“I am Hive Commander Kah-Sissh.”
“Supreme Commander Ashnak,” the life-form growled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Fifty metres away a Jassik soldier rolled, black carapace shredding in the clinging yellow gas. Exoskeletal limbs sprouted, malformed, desperately attempted to re-grow. She finally dissolved into a metallic black sludge, self-repair mechanisms run wild.
Hive Commander Kah-Sissh spat, “It is our dishonour to surrender ourselves to you, indigenous life-form!”
The native scratched with taloned manipulators at the division of its bifurcated trunk.
“That’s ‘orc’ to you.” Its tusked head lifted, staring up at the Jassik Hive Commander, and it jerked one of its opposable thumbs at the only native hovel left standing in the area. “Inside!”
The translation device that the other native had carried burned against Kah-Sissh’s thorax. He understood. The novelty of studying these creatures other than to kill them momentarily took his interest.
Hive Commander Kah-Sissh looked up at the three-story building, set like an island here where two major roads crossed: north-south and east-west. A creaking wooden panel suspended on the frontage bore a two-dimensional image—one of the native beasts of burden, portrayed as rearing in an anatomically unlikely manner.
“I consent.” Hive Commander Kah-Sissh hissed an order. Thirty exoskeletal Jassik heels clicked down onto the dirt. The command escort’s lines straightened up smartly, their carapaced heads jutting forward in a uniform position, odorous slime dripping down and eating into the soil at their feet. Kah-Sissh’s thorax expanded with a desperate pride.
“Battlemaster! Flightmaster! To me!”
Two of the largest Jassik stepped out, black metal harnesses glittering on their articulated thoraxes, disruptor and blaster power cables growing from their backs. The raised marks grown into the chitin of their shoulders marked them as high-ranking officers, suitable to accompany Kah-Sissh into disgrace.
“Awright, awright!” The native life-form did something to its dead-metal weapon that made it click. “I’m not running a goddamn party here. Get your Bug asses inside there, sharp!”
The Battlemaster and Flightmaster followed Kah-Sissh into the low-beamed structure. The Jassik Hive Commander picked his way distastefully through the overturned chairs, tables, and broken glass of what was obviously a shell-battered civilian hostelry.
“This will suffice for the Immolation of Disgrace,” Kah-Sissh announced, seating himself in the middle of the floor and gazing down at the fleshy bipeds.
“Not in this here inn, you don’t!” a portly native of the Man variety announced, bustling out from behind the long bench that stretched the length of the room. “‘Scuse me, master orc, but are these…‘visitors’ with you?”
Kah-Sissh watched Supreme Commander Ashnak draw himself up to his full height and glare round the interior of the inn. “This is where I’m holding our top-secret, highly confidential peace negotiations. Any objections?”
There was a clink of glasses from seats in a niche by the chimney that Kah-Sissh took to be the local heating-source. Several much smaller natives, the curly hair on their pedal extremities grizzled and grey, raised button-black eyes to the orc.
“Holding peace negotiations, is it?” one remarked.
“‘Oo’s stopping you, boy?” another commented. “So long as us halflings gets a quiet drink, we doesn’t care. Does we, Walter?”
“That us don’t, Matthew. That us don’t. Got better things to do than listen to orcs.” The more elderly of the halflings grumbled, sinking its mouth into a tankard. “By the Light! but it’s getting hard to find a good pint, what with the war an’ all. I recall as how you used to get a good pint at the Dog and Leggit—”
Hive Commander Kah-Sissh tapped the translation device hanging from his thorax, and despite himself queried: “The Dog and Leggit?”
“Ar,” the elderly halfling, Walter, replied. “Inn over at Bremetys, that were. Called that on account of you threw up over the dog and then you legged it.”
Kah-Sissh eventually decoded the small natives’ hissing expirations as amusement.
“Cider was better in the Dragon’s Nest,” the third halfling drinker remarked, from a seat at the back of the snug. “Whatever ’appened to the Dragon’s Nest?”
“‘Undred and fifty-five millimetre, six rounds of,” Walter remarked dolefully. “Drink ain’t never been the same since this ’ere danged fighting.”
The portly Man bustled across the inn floor and bowed to the orc commander, his gaze sliding sideways to Kah-Sissh. “If you gentlesirs will wait just one moment, I’ll set you up a table. Dick! Tom! Drat it, where have those lads gone?”
Kah-Sissh watched as the portly innkeeper stomped into the back of the building. His keen hearing caught the Man’s muttering:
“…don’t know what it’s all coming to; all we had to contend with in the old days was cloaked strangers in hoods, and sometimes a disappearing halfling or two; the odd black rider; t’isn’t like we had all these newfangled Bugs to put up with…”
The outer door banged. A smaller uniformed orc entered and marched up to its commander. “Supreme Commander Ashnak, sir, you can’t agree to let these things surrender! We can wipe them out to a Bug, sir. Strategically it’s the only thing to do.”
The small biped lowered its voice, its eyes on Kah-Sissh. The Hive Commander noted how its spindly ears drooped, under the rim of its dead-metal helmet.
“We’re orcs, sir,” it whispered. “We can’t go around sparing enemies. The grunts will never stand for it. We’ll never live it down!”
Another of the orc-bipeds strode in, completely ignoring Kah-Sissh and the other Jassik. This one wore peaked headgear and a long olive-drag garment over battle-stained fatigues.
“Barashkukor’s right, sir. It isn’t the Way of the Orc, sparing enemies. Why have you stopped the battle? We ought to massacre—”
The large orc commander pointed his dead-metal weapon at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
FOOM!
A proportion of the ceiling vapourised. Chunks of plaster drifted down, whitening the Hive Commander’s battle-scarred carapace. Kah-Sissh brushed himself clean. The halfling drinkers in the hearth-snug glanced up momentarily, then returned to a game they were playing with black-and-white spotted counters.
“I protest!” Kah-Sissh hissed. “The dignity of these proceedings is severely impaired, Supreme Commander Ashnak, by your continued failure to observe the correct ceremonies.”
The large orc ignored Kah-Sissh, rounding on his underlings. “If I say these are peace negotiations, these are peace negotiations. Are you receiving me, marines?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Good…” The orc bared his teeth as more be-weaponed orcs entered the inn, taking up covering positions at the hostelry’s windows. They had an encouragingly exoskeletal appearance—but it was not, the Jassik Hive Commander noted with regret, natural to the species.
“We have not surrendered to an honourable enemy,” Kah-Sissh announced to the Battlemaster and Flightmaster.
“No, Hive Commander.” The Flightmaster extended her jaws, acid saliva etching the hostelry’s wooden floor. “Are they are of sufficient honour even to witness the Immolation of Disgrace?”
Before Hive Commander Kah-Sissh could express his opinion, the large orc stomped across the floor towards the Jassik. He pulled out a chair from the table a young Man had just set upright and covered with a white cloth, and seated himself; throwing one booted hind limb over the chair’s arm, his battle-stained peaked cap shading his deep-set eyes.