instructed to take away the bodies.

She............

Lurks, stewing in indecision and anxiety and looking for a good opportunity to rescue the prisoners. It'll probably be when they're on the ship and away from help. She can come at them from the direction of the sun, then. The prisoners won't exactly be any more vulnerable later. She can loiter up here for a while.

Eventually the first ship is fully laden - it must be quite cramped belowdecks with the number that were loaded onto it, and there are little piles of excess cargo poorly secured all along the deck. It starts to manoever out of the port with the aid of the large banks of oars that protrude from its lower regions. There is a lookout in the crow's nest but nobody looks especially alert and ready; the visible crew are all orcs and mostly involved in either hauling on ropes, supervising people hauling on ropes, looking nervously at poorly secured cargo, or generally being in high spirits and congratulating each other.

As they get out to sea, the urgent rope-hauling mostly dies down a bit and more of the crew start trying to find places to lean on things or sit down which are out of sight of the supervisors, who seem more concerned with having cheerful conversations with each other than looking out for laziness, although they occasionally happen to an unfortunate crew member and generally order them below decks, usually not following them.

She has to steel herself for this. It's a knot of anxious tension in her chest. Killing and dying soon to become real.

She wishes she had nonlethal weapons. Not much call for those against the alien menace.

Out of the sun in a slow-ish glide. Railgun to single shot mode. She shuts her eyes, takes deep breaths-

-You're saving lives. Taking down dangerous people who won't hesitate to gut you or others. It's necessary. To reduce the total death. To free slaves.

Could she go for shock and awe? Get them to surrender without a fight? Something tells her 'not fucking likely'.

You're not even going to try, though?

Shut up, inner me. People die. You did tactical exercises where tank crews died to save many more. It's worth it.

She settles into a hover a thousand feet away, sun directly behind her, and starts shooting. Center mass, the captain and then anyone wielding weapons. The only sign of it being sharp cracks in the air and then supercavitating wounds.

Immediate panic - although how these orcs panic is a pretty credible effort on the part of everyone on deck to scramble down hatches and otherwise get out of the open as quickly as possible - they're not helping each other but they're not massively getting in each other's way either.

The lookout in the crows nest ducks down and makes herself as small as possible but doesn't try to climb down the mast.

She zips forward and hovers just over the deck. Loudspeaker-

"GRENDELS DROP YOUR WEAPONS. SURRENDER AND YOU WILL LIVE. KILL A SLAVE AND YOU WILL DIE."

She - rips a hole in the deck with her impeller rather than try to go down one of the hatches or stairways. "I CAN DEFEAT YOU ALL. YOU DO NOT NEED TO DIE. DROP YOUR WEAPONS."

Lenora tears a hole in the ship. Terrified people scatter from the light. It smells _awful_ down there - sweat, vomit, blood...

It's no picnic up here too, what with the dead bodies scattered around where they fell.

One of the less well dressed orcs stumbles into the light, as if shoved from the shadows. He does not have any obvious weapons on him, although he has a belt that looks like it probably had a sword on until extremely recently.

"I've been told to... ask the terms of our surrender," he stammers, terrified.

"I'm going to take the slaves to Brass Coast and their freedom. You can come with as prisoners or be put ashore here with some small part of your wealth, a few supplies and weapons I hand over only after you are off the ship."

There is some frantic whispering from the darkness, to the tune of 'Put ashore where?', 'Better than dying', and in lower tones, 'Stall her', as well as, somewhere further back, a furious 'keep that hatch down!' and... something muffled about bodies.

"Put ashore where?" asks the clearly expendable negotiator, starting to try to put a brave face on it.

She'll tear anoyher hole in this shitty slave ship and go down another deck. "YOU'RE NOT SURRENDERING PROPERLY. ALL GRENDELS TO THE TOP NOW. I HAVE NO PATIENCE FOR SLAVERS."

The ship makes a dangerous creaking noise.

The deck below is full of terrified humans. Very full of terrified humans. Some of them are children. They have been doing a lot of crying and comforting each other and trying to stay out of the worst of the ordure while chained together in groups of about half a dozen and with barely enough space for them all to stand, let alone sit or lie down.

A number of orcs start dutifully climbing out of the hole. They appear to have left their swords or whatever weapon they were carrying behind. Some of them appear to have stuffed every available part of their clothing with miscellaneous valuables.

She doesn't care about the fucking gold she cares about the PEOPLE.

She - fuck.

This is horrible. But you can't just stop. She gathers up a few swords and - carefully - shears through a few chains with the plasma-edged monosaber, carefully limited to just a few inches long - and hands the swords to the strongest-looking people she frees. She doesn't know what to say. She wants to cry but hahahahaha NO this is still a combat situation.

"People. Please - help me herd the Grendels and if you know how to sail, come up. I - you're going to be free. If - if anyone needs medical attention, speak up!"

A few of the humans extremely gleefully pick up swords, start scrambling up through the hole, and immediately begin viciously hacking down any orc in reach - whether unarmed, cowering, fleeing...

Another set start scrambling up calling out their qualifications for sailing duty, but wait behind the sword-enabled people, expecting them to clear the deck of surrendered Grendel - the fatal way.

"Please, my daughter, she's not breathing," someone yells.

There is also a splash from further down on a side of the ship Lenora can't see from this angle, as if someone has dropped something approximately body-sized in the water.

And there's a flashing light being pointed at shore from somewhere around the oar deck, which is below the slave deck she has just opened.

And the orc in the crow's nest has got up and daringly started raising a set of brightly coloured flags.

"NO!" Swords get yanked hard out of hands by a shimmery blue field, probably breaking bones. "They're fucking surrendering you dipshits! No more killing!"

God fucking dammit she can't police an entire huge ship all by herself what the fuck was she thinking- "JUST STOP. EVERYBODY JUST FUCKING STOP GOD DAMMIT."

Fuck, there's another deck she has to go clear what the fuck is happening THERE god dammit all- Oar deck, without ripping a hole this time, is there anyone actively killing people?

Lenora tries to get down a hatch non-destructively, but it has been dogged tight. The wood seems to be somewhat sturdier than one might generally expect wood to be.

The freed humans who still have some fight left in them are trying to organise tending their wounded, wrangling the ship out of deep water, and occasionally sneaking off to pick up swords and kill orcs out of the shouty lady's immediate reach. The orcs who came up on deck are mostly trying to desperately hide. Several groups of humans who are still chained are anxiously attempting to get her attention.

There are additional body-sized splashes. Frantic light signalling continues.

This is such a fucking mess. Literally none of this is going right.

She contains the destructive shearing force of the Impeller Field to the hatch itself and any possible locking mechanisms this time, trying not to ruin the ship's structure any more, but they might be killing people down there.

Well... no-one's _actively_ killing anyone.

Some humans and some orcs are chained to oar-benches and some have already injured themselves in their panicked attempts to get out of their shackles as the ship started to make alarming noises and they stopped being closely supervised.

A couple of orcs over there are attempting to shovel a dwindling pile of dead human bodies overboard. One orc is determinedly signalling with sunlight and a mirror out the side of the ship that faces the shore they just left, although whether anyone can see it over the distance involved is not clear; it seems to be a simple repeating distress signal.

Several orcs have dropped to the floor in a weak attempt to hide as the hatch flew open.

Fuck. Fuck. 

Godammit. Godammit. 

She can't handle this anymore. It's just such a fucking mess. She'll just - quickly as she can cut through all the various chains, then do the same on the next deck up, then head topside and try to keep the prisoners from murdering ALL the orcs.

The armed prisoners are not very keen on being seen with weapons and will drop or hide them when she comes into view, but it's quite hard to be everywhere at once even with a huge hole in the middle of two decks.

The remaining Grendel are quite interested in not being seen by anyone, and surprisingly good at it given the general open-plan design of the vessel.

Between these two factors, the rate of orc murder drops dramatically when she concentrates on it; many of the previously armed individuals would like all their limbs intact to try to steer the ship towards Madruga.

From the chatter of the impromptu human sailors, it seems likely that they will run her aground on a tiny rocky island, which will be better than sinking but they're a bit worried there aren't food supplies for an extended stay and are trying to find someone who thinks they can swim for shore.

They clearly don't even see her as an ally! She's an obstacle to work around in this chaotic mess of a battlefield! And it's probably her own damn fault somehow! Her head feels fuzzy and her gut feels like it's full of rocks, but she keeps moving. Everyone's cut free - medical attention consists of pointing her survival-grade  autodoc at them and doing what it says, she doesn't have any true vervain or whatever it was but the 'doc has a 22nd century trauma medicine VI, though not a very big supply of medicine - there's so many injured and dying people, it makes her want to throw up. Fucking fuckity fuck.

Very few people on the vessel are in good shape according to the autodoc. Those who come to her, or are brought to her, mostly have obvious wrenched joints and hand-to-hand combat injuries that they would like dealt with, and a few cases of overwhelmed unconsciousness. When the autodoc looks at them, there are a lot of parasites, lice, viruses, infectious bacterial diseases, and all that good stuff going round. Mostly the autodoc actually prescribes cleaning out wounds, painkillers and antibiotics if available, immobilisation or elevation of body parts.

The more badly injured are mostly those who were involved in murdering orcs, who were mostly injured by her, and aren't very interested in reporting for treatment; they appear to have been stabilised by the expedient of another human tying various bits of varyingly clean cloth to the affected area, which actually seems to have worked unnaturally well...

There are presumably a lot of orcs with sword wounds somewhere, but those who haven't succumbed to them have mostly dragged themselves out of sight.

She is capable of implementing the concept of 'triage'. Sort of. Ticks? Parasites? Not going to kill you in the next hour. Painkillers, yes. Antibiotics, yes. That baby who wasn't breathing-

Don't cry.

-Has anyone managed to appoint themselves New Captain or something?

Not exactly, but there seems to be a group of sailors fairly competently hauling on ropes and things; the ship has gradually made a turn and is struggling back not quite the way it came. There seem to be a few independent squads working on useful things, everyone just pitching in where they think they might be helpful, nobody giving orders: a rigging crew, a group assessing the damage and nailing spare bits of wood to the sides in some kind of hopeful reinforcement strategy, a first aid station, a group that went and rounded up fresh water and food supplies, a few circles of people singing.

And less productive activities, some people attempting to sort and catalog miscellaneous valuables, some people trying to trouser as much as they can, some people trying to shake them down for them.

And, now she's paying greater attention to things not directly in front of her again, still some muffled sounds of violence from the depths of the ship. It sounds like at least some people have decided she was distracted by medical triage and have gone off to start killing each other, in a slightly more subtle fashion this time.