Down By Bluebell Creek | Glowfic Constellation

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.

Of course they're still murdering each other.

She is

Going to try to reduce the total number of deaths. That means medical triage until everyone who's likely to die in the next hour has been looked at and then manhandling ALL the remaining Grendels she can find onto the top deck and under her guard with stern warnings not to kill the ones she's already retrieved, looking angry and lost, and then ... looking for a rowboat or something.

The only medical triage cases that are openly coming to Lenora who were in imminent danger were some advanced dehydration cases she's already attended to.

A few of the injured orcs she finds are not quite corpses and stopping the bleeding and similar temporary holding solutions are useful.

A few Grendel try to beg and plead to let them stay hidden, and there are a few bribery attempts either with 'everything I'm carrying' or promises of riches available later, to let them live, or stay hidden, or get a head start once they're on shore. None of them put up any kind of fight.

A couple of the more quick on the uptake Grendel offer her the freedom and safe passage to the Empire of the slaves they have at home, if she will safely escort them back across the border to Feroz or to the Broken Shore.

Now they'd have to do it in public against her orders, everyone seems much less inclined to murder the orcs, although Lenora does find a couple of them get tied to things, apparently after trying to sneak off when she was distracted.

The freed prisoners are mostly much more concerned with operating the vessel, handing out food and water, and arguing about what should happen to the cargo.

It sounds like much of it is various personal belongings looted from Feroz, so some want to try to find the owners, some to divide it up and claim it provisionally on the rightful owner not showing up, and some want to hide the best bits so the magistrates don't just confiscate it all. (And a few are pointing out the logistical difficulties of getting it anywhere useful and that they'll owe some of it to a rescue party.)

There is a small rowboat stowed on the oar deck, although the Grendel who directs her to it warns her that the seas are a bit heavy for it, this far from shore. It looks designed for maybe half a dozen occupants, a dozen if they're very friendly.

Then the human who has climbed up to the crow's nest as replacement lookout shouts something about a second Grendel vessel approaching to cut them off. And there does appear to be a very similar ship on approach, rather faster than this one is going with noone at the oars.

The thing is, lifting an entire rowboat is actually easier than lifting a single person because she doesn't have to be as careful. Who wants to go back to that city they just left in a flying rowboat. Quickly, because that other ship needs attention next.

30 of the 36 living orcs in the orc huddle rounded up want to do this. (The other 6 are dressed much more raggedy, have shackle marks from the oar benches and are off to one side trying not to attract anyone's attention.)

That is likely to affect the structural integrity of the rowboat if she let's them all aboard, especially with the armour and the suspiciously jingling sleeves.

Maybe 20 would be okay if they weren't carrying too much, more would be pushing it. Most of the assembled are very keen to offer bribes such as gold, jewels, property in Feroz or the Broken Shore, unfathomable wealth, introductions to important people, as many slaves as she can lead away, etc.