"Over here! Over here! I smell a trail! Over here!"

Cursing quietly, Svatken shifted in her position in the underbrush. She raised her rifle and sighted in on the Lesser Predator. It was a short specimen. Larger than her, yes, but not by much. It pointed a claw even as it sniffed, not directly at her, but it was in the general direction. Close enough that she didn't have much time. They were only a couple hundred meters from her.

She exhaled, held her breath, and squeezed the trigger.

Bang.

Her target saw it coming. Either by some natural predator instinct — perhaps it heard a twig snap as she moved — or pure luck. It ducked behind a thick tree right in time.

"Over there! Over there!" It yipped excitedly to its comrades. "She's over there!"

Judging by what she knew about predator search tactics, killing this group would give her at least thirty minutes. And she'd been hiding out here long enough to have made extensive plans, hence the small boat stash near the river, about a twenty minutes hike to her north. If she could reach it in time, she could disappear downstream, out of sight and smell before they brought in their aircraft with their thermal optics.

After that…

She paused for a moment to think.

There was a village about six kilometers east from her where she'd often go and steal supplies. But she couldn't go back there. In hindsight, that was probably how they found her. This area was mostly inhabited by Znosians who were still secretly loyal to the old Dominion, but the schismatics might have bought someone off. Perhaps someone saw the State Security blood group markings behind her ear; she'd considered putting a bandaid on it whenever she headed to town, but that would have drawn more attention. Or maybe one of their cursed thinking machines found some irregularity in the village's inventories.

However it was she was discovered, she decided that was another problem for another day. There was another town about a two day's hike to her west, and one about four days to her southwest. It wasn't going to be easy, but she had thorough preparations. She made sure of that before the planet fell.

Svatken desperately tried to regain sight of her pursuers in her weapon scope. She needed to take these ones out before they got the bright idea of calling in reinforcements. The lack of urgency in their voices seemed to imply that they knew she was a fugitive, but not exactly who she was. If they did, she suspected they'd be sending a hypersonic cruise missile, not a small search team.

"Good work, Sergeant." Another one of their voices floated through the forest, just enough for her to hear. "Time to go to work. Rex, you're up."

She stared intently at where she shot at the Lesser Predator, but it wasn't stupid enough to poke its head back out again. She scanned the area next to it, willing one of them to make a mistake. Maybe some gap in the trees.

Come on, just peek…

Nothing.

Then, out of the corner of her optics, she spotted a disturbance in the underbrush, about a hundred meters from her position.

That's when she heard it.

Woof. Woof.

She snapped her rifle to it, trying to control her breathing to keep her arm steady.

Woof. Woof. Awooooooo.

Her hind legs trembled beneath her, refusing orders from her brain to steady. Her ears flattened involuntarily, instincts screaming hide, burrow, vanish. Her ancestors had fled from sounds like this in a time before fire. And even now, in a galaxy of missiles and guns, the barks reduced her to prey.

The underbrush parted in two columns. The creature didn't sprint — it stalked.

Svatken knew exactly what it was. She got intelligence reports. Most of her people who witnessed them didn't live to tell the tale, but she knew what they looked like and she'd seen videos of them in action. Thick fur, thick hides. Muscles bunched under their hides like coiled wire. Teeth nearly as long as her ears. Snouts wet, black, twitching — they smelled fear.

Woof.

She swore she could hear the excitement in its breathing.

There was a pathetic whimper, much closer, and Svatken realized it was her own snout that produced the sound.

She tried to take aim, but the rifle kept slipping in her shaking paws. She couldn't line up the sights. Her vision blurred hard with every thud of her heart. She blinked, sighted in, tried again, but the predator — it moved faster than she anticipated. Its blur vanished into the thickets to her right, and she lost it.

What in the Prophecy.

She spun around.

Silence.

Then—

Snap. A twig behind her. Closer than it should be.

Much closer.

Her breathing turned into short, quiet gasps. Panic roiled in her gut. She backed away, muzzle twitching, scanning for cover, for a tree, a ditch, a hole. Anywhere she could disappear into. There was nothing. Her back foot caught on a root, and she nearly tumbled.

All thoughts of timelines, stashes, escape plans, it all left her in that instant.

She ditched her rifle. It wasn't a conscious choice, some careful decision balancing the need for speed and odds of survival. No, she just needed to run. To get away. Get away from here. Escape.

Woof. Woof. Woof.

It sounded… excited.

Run!

She hopped with all she could.

Woof.

Regaining some semblance of rational thought thanks to her Dominion breeding, she remembered her sidearm still strapped to her waist. She drew it from the holster with her still-trembling paw, not breaking her pace as she hopped wildly.

Woof. Woof.

It was right behind her now. She could turn around and shoot at it, but then she'd need to turn around, and some ancient part of her brain screamed at her not to do that.

Woof. Woof.

It was right behind her. She finally decided she'd turn and deal with the primitive—

Woof. Crunch.

Svatken felt a sharp pain in her right leg as it broke in the slobbering teeth of the monster. Her vision turned upside down, the whiplash almost snapping her spine as the predator shook her in its jaws.

"Ahhhh!" she screamed.

On pure instinct, she pointed her handgun down, and she held down its trigger.

Rat-at-at-at-at.

Thump.

The beast dropped her and ran off.

She wasn't sure why. Maybe she clipped it in her wild shooting. For a moment, she heard nothing but the sound of her own rasped breathing and the whistles and calls of the predators in the distance.

Dazed, she climbed back to her feet, only to stumble and fall to the forest floor again as her useless right leg sent a shooting pain up her spine as soon as she put the slightest weight on it.

Svatken whimpered again.

She crawled. She wasn't sure where she was crawling to.

She just needed to be away.

Away from here.

"Over there! She's over there!" she heard the predators, the intelligent ones, yell out in her direction.

Svatken crawled until her arms ran out of strength. She turned back once more, approximating the source of the closing hunters' sounds. They were close, very close.

She checked her handgun magazine.

Near-empty.

Near.

Enough. She'd had enough.

No more.

Svatken raised her gun to her head, carefully pointed it in between her ears, and after a long moment of hesitation, she squeezed the trigger.

Bang.

She saw her life flash before her eyes in an instant. Everything. The glory, the work, her rise to power, and then the fall, the escape, the chase.

And then darkness.

Nothing.

Then, pain.

So much pain. Every pain receptor on her body was on fire.

Svatken screamed a soundless scream.

Her vision flashed a series of colors, and after what felt like forever, the pain went away. Slowly. She could feel its tendrils slowly slithering away from her, withdrawing from her extremities one-by-one.

What in the Prophecy?

Her surroundings came into focus as the pain subsided. She was in some kind of room. White-tiled walls.

She was in a bed. She tried to move, but her arms were strapped to its sides. Clear tubes hooked into her paws at the wrist, ending in a bag hooked above the bed. It smelled sterile, like cleaning chemicals.

How did I get here?

"She's awake again."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"That was a quick one."

She looked up at the source of the new voices. There was a pair of silhouettes behind a tinted window… some kind of observation room.

Slow Predators.

Svatken mustered up all the strength she had and snarled, baring her teeth at them in hostility.

"Still some fire. Must have taken the easy way out this time," the Slow Predator said, grinning at her through the glass.

The other creature in the window looked at its datapad. "Yup. Looks like she ended it before the dogs really started to get going."

"Aw, that's no fun. Can't we tell our thinking machine to modify her ammunition state before she does that next time?"

"It says that breaks immersion, and the stability of the construct is already way below baseline."

"Pity. Maybe if we start her without her—"

"Who are you? Where am I? What is this?" Svatken demanded.

They turned to face her with their full attention. "Welcome back to reality, Director Svatken. Bad dream?"

"Reality?" She spotted an insignia on its uniform. She hissed as she identified it. "Slow Predator Intelligence. What an oxymoron!"

"Very good. You have your memories, which is the important part, really."

"Where am I?" she asked again.

"Znos-4, of course. Where else?"

Her eyes darted around, examining her surroundings in more detail. There weren't any features she could see that revealed where they were. She gave up after another few heartbeats.

"Where on Znos-4?"

"District 433."

She recalled the island district in her memories. A small uninhabited island, with barely an administrative building for its ten square kilometers of barren land, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of ocean. There was an extermination camp here for Znosian apostates and outliers. That was before the schismatics and predators took the planet.

"Why—" She suppressed the quiver in her voice as she stared at the instruments beside her bed. "Why? Why am I here? What did you do to me? What are you doing to me?!"

"This… is purgatory for you, Director."

"Purgatory?"

"You see, our allies in Sol have some very interesting theories of justice. They think even some of the worst souls can be redeemed. Through therapy, education, and kindness. A few decades in their prisons, and even the worst offenders can be rehabilitated."

"Rehabilitated?" she scoffed. "In prison?!"

"And that… is where your colleagues are."

Rage flared in Svatken as she recalled the war crime tribunals. She'd watched them on the predator news unfold with seething contempt. Thousands and thousands of loyal Servants of the Prophecy were marched in front of their inferiors. In front of uncivilized abominations, who produced recovered State Security documentation, proclaimed their guilt, and threw them into pens for their contributions to the Prophecy.

The Slow Predator continued, "And that… is what they'd try to do to you… if they knew where you are."

Realization came in an instant. "You're hiding me. From them."

"Very good."

Her restraints were tight, but she knew from experience that nothing kept a determined prisoner tied up forever. She searched her surroundings for something, anything she could use to get herself out of them. After that… she hadn't been in this facility before, but it was obviously built for her people with its short ceiling and small doors. She'd find a way out.

She tried to stall the predators. "They think I'm… what? Dead?"

"Actually, they think you're still on the run. It's been… a while… since your last sighting, but their thinking machine still has a subroutine searching for you. As you can see, we've learned quite a bit from them. Including how to keep ourselves hidden." The Slow Predator gestured at the tubes attached to her. "And their neural biology. In some ways, even before the war, our technology in that area was about as advanced as theirs, just without these… interesting applications."

As the schism in the Dominion progressed and the cross-cultural contamination between the schismatics and the predators continued, Svatken had learned about the neural interrogation techniques the Great Predators used. It wasn't a secret in their own civilization, and the secret was out of the bag before the war ended.

She put her top scientists on it. They'd made some progress in their experimentation, but alas, the Dominion didn't have the computer technology to make it work nearly as well. The furthest they got was in lie detection, which showed promise, but the war ended too early for more productive results.

"What do you want to know from me?" she asked. "I won't betray my people—"

"Nothing… We don't need anything from you. We already got everything we needed to know."

"Huh. Then why am I still—"

"You are here because you murdered billions of my people. My clan. My clan's clan. And for every one of them, you get to feel the fear, the helplessness they had in their last moments. Here, in a prison of sorts, in a prison of your own mind, you get to experience a fraction of their pain. Their suffering. Then, when the authorities find us… eventually, then you will finally get the quick death you don't deserve."

She scowled. "Petty, pointless predator vengeance."

"Call it what you like." The Slow Predator shrugged as it looked down at its datapad. "Any preferences on which method of death you want this time? One of our operatives managed to record the neural signals of one of your people going out the airlock. Haven't tried that one yet. Might be interesting. What about drowning? Or maybe the forest scenario again, that's my personal favorite."

"How many times have I… died here?"

"About a thousand. So you've got… about a billion more to go before we're even."

She glared at it hatefully. "This— this is— this is an abomination."

"Takes one to know one, Director."

"This proves everything that we feared. That you predators are all sick in the head. This proves that your species deserves extermination. We were right all along."

The Slow Predator seemed amused by her venom. "Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? But you know what? You know what's the most important ingredient for the fidelity of these mental simulations? Our invasive neural tech is still all very new and primitive, and we only get to direct the outlines of the scenario, but we have help. You. It's your own brain. Filling out the details and filling in the blanks for us in real time. The perfect accomplice to your own torture. So, why don't you tell me which of us is sick in the head?"

"Predator lies!"

The predator ignored her and chuckled. "For example, in that last scenario, if you'd surrendered to that search team instead of shooting at them, you know what would have happened? What would realistically happen? They'd capture you. You'd get a trial, and you'd go to prison. Unpleasant? Yes. Rough? Probably. But a fraction of the pain and terror. It is you who always insists on taking the fun path. You see, Director? You see how the cruelty of your punishment is much of your own making? That's all on you, not us."

Svatken didn't reply. Instead, she struggled with her restraints uselessly, grunting in increasing desperation and frustration as they refused to budge or even loosen.

"Or maybe that is simply the lie I tell myself, so I can continue to carry out the terrible justice that billions of creatures deserve. But… I don't care. I have nothing left. You have already taken everything else from me…" her captor muttered to itself. It looked up at her as she struggled with her bonds. "Ah. I see you're very excited about getting started again. Me too, Director. Me too… Is the scenario ready? Good. Load it up. Iteration one-two-two-five, initializing."

She heard a whirr next to her as some machinery activated. The tubes in her arm went cold, and she saw it fill with a clear liquid.

Whatever they were injecting her with, Svatken knew she only had moments of consciousness and rationality left. There was no way she could get out of her restraints, and even if she could, she doubted they were dumb enough to let her escape anywhere.

No, there was only one way out of here.

Svatken was no stranger to these situations, though admittedly, most of that experience was on the other side of the glass. Sometimes, prisoners under interrogation would try to end it all early before they spilled all the information she needed. There were various obvious methods, but in her short time conscious here, she could see that her predator captors had made sure to prevent against most of them. They were not amateurs. They didn't leave any loose scalpels lying around, that was for sure.

But there was still one way out. A rare one. Painful, but viable and reliable.

One of the major Znosian arteries ran through the tongue, and an average Znosian had just enough jaw strength to bite through it. With it open, bleeding out was quick. The only requirement was willpower. And the insanity to carry it out.

State Security operatives were trained extensively on biology, and they knew what to do with prisoners for which this was a risk. Judging by the lack of a specialized muzzle on her snout, these predators — evidently — were not.

Svatken took a deep breath, and then she chomped down hard on her own tongue with all the strength she had. She was rewarded with a sharp pain as she felt her own tongue sever slickly with a single bite.

"Gah… Mmmmmmh," she whimpered, trying to keep quiet through the intense pain. She saw stars, and then she tasted blood as it spurt out in a continuous stream.

She swallowed it all. It wouldn't do her any good to have the predators figure it out in time, and she didn't need that much time. There was only so much blood in her relatively small body, and her excited heart obliged by even pumping more of it straight out of the open wound in her mouth. She stared emotionlessly at the predators through the glass, watching them fiddle with their datapads as she tried not to gag on her own blood.

Beep beep.

One of the medical monitors next to her obviously noticed that something was wrong a few seconds later.

Beep beep.

Beep beep beep.

Beep beep beep beep.

The Slow Predators in the observation window looked up sharply. "What the— what did she do?"

"I don't— low blood pressure. Get her out of there!"

She felt her own blood run down her throat, into her lungs. Soon, she was choking on the fluid, but she kept her snout shut as long as possible. Lightheaded, she watched as the doors to her cell jiggle and pop open. Two of the predators' medics rushed in right as her willpower failed. Her head lolled to the side, and she threw up a stream of blood straight onto the white bedsheet.

Blaaarrrrgh. Cough cough cough.

If they knew more about Znosian biology, if they had fresh Znosian blood on standby, if they were prepared to cool her body to preserve her brain, if this was a hospital and not an illegal torture chamber built to evade scrutiny…

Perhaps they could have saved her, but they did not. By the time they undid her restraints and found the source of her bleeding to try to stem it, she no longer had the energy to do anything to resist. She didn't need to. She'd killed enough people to know… it was too late.

Too late. For them. For her.

She couldn't even summon up the strength to look the predators in the eye as her vision darkened around its edges. Her consciousness ebbed, she closed her eyes, and then…

Darkness.

Nothing.

Rumble. Rumble.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble.

What?

The deep rumbling got more intense, and then Svatken realized what it was.

Laughter. Predator laughter.

"Hmmm hmmm hmmm hahahahaha bahahahaha."

Pain.

A deep voice boomed, echoing around her head even as she screamed without sound. "Nice try, Director. But your reality… it is whatever I say it is, and you are going absolutely nowhere."

The memories of all the previous iterations of whatever this torture was — they all came flooding into her mind. Forest. Water. Gunfire. Years' worth of grotesque simulations, a hundred painful and terrifying ways to die, all flashed before her eyes all in an instant. She experienced everything: the fear, the despair, the pain.

Especially the pain. So much pain. There was only pain.

If the machines controlling her brain didn't specifically protect her mind against corruption, she would have gone mad. But she was denied even that reprieve.

After what felt like an eternity, the predator's deep voice returned. "Iteration one-two-two-six, initialize."

Darkness. Nothing.

Then, light.

Green. Fresh, cool air. The sound of bugs and wildlife calling out in the distance.

She was in a forest again.

Again? Have I been here before? Where am I?

Svatken looked around. She was nestled miserably under a pile of leaves, sandwiched between two fallen trees. There was a rifle in her paws.

This feels familiar. How did I get here?

A moment later, the memories flooded into her, displacing the vestiges of her confusion. And she knew exactly where she was. Every moment up to this, she remembered again.

She was on the run. The predators had somehow found her hideout in the woods. If she could shake these pursuers, she could get to her boat stash. Then, she had options. She had a plan. Preparations had been made.

That was when she heard a voice call out in the distance.

"Over here! Over here! I smell a trail! Over here!"

Despite a five-year six-hundred star system-wide manhunt, the whereabouts of Znosian State Security Director Svatken remained a mystery to the investigators at the Republic Office of Justice. Her first place on the Republic Most Wanted list was eventually displaced by a notorious Malgeir tax cheat a few years later.

Many former State Security operatives kept fighting, holding out hope that she was still alive for a couple years, perhaps thinking that she'd return and lead the Dominion back to the glory days where they could murder predators for fun. If that was the case, they were sorely disappointed. Some conspiracy theorists believed she had been captured and extradited by the Terran Republic Navy, secretly held and mined for intelligence on Znosians. To be used against them in another potential future war. That was an entirely baseless hypothesis, and everyone knew that kind of shady deception was the job of the TRO, not the Navy.

To add fuel to the fire, for decades, the TRO refused to declassify most of their files on Director Svatken, citing ongoing operations, safety concerns for their sources, and secret methods still in use. What little they did release was enough to embroil the office in constant controversy, both in the Republic itself and in the newly formed Free Znosian States.

After three decades, Svatken was presumed dead due to the natural lifespan of most pre-war Znosians, and her official file was closed.

Amateur historians and bounty hunters continued to comb through the reconstructed Dominion State Security files for any hints for where she might have gone for another few years, but eventually, most people accepted that she probably died some time after the Second Battle of Znos. Many people died in the fighting on that day. That did not give a lot of comfort to her many victims, but life was often full of disappointment.

In 2195, an elderly Granti former intelligence officer confessed on his deathbed that he had seen Director Svatken last. He claimed he led a rogue unit of Granti Intelligence operatives who managed to find her after the fall of Znos, capture her, interrogate her for information, and then kept her alive on a virtual reality torture program for twenty-six years before a neural device malfunction turned her brain to mush. For a few months, they attempted to reconstruct it based on the memories they'd backed up but abandoned the project due to objections from his team, which disbanded a year later.

Due to his advanced age, he could not undergo neural lie detection to prove his story, and whatever physical evidence there was had been thoroughly sanitized decades ago when his unit dispersed. Allegedly. Some historians of Znosian history believed his accounting of events, but the majority of the Znosian War historians dismissed the tale — along with many others like it, with all their many exaggerations and inconsistencies — as the delusions of an old veteran with signs of untreated post traumatic stress.

No verifiable traces of Director Svatken were ever recovered beyond the Fall of Znos. Truly one of the great unsolved mysteries of Znosian history.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.