Red Dragon Spaceship Awakening: I Gain Alien Abilities on Mars

Chapter 245 245: Useless Intel

Tatehan took about five seconds, staring at Torvan with an expression that shifted from thoughtful to mildly embarrassed, and then he genuinely laughed.

Not a polite chuckle, not a nervous laugh, but a real, open laugh that filled the workshop and made Riven and Lyra exchange amused glances.

They were like:

'Uh…'

"Ah... I never thought of this, lol," Tatehan said, shaking his head at himself. He ran a hand through his hair, still grinning. "Guess I'll have to tell Bjorn about the plan after all."

He paused, his expression becoming more serious, leaving the amused state for a while as he thought it through.

"But I'll tell him it's what the others can know about only if I've executed it. Like a secret between the two of us for now. He keeps it quiet until we've actually done it, and then we share the results with the alliance."

Torvan nodded, looking satisfied that the logical inconsistency in the plan had been addressed. "That works. Bjorn strikes me as someone who can keep a secret when he needs to I guess?"

"Yeah," Tatehan agreed. "He can."

The mention of Bjorn and the prisoners at New Helios made Tatehan's mind drift to something he had not thought about in a while.

The other prisoners.

The ones they had captured during the raid on the bases. The fifty-something soldiers who had surrendered when it became clear the battle was lost, who had been handcuffed and loaded onto transports and taken back to New Helios along with the battle commander.

The reason Tatehan had not been discussing them, the reason he had not mentioned them in any of the strategy meetings or brought them up in more conversations was simple.

They were absolutely, completely, frustratingly useless.

During the one month since the raid, Bjorn and Tatehan had conducted interviews on all of them, working through the prisoners one by one in a process that was considerably less dramatic than what they had done with the battle commander.

There had been no shocking scissors, no glowing iron rods and no elaborate psychological pressure tactics. All there was, was Bjorn standing in a room, arms crossed, asking questions in that deep, authoritative voice of his, and Tatehan sitting nearby, watching.

The fighters had been quick to talk, actually. Unlike the battle commander, who had held out with almost impressive stubbornness before finally breaking, these regular soldiers had cracked almost immediately. A few firm words from Bjorn, maybe a punch or two, and they were already spilling everything they knew.

The problem was what they knew.

Or rather, what they did not know.

Of all the fifty-something soldiers they had abducted, every single one of them had given the same type of information:

The Obscuron was powerful. He was their leader. They worked for him to achieve his goals. They believed in his cause. They would die for him.

That was it. That was the sum total of the intelligence they had extracted from over fifty prisoners.

Not a single one of them knew anything about the force field(they knew there was a force field but nothing deep to it, like whether it was harmful or not), about the operations in the West, about the specific plans being made and about the timeline for the Obscuron's assault on the cities.

They were foot soldiers, grunts actually, the lowest rung of the organizational ladder. People who were told where to go and what to fight, but never why or how or what the bigger picture looked like.

Some of them had not even known the bases they were stationed at were specifically designed as staging grounds for an assault on Waython Hollow. They had just been following orders and doing their jobs, completely ignorant of the strategic purpose behind everything they were part of.

Tatehan had not even needed to be present for most of the interviews. There was no need for harsh action and definitely no need for the kind of psychological pressure he had deployed against the battle commander. The fighters were already talking before he even walked into the room.

And they had nothing worth hearing.

Unlike the battle commander, who had known the Obscuron's back history, understood the nature of his transformation from aging human to synthetic being, had been privy to the actual plans and operations of the Obscuron's inner circle — these soldiers were completely in the dark.

Some of them had said things so absurd that Tatehan had genuinely not known how to respond.

One man had insisted, with complete seriousness, that the Obscuron never urinated, never defecated, and never farted, because his synthetic body had transcended the need for such base biological functions.

Another had claimed that the Obscuron decorated his personal chambers with the skulls of his enemies, arranging them in elaborate patterns on the walls as a reminder of his power. A third had whispered, in a tone of genuine reverence and terror, that the Obscuron could hear his name being spoken from anywhere on Mars, no matter how far away, which was why none of them ever said it out loud.

LOL!

Bjorn had listened to all of this with the expression of a man slowly losing his patience, and by the end of the interviews, he had been shaking his head so frequently that Tatehan had worried he might strain his neck.

In the end, there was nothing to be done with them. They were not worth keeping, not worth the resources it took to feed and guard them, and certainly not worth the diplomatic headache of figuring out what to do with them long-term.

But Bjorn had come up with a solution that was, in its own way, both really wise and deeply satisfying.

The families…

When the Obscuron had attacked New Helios a month before the summit, he had sent a battle commander with three hundred warriors, and while the Vikings had won the fight, thirty of their own had been taken.

They had been kidnapped and dragged away into the somewhere and never seen again. Their families: parents, siblings, partners, children, had been living with that grief ever since, that horrible uncertainty about whether their loved ones were alive or dead, whether they were being treated well or suffering somewhere in the darkness of the West.

Bjorn had decided to give the families of those kidnapped warriors the prisoners.

Not as a gift, exactly. More as a reckoning.

The families had received them without ceremony, without fanfare and without any formal process or oversight.

And what happened next was exactly what anyone who understood Viking culture would have predicted.

They killed every single one of them.

Not quickly, not cleanly, and not without a great deal of creative expression.

No!

The families of thirty kidnapped warriors, burning with months of grief and rage and the particular ferocity of people who had nothing left to lose, had taken out every ounce of that emotion on the fifty-something prisoners delivered to them.

They were killed to death.

'Killed to death!'

Tatehan had heard the phrase for the first time when one of Bjorn's lieutenants had reported back on the outcome, and he had made the man repeat it twice just to make sure he had heard correctly.

Killed to death? As if regular killing was not thorough enough and required emphasis.

Crazy stuff!

He had not said anything about it to anyone outside of New Helios. It was not exactly the kind of thing you put in an alliance briefing. And honestly, given what the Obscuron had done: given the thirty warriors who were still missing, still unaccounted for, their fates unknown, Tatehan found it difficult to muster much sympathy for the soldiers who had ended up in the hands of grieving Viking families.

They had chosen their side and they had lived and died by that choice.

So them being KILLED TO DEATH was a good thing y'know.