Aldric accepted the tin but didn’t eat it.
The ecological ship had its own farm.
There was no reason to choke down ration cans.
The players could eat.
They were in clone bodies, and the taste feedback system could be dialed down to a floor of thirty percent.
Drool looked at the tin in front of him, then checked his clone’s status.
Already showing hungry.
“Is this like Tarkov’s nutrition system?”
“What do you think it tastes like?” Drool asked his teammates while prying the lid open.
“Probably carries over from the food system in the last version of the game.”
Bruceus took a slow sip and nodded.
“The food in the last version was genuinely good.”
Drool grinned.
“Watch me crank the taste system all the way to a hundred.”
Stellaris: Star War had a food system.
The Federation’s territory was vast, and its cuisine put Earth’s to shame many times over.
The food system had always been one of the game’s beloved features, endlessly discussed among Earth players.
The variety, the richness of flavor.
People never stopped talking about it.
Drool took a bite and froze.
“Well?” Bruceus asked.
“Four bites a day, delicious, flavorful!” Drool’s face had locked up completely.
He was deploying every last gram of willpower he possessed to force something resembling a satisfied smile.
Bruceus watched, matched his taste system to a hundred, and took a bite of his own.
Vrekk saw both of them eating and opened his tin.
“What does it taste like?”
Bruceus’s smile went rigid.
“Delicious.”
The moment Vrekk put the spoon in his mouth, his expression did the same thing.
He looked up at Bruceus and Drool with murder in his eyes.
Then the murder faded, because his gaze had already moved on to the other players.
“Hey, friend.
You know about the food system in Stellaris, right?”
…
“Bleugh.” Drool had found a wall to lean against and vomited.
“What even is this?”
“This is absolutely disgusting!”
Bleurgh….
“Even a mystery meat burger doesn’t taste this bad.
Bleugh…” One player had gone completely pale.
Bruceus pointed at Drool.
“You absolute animal…”
Watching the players gag and retch, Aldric glanced at the tin in his hand and quietly pushed it away.
What kind of dark technology was this?
It was making the players physically ill?
Marcus looked on with genuine confusion.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“This is a relatively high-quality can.”
Aldric pocketed the tin to throw away later.
He had eaten bad food before.
During the Federation’s hardest campaigns, he had choked down tins with every ingredient imaginable thrown in together.
Some operations stretched logistics past the breaking point, and when that happened, canned food was all that was available.
Got his own ecological ship.
Those days felt very far away now.
No matter how rough things got, you didn’t make the Commander eat badly.
That was just how it worked.
Players could dial their taste system down to thirty percent.
His tongue had no such setting.
He wasn’t a player.
The haul from this engagement was substantial.
First, a significant amount of local Reputation from the battle itself.
Reputation unlocked stronger mod functions, like the combat module he had just used.
Second, raw materials from the salvage.
Third, energy.
Five to six hundred ork bodies, fed into the bio-power plant.
The ecological command ship ran a bio-power system.
Feed it biomass, get electricity out.
A single ork corpse yielded roughly seven to fourteen energy units, enough to sustain the ship’s minimum life support for one to two weeks.
Minimum life support meant keeping the AI running and the air cycling.
Nothing more.
Energy from the orks was split 7:3 ratio.
70% to Aldric, 30% to the players.
And players only saw their 30% on mission kills.
Anything they dropped outside of an active mission, they kept one unit per kill.
The mission system was an incentive structure, designed to keep players hungry and motivated.
With enough energy, more of the command ship’s systems could come back online.
The intact secondary cannon.
The stealth module.
The ecological ship was his base of survival until he reached the Federation again.
The stealth module could render the wreck optically invisible, protecting it from discovery.
Optical stealth wasn’t perfect.
Up close, a sharp eye could still pick it out.
No amount of light-bending could change the shape of the environment around it.
The secondary cannon would be his trump card.
When Aldric told Marcus he needed to take the ork bodies, the captain didn’t question it.
He had been planning to burn them all anyway.
Leave ork corpses unburned and next year’s problem would be far worse.
The bodies would germinate into a new crop.
Orks grew from spores in the ground.
Marcus assumed Aldric was taking them somewhere for mass disposal.
He didn’t give the destination a second thought.
The medics worked quickly.
Serious casualties were few, because on a battlefield like this, serious wounds tended to be fatal.
The survivors were mostly lightly wounded, with a handful of injuries severe enough to threaten limb function.
“Little sister, what’s wrong?
You’re scaring me…” The older brother was clutching his sister and crying out.
His voice caught Aldric’s attention.
They had met before, after all.
A half-eaten ration tin lay on the ground beside them, its contents mixed with blood.
The younger sister was coughing up blood.
Her body was convulsing.
Aldric already knew the ration tin tasted awful.
“Medic!”
“Check her condition.”
The older brother looked up the moment he saw Aldric and grabbed onto the sight of him like a lifeline.
He let the medic examine his sister.
The medic administered a painkiller first, then checked her eyes and ran a quick assessment.
“Commander, this one’s serious.”
“Internal organ damage.
Signs of internal bleeding.
Something compressed her body with significant force.”
“Field treatment won’t be enough.”
How had she taken injuries this severe?
A player walked past just then, hauling an ork body across his shoulders.
Of course.
The orks.
Earlier, the younger sister had been grabbed by an ork.
With ork strength, crushing a person was effortless.
It was like a traffic accident where you walk away feeling fine, move around normally for a while, and then collapse without warning.
The damage had already been done inside.
A girl like her had no chance of walking away from that grip unscathed.
Drool had taken a direct ork hit at close range and been launched across the room even with a clone soldier shielding him in powered exoskeleton.
An ordinary person would have fared far worse.
“Please, save my sister…” The older brother knelt in front of Aldric and pressed his head to the ground again and again.
“I’ll do anything for you, please…” He didn’t know if Aldric could help.
He just had nowhere else to turn.
“The Federation does not stand by while a helpless human calls out for help.”
“Bring your sister.
Follow me.”
Aldric had not planned to reveal the ecological ship’s location.
The Federation did not permit the persecution of humans, but it did not coddle them either.
Proud as humans were, they understood their own destructive potential just as well as anyone.
Greedy humans, foolish humans, those were the ones who tested the Federation’s patience.
The Earth Federation’s brain-dead leadership being the prime example.
But the Federation was also capable of tolerance, strictly where humans were concerned.
Not planning to reveal it was different from being unable to.
The ship’s existence was never going to stay hidden for long.
The older brother followed Aldric to the ecological command ship, fear and disbelief written across his face in equal measure.
None of this was anything he had ever seen before.
“I need you to keep this between us.”
He nodded repeatedly.
He understood what was expected.
Aldric opened the medical bay and unlocked commander-level access.
“Place your sister inside.”
The older brother steeled himself at the sight of the medical pod and lowered his sister in.
The moment it activated, a medical laser swept across the younger sister’s body and burned away everything on her skin, filth, bacteria, and pathogens alike.
“Go clean yourself up as well.”
He had tracked a line of footprints across the floor when he carried her in.
Aldric directed the older brother to the cleaning unit, which was really just an automated shower room.
The younger sister’s skin was a warm brown.
Lying in the medical pod, that much was clear now.
But across that skin, large and small patches of white had spread everywhere.
Roughly forty percent of her body was covered in pale blotches of varying sizes.
It looked very much like vitiligo.
“Commander, there is a genetic anomaly in both of them.” Thaniel_a_goodchild much appreciated