First Lieutenant Dawson Bentley, the Junior Garrison Adjutant at Fort Imperium, conducted himself throughout the brutal conflict as any proud soldier of the New Imperial Order should. He showed no fear as the Mawites descended in their devastating crash assault, and he accepted his superiors' decision to use artillery lay waste to the city he had lived in for
years in order to stall their advance. He did not flinch when street-fired rockets began to fall on Fort Imperium itself, no matter how close the detonations got. And when the walls of the fort were opened, a small but tactically significant breach blasted into them, he still held strong under pressure.
There was only one problem. Dawson Bentley had been dead for several weeks.
In the aftermath of the conflict, as rubble was cleared away from the countless leveled buildings and blasted streets, a corpse would be discovered in the sub-basement of a nearby apartment building. The body had been tied to a chair with thick durasteel cables, and was covered in burns, welts, and lacerations. By the look of it, the unfortunate man had been brutally tortured over the course of a week or more, the heavy duracrete ceiling and out of the way location preventing anyone from hearing his screams. Given the length of the torture, it seemed the young man had held out for quite some time before he bent to his torturer's will.
But in the end, Dawson Bentley had told them everything. He had taught someone how to wear his skin.
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The "Dawson Bentley" present at Fort Imperium on the day of the Mawite attack, then, was not the real one. His true name - or
her true name, in this case - was Elahi Pahlon, and she was a
Shi'ido Fleshtaker. Years ago now, when the Brotherhood of the Maw had first invaded the jungles of her homeworld, she and her family had tried to escape he brutal marauders. She had shapeshifted time and again to evade them - into a nondescript tree, a scurrying rodent, a swift avian. But in the end, their nets and tranquilizer darts had brought her down, and she had been dragged back to the black stone keep at Goshen War Camp to be remade.
The torture she had experienced there made the horrors she'd wrought on Bentley look like mild tickling.
Over the course of an entire year, Elahi had been stripped down to her basest parts. They had taken her memories, her personality, her whole sense of
self, and had left behind only what was useful to them: her shapechanging ability, her talent for mimicking the faces and voices of others. It wasn't the pain that got to her, in the end, but the utter despair of knowing that she was totally helpless. No one was coming to save her, and the Brotherhood would not let her die. The torture would go on and on, physical and mental, day in and day out. There was only one escape: to give in, to do what they wanted, to become a servant of the Maw.
In the end, she did. They all did. What
point was there in endless suffering for a lost cause?
The Brotherhood promised paradise to all who served their dark gods, and that paradise became the only light left in Elahi's life. It was the promise of a brand new galaxy, one where she would be reborn - free of chains, free of the agonies that wracked her body, free of the equally agonizing fragments of memories of who she had once been: mother, teacher, Shi'ido. She and her pod of infiltrators - for Fleshtakers always worked in pods of three - clung to this foreign faith when nothing else was left for them. Across their many missions, assassinations and thefts and espionage and sabotage, they prayed for worthy deaths to release them.
Maybe today, whispered the mad voice in the back of Elahi's mind. It whispered that
every day.
She had ambushed Bentley on his way back to barracks after having dinner with his mother, some mid-price downtown restaurant becoming the last place he would ever see. She'd scouted the sub-basement of a nearby apartment in the Pellaeon District days earlier, disposing of the janitor who kept his supplies down there. He lived alone, in the low-income apartments of Pellaeon, always rundown; no one would note his lack of cleaning for weeks. Then she'd dragged the poor Lieutenant down there, blindfolded, and gone to work on him. It had been a full day of torture before she'd even asked him any questions, letting his helplessness set in before she began.
She had learned her craft from the Taskmaster himself. She was an expert in breaking prisoners.
Step by bloody, brutal step, Elahi coaxed it all out of him: his daily routine, his responsibilities, his friends and comrades, his access codes. He tried to deceive her only once, and the deception failed instantly. Her two podmates had also captured low-ranking officers, people who were on a few days' leave like Bentley was, and would not be immediately missed so long as their faces were seen around town. Every scrap of information they gave up was cross-referenced with the confessions of the other captives, and if it did not match up, there was punishment. By the end, Bentley was
begging to tell her the truth, sobbing out broken apologies. He'd never lied to her again.
Elahi practiced impersonating him over the course of the week, using what he gave her to take his form and interact with his friends and family. She read all the subtle cues that told her if she acted just a bit
off, amending her mannerisms and routine. Her natural shapeshifting abilities came with a certain Force presence that covered minor missteps through a sort of mind trick, the ability that made Shi'ido the greatest of all the galaxy's shapeshifters. When she had used that and all the information he had spilled to truly master impersonating him, Dawson Bentley was no longer useful. She gave him a clean death, severing his spinal cord with her molecular razor.
Shock took him instantly, putting an end to the Lieutenant's long week of suffering.
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On the day of the Mawite attack, just like over the weeks before it, Elahi gave no sign that anything was amiss in the life of Dawson Bentley. The First Lieutenant performed his duties as Junior Barracks Adjutant with the same dedication and precision he always had, in no way causing trouble for the NIO response to the Brotherhood's landing. That was not the Fleshtaker's designated assignment. Everything progressed just as it would have if Bentley himself had been the one wearing his skin, right up until the breach in Fort Imperium's walls opened. At that moment, Bentley quietly slipped away from his post, heading back toward the center of the fort.
If questioned, Elahi had a dozen credible reasons ready. An adjutant's role could take him most anywhere.
The Fleshtaker knew the way to go; she had practiced this route a dozen times over the past two weeks, and now, with the fort's defenders largely occupied by the wall breach, it was even easier to walk it uninterrupted. Her path took her around a maze of bunkers and barracks buildings, the inner defenses of Fort Imperium, until she reached her target: an air defense battery, keeping the skies clear of Mawite forces and intercepting incoming Mongrel's Howl missiles with powerful point defense lasers. The spaceport's big guns were not the only defenders of New Carannia's airspace. The fort had a defense grid all its own, military-grade and powerful.
There was no way to completely destroy it, of course. The NIO was far too careful to miss someone, even one of their own officers, smuggling detonite inside the fort's walls, so explosives had been out of the question. But even the Maw could be subtle when it needed to be, as the rise of the Death Cults outside had already proven. When Elahi reached the battery, one of several watching over the fort, her two podmates had already arrived. They wore the skins of other junior officers, allowing the three of them to appear to be in conference about ammunition and other logistics. In truth, each of them carried a few electronic components, pieces of a larger device.
The three of them were well accustomed to working together, and it took them less than a minute to assemble the computer spike. Under the guise of checking power consumption, Elahi approached the control terminal... and slid the spike into place. There was no grand explosion or sudden, juddering lack of power. That would have been too obvious, letting the enemy onto the Mawites' plans. Instead, the little virus merely introduced a tiny delay into the targeting data feed, less than a second, the kind of thing it would take a Givin mathematician to detect. The exact delay that had been coordinated with
Alars Keto
's incoming starship, payload at the ready as it streaked over New Carannia.
It would buy the ship only an instant... but perhaps long enough to unleash the Brotherhood's secret weapon.
With their task complete, the three Fleshtakers simply returned to their posts, resuming the lives they had stolen. They coordinated and supplied and relayed messages. They were even ready to join the fight, to use their sidearms to gun down onrushing marauders, if it came to that. The grand deception was
everything, the plots within plots that they held within their broken minds all still in play. There might be security doors to open, or shields to sabotage, or commanders to kill, if the right opportunity fell into place. Or perhaps they would be discovered somehow, make some error. They were not warriors. Without stealth, they would die.
Maybe today, whispered the voice in Elahi's mind. Maybe today she would go to paradise at last.
Tegan Starfall
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Rurik Fel
Ragnar Bloodfist
Khroraic @IMSAAVEINA
Djorn Bline
Keilara Kala'myr
Kyrel Ren
Detritus Ren
