Death was the greatest mercy the God-Emperor and the Imperium ever showed a lowly miner.
But he was only injured.
He could still be saved.
He wasn’t worth saving.
The medicine cost more than he did.
Drag him out.
Throw him away.
He’s making noise.
When he’s dead someone will come collect the body and put it to use.
Don’t just stand there!
Get back to the pit.
No…
Father!
…
“Commander, someone just drew a significant amount of energy.”
“What happened?
The players shouldn’t have that much Reputation yet.”
The equipment update had gone through and most of the Reputation had cycled back into the system.
“A miner is badly injured.
Critical physical damage.”
Aldric stood at the command station and watched the players gathered together.
The miners around them watched in stunned silence.
Drool held the rank of Federation-certified Captain, a Federation officer, with two clone soldiers and two miners under his command.
Miners have always considered themselves the lowest of the low.
And yet here was an officer of considerable standing, personally carrying an injured miner on his back, running as hard as he could toward camp, shouting for help.
His anxious and desperate appearance was deeply moving.
A normal person wouldn’t understand the visual impact this scene had on the miners.
How could there be such a person?
Aldric’s expression softened.
“It seems the players haven’t forgotten to value a life.”
The scenario he had feared, players treating miners as disposable, had not materialized.
That was part of why he had put the recruitment cap in place.
A miner’s death permanently locked a recruitment slot.
It forced players to weigh the loss, to think twice before treating lives carelessly.
He also accepted that soldiers and miners would die in ways that meant something.
He was human.
He was not a god.
With the camp currently operating at a loss, every bit of energy needs to be used wisely.
In the clash between reason and emotion, it seems emotion has won.
The stasis pod could handle almost any wound.
It could purge viruses and disease, and even make shallow adjustments at the genetic level.
The worse the injury, the more Reputation it required.
Reth’s wound was near-total severance at the waist.
No conventional treatment had any chance of addressing that.
To get him to the pod in time, Drool had burned a fuel cell to activate his exoskeleton.
The players pooling their Reputation to save a single miner left the Federation Commander quietly moved, and left the former Imperium miners unable to believe what they were witnessing.
Antor and Annie were standing near Aldric.
They had seen the whole thing.
“Our miners, the Federation’s miners, deserve protection.
They deserve safety.”
“The armor modifications are finished.
We just completed a partial stockpile.
Half a day more and…” Antor bit his lip, his face tight with self-reproach.
Half a day.
Half a day and the defensive equipment would have been ready to distribute.
He felt like he had failed Aldric’s trust.
“This isn’t your fault.
No one knows whether the accident or tomorrow comes first.”
Septimus spoke.
“Commander, energy reserves are low.
Authorization required.”
At the same moment, the same request came through from the ecological pod itself.
“Why does it need authorization?”
“Can’t everyone’s Reputation be used together?” Drool was still standing at the pod, knocking on the door in confusion.
Regardless of where it came from.”
Antor and Annie both looked at Aldric in surprise.
As engineers, they knew exactly what the camp’s energy situation was.
The modification work had been paused several times because there wasn’t enough power to run it.
To scrape together even a little more for the shelter, they had quietly cut back on their own genetic stabilization treatments.
“Federation soldiers can fall in battle.”
“Federation fleets fleets can fall.”
“They can die on the road to their ideals.”
“But when has the Federation ever abandoned humanity?”
Behind Aldric, Annie’s fingertips trembled as they moved quietly across her data pad.
The AI calculated in its flat, indifferent way.
“Energy expenditure will increase destabilizing factors.”
“I know.”
“The difference between half a day sooner and half a day later.”
“If this place collapses, saving that little energy wouldn’t have stopped it anyway.”
Power flowed into the stasis pod.
It came to life.
Mechanical arms extended from the unit, and with them came something that looked almost like fine dust drifting through the air.
Those particles were nanoscale medical drones.
As the energy was consumed, Reth’s wounds began to close.
Sealed, more precisely, stitched together at the nanoscale unit by unit.
Reth jolted awake from inside the pod.
“Dad!”
Fear came from Reis’s nightmare, from his memories.
Being thrown out like trash became his eternal nightmare.
“You’re supposed to call me sir.
Or Captain.”
Reth had just come back.
He was only extreme hunger and weakness for the first moment.
He was so terrified, confused, his eyes scanning his surroundings, trying to suppress the fear in his heart.
Then he found Drool, sitting beside him and opening a ration tin.
“Squad…
leader…”
Drool gave a small, surprised nod.
This game was something else.
“Here.” He held out the open tin.
“You must be hungry.”
Gulp.
Gulp.
The stasis pod didn’t provide energy.
It consumed the patient’s own reserves to fuel the recovery.
Reth ate by instinct, barely thinking.
When the flavor hit his dry tongue, the numbness cracked open.
He lifted his head.
His eyes moved like he was searching for the answer to something.
Confusion, bewilderment, a kind of lost quality behind them.
The question came out of all of it.
“Captain.
Why did you save me?”
Drool looked up, genuinely caught off guard.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re my miner.
You’ll be one of my soldiers someday.”
“In the Commander’s words, you’re a citizen of our Federation.”
“You’re a human being the same age as me.
Could I just watch you die?”
“What, shouldn’t I save you?”
“What else?” Miner Reis was agitated.
“Like my father.”
“Like my father.”
“He was a miner too.
The lowest kind of miner in the Imperium’s eyes.
So am I, the lowest of the low.”
“His leg was injured, bitten by a rock-borer.”
Reth trembled with emotion, tears welling in his eyes.
“Those people, those people abandoned him in the wasteland, sold his body.”
“Just because my father wasn’t worth saving.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“I was the least deserving of saving.”
“Why?
Why?”
Tears welled up in the miner Reis’s eyes, streaming down his face.
This made Drool freeze.
What kind of world was this?
What a cruel story he had?
What a brutal world.
What a brutal Imperium.
“I’m a selfish man, so selfish that I’d even protect the lives of my own soldiers.”
“I’m grateful.
Grateful that I’m in the Federation.
That I’m part of the Human Federation.”
“No matter the reason, I can’t stand by and watch my fellow humans, the same age as me, die before my eyes.”
“Even if you’re just a number in the empire.”
Even if you’re just data, he doesn’t want to watch his own people die.
Reth wailed.
The crying was raw and unrestrained.
“Why, why, why…”
His hysterical cries moved everyone present.
“Why, why didn’t you come sooner!”
Reth sobbed, leaning against Drool’s shoulder.
“Why…”
The words, which should have been a question, carried little accusation in his tone.
What filled it instead was something else entirely.
The cry of a person who had been dragged from the depths of despair all the way to something like grace, only to feel the whole weight of everything they had endured come crashing down all at once.
Drool raised his hand.
Was this tears?
Warm liquid dampened his hand.
Only a truly emotional person could shed such burning tears.
It felt like something out of a dream.
He spoke quietly, almost to himself.
“This shitty world, this shitty empire.”
Drool’s eyes welled.
Damn it!!
“The planning team, you…
won.”
For some reason, even though He knew this was a game, the emotional impact was still incredibly strong.
He understood Reth’s breakdown.
It was all too reasonable.
A miner at the very bottom of society felt no warmth whatsoever.
Every day was just mining, mining, mining.
Stopping meant certain death.
When something new and warm finally arrives, the first response isn’t joy.
It’s the collapse of everything that had been held in place by desperation, the helpless unraveling of every unbearable thing that was suffered before.
Eating those nauseating rations.
Drinking water that smelled like rust and blood.
“Oh, wait, shit, those canned goods.”
Those rations.
Drool thought about the ingredient list on those tins.
Then he thought about what Reth had just told him about his father.
His expression shifted into something horrified.
This tragic story left the viewers watching the game stream in disbelief.
“My god, a personal storyline?
Or was it designed by AI?
How did the Stellaris development team manage this?”
“Did they write this specifically for Drool’s playthrough?”
“There’s no way the NPCs are actual people, right?”
Drool couldn’t shake the feeling that Reth was a real person, and that the dev team were all monsters.
Horror, revulsion, disgust, pity, and grief tangled together inside him.
“Damn dev team, set up a offline event.
I’ll beat you all up.”
“The Imperium.
Absolute animals.” Thaniel_a_goodchild much appreciated!!