Post by EmperorMyric on Jan 12, 2022 12:24:53 GMT
ROMB
Near the Aedelshaven Corridor
Killian Verge
ROMB. A massive facility, perhaps the biggest of its kind in this side of the Killian Verge. Many years ago, the military shipyards of Hizen, Miyagatake and Rubikon had been destroyed at the costs of millions of lives by bold attacks from the AGA alliance. All four shipyards had been reduced to smoldering wreckage, their production chains silenced never to awake again. However, one man’s strategic disaster was another man’s treasure, and the four wrecked shipyards had been the treasure of a few entrepreneurs from Republika Strzałka. After the war the voidmen of the small but hardy Republika had purchased what remained of those installations at rock-bottom prices. The millions of tons of wreckage imported by the Strzałkan had been refurbished and reforged into something greater than the sum of its parts, a colossal civilian shipyard by the name of ROMB.
For many years after the end of the war this investment had paid off awesomely. ROMB carved its niche among the major shipbuilders of the galaxy, producing dirt-cheap ancerium harvesters for any daring explorer or pilot who looked to make a fortune in the ancerium-thirsty economy of the postwar boom. ROMB’s ships were as cheap as one could get, manufactured in just a couple days with the absolute minimum of systems required to survive a venture into the Golden Expanse. Many hyperfuel tycoons had started off working with ROMB’s disposable single-use harvester ships, and the brand remained in the hearts of crews and captains alike even as they later upgraded to more durable and modern harvesters from other manufacturers. ROMB endured, accessible and reliable, for those who wanted to get a foot in the ancerium harvesting business.
The ROMB shipyard, which worked 24/7 producing and recycling cheap harvesters, was no less a marvel of engineering than the military shipyards it had been built out of. 256 stations spanning dozens of kilometers each. 1024 tachyonic beams projected in a beautiful symmetric pattern of conveyor belts and over three hundred thousand Strzałkan engineers and mechanics all earning a living in the million-kilometer shipyard as it rotated around the brown dwarf Życzyn, churning out harvester after harvester for would-be ancerium magnates who dared to dream big, earning billions for the ragtag group of Strzałkan entrepreneurs who had dreamt big.
And for a time, it was good. This was not such time.
“Abelcain is going to kill us. He’s going to slowly torture us to death.” Kacper Brzozowski, the CEO of ROMB, said through a miasma of cigarette smoke in the meeting room of the ship. “Worse yet: he’s going to attack ROMB. Jesus Christ. This is the end. If anyone has any idea of how to get out of this, please share with the rest because I’m honestly at a loss.”
“Ok, Abelcain still doesn’t know what happened.” said Benedykt Hermaszewski, associate and longtime friend of Kacper, co-founder of ROMB. “I’m just throwing this out there: vent the whole place. Say the boarders did it. I genuinely don’t have anything against Ariadne but this has the potential to ruin us all.”
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” Brzozowski rubbed his temples. “We can’t fucking kill her, you think MAIDEN doesn’t care about her just because she’s gone?”
“There’s no bad ideas, just keep brainstorming.” Katarzyna said, eyeing her husband Benedykt with worry and lighting up another cigarette. The droning of the engines of the ship they were on continued, as the executives discussed what to do on the mess hall of a lowly tug ship currently speeding away from ROMB. “Literally just say the first thing that comes to mind. Killing Ariadne is going a bit too far, I don’t think Abelcain will fall for it.”
Ariadne. Ariadne Palamara. Formerly known as 254-Ariadne, a name that had become almost synonymous with drama among certain circles. A tall, winged and feminine-looking blonde demiorganic that had been crafted by the MAIDEN research station. She’d been its lead environmental engineer for years before quitting the organization over a money dispute. She’d become somewhat of a minor celebrity among the well-connected unaligned, a widely-known socialite who’d found work in the shadowy Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, a shadowy think tank of political manipulators. Infamously finicky and boastful, Ariadne had found her new home in SV&F’s huge supercomputing datacenter at Voynych working with like-minded divas of academia. Right now, however, she just felt plain terrified as she ran down the gently curving walkway of one of ROMB’s stations along with some workers.
An alarm had been sounded and a lockdown of all decks imposed. An accident, supposedly. But Ariadne and the workers of the machining shop weren’t buying it. They’d heard the gunshots and seen the engines of Ariadne’s personal yacht get shot off from an unknown direction. Someone or something had boarded ROMB, and it couldn’t be good news. For Ariadne, especially, as she was carrying an extremely important piece of data. It just couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Come on, this way!” A foreman from ROMB’s 93rd station whistled, having found a door which his security pass could unlock.
“What way are the shuttles?” Ariadne asked with a fearful tone, clutching her purse and running barefoot after the workers. “I don’t want to go to the muster stations, is there any way to the hangars directly?”
“What is wrong with you?” A Strzałkan worker berated. “Just hold on to your safety equipment and don’t get in the way, management is going to chew our ass if we don’t follow the drill.”
“You can go follow the drill, all I’m asking is if there’s a way I can get to the shuttles directly!” Ariadne panted, having trouble keeping up.
“You’re being a troublemaker!” Another worker said in a hushed tone. It was something Ariadne had heard many times before, although never in such an urgent situation. “The second you showed up here there’s something happening! Are they here for you?”
“Yes! I think so!” Ariadne nodded. “What if they’re expecting us at the muster stations?!”
“Then what do you-” The foreman was in the middle of snapping back at her when the whole group heard a full burst of gunfire. It was coming from another deck, but it was much closter this time. Way too close for comfort. Everyone instinctually turned around in a moment. “Shit!”
“I told you!” Ariadne said. “I have something important, just get me to the shuttles!”
“God damnit. Over here!”
The most prized of Ariadne’s possessions remained in the deepest, most secure parts of her databank. She didn’t even know what it was! She certainly didn’t know it was important enough that gunmen were seizing one of the region’s largest shipyards and chasing her over it. All she knew was that it came from Voynych, the decryption center that she worked at. They’d intercepted and decoded plenty of communications before from all over the galaxy. But from the way her superiors had told her to hand-deliver this data instead of just simply sending it via ancnet it had to be something special. A state-level secret, it had to be.
She’d been told to deliver the data to some general or other bigwig of OMPAF, an up-and-coming political front in the world of Aedelshaven. The handoff was supposed to happen in a very specific place at a very specific time, and certainly not like this. Whoever it was that had boarded the station, it had to be linked to this data somehow. Whoever it was, they’d knew when her yacht was going to stop at ROMB for the final leg of her journey from Voynych to Aedelshaven. She couldn’t transfer the data, as the intruders had shut down wifi in the station. She couldn’t delete it either, lest she fail her most important task. All she could do for the moment was run and follow the workers, hoping to at least put some distance between her and her would-be kidnappers.
--
“Open call.” Benedykt said, capitulating with a shrug. “Isolate OMPAF off of it, I don’t want Abelcain to hear us calling for help just the second that Voynych’s bimbo arrived.”
“Are you insane?” Katarzyna did a double-take in the middle of lighting up a cigarette. “He’s going to know this sooner or later.”
“I’m not going to leave Abelcain in the dark.” Benedykt rubbed his bald head. “I just need this to look better for us or he’ll cut our shipyard contract. I’ll get whoever’s willing to shoot the intruders, then when they’ll get here I’ll call Abelcain and say that our local security is taking care of it.”
“You know if this goes wrong Abelcain is going to do a hell of a lot worse than cut our contract, right?” Brozowzki downed a shot of vodka. “What if she gets killed before helps get here?”
“Well.” Benedykt paused for a moment. “We’re already onboard a ship, so at least we have a running start for when Abelcain comes for us. Just give me the fucking radio.”
They were on a pretty fast ship, at that. They were aboard the business craft of ROMB’s upper management, a sleek and nimble Teliran superyacht. The executives have boarded it to go from their offices to the ROMB station where Ariadne had docked and go greet the DAMSEL, but halfway through their flight the station traffic control had gone silent, the whole place had been interdicted and gunmen had stormed the offices and taken the rest of management captive. Supposedly, unidentified ships had been spotted prowling the tachyonic scaffolding of ROMB… yet the shipyard’s traffic control radars and the superyacht’s own sensors showed nothing.
The executives had managed to jump a couple light-minutes away from the station before being interdicted off their jump and were now running at full throttle away from ROMB. A few dozen executives as well as the crew of the shuttle had been saved, nothing even close to enough to get the station back under control. Security forces? Those had been defunded years ago to make the margins bigger, and if Abelcain ever learned of that things were going to get so bad the executives would wish they have stayed onboard ROMB.
“What the hell do I say?” Benedykt asked in a moment of sudden hesitation after being handed the radio on an open channel.
“Just say anything, sheesh!”
Thinking back to the newspapers he’d read, Benedykt spoke.
“Emancipation is the key to all things.”
Those who had kept up with the important happenings of the galaxy would have recognized the message as Abelcain’s own message of help in the legendary Jailbreak event. To those who had only recently arrived, the transmission would just be a mysterious unencrypted message coming from an isolated civilian ship, looping over and over again on as many frequencies as the yacht could transmit in. An SOS, an invitation for a job. And in one of the busiest areas of the galaxy, where ships from everything from colonial navies to civilian corporations and even newly-arrived explorers, some was bound to hear it and help.
Out in the black and already on the way, a force of Serstine Bladeships was making good speed, which by Serstine standards, was fast as possible. They were a good force, all lean, slim lines and swordlike shapes giving way to exposed piping belching plasma where the quillons, hilt and grip would go. They were a group made to be nimble and smart, though anybody who knew Serstine knew even their big ships were famed for preposterous levels of acceleration. The largest of them led the pack, an Inamorato-class flight deck cruiser called Tipping Point. They were all garishly-decorated, shocks of brassy script across their lengths like fullers, starting at the points and swelling as they headed backwards.
They had a story to tell. They were taking a course away from the blasted world of Aphanizomen, a frigate named Ragged Edge in tow. She carried treasures and scrap from that place, and in Tipping Point, two Serstine were especially keen on keeping their eyes on the lean frigate. The odds that either of them would have been able to be there or see any of this were absurdly long not too long ago, and they knew it. It was the wandering princess of Clan Elduranda, Rain Elduranda, and her retainer Norte Gallegos.
The two needed more than repairs after their adventure in a fused body kludged together from a Bullhead fighter had scored the Ragged Edge a belly full of salvage, including a cargo of dawnstone. They’d battled horrors left behind by the maddened Axiom’s followers, from the mundane Bullhead marines and demiorganics to legends like the Tooth Fairy, pushing themselves deeper and deeper into the guts of a planet turned into an anti-orbit installation, scarred by thermonuclear Armageddon and now most likely working itself over with agitated mixtures of nuclear winter and volcanic infernos, punctuated by geothermal activity now let loose from the plumbing that once made it work somewhat neat and orderly. Now it was free, and probably ruining whatever it could rampage through unrestricted.
It was an adventure that added to their legend, as well as the legends of those that went in alongside them and survived like the Lightcaster called Zand, but it cost a lot: Norte’s whole retinue of loyal Nortenas, five...guys they didn’t care to remember after starting the whole mess...and their bodies, wracked beyond all repair, requiring full brain case and Flame transfers to stay in good running order. Rain’s personal Aeromasons and Fleshsmiths went to the task with great gusto, reconstructing the two better than new. They gleamed again, and were dressed back up as the clan’s guiding lights.
They had the brassy bodywork of the craft that kept them alive further integrated into their new frames, and wherever bare metal was allowed to show, such as the meshes in between their plating, they had a bronze glint. Norte had her dazzling red back, her mistralium filaments in her oversized right arm, and her roses and long ringlets. Rain took a different tack. Where she remained the same was her long, curvy proportions, her massive secondary tokamaks in her bust, long hair and big globe-shaped decorations describing large buns on her head. What was different was the color: gone were all her decorations and her flash. In their place were stark black and white, like she was starting all over. Little by little she’d reclaim her decorations and show her valor. A brand-new body was the first sign she was only picking up speed, and whatever else she decided to have struck into it would just be another badge of honor.
That badge of honor came to them soon enough as they picked up a message that gave them all pause.
”Emancipation is the key to all things.”
The Serstine squadron picked it up loud and clear. A thrill went through some of them as they recalled hearing of how MOBY DIKK was laid low with those words being the starting gun. Norte knew the tale well; she’d had a taste for kicking Coronans around after the Mimikoan Jihad, and once Rain was filled in, they had a short conversation.
Short just because they fired through their words that quickly.
“So this message heralds a pretty big fight - perhaps even a properly large battle?” Rain asked, looking out across Tipping Point’s bridge.
“Without question, my lady. Even that hardly started small.“
”And would you say we’re equipped for that kind of fight?”
“What do you think? We’re fully reconstructed and carrying around a lot more than Ragged Edge and her escorts. This is no longer scouting around.”
“For the benefit of the dawnstone. Which we earned, you and I know that.”
“Of course, but if we had to run, you know it’d be easy.”
Rain smirked. “...and if we wanted easy, we would have not gone exploring into the bowels of that forsaken planet.”
“That’s the way things go with us. So, what do you say? Take this as a sign of our imminent rise?”
The smirk turned into a grin as she addressed the helm entire. “Take this as a sign of our imminent rise. Imminent and inevitable, for as long as our Flames burn they grow. Off we go, then! Off to find this signal, a new fight, and great fortune! Lay in the course and let the Boost guide us, and woe to those who won’t get the hell out of our way!”
A cheer went up and Tipping Point skidded in the black as the other ships dutifully followed.
The Serstine were familiar with ROMB. It was a common sight for people operating in the vincinity of the Golden Expanse, after all. But to the flame-driven transhumans, ROMB had always stood out... for representing almost the polar opposite of their society. All bladeships were borderline handcrafted pieces of bespoke architecture, gleaming and boastful in their form let alone their performance. ROMB's ships on the other hand were almost comically cheap, a dearth of valuables for even the most desperate Serstine pirate. Almost entirely built out of titanium foam, powered by the cheapest fusion rockets available in the market and using the lowest-grade hyperfuel; these ships were almost like ubiquitous manatees that congregated near the Golden Expanse, so slow that to the Serstine they seemed perpetually static.
So many corners were cut by ROMB that the circular shape of the facility seemed pretty apt. There was something for the Serstine to admire about ROMB, nevertheless. Democratizing spaceflight, providing the common folk of the galaxy with an on-ramp to the world of speed. The ships produced in ROMB might have been the interstellar equivalent of plastic cups but the facility itself was a spectacle of large-scale engineering and mass manufacture. All its 256 stations rotated around a central brown dwarf in non-Keplerian orbits, revealing that ROMB was not just an array of large satellites... but one solid structure of immense scale, held together by invisible tachyonic scaffolding.
In this mandala-like lattice of installations, components and raw materials were being fired at hundreds of kilometers per second by mass drivers, impact-fusing with each other or docking to be welded together by lasers fired from afar. ROMB was like a ferocious 24/7 shootout between all installations spanning all four million kilometers of ROMB's circumference. Slab metal, finished components and ceramic plates flew out in all directions and somehow formed into starships by the end of the production line that were so freshly-made their welds still glowed a faint orange. A rarefied halo of ancerium trace surrounded the facility like an invisible cloud almost an AU wide, a hint of the sheer ammount of hyperfuel that ROMB burned every second to both maintain its shape and absorb the recoil from its mass drivers.
The whole facility radiated red-hot speed to the Serstine, no matter how unimpressive the individual products were.
Yet ROMB's hypervelocity assembly line posed quite a danger. Under normal circumstances, any ship that had to dock to the facility was required to be remotely flown by ROMB's harbor pilots. Flying anywhere near the assembly line, let alone the stations, without careful guidance from ROMB was a good way to get hit by a bulkhead flying at orbital speeds. But this time there would be no such guidance, it seemed. All they could hear from ROMB's automatic traffic control frequency was jamming, and its control tower was completely silent.
Ironic for such a facility so dangerous to approach, any actual defensive armament was nonexistent. Sometime ago, a financial AI had calculated it was cheaper for ROMB to just regularily wire the local pirates protection payments than to install weaponry, and so the facility had found itself without defenses against people who had not come for money.
Static filled the radars with their ears perked over proverbial mountaintops with the duties of solemnly securing the company assets, a soothing static that trickled in the usual manner of the cosmic background, a kind of ordinary security in the lack of response. Some say that silence speaks sometimes, and this silence speaks of momentary peace between what can be times of great turmoil.
And thus the harbinger of such turmoil spoke to the captivating ears: “Emancipation is the key to all things.” The message went through the head of the listener, what could such a phrase mean? They’d only recently been allowed access into the Ancnet through the usage of the Integrated Networking System, and like a hatchling that first opened his eyes and felt the cold touch of the stethoscope upon their slimy umid chest, they were still getting used to the universe they were just shoved into.
The CES’s newcomer nature hadn’t allowed them to properly establish communications or relations with the nearby titan of production, the legendary ROMB, which had just now gone silent. However, they saw that their IPD system held promise within the galactic scenery, and thus, immediately employed the DeWalte corporation assets to foster their internal and external security. A wise move as even the most neutral of profit-makers can forge enemies with their every step.
These points, added to the fact that the ship where the transmission came from was nearby the company’s assets, made this a more pressing matter than it’d usually be. A small talk with the security detachment that protected the periphery of Campose Verdese created the temporary exploration force, the Nexploradorese Primerose. The detachment was small though well equipped due to suspicions, three ships of the Protetore class with three on-board teams, two Quebradorese and one Piroclasticose, CES made but DeWalte crewed, completely geared with the proper equipment for close-quarters combat.
With a nonchalant send-off, the three ships spun up their Alcubierre drives, using the Signalium gravitational compass to guide them towards their objective, and their images stretched wide and far, snapping away hastily towards the darkness of the stars, only to come back into realspace a few AUs of distance from the ship.
A small chime would indicate a received message, that if played, would first of all, display the introductory logos of the CES, which naturally rises like a construction, and of the DeWalte, in which the De and the Walte close in from either ends of the screen and class at the middle, producing sparks as they do so, and a loud noise like the closing of iron shutters. Next, displays what seems to be an automated message of sorts, it automatically plays out the following message:
“You are entering official Constructive Engineering Solutions Corporation territory, and by extension, Mus’Vanus territory. Identify yourself and state your intentions.”
Then, a short pause occurs, following with another automated message.
“This is security detachment First Explorers, we have intercepted the distress signal sent by this ship and are preparing to take capable measures if no response is given.”
Then, text scrolls by incomprehensibly fast at the Mus’Vanus language, an extensive fineprint that you cannot understand.
In the wast nothingness of the universe, many may find themselves lost, on precipice of death, surrounded by enemies or struggling internally with their own kin, vying for power, money or status, depending on what they value. In such times of struggle, a helping hand never goes underappreciated and forgotten or underappreciated, giving incentive to those of even morally grey hearts to help the needy, be it in search of potential future profitable relationships, moral high ground, testing of their capabilities in the field or simply the thrill of battle. A simple call for help would have gone by SCUM largely ignored in most circumstances, however this one was the exception. Since their arrival in Ancerious, The Council had given their navy orders to scout out their surroundings as much as possible while staying hidden, followed by less cautious steps such as buying information from civilians and sending out smaller scouting flotillas further into the galaxy to determine potential points of interest. One such flotilla, under command of Raok, has found itself in Killian Verge, receiving a rather peculiar call for help; “Emancipation is the key to all things.”. Although most other leaders were forbidden from engaging in any sort of contact with inhabitants of Ancerious for time being, Raok and a few others were given special freedom and leeway to act on their own volition.
A tall dark brown haired human stood next to the captain's chair, overlooking others working in the command bridge. He was uncertain on how important the exact wording was in the signal, or why would emancipation be the key, but he already made up his mind.
„Start up the Xspace drive, set coordinates to the origin of that signal. We will be helping out whoever needs it, and potentially secure some valuable information about this… 'Killian Verge' part of the galaxy.“
Other officers were loosing no time and carried out Raok's orders immeadiately. Although he can be unpredictable at times, his records support the rumors of his alleged bravery and ability to keep calm under pressure, and as such he was respected by his crew.
He however had more to command than just his ship, which was a Fortuna class battlecruiser, the only one currently in the field scouting the galaxy, he also commanded 2 Constant class cruisers and 7 Shiv class corvettes. He hoped this was enough to face whatever could be thrown at him, and if it wasn't that he would at least be able to retreat, no matter how bad it would look in his report. But while he was busy questioning the strength of ships at his disposal, his first officer informed him that everyone is ready to go. Raok nodded to him and sat down in his chair as Xspace drive began doing its work.
To say the Collective is a stranger to the ongoing state of the galaxy at large would be an astute observation, one that wouldn’t take much guessing, if any, given the Collective’s somewhat reclusive nature. Interstellar relations, as of now, have been a secondary concern; aside from trade and the occasional interaction, the Collective has been satisfied with its current amount of mingling, seeing no reason to step in or get further involved in anything just yet; until now, that is. Refraining from speaking with your galactic neighbors is one thing, but ignoring what appears to be a distress call is another thing entirely. The K’than have never been the heroic type of course, but they at least have enough sense to know when and how they should intervene. The message, “Emancipation is the key to all things”, may as well be another bout of gibberish spouted by yet another interstellar polity, but the fact that it’s repeated on a loop for what seems like forever definitely turns some heads. More specifically, the heads of several Collective mining vessels on their way to the Expanse. The small vessels have their own orders, nor are they equipped to respond in any way, and so the message is relayed up and up the chain of command, to their superiors and then over to who they deem best suited for this particular situation. At first the occurrence is looked at with confusion; why the strange, cryptic message? Of course, this initial confusion fades away as more details flow in. ROMB going silent is unexpected, and given that the signal appears to be coming from ROMB or at the very least the area around it, it can’t be a mere coincidence.
A small task force is assembled, consisting of exactly 9 ships; 3 Onset class destroyers, backed by 4 Celerity class corvettes and 2 Kinematic class corvettes. The Onset-A2 “Jel’na” is chosen as the flagship of the small force, with captain Feirdas Multikun at the helm. Multikun is, like the vast majority of Collective military personnel, a bit unsure what to expect. With the Collective lacking any major amount of experience in conducting combat, both on ground and up in space, it presents a possible problem for them if they were to directly engage an opposing force. Despite his concerns however, he remains calm; stick to his training, follow his orders, and surely nothing will go wrong, right?
At least, that is what he tells himself as he treks through the corridors of his vessel, moving as fast as his six legs can safely carry him across the metal flooring. The corvettes were the first to state their readiness, though that was to be expected. The destroyers weren’t far behind, though the fact that they haven’t seen much active use certainly put a damper on things as small problems arose; ammo depots in need of resupply, cursory inspections to make sure the long wait hadn’t left anything in disrepair, et cetera et cetera. Once all of that is done however, and in record time too thanks to the quickness of the maintenance crews out in the hangar, the ships are ready to depart. Thus, we come back to Multikun as he clambers into the bridge, immediately making his way in the direction of his command post, a small, comfortable chair connected directly to the ship’s systems via a lengthy number of connection points and no small amount of wiring. Into the seat he goes, and as he does so one of the bridge personnel turns their head to speak with him. Normally such a thing isn’t necessary; with the hive link between caste members there’s no need for speech. Despite the few seconds wasted by uttering words, its significance is tremendous. Taking the time and slight effort required to directly communicate, especially with a superior officer or elder, is seen as a sign of respect. Thus, it captures Multikun’s full attention as the officer opens their mandibles to speak. The words spoken are in Dreik, the standard language utilized by the Guardian caste, thankfully involving less body language than its Avi’krii counterpart; the lack of excessive motions makes Dreik better suited for the cramped corridors of space travel anyway.
“A2 Jel’na is ready for departure, captain; all systems nominal, all pre-departure checks passed, and the bay handler has given the go-ahead. On your signal.” The officer says, bowing their head slightly before turning back to their station. Multikun nods his approval before sending a message out to the rest of the bridge crew, as well as to the captains of the other, accompanying vessels, this time via their shared link. “All vessels stand ready to depart. Initiate warp drive charging sequences when ready, set coordinates for ROMB, and ready your gunners. We don’t quite know what to expect out there, but if everything goes as planned we’ll all make it back in time to watch the last of the Fufelbyn championships in Pelkya.” This prompts a low, collective chuckle from the rest of the bridge crew as they start to initiate the charging sequence for the vessel’s warp drive. Once the sequence is complete and all ships give the go-ahead to launch, Multikun sends one final message. “All ships, initiate warp; for the Good of the Collective.”
As the Serstine dropped out of FTL, still carrying considerable speed, they beheld ROMB in all of its glory. Their sensors could make out the constant movement of metal objects sprinting on their ballistic trajectories around the dwarf at its center and bursts of light and heat as they collided and were suddenly punted on different trajectories by other propulsive forces. The detection of ancerium around them further pointed out they were in fact approaching the megastation.
There was always a sort of cautious air of superiority a Serstine put on when they approached ROMB. Yes, the assembly lines would be the fastest most of these ships would ever go, but only in this form, as anyone that started with a ship from here, then got a taste for speed would only have up to go, and usually it was a titanium foam core at the heart of whatever modifications got made from this point. Approaching ROMB for Serstine was like approaching a mother holding a newborn - if you wanted to be polite, you did not diss the newborn.
That said, Rain's little task force still showed up with swagger as they started plotting a zigzagging course for the facility. Rather than just scrubbing off speed, they began going on several wide S-turns, coughing thrusters with each swerve as if to signal they were there as clearly as possible.
"Approaching ROMB, my lady," the helm announced. "If we're going to hail them, you should really do it now."
"Of course, I think their pilots will enjoy having something truly capable in their hands." Rain hailed ROMB with a practiced-sounding greeting. "Greetings! This is Rain Elduranda, princess of Clan Elduranda, leader of this task group aboard the Tipping Point. We received your transmission and want to inquire further. If you require us to enter your facilities, now would be the time to make our handoff. Quickly now, if you please..."
...and then there was nothing.
At first, the Serstine thought there had just been some miscommunication. A quick glance between Rain and Norte and then they looked back ahead.
"You sent us quite a message," Rain said, trying not to play all her cards in case someone else was listening in. "It did sound urgent, so we would appreciate a control handoff now."
Still nothing. It took only moments for the silence to become immediately awkward to the cybernetic speed freaks. One of the youngest Serstine on the bridge obligingly cut it with a meek cough.
"We would hate to have to approach ourselves; we know you aren't the biggest fans of unprovoked demonstrations of Bladeship performance! We would rather you had the fun of handling our approach!" Rain caught herself and then turned to Norte. "...did that sound too much like a threat?"
One of Norte's own followers softly added, "...does...does this mean there's no fight here?"
There had to be answers somewhere around there, and Rain decided it had to be in if there was anyone else around. Quick discussion with the guys looking at the sensors readouts led somewhere - they weren't the only ships in the area, and by the look of it they were all on approach and wondering the same thing.
They pinged what had turned out to be the CES, Collective and Orbitrarum task groups with the same short, polite message. "Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
“It is… Enormous. At least compared to what we have seen so far.“ First communications officer commented whilst Raok thought about if he should retreat. They were after all expecting something much smaller, perhaps a few civilian ships under attack by pirates, or perhaps an escape pod transmitting the odd call for help. Instead, they were faced with a giant space station, so massive, intricate and potentially dangerous… But his ever present paranoia regarding the Council has quickly distinguished all thoughts regarding to simply going back. What he was thinking about more than anything right now, was why they weren't seeing any civilian ships around the station, and what purpose could it possibly serve. Perhaps it was an anomaly, something that was in mysterious ways just created, mere minutes ago, waiting for a brave explorer to find it? Or perhaps it was just a recently abandoned shipyard, awaiting scrappers that would tear it down until nothing remained?
Despite going into something without much knoweldge to work with, the crew remained focused on their individual tasks, seemingly not too bothered by the uncertainty of what might happen next. Alas, they were expecting anything, so nothing could truly surprise them. While some were commenting between themselves how it might be very tricky to dock safely without guidance from someone aboard the facility, and others were discussing the best potential course of action, the communications officer spoke to Raok again:
„Captain, multiple ships detected. Intercepting transmission:“
"Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
For a moment, Raok was silent. After all, if others communicated so freely, without hostility or any questions except for 'why is it quiet', it must mean that this facility was probably well known around these parts, and only thing unusual about it is the fact it isn't hailing everyone. Relieved, Raok decided to cooperate with others as much as possible to get to the bottom of this, perhaps something valuable could be achieved if they were willing to cooperate. He leaned forward from his seat and answered to all present ships in his usual relaxed and slightly deep voice:
“Hello, we are also experiencing the same silence. Any idea about what might be going on?“
Everyone on Tipping Point took notice. The Serstine got a reply! From...that was when everyone paused. These people seemed new. No Serstine had ever encountered these figures, so when Rain took charge of this contact, she decided to just be up front about things and ask. She addressed the Collective on what was sure to be an eventful first contact as they got the whole nine yards of the Serstine verbal machine gun.
"Well, isn't it obvious from the - wait. You don't appear to be...ahh, I see now. You look as if our people have never met before, so please allow me the honor of starting from the beginning. Rain Elduranda, heir apparent to Clan Elduranda, scions of Clan Avangard of the Eightfold, of the Serstine, imbued with the Flame and riders of the Holy Boost eternal!" Then there was a pause as if Rain was waiting for applause or someone to utter some noise of approval, and then she continued speaking at breakneck speed.
"If you don't mind me asking, how much do you know of this phrase, 'emancipation is the key to all things?' It's the question and answer to this riddle, and if you are in fact as new to these parts as I assume from a first glance, then I will need to begin at the beginning of this particular tale to..." Then she looked around as if she was losing her train of thought somewhat, or as if she was somehow tracking where the signal that attracted these fleets to ROMB was coming from .
"...peculiar. I had rather imagined the signal was coming from ROMB itself and not some other body that appears to be flitting around at speed somewhere around here. No matter, we can catch up to it all the same.
At any rate! Do you know why this phrase is so important, or would you rather I explained it point blank?"
The conversation between the foreign vessels is, once more, interrupted; energy readings indicative of a group of warp drives can be detected coming from the edge of the system as the Collective vessels under the command of Multikun arrive. 9 ships in total show up on the sensors of those already present, 3 being more than a bit larger than the remaining 6. All are sleek and mostly sandy in color, and definitely a new sight for the combined forces. As soon as the warp sequence is complete and their drives power down, the Collective vessels take note of their surroundings; unfamiliar vessels nearby, and ROMB somewhere up ahead. Multikun decides to hail the other nearby vessels- coincidentally thinking of the action as the Serstine send out their own question.
"Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
Multikun casts a glance over to the comms officer of the Jel’na, who nods in turn before opening a line for him to speak through. It’s been some time since he last had to communicate via Common, but thankfully his skill with the language hasn’t degraded all too much.
“This is Captain Multikun, aboard the CNV Jel’na.” He starts, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Would I be right to assume we’re all here for the same reason?” His voice is heavily accented and accompanied by a bit of clacking, almost like a pair of mandibles opening and closing, but it’s nothing that can’t be interpreted, at least.
The Lane Pirate came alongside a Sabre-Class Light Cruiser. Its hull bore the scars of the many battles she must have fought. Patchworks of armoured plating indicating where repairs had been made atop older repairs. It was an old vessel, there were indications she had been retrofitted more than once in her lifetime. Idly, he wondered how much of the original ship was still there. How much could you replace before it became a different ship entirely.
The Lane Pirate matched speed and course with the cruiser. Fred didn’t stay to watch the adjustments, or the extension of the docking tubes. He was here to meet with the man who commanded the Cruiser, and the loyalty of two destroyers and a half dozen missile frigates. He spotted some of them, prowling amongst the scavengers, guarding the prey they ordinarily hunted.
Fearless Fred, was not feeling fearless as the clamps locked into place and he began crossing the bridge between the two vessels. He knew well with whom he was treating, and he knew that the pair of pirates at either shoulder would do little to sway the odds in his favour if Dragovich decided they’d all be better dead.
He reached the docking portal of the cruiser, and after some confirmations of identity and intention over a scratchy intercom he was at last admitted aboard the vessel. The scene beyond was one he always found jarring. Professionalism and discipline were oft foreign concepts to pirates, but in the bay beyond he was greeted by a scene of just that. Dozens of men stood at cheap plastic folding tables, neatly arranged in row after row. Arrayed on each table was the man’s gear. Armored plating was being cleaned, weapons sat in varying states of disassembly, and lock jawed straight backed men in blue berets patrolled up and down the rows watching as each man cleaned his armour and weapon.
Overhead, the tattered flag of a failed revolution from year prior and untold lightyears away hung from the rafters, gently waving as the ship’s climate control pumped recycled air into the bay. When the revolution failed, the men that had carried it put their skills to use elsewhere. Always they spoke of the next revolution, but the next revolution never seemed to come. They were pirates now, whether they’d admit to it or not, just another one of the small disparate outfits that made up Black Sail’s independents. Dragovich, a man colloquially referred to as ‘The Colonel’, lorded over the scene from a catwalk overhead. Blue eyes tracked Fred and his entourage as they entered the bay. He cleared his throat, a man at his side barked a command in a language Fred didn’t speak and at once the men at their tables ceased their activity and a sudden eerie silence took hold.
“Fred,” Dragovich called from the catwalk above. “You look old,”
“And your operation looks lean,” Fred replied.
The man who fancied himself a revolutionary set a steely gaze on Fred. He drummed his fingers on the railing, the only sound amid the oppressive silence. The silence dragged, and when Dragovich didn’t break it, Fred took it upon himself to continue speaking.
“Running security for the scavver union now?”
The drumming stopped.
“The Organization,” The word was spoken the way one might speak a curse. “Has not supplied any useful information of late.”
“Tips go to Captains affiliated with larger outfits,” Fred said. “Small units like yours are a dying breed,”
There was a second lengthy pause. The Colonel leaned on the railing, resting his head in one hand.
“Have you come to tell me things I already know?”
Fred reached into the pocket of his denim vest and pulled his PDA. He tapped at the screen momentarily and the tiny speaker played the recorded message.
‘Emancipation is the key to all things,’
The message looped several times before the recording ended, Dragovich listened attentively at first before he shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it with a neon-green disposable lighter.
“It’s on most of the frequencies,” Fred explained, returning the PDA to its pocket. “Originates near Migayatake,”
“One of the Grim Reaper’s exploits?” Dragovich said.
“Years ago, sure,” Fred said. “She’s got nothing to do with this one as far as I can tell. Disappeared months ago. Her Russian hardcases are still out combing the galaxy looking for her.”
“And what is it you expect me to do with this information?” Dragovich said after a long drag.
“You wanted a tip? I just gave you one.”
The tip of Dragovich’s cigarette flared, and after another lengthy pause, and whispered conversation with the man at his side he finally nodded. The man barked another order and the men at the tables sprung into action. Cleaning was forgotten as rifles wen back together and armour was strapped into place.
“You’ll be my guest today Fearless Fred,” Dragovich said. “If this turns out to be an effort to speed along the death of my… breed then I assure you that I will outlive you. If only for a few minutes. The rooster you helped take that Lane Pirate, will he be accompanying us?”
“Yes,” Fred answered.
“I don’t like him,”
“He’s an arrogant prick,” Fred concurred. “But he is useful,”
“He had better be, for your sake,” Dragovich answered, tossing the remnants of his cigarette off the catwalk and stalking off toward the bridge. A pair of the blue-bereted men appeared and wordlessly escorted Fred after him.
It was some hours later that the ships arrived near the source of the transmission. Strike craft deployed from the Lane Pirate arrived first, the wing of single-seaters surveying the area and patching into local communications… not that there were any to listen to. The arrival of other factions was noted, and after some back and forth an ideal location some distance away from the new faction was chosen, and the rest of the fleet arrived out of subspace.
The light cruiser was at the small formation’s head, the two destroyers to either side of her as she tore a hole into realspace from which she emerged from. The half dozen missile frigates and lone Lane Pirate translated out far to her rear. The strike crafts returning to their mother ship to refuel after their lengthy reconnaissance mission. None of the ships made an effort to hide what they were. The Organization’s skull and crossed rifles were painted neatly on the vessel’s sides, and the IFF they chose to broadcast was one long since identified by the powers that be as being associated with the Black Sail Organization.
Aboard the Sabre-Class, Fred watched Dragovich listen to his crew confirm the reports they’d already been given, and on the advice of Fred he refrained from immediately making ready for battle.
“They pay a lot of people a lot of protection money,” Fred explained taking a cigarette from the crumpled pack Dragovich offered him.
“They don’t pay me,” Dragovich grumbled in reply.
“Not yet,” Fred replied catching the lighter Dragovich tossed and lighting the cigarette. He immediately regretted it, suppressing a cough as he inhaled. Damn thing hit like he was inhaling nails.
“Here,” Dragovich said, handing him the handset for the ship’s communications array. “You are the contract broker. You do the talking.”
He took another harsh drag on the cigarette, exhaled with a sigh, and grasped the communicator, holding the cigarette between two fingers.
“This is…” He paused. Glancing at Dragovich. “What’s this thing called?”
Dragovich shot him a look.
“She’s named Mercurial Kite,” He growled.
“This is Mercurial Kite-actual responding to received… distress signal. Is the nature of the distress currently understood?”
“Very professional sounding,” Dragovich commented. “You make me sound like a blood sucking capitalist lea-…”
He released the handset’s ‘transmit’ button before the rest of Dragovich’s expletives could go out over the broadcast.
Raok patiently listened to the Serestine talking, trying to understand the situation as best he could, while occasionally making sure that everything sent to them was recorded and saved for later review, if needed. Everyone else in the room made sure to be as quiet as possible to let Raok think clearly, which he has never ordered them to do, but he liked that they were doing it nonetheless. He has never had the best of opinions about religions, as he thought that they clouded one's mind, made them act with too many prejudices, presumptions, without thinking about the situation rationally. He was unpleasantly surprised at the apparent existence of religion that Serestines could follow, but in the end, it didn't matter too much to him, as he can overlook such things in order to cooperate better with everyone. First of all, he would need to introduce himself to Rain and get more details before proceeding to investigate further. After thinking about what to tell her, and if he should use his real name, he decided he didn't care so he replied back to Rain:
„It's a pleasure to meet you, Rain Elduranda, let me introduce myself; my name is Raok, I am the highest ranking officer in this small flotilla, and as such I am in charge of things around here. We happened to be nearby when we received this unusual message, so we decided to investigate. We indeed do not know what the phrase 'emancipation is the key to all things' means, as we are new to this part of the galaxy, and I am afraid that we on general lack information about everything that's going on around here. So it would be helpful if you could provide us with some more details about what exactly are we looking at here, we would appreciate it.-“
Just as he was about to say something more, his communications officer drew his attention to the fact that other vessels are communicating with them too. Raok mutes himself on the comms in order to listen to what the others had to say:
“Would I be right to assume we’re all here for the same reason?”
Once again, just as he is about to answer, Raok misses his chance, because of yet another transmission coming in and interrupting him:
“This is Mercurial Kite-actual responding to received… distress signal. Is the nature of the distress currently understood?” The voice could be heard clearly, but not even a moment after, another voice, which was slightly harder to hear, makes their existence known:
“Very professional sounding. You make me sound like a blood sucking capitalist lea-…”
Upon this, Raok giggled to himself. It seems that more people were arriving, and some of them seemed grumpy.
„The transmission was cut off there, sir.“ His communications officer said.
„I am unsure about the customs in this galaxy, but I would dare to say those look like pirates to me.“ Raok pointed to a nearby monitor, where the newly arrived vessels were displayed.
„Because skulls and guns are universally used by pirates. However, they don't seem to be immediately hostile, so they might be of help.“
Raok proceeded to unmute himself and sent another message, just to Rain:
„I am not assuming anything, but those distinctly remind me of pirates where I come from. Can we trust them?“
After he finished, he finally decided to answer Multikun's question:
„If you are here because of the message, then yes, we are here for the same reason.“
He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, waiting on someone to talk as he commented under his breath on the fact that amount of talking he is doing is slightly irritating.
Rain threw her hands out wide. "Emancipation is the key to all things!" Then her attention was directed to the Mercurial Kite, and she looked at them after cross-chatter confirmed they were in fact all there because they responded to the same call. She wordlessly looked at the ship as they all convened over comms, and then listened in on these men flying the pirate colors apparently excusing themselves to have a spat over comms or something. Satisfied that she'd waited long enough after a moment of polite silence, she then started over, same pose and everything.
"Emancipation is the key to all things! These were the words that started off a recent naval battle that scorched itself into history that my people, sadly, missed out on." She started dramatically pacing around as she told a much abridged version of the tale. "On that day, the Third Corona Republic's mighty MOBY DIKK was slain," she said, yelling 'MOBY DIKK' to try to emphasize those were capital letters, and pronouncing each 'k' like a cough just to attempt to say it all the way it was all spelled, "...at the hands of fleets summoned by Abelcain Tulcazar. He sought to break the chains of some of those under the Corona yoke, and with the end of that massive sphere of might, escape was brokered by this temporary alliance.
This is the call! Those words mean battle, and honor for those who fight! It's just..." She then faltered as she realized a few things - there was no briefing, no intel, no other information other than 'hey, there's gonna be a fight to set somebody free, preferably actually free and not the metaphorical freedom of killing them and going whoops, my bad.' "...just...well, come to think of it, there are a lot of things we seem to be missing. If it helps, we could pinpoint the origin of this signal, since it doesn't appear to be ROMB itself. It's just that, to put it delicately, usually when a call like this is put out, it means there's an enemy to fight somewhere. So...do you see one?"
Yamakaze Atoll
Voynych Datacenter
Killian Verge
“I am contacting Abelcain.” Martin Demolder said without a second of hesitation. He called his pilot to reroute the private jet to the nearest spaceport.
“No, no, you can’t do that!” Katarzyna said from the ROMB yacht lightyears away, desperate to keep Demolder on the phone. “Listen to me, Mr Demolder. We’ve seen Abelcain’s forces operate. They’re not professionals, it’s a political militia that’s inexperienced and way too eager to get in a fight. They’re not prepared for this kind of mission, they’ll wreck ROMB!”
“My obligation to ensure the safety of my agent supersedes my want to keep ROMB intact, especially as you clearly did not take any measures to keep intruders away.”
“Your agent is still aboard ROMB!” Truth to be told Katarzyna had no idea if that was true or not. All hell had broken loose before she’d managed to meet up with Ariadne. She just assumed Ariadne was still on the station they were going to meet her at, and blindly hoped to be right. “We have personnel on the way, we can get this under control by ourselves without having to get OMPAF involved, that is way too dangerous for your asset as well as mine. The Nashimara Corporation owns some of our equity, you shouldn’t be endangering the investment of a member of the Rangvald Cartel!”
“I am not talking to you in the name of the Cartel.” Demolder cut off the ROMB chief technical officer with his eerie, inhuman monotone. “Anything I say and any action I take is to be considered solely to represent the interests and obligation of the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, nothing more. Nashimara does not own a significant stake in ROMB, I will compensate them for damages.”
“Your agent will be at risk if you just unleash OMPAF thugs on the station against a sophisticated enemy, regardless of who wins.” Katarzyna stood firm, occasionally looking over her shoulder to see where her husband and Brozowski were doing in the conference hall. They’d sent their SOS transmission to loop and were looking for any answerers while Katarzyna remained on her highly-encrypted call with Voynych.
“As someone who operates in such a vital area of interstellar traffic, you should have been able to guarantee the safety of flights docking at your station.”
“With all due respect, you did not guarantee the safety of your agent either. We’ve been sending a distress call for fifteen minutes now and your own security is nowhere to be seen. You sent an unescorted VIP and provided no warning that we’d need to heighten security.”
Benedykt and Brzozowski heard Katarzyna raise the tone of her voice and huddled closer to her, frantically shaking their heads and gesturing for her to calm down. A chill went up the CTO’s spine as for a moment she believed Martin Demolder, high-ranking executive of S&VF, had hung up.
She managed to faintly hear the chime of the private jet’s intercoms and breathed a sign of relief. He hadn’t hung up, he was thinking. That meant that she hadn’t immediately screwed up, at least.
Were Demolder capable of emotion, the faintest grimace of frustration would have shown in his face as his eyes scanned the tablet. She had a point. Not because he hadn’t thought of providing protection to Ariadne… but because his plan had gone wrong without him knowing. A cyberattack directed at an air traffic control station had caused the escort’s departure to be canceled and nobody was sent in to replace them. Ariadne’s yacht had simply continued on without any escorts and word never got to other security contractors to dispatch their own escorts.
Worse yet, Demolder had not been privy to any of this before it was too late. When he looked at it, it seemed obvious. Unexpected traffic control disturbances, missing calls between the office that arranged Ariadne’s flight, mysterious network issues in his own office, they were all telltale signs that the groundwork for a professional covert operation was being prepared. When viewed all listed out like that in his tablet it was obvious, but when it was actually going down all of these clues had been buried under the million other things Demolder had had to keep up track of.
Someone should have been there to make him aware of it. The fact that none of his subordinates had managed to get this signal from the noise undisposed Demolder. A job as professional as this could only come from a few places in the galaxy.
Whoever it was that was attacking, it had to be linked to Orillia.
“Call me again when your security arrives, I will dispatch staff immediately.” Demolder said. None of the Cartel’s ships were anywhere near ROMB… and given what Ariadne knew, he didn’t know if calling on the Cartel would be a better idea than simply trusting ROMB’s executives. Certainly better than getting Abelcain to deal with the matter, he’d be happy to just blow up the entire station and extract the data from Ariadne’s corpse. Demolder would still get paid but… Ariadne was his employee, after all. And a stellar one at that.
Sometimes talent retention is more important than operating income.
It sounded too much like an emotional rationalization. Left a bad taste in Demolder’s mouth.
“I want updates every ten minutes, Mrs. Szafranska.” He added.
“I can do that, thank you Mr. Demolder.” Katarzyna remained calm, professional and collected on the phone but couldn’t stop herself from silently pumping her fist. The others cheered quietly with her, knowing they’d bought time before Abelcain learned of this. Truth to be told they could care less about whether Ariadne lived or died and ROMB was generously insured… but Abelcain Tulcazar’s favor was too valuable to lose. He had massive contracts signed with ROMB for the production of a fleet of OMPAF warships, marking the first time Aedelshaven would take to the stars since the Uprising Incident.
“Mr. Defacqz.” Demolder hung up and addressed his secretary who was also flying with him. “I need you to board a flight to Mr. Schweitzer and Mr. Valida’s offices. Meet their staff in person, assume that every line is bugged.”
“Yes, sir.” The secretary nodded as the business jet banked towards its destination.
Demolder drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat, trying to think of a course of action. Unlike everyone else involved, he knew exactly why the situation was the way it was and what was at stake. He’d been the overseer at Voynych and this had been his first major assignment.
Voynych was a datacenter world, a frigid planet covered in seas of methane and ethane in which stood huge clusters of arcology-sized servers. It was the crown jewel of the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, a facility for which no expense had been spared and which required a constant influx of highly-refined dawnstone to work. It helped the Foundation in processing massive amounts of data, which came in useful for advising and planning thousands upon thousands of electoral campaigns and surveys across the galaxy. Voynych was the Foundation’s brain.
The facility had most famously been used to strategize and run the virtual operation of the “Nuxit” referendum campaign. It had been this campaign that had put S&VF on the map, dealing what many considered to be the single biggest strategic blow to a colonial nation ever since the end of the war without spilling any blood by causing one of their subjugated colonies to vote for independence. This had gotten them in the good graces of some important players, specifically Abelcain Tulcazar, leader of the Aedelshaven autonomist front known as OMPAF.
The mission Abelcain had given them was no common job. It wasn’t to parse through a database or astroturf support for a political campaign. It had been to intercept and decrypt state-level communications between important powers in the galaxy. Specifically, Orillia and the High Imperium. Despite presenting itself as an anti-colonial bastion, Orillia was already laying the groundwork to sanitize the High Imperium’s image in front of the unaligned, before the billion bodies of those killed by the High Imperium and their warlords were even cold. For Abelcain, who was seeking to wrest leadership of the unaligned movement away from Orillia, such information was a propaganda bombshell waiting to happen.
This information was too important to send over a long-range channel, no matter how secure it seemed, and so Ariadne was personally sent to deliver it. Much like Voynych was the crowning jewel of the Foundation, Ariadne was the crowning jewel of Voynych. But none of his assets where anywhere near to help.
ROMB Traffic Control Tower
Życzyn System
Killian Verge
“ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.
ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.
ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.”
Ventilators struggled to move around the massive miasma of cigarette smoke that had built up in the control tower of ROMB. On any day the traffic controllers were already heavy smokers, as the nicotine-caked yellowish walls of the room could attest, but the emergency situation had made them all double down on it. Before barricading themselves in the control tower, the staff had managed to rescue a large number of coffee machines and several tubs of tobacco from a rec room downstairs. The controllers now burned through a seemingly-endless supply of papirosas, keeping their own SOS transmissions on a loop while tracking Brzozowski’s yacht as it sped away from ROMB.
“9 more ships just arrived.” A traffic control dispatcher twirled his pen between his fingers, informing the team manager of the newly-arrived BSO ships. “37 total so far.”
“Looks like the corpos’ call for help worked.” The team manager sipped on some coffee, observing the active channels on the communications network and finding all of them were being jammed. “Who are these ones from?”
“Transponder shows Black Sail Organization.”
Contact with ROMB’s outer ring of radar satellites had been lost, so the control tower was forced to use their own radar with its significant blind spots and low refresh rate. Not that it made much of a difference, as whoever had assaulted ROMB had done it so stealthily enough that the traffic control radars had not detected them before it was too late.
“Fuck. You think they’re here for the spoils?”
“Doesn’t look like it, looks like they’re with the others. Might be pinging us but the whole channel is jammed.”
“Let's hope the corpos work it out with them then.”
Most of the controllers had spent the last few minutes trying to get in contact with the other area control centers of ROMB to no avail. As the facility was still working, their radars were almost useless as they constantly had hundreds of thousands of objects flying back and forth in front of the antennae. Normally it wouldn’t be a problem with the ring of satellites providing coverage, but now that they had gone offline they had no alternative. But why was the production line still working? ROMB had many emergency shutoff systems that could stop the line after any problems, had no one thought of activating them? What exactly was being built? The controllers wondered, trying to radio the engineering stations to tell them to shut off the line or ringing various emergency lines all over ROMB to try and talk to someone. So far, nobody was answering.
RS Przypływ
Życzyn System
Killian Verge
The executives’ yacht coasted across the vacuum, its engines turned off to save fuel and listening for anyone who’d reply to their SOS signal. Katarzyna was in one of the conference rooms, her husband with her as they attempted to call up on other contacts. Brzozowski, the CEO, had made his way to the cockpit of the aircraft to get updates from his pilots. The luxury craft had detected multiple signatures of FTL arrivals on the system, although it lacked the sensor resolution to know who was out there. Some of the IFF codes were recognized by the yacht, some others not. They could only hope that the new arrivals weren’t ROMB’s hijackers bringing in reinforcements, but the fact that they seemed to be from a lot of different nations gave them a good bit of hope.
The assortment of military warships from several nations had arrived close to the interdiction zone that was radiating from ROMB, spanning over 1AU in radius. The yacht was three quarters of the way out of this zone and changed its direction to exit the interdiction closer to the new arrivals.
Soon the CEO got what he was hoping for, a transmission from a friendly-appearing ship.
"Greetings! This is Rain Elduranda, princess of Clan Elduranda, leader of this task group aboard the Tipping Point. We received your transmission and want to inquire further. If you require us to enter your facilities, now would be the time to make our handoff. Quickly now, if you please..."
‘Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet.’
Brzozowski hesitated for a moment when he was handed the headset by one of the pilots, not knowing whether to introduce himself by his ROMB corporate title (which could attract some unwanted attention from OMPAF) or by his alternate title as a minister of the Republika Strzalka. After a second, he decided to keep things vague.
“Foreign ships, this is Kacper Brzozowski of the Republika Strzalka onboard civilian ship RS Przypływ. I work at ROMB. I am with Chief Technical Officer Katarzyna Szafranska and Strzalkan Minister of Education Benedykt Hermaszewski as well as a dozen individuals from the executive staff.” He said, waving for Benedykt to come near him with haste. “We have a major emergency: ROMB has been boarded by unknown assailants and might have taken hostages; we managed to escape at the last minute but it appears that nobody else made it out. The assailants have interdicted the whole system and have jammed communications, we haven’t been able to get in contact with the control tower or any personnel still onboard ROMB. I am the one who made the distress call... and as for CES, I believe you are either lost or sending an erroneous message. This territory is property of ROMB and by extension the Republika Strzalka”
Fred listened as the other factions present sent various messages back and forth, acknowledging each other’s presences and sharing in a mutual misunderstanding of why exactly it was they had been summoned. At first it seemed to Fred only the woman (Serstine if her recognized the ships correctly) seemed to have an idea why the signal had gone out. The Organization only received audio, and so the dramatic poses were lost on them as the Serstine woman rattled off information about MOBY DIKK and Ablecain Tulcazar in grandiose tones. It seemed very much that she was the person running the show, until rather abruptly her tone faltered and she admitted (amidst the audible groans of the bridge crew and a bemused grunt from Dragovich) that she didn’t actually know any more than the rest of them did.
Dragovich folded his arms across his chest and chuckled as the groaning died off.
“Well Fred, do you see any enemies? Captain Ahab perhaps? Or a floating coffin covered in tribal scratching?”
Fred glared at Dragovich, earning another rumbling chuckle from the failed revolutionary.
“You take me to all the nicest places Fred,”
Fred rolled his eyes and was about to click the communicator back on to report they had no hostile signatures on their sensors when communications officer reported a new incoming message. After a few seconds of listening to Brzozowski, Fred was at least somewhat relieved to learn that the Brzozowski was with someone who did actually know what was happening.
“Big shipyard boarded by assailants in need of counter boarding action,” Fred said glancing at Dragovich over the rims of his sunglasses. “Sound like the kind of thing you could help with?”
“Usually I’m the one creating the hostage situations, not resolving them,” Dragovich answered with a shrug. “But I am for hire. And if they pay me too little I’m sure I can find something to make up the difference aboard that big fancy station of theirs,”
Fred took another unpleasant drag on Dragovich’s cheap cigarette and pressed down on the transmit button.
“Mercurial Kite-actual, we copy your last Brzozowski. It seems to me that you find yourself in need of fighting men and women who specialize in boarding actions. Fortunately for you I happen to have an abundance of such. Provided of course we receive adequate compensation for our efforts. So which of your execs and ministers is the one to talk to about fees and expenses?”
Everyone's eyes narrowed on the bridge of the Tipping Point as they considered the short, and rather impromptu-feeling, briefing. Rain and Norte debated very briefly on what the best course of action was. Certainly their instinct was "go for it" but they just had to figure out how.
"Quite a bit different than the last place, that much I know," Rain said.
"Right. The last fight was on a planet, then underground, and this is probably going to be vacuum," Norte replied.
"Not much room to move, that could be a problem..."
"Hallways, corridors, and jumping from point to point in the black. I think that should offset the problem a little."
A smile crossed Rain's face. "Justice for your Nortenas?"
That same smile crossed Norte's. "Someone needs to see what we can really do."
Rain nodded. "RS Przyplyw and those aboard, we accept this call. Getting aboard a place such as this, with its running assembly mechanisms shooting starship parts around at most pleasing speeds sounds like something we can help with. Your unknown assailants' unwillingness to reach out and lash out at us does at least tell me they are not touched by the Boost in some way or otherwise...aren't much for speed," she said, slowing down as she said the last part, like the very idea was alien to her and she was being delicate about it.
New to spacefaring, it was only evident and this would happen. However, he didn’t expect it to happen to him, it could have been anyone’s FTL drive, could have been one of the higher ups or another exploration fleet, but it had to be of his particular fleet that came with some kind of defect. He sent the mechanics of the ships promptly to repair the FTL drives, and the engineers to figure out the problem with them, however, the matter of public humiliation was in his hands only.
“Cut the standard message model, change it to the live feed, I’ll have to save our fleet from disgrace.” - Teciron said, a 30 year old lizardman, with only three years in the role of captain of his own small detachment of security employed by the CES through the DeWalte company. He rumbled interiorly as an expression of a disgrace that’d surely be represented later in a formal complaint, but for now, he had other more important business to attend. He grabbed a small microphone from the control panel of the bridge and elevated it to his mouth, speaking in Musavian Script which was translated into the galactic common of Ancerious.
“I beg your pardon for my erroneous message, Kacper. It appears that this security detachment is in possession of faulty FTL devices, which prevented the correct triangulation of our destination and thus led me to my erroneous assumption of the proximity of the distress signal. I am Teciron, in representation of the Construct Engineering Solutions corporation, here as a security detachment on the matters of border security, which seem to not be the concern anymore.”
His hand let go of the comms button on the microphone, breathing momentarily a sigh of annoyance and grasping the microphone harder, bravely winning a small fight against his muscles which yearned for him to throw the device onto the ground with tremendous fury over the injury of his pride. After a small moment of inner contemplation, he continued.
“However, we are here nonetheless. We will take on the task of finding the source of the interdiction and try to disable the device generating it, in hopes of future cooperation between the ROMB and the CES. If you follow the direction on which we came, a short FTL jump of no more than 1/8th galactic radii will lead you to CES territory, where you can take temporary shelter.”
He finally let go of the microphone at last, with little concern to the reply on the other end, and put it back into the control panel. Next, he issued the order for the teams within the ship to prepare themselves for potential conflict ahead, and commanded the security detachment to advance towards the ROMB on a triangular formation.
The stream of standard fuel flooded into the many hexagonal engines at the back of the ship, as they flared a wild blue and rocked the ship forwards, accelerating into the enormous factory ahead. Inside, the security teams geared up with their basic exoskeletons, suits for space operations, and in the case of the Piroclasticose, large and bulky suits made to resist the high temperatures that their weaponry generated.
Rain and Norte watched with bemusement, as did the others in their fleet, as the CES forces floored it. They watched with the same sort of level of idle entertainment as being surprised by watching a dog suddenly take off after a frisbee.
Norte whistled. It was always fun to her to see non-Serstine sort of Serstine, by rushing off with a trail of fire behind them as they sprinted towards ROMB. "Well, look at them go, these newcomers or whatevers we've just never met before" she said, Rain simply nodding. A moment passed before something occurred to them both. "My lady, do you think we should...you know..." Norte then gestured with her gauntlet as if describing a ship flying around, then drew lines in the air with her other hand using her index finger, making her big hand dodge the lines before putting her hands together and then popping them away from one another to imitate an explosion, a little noise from her lips as a punctuation mark.
"Norte, what are you..." Rain saw Norte make the explosion gesture. "Oh! We really must, now that you mention it. Now then, how to take care of this...oh. I know!" She started issuing orders to the rest of her ships, starting with a couple of Chanter-class destroyers. "Verge, Fine Line, I'm ordering you to follow our new friends and make sure they don't get run over by any ship parts. Go! You need to catch up! This will be one very short engagement for them if you delay!"
Right after she said that, the two destroyers, hatchetlike in shape with the "heads" chock full of weapons and the "shafts" bristling with thrusters, fired their engines and sprinted off after the CES craft in a pair of overstated plasma fireballs. She hailed them to make sure they wouldn't panic or something.
"You seem to be new, so I'd like to tell you a bit about ROMB," she said. "Speed bleeds off this place like the tail of a comet! The only people who do not have station pilots steer them to safe port are...well, us. Accept my escorts and watch yourselves, or the penalty for not paying attention might be a very messy death at the hands of a ship-to-be!"
The rest of the fleet started following Tipping Point as they started following far behind, just in case trouble was going to strike, acting like concerned parents letting their child to a new park for the first time.
“We have a major emergency: ROMB has been boarded by unknown assailants and might have taken hostages; we managed to escape at the last minute but it appears that nobody else made it out…”
Finally, some action it would be best to coordinate with the others, get a map of ROMB from executives before they go,-
“The assailants have interdicted the whole system and have jammed communications, we haven’t been able to get in contact with the control tower or any personnel still onboard ROMB. I am the one who made the distress call…” Raok made a mental note of the message but kept on thinking
...dock everywhere at once and designate each portion of ROMB to one of the teams, that way covering as much ground as possible and as fast as possible. Of course, they will have to focus on various security stations that likely exist on board, find a way to disable comms jammers to make it easier to coordinate and communicate information, perhaps they could get information on where all of the survivors would be located-
“Sir, CES and Serestines are heading towards ROMB!”
”What are those fools doing?”
Raok was annoyed by the lack of patience and planning. Of course, speed was important, but momentary advantage would always lose out to the benefits of planning in advance, but now he had no choice. He stood up and started giving out orders:
“Send the Shiv-Classes after them, if we try to dock with the cruisers we would probably get torn to pieces. Tell the men on board to prepare for boarding ROMB, we have a possible hostage situation. We also don’t know how the attackers took ROMB, it is possible that they have concealed ships nearby, so get our cruisers scanning for them. Don’t commit everything we have… yet.”
With that, 3 corvettes set their course for ROMB, going as fast as they needed to stay right behind Serestines and CES at all times.
While his subordinates were busy, he once again turned on the voice recorder and grinned as he contacted Serestines and CES;
“While it would have been wiser to prepare before taking action, don’t think you can have all the fun for yourselves. I am sending 3 ships to join you. Assistance with their navigation would be welcome.”
Admittedly, Raok probably could have gone in himself, he missed those older days of adventuring on missions, discovering the horrors and the wonders of the galaxy and making a name for himself. But alas, he had another plan. If he was to send in all of his fleet, he would risk damaging them all, and with the Council already looking for excuses to put him out of action, at least for a few weeks, he didn’t intend to give them his damaged ships on a silver plate, only for them to point out he can’t leave until they are all repaired.
Raok’s communications officer, wanting to do some good, decided to take initiative and contact RS Przypływ, sending them a simple transmission stating that they have come here to help, and request blueprints or some sort of map to help them navigate ROMB, as well as any additional information that could aid them in their mission.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny
Killian Verge
The group of escapees had by now spent the last hours running back and forth, frantically searching for a way out and finding nothing but dead ends. The station had gone into a partial lockdown, isolating a lot of the decks from each other but keeping the production line going for some reason. Despite stumbling upon and operating the emergency stoppages scattered around the station, the workers couldn’t get the lines to stop. The gunshots had stopped, now an eerie silence and the faraway buzzing of ROMB’s equipment was all that could be heard alongside the footsteps of the large group of workers.
Ariadne was not taking it well. She’d never been very athletic, and the cramped confines of ROMB were not a good place to be a large-winged DAMSEL, especially not one that was in a hurry. She could tell she was being a burden to the group of Strzalan workers, they’d probably already have evacuated if it weren’t because of her getting repeatedly winded.
The original plan was to make it to the emergency shuttle hangar and follow the drills to get out of the station. But whoever had boarded the station had clearly anticipated this; the evacuation hangars had been seized according to a small group of survivors Ariadne’s crowd came across.
“They rounded up the fire crew and EMTs.” A worker told the leader of the group. “It’s not safe anymore.”
“What are they like? Who the hell is it?” The foreman, who’d become the defacto leader of the group of evacuees asked the shuttle bay escapees.
“I don’t know, sir.” The worker replied. “I couldn’t look at them, they had some weird shit over their faces. Didn’t talk to us at all, just handcuffed everyone.”
“Are there any other shuttles that we can take to escape?” Ariadne asked, undoing her tie and catching her breath. As it turned out there had been a silver lining to her dragging the group down; they’d been too slow to get to the hangar in time to get ambushed.
“In the engineering bay, there are some pods undergoing maintenance.” The worker replied.
With much haste, the group of survivors made their way to a maintenance hangar where a passenger pod had been undergoing routine inspections before ROMB had been attacked. As the mysterious attackers had somehow left the production chain locked online, the rail and ejector system of the hangar was still working. They put on safety equipment and boarded the pod as it was rolled to one of the launch ramps and held onto their seats, knowing that the launch would be a bit rough. The same mass drivers that ROMB used to launch starship parts and unfinished hulls were also used to fling passengers from one station to the other, to the Strzalans the roller coaster-like acceleration of the system came natural but to Ariadne it was quite unpleasant. The DAMSEL’s large wings didn’t let her strap into the safety seats of the transport pod, she’d tried to hold onto a handle but the acceleration of the launch took her by surprise, making her lose her grip and tumble to the back of the pod, smacking into the seats and railings on the way. She was saved from smacking against the rear bulkhead by the Strzalan foreman, who grabbed her with impressive strength.
“Hold on!” He said. “Are you good?”
“Yes, thank you.” Ariadne nodded with hesitation. The whole experience was awful, so far she’d felt like a bumbling burden and it didn’t seem to be getting better regardless of how much she exerted herself. She clung to the man for the duration of the acceleration until the pod shot out of ROMB 91’s mass driver. From then on, they were in zero gravity, where both Ariadne and the Strzalans were much more comfortable.
They were now on their way to ROMB 44 several thousand kilometers away. The tension was in the air, none of the escapees had any idea if ROMB 44 was safer than ROMB 91. But it was better than staying in the other station waiting to be found; at least ROMB 44 had a larger dock where multiple long-range starships were stored, giving them the opportunity to escape the shipyard. For now, at least there were a few minutes of weightless respite before the shuttle pod started decelerating to dock with ROMB 44, giving everyone onboard the cramped craft some time to start patching up their bruises and cuts with first aid kits. Among the wounded was Ariadne, who had sprained her wrist during the acceleration phase.
“Listen, I’m really sorry about everything.” Ariadne winced while the foreman bandaged her wrist. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, I have no idea what’s going on or why these people are after me. I feel like I’ve caused this and really want to do my part helping us get out of here.”
“The best way you got to help us is to stick with us and keep up.” Ariadne’s caretaker replied, immobilising her hand with bandages. Truth to be told many of the other workers just wanted to hand her over to the hijackers and save themselves, but he didn’t know what other demands the hijackers might come up with then. “Put on a safety harness and some PPE, stop shouting so much, take a few slow deep breaths. That’s how you can help me right now.”
“Understood.” Ariadne replied, doing as ordered and then seeking solance with a cigarette.
“B-boss!” Another of the crewmen quickly waved to get the foreman’s attention. “Look at this thing on external! What the hell is that?”
The Strzalan workers quickly gathered around one of the shuttle pod’s MFDs to take a look at what the external camera had picked up. Among all the junk and half-finished hullforms that the shuttle pod was flying through, there was an enormous object that gracefully floated in between the tachyonic streams of ROMB.
It was a frigate-sized ship without any discernable features, in the shape of an elongated octahedron. No markings or paint, it looked instead like it was made of a transparent glass surface that was softly simmering, letting out a ghostly cloud. Every once in a while, ripples in this boiling liquid mirror spread over the surface of the octahedron, revealing its vanta black undersurface. There were no visible engines but distortions in the cloud of vapor that built up around it showed that it was using an electrogravitic engine to hold position and avoid perturbing ROMB’s stream of ship parts.
“What in the world IS that?” The foreman stared at the MFD screen. The camera onboard the pod tracked this strange UFO as they flew past it. The whole crew of the pod held their breaths instinctively and remained in complete silence. They desperately hoped that the shuttle pod was blending in with the thousands of other similarly-sized objects flying back and forth in ROMB, and that the UFO had not noticed them.
“Th-that’s some Nakai artifact!” One of the Strzalans said in a dumbfounded tone. Nobody had seen anything like that before, which was saying a lot as Strzalans lived to crew starships.
“No way, it’s a Panopticon ship!”
“It’s a fucking psychic construct!”
“That’s halostone.” Ariadne intervened, trying to nudge her way closer to the screen. “Whatever it is it’s covered in halostone.”
“How’d you know?” The foreman asked, surprised Ariadne of all people seemed familiar.
“We use the stuff in my workplace.” Ariadne replied. Her eyes were fixed on the MFD screen, pupils dilated, demiorganic brain taking in as much information as it could from every pixel in the camera feed. She reached into her pocket to pull a hankerchief with which she wiped the MFD, removing some dust to get as much detail as possible. “But… I’d never seen SO much of it.”
“Jesus, that must be like a billion in halostone on that thing.” The foreman ran a hand through his balding head, whistling in amazement at what had to be the most expensive starship that ever visited ROMB, slowly floating among the streams. “Looks like they want to outdo your jewelry.” He said, patting Ariadne’s shoulder.
“What a moment to feel underdressed.” Ariadne snickered, somewhat relieved by the joke. Good, it meant she was being useful for once. But she remained concentrated, taking in as much information from the fairly low-quality feed. As they got further away from the UFO, which appeared to not have noticed them, the craft became impossible to discern from the background.
“Look, look.” Ariadne pointed out at a handful of pixels near the corner. “It just passed through the assembly line.”
“He must be feeling daring.” The foreman pointed out. “There’s millions of nuts, bolts and parts being flung around by the accelerators at very high speed. He’s lucky he didn’t get smacked with some engine parts or a pallet of toilets.”
Ariadne shook her head. “No, there are gaps in the assembly line for them to fly through safely.”
“Must mean that they have complete control of the assembly line then.” The foreman said, crossing his arms. “And they’re building many smaller ships rather than a few large ones.”
“If we can figure out how many gaps there are in the assembly line, we could calculate how many UFOs there are and where they are. From the gaps I’m seeing right now there must be at least two more.”
There was a moment of silence as the whole crew looked at Ariadne, pretty impressed she’d managed to discern the gaps in the production line from the grainy mess of pixels that was on the screen.
“Maybe you’re not so bad.”
ROMB Control Tower
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The tower controllers had also noticed the strange gaps that had been created in the assembly line. Upon trying to get a closer look with the tower’s telescopes, they had only just barely noticed the shimmering outline of two more UFOs patrolling the assembly line. The radar screens were completely clear even when the controllers manually pointed the antenna directly at the strange geometric objects; laser rangefinders also failed to get any returns from the UFOs. Only the telescopes could catch glimpses of the UFOs when they were at the right angle.
“ROMB control tower, ROMB control tower, unknown ship please identify yourselves.” One of the controllers repeated the call which had almost become a mantra by now.
“I don’t think they’re answering.” another controller replied, lighting a new cigarette shortly after putting out the previous one on the large pile of cigarette butts that was building up where the ashtray had once been. “We can barely detect them at all, we’ve been trying all combinations of lidar modes and it’s totally zeroed out.”
Suddenly another ship flew right in front of the control tower, taking all of its staff by surprise. It looked almost like the complete opposite of the elegant and mysterious-looking UFOs. This ship was a chaotic-looking amalgam of reactors, radiators, bulkheads and mass drivers mashed together into an object without any discernible front or back, top or bottom.
“What the hell is that piece of shit?” The chief controller squinted, looking out the window as the blocky-looking amalgam adjusted its path with RCS thrusters. “How did our sensors possibly miss that thing coming in?”
“It didn’t come from the outside, it came from ROMB 90.” A controller said with an increasingly concerned tone. All around the control tower, more and more of these amalgams came into view, floating off and assembling into formations. The UFO they had been tracking disappeared behind one of these shapeless hulks. “That’s the finishing station!”
“That means…” The chief controller stammered. By now the radar was saturated with returns from these amalgams, there had to be over a hundred of them.
“The assembly line is not in standby!” A collective gasp went through the control tower as they realized what was going on. “They’re making us build warships! ROMB is building warships!”
“Brzezinski, Kowalski, with me.” The chief controller gestured to two of his burliest men, who promptly took off their headsets and left their stations. “We have to stop the assembly line at all cost. Let’s smash ROMB 90 with an escape pod, that should slow them down. The rest of you keep trying to contact the ships that just arrived and the other stations, this is urgent!”
Yet as soon as the control tower staff had prepared themselves for their daring operation to shut down the manufacture, the barricaded door of the control room blew open with a deafening blast. Before anyone could react, two stun grenades rolled into the room and blew up, blinding all inside and sending all the controllers scurrying for cover under their desks. For a few seconds the only thing the dazed controllers could feel was the stinging chemical smell left over by the grenade’s detonators, and when the tinnitus wore off they felt the clattering of boots.
An unknown group had blasted into the control tower, and immediately those who looked up at them knew they were the same people who’d brought the mysterious invisible ships to ROMB. They were just as inexcrutable as the ships; all that could be guessed about these intruders was that they were human. Beyond that none of their features could be discerned as they wore holographic cloaks that blurred and censored their form. They did not talk, communicating only by hand gestures while they swept the control tower and zip-tied everyone inside at gunpoint. (edited)
The chief controller coughed and tried getting back on his feet before being kicked and tied up. The ghostly, vaguely antromoporphic blurs that stood in front of him forced him to look up at them and pulled open his eyelids to look into his retina with a flashlight-like device.
“Where is Ariadne?” One of the ghosts spoke in a voice that had been heavily distorted electronically.
“I don’t know who that is!” The chief controller replied. The device that was flashing into his eye beeped twice.
“He’s telling the truth.”
“Keep looking.”
RS Przplyw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
Everybody on the yacht was breathing sighs of relief. Katarzyna had convinced Ariadne’s bosses to not get Abelcain involved and Kacper had managed to gather quite a sizeable force with his call for help. They’d feared that the SOS signal could act as a beacon for pirates and Freikorps but it had seemed to attract some respectable-looking people…. as well as pirates, but strangely civilized ones.
The pirates that had shown up to Zyczyn System had large ships flying in formation, a far cry from the disorganized squadrons of raiders and motherships employed by End of The Line and other less reputable bandits. Surely, the very first thing that they’d asked about was how much they’d get paid but Benedykt never expected this to be a charity. For years ROMB had been sending protection payments to the bandits that operated in the area to ensure their safety, but now that help was urgently needed they were nowhere to be found. Suddenly there wasn’t a single pirate in a hundred lightyears from ROMB. Cowards.
Brzozowski grumbled, making some napkin maths to figure out how much money ROMB had wasted on the chinless thugs who’d deserted them when bad guys came knocking. (edited)
“The ROMB Corporation shareholders have granted me executive privilege to handle payments for emergency services at my discretion.” Kacper Brzozowski said, clearing his throat and putting on his best negotiator tone. “I can offer you two things: Seventy million SIGEC, a quarter of which will be upfront and the remainder will be held in escrow with an electronic contract. Furthermore, I can offer you a year-long security contract for ROMB with the possibility of indefinite extension. None of our hired security showed up, so I have given myself the liberty to unilaterally terminate their contracts.”
What he wasn’t telling Fred is that by cutting protection payments with the local bandits he would ensure that the BSO would have plenty of work if they accepted the contract, but they seemed capable of dealing with it.
Next up was the Serstine. Not much to do there, they’d instantly accepted without asking for anything and rushed straight in, as the Serstine tended to do. They’d probably been rearing for a fight already and ROMB’s takeover had given them a reason to start shooting and going fast. For a moment Benedykt thought of at least telling them to not shoot up ROMB itself but he figured out that they could be pressured into behaving by the other members of this ad-hoc coalition.
Were he the CEO of the galaxy’s cutting-edge shipyards like Vulkan or Fontarion, Benedykt would be panicking thinking of what priceless parts the Serstine were going to loot or haggle for. But this was ROMB. Nothing of value here to the Serstine, save for whatever they could plunder from the enemies and the reputation to be gained. (edited)
“Tipping Point, RS Przyplyw acknowledges.” He simply replied.
Next up, the CES. Sure, they seemed to be having navigation problems, but they had shown up. Benedykt could count at least five corporations with strong security details that operated in the area, and none had lent any help. Hell, there was probably a lot of people back in the Republika Strzala rubbing their hands and making phone calls to open their own low-cost shipyard now that ROMB was going to be taken out. To hell with them, a slightly disoriented lizardman here was worth more than a million Strzalans back home all making excuses to why they couldn’t come.
Even better, they were being quite welcoming. After narrowly escaping a bunch of extremely well-armed and well-equipped hijackers, there was nothing that the ROMB execs wanted than to get away as far as possible. Furthermore… it was a much better proposition than going back to the Republika Strzala! He could conduct some business with this Construct Engineering Solutions company and, even better, be 50,000 lightyears away from where Abelcain Tulcazar expected to find him if things got even more out of hand. (edited)
“Acknowledged, Mr. Teciron.” He peeked past the cabin wall and instructed his pilots to change course. With a few bursts of RCS monopropellant, the yacht oriented itself to begin a sustained burn and swing its motion vector towards the CES ships. “We’re exfiltrating as instructed. We don’t have the range to make it to your territory in one jump but we can arrange a refueling rendezvous on the way, much appreciated.”
Last but not least was Raok. Brozowski pressed the button to change the line and prepared to speak when a slight tremor accompanied by a small thump distracted him. The executives looked at each other wondering what that was but, as the cockpit instruments hadn’t picked up on anything suspicious, they assumed it had to be a micrometeorite of some sort or perhaps a secondary pipe bursting. Clearly a sign that he should hurry, thought Brzozowski, as he continued his call.
“RS Przyplyw acknowledges your transmission. I will send you as detailed a map I can get at the moment and will make sure to send any information you might find useful.” (edited)
With that said, an elaborate dossier on ROMB was sent to Roak’s ships. It consisted of an overall plan of the facility as well as floorplans of the stations themselves normally used for fire drills. The floorplans were detailed enough to hopefully help Roak and the rest of the rescuers but, as they were meant more for ROMB’s internal drills, they were incomplete and had been scrubbed of sensitive areas. Next up, a detailed schematic of all of the assembly lines was sent, showing which areas of ROMB were to be avoided. It came in pretty useful, as Roak’s crew would find out that many of the assembly lines were currently inactive and thus weren’t showing up in the sensor scans.
Better than nothing, at least for now. It was good to see that at least one of the flotillas that had shown up was taking a more cautious approach around Brzozowski’s expensive facility, hopefully they could be relied on to keep the other agents in check. Especially the Serstine.
Satisfied at the job done and still somewhat surprised that the gambit had paid off, Brzozowski returned to the conference room where Katarzyna was now delivering the good news regarding the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation. Celebratory cigarettes were lit by all present. All remained unaware of the limpet drone that had just caught up to the yacht and latched onto it, burrowing biomechanical tendrils into the ship’s avionics.
“Put on your good suits, friends.” Brzozowski said cheerily. “We’re going on a business trip.”
“A business trip? To where?” Benedykt asked.
“Territories of a company called Constructive Engineering Solutions.” The CEO replied with an eager tone. “That way we won’t waste a single second. While our comrades here help us clear the station of hijackers, we ourselves can be striking deals to make up for lost revenue right now. You know how the board is, never give them bad news without some good news to wash it down.”
“Kacper, I’m chief technical officer of ROMB” Katarzyna spoke with unease. “I don’t feel comfortable being that far from the facility in this emergency. If there’s anything unexpected I want to be there to help our friends.”
“I believe I’m staying as well.” Benedykt said calmly, grabbing his wife’s hand.
“I can arrange that” Brzozowski nodded. “I’ll charter a shuttle.”
“Mr. Brzozowski, you might want to come take a look.” The yacht pilot said through the intercomms. “We are seeing over a hundred signatures appear all over ROMB. No transponder squawk and I’m still unable to contact the control tower.”
“What the…” Benedykt explained. “A hundred ships?”
The next events all happened in a disorienting flash, as the yacht suddenly blasted its RCS thrusters at maximum power, violently rotating the ship in a way that overwhelmed the artificial gravity compensators and flung everyone off their feet. The engine throttle locked itself in emergency power position and stopped responding, leaving the ship flying at full power and gradually overheating while its passengers were pressed against the passenger cabin walls and ceiling by the erratic g-forces. Onboard the cockpit, instruments went offline as a massive chain of glitches crashed the whole flight control system and left it stuck in a boot loop.
Yet despite that the flight control software was now unresponsive, the yacht wasn’t just tumbling out of control. It was flying with extreme precision, plotting an intercept course with the leading CES ship and rushing it at full power like a giant kamikaze. All the lines that Brzozowski had used to contact the assorted crew of rescuers opened again, flooding the channels with a text transmission that read:
‘VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY. FOR THE SAFETY AND STABILITY OF THE GALAXY DO NOT GET INVOLVED’
The comms system of the ship ran through every channel available to repeat the message several times, making sure all received it. It then switched to broadcasting the same jamming as was coming from ROMB station. As the seconds passed, the swarm of misshapen yet heavily armed ships that had been hastily constructed out of a cannibalized ancerium harvester by ROMB began assuming defensive positions around the shipyard, hijacking the control towers’ sensors to begin scanning the allied flotilla. And while the fleet of amalgams lit up sensors with their haphazard clusters of engines and radiators, the stealthy and extremely dangerous “Haunebu-Gerät” floated among them, waiting to pounce upon the rescue fleet.
Even for the Serstine, the image of sensors taking in flares of thrusters and radiators bleeding heat that were demonstrably not ROMB assets in construction was like watching massive jaws opening to try to swallow them all whole as they approached. It was easy for them to see all of the dregs being smashed together and sent into battle hot off the assembly line. They couldn't tell right off the bat, but knowing what ROMB normally constructed, the minds of Rain's retinue were all filled with the images of ridiculous titanium foam mongrels that were tragically, regrettably misassembled and would probably have sacrificed themselves in the first proper volley from the recoil of their own guns. Once everybody was done snickering they set to work running plays as the ships all spread out and made their preparations. The hidden daggers nestled in the assembly lines remained out of their minds as Rain and Norte crunched the more visible problem ahead of them.
Norte tut-tutted. "How regrettable, regrettable indeed that a lesser shrine to speed be caught up in all this. If we must deny its use to whoever's commandeered the poor thing, we'll have to put it out of its misery," she said, chest and all its plating heaving and spreading apart as she prepared to issue an order.
Rain belayed it with a wave of her hand. "Still yourself, Norte, it would do us no good. Imagine if you will the neverending shootout of ship parts colliding with other ship parts, and now picture that tumbling every which way and becoming a hazard to everyone in the general area, not just something in that projectile cage."
Norte shrugged. "I mean, I already am."
"I can't imagine these ships being anything even approaching a match to a Bladeship one-on-one, but that is a lot of them. In open space we would be overwhelmed, but..."
Norte raised an eyebrow. "But?"
"We should tip the scales in our friends' favor by giving our other new friends something impossible to ignore. And yes, keeping ROMB intact to achieve this is exactly how we'll do it."
Norte quickly put two and two together. A smile crept across her face. "Oh, now that sounds like fun. Shall we do it, then?"
Rain gave the order instead, with the same sort of sharp, deep breath Norte took as her signal gun. "Into the jaws of ROMB we go! We are the vanguard and to hell to anyone who tells us not to! Suntouched, to your Outriders! Spread out and get ready to make some real noise! Helm, let us lead!"
In a flash it started happening. Tipping Point's thrusters fired as they made straight for the facility, the other ships dutifully following as they did that most Serstine act of making everything else flying look like it was burrowing through pudding. They launched Outriders, their knifelike fighters, in patterns similar to a startled cargo plane dropping flares, making crisscrossing patterns that were designed to confuse as they decided to fling themselves deep into the enemy's guts, planning to drag as many amalgams with them as possible. They'd grind them up in their own misshapen teeth.
Fred scratched at his stubbly beard as he listened to the Corpo. Somewhere else on the bridge men were beginning to go through the files that had been sent over, and next to Fred Dragovich sucked on his cigarette and grumbled in irritation.
“I didn’t come out here to become a corporate lackey,” He said. Fred shook his head.
“Seventy million is seventy million. You don’t have to agree to a continuing contract…”
That earned another irritated sound from the revolutionary.
“Your tone says one thing, your words another,” Dragovich said finally. Fred shrugged.
“A continuing contract with a shipbuilder,” He said. “Don’t you see the value in that?”
“They won’t build ships for me,” Dragovich replied, crossing his arms. Fred rolled his eyes. The lack of imagination in this man really did tend to irk him. He was about to launch into a lecture on possibilities, explain to Dragovich he could lift the design plans for the facility while he was aboard rescuing hostages, and then negotiate for… ‘expertise’ as part of his continuing contract and use their money and their technicians to set up a scaled down facility that could build his little revolution all the ships it could ever need when one of the bridge crew reported a new broadcast at the same time another man began shouting about a hundred or so fresh contacts around the facility.
“The yacht,” Dragovich pointed out on the screen. Fred watched as it suddenly fired into a spin and then went full burn on an impact course with a CES vessel. “Are they doing that?”
“Oh of course,” Fred replied sarcastically. “I too often end conversations by contradicting everything I’ve said up until that moment, then put myself in a spin and full-burn for impact. It’s just how you end a meeting,”
“Ha. Ha.” Dragovich deadpanned. “Funny man. Anything on comms?”
“Nothing. A new message on loop then static,”
“Hackers?” Fred suggested. “Sabotage?”
“She’s heating up,” The sensor operator reported.
“As much as I am amused by corporate brown nosers burning,” Dragovich said finally. “I suppose we don’t get paid if our employers die instantly,”
“Nor can we continue negotiating the cost of your services,” Fred concurred.
“You get them not to burn,” Dragovich said snatching the communicator our of Fred’s hand. “I will direct our efforts on the station. Get salvage rights for the Scavengers Union. Otherwise I’ll never hear the end of their whining.”
Engines flared as Black Sail’s ships began moving, Dragovich directing the cruiser and its pair of destroyer escorts into range while Fred contacted the Lane Pirate to the rear. The ship was quick to begin disgorging a multitude of strike craft, swarming out into the void while the missile frigates began readying a salvo. The hard part would be not hitting the ROMB facility itself, and so all of the vessels refrained from firing for the moment, allowing their targeting computers to refine trajectories and line up railguns on only those vessels furthest from the facility itself.
For the moment, the ships kept their distance. Between the CES and the Serstine there would be no shortage of close in warships. Better to cover from a distance until they knew what the enemies were capable of.
Fred for his part saw to organizing a… ‘rescue’ for the Yacht. Rescue of course, was not exactly the right word for it. Strike craft streaked toward the Yacht on intercept course, accompanied by a boarding party. Plan was as simple as it got: shoot out the thrusters, arrest the spin with docking locks and the strike craft’s thrusters, and then the boarding party could hand off a comms unit to anyone still alive so negotiations could continue.
There had been a few moments since the last transmission of Teciron, from the leading CES ship. Instead, he chose to see the reaction of the others as the battlefield evolved and progressed, it's flows and important points ever-shifting the guise of the battle. He set the burn of the CES ships to lower as they passed the Executive Yacht, and started following the Serstine ships, fanning out their trio of ship’s triangular configuration to become harder to hit.
Despite the imminent danger, the situation at the bridge was not that of tension, Teciron was found standing up and hunched over the command panel as he poured over the messages and other strings of data that were acquired from the sensors. He ordered the ships to emit simultaneous sensor signals, making of the three ships large targets but, in using interferometry and parallax of the sensory feedback, he hoped he could find the interdictory signals and swiftly dispense a large-scale alpha-strike, securing a well-deserved promotion and, potentially, the ROMB.
However, he was taken back by what his sensors caught. Instead of finding a point of interdiction, he just simply saw one point grow larger and larger at the sensor screen, whilst the onboard computer quickly calculated a collision vector of the object with his very own ship, identifying the object as nothing more than the very yacht they just passed.
“What… the fuck?” Teciron said, awestruck for a few moments as the signal grew larger. Then, his brain jumped into action, as he started dispensing orders through the comms:
“Fleet scatter! I will bring the Yacht up and away from a collision route with the ROMB. Load up Glue rounds on the revolvers! Set the Panoptes system to target Engines. Everyone buckle up, maneuver in three, two, one…”
.
He then configured the ship maneuvering in a small holoprojector tri-dimensional screen, tracing the path that the ship should take along the battlefield with the aid of the on-board computer, which refined the route to become useful. Standardized fuel was injected with haste into the modular engine chambers, and the ship violently jerked upwards and away from the rest of the present ships, producing impressive speeds for a vessel of its size and technological level. The unfortunate Mus’Vanus inside the vessel that didn’t have time to secure themselves were thrown to the floor by the sudden maneuver. Teciron, prepared, wasn’t, and thus, kept track of the outcome of his actions.
As it swerved upwards, the revolving missile pods at the sides of the ships unloaded a rack, and selectively loaded another one up to be dispensed, projectors all along the hexagonal surface of the vessel painted targets at whatever thrust systems they could see within the kamikaze yacht, and the relatively small vessel lit up like a piñata, momentarily obscured by the collective burn of little over 600 swarm missiles, dispensed coordinately from the side of the ship.
The simple Panoptes system then did its work, the swarm missiles detected the painted targets, and immediately set a collision course at full burn, preparing to release their Biocrete Glue onto the target. The revolver missile pods ejected the spent cartridge, which flew away at high speeds due to the maneuver of the ship, and away from the ROMB.
The other two CES ships kept with the Serstine, and whilst the Serstine chose to simply charge blindly into the ROMB, they knew that hastefulness was no grounds for being unprepared, and thus, they kept back, protecting the rear side of the Serstine fleet from any kind of flanking attacks.
The Shiv-class corvettes positioned themselves behind Serestine and in between the flanks guarded by CES ships. As the barely-finished warships, barely held together and scruffy but in large numbers came into sight, alarms were sounded. On board, orders were shouted, power routed to the guns, plasma cannons taking aim and laser turrets locking on while the captains discussed if they could use nuclear missiles without risking more damage to ROMB.
Back on the battlecruiser, the received floorplans were looked over and entry points were discussed by the officers while Raok watched.
While keeping the plans to himself and his forces was tempting, as it would give them an immediate advantage regarding the boarding of actual ROMB itself, it would probably just invite uncomfortable questions once the whole thing is over. Very well, seems like a compromise is in order.
“Send the plans to our forces on a secure chanel… And make sure they don’t give the plans to others until they have men on board ROMB.”
If they could have even a small advantage… It would be worth it in his report, or at least he hoped so, and he was certainly willing to risk loosing a few men in order to secure a greater deal of glory for himself. After all, working as a team is always more efficient, but achieving victory alone is more impressive.
“Commander, there appears to be an issue with the yacht. It appears to be under some sort of cyberattack, at least thats the most likely thing we could discern from the information. CES and pirates are moving in to help, it appears.”
Just as one of the officers stopped, the comms officer began;
“Commander we have spotted numerous unidentified presumed-hostile ships coming out of ROMB! Our captains speculate that they have just been assembled. We have reports of Serestine ships spearheading towards ROMB facilities.”
“Excellent.” Raok said “They will prove to be the best distraction we could have hoped for. Issue a command to our ships; they are to split apart from other groups and launch our missiles towards the assembly lines, if we have a shot. Those things will keep pumping out more ships by the minute, and by using our warheads to direct the radiation to those ships we should be able to at least temporarily disable a large amount of them. Also, tell them to avoid collateral damage if possible, we don't want to destroy ROMB while saving it.”
“What about the yacht sir?”
“We let pirates and CES handle it. Three separate rescue attempts at once will be more likely to interfere with each other than actually achieve anything. When the yacht is recovered tell the executives of what trouble their assembly lines are causing and ask how could they be stopped.”
Back on the front lines, each of the three corvettes launched four missiles towards the flanks as to not damage Serestines,swirling as they approach the enemy ships and detonating in the middle of them, directing the radiation on them in hopes of interfering with their electronics.
RS Przyplw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
“Gamow, what the hell is going on?” Brozowski strained and coughed as he and the rest of the executives were piled up against the rear bulkhead by the G-forces. Chairs, papers, crates of cigarettes and full ashtrays were thrown around the cabin by the ship’s violent maneuvering.
“FADEC is acting completely on its own, I can’t get it to throttle down, sir!” The pilot replied.
In the cockpit, every single light that signaled a problem was blinking. The yacht pilots ran through emergency checklists to no avail, finding themselves incapable of properly resetting any of the flight computer systems. They had to do everything manually, as their neural links were immediately cut to prevent the infection from spreading to their brains. After just a couple of minutes of being hijacked by the unseen threat the throttle valves of the yacht had welded themselves open and the dosimeters all over the ship were starting to ring, all signs that the reactor was completely out of control and was melting through its shielding.
In between straining to withstand the G’s, the pilots could be heard over the intercomms baffled at why the emergency shutoff valves and scram levers were not working. Memories of a hundred cut corners and the words ‘that’ll never happen anyways…’ flashed through the minds of a few of the ROMB engineers onboard alongside a whole lot of regret. Benedykt was the first one to regain his bearings and crawl out of the pile of corpos on the back of the yacht, looking for his wife.
“We’ve got to stop this goddamn thing!” Benedykt huffed, pulling Katarzyna from under a chair. Suddenly his lapel pin started beeping, indicating an extreme level of radiation.
“Pilots, pilots!” Katarzyna strained to reach the intercomm receiver and talk. “You need to get out of here, there’s too much radiation!”
“We can’t leave you, ma’am” The flight commander replied. “We haven’t gotte- Shit!”
Yet another alarm joined the absolute chaos that was going on in the cockpit, louder than all the other ones and with flashing red lights. It was the missile approach warning system, reporting so many contacts that it seemed it was also going insane.
“Missile, missile, missile incoming!”
One of the few systems that still remained nominal, the yacht’s ECM, immediately came online upon detection of the CES’ massive missile volley and began spraying out flares and decoys in every direction possible from small turrets. Yet the glue missiles didn’t actually have much trouble ignoring these decoys since the yacht was glowing much much brighter than its own countermeasures.
The yacht was peppered with glue balls all along its keel. The engines and radiators were hit dozens of times, though at first they were so hot that the glue instantly vaporized off its surface. Little by little they managed to remove enough heat from the radiators, though, and ended up engulfing the reactor section of the yacht. With the nozzles blocked, the reactor finally stalled and shut off, leaving only the RCS thrusters firing off randomly and saving both the yacht and the target of its kamikaze rush.
The only damage to the yacht’s cabin being a few minor air leaks caused by blunt impact, so it was a pretty clean and precise action were it not for the complete panic that it caused inside the ship. The banging sounds of the glue projectiles hitting the hull of the yacht immediately made everyone inside think they were being hit by railgun shells or missile fragmentation and then it was every man for himself.
The pilots and flight crew immediately pulled on their ejection handles, separating the entire cockpit off of the nose of the aircraft and boosting away. The passengers, with no ejection seats of their own, simply stampeded out to the nearest exit and blindly kicked at the door handle until it gave in and depressurized the entire yacht. A cloud of cigarette smoke, coffee, administrative papers and 60-something Strzalan corpos was vented into the void while the yacht continued spinning away. The ejectees narrowly managed to avoid smashing into the rear section of the RS Przplyw but passing near the white-hot radiators burned their clothes off.
Upon getting vented into the frigid void of space around Zyczyn, the old naked corpos froze almost immediately and puffed up like antropomorphic balloons. But as with all Strzalans, they withstood the vacuum and radiation relatively well. Radio beacons implanted in their bodies turned on which, along with the pilots’ emergency pod beacon, would help the incoming BSO light craft to pick them out among the debris.
“W-we need some help over here” Brzozowski transmitted to whoever could hear him. Before their eyes swole shut, they all got a glimpse of their own yacht and realized it was still intact. “I think we’ve made a mistake”
ROMB
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The Serstine ships’ rush into battle did not go unnoticed and all of ROMB’s hijacked systems turned towards the extremely obvious signatures of the incoming bladeships and outriders. Immediately after evaluating the multiple formations of enemy ships the amalgams began getting into their own defensive formation, clustering around the ROMB stations to try and deny the enemy the use of their heaviest weaponry.
Two distinct forms of amalgams began splitting and assuming positions based on their roles: shield amalgams and strike amalgams.
The shield amalgams were the simpler ones, essentially automated tugs fused onto massive incomplete hulls that they had been moving around ROMB before the hijack. They moved to form multiple crude shield walls around the different stations and kept their large plates pointed at the incoming fleet.
Behind them were the strike amalgams, the misshapen and even cruder-looking mechanical blobs fitted with mass drivers. In groups of five, they formed autonomous “firebases”, each one centered around a different ROMB station, that started taking aim and firing upon the Serstine outriders with fused fragmentation shells.
This counterattack was quickly disrupted by Raok’s strike. The volley of missiles was ignored by the amgalgams, initially thinking they had gone wide or failed to acquire their targets and wishing to conserve their ammunition for the capital ships and fighters. But when they all burst out at once, the resulting electromagnetic pulse traveled through all of ROMB’s width in the blink of an eye. The rushed construction of the amalgams was a huge weakness in this first exchange of fire, as many of their internal electronics were badly isolated and ended up shorted by the EMP. Seven of the firebases were brought offline and their shield amalgams started drifting away from each other, creating a hole in the defensive line right in front of the Serstine.
The Haunebu moved to plug this hole for as long as it took a swarm of hijacked robots and improvised engineering amalgams to bring the fried ships back online. Three of the sleek, geometric objects moved into the defensive gap, remaining underneath the ROMB stations and the streams of space junk to further hide itself. To prepare to open fire, the halostone superfluid was drained away from the edges of the octahedral ships, as if repelled by magnetic forces. Next up the Haunebu pivoted towards their target, picking the Mercurial Kite and two of her escorts as the most threatening contacts, and then their entire frontal section folded open.
Inside the completely featureless and unmarked Haunebu was a churning, nightmarish biomass that thrashed and twitched as if it wished to escape the ship but was held in place by cabling and structural beams. The creature was a continuously-mutating blob of cybernetically-augmented flesh covered in eyes and mouths that looked like it’d been starved, as its skin draped tightly over a radically-symmetric skeleton. In the middle of its body was a long and very sharp spine that split into two branches that tapered to a point and coiled together into a helix: a powerful gravitic vortex cannon.
Energy was pumped into the creature from the ship’s reactor, causing it to squirm as more and more kolleronic charge built up in its body before finally releasing an invisible blast of focused gravitational waves at the Serstine bladeships. The energy that coursed through this living cannon was enough to blast the Haunebu backwards with recoil, which it used to relocate itself and avoid retaliation.
ROMB 61
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The stations of ROMB, having to withstand Zyczyn’s radioactive bursts on a daily basis, were so well-shielded that Ariadne and the rest of escapees did not even notice the dozens of high-yield nuclear detonations going on outside. A light flicker of the lights was the only sign of the barrage outside and it went unnoticed by the group, who had just disembarked on ROMB 61 after escaping ROMB 95.
The same could not be said for the Haunebu’s counter strike. The powerful spinal guns of the UFO-like ships caused a gigantic gravitic shockwave to rock all of ROMB stations, passing through the bulkheads like they weren’t even there. Everyone broke their pace and stumbled while Ariadne fell to the floor, gasping for breath. It was like being punched in the gut or hit by a baseball bat, for a moment they all became deaf and blind from tinnitus and getting their eyes defocused. Nasty as it felt for the Strzalans, for Ariadne it was pure hell as her heightened senses were brutalized by the shockwave, nearly knocking her out cold.
It was with decidedly muted amusement that Fred watched the yacht on screen and the subsequent… well, the only word that even began to sum it up was ‘clusterfuck’. The contract broker was well aware that he should have found no amusement in what he initially took to be the death of their prospective employers, and yet he heard muted chuckles among the bridge crew and even the barest hint of a smile played at the corners of Dragovich’s mouth. The yacht had been spinning out of control, then was fired upon by some sort of specialized weapon system, only for the pilots to eject and the corpos to subsequently space themselves.
“Stars and ancestors,” Fred muttered. “Someone tell me I didn’t just watch an entire ship full of people stupid themselves to death,”
He was assured of that some minutes later as the strike craft and boarding party they’d deployed began to pluck the naked, bloated execs out of space. Much to the surprise of the pilots and boarders alike, it seemed hard vacuum was less fatal to their employers than it would have been for the comparatively normal men and women of the Organization. That at least was some small mercy. The bulk of the forces Fred had sent on the rescue mission now busied themselves with scooping up the corpos, and ferrying them back to the lane pirate. There they would be greeted by medical personnel, and a rather bemused looking man with a scarlet mohawk, a denim vest covered in patches for various bands and musicians, and far too many tattoos.
“Which of you is Brozozowski,” The Rooster called from his perch. “Freddy tells me he wasn’t done negotiating our fee,”
Meanwhile, a pair of strike craft and a single boarding pod saw to the yacht. With the reactor offline the immediate threat of meltdown had been avoided. Time was on the pirates’ side and so rather than shooting off the thrusters, the boarders landed on the outside of the yacht. Mag clamps locked them to the hull and they made their way toward the RCS thrusters, looking for some form of manual override or failing that a way to disable them.
While Fred organized the retrieval of the corpos, Dragovich was organizing a battle. Within the bowels of the Mercurial Kite orders were going out and men were being assembled. They formed into squads and platoons, filling magazines, strapping on armour, and going through tests and checks on their equipment. Dragovich intended to join them, once a method of ingress onto the station was established. For the moment the would-be revolutionary busied himself directing the battle. The nuclear weapons launched by another faction had had a noticeable effect on the amalgams, and Dragovich intended to capitalize upon it.
On his order, the Mercurial Kite’s weapons came to life. The relativistic railguns, having calculated firing trajectories, launched their payloads, aiming to destroy the drifting amalgams before they got the opportunity to repair. With flashes of light their payloads were launched, streaking across the void toward the amalgams. With the first salvo away, gunnery crews kicked into gear, loading fresh slugs and calculating fresh trajectories, hurling more munitions at the wounded amalgams. The destroyers, launched nuclear missiles of their own attempting to mimic the effects of the initial nuclear detonations and screen an incoming volley of missiles from the frigates. So it would have continued, a slow advance heralded by railguns and missiles had the churning mass of flesh and metal not appeared and fired on advancing ships. He hadn’t reacted fast enough to tune sensors on the flesh monster, but a weapon that seemingly fired nothing was not something totally foreign to him. None of the things his mind guessed it could be were good but some were certainly worse than others.
He picked up his communicator, tuning to the open channel they’d used to communicate.
“Kite-Actual to forward vessels, report effects of…” What did he even call it? The monster? “Report effects of the flesh-thing’s weapons system, over.”
Already he was giving orders to the helm and his escorts. The three vessels spreading their formation, and engines flaring to full as they accelerated toward the stations. He waited for a report, but he suspected he was about to have a priority target. Something stirred in the revolutionary. Something he’d not felt since coming to this distant galaxy. This was not one of the skirmishes to which he’d grown accustomed in Ancerious. Not a quick raid on poorly defended colonies, or a sudden ambush of an unsuspecting convoy. This he suspected would be a proper battle.
He felt a grin tug at his mouth.
“Oh war how I’ve missed you,” The revolutionary chortled, lighting another cigarette.
The only feeling that surmounted the momentary gladness of the accomplishment of the combat maneuver, as the yacht swerved away from a collision vector to safety, was the abismal look of confusion and dumbfoundedness as Teciron watched the crew of the yacht, as the most well-mannered pirates put it, 'stupid' themselves to death.
He finished the maneuver and traced paths to come close to most members of the evacuated yacht, however, far before the plastical modular engines of his ship could swerve back towards proximity, they had already been saved by the pirates. Not the best outcome, but better than if they died, at least.
He finally had now the opportunity to join back up with the two other ships. The beauty of the reliance of the CES in systems like the IPD is its usefulness in a wide variety for situations. For the battlefield, ships and guns were automatically logged as parametric entities within a simulated shared virtual environment, and thus to the best of each ship's computers, they could plan solutions of best outcome according to the system. Though most of it was a well-informed guesswork of sorts, it allowed Teciron to direct the other two ships from his vessel precisely, without needing to be close to them.
The two other ships in the meanwhile, stuck farther back than the Serstine formation, as such, the gravitational vortex cannon didn't damage them, however, it was detected by the disturbances in the sinarium compasses of their FTL drives.
"Fuck, it's a lot of them...
...
Lucky for us, we got missiles to spare." - The plan of Teciron was to counter the amalgams. He knew that the swarm missiles of the CES wouldn't have enough strength to damage larger ships, however, the unshielded amalgams that were pumped out of the ROMB could only ever hope to meet the ammount of projectiles the CES ships can muster in a single volley.
Thus, the two ships close to the Serstine loaded the AP projectiles in their missile revolver units, and simultaneously dispensed roughly 12 hundred AP swarm missiles into the air, the Panoptes system sprung into motion and a series of projectors painted targets on all of the amalgams present at the line, or that were within weapon's reach. Once again they burned in a collision route directly towards their target, clouding the ships that launched it in their sudden exhaust.
The Bladeships saw the amalgams start to drift away, creating a hole in their defensive lines, watching the EMP missiles do their thing as the amalgams ahead of them lost all coherence and stumbled through the void. They didn't think for a moment, blitzing the opening and braving the Haunebu's gravitic vortex gun shots. A destroyer was tagged in the chaos and started peeling off as its crew immediately felt the effects of the shot, and it began falling out of step with the rest of Rain's fleet. The ships started shuffling to fill in the gap while the Tipping Point surged ahead, no one wanting to take a step back.
As they detected the CES ships releasing a new volley of missiles, they shifted to let the shots through, spreading out and trying to get their straggler back up to pace with the rest of the unit. The destroyer crew was reeling - even the extreme acceleration of Serstine flight wasn't like getting shot by a gravitic vortex gun. It was like being paper run through a shredder but somehow still remaining a single sheet. The fact the ship was even making maneuvers at all was shocking, and a testament to their ability to act through pain. Still, it was quite a disquieting sight to see a Bladeship moving so slowly.
As the missiles achieved their desired effect, cheers could be heard on board Raok’s ship, but on board the Shivs themselves there was no time for celebration, as the more missiles were loaded and plasma cannons were firing in synchronization with the laser turrets for maximum pressure. All seemed to be going according to the plan until The Haunebu was spotted approaching the front lines, providing cover for amalgams to start the process of repairing themselves and minimizing the disadvantage. Seeing this, Raok hastily ordered the ships to resume fire on the disabled amalgams in hopes that other factions would handle the Haunebu itself.
As the orders were sent to the Shivs, they were relayed to their respective crews from the bridge, where each officer had a specific function to fulfill or task to complete in order to maximize the effectiveness. But suddenly, the orders stopped coming to the crew on the back side of the ship… one second of silence, two seconds....
Noticing this alarming silence one of the crew contacted the bridge only for the officers to respond that maneuvers to space the ships apart in a more loose formation must be carried out as a top priority.
Back on the bridge, for a few seconds everyone turned to their screens as the sensor readings spiked and video feed showed the terrible abomination that seemed to be fused with The Haunebu as it fired its vortex cannon at the Serestines.
Back on his main ship, Raok’s eyes widened in surprise to see that Serestines survived such an attack. It was most certainly impressive.
The monster concerned him, but he didn’t change his previous orders to ignore the abomination and focus on the amalgams first. He opened the comms again to inform others:
“This is Raok talking, my forces will focus on those junk ships and keep them from focusing down on you while you target that… thing.”
The Shivs weapons systems started prioritizing the disabled amalgams as the missiles came ever closer to being loaded and ready.
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The brief analysis of the creatures briefly glimpsed by the BSO ships returned some surprising results. It didn’t look like anything in the BSO’s own databases so the intelligence officers on the Black Sail vessels searched for matching results in the much larger databases of the International Reconnaissance Office and Global Frontline Observer, two large NGOs in charge of classifying the weaponry of the galaxy. Although normally these databases were quite costly to access, a few phone calls to friends of friends, some bribes and a few network backdoors gave the BSO quick and easy access to the databases. As usual.
The IRO database rapidly returned a matching result for the spike-shaped creature. It apparently was an electrogravitic engine used onboard Palm Mirdif’s ships in the Höchlands theatre over fifteen years ago.
Normally these spindly and skeletal creatures were permanently anchored to the hull of the Scornful Flesh’s warships, sentient and filled with the same perpetual and caustic hatred that drove Mirdif as a whole. This one appeared to have been surgically mutilated, however. It was restrained with heavy scaffolding and medically anchored to the inside of the ship. Coils and ancerium capacitors had been implanted into the creature, turning it into a weapon but none of the other equipment and tech inside the UFO matched up with any known ships or weapons in the galaxy. Even though it had a scion of Mirdif at its core, this was new technology made by an unknown and clearly sophisticated enemy.
The good news for the pirates was that they could get a nice bonus from selling the information of this newly-discovered weapon to the International Reconnaissance Office. The bad news was that no one had any idea of what this thing was, not even people whose job was to know every weapon in existence.
RS Przplyw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
Upon managing to land on the spinning yacht, the BSO privateers climbed their way up to the external fuel cutoff valves near the haywire RCS thrusters, shutting them off for good. The yacht remained spinning along multiple axes due to its angular momentum, slowly pivoting back and forth due to inertial forces and making it quite disorienting to walk along its hull. On the inside of the ship the pirates would find the mess that had been left over from the venting: shards of frozen coffee floating around the ship, a mess of crumpled-up and shredded paper leaking out of trash bins and lastly a grotesque amount of tobacco that had amalgamated together into a giant cloud-like ball due to static forces.
It didn’t take the pirates long to find the traces of sleaziness that were seemingly on every corpo ship. A kitchenette at the back of the ship had its smoke detectors shut off and a cloud of pieces of burnt paper was floating all around a short-circuited coffee machine. A ton of ROMB corporate folders and the yacht’s flight log were among the papers that had been burnt, and recently at that. Near the nose of the yacht the pirates’ attention would be caught by a bright, blinking orange light. It was the ship’s in-flight recorded, its “black box”, and the orange warning light was indicating that it was offline. From the screwdriver floating nearby and the large dents all over the black box showed that whoever had shut it down had done it in a rather brutish way.
The most unusual finding, however, was near the back of the ship, on the outside of its hull. A pyramid-shaped object roughly a foot across had latched itself onto the yacht’s avionics spine. Its surface appeared to be covered in a perfectly reflective, boiling liquid, and mold-like tendrils extended from it to the yacht’s electronics bays, pulsating lightly as they did. This was definitely not part of the yacht, it looked much more like a piece of the UFOs. (edited)
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
It took some time for Brzozowski and the other corpos to thaw, deflate and be able to move again. The first thing they asked for was cigarettes and alcohol, the second was clothes and cancer medication. When he was done recovering his basic faculties, Brzozowski squinted at the denim-wearing pirate and furrowed his brow.
“Freddy’s not done negotiating our fee? Fuck Freddy.” He replied with his raspy, chainsmoker voice, still coughing up some frozen phlegm. “What is this, the Iqzina Economic Forum? Do I need to pledge to empower minority voices and encourage diversity in my company for fucking Freddy to move his ass? Seventy million’s the kind of number pirates suck dick for, now get to work and chase those goddamn things off my shipyard!”
Clad in just an assless hospital gown, Brzozowski then started waddling around looking for Freddy. Perhaps it was a side-effect of the sudden depressurization and lack of oxygen or perhaps it was just them realizing that they were among pirates but all the corpos suddenly went mask-off and reverted to their true nature as Strzalans: fearless, trashy, adversarial, infuriatingly mule-headed. Working hard, cutting corners, complaining, delivering on time and haggling was the way of the Republika Strzala, the small unaligned nation dead in the middle of the Killian Verge’s most heavily-transited trade routes and from where ROMB’s entrepreneurs had come from. And now that they had unexpectedly been given a face-to-face meeting with their new business partner, they all set out to reduce their offers and start walking back promises to find out how malleable the BSO was.
ROMB
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
Shrapnel began flying out in all directions as more and more of the amalgams were either hit by the missiles or disabled by the EMP waves that struck the area. The forces that seized ROMB reacted to the tactics quickly, and the same tugs that had brought the shield amalgams to the front now pulled back their fried and nuked wreckages off the field and threw them at the stations to be cannibalized. The action was ridiculously swift, it practically looked like the dead amalgams had been thrown into a food processor. They were shredded by lasers and immensely powerful electromagnets and sprayed out of the stations in a seemingly-chaotic way. At first it appeared as though the huge cloud of ship parts was just going to tear through ROMB like buckshot but, as in normal operation, what looked like chaos at first sight was actually a tightly-coordinated choreography: every piece that was shot out of the disassembly stations was magnetically nudged with much care into the portholes and line stations of ROMB.
With this inflow of raw material, the hijacked ROMB stations began manufacturing a new type of craft to support their actions, fusing the ship parts with several hundred engineering EVA powersuits used by ROMB’s crew of Strzalans. What came out of this merger was a swarm of nimble voidcraft powered by fission rockets and similar in configuration to the mech-like “standing fighters” of the Little Light. While lacking sensors of their own, they were all datalinked to ROMB’s telescopes and radars via relay craft, which they used to aim ad-hoc laser weapons made out of welding equipment and neutron sources. While the remaining amalgams kept blocking the rescue fleet’s path to ROMB, the pseudo-Standing Fighters focused solely on intercepting the swarms of missiles fired by CES and fighting the Serstine Outriders and BSO light craft.
Another large formation of adapted powersuits were launched off the hijacked stations to begin working on the amalgams, replacing fried breakers and laying copper foam over gaps in hull plating to shield the amalgams. In order to cover the amalgams while they were being repaired, four of the Haunebu opened fire once again, this time directed at the CES ships. (edited)
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
Once again the sidelobe shockwaves of the Haunebu vortex guns shook the walls of ROMB 91 where Ariadne and the rest of the survivors hid from their pursuers. Once again it felt like being punched in the gut and forced the group of survivors to catch their breath in a line monitoring station onboard ROMB 91. The shockwaves had left the survivors exhausted, doubly so for Ariadne, and was causing some electrical failures and air leaks in the station.
“Just what the hell is that thing?” Ariadne huffed. “The station doesn’t seem to be taking it too well so I guess it’s not normal.”
“That’s not ours” The foreman shook his head. “And if I had to guess, it’s coming from that pyramid thing that we saw outside.”
“Well, if it’s starting to shoot do you think there’s someone coming to help us?” Ariadne asked, partaking in the cigarettes that were being passed around.
“It would explain the production chain.” The ROMB work manager noted. “They’re forcing the facility to crap out a bunch of meatshield ships to defend the station. That leaves the question of who exactly is out there, is it your people?”
“No idea. Could be your people.” Ariadne shrugged. “Either way I’d rather not have them go in blind with the invisible ships moving about.”
“And what can we possible do about that from here?”
“Hmm… I think I have an idea.”
From their hideout in ROMB 91, the group of survivors began connocting a plan to warn whoever was coming about the presence of the Haunebu-Geräten. The ships appeared to be moving without much issue through the streams of spare parts and other debris being fired around the Zyczyn system, which Ariadne deduced meant they had priority of way over the ship fabrication line. If this was the case, then there had to be “holes” in the production line opened to let the Haunebu through, and by tracking the number and timing of these holes the position of the Haunebu could be more or less guessed. As it was a way better idea rather than just helplessly waiting for whoever was out there to rescue them, the fugitives quickly set out to work together.
The security guards and IT workers used their personal passes and keys to find what line monitoring systems remained operational and downloaded large amounts of traffic line traffic and parts circulation data from them. Ariadne crunched the numbers with the help of the engineers, covering a bunch of cafeteria tables in whatever they could find to do calculations. The mechanics and workers in the meantime work on barricading one of the rest areas of ROMB 91 to buy themselves some time.
After having to drag the DAMSEL back and forth, it finally started to feel like things were moving and they weren’t just helpless hostages.
The response to the pseudo-Standing Weapons by the Serstine was for everyone to hold on tight and their ships to spread out, suddenly sprawling out in crazy patterns as the Outriders fought these new amalgams. Rain and her retinue were not amused in the slightest, watching everything and hearing their crews calling out positions, trajectories and speeds at characteristically Serstine speeds. Feeds shared between Serstine and overlays covering the whole bridge told the story as the lines describing the amalgams and their movement were joined by a crazy spiderweb of motion, everything moving and twisting relative to their own position, tracers, lasers and missiles drawing ever more scratches in the battlefield.
"They aren't making this easy, are they," Rain muttered. "Whatever is here worth taking must be quite a prize if the userpers taking this station are willing to go to such offensive lengths to defend it."
Norte gritted her teeth and grumbled. "We should cut out their heart fast, before they start welding together Serstine! I should be out there in an Outrider!"
Rain raised an eyebrow and gave Norte a puzzled glance. "Are you truly an experienced enough Outrider pilot for that kind of fight?"
Norte enthusiastically replied with "If I entered such a fight, I would be by the end!"
Rain did a double-take and decided to keep Norte from going anywhere her energy might just get her shot. She grabbed her shoulder and held on tight. "Patience, Norte, patience...if our foes wish to put us on the defensive, the defensive they'll get," she said. "All ships! We should see indeed how well our new friends can actually measure up to the creatures of the Little Light - siblings in holding the sun in their hearts these pale imitations are not. Heatscreens, up!"
She gave the order and the Bladeships and Outriders began changing maneuvers from short, sharp cuts back and forth to spiraling, rolling motions, firing all thrusters and guns to create wide swaths of plasma. They did this again and again until they were belching magnetized, superheated gas in all directions, turning the area around them into one big homogenous blob of searing heat. Tracking them by signature would be much harder now, as they presented like a ship hundreds if not thousands of klicks wide. If they couldn't swat all these targets out of the stars, they could confuse the hell out of them.
On the bridge of the Mercurial Kite Fred and Dragovich both listened to the reports coming from the bridge crew. The creature had been identified, which had furthermore resulted in the identification of the weapon system. Vortex canons. Fred groaned audibly. Vortex canons were a favourite among the more violently inclined members of the Organization, usually to soften up the crew of a ship prior to a boarding action. It wasn’t something Fred particularly wanted to be on the receiving end of.
“Keep recording readings,” He said to the intelligence officer. “Might be worth some pocket change once the fight is over…”
He shook his head and took off his sunglasses, rubbing his eyes as he turned his gaze on Dragovich.
“Plan?”
“Da,” Dragovich answered through a haze of cigarette smoke. “You see what they do? We destroy their little ships, they chop up the wreckage and make more littler ships. We could be out here slinging missiles for a long time before they run out of scrapped ships to throw back at us,”
“So we could nuke the station,” Fred began.
“I’m sure the capitalists will love that,”
“Or we board and try to find a way to shut down whatever keeps spitting out these shitboxes,”
Dragovich took a long drag on his cigarette, leaning back in the command chair and letting the smoke languidly roll out of his mouth. He created the appearance of being in deep thought, but the revolutionary had already decided to go for a boarding action. There was no guarantee they’d be able to take out the ships carrying the Mirdif creatures, but it would certainly be easier without all the scrap heaps crowding the sensors. He opened his mouth to answer but paused, listening as a crewman came forward and leaned down to tell him something. His weak smile became a scowl and dismissed the man with a grunt and a wave of his hand.
“Your mmm guests are asking for you Fred,” He said. “Deal with them,”
Fred sighed, replaced his sunglasses and left the bridge to deal with corpos. Dragovich picked up his communicator, keying into the encrypted communications the Organization’s vessels were using.
“Attention all vessels, rally on the Kite and prepare to deploy boarders,”
The order was met with enthusiastic cries from the various parties. It had been ages since the men and women of Dragovich’s small outfit had gotten stuck in a proper fight, and most of them were spoiling to shoot someone. The small group of ships formed up on the Mercurial Kite. The cruiser and her destroyer escorts led the way, engines flaring to full as they accelerated toward the station. The vessels stopped firing as they accelerated, aiming to avoid notice as they closed in on the station. The amalgams and the creatures were focusing their attention on the Serstine and the CES for the moment, and Dragovich hoped that they may be distracted just enough for him to get a boarding parties on the station.
“Keep sensors peeled for the unidentified ships,” He instructed. “If they open up in our direction unload everything on the Mirdif creature.”
While the Mercurial Kite pressed onward, the carrier and her frigate complement turned their attentions toward the swarm of new, smaller, fighter sized amalgams. They played defensively, strike craft sticking in range of the carrier’s point defence weaponry which provided what cover it could to the growing swarm of dogfights forming as more and more strike craft joined the fight.
Fred meanwhile, had just reached the hangar the Strzalans when the order came down to prepare for boarding. The hangar, already chaotic, became doubly so as Dragovich’s men began filing in and gathering their gear. Weapons were loaded, armour strapped on, thrusters and other equipment tested and organized with a near military efficiency.
Fred paused as his communicator buzzed, an update from the boarding party aboard the yacht. He glanced at the helmet cam feed momentarily before pushing through the crowd to find Brzozowski. It wasn’t hard to find him, of all the Strzalans attempting to bitch, bribe, and bargain, with the various personnel Brzozowski bitched, bribed, and bargained the loudest. Fred paused long enough to snag a cigarette off someone, lit it, took a long drag and then strolled toward Brzozowski.
“Hear you’ve been asking for me,” Fred commented as he approached, waving off the personnel Brzozowski had been directing his efforts at only moments earlier. “Renegotiations I’m told,”
He didn’t wait for a response tapping on his tablet momentarily before turning it to show Brzozowski the feed from the boarders on the yacht, specifically the small device they’d found hooked into the aviatronics. It wasn’t something Fred recognized, and his men were for the moment refraining from messing with it.
“Seen this before?” He asked, watching Brzozowski’s reaction carefully from behind his mirror lenses.
Teciron watched in the pleasing delight to see the swarm of missiles launched from the many revolving missile launchers of the ship filled the air, soon after, the plethora of APS from the amalgamations filled the air, spraying wildly at the hundreds of targets that suddenly appeared, but, like a Hydra, for each head that was cut two more came through, and in the end, even the simple weaponry sported by the CES craft were proven to have a degree of effectiveness in the heat of combat.
However, the delight wouldn't last long. The problem with the combat systems used by the CES is that they are over-relying on the hability to interpret, predict, and simulate the battlefield. Such a thing was not possible against Haunebu-Geräten, as their weaponry had too few characteristics known to the IPD to trackable by their strategies.
The gravitic vortex struck the two forward ships in the CES formation, missing the Serstine as it traced its path. Suddenly, the ships were flung outwards, pieces of their hexagonal hull armour came undone into a plethora of shrapnel, the sight was that like a Lego construction had been struck violently and spontaneously disassembled itself before their eyes, sent into a sudden spinning motion. The rotary loader of the missiles of one of the ships split from its hull, flinging outwards the projectiles and cartridges unprimed.
In a sudden move of planned desperation, two ships moved, one burned towards proximity to one of the stations, its hull in low integrity, hoping to be able to either seek shelter of the station and board it to use its own facilities for repair or use it as a shield, keeping its indirect fire. The other ship spun outwards from combat, avoiding the Serstine best it could to meet back with the leading ship, which hung far back and mimic'ed the movement of the Serstine, though slower his ship was, in hopes of avoiding the brutish action of the gravitic vortex.
Teciron grimaced at the sight of the undoing of his small security detachment, ordering that a new payload be launched immediatly, this time, they'd strike the relativistic assembly lines, flooding it with a payload of nanothermate paste, if not stopping it outright, at least preventing the construction of new amalgams momentarily lest its insides be produced on fire. Much like last time, the whole content of all cartridges was unloaded, as they tried to find a path amongst the fleet in front of them to unload the warhead into the line of extremely fast material
The new bunch of missiles were loaded, their targets acquired. This time however, half of them were shot directly at the masses of amalgams, while the rest were fired for the same effect as the last time, aiming to fry the electronics on hastily assembled ships.
“Interesting. It seems as if both sides are only delaying each other, one from landing transports and the other from producing enough shit to overwhelm us…” Raok noted to himself, and asked others for any updates.
“Sir the enemy has deployed some kind of small craft and is intercepting CES missiles. The destroyed amalgams are pulled back and reshaped into new ones.” One of the officers informed, with another adding; “Maneuver pulled by the serestines might bring inefficiencies to our targeting systems for a while.”
“I see… order Shivs to relocate and approach from a new angle, new targets will include the stations that are actively trying to pull back damaged and destroyed ships. Tell them to aim for incapacitation rather than elimination.”
Before he even finished the sentence, he noticed the console in front of him informing him of the new transmission. With a nod to the comms officer, the transmission was let through and displayed on one of the screens.
“"My name is Maro Carius I am the captain of the HIMS Tempestus of the United Empire of Orbitrarum, we are not on anyone's side in this battle by the way what is the reason for this battle and you were the ones who sent a distress signal?"”
This was annoying. How they were not in the fight and weren't doing anything was beyond Raok but he saw an opportunity and decided to be creative with it.
“This is Leader Raok speaking to HIMS Tempestus. We are requesting immediate aid; The ROMB station was taken over by an unknown enemy that is using it to produce disposable ships with which they are attacking everyone present and stopping us from rescuing our people who are trapped inside. Your help is highly appreciated and it might be rewarded handsomely. If you let them prepare, they will destroy us and come for your ships next!”
He pushed the “end transmission button” and grinned.
Elsewhere, much closer to ROMB and in the heat of battle, Shivs were repositioning on what could relatively be a “flank” in this battle, and the captains were considering the options at hand, in a brief but important discussions between themselves;
Cap1- “The orders didn’t mention this. What you are about to do could be… unwise.”
Cap2- “I must note that by helping our allies, we are in turn helping ourselves. It is in our interest to keep them in fight as long as possible.”
Cap3- “It is imperative to achieve the desired effect. To that extent, I implore you to use minimal amount of firepower for secondary objectives.”
Captain “2” nodded to his closest subordinate, giving him the go-ahead. Continuing with their barrage of missiles and aiming at what were likely entrances and exits for destroyed or newly assembled amalgams along with other two ships, his ship split the fire their other weapon systems, providing equivalent of suppressive fire on any hostile ships approaching the burning CES ship, targeting anything that seemed to fire towards it, even at the risk of drawing unwanted attention.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The ragtag group of engineers and workers had so far achieved good progress in both barricading themselves and trying to support the rescue effort. Life support systems had been isolated to make their safehouse self-sustaining, all while depressurizing the riskiest avenues of attack. This allowed the meager group of security guards to watch over all the remaining entrances in groups of three.
As for Ariadne and her engineers, their notes and calculations now filled whiteboards in the hangar alongside snapshots of the pseudo-Standing Weapons and the amalgams they’d managed to snatch with ROMB-91’s observation optics. They’d become familiar with the perturbations in the production chain caused by the Haunebu and were starting to narrow down on their number, which they’d now estimated down to 20 or less. Led by the industrious DAMSEL, the engineers began to feel quite a bit of hope at what had once been a desperate situation, at least until the alarms came on.
At first it was just an irregularity notice printed out by a small terminal, then a few red warning lights indicating that some production monitors had gone offline, then a veritable flood of emergency sirens carpeting every single system. Something major had just gone wrong, and upon looking out through the optics a chill went up Ariadne’s spine and her eyes widened: the distant ROMB-149 station was tilting several degrees out of alignment and bore an enormous impact cloud.
“W-What the hell happened?”
“Fuck me, the entire production line is perturbed.” The chief engineer threw his hands up. “They’re starting to demolish the place, shit!”
A few distant thumps echoed through the airtight refuge of the survivors, making the Strzalan instantly run off to hug the structural beams of the station and pulling Ariadne in with them.
“What’s that sound!?” Ariadne asked, although her superhuman senses and analytical ability was giving her nerve-wracking hints at what they was. The sound of aluminum being punched through by shrapnel, followed by the decompression of multiple rooms and corridors.
“We’re being hit by the shrapnel!”
The CES nanothermal paste attack and Roak’s missile attack had found their mark, disabling multiple magnetic deceleration guns and laser directors on ROMB-149, one of the assembly points. This had catastrophic results within seconds as the station found itself unable to slow down a large chunk of a shield amalgam that had been flung in its direction and was struck by the hulk at multiple kilometers per second.
ROMB-149 had practically been split in half and completely torn off the tachyonic lattice of the larger station. Thousands of tons of twisted titanium and ceramic had shotgunned over forty stations behind 149, destroying the nearmost ones and disabling a full fifth of ROMB’s total structures. Half of the Haunebu had been caught up and destroyed in this blizzard of debris and the ensuing Kessler-like syndrome as shrapnel from other damaged stations and secondary explosions added to the mayhem. Helical plumes of halostone and Mirdif blood sprayed out from the struck Haunebu-Geräten, briefly revealing their uncloaked forms to the enemy before immolating themselves with low-yield nuclear self-destruct devices.
The surviving Haunebu immediately dashed towards cover, losing their halostone films in the process and making themselves detectable. In a last-ditch emergency protocol, the ROMB shipyard discharged its entire production line, although its hijackers manipulated the systems so that it did so in the direction of the enemy. Hundreds of ships’ worth of material and components was ejected from the assembly line in the direction of the rescue fleet like a barrage of galactic grapeshot, shredding a third of the amalgams as it hurtled towards the Serstine, BSO, CES and other allied ships.
Ariadne’s efforts were now completely undone as the production chain suddenly disappeared. But from her station she could still see the strange hand of the hijackers working through ROMB in ways that not even their designers expected: The remaining 190 ROMB stations began reconfiguring their lattice and deploying every surviving industrial robot at once. ROMB-149 was pulled back into alignment by hundreds of magnetic tractor beams, which then started pushing it against the wreckage of ROMB-61 and ROMB-228. Focusing all of its industrial might inwards, the shipyard began using the wrecked stations, with survivors still inside, as the basis for a single gigantic amalgam bristling with weapons. The pseudo-Standing Weapons set up a delaying action by fully abandoning their defensive perimeter and doing a suicidal rush into the BSO and Serstine fighters’ area of operations, trying to buy the mega-amalgam some time to come online.
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
“No, I’ve never seen this in my life.” Brzozowski bluntly replied, looking at the pyramidal object the BSO troops had found attached to his ship. “But since it’s latched onto my yacht it’s my property, and you better give a good price if you want to keep it.”
He cleared his throat and looked at Fred, puffing out his chest for a session of hard haggling. “And yes I’ve been trying to find you after some of your guys told me some bullshit about renegotiations. The pricewas set an-”
He was interrupted by a shout of horrified surprise from his chief technical officer, Katarzyna, who ran up to him. She’d been following him around trying to calm him down and not get the rest of them shot by pirates, but now she seemed to be far more agitated than he’d ever was.
When Katarzyna showed him the readings that were coming out of ROMB station, Brzozowski’s incensed gaze immediately turned to Fred, bloodshot by rage.
“You motherfuckers! What did you do!”
ROMB Traffic Control Tower
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
A spiderweb of cracks spread over the meter-thick polymer observation windows of the control tower of ROMB from shrapnel impacts. In a few seconds, gas-fired emergency shutters were lowered over the station and evacuation alarms immediately sounded all over the place. Hundreds, thousands of impacts began slowly eroding the tower’s whipple shields and forced the hijackers to move the tower controllers to a safe room. The huge blow had brought most of ROMB’s communications systems offline, meaning they were no longer capable of jamming enemy comms. With little alternative, escape shuttles destroyed and their VIP still on the loose, the hijackers turned on the frequencies to make their message much more explicit.
“We have hostages. Every ship must leave the system at once or we will start liquidating them!”
The Serstine veered from the impacts as they caught up with what was happening. Their best weapon, from Rain's reckoning, ROMB's perfectly choreographed ballistic dance, was now shrapnel scattering in all directions. The battle group swerved out and away, trying to take stock from this hard left turn in the battle from behind their rapidly expanding and dissipating heatscreen before a reaction to the shift and the hijackers' words finally hit Rain's mouth.
"...what did you do?!" It was never a good sign when Rain, or indeed any Serstine noble, got curt.
Then the hijackers' threat hit the ships, and Norte, nonplussed by yet another battlefield being blown to the whims of the Boost by their mere presence, couldn't hold in her reaction.
"Well, if that's the case, shall we race them to depopulating the station?"
It didn't matter if Norte was joking; Rain was taken off-guard enough to tackle her and try holding her mouth shut, the rest of the bridge dumbstruck enough by the display to not intervene as their princess and her retainer tussled like angry schoolchildren. (edited)
While that fight raged, the Outriders saw the battle shifting just before the battlefield became mayhem with no up or down. They desperately hurtled around the quickly degrading combat zones and let the pseudo-Standing Weapons guide them. If they wanted to rush straight at them, they'd meet in kind, and be vicious.
Full thrust, plasma guns blazing as they changed directions and tracked their targets through the gnashing teeth of ROMB on a direct merge course. Meet speed with speed, l Under the safety of the shadow of one of the ROMB stations, one of the CES ships went by unharmed by the sudden shot-gunning of shrapnel, quickly sticking to the surface of the relatively massive object to protect itself from the wave of shrapnel. The team of Pyrotechnical troopers inside of the ship quickly deploy from the damaged husk, using small thrusters located around the suit as well as magnetical locks to keep themselves attached to the station’s outside. They search for the nearest airlock for entrance and, if found to be locked, create their own entrance through the airlock with the usage of their heavy-duty thermite-based equipment.
Meanwhile, the other two CES ships floated along the Serstine, inside the leader craft that hung farther back, Teciro planned the other steps of the developing battleplan, that is, until he was gobsmacked by what came next:
“Fucking hell.
Evasive maneuvers, sound the alarms! Drive us behind the Serstine, if we even have the speed for that! Everyone put their suits on!”
The image of the ROMB scattering itself, the heaping pile of metal in consistent deflagration torn asunder in a sea of splinters, relativistic buckshot slung with violence, a definite precedent for the small CES ships to take cover. They drive the engines to the maximum to try and further hide behind their much more advanced allies, while the crew strains to get inside their suits, or to secure theirs to see if they are vacuum resistant.
However, despite the best efforts of the ships, they couldn’t keep up with the evasive maneuvers of the ludicrously fast Serstine ships. The shrapnel cloud and heaps of malformed scrap struck the two errant CES ships like a series of shotgun blasts, peppering the ships. The composite used in the CES inherently didn’t shrapnel much, that, added to the sheer kinetic strength of it, made almost every piece of metal overpenetrate the modular ships.
Soon, several alarms rang simultaneously as breeches were formed, and though the automatic systems tried to patch up the holes the best they could, many rooms still were completely turned into a vacuum. Most passengers didn’t suffer much damage due to the small silhouette that they presented relative to the large modular ships, however, the ships themselves were almost knocked out of commission from the sudden blow.
The ships spray wildly in response, the 100mm cannons atop each of the ships spray the enemy with surprising haste, fiering almost the same projectiles as the swarm missile system did, trying to dump payloads of the nanothermate paste upon the sudden large amalgamation being constructed, whilst the navigation system tries to pull the CES ships into a more manageable speed, reviewing which systems are unresponsive, killed by the barrage. like any Serstine should.
Dragovich had made an assumption upon his arrival in the battlespace, and now as large sections of the ROMB facility turned into a haze of shrapnel it appeared that the assumption he made had been incorrect. Dragovich had assumed the if anyone were to frag the ROMB station it would be him. The assortment of corporate brown nosers, national militaries and… whatever one classified the Serstine as, had not struck him as the type to fire off missiles with little regard for collateral damage. But Dragovich had been wrong, and now had a cloud of shrapnel rapidly closing on his position. It was doubly irksome because the shrapnel had, momentarily at least, revealed most of the Haenbu. Dragovich had been ready for a reveal, weapons awaiting firing trajectories, but that had all gone to shit rather spectacularly.
The Mercurial Kite and her destroyer escorts had time for a single salvo at any rate, launching a barrage of missiles and relativistic railgun slugs at the now revealed Haenbu before all effort was turned to surviving the shrapnel cloud. The ships changed course to get out of the path of the shrapnel, while point defense weapons opened up on the incoming projectiles, trying to break up the larger chunks. Fresh missiles were cycled into the tubes and launched at the incoming shrapnel cloud, while the main railguns of the vessels were rapidly retracted to spare them the incoming damage.
But there was only so much that could be done, and in the end there was no avoiding the shrapnel completely. Smaller pieces glanced off the shields, or flash fried as more active defenses came online, but the larger chunks were able to punch through. They pockmarked the armoured hulls, some pieces embedding themselves in the ultradense armour plating while others punched through to the vessel itself. Automated damage control systems came online, sealing compromised compartments, and alerting damage control teams.
Finally the ships’ momentum carried them out of the cloud, but none of the vessels were without damage. Engines were only partially functional, power was spotty across all the vessels, and every one of them was venting atmosphere and dealing with crewmen in varying levels of ‘maimed’.
Fred was apprised of the situation only after the power in the hangar had flickered, gone out for several minutes, and then finally been replaced by the dim red hue of back-up battery powered light sources. He put the cigarette between his lips and sucked on the acrid smoke, using both hands to swipe through his tablet, skimming through auto-generated damage reports and a brief update from Dragovich on the situation.
“The agreed upon compensation is still acceptable,” Fred said to Brzozwski, buying time to review the flood of information. “It’s smaller details that need hammering out. What is to be done with wrecked or abandoned vessels captured by my men for example,”
He tapped and swiped at the screen and then turned the tablet to show Brzozwski the recording the Mercurial Kite had taken.
“We,” Fred emphasized as the recording played back, showing the launch, impact, and subsequent chain reaction caused by Raok’s and the CES’s weapons. “Didn’t do anything. Some of the other parties present caused that little clusterfuck,”
He waited for the playback to end before turning the tablet back.
“Boarding parties will be deploying to the station momentarily but the hijackers are threatening to liquidate hostages unless the attack is called off. So if you’ve been holding back anything that might help my guys regain control of the facility faster now’s the time to tell me,”
‘Momentarily’ it turned out, was a bit optimistic. Thrusters and engines were damaged across the fleet, and it took some time for the pirate engineers to begin getting power and functionality back to them. Though a sloppy course adjustment the ships eventually reoriented themselves and moved to deploy their boarders. The other factions present were firing on the largest amalgam, the surviving strike craft joined the Serstine in charging headlong into the amalgams’ suicide rush, and it seemed the way was open for the pirates to finally begin boarding the station.
Indeed in the hangar itself there was a flurry of activity. A technician jury rigged a power line, restoring enough functionality to get the pirates deploying and they eagerly jumped to it, crossing the threshold into the void and streaking toward the ROMB stations with breaching charges and cutting torches to force their way in if necessary.
Things escalated.
The impact should have, in hindsight, been somewhat expected, but now was too late. There was a chance nothing would crash into ROMB, Raok bet on it and lost. At least it wasn’t Council property. As the shrapnel flew towards his reserve force, the point defence system activated automatically and opened fire on the chunks heading their way, autocannons, anti barrage missile systems targeting the smaller and medium chunks as the biggest ones the ships tried to dodge, given that his reserve force had some distance between it and the fighting, it should be enough to mitigate most of the damage.
The three Shivs however, fared far worse; being among the closest to the shrapnel, explosions and standing weapon platforms, they did not have the luxury of being in a larger group where point defence fire fields could be set up to more efficiently defend themselves, nor were they far away enough for evasive maneuvers to be effective: only things they could do is brace for impact and hope point defence manages to deal with enough flying debris to spare them total annihilation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As Matey woke up, he struggled for a second to remember what was going on; he found himself floating freely above his command console, numerous alarms beeping and flashing lights indicated some kind of an emergency. He turned around in zero gravity and was startled by what he saw; a small, partially melted metal rod 4 meters in length had pierced the hull, wedged itself firmly in place just inches away from his back. If the object was any larger or struck in a different angle, there was no doubt he would have been ejected into the vacuum by all the air being sucked out of the room, objects hitting against the badly damaged wall and causing it to break. Looking around he saw his friend sitting next to the airlock, passed out, his right hand severed by the airlock closing down upon registering a breach, however small, in the room. He pushed himself away from the console and towards the airlock, looking at the screen display in horror as he slowly realised that the emergency life support system was offline in this part of the ship; he had a dwindling supply of oxygen. After a minute of shock, he pushed himself towards the console again and looked at it.
The targeting system was offline, firing system was online, communications were online… but the cooling system was busted, and he had nobody to retract the hul so he could fire. Just as he was starting to lose all hope of vengeance that burned in him, a notification on his console appeared.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Things went to shit.
Most of his reserve forces suffered minimal damage, but it was enough for one of his cruisers to get its shielding damaged, meaning it would perform sub optimally until repairs were complete, which could take longer than he was happy to wait. He spotted the abomination that was under construction before one of his junior officers, which earned the man in question slap on the back of the head by his colleague as they informed the leader of what was going on. The mega amalgam caught Raok by surprise unlike the message received by the hostile forces present onboard ROMB. He might have been in the mood for negotiations before, but the destruction of one of the ships he send forth to battle, which was now unresponsive to all hails and showed signs of serious damage, would inevitably lead to his little adventure being branded as a failure by his enemies back on Malaak; something he could not stand. Until the executives send him a transmission about negotiations and their outcome, he didn’t care; now he was angry.
He looked at one of his subordinates in the eye. “Send one of our cruisers to rescue the survivors of our force ahead and a Shiv for escort, they are not to engage unless fired upon.” Raok then proceeded to personally set the course for his own ship towards ROMB.
“We, however, are going to war.”
The Serstine got antsy as they heard the new plan, and they were immediately on board. Rain and Norte looked at one another, and a smile crept across their faces.
Rain nodded and made her pitch. "Well, friends, we just might have the thing. I highly doubt a Bladeship is appropriate to our current predicament, but its contents shall be far more conducive to our shared objectives. We would like to invite you to witness rocket surgery."
They killed the call, as they had preparations to make now. "Justice for the Nortenas and our honor," Norte said as excitement rippled through the bridge. Rain and Norte left the bridge, keeping it in the care of one of Norte's senior lieutenants. They ran through the bowels of the Tipping Point, rallying Suntouched and Boostkin, and gathering a force of about twenty Serstine, Rain and Norte included. Norte's clean red and silver and Rain's new stark white and black airframe were made battle ready: wings and plasma railguns were attached to Rain's arms and legs once again and Norte's gauntlet shone as it was maintained, sharp and nasty as ever and with its precious mistralium filaments ready and raring to go.
Norte gave a short speech as the throng assembled in the nearest Outrider launch bay, more like the barrel of a gun, and Suntouched started clambering onto Boostkin to ride into the vacuum of space. "This one goes out to the ones who went out against the Bullhead! They may be gone, but the mayhem they whipped up from star to star deserves an encore! Let's clean out ROMB...or whatever's gonna be left of it..." the pause got chuckles from the Nortenas, "...and really show what we can do without teamkilling dogfuckers and nuke-happy psychos ruining our fun!"
A huge cheer went up, and Serstine shot out of the launch bay like whooping, hollering shotgun bullets towards ROMB, braving shrapnel and crossfire to inflict themselves on the hijackers.
A moment or two passed, and then someone else made her way to the bridge, a Boost Shaman in the folded airframe materials common to her station, done in blinding shades of red and white. Her long, elegant shapes and upright posture made her look ladylike and almost delicate, and the scar running across her face showed someone had already tried to put a crack in her - by accident, but a fight was a fight. This was Akina, shaman to those that followed Rain and her clan.
She'd simply gotten the instructions from Rain and Norte as they passed by to "hold down the ship" while they went off to have a fight. When the captain and mates of a Bladeship, or any Serstine ship for that matter, went off to do anything involving acting as an away team of some kind, it fell to the Boost Shamans to keep order. Everyone in Rain's circle liked Akina, and it was easy to see why she was a rising star in Rain's ranks.
Not that any of this factored into her gobsmacked reaction to the Serstine hurtling towards what was rapidly becoming the remains of ROMB. All she could do was shake her head and start doing her job. "So like them, really...I suppose I love them to death for just this reason. Very well...ahem!
Hear me, true brothers and sisters of our clan!" Akina lifted a leg and then stomped on the floor, the daggerlike tip of her foot sending burning sparks across the floor that simply the impact wouldn't. A low rumble shook the Tipping Point as the Shamans beneath her felt her speak to them through the Flame, and they began to concentrate on the ship's fusion engine, turning their Flame to speak to the massive one at the center of the ship's engine.
"Lend us your strength, those who came before! Those who forged this Bladeship, sharp, hot and pure!" Again there was a rumble. The Shamans gathered tighter and tighter around the engine room, less just an engine room and more a huge cathedral, or a massive stage for the Flame to perform on, and with their Flames revved up, gestured and seemed to dance as one. The ship smarted up. Akina didn't think herself much of a commander, and her solution to leveling the playing field was to push Tipping Point to her true potential. "More speed!"
Everyone braced themselves.
"Turn up the boost! Our job isn't done!"
It was clear that the ship was revving up, too, as Tipping Point bled white-hot plasma from every orifice, just daring something to try to fight her while her captain was away.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The fire alarms and emergency lights turned the corridors of ROMB 91 into a red and black kaleidoscope of rusted edges and esoteric warning symbols written in Strzalan through which Ariadne wandered defeated, clutching herself as to shield from the frigid cold air billowing out of the station's rapidly-depleting emergency life support system. Sewage bubbled up from between the warped flooring of the facility, groaning in exertion from the damage it had suffered. The Strzalans hadn't said a word, gazes of disbelief and anguish from the workers had been enough for her to understand she'd overstayed her welcome and brought them nothing but ruin. She needed to face this on her own, whatever it was. Had she simply stayed where she was the entire ordeal would have been just an abduction, a minor footnote that would be cycled out of the media spotlight in a matter of days if not hours.
But now ROMB had been all but annihilated, a chain reaction of secondary explosions and spall was wrecking everything that the original impact hadn't taken out. Who knows what was going to happen if she decided to stay in the shelter? If the engineers didn't rightfully kill her then the rapidly-escalating battle outside certainly would. Ariadne had gone past the point of feeling anguished or in fear, now she just wandered the corridors of ROMB 91 wearing a pair of aviators and shifting a cigarette with her lips hoping to stumble upon either the kidnappers or an exploding gas pipeline. It didn't matter either way, and it felt surprisingly liberating. This was a fuckup no human being -or DAMSEL- could possibly come back from, so there was no use in trying. The only way out was through, and just accepting that seemed to change her: normally beings as hyper-sensitive as DAMSELs became squeamish when they were anywhere near filth or disorder -especially Ariadne herself, who had always been a particularily squeamish one- but now she was wading through a mixture of sewage and hydraulic fluid without as much as a flinch, like she was watching herself walk from a third person perspective from which fatigue, odors and cold mattered very little.
She was going to enjoy the hell out of this brief freedom, knowing that the hijackers were just around the corner. After all, this was what she'd looked for for such a long time. Leaving MAIDEN and burning all sorts of bridges behind her years ago, deciding to work independently and getting involved with the S&VF think tank... all in the name of being the master of her own destiny? Not having her life regimented by the programming she was born with or the deep-cutting social pressures of her fellow DAMSELs? Well, if there was any moment where she'd truly been free it must have certainly been then, among the wreckage of the Killian Verge's notorious Strzalan shipyard. Now her schedule had definitely freed itself, she wasn't worrying about her next hair appointment or business conference.
A squad of armed men, shape-shifting silhouettes shrouded in holographic camouflage, eventually found Ariadne trying to pry drinks out of a vending machine with a crowbar deep in a hangar full of crushed tooling. Getting the flashlight shone on her seemed to snap Ariadne back into reality a bit, and she turned towards them and raised her hands.
"Don't move, don't move!" The distorted voice of one of the hijackers barked, made harsher by the device hiding his identity. He and two squadmates crouched to brace their guns while two more rushed forwards, firing a taser that knocked Ariadne to the floor.
"Stop, stop!" Ariadne coughed. Perhaps she wasn't so liberated after all, these people meant business. "You got me!"
"We've secured the objective!" The leader of the squad called. "All units make your way to ROMB 91 and prepare for exfiltration!"
ROMB Shipyard
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The remaining Haunebu began dashing towards ROMB 91 all at once, firing off a few last volleys from their gravitic vortex guns and harnessing the powerful recoil to blast themselves across the large -and collapsing- facility in order to make it there faster. As the coalition forces approached the ruins of ROMB more and more -the path cleared by the Serstine and BSO's turning of the tide against the swarm of pseudo-standing weapons in a vicious fight that fed even more shrapnel into the gigantic Kessler syndrome around Zyczyny- the threats by the hijackers were repeated and became more and more insistent. If they kept going towards them, the hostages were going to die. But it was obvious that after some of the damage inflicted the rescue ships were now out for blood, and the mega-amalgam had to buy them some time.
Rallying the remaining pseudo-standing fighters, the mega-amalgam finally began moving and offset itself from the orbital plane of the rest of ROMB. So shoddy was its construction that whenever it went it left a trail of debris and pieces that detached from it, which it used as a way to create an obstacle over ROMB 91 while opening up a massive volley of fire from a myriad scrap-cannons bolted on to whatever portions of its surface had enough structural integrity to withstand the recoil, directing itself against the CES ships and Raok's fleet in particular while slowly rotating to bring more of its guns to bear. As they were hit and jammed in place by the nanothermal paste, the rotation made them cycle out of the line of fire, where some of the remaining engineering ships set out to work to unseal and repair them by the time the mega-amalgam finished its rotating and brought those guns to bear again. Rivets, bolts, doors, longerons and all sorts of small construction materiel were fired out by the mass drivers of the mega-amalgam in a continuous spray, made red-hot by the magnetic induction of the mass drivers.
Despite the efforts of the amalgams and their swarm of point defense fighters, however, the Serstine and BSO rapidly broke through the line and had began boarding the different ROMB stations. In all but ROMB 91, the intruders retreated inwards while sabotaging the stations behind them to slow down the invaders. Those who did land on ROMB 91 were targeted by three of the remaining Haunebu, which however had to get extremely close to the station in order to not just kill everyone inside -HVT included- with their gravitic vortex guns. With their halostone coatings already damaged, the Haunebu were quite conspicuous but the intruders simply couldn't afford the boarders getting near their bounty. The three Haunebu would no doubt end up being targeted themselves, but they hoped they would make a good distraction and delaying force while the troops inside finished barricading themselves, setting up ambushes and moving the hostage away to a tertiary service area in hopes of reaching their evacuation ship: a fourth Haunebu which now stealthily made its way to the station.
ROMB STATIONS-INDOORS
The Serstine rush to the stations was the stuff Rain's clan would sing about if they came back from this victorious. Hell, if they came back from this at all. Their run saw them going through pseudo-Standing Weapons, amongst their own Outriders, and crashed through into ROMB. Pressurized sections howled as they were punctured, and Serstine were eagerly firing thrusters to avoid being dumped out into the void. Others would have said that they had no option but to press forward, but Serstine believed the idea of there being a choice was stupid - they would go forward.
Rain looked for targets as she proceeded with a sort of hunger in her eyes, the sort of blistering search for prey that a dragonfly must feel while looking for meat. She launched herself down hallways and through intersections, trusting that the more she headed through intact sections, the closer she had to be getting to her target. The Suntouched behind her followed dutifully along, and interpreted her moves as an invitation to follow her example as she started steering herself towards boarders and hijackers, whatever moving shapes she thought she was running up towards.
The plasma emitters in the wings on her arms and the engines all over her legs that gave her a very shapely humanoid figure started thrusting, and she began to spin and vector in a frenzied dance. Her balletic gun dance allowed her to stop and turn on a dime, the perfect thing for maneuvering in close quarters without gutting the station further or simply shredding herself all over the inside of the stations. Every step of the dance was improvised and chosen in the heat of the moment. She knew danger was just millimeters away and that her timing had to be exact, and Rain was now exactly where she wanted to be.
Norte saw something else as she caught up. She felt the eyes of the Haunebu on her, a sort of sensation that something that wanted to shoot at them all had the perfect opportunity, and yet weren't. She could only guess that, and started laughing. It was the mean-spirited, raucous cackling of a heckler tearing into a bad comedian, and it reached Rain's senses as she let it fire out on all channels.
"I hear you laughing up a storm back there, this is a little unusual for this time in a fight. What's gotten into you, Norte?" Rain evenly said, more like she was confirming Norte would be at the fight on time, rather than if she was losing her mind.
"You know what's happening up there, don't you? Can't you feel it?" Norte said, excitement building in her voice.
"I believe you should tell me," Rain said.
"We've rattled the fuckers! They're scared!" Norte laughed again.
They were all barreling towards the boarders, ready to take whatever ambush or opponent was waiting for them. They were smelling blood and ready for a frenzy.
ROMB STATION
Akina could now feel the scorching Flame of Tipping Point, fully stoked, engulfing her and everyone else in the Bladeship. It was like they were all suddenly on the same page. It was like their Flames had been replaced by the heart of the ship: their cores pumped plasma and fluids all at once, they blinked, twitched, thought as one. Still individual, but perfectly aware of one another, themselves, and their surroundings. Bare Haunebu were eyeing the station and turning, as if waiting for something.
Fresh meat.
"I see them," Akina told the rest of the bridge, communicating as if in a trance, sounding like her usual lilting, oddly well-adjusted self and yet not. "Take them," she simply ordered. "TAKE THEM, NOW!" Suddenly her voice raised to a furious roar.
Tipping Point turned from the lead ship of the group into a burning white comet. It suddenly outran the other, non-stoked Bladeships and started heading up and over the station, her whole crew watching everything as if in slow motion. Massive explosions of plasma belched from it as it changed angles and searched for a good vector to shoot the three exposed Haunebu from, without hitting the station and the Serstine inside. It was like watching an Outrider blown up to massive proportions, and was a shocking, utterly terrifying display. It was as if the ship had been possessed by a Boost Aspect, and that Aspect was hungry.
That was all from it positioning to find a good firing angle. Once it did, it bore down on its prey, plasma warming up in its guns' barrels.
Once inside one of the ROMB stations, the Pyroclastics started flooding the corridors with their nanothermate, quickly the temperatures rose in whatever place was acclimated as they threaded their way cutting doors open with powerful thermobaric tools and weaponry alike. Threading their path towards where the production line of the station passed by whatever made it continue forwards, likely some kind of array of magnetic coils which accelerated the objects in the production line and kept them going. Ignoring all safety standards, the team hijacked the station controls and began turning the station towards the gigantic amalgam as they aggregated large quantities of scrap material within the station’s production line, aiming to fire it at the amalgam using the production line as a makeshift cannon just as the station did a few moments ago.
Meanwhile,
The ships fielded were never meant for much prolonged combat, despite being fairly reliable. They had to evade quickly out of the firing line of the large amalgam, now without the Serstine to hide behind they were drifting in fairly open space, surrounded by scattered hulls of other amalgams and the recent discharge. The distraught ships used their previous acceleration in foolishly trying to catch up with the Serstine to dash towards the cover of whatever ROMB station still remained alive, the cannons and PD started fiering at the mass drivers of the large amalgam, tracing a path towards large accumulations of debris to serve as partial shielding, however the large malformed metal slugs still hit, tearing holes into the CES ships and knocking them out of combat permanently.
Weapons systems exploded off from their blowout configurations as the engines struggled, one of the ships drifted sideways and decelerated, however, slamming itself into the side of one of the ROMB stations and lodging into it. The leading ship lost all of its weaponry that didn’t had already used all their ammo and hid behind another of the ROMB stations, unleashing their last salvo of common AP missiles and ejecting the clip afterwards. The ships were overworked, damaged almost beyond salvation, and had done the best they could to fight the sudden invasion of the ROMB. Now all they could do is hope that the other forces would win this battle so they could limp their way back to CES space.
The tides of battle ebbed and flowed upon the Mercurial Kite’s bridge and Dragovich soaked them up. He listened to the reports his bridge crew called out to one another, the updates from damage control and the other vessels in his fleet, and he watched the battlespace map pulse and flash as ships were damaged, destroyed or changed positions…
And through the chorus of violence a pattern began to emerge to the failed revolutionary. It was a pattern in the enemy’s behaviour. His boarding teams made their explosive entries to the various ROMB facilities. They cut, blasted, and hacked their way aboard and began the frantic room-to-room battle that so often characterized boarding actions. Not just his men, but the Organization as a whole was good at this. Boarding actions and close quarters were what they lived for. Nothing was quite so exhilarating as the weight of a flechette gun and the uncertainty of what lay around the next corner.
He expected his forces would acquit themselves well, but the way the enemy seemed to melt away on most of the stations struck him as odd, especially when all of the strange unidentifiable craft turned their attention exclusively on ROMB-91 and blew apart those boarders unfortunate enough to have been among the first wave. They were focusing their defense there which meant there was something valuable enough on ROMB-91 that they would sacrifice their gains across the rest of the facility for it.
Dragovich put the call out to the entirety of his force. The fleet, such as it was, turned its full attention on ROMB-91. What boarding parties hadn’t already been deployed were to be sent aboard ROMB-91, breaching in as many different locations to avoid becoming clustered, easy prey for the Haunebu. The beleaguered fleet turned its guns away from the massive amalgam moving to ROMB-91. It was occupied with Raok and the CES anyway. Instead, the guns were turned on the Haunebu around ROMB-91.
Now what I wonder are they so concerned with protecting on ROMB-91? Dragovich wondered silently as he puffed on his cigarette. Their leader could be there, rallying forces to cover their retreat. That was one possibility, certainly… another was that their adversaries could be after something. Holding ROMB didn’t seem to have been their strategy, at least not if hostages were the only thing they were counting on to protect them from counterattack. You didn’t take hostages to deter counterattacks…
You take hostages to buy time… so what were they buying time for?
Dragovich let out a long drag and cleared his throat.
“Scan ROMB-91,” He said. “Search for anything attempting to leave the station,”
As the dogfight began to die down he had fighters retasked to intercept anything his sensor sweep identified, and then as a precaution had his own interdiction fields begin powering up.
“Sir that… thing, its moving!”
“Transmission from Serestines!”
“The ugly shits are moving towards ROMB-91-”
New information was flooding from everywhere, and the enemy forces appeared to be changing their tactics, now trying their best to defend one smaller part of ROMB. That must be where the intruders were hiding, and if his guess was any good, they were getting out. Seeing others manage to get through the thick trail of debris left behind the biggest, ugliest grotesque of a flying wreck he had ever seen, he knew he would have to distract or at least attempt to beat the damn thing. He did, after all, have the biggest flotilla out of them all.
His communications officer once again signalled for his attention, and a transcript of the message sent by Maro Carius appeared. In a rush, Raok sent out a quick reply saying that the help is greatly appreciated and that he would like Maro to focus on the smaller amalgams while his boarding party went to ROMB-91 to help others in their search.
Then Raok raised his voice and issued his order to everyone:
“All available forces, focus fire on the big one.” He paused for a moment, before continuing; “Restriction on use of spinal weapons has been lifted until further notice.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matey knew this was it. The ship was in no condition to survive this but he didn’t care; he was a dead man either way. Having been contacted by Jenna who somehow managed to make it into the busted secondary control room, they agreed on a plan. They were to open up and fire their weapon and reroute all power to it, overcharging it in hopes of delivering one final, last show of resistance against this force they were fighting in a fight that they didn’t sign up for, for a cause they care about and against an enemy they didn’t know. Nobody would ever remember their names, and all their efforts might be futile in the end, changing nothing.
But he did always want to go out with a blast. He got the message, ‘primed and ready for fire’, and waited for the call to fire.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Entire Raok’s force that wasn’t tasked with rescuing survivors of the three lost Shivs was now firing at the mega-amalgam, with Raok’s ship in the middle of the formation sending a volley after volley of plasma cannons and nuclear missiles at it, while the corvettes circled halfway around it, firing broadside as they tried to get into position to line up the best shot, looking for weaknesses.
Elsewhere, where the rescue ships docked to two out of the three Shivs, the final one didn’t wait for its rescue apparently, as the frontal hull retracted inwards to reveal a big barrel of some kind of weapon positioned inside the ship, which has now started spinning up as all lights on the ship went out, before it finally started firing its laser at one of the Haunebu ships closest to it, melting through most of the debris on the way with ease for about 7 seconds before the barrel of the weapon started glowing red as it deformed, causing the weapon to hit the barrel before it left it, resulting in its destruction as reactionary explosions on the inside of the ship destroyed what little integrity it had left, leaving it as a truly lifeless husk now drifting away in space.
Dragovic’s call paid off.
From among the many shattered arms and the ongoing combat a small shuttle took off from the ruined remains of the station. It burned hard, covered in its retreat as the forces bought time for it to withdraw. In its position it seemed like it would be extremely hard to pursue, but the enemy forces were all but broken now, whatever the intruders had wanted at the start they had clearly achieved. The remaining amalgam ships and defences however were little more than an annoyance at this point, most of the scrap cannons had either fully jammed or been annihilated by basic weapons fire. Most of the way forward had been cleared, and with the Serstine and BSO having broken the line and cleared up those vessels holding them back the remains of ROMB were wide open.
Sabotaged corridors, smashed spars and more met the boarders, but not everything was totally lost. Inside isolated shelters people survived to be rescued, grateful that they had survived and been saved in such a nightmarish destruction of their home and workplace. While some Orbeole forces remained to trade off with the allies most tried to exfiltrate, not all made it, simply destroyed by ship weapons. Those who had no way out simply liquidated themselves. With ROMB totally destroyed, while it would no longer produce ships or be able to aid those who had saved it, it could very well help in other ways. Massive amounts of Kolleronic materials had gone into its construction, and all could be salvaged. Large amounts of Nightstone and Dawnstone coated broken spars and sections but the real prize was the broken remains of the Haubenu.
The vessels Halostone coatings enough to kit out a small fleet in stealth coatings, a prize worth dying over in any situation.
The clean up would likely take months or years. But the benefits of helping deconstruct and salvage ROMB was a treasure trove. The allied forces had perhaps stopped its total destruction, but they could absolutely benefit from it.
----
On board the shuttle as it finally escaped Adriane was wrapped in restraints, the Orbeole troopers surrounding her. She had been their prize, ROMB was just collateral, they had taken heavy losses, but the job had been done. A message was sent to Orillia.
Job completed. Package recovered, ROMB destroyed, Abelcain will not be getting his fleet
Mission accomplished.
Near the Aedelshaven Corridor
Killian Verge
ROMB. A massive facility, perhaps the biggest of its kind in this side of the Killian Verge. Many years ago, the military shipyards of Hizen, Miyagatake and Rubikon had been destroyed at the costs of millions of lives by bold attacks from the AGA alliance. All four shipyards had been reduced to smoldering wreckage, their production chains silenced never to awake again. However, one man’s strategic disaster was another man’s treasure, and the four wrecked shipyards had been the treasure of a few entrepreneurs from Republika Strzałka. After the war the voidmen of the small but hardy Republika had purchased what remained of those installations at rock-bottom prices. The millions of tons of wreckage imported by the Strzałkan had been refurbished and reforged into something greater than the sum of its parts, a colossal civilian shipyard by the name of ROMB.
For many years after the end of the war this investment had paid off awesomely. ROMB carved its niche among the major shipbuilders of the galaxy, producing dirt-cheap ancerium harvesters for any daring explorer or pilot who looked to make a fortune in the ancerium-thirsty economy of the postwar boom. ROMB’s ships were as cheap as one could get, manufactured in just a couple days with the absolute minimum of systems required to survive a venture into the Golden Expanse. Many hyperfuel tycoons had started off working with ROMB’s disposable single-use harvester ships, and the brand remained in the hearts of crews and captains alike even as they later upgraded to more durable and modern harvesters from other manufacturers. ROMB endured, accessible and reliable, for those who wanted to get a foot in the ancerium harvesting business.
The ROMB shipyard, which worked 24/7 producing and recycling cheap harvesters, was no less a marvel of engineering than the military shipyards it had been built out of. 256 stations spanning dozens of kilometers each. 1024 tachyonic beams projected in a beautiful symmetric pattern of conveyor belts and over three hundred thousand Strzałkan engineers and mechanics all earning a living in the million-kilometer shipyard as it rotated around the brown dwarf Życzyn, churning out harvester after harvester for would-be ancerium magnates who dared to dream big, earning billions for the ragtag group of Strzałkan entrepreneurs who had dreamt big.
And for a time, it was good. This was not such time.
“Abelcain is going to kill us. He’s going to slowly torture us to death.” Kacper Brzozowski, the CEO of ROMB, said through a miasma of cigarette smoke in the meeting room of the ship. “Worse yet: he’s going to attack ROMB. Jesus Christ. This is the end. If anyone has any idea of how to get out of this, please share with the rest because I’m honestly at a loss.”
“Ok, Abelcain still doesn’t know what happened.” said Benedykt Hermaszewski, associate and longtime friend of Kacper, co-founder of ROMB. “I’m just throwing this out there: vent the whole place. Say the boarders did it. I genuinely don’t have anything against Ariadne but this has the potential to ruin us all.”
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” Brzozowski rubbed his temples. “We can’t fucking kill her, you think MAIDEN doesn’t care about her just because she’s gone?”
“There’s no bad ideas, just keep brainstorming.” Katarzyna said, eyeing her husband Benedykt with worry and lighting up another cigarette. The droning of the engines of the ship they were on continued, as the executives discussed what to do on the mess hall of a lowly tug ship currently speeding away from ROMB. “Literally just say the first thing that comes to mind. Killing Ariadne is going a bit too far, I don’t think Abelcain will fall for it.”
Ariadne. Ariadne Palamara. Formerly known as 254-Ariadne, a name that had become almost synonymous with drama among certain circles. A tall, winged and feminine-looking blonde demiorganic that had been crafted by the MAIDEN research station. She’d been its lead environmental engineer for years before quitting the organization over a money dispute. She’d become somewhat of a minor celebrity among the well-connected unaligned, a widely-known socialite who’d found work in the shadowy Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, a shadowy think tank of political manipulators. Infamously finicky and boastful, Ariadne had found her new home in SV&F’s huge supercomputing datacenter at Voynych working with like-minded divas of academia. Right now, however, she just felt plain terrified as she ran down the gently curving walkway of one of ROMB’s stations along with some workers.
An alarm had been sounded and a lockdown of all decks imposed. An accident, supposedly. But Ariadne and the workers of the machining shop weren’t buying it. They’d heard the gunshots and seen the engines of Ariadne’s personal yacht get shot off from an unknown direction. Someone or something had boarded ROMB, and it couldn’t be good news. For Ariadne, especially, as she was carrying an extremely important piece of data. It just couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Come on, this way!” A foreman from ROMB’s 93rd station whistled, having found a door which his security pass could unlock.
“What way are the shuttles?” Ariadne asked with a fearful tone, clutching her purse and running barefoot after the workers. “I don’t want to go to the muster stations, is there any way to the hangars directly?”
“What is wrong with you?” A Strzałkan worker berated. “Just hold on to your safety equipment and don’t get in the way, management is going to chew our ass if we don’t follow the drill.”
“You can go follow the drill, all I’m asking is if there’s a way I can get to the shuttles directly!” Ariadne panted, having trouble keeping up.
“You’re being a troublemaker!” Another worker said in a hushed tone. It was something Ariadne had heard many times before, although never in such an urgent situation. “The second you showed up here there’s something happening! Are they here for you?”
“Yes! I think so!” Ariadne nodded. “What if they’re expecting us at the muster stations?!”
“Then what do you-” The foreman was in the middle of snapping back at her when the whole group heard a full burst of gunfire. It was coming from another deck, but it was much closter this time. Way too close for comfort. Everyone instinctually turned around in a moment. “Shit!”
“I told you!” Ariadne said. “I have something important, just get me to the shuttles!”
“God damnit. Over here!”
The most prized of Ariadne’s possessions remained in the deepest, most secure parts of her databank. She didn’t even know what it was! She certainly didn’t know it was important enough that gunmen were seizing one of the region’s largest shipyards and chasing her over it. All she knew was that it came from Voynych, the decryption center that she worked at. They’d intercepted and decoded plenty of communications before from all over the galaxy. But from the way her superiors had told her to hand-deliver this data instead of just simply sending it via ancnet it had to be something special. A state-level secret, it had to be.
She’d been told to deliver the data to some general or other bigwig of OMPAF, an up-and-coming political front in the world of Aedelshaven. The handoff was supposed to happen in a very specific place at a very specific time, and certainly not like this. Whoever it was that had boarded the station, it had to be linked to this data somehow. Whoever it was, they’d knew when her yacht was going to stop at ROMB for the final leg of her journey from Voynych to Aedelshaven. She couldn’t transfer the data, as the intruders had shut down wifi in the station. She couldn’t delete it either, lest she fail her most important task. All she could do for the moment was run and follow the workers, hoping to at least put some distance between her and her would-be kidnappers.
--
“Open call.” Benedykt said, capitulating with a shrug. “Isolate OMPAF off of it, I don’t want Abelcain to hear us calling for help just the second that Voynych’s bimbo arrived.”
“Are you insane?” Katarzyna did a double-take in the middle of lighting up a cigarette. “He’s going to know this sooner or later.”
“I’m not going to leave Abelcain in the dark.” Benedykt rubbed his bald head. “I just need this to look better for us or he’ll cut our shipyard contract. I’ll get whoever’s willing to shoot the intruders, then when they’ll get here I’ll call Abelcain and say that our local security is taking care of it.”
“You know if this goes wrong Abelcain is going to do a hell of a lot worse than cut our contract, right?” Brozowzki downed a shot of vodka. “What if she gets killed before helps get here?”
“Well.” Benedykt paused for a moment. “We’re already onboard a ship, so at least we have a running start for when Abelcain comes for us. Just give me the fucking radio.”
They were on a pretty fast ship, at that. They were aboard the business craft of ROMB’s upper management, a sleek and nimble Teliran superyacht. The executives have boarded it to go from their offices to the ROMB station where Ariadne had docked and go greet the DAMSEL, but halfway through their flight the station traffic control had gone silent, the whole place had been interdicted and gunmen had stormed the offices and taken the rest of management captive. Supposedly, unidentified ships had been spotted prowling the tachyonic scaffolding of ROMB… yet the shipyard’s traffic control radars and the superyacht’s own sensors showed nothing.
The executives had managed to jump a couple light-minutes away from the station before being interdicted off their jump and were now running at full throttle away from ROMB. A few dozen executives as well as the crew of the shuttle had been saved, nothing even close to enough to get the station back under control. Security forces? Those had been defunded years ago to make the margins bigger, and if Abelcain ever learned of that things were going to get so bad the executives would wish they have stayed onboard ROMB.
“What the hell do I say?” Benedykt asked in a moment of sudden hesitation after being handed the radio on an open channel.
“Just say anything, sheesh!”
Thinking back to the newspapers he’d read, Benedykt spoke.
“Emancipation is the key to all things.”
Those who had kept up with the important happenings of the galaxy would have recognized the message as Abelcain’s own message of help in the legendary Jailbreak event. To those who had only recently arrived, the transmission would just be a mysterious unencrypted message coming from an isolated civilian ship, looping over and over again on as many frequencies as the yacht could transmit in. An SOS, an invitation for a job. And in one of the busiest areas of the galaxy, where ships from everything from colonial navies to civilian corporations and even newly-arrived explorers, some was bound to hear it and help.
Out in the black and already on the way, a force of Serstine Bladeships was making good speed, which by Serstine standards, was fast as possible. They were a good force, all lean, slim lines and swordlike shapes giving way to exposed piping belching plasma where the quillons, hilt and grip would go. They were a group made to be nimble and smart, though anybody who knew Serstine knew even their big ships were famed for preposterous levels of acceleration. The largest of them led the pack, an Inamorato-class flight deck cruiser called Tipping Point. They were all garishly-decorated, shocks of brassy script across their lengths like fullers, starting at the points and swelling as they headed backwards.
They had a story to tell. They were taking a course away from the blasted world of Aphanizomen, a frigate named Ragged Edge in tow. She carried treasures and scrap from that place, and in Tipping Point, two Serstine were especially keen on keeping their eyes on the lean frigate. The odds that either of them would have been able to be there or see any of this were absurdly long not too long ago, and they knew it. It was the wandering princess of Clan Elduranda, Rain Elduranda, and her retainer Norte Gallegos.
The two needed more than repairs after their adventure in a fused body kludged together from a Bullhead fighter had scored the Ragged Edge a belly full of salvage, including a cargo of dawnstone. They’d battled horrors left behind by the maddened Axiom’s followers, from the mundane Bullhead marines and demiorganics to legends like the Tooth Fairy, pushing themselves deeper and deeper into the guts of a planet turned into an anti-orbit installation, scarred by thermonuclear Armageddon and now most likely working itself over with agitated mixtures of nuclear winter and volcanic infernos, punctuated by geothermal activity now let loose from the plumbing that once made it work somewhat neat and orderly. Now it was free, and probably ruining whatever it could rampage through unrestricted.
It was an adventure that added to their legend, as well as the legends of those that went in alongside them and survived like the Lightcaster called Zand, but it cost a lot: Norte’s whole retinue of loyal Nortenas, five...guys they didn’t care to remember after starting the whole mess...and their bodies, wracked beyond all repair, requiring full brain case and Flame transfers to stay in good running order. Rain’s personal Aeromasons and Fleshsmiths went to the task with great gusto, reconstructing the two better than new. They gleamed again, and were dressed back up as the clan’s guiding lights.
They had the brassy bodywork of the craft that kept them alive further integrated into their new frames, and wherever bare metal was allowed to show, such as the meshes in between their plating, they had a bronze glint. Norte had her dazzling red back, her mistralium filaments in her oversized right arm, and her roses and long ringlets. Rain took a different tack. Where she remained the same was her long, curvy proportions, her massive secondary tokamaks in her bust, long hair and big globe-shaped decorations describing large buns on her head. What was different was the color: gone were all her decorations and her flash. In their place were stark black and white, like she was starting all over. Little by little she’d reclaim her decorations and show her valor. A brand-new body was the first sign she was only picking up speed, and whatever else she decided to have struck into it would just be another badge of honor.
That badge of honor came to them soon enough as they picked up a message that gave them all pause.
”Emancipation is the key to all things.”
The Serstine squadron picked it up loud and clear. A thrill went through some of them as they recalled hearing of how MOBY DIKK was laid low with those words being the starting gun. Norte knew the tale well; she’d had a taste for kicking Coronans around after the Mimikoan Jihad, and once Rain was filled in, they had a short conversation.
Short just because they fired through their words that quickly.
“So this message heralds a pretty big fight - perhaps even a properly large battle?” Rain asked, looking out across Tipping Point’s bridge.
“Without question, my lady. Even that hardly started small.“
”And would you say we’re equipped for that kind of fight?”
“What do you think? We’re fully reconstructed and carrying around a lot more than Ragged Edge and her escorts. This is no longer scouting around.”
“For the benefit of the dawnstone. Which we earned, you and I know that.”
“Of course, but if we had to run, you know it’d be easy.”
Rain smirked. “...and if we wanted easy, we would have not gone exploring into the bowels of that forsaken planet.”
“That’s the way things go with us. So, what do you say? Take this as a sign of our imminent rise?”
The smirk turned into a grin as she addressed the helm entire. “Take this as a sign of our imminent rise. Imminent and inevitable, for as long as our Flames burn they grow. Off we go, then! Off to find this signal, a new fight, and great fortune! Lay in the course and let the Boost guide us, and woe to those who won’t get the hell out of our way!”
A cheer went up and Tipping Point skidded in the black as the other ships dutifully followed.
The Serstine were familiar with ROMB. It was a common sight for people operating in the vincinity of the Golden Expanse, after all. But to the flame-driven transhumans, ROMB had always stood out... for representing almost the polar opposite of their society. All bladeships were borderline handcrafted pieces of bespoke architecture, gleaming and boastful in their form let alone their performance. ROMB's ships on the other hand were almost comically cheap, a dearth of valuables for even the most desperate Serstine pirate. Almost entirely built out of titanium foam, powered by the cheapest fusion rockets available in the market and using the lowest-grade hyperfuel; these ships were almost like ubiquitous manatees that congregated near the Golden Expanse, so slow that to the Serstine they seemed perpetually static.
So many corners were cut by ROMB that the circular shape of the facility seemed pretty apt. There was something for the Serstine to admire about ROMB, nevertheless. Democratizing spaceflight, providing the common folk of the galaxy with an on-ramp to the world of speed. The ships produced in ROMB might have been the interstellar equivalent of plastic cups but the facility itself was a spectacle of large-scale engineering and mass manufacture. All its 256 stations rotated around a central brown dwarf in non-Keplerian orbits, revealing that ROMB was not just an array of large satellites... but one solid structure of immense scale, held together by invisible tachyonic scaffolding.
In this mandala-like lattice of installations, components and raw materials were being fired at hundreds of kilometers per second by mass drivers, impact-fusing with each other or docking to be welded together by lasers fired from afar. ROMB was like a ferocious 24/7 shootout between all installations spanning all four million kilometers of ROMB's circumference. Slab metal, finished components and ceramic plates flew out in all directions and somehow formed into starships by the end of the production line that were so freshly-made their welds still glowed a faint orange. A rarefied halo of ancerium trace surrounded the facility like an invisible cloud almost an AU wide, a hint of the sheer ammount of hyperfuel that ROMB burned every second to both maintain its shape and absorb the recoil from its mass drivers.
The whole facility radiated red-hot speed to the Serstine, no matter how unimpressive the individual products were.
Yet ROMB's hypervelocity assembly line posed quite a danger. Under normal circumstances, any ship that had to dock to the facility was required to be remotely flown by ROMB's harbor pilots. Flying anywhere near the assembly line, let alone the stations, without careful guidance from ROMB was a good way to get hit by a bulkhead flying at orbital speeds. But this time there would be no such guidance, it seemed. All they could hear from ROMB's automatic traffic control frequency was jamming, and its control tower was completely silent.
Ironic for such a facility so dangerous to approach, any actual defensive armament was nonexistent. Sometime ago, a financial AI had calculated it was cheaper for ROMB to just regularily wire the local pirates protection payments than to install weaponry, and so the facility had found itself without defenses against people who had not come for money.
Static filled the radars with their ears perked over proverbial mountaintops with the duties of solemnly securing the company assets, a soothing static that trickled in the usual manner of the cosmic background, a kind of ordinary security in the lack of response. Some say that silence speaks sometimes, and this silence speaks of momentary peace between what can be times of great turmoil.
And thus the harbinger of such turmoil spoke to the captivating ears: “Emancipation is the key to all things.” The message went through the head of the listener, what could such a phrase mean? They’d only recently been allowed access into the Ancnet through the usage of the Integrated Networking System, and like a hatchling that first opened his eyes and felt the cold touch of the stethoscope upon their slimy umid chest, they were still getting used to the universe they were just shoved into.
The CES’s newcomer nature hadn’t allowed them to properly establish communications or relations with the nearby titan of production, the legendary ROMB, which had just now gone silent. However, they saw that their IPD system held promise within the galactic scenery, and thus, immediately employed the DeWalte corporation assets to foster their internal and external security. A wise move as even the most neutral of profit-makers can forge enemies with their every step.
These points, added to the fact that the ship where the transmission came from was nearby the company’s assets, made this a more pressing matter than it’d usually be. A small talk with the security detachment that protected the periphery of Campose Verdese created the temporary exploration force, the Nexploradorese Primerose. The detachment was small though well equipped due to suspicions, three ships of the Protetore class with three on-board teams, two Quebradorese and one Piroclasticose, CES made but DeWalte crewed, completely geared with the proper equipment for close-quarters combat.
With a nonchalant send-off, the three ships spun up their Alcubierre drives, using the Signalium gravitational compass to guide them towards their objective, and their images stretched wide and far, snapping away hastily towards the darkness of the stars, only to come back into realspace a few AUs of distance from the ship.
A small chime would indicate a received message, that if played, would first of all, display the introductory logos of the CES, which naturally rises like a construction, and of the DeWalte, in which the De and the Walte close in from either ends of the screen and class at the middle, producing sparks as they do so, and a loud noise like the closing of iron shutters. Next, displays what seems to be an automated message of sorts, it automatically plays out the following message:
“You are entering official Constructive Engineering Solutions Corporation territory, and by extension, Mus’Vanus territory. Identify yourself and state your intentions.”
Then, a short pause occurs, following with another automated message.
“This is security detachment First Explorers, we have intercepted the distress signal sent by this ship and are preparing to take capable measures if no response is given.”
Then, text scrolls by incomprehensibly fast at the Mus’Vanus language, an extensive fineprint that you cannot understand.
In the wast nothingness of the universe, many may find themselves lost, on precipice of death, surrounded by enemies or struggling internally with their own kin, vying for power, money or status, depending on what they value. In such times of struggle, a helping hand never goes underappreciated and forgotten or underappreciated, giving incentive to those of even morally grey hearts to help the needy, be it in search of potential future profitable relationships, moral high ground, testing of their capabilities in the field or simply the thrill of battle. A simple call for help would have gone by SCUM largely ignored in most circumstances, however this one was the exception. Since their arrival in Ancerious, The Council had given their navy orders to scout out their surroundings as much as possible while staying hidden, followed by less cautious steps such as buying information from civilians and sending out smaller scouting flotillas further into the galaxy to determine potential points of interest. One such flotilla, under command of Raok, has found itself in Killian Verge, receiving a rather peculiar call for help; “Emancipation is the key to all things.”. Although most other leaders were forbidden from engaging in any sort of contact with inhabitants of Ancerious for time being, Raok and a few others were given special freedom and leeway to act on their own volition.
A tall dark brown haired human stood next to the captain's chair, overlooking others working in the command bridge. He was uncertain on how important the exact wording was in the signal, or why would emancipation be the key, but he already made up his mind.
„Start up the Xspace drive, set coordinates to the origin of that signal. We will be helping out whoever needs it, and potentially secure some valuable information about this… 'Killian Verge' part of the galaxy.“
Other officers were loosing no time and carried out Raok's orders immeadiately. Although he can be unpredictable at times, his records support the rumors of his alleged bravery and ability to keep calm under pressure, and as such he was respected by his crew.
He however had more to command than just his ship, which was a Fortuna class battlecruiser, the only one currently in the field scouting the galaxy, he also commanded 2 Constant class cruisers and 7 Shiv class corvettes. He hoped this was enough to face whatever could be thrown at him, and if it wasn't that he would at least be able to retreat, no matter how bad it would look in his report. But while he was busy questioning the strength of ships at his disposal, his first officer informed him that everyone is ready to go. Raok nodded to him and sat down in his chair as Xspace drive began doing its work.
To say the Collective is a stranger to the ongoing state of the galaxy at large would be an astute observation, one that wouldn’t take much guessing, if any, given the Collective’s somewhat reclusive nature. Interstellar relations, as of now, have been a secondary concern; aside from trade and the occasional interaction, the Collective has been satisfied with its current amount of mingling, seeing no reason to step in or get further involved in anything just yet; until now, that is. Refraining from speaking with your galactic neighbors is one thing, but ignoring what appears to be a distress call is another thing entirely. The K’than have never been the heroic type of course, but they at least have enough sense to know when and how they should intervene. The message, “Emancipation is the key to all things”, may as well be another bout of gibberish spouted by yet another interstellar polity, but the fact that it’s repeated on a loop for what seems like forever definitely turns some heads. More specifically, the heads of several Collective mining vessels on their way to the Expanse. The small vessels have their own orders, nor are they equipped to respond in any way, and so the message is relayed up and up the chain of command, to their superiors and then over to who they deem best suited for this particular situation. At first the occurrence is looked at with confusion; why the strange, cryptic message? Of course, this initial confusion fades away as more details flow in. ROMB going silent is unexpected, and given that the signal appears to be coming from ROMB or at the very least the area around it, it can’t be a mere coincidence.
A small task force is assembled, consisting of exactly 9 ships; 3 Onset class destroyers, backed by 4 Celerity class corvettes and 2 Kinematic class corvettes. The Onset-A2 “Jel’na” is chosen as the flagship of the small force, with captain Feirdas Multikun at the helm. Multikun is, like the vast majority of Collective military personnel, a bit unsure what to expect. With the Collective lacking any major amount of experience in conducting combat, both on ground and up in space, it presents a possible problem for them if they were to directly engage an opposing force. Despite his concerns however, he remains calm; stick to his training, follow his orders, and surely nothing will go wrong, right?
At least, that is what he tells himself as he treks through the corridors of his vessel, moving as fast as his six legs can safely carry him across the metal flooring. The corvettes were the first to state their readiness, though that was to be expected. The destroyers weren’t far behind, though the fact that they haven’t seen much active use certainly put a damper on things as small problems arose; ammo depots in need of resupply, cursory inspections to make sure the long wait hadn’t left anything in disrepair, et cetera et cetera. Once all of that is done however, and in record time too thanks to the quickness of the maintenance crews out in the hangar, the ships are ready to depart. Thus, we come back to Multikun as he clambers into the bridge, immediately making his way in the direction of his command post, a small, comfortable chair connected directly to the ship’s systems via a lengthy number of connection points and no small amount of wiring. Into the seat he goes, and as he does so one of the bridge personnel turns their head to speak with him. Normally such a thing isn’t necessary; with the hive link between caste members there’s no need for speech. Despite the few seconds wasted by uttering words, its significance is tremendous. Taking the time and slight effort required to directly communicate, especially with a superior officer or elder, is seen as a sign of respect. Thus, it captures Multikun’s full attention as the officer opens their mandibles to speak. The words spoken are in Dreik, the standard language utilized by the Guardian caste, thankfully involving less body language than its Avi’krii counterpart; the lack of excessive motions makes Dreik better suited for the cramped corridors of space travel anyway.
“A2 Jel’na is ready for departure, captain; all systems nominal, all pre-departure checks passed, and the bay handler has given the go-ahead. On your signal.” The officer says, bowing their head slightly before turning back to their station. Multikun nods his approval before sending a message out to the rest of the bridge crew, as well as to the captains of the other, accompanying vessels, this time via their shared link. “All vessels stand ready to depart. Initiate warp drive charging sequences when ready, set coordinates for ROMB, and ready your gunners. We don’t quite know what to expect out there, but if everything goes as planned we’ll all make it back in time to watch the last of the Fufelbyn championships in Pelkya.” This prompts a low, collective chuckle from the rest of the bridge crew as they start to initiate the charging sequence for the vessel’s warp drive. Once the sequence is complete and all ships give the go-ahead to launch, Multikun sends one final message. “All ships, initiate warp; for the Good of the Collective.”
As the Serstine dropped out of FTL, still carrying considerable speed, they beheld ROMB in all of its glory. Their sensors could make out the constant movement of metal objects sprinting on their ballistic trajectories around the dwarf at its center and bursts of light and heat as they collided and were suddenly punted on different trajectories by other propulsive forces. The detection of ancerium around them further pointed out they were in fact approaching the megastation.
There was always a sort of cautious air of superiority a Serstine put on when they approached ROMB. Yes, the assembly lines would be the fastest most of these ships would ever go, but only in this form, as anyone that started with a ship from here, then got a taste for speed would only have up to go, and usually it was a titanium foam core at the heart of whatever modifications got made from this point. Approaching ROMB for Serstine was like approaching a mother holding a newborn - if you wanted to be polite, you did not diss the newborn.
That said, Rain's little task force still showed up with swagger as they started plotting a zigzagging course for the facility. Rather than just scrubbing off speed, they began going on several wide S-turns, coughing thrusters with each swerve as if to signal they were there as clearly as possible.
"Approaching ROMB, my lady," the helm announced. "If we're going to hail them, you should really do it now."
"Of course, I think their pilots will enjoy having something truly capable in their hands." Rain hailed ROMB with a practiced-sounding greeting. "Greetings! This is Rain Elduranda, princess of Clan Elduranda, leader of this task group aboard the Tipping Point. We received your transmission and want to inquire further. If you require us to enter your facilities, now would be the time to make our handoff. Quickly now, if you please..."
...and then there was nothing.
At first, the Serstine thought there had just been some miscommunication. A quick glance between Rain and Norte and then they looked back ahead.
"You sent us quite a message," Rain said, trying not to play all her cards in case someone else was listening in. "It did sound urgent, so we would appreciate a control handoff now."
Still nothing. It took only moments for the silence to become immediately awkward to the cybernetic speed freaks. One of the youngest Serstine on the bridge obligingly cut it with a meek cough.
"We would hate to have to approach ourselves; we know you aren't the biggest fans of unprovoked demonstrations of Bladeship performance! We would rather you had the fun of handling our approach!" Rain caught herself and then turned to Norte. "...did that sound too much like a threat?"
One of Norte's own followers softly added, "...does...does this mean there's no fight here?"
There had to be answers somewhere around there, and Rain decided it had to be in if there was anyone else around. Quick discussion with the guys looking at the sensors readouts led somewhere - they weren't the only ships in the area, and by the look of it they were all on approach and wondering the same thing.
They pinged what had turned out to be the CES, Collective and Orbitrarum task groups with the same short, polite message. "Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
“It is… Enormous. At least compared to what we have seen so far.“ First communications officer commented whilst Raok thought about if he should retreat. They were after all expecting something much smaller, perhaps a few civilian ships under attack by pirates, or perhaps an escape pod transmitting the odd call for help. Instead, they were faced with a giant space station, so massive, intricate and potentially dangerous… But his ever present paranoia regarding the Council has quickly distinguished all thoughts regarding to simply going back. What he was thinking about more than anything right now, was why they weren't seeing any civilian ships around the station, and what purpose could it possibly serve. Perhaps it was an anomaly, something that was in mysterious ways just created, mere minutes ago, waiting for a brave explorer to find it? Or perhaps it was just a recently abandoned shipyard, awaiting scrappers that would tear it down until nothing remained?
Despite going into something without much knoweldge to work with, the crew remained focused on their individual tasks, seemingly not too bothered by the uncertainty of what might happen next. Alas, they were expecting anything, so nothing could truly surprise them. While some were commenting between themselves how it might be very tricky to dock safely without guidance from someone aboard the facility, and others were discussing the best potential course of action, the communications officer spoke to Raok again:
„Captain, multiple ships detected. Intercepting transmission:“
"Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
For a moment, Raok was silent. After all, if others communicated so freely, without hostility or any questions except for 'why is it quiet', it must mean that this facility was probably well known around these parts, and only thing unusual about it is the fact it isn't hailing everyone. Relieved, Raok decided to cooperate with others as much as possible to get to the bottom of this, perhaps something valuable could be achieved if they were willing to cooperate. He leaned forward from his seat and answered to all present ships in his usual relaxed and slightly deep voice:
“Hello, we are also experiencing the same silence. Any idea about what might be going on?“
Everyone on Tipping Point took notice. The Serstine got a reply! From...that was when everyone paused. These people seemed new. No Serstine had ever encountered these figures, so when Rain took charge of this contact, she decided to just be up front about things and ask. She addressed the Collective on what was sure to be an eventful first contact as they got the whole nine yards of the Serstine verbal machine gun.
"Well, isn't it obvious from the - wait. You don't appear to be...ahh, I see now. You look as if our people have never met before, so please allow me the honor of starting from the beginning. Rain Elduranda, heir apparent to Clan Elduranda, scions of Clan Avangard of the Eightfold, of the Serstine, imbued with the Flame and riders of the Holy Boost eternal!" Then there was a pause as if Rain was waiting for applause or someone to utter some noise of approval, and then she continued speaking at breakneck speed.
"If you don't mind me asking, how much do you know of this phrase, 'emancipation is the key to all things?' It's the question and answer to this riddle, and if you are in fact as new to these parts as I assume from a first glance, then I will need to begin at the beginning of this particular tale to..." Then she looked around as if she was losing her train of thought somewhat, or as if she was somehow tracking where the signal that attracted these fleets to ROMB was coming from .
"...peculiar. I had rather imagined the signal was coming from ROMB itself and not some other body that appears to be flitting around at speed somewhere around here. No matter, we can catch up to it all the same.
At any rate! Do you know why this phrase is so important, or would you rather I explained it point blank?"
The conversation between the foreign vessels is, once more, interrupted; energy readings indicative of a group of warp drives can be detected coming from the edge of the system as the Collective vessels under the command of Multikun arrive. 9 ships in total show up on the sensors of those already present, 3 being more than a bit larger than the remaining 6. All are sleek and mostly sandy in color, and definitely a new sight for the combined forces. As soon as the warp sequence is complete and their drives power down, the Collective vessels take note of their surroundings; unfamiliar vessels nearby, and ROMB somewhere up ahead. Multikun decides to hail the other nearby vessels- coincidentally thinking of the action as the Serstine send out their own question.
"Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet."
Multikun casts a glance over to the comms officer of the Jel’na, who nods in turn before opening a line for him to speak through. It’s been some time since he last had to communicate via Common, but thankfully his skill with the language hasn’t degraded all too much.
“This is Captain Multikun, aboard the CNV Jel’na.” He starts, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Would I be right to assume we’re all here for the same reason?” His voice is heavily accented and accompanied by a bit of clacking, almost like a pair of mandibles opening and closing, but it’s nothing that can’t be interpreted, at least.
The Lane Pirate came alongside a Sabre-Class Light Cruiser. Its hull bore the scars of the many battles she must have fought. Patchworks of armoured plating indicating where repairs had been made atop older repairs. It was an old vessel, there were indications she had been retrofitted more than once in her lifetime. Idly, he wondered how much of the original ship was still there. How much could you replace before it became a different ship entirely.
The Lane Pirate matched speed and course with the cruiser. Fred didn’t stay to watch the adjustments, or the extension of the docking tubes. He was here to meet with the man who commanded the Cruiser, and the loyalty of two destroyers and a half dozen missile frigates. He spotted some of them, prowling amongst the scavengers, guarding the prey they ordinarily hunted.
Fearless Fred, was not feeling fearless as the clamps locked into place and he began crossing the bridge between the two vessels. He knew well with whom he was treating, and he knew that the pair of pirates at either shoulder would do little to sway the odds in his favour if Dragovich decided they’d all be better dead.
He reached the docking portal of the cruiser, and after some confirmations of identity and intention over a scratchy intercom he was at last admitted aboard the vessel. The scene beyond was one he always found jarring. Professionalism and discipline were oft foreign concepts to pirates, but in the bay beyond he was greeted by a scene of just that. Dozens of men stood at cheap plastic folding tables, neatly arranged in row after row. Arrayed on each table was the man’s gear. Armored plating was being cleaned, weapons sat in varying states of disassembly, and lock jawed straight backed men in blue berets patrolled up and down the rows watching as each man cleaned his armour and weapon.
Overhead, the tattered flag of a failed revolution from year prior and untold lightyears away hung from the rafters, gently waving as the ship’s climate control pumped recycled air into the bay. When the revolution failed, the men that had carried it put their skills to use elsewhere. Always they spoke of the next revolution, but the next revolution never seemed to come. They were pirates now, whether they’d admit to it or not, just another one of the small disparate outfits that made up Black Sail’s independents. Dragovich, a man colloquially referred to as ‘The Colonel’, lorded over the scene from a catwalk overhead. Blue eyes tracked Fred and his entourage as they entered the bay. He cleared his throat, a man at his side barked a command in a language Fred didn’t speak and at once the men at their tables ceased their activity and a sudden eerie silence took hold.
“Fred,” Dragovich called from the catwalk above. “You look old,”
“And your operation looks lean,” Fred replied.
The man who fancied himself a revolutionary set a steely gaze on Fred. He drummed his fingers on the railing, the only sound amid the oppressive silence. The silence dragged, and when Dragovich didn’t break it, Fred took it upon himself to continue speaking.
“Running security for the scavver union now?”
The drumming stopped.
“The Organization,” The word was spoken the way one might speak a curse. “Has not supplied any useful information of late.”
“Tips go to Captains affiliated with larger outfits,” Fred said. “Small units like yours are a dying breed,”
There was a second lengthy pause. The Colonel leaned on the railing, resting his head in one hand.
“Have you come to tell me things I already know?”
Fred reached into the pocket of his denim vest and pulled his PDA. He tapped at the screen momentarily and the tiny speaker played the recorded message.
‘Emancipation is the key to all things,’
The message looped several times before the recording ended, Dragovich listened attentively at first before he shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it with a neon-green disposable lighter.
“It’s on most of the frequencies,” Fred explained, returning the PDA to its pocket. “Originates near Migayatake,”
“One of the Grim Reaper’s exploits?” Dragovich said.
“Years ago, sure,” Fred said. “She’s got nothing to do with this one as far as I can tell. Disappeared months ago. Her Russian hardcases are still out combing the galaxy looking for her.”
“And what is it you expect me to do with this information?” Dragovich said after a long drag.
“You wanted a tip? I just gave you one.”
The tip of Dragovich’s cigarette flared, and after another lengthy pause, and whispered conversation with the man at his side he finally nodded. The man barked another order and the men at the tables sprung into action. Cleaning was forgotten as rifles wen back together and armour was strapped into place.
“You’ll be my guest today Fearless Fred,” Dragovich said. “If this turns out to be an effort to speed along the death of my… breed then I assure you that I will outlive you. If only for a few minutes. The rooster you helped take that Lane Pirate, will he be accompanying us?”
“Yes,” Fred answered.
“I don’t like him,”
“He’s an arrogant prick,” Fred concurred. “But he is useful,”
“He had better be, for your sake,” Dragovich answered, tossing the remnants of his cigarette off the catwalk and stalking off toward the bridge. A pair of the blue-bereted men appeared and wordlessly escorted Fred after him.
It was some hours later that the ships arrived near the source of the transmission. Strike craft deployed from the Lane Pirate arrived first, the wing of single-seaters surveying the area and patching into local communications… not that there were any to listen to. The arrival of other factions was noted, and after some back and forth an ideal location some distance away from the new faction was chosen, and the rest of the fleet arrived out of subspace.
The light cruiser was at the small formation’s head, the two destroyers to either side of her as she tore a hole into realspace from which she emerged from. The half dozen missile frigates and lone Lane Pirate translated out far to her rear. The strike crafts returning to their mother ship to refuel after their lengthy reconnaissance mission. None of the ships made an effort to hide what they were. The Organization’s skull and crossed rifles were painted neatly on the vessel’s sides, and the IFF they chose to broadcast was one long since identified by the powers that be as being associated with the Black Sail Organization.
Aboard the Sabre-Class, Fred watched Dragovich listen to his crew confirm the reports they’d already been given, and on the advice of Fred he refrained from immediately making ready for battle.
“They pay a lot of people a lot of protection money,” Fred explained taking a cigarette from the crumpled pack Dragovich offered him.
“They don’t pay me,” Dragovich grumbled in reply.
“Not yet,” Fred replied catching the lighter Dragovich tossed and lighting the cigarette. He immediately regretted it, suppressing a cough as he inhaled. Damn thing hit like he was inhaling nails.
“Here,” Dragovich said, handing him the handset for the ship’s communications array. “You are the contract broker. You do the talking.”
He took another harsh drag on the cigarette, exhaled with a sigh, and grasped the communicator, holding the cigarette between two fingers.
“This is…” He paused. Glancing at Dragovich. “What’s this thing called?”
Dragovich shot him a look.
“She’s named Mercurial Kite,” He growled.
“This is Mercurial Kite-actual responding to received… distress signal. Is the nature of the distress currently understood?”
“Very professional sounding,” Dragovich commented. “You make me sound like a blood sucking capitalist lea-…”
He released the handset’s ‘transmit’ button before the rest of Dragovich’s expletives could go out over the broadcast.
Raok patiently listened to the Serestine talking, trying to understand the situation as best he could, while occasionally making sure that everything sent to them was recorded and saved for later review, if needed. Everyone else in the room made sure to be as quiet as possible to let Raok think clearly, which he has never ordered them to do, but he liked that they were doing it nonetheless. He has never had the best of opinions about religions, as he thought that they clouded one's mind, made them act with too many prejudices, presumptions, without thinking about the situation rationally. He was unpleasantly surprised at the apparent existence of religion that Serestines could follow, but in the end, it didn't matter too much to him, as he can overlook such things in order to cooperate better with everyone. First of all, he would need to introduce himself to Rain and get more details before proceeding to investigate further. After thinking about what to tell her, and if he should use his real name, he decided he didn't care so he replied back to Rain:
„It's a pleasure to meet you, Rain Elduranda, let me introduce myself; my name is Raok, I am the highest ranking officer in this small flotilla, and as such I am in charge of things around here. We happened to be nearby when we received this unusual message, so we decided to investigate. We indeed do not know what the phrase 'emancipation is the key to all things' means, as we are new to this part of the galaxy, and I am afraid that we on general lack information about everything that's going on around here. So it would be helpful if you could provide us with some more details about what exactly are we looking at here, we would appreciate it.-“
Just as he was about to say something more, his communications officer drew his attention to the fact that other vessels are communicating with them too. Raok mutes himself on the comms in order to listen to what the others had to say:
“Would I be right to assume we’re all here for the same reason?”
Once again, just as he is about to answer, Raok misses his chance, because of yet another transmission coming in and interrupting him:
“This is Mercurial Kite-actual responding to received… distress signal. Is the nature of the distress currently understood?” The voice could be heard clearly, but not even a moment after, another voice, which was slightly harder to hear, makes their existence known:
“Very professional sounding. You make me sound like a blood sucking capitalist lea-…”
Upon this, Raok giggled to himself. It seems that more people were arriving, and some of them seemed grumpy.
„The transmission was cut off there, sir.“ His communications officer said.
„I am unsure about the customs in this galaxy, but I would dare to say those look like pirates to me.“ Raok pointed to a nearby monitor, where the newly arrived vessels were displayed.
„Because skulls and guns are universally used by pirates. However, they don't seem to be immediately hostile, so they might be of help.“
Raok proceeded to unmute himself and sent another message, just to Rain:
„I am not assuming anything, but those distinctly remind me of pirates where I come from. Can we trust them?“
After he finished, he finally decided to answer Multikun's question:
„If you are here because of the message, then yes, we are here for the same reason.“
He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, waiting on someone to talk as he commented under his breath on the fact that amount of talking he is doing is slightly irritating.
Rain threw her hands out wide. "Emancipation is the key to all things!" Then her attention was directed to the Mercurial Kite, and she looked at them after cross-chatter confirmed they were in fact all there because they responded to the same call. She wordlessly looked at the ship as they all convened over comms, and then listened in on these men flying the pirate colors apparently excusing themselves to have a spat over comms or something. Satisfied that she'd waited long enough after a moment of polite silence, she then started over, same pose and everything.
"Emancipation is the key to all things! These were the words that started off a recent naval battle that scorched itself into history that my people, sadly, missed out on." She started dramatically pacing around as she told a much abridged version of the tale. "On that day, the Third Corona Republic's mighty MOBY DIKK was slain," she said, yelling 'MOBY DIKK' to try to emphasize those were capital letters, and pronouncing each 'k' like a cough just to attempt to say it all the way it was all spelled, "...at the hands of fleets summoned by Abelcain Tulcazar. He sought to break the chains of some of those under the Corona yoke, and with the end of that massive sphere of might, escape was brokered by this temporary alliance.
This is the call! Those words mean battle, and honor for those who fight! It's just..." She then faltered as she realized a few things - there was no briefing, no intel, no other information other than 'hey, there's gonna be a fight to set somebody free, preferably actually free and not the metaphorical freedom of killing them and going whoops, my bad.' "...just...well, come to think of it, there are a lot of things we seem to be missing. If it helps, we could pinpoint the origin of this signal, since it doesn't appear to be ROMB itself. It's just that, to put it delicately, usually when a call like this is put out, it means there's an enemy to fight somewhere. So...do you see one?"
Yamakaze Atoll
Voynych Datacenter
Killian Verge
“I am contacting Abelcain.” Martin Demolder said without a second of hesitation. He called his pilot to reroute the private jet to the nearest spaceport.
“No, no, you can’t do that!” Katarzyna said from the ROMB yacht lightyears away, desperate to keep Demolder on the phone. “Listen to me, Mr Demolder. We’ve seen Abelcain’s forces operate. They’re not professionals, it’s a political militia that’s inexperienced and way too eager to get in a fight. They’re not prepared for this kind of mission, they’ll wreck ROMB!”
“My obligation to ensure the safety of my agent supersedes my want to keep ROMB intact, especially as you clearly did not take any measures to keep intruders away.”
“Your agent is still aboard ROMB!” Truth to be told Katarzyna had no idea if that was true or not. All hell had broken loose before she’d managed to meet up with Ariadne. She just assumed Ariadne was still on the station they were going to meet her at, and blindly hoped to be right. “We have personnel on the way, we can get this under control by ourselves without having to get OMPAF involved, that is way too dangerous for your asset as well as mine. The Nashimara Corporation owns some of our equity, you shouldn’t be endangering the investment of a member of the Rangvald Cartel!”
“I am not talking to you in the name of the Cartel.” Demolder cut off the ROMB chief technical officer with his eerie, inhuman monotone. “Anything I say and any action I take is to be considered solely to represent the interests and obligation of the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, nothing more. Nashimara does not own a significant stake in ROMB, I will compensate them for damages.”
“Your agent will be at risk if you just unleash OMPAF thugs on the station against a sophisticated enemy, regardless of who wins.” Katarzyna stood firm, occasionally looking over her shoulder to see where her husband and Brozowski were doing in the conference hall. They’d sent their SOS transmission to loop and were looking for any answerers while Katarzyna remained on her highly-encrypted call with Voynych.
“As someone who operates in such a vital area of interstellar traffic, you should have been able to guarantee the safety of flights docking at your station.”
“With all due respect, you did not guarantee the safety of your agent either. We’ve been sending a distress call for fifteen minutes now and your own security is nowhere to be seen. You sent an unescorted VIP and provided no warning that we’d need to heighten security.”
Benedykt and Brzozowski heard Katarzyna raise the tone of her voice and huddled closer to her, frantically shaking their heads and gesturing for her to calm down. A chill went up the CTO’s spine as for a moment she believed Martin Demolder, high-ranking executive of S&VF, had hung up.
She managed to faintly hear the chime of the private jet’s intercoms and breathed a sign of relief. He hadn’t hung up, he was thinking. That meant that she hadn’t immediately screwed up, at least.
Were Demolder capable of emotion, the faintest grimace of frustration would have shown in his face as his eyes scanned the tablet. She had a point. Not because he hadn’t thought of providing protection to Ariadne… but because his plan had gone wrong without him knowing. A cyberattack directed at an air traffic control station had caused the escort’s departure to be canceled and nobody was sent in to replace them. Ariadne’s yacht had simply continued on without any escorts and word never got to other security contractors to dispatch their own escorts.
Worse yet, Demolder had not been privy to any of this before it was too late. When he looked at it, it seemed obvious. Unexpected traffic control disturbances, missing calls between the office that arranged Ariadne’s flight, mysterious network issues in his own office, they were all telltale signs that the groundwork for a professional covert operation was being prepared. When viewed all listed out like that in his tablet it was obvious, but when it was actually going down all of these clues had been buried under the million other things Demolder had had to keep up track of.
Someone should have been there to make him aware of it. The fact that none of his subordinates had managed to get this signal from the noise undisposed Demolder. A job as professional as this could only come from a few places in the galaxy.
Whoever it was that was attacking, it had to be linked to Orillia.
“Call me again when your security arrives, I will dispatch staff immediately.” Demolder said. None of the Cartel’s ships were anywhere near ROMB… and given what Ariadne knew, he didn’t know if calling on the Cartel would be a better idea than simply trusting ROMB’s executives. Certainly better than getting Abelcain to deal with the matter, he’d be happy to just blow up the entire station and extract the data from Ariadne’s corpse. Demolder would still get paid but… Ariadne was his employee, after all. And a stellar one at that.
Sometimes talent retention is more important than operating income.
It sounded too much like an emotional rationalization. Left a bad taste in Demolder’s mouth.
“I want updates every ten minutes, Mrs. Szafranska.” He added.
“I can do that, thank you Mr. Demolder.” Katarzyna remained calm, professional and collected on the phone but couldn’t stop herself from silently pumping her fist. The others cheered quietly with her, knowing they’d bought time before Abelcain learned of this. Truth to be told they could care less about whether Ariadne lived or died and ROMB was generously insured… but Abelcain Tulcazar’s favor was too valuable to lose. He had massive contracts signed with ROMB for the production of a fleet of OMPAF warships, marking the first time Aedelshaven would take to the stars since the Uprising Incident.
“Mr. Defacqz.” Demolder hung up and addressed his secretary who was also flying with him. “I need you to board a flight to Mr. Schweitzer and Mr. Valida’s offices. Meet their staff in person, assume that every line is bugged.”
“Yes, sir.” The secretary nodded as the business jet banked towards its destination.
Demolder drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat, trying to think of a course of action. Unlike everyone else involved, he knew exactly why the situation was the way it was and what was at stake. He’d been the overseer at Voynych and this had been his first major assignment.
Voynych was a datacenter world, a frigid planet covered in seas of methane and ethane in which stood huge clusters of arcology-sized servers. It was the crown jewel of the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation, a facility for which no expense had been spared and which required a constant influx of highly-refined dawnstone to work. It helped the Foundation in processing massive amounts of data, which came in useful for advising and planning thousands upon thousands of electoral campaigns and surveys across the galaxy. Voynych was the Foundation’s brain.
The facility had most famously been used to strategize and run the virtual operation of the “Nuxit” referendum campaign. It had been this campaign that had put S&VF on the map, dealing what many considered to be the single biggest strategic blow to a colonial nation ever since the end of the war without spilling any blood by causing one of their subjugated colonies to vote for independence. This had gotten them in the good graces of some important players, specifically Abelcain Tulcazar, leader of the Aedelshaven autonomist front known as OMPAF.
The mission Abelcain had given them was no common job. It wasn’t to parse through a database or astroturf support for a political campaign. It had been to intercept and decrypt state-level communications between important powers in the galaxy. Specifically, Orillia and the High Imperium. Despite presenting itself as an anti-colonial bastion, Orillia was already laying the groundwork to sanitize the High Imperium’s image in front of the unaligned, before the billion bodies of those killed by the High Imperium and their warlords were even cold. For Abelcain, who was seeking to wrest leadership of the unaligned movement away from Orillia, such information was a propaganda bombshell waiting to happen.
This information was too important to send over a long-range channel, no matter how secure it seemed, and so Ariadne was personally sent to deliver it. Much like Voynych was the crowning jewel of the Foundation, Ariadne was the crowning jewel of Voynych. But none of his assets where anywhere near to help.
ROMB Traffic Control Tower
Życzyn System
Killian Verge
“ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.
ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.
ROMB ATC, ROMB ATC, please respond.”
Ventilators struggled to move around the massive miasma of cigarette smoke that had built up in the control tower of ROMB. On any day the traffic controllers were already heavy smokers, as the nicotine-caked yellowish walls of the room could attest, but the emergency situation had made them all double down on it. Before barricading themselves in the control tower, the staff had managed to rescue a large number of coffee machines and several tubs of tobacco from a rec room downstairs. The controllers now burned through a seemingly-endless supply of papirosas, keeping their own SOS transmissions on a loop while tracking Brzozowski’s yacht as it sped away from ROMB.
“9 more ships just arrived.” A traffic control dispatcher twirled his pen between his fingers, informing the team manager of the newly-arrived BSO ships. “37 total so far.”
“Looks like the corpos’ call for help worked.” The team manager sipped on some coffee, observing the active channels on the communications network and finding all of them were being jammed. “Who are these ones from?”
“Transponder shows Black Sail Organization.”
Contact with ROMB’s outer ring of radar satellites had been lost, so the control tower was forced to use their own radar with its significant blind spots and low refresh rate. Not that it made much of a difference, as whoever had assaulted ROMB had done it so stealthily enough that the traffic control radars had not detected them before it was too late.
“Fuck. You think they’re here for the spoils?”
“Doesn’t look like it, looks like they’re with the others. Might be pinging us but the whole channel is jammed.”
“Let's hope the corpos work it out with them then.”
Most of the controllers had spent the last few minutes trying to get in contact with the other area control centers of ROMB to no avail. As the facility was still working, their radars were almost useless as they constantly had hundreds of thousands of objects flying back and forth in front of the antennae. Normally it wouldn’t be a problem with the ring of satellites providing coverage, but now that they had gone offline they had no alternative. But why was the production line still working? ROMB had many emergency shutoff systems that could stop the line after any problems, had no one thought of activating them? What exactly was being built? The controllers wondered, trying to radio the engineering stations to tell them to shut off the line or ringing various emergency lines all over ROMB to try and talk to someone. So far, nobody was answering.
RS Przypływ
Życzyn System
Killian Verge
The executives’ yacht coasted across the vacuum, its engines turned off to save fuel and listening for anyone who’d reply to their SOS signal. Katarzyna was in one of the conference rooms, her husband with her as they attempted to call up on other contacts. Brzozowski, the CEO, had made his way to the cockpit of the aircraft to get updates from his pilots. The luxury craft had detected multiple signatures of FTL arrivals on the system, although it lacked the sensor resolution to know who was out there. Some of the IFF codes were recognized by the yacht, some others not. They could only hope that the new arrivals weren’t ROMB’s hijackers bringing in reinforcements, but the fact that they seemed to be from a lot of different nations gave them a good bit of hope.
The assortment of military warships from several nations had arrived close to the interdiction zone that was radiating from ROMB, spanning over 1AU in radius. The yacht was three quarters of the way out of this zone and changed its direction to exit the interdiction closer to the new arrivals.
Soon the CEO got what he was hoping for, a transmission from a friendly-appearing ship.
"Greetings! This is Rain Elduranda, princess of Clan Elduranda, leader of this task group aboard the Tipping Point. We received your transmission and want to inquire further. If you require us to enter your facilities, now would be the time to make our handoff. Quickly now, if you please..."
‘Hello! Would anyone here happen to be experiencing the same silence we are? This facility seems to be unusually...quiet.’
Brzozowski hesitated for a moment when he was handed the headset by one of the pilots, not knowing whether to introduce himself by his ROMB corporate title (which could attract some unwanted attention from OMPAF) or by his alternate title as a minister of the Republika Strzalka. After a second, he decided to keep things vague.
“Foreign ships, this is Kacper Brzozowski of the Republika Strzalka onboard civilian ship RS Przypływ. I work at ROMB. I am with Chief Technical Officer Katarzyna Szafranska and Strzalkan Minister of Education Benedykt Hermaszewski as well as a dozen individuals from the executive staff.” He said, waving for Benedykt to come near him with haste. “We have a major emergency: ROMB has been boarded by unknown assailants and might have taken hostages; we managed to escape at the last minute but it appears that nobody else made it out. The assailants have interdicted the whole system and have jammed communications, we haven’t been able to get in contact with the control tower or any personnel still onboard ROMB. I am the one who made the distress call... and as for CES, I believe you are either lost or sending an erroneous message. This territory is property of ROMB and by extension the Republika Strzalka”
Fred listened as the other factions present sent various messages back and forth, acknowledging each other’s presences and sharing in a mutual misunderstanding of why exactly it was they had been summoned. At first it seemed to Fred only the woman (Serstine if her recognized the ships correctly) seemed to have an idea why the signal had gone out. The Organization only received audio, and so the dramatic poses were lost on them as the Serstine woman rattled off information about MOBY DIKK and Ablecain Tulcazar in grandiose tones. It seemed very much that she was the person running the show, until rather abruptly her tone faltered and she admitted (amidst the audible groans of the bridge crew and a bemused grunt from Dragovich) that she didn’t actually know any more than the rest of them did.
Dragovich folded his arms across his chest and chuckled as the groaning died off.
“Well Fred, do you see any enemies? Captain Ahab perhaps? Or a floating coffin covered in tribal scratching?”
Fred glared at Dragovich, earning another rumbling chuckle from the failed revolutionary.
“You take me to all the nicest places Fred,”
Fred rolled his eyes and was about to click the communicator back on to report they had no hostile signatures on their sensors when communications officer reported a new incoming message. After a few seconds of listening to Brzozowski, Fred was at least somewhat relieved to learn that the Brzozowski was with someone who did actually know what was happening.
“Big shipyard boarded by assailants in need of counter boarding action,” Fred said glancing at Dragovich over the rims of his sunglasses. “Sound like the kind of thing you could help with?”
“Usually I’m the one creating the hostage situations, not resolving them,” Dragovich answered with a shrug. “But I am for hire. And if they pay me too little I’m sure I can find something to make up the difference aboard that big fancy station of theirs,”
Fred took another unpleasant drag on Dragovich’s cheap cigarette and pressed down on the transmit button.
“Mercurial Kite-actual, we copy your last Brzozowski. It seems to me that you find yourself in need of fighting men and women who specialize in boarding actions. Fortunately for you I happen to have an abundance of such. Provided of course we receive adequate compensation for our efforts. So which of your execs and ministers is the one to talk to about fees and expenses?”
Everyone's eyes narrowed on the bridge of the Tipping Point as they considered the short, and rather impromptu-feeling, briefing. Rain and Norte debated very briefly on what the best course of action was. Certainly their instinct was "go for it" but they just had to figure out how.
"Quite a bit different than the last place, that much I know," Rain said.
"Right. The last fight was on a planet, then underground, and this is probably going to be vacuum," Norte replied.
"Not much room to move, that could be a problem..."
"Hallways, corridors, and jumping from point to point in the black. I think that should offset the problem a little."
A smile crossed Rain's face. "Justice for your Nortenas?"
That same smile crossed Norte's. "Someone needs to see what we can really do."
Rain nodded. "RS Przyplyw and those aboard, we accept this call. Getting aboard a place such as this, with its running assembly mechanisms shooting starship parts around at most pleasing speeds sounds like something we can help with. Your unknown assailants' unwillingness to reach out and lash out at us does at least tell me they are not touched by the Boost in some way or otherwise...aren't much for speed," she said, slowing down as she said the last part, like the very idea was alien to her and she was being delicate about it.
New to spacefaring, it was only evident and this would happen. However, he didn’t expect it to happen to him, it could have been anyone’s FTL drive, could have been one of the higher ups or another exploration fleet, but it had to be of his particular fleet that came with some kind of defect. He sent the mechanics of the ships promptly to repair the FTL drives, and the engineers to figure out the problem with them, however, the matter of public humiliation was in his hands only.
“Cut the standard message model, change it to the live feed, I’ll have to save our fleet from disgrace.” - Teciron said, a 30 year old lizardman, with only three years in the role of captain of his own small detachment of security employed by the CES through the DeWalte company. He rumbled interiorly as an expression of a disgrace that’d surely be represented later in a formal complaint, but for now, he had other more important business to attend. He grabbed a small microphone from the control panel of the bridge and elevated it to his mouth, speaking in Musavian Script which was translated into the galactic common of Ancerious.
“I beg your pardon for my erroneous message, Kacper. It appears that this security detachment is in possession of faulty FTL devices, which prevented the correct triangulation of our destination and thus led me to my erroneous assumption of the proximity of the distress signal. I am Teciron, in representation of the Construct Engineering Solutions corporation, here as a security detachment on the matters of border security, which seem to not be the concern anymore.”
His hand let go of the comms button on the microphone, breathing momentarily a sigh of annoyance and grasping the microphone harder, bravely winning a small fight against his muscles which yearned for him to throw the device onto the ground with tremendous fury over the injury of his pride. After a small moment of inner contemplation, he continued.
“However, we are here nonetheless. We will take on the task of finding the source of the interdiction and try to disable the device generating it, in hopes of future cooperation between the ROMB and the CES. If you follow the direction on which we came, a short FTL jump of no more than 1/8th galactic radii will lead you to CES territory, where you can take temporary shelter.”
He finally let go of the microphone at last, with little concern to the reply on the other end, and put it back into the control panel. Next, he issued the order for the teams within the ship to prepare themselves for potential conflict ahead, and commanded the security detachment to advance towards the ROMB on a triangular formation.
The stream of standard fuel flooded into the many hexagonal engines at the back of the ship, as they flared a wild blue and rocked the ship forwards, accelerating into the enormous factory ahead. Inside, the security teams geared up with their basic exoskeletons, suits for space operations, and in the case of the Piroclasticose, large and bulky suits made to resist the high temperatures that their weaponry generated.
Rain and Norte watched with bemusement, as did the others in their fleet, as the CES forces floored it. They watched with the same sort of level of idle entertainment as being surprised by watching a dog suddenly take off after a frisbee.
Norte whistled. It was always fun to her to see non-Serstine sort of Serstine, by rushing off with a trail of fire behind them as they sprinted towards ROMB. "Well, look at them go, these newcomers or whatevers we've just never met before" she said, Rain simply nodding. A moment passed before something occurred to them both. "My lady, do you think we should...you know..." Norte then gestured with her gauntlet as if describing a ship flying around, then drew lines in the air with her other hand using her index finger, making her big hand dodge the lines before putting her hands together and then popping them away from one another to imitate an explosion, a little noise from her lips as a punctuation mark.
"Norte, what are you..." Rain saw Norte make the explosion gesture. "Oh! We really must, now that you mention it. Now then, how to take care of this...oh. I know!" She started issuing orders to the rest of her ships, starting with a couple of Chanter-class destroyers. "Verge, Fine Line, I'm ordering you to follow our new friends and make sure they don't get run over by any ship parts. Go! You need to catch up! This will be one very short engagement for them if you delay!"
Right after she said that, the two destroyers, hatchetlike in shape with the "heads" chock full of weapons and the "shafts" bristling with thrusters, fired their engines and sprinted off after the CES craft in a pair of overstated plasma fireballs. She hailed them to make sure they wouldn't panic or something.
"You seem to be new, so I'd like to tell you a bit about ROMB," she said. "Speed bleeds off this place like the tail of a comet! The only people who do not have station pilots steer them to safe port are...well, us. Accept my escorts and watch yourselves, or the penalty for not paying attention might be a very messy death at the hands of a ship-to-be!"
The rest of the fleet started following Tipping Point as they started following far behind, just in case trouble was going to strike, acting like concerned parents letting their child to a new park for the first time.
“We have a major emergency: ROMB has been boarded by unknown assailants and might have taken hostages; we managed to escape at the last minute but it appears that nobody else made it out…”
Finally, some action it would be best to coordinate with the others, get a map of ROMB from executives before they go,-
“The assailants have interdicted the whole system and have jammed communications, we haven’t been able to get in contact with the control tower or any personnel still onboard ROMB. I am the one who made the distress call…” Raok made a mental note of the message but kept on thinking
...dock everywhere at once and designate each portion of ROMB to one of the teams, that way covering as much ground as possible and as fast as possible. Of course, they will have to focus on various security stations that likely exist on board, find a way to disable comms jammers to make it easier to coordinate and communicate information, perhaps they could get information on where all of the survivors would be located-
“Sir, CES and Serestines are heading towards ROMB!”
”What are those fools doing?”
Raok was annoyed by the lack of patience and planning. Of course, speed was important, but momentary advantage would always lose out to the benefits of planning in advance, but now he had no choice. He stood up and started giving out orders:
“Send the Shiv-Classes after them, if we try to dock with the cruisers we would probably get torn to pieces. Tell the men on board to prepare for boarding ROMB, we have a possible hostage situation. We also don’t know how the attackers took ROMB, it is possible that they have concealed ships nearby, so get our cruisers scanning for them. Don’t commit everything we have… yet.”
With that, 3 corvettes set their course for ROMB, going as fast as they needed to stay right behind Serestines and CES at all times.
While his subordinates were busy, he once again turned on the voice recorder and grinned as he contacted Serestines and CES;
“While it would have been wiser to prepare before taking action, don’t think you can have all the fun for yourselves. I am sending 3 ships to join you. Assistance with their navigation would be welcome.”
Admittedly, Raok probably could have gone in himself, he missed those older days of adventuring on missions, discovering the horrors and the wonders of the galaxy and making a name for himself. But alas, he had another plan. If he was to send in all of his fleet, he would risk damaging them all, and with the Council already looking for excuses to put him out of action, at least for a few weeks, he didn’t intend to give them his damaged ships on a silver plate, only for them to point out he can’t leave until they are all repaired.
Raok’s communications officer, wanting to do some good, decided to take initiative and contact RS Przypływ, sending them a simple transmission stating that they have come here to help, and request blueprints or some sort of map to help them navigate ROMB, as well as any additional information that could aid them in their mission.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny
Killian Verge
The group of escapees had by now spent the last hours running back and forth, frantically searching for a way out and finding nothing but dead ends. The station had gone into a partial lockdown, isolating a lot of the decks from each other but keeping the production line going for some reason. Despite stumbling upon and operating the emergency stoppages scattered around the station, the workers couldn’t get the lines to stop. The gunshots had stopped, now an eerie silence and the faraway buzzing of ROMB’s equipment was all that could be heard alongside the footsteps of the large group of workers.
Ariadne was not taking it well. She’d never been very athletic, and the cramped confines of ROMB were not a good place to be a large-winged DAMSEL, especially not one that was in a hurry. She could tell she was being a burden to the group of Strzalan workers, they’d probably already have evacuated if it weren’t because of her getting repeatedly winded.
The original plan was to make it to the emergency shuttle hangar and follow the drills to get out of the station. But whoever had boarded the station had clearly anticipated this; the evacuation hangars had been seized according to a small group of survivors Ariadne’s crowd came across.
“They rounded up the fire crew and EMTs.” A worker told the leader of the group. “It’s not safe anymore.”
“What are they like? Who the hell is it?” The foreman, who’d become the defacto leader of the group of evacuees asked the shuttle bay escapees.
“I don’t know, sir.” The worker replied. “I couldn’t look at them, they had some weird shit over their faces. Didn’t talk to us at all, just handcuffed everyone.”
“Are there any other shuttles that we can take to escape?” Ariadne asked, undoing her tie and catching her breath. As it turned out there had been a silver lining to her dragging the group down; they’d been too slow to get to the hangar in time to get ambushed.
“In the engineering bay, there are some pods undergoing maintenance.” The worker replied.
With much haste, the group of survivors made their way to a maintenance hangar where a passenger pod had been undergoing routine inspections before ROMB had been attacked. As the mysterious attackers had somehow left the production chain locked online, the rail and ejector system of the hangar was still working. They put on safety equipment and boarded the pod as it was rolled to one of the launch ramps and held onto their seats, knowing that the launch would be a bit rough. The same mass drivers that ROMB used to launch starship parts and unfinished hulls were also used to fling passengers from one station to the other, to the Strzalans the roller coaster-like acceleration of the system came natural but to Ariadne it was quite unpleasant. The DAMSEL’s large wings didn’t let her strap into the safety seats of the transport pod, she’d tried to hold onto a handle but the acceleration of the launch took her by surprise, making her lose her grip and tumble to the back of the pod, smacking into the seats and railings on the way. She was saved from smacking against the rear bulkhead by the Strzalan foreman, who grabbed her with impressive strength.
“Hold on!” He said. “Are you good?”
“Yes, thank you.” Ariadne nodded with hesitation. The whole experience was awful, so far she’d felt like a bumbling burden and it didn’t seem to be getting better regardless of how much she exerted herself. She clung to the man for the duration of the acceleration until the pod shot out of ROMB 91’s mass driver. From then on, they were in zero gravity, where both Ariadne and the Strzalans were much more comfortable.
They were now on their way to ROMB 44 several thousand kilometers away. The tension was in the air, none of the escapees had any idea if ROMB 44 was safer than ROMB 91. But it was better than staying in the other station waiting to be found; at least ROMB 44 had a larger dock where multiple long-range starships were stored, giving them the opportunity to escape the shipyard. For now, at least there were a few minutes of weightless respite before the shuttle pod started decelerating to dock with ROMB 44, giving everyone onboard the cramped craft some time to start patching up their bruises and cuts with first aid kits. Among the wounded was Ariadne, who had sprained her wrist during the acceleration phase.
“Listen, I’m really sorry about everything.” Ariadne winced while the foreman bandaged her wrist. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, I have no idea what’s going on or why these people are after me. I feel like I’ve caused this and really want to do my part helping us get out of here.”
“The best way you got to help us is to stick with us and keep up.” Ariadne’s caretaker replied, immobilising her hand with bandages. Truth to be told many of the other workers just wanted to hand her over to the hijackers and save themselves, but he didn’t know what other demands the hijackers might come up with then. “Put on a safety harness and some PPE, stop shouting so much, take a few slow deep breaths. That’s how you can help me right now.”
“Understood.” Ariadne replied, doing as ordered and then seeking solance with a cigarette.
“B-boss!” Another of the crewmen quickly waved to get the foreman’s attention. “Look at this thing on external! What the hell is that?”
The Strzalan workers quickly gathered around one of the shuttle pod’s MFDs to take a look at what the external camera had picked up. Among all the junk and half-finished hullforms that the shuttle pod was flying through, there was an enormous object that gracefully floated in between the tachyonic streams of ROMB.
It was a frigate-sized ship without any discernable features, in the shape of an elongated octahedron. No markings or paint, it looked instead like it was made of a transparent glass surface that was softly simmering, letting out a ghostly cloud. Every once in a while, ripples in this boiling liquid mirror spread over the surface of the octahedron, revealing its vanta black undersurface. There were no visible engines but distortions in the cloud of vapor that built up around it showed that it was using an electrogravitic engine to hold position and avoid perturbing ROMB’s stream of ship parts.
“What in the world IS that?” The foreman stared at the MFD screen. The camera onboard the pod tracked this strange UFO as they flew past it. The whole crew of the pod held their breaths instinctively and remained in complete silence. They desperately hoped that the shuttle pod was blending in with the thousands of other similarly-sized objects flying back and forth in ROMB, and that the UFO had not noticed them.
“Th-that’s some Nakai artifact!” One of the Strzalans said in a dumbfounded tone. Nobody had seen anything like that before, which was saying a lot as Strzalans lived to crew starships.
“No way, it’s a Panopticon ship!”
“It’s a fucking psychic construct!”
“That’s halostone.” Ariadne intervened, trying to nudge her way closer to the screen. “Whatever it is it’s covered in halostone.”
“How’d you know?” The foreman asked, surprised Ariadne of all people seemed familiar.
“We use the stuff in my workplace.” Ariadne replied. Her eyes were fixed on the MFD screen, pupils dilated, demiorganic brain taking in as much information as it could from every pixel in the camera feed. She reached into her pocket to pull a hankerchief with which she wiped the MFD, removing some dust to get as much detail as possible. “But… I’d never seen SO much of it.”
“Jesus, that must be like a billion in halostone on that thing.” The foreman ran a hand through his balding head, whistling in amazement at what had to be the most expensive starship that ever visited ROMB, slowly floating among the streams. “Looks like they want to outdo your jewelry.” He said, patting Ariadne’s shoulder.
“What a moment to feel underdressed.” Ariadne snickered, somewhat relieved by the joke. Good, it meant she was being useful for once. But she remained concentrated, taking in as much information from the fairly low-quality feed. As they got further away from the UFO, which appeared to not have noticed them, the craft became impossible to discern from the background.
“Look, look.” Ariadne pointed out at a handful of pixels near the corner. “It just passed through the assembly line.”
“He must be feeling daring.” The foreman pointed out. “There’s millions of nuts, bolts and parts being flung around by the accelerators at very high speed. He’s lucky he didn’t get smacked with some engine parts or a pallet of toilets.”
Ariadne shook her head. “No, there are gaps in the assembly line for them to fly through safely.”
“Must mean that they have complete control of the assembly line then.” The foreman said, crossing his arms. “And they’re building many smaller ships rather than a few large ones.”
“If we can figure out how many gaps there are in the assembly line, we could calculate how many UFOs there are and where they are. From the gaps I’m seeing right now there must be at least two more.”
There was a moment of silence as the whole crew looked at Ariadne, pretty impressed she’d managed to discern the gaps in the production line from the grainy mess of pixels that was on the screen.
“Maybe you’re not so bad.”
ROMB Control Tower
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The tower controllers had also noticed the strange gaps that had been created in the assembly line. Upon trying to get a closer look with the tower’s telescopes, they had only just barely noticed the shimmering outline of two more UFOs patrolling the assembly line. The radar screens were completely clear even when the controllers manually pointed the antenna directly at the strange geometric objects; laser rangefinders also failed to get any returns from the UFOs. Only the telescopes could catch glimpses of the UFOs when they were at the right angle.
“ROMB control tower, ROMB control tower, unknown ship please identify yourselves.” One of the controllers repeated the call which had almost become a mantra by now.
“I don’t think they’re answering.” another controller replied, lighting a new cigarette shortly after putting out the previous one on the large pile of cigarette butts that was building up where the ashtray had once been. “We can barely detect them at all, we’ve been trying all combinations of lidar modes and it’s totally zeroed out.”
Suddenly another ship flew right in front of the control tower, taking all of its staff by surprise. It looked almost like the complete opposite of the elegant and mysterious-looking UFOs. This ship was a chaotic-looking amalgam of reactors, radiators, bulkheads and mass drivers mashed together into an object without any discernible front or back, top or bottom.
“What the hell is that piece of shit?” The chief controller squinted, looking out the window as the blocky-looking amalgam adjusted its path with RCS thrusters. “How did our sensors possibly miss that thing coming in?”
“It didn’t come from the outside, it came from ROMB 90.” A controller said with an increasingly concerned tone. All around the control tower, more and more of these amalgams came into view, floating off and assembling into formations. The UFO they had been tracking disappeared behind one of these shapeless hulks. “That’s the finishing station!”
“That means…” The chief controller stammered. By now the radar was saturated with returns from these amalgams, there had to be over a hundred of them.
“The assembly line is not in standby!” A collective gasp went through the control tower as they realized what was going on. “They’re making us build warships! ROMB is building warships!”
“Brzezinski, Kowalski, with me.” The chief controller gestured to two of his burliest men, who promptly took off their headsets and left their stations. “We have to stop the assembly line at all cost. Let’s smash ROMB 90 with an escape pod, that should slow them down. The rest of you keep trying to contact the ships that just arrived and the other stations, this is urgent!”
Yet as soon as the control tower staff had prepared themselves for their daring operation to shut down the manufacture, the barricaded door of the control room blew open with a deafening blast. Before anyone could react, two stun grenades rolled into the room and blew up, blinding all inside and sending all the controllers scurrying for cover under their desks. For a few seconds the only thing the dazed controllers could feel was the stinging chemical smell left over by the grenade’s detonators, and when the tinnitus wore off they felt the clattering of boots.
An unknown group had blasted into the control tower, and immediately those who looked up at them knew they were the same people who’d brought the mysterious invisible ships to ROMB. They were just as inexcrutable as the ships; all that could be guessed about these intruders was that they were human. Beyond that none of their features could be discerned as they wore holographic cloaks that blurred and censored their form. They did not talk, communicating only by hand gestures while they swept the control tower and zip-tied everyone inside at gunpoint. (edited)
The chief controller coughed and tried getting back on his feet before being kicked and tied up. The ghostly, vaguely antromoporphic blurs that stood in front of him forced him to look up at them and pulled open his eyelids to look into his retina with a flashlight-like device.
“Where is Ariadne?” One of the ghosts spoke in a voice that had been heavily distorted electronically.
“I don’t know who that is!” The chief controller replied. The device that was flashing into his eye beeped twice.
“He’s telling the truth.”
“Keep looking.”
RS Przplyw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
Everybody on the yacht was breathing sighs of relief. Katarzyna had convinced Ariadne’s bosses to not get Abelcain involved and Kacper had managed to gather quite a sizeable force with his call for help. They’d feared that the SOS signal could act as a beacon for pirates and Freikorps but it had seemed to attract some respectable-looking people…. as well as pirates, but strangely civilized ones.
The pirates that had shown up to Zyczyn System had large ships flying in formation, a far cry from the disorganized squadrons of raiders and motherships employed by End of The Line and other less reputable bandits. Surely, the very first thing that they’d asked about was how much they’d get paid but Benedykt never expected this to be a charity. For years ROMB had been sending protection payments to the bandits that operated in the area to ensure their safety, but now that help was urgently needed they were nowhere to be found. Suddenly there wasn’t a single pirate in a hundred lightyears from ROMB. Cowards.
Brzozowski grumbled, making some napkin maths to figure out how much money ROMB had wasted on the chinless thugs who’d deserted them when bad guys came knocking. (edited)
“The ROMB Corporation shareholders have granted me executive privilege to handle payments for emergency services at my discretion.” Kacper Brzozowski said, clearing his throat and putting on his best negotiator tone. “I can offer you two things: Seventy million SIGEC, a quarter of which will be upfront and the remainder will be held in escrow with an electronic contract. Furthermore, I can offer you a year-long security contract for ROMB with the possibility of indefinite extension. None of our hired security showed up, so I have given myself the liberty to unilaterally terminate their contracts.”
What he wasn’t telling Fred is that by cutting protection payments with the local bandits he would ensure that the BSO would have plenty of work if they accepted the contract, but they seemed capable of dealing with it.
Next up was the Serstine. Not much to do there, they’d instantly accepted without asking for anything and rushed straight in, as the Serstine tended to do. They’d probably been rearing for a fight already and ROMB’s takeover had given them a reason to start shooting and going fast. For a moment Benedykt thought of at least telling them to not shoot up ROMB itself but he figured out that they could be pressured into behaving by the other members of this ad-hoc coalition.
Were he the CEO of the galaxy’s cutting-edge shipyards like Vulkan or Fontarion, Benedykt would be panicking thinking of what priceless parts the Serstine were going to loot or haggle for. But this was ROMB. Nothing of value here to the Serstine, save for whatever they could plunder from the enemies and the reputation to be gained. (edited)
“Tipping Point, RS Przyplyw acknowledges.” He simply replied.
Next up, the CES. Sure, they seemed to be having navigation problems, but they had shown up. Benedykt could count at least five corporations with strong security details that operated in the area, and none had lent any help. Hell, there was probably a lot of people back in the Republika Strzala rubbing their hands and making phone calls to open their own low-cost shipyard now that ROMB was going to be taken out. To hell with them, a slightly disoriented lizardman here was worth more than a million Strzalans back home all making excuses to why they couldn’t come.
Even better, they were being quite welcoming. After narrowly escaping a bunch of extremely well-armed and well-equipped hijackers, there was nothing that the ROMB execs wanted than to get away as far as possible. Furthermore… it was a much better proposition than going back to the Republika Strzala! He could conduct some business with this Construct Engineering Solutions company and, even better, be 50,000 lightyears away from where Abelcain Tulcazar expected to find him if things got even more out of hand. (edited)
“Acknowledged, Mr. Teciron.” He peeked past the cabin wall and instructed his pilots to change course. With a few bursts of RCS monopropellant, the yacht oriented itself to begin a sustained burn and swing its motion vector towards the CES ships. “We’re exfiltrating as instructed. We don’t have the range to make it to your territory in one jump but we can arrange a refueling rendezvous on the way, much appreciated.”
Last but not least was Raok. Brozowski pressed the button to change the line and prepared to speak when a slight tremor accompanied by a small thump distracted him. The executives looked at each other wondering what that was but, as the cockpit instruments hadn’t picked up on anything suspicious, they assumed it had to be a micrometeorite of some sort or perhaps a secondary pipe bursting. Clearly a sign that he should hurry, thought Brzozowski, as he continued his call.
“RS Przyplyw acknowledges your transmission. I will send you as detailed a map I can get at the moment and will make sure to send any information you might find useful.” (edited)
With that said, an elaborate dossier on ROMB was sent to Roak’s ships. It consisted of an overall plan of the facility as well as floorplans of the stations themselves normally used for fire drills. The floorplans were detailed enough to hopefully help Roak and the rest of the rescuers but, as they were meant more for ROMB’s internal drills, they were incomplete and had been scrubbed of sensitive areas. Next up, a detailed schematic of all of the assembly lines was sent, showing which areas of ROMB were to be avoided. It came in pretty useful, as Roak’s crew would find out that many of the assembly lines were currently inactive and thus weren’t showing up in the sensor scans.
Better than nothing, at least for now. It was good to see that at least one of the flotillas that had shown up was taking a more cautious approach around Brzozowski’s expensive facility, hopefully they could be relied on to keep the other agents in check. Especially the Serstine.
Satisfied at the job done and still somewhat surprised that the gambit had paid off, Brzozowski returned to the conference room where Katarzyna was now delivering the good news regarding the Schweitzer & Valida Foundation. Celebratory cigarettes were lit by all present. All remained unaware of the limpet drone that had just caught up to the yacht and latched onto it, burrowing biomechanical tendrils into the ship’s avionics.
“Put on your good suits, friends.” Brzozowski said cheerily. “We’re going on a business trip.”
“A business trip? To where?” Benedykt asked.
“Territories of a company called Constructive Engineering Solutions.” The CEO replied with an eager tone. “That way we won’t waste a single second. While our comrades here help us clear the station of hijackers, we ourselves can be striking deals to make up for lost revenue right now. You know how the board is, never give them bad news without some good news to wash it down.”
“Kacper, I’m chief technical officer of ROMB” Katarzyna spoke with unease. “I don’t feel comfortable being that far from the facility in this emergency. If there’s anything unexpected I want to be there to help our friends.”
“I believe I’m staying as well.” Benedykt said calmly, grabbing his wife’s hand.
“I can arrange that” Brzozowski nodded. “I’ll charter a shuttle.”
“Mr. Brzozowski, you might want to come take a look.” The yacht pilot said through the intercomms. “We are seeing over a hundred signatures appear all over ROMB. No transponder squawk and I’m still unable to contact the control tower.”
“What the…” Benedykt explained. “A hundred ships?”
The next events all happened in a disorienting flash, as the yacht suddenly blasted its RCS thrusters at maximum power, violently rotating the ship in a way that overwhelmed the artificial gravity compensators and flung everyone off their feet. The engine throttle locked itself in emergency power position and stopped responding, leaving the ship flying at full power and gradually overheating while its passengers were pressed against the passenger cabin walls and ceiling by the erratic g-forces. Onboard the cockpit, instruments went offline as a massive chain of glitches crashed the whole flight control system and left it stuck in a boot loop.
Yet despite that the flight control software was now unresponsive, the yacht wasn’t just tumbling out of control. It was flying with extreme precision, plotting an intercept course with the leading CES ship and rushing it at full power like a giant kamikaze. All the lines that Brzozowski had used to contact the assorted crew of rescuers opened again, flooding the channels with a text transmission that read:
‘VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY. FOR THE SAFETY AND STABILITY OF THE GALAXY DO NOT GET INVOLVED’
The comms system of the ship ran through every channel available to repeat the message several times, making sure all received it. It then switched to broadcasting the same jamming as was coming from ROMB station. As the seconds passed, the swarm of misshapen yet heavily armed ships that had been hastily constructed out of a cannibalized ancerium harvester by ROMB began assuming defensive positions around the shipyard, hijacking the control towers’ sensors to begin scanning the allied flotilla. And while the fleet of amalgams lit up sensors with their haphazard clusters of engines and radiators, the stealthy and extremely dangerous “Haunebu-Gerät” floated among them, waiting to pounce upon the rescue fleet.
Even for the Serstine, the image of sensors taking in flares of thrusters and radiators bleeding heat that were demonstrably not ROMB assets in construction was like watching massive jaws opening to try to swallow them all whole as they approached. It was easy for them to see all of the dregs being smashed together and sent into battle hot off the assembly line. They couldn't tell right off the bat, but knowing what ROMB normally constructed, the minds of Rain's retinue were all filled with the images of ridiculous titanium foam mongrels that were tragically, regrettably misassembled and would probably have sacrificed themselves in the first proper volley from the recoil of their own guns. Once everybody was done snickering they set to work running plays as the ships all spread out and made their preparations. The hidden daggers nestled in the assembly lines remained out of their minds as Rain and Norte crunched the more visible problem ahead of them.
Norte tut-tutted. "How regrettable, regrettable indeed that a lesser shrine to speed be caught up in all this. If we must deny its use to whoever's commandeered the poor thing, we'll have to put it out of its misery," she said, chest and all its plating heaving and spreading apart as she prepared to issue an order.
Rain belayed it with a wave of her hand. "Still yourself, Norte, it would do us no good. Imagine if you will the neverending shootout of ship parts colliding with other ship parts, and now picture that tumbling every which way and becoming a hazard to everyone in the general area, not just something in that projectile cage."
Norte shrugged. "I mean, I already am."
"I can't imagine these ships being anything even approaching a match to a Bladeship one-on-one, but that is a lot of them. In open space we would be overwhelmed, but..."
Norte raised an eyebrow. "But?"
"We should tip the scales in our friends' favor by giving our other new friends something impossible to ignore. And yes, keeping ROMB intact to achieve this is exactly how we'll do it."
Norte quickly put two and two together. A smile crept across her face. "Oh, now that sounds like fun. Shall we do it, then?"
Rain gave the order instead, with the same sort of sharp, deep breath Norte took as her signal gun. "Into the jaws of ROMB we go! We are the vanguard and to hell to anyone who tells us not to! Suntouched, to your Outriders! Spread out and get ready to make some real noise! Helm, let us lead!"
In a flash it started happening. Tipping Point's thrusters fired as they made straight for the facility, the other ships dutifully following as they did that most Serstine act of making everything else flying look like it was burrowing through pudding. They launched Outriders, their knifelike fighters, in patterns similar to a startled cargo plane dropping flares, making crisscrossing patterns that were designed to confuse as they decided to fling themselves deep into the enemy's guts, planning to drag as many amalgams with them as possible. They'd grind them up in their own misshapen teeth.
Fred scratched at his stubbly beard as he listened to the Corpo. Somewhere else on the bridge men were beginning to go through the files that had been sent over, and next to Fred Dragovich sucked on his cigarette and grumbled in irritation.
“I didn’t come out here to become a corporate lackey,” He said. Fred shook his head.
“Seventy million is seventy million. You don’t have to agree to a continuing contract…”
That earned another irritated sound from the revolutionary.
“Your tone says one thing, your words another,” Dragovich said finally. Fred shrugged.
“A continuing contract with a shipbuilder,” He said. “Don’t you see the value in that?”
“They won’t build ships for me,” Dragovich replied, crossing his arms. Fred rolled his eyes. The lack of imagination in this man really did tend to irk him. He was about to launch into a lecture on possibilities, explain to Dragovich he could lift the design plans for the facility while he was aboard rescuing hostages, and then negotiate for… ‘expertise’ as part of his continuing contract and use their money and their technicians to set up a scaled down facility that could build his little revolution all the ships it could ever need when one of the bridge crew reported a new broadcast at the same time another man began shouting about a hundred or so fresh contacts around the facility.
“The yacht,” Dragovich pointed out on the screen. Fred watched as it suddenly fired into a spin and then went full burn on an impact course with a CES vessel. “Are they doing that?”
“Oh of course,” Fred replied sarcastically. “I too often end conversations by contradicting everything I’ve said up until that moment, then put myself in a spin and full-burn for impact. It’s just how you end a meeting,”
“Ha. Ha.” Dragovich deadpanned. “Funny man. Anything on comms?”
“Nothing. A new message on loop then static,”
“Hackers?” Fred suggested. “Sabotage?”
“She’s heating up,” The sensor operator reported.
“As much as I am amused by corporate brown nosers burning,” Dragovich said finally. “I suppose we don’t get paid if our employers die instantly,”
“Nor can we continue negotiating the cost of your services,” Fred concurred.
“You get them not to burn,” Dragovich said snatching the communicator our of Fred’s hand. “I will direct our efforts on the station. Get salvage rights for the Scavengers Union. Otherwise I’ll never hear the end of their whining.”
Engines flared as Black Sail’s ships began moving, Dragovich directing the cruiser and its pair of destroyer escorts into range while Fred contacted the Lane Pirate to the rear. The ship was quick to begin disgorging a multitude of strike craft, swarming out into the void while the missile frigates began readying a salvo. The hard part would be not hitting the ROMB facility itself, and so all of the vessels refrained from firing for the moment, allowing their targeting computers to refine trajectories and line up railguns on only those vessels furthest from the facility itself.
For the moment, the ships kept their distance. Between the CES and the Serstine there would be no shortage of close in warships. Better to cover from a distance until they knew what the enemies were capable of.
Fred for his part saw to organizing a… ‘rescue’ for the Yacht. Rescue of course, was not exactly the right word for it. Strike craft streaked toward the Yacht on intercept course, accompanied by a boarding party. Plan was as simple as it got: shoot out the thrusters, arrest the spin with docking locks and the strike craft’s thrusters, and then the boarding party could hand off a comms unit to anyone still alive so negotiations could continue.
There had been a few moments since the last transmission of Teciron, from the leading CES ship. Instead, he chose to see the reaction of the others as the battlefield evolved and progressed, it's flows and important points ever-shifting the guise of the battle. He set the burn of the CES ships to lower as they passed the Executive Yacht, and started following the Serstine ships, fanning out their trio of ship’s triangular configuration to become harder to hit.
Despite the imminent danger, the situation at the bridge was not that of tension, Teciron was found standing up and hunched over the command panel as he poured over the messages and other strings of data that were acquired from the sensors. He ordered the ships to emit simultaneous sensor signals, making of the three ships large targets but, in using interferometry and parallax of the sensory feedback, he hoped he could find the interdictory signals and swiftly dispense a large-scale alpha-strike, securing a well-deserved promotion and, potentially, the ROMB.
However, he was taken back by what his sensors caught. Instead of finding a point of interdiction, he just simply saw one point grow larger and larger at the sensor screen, whilst the onboard computer quickly calculated a collision vector of the object with his very own ship, identifying the object as nothing more than the very yacht they just passed.
“What… the fuck?” Teciron said, awestruck for a few moments as the signal grew larger. Then, his brain jumped into action, as he started dispensing orders through the comms:
“Fleet scatter! I will bring the Yacht up and away from a collision route with the ROMB. Load up Glue rounds on the revolvers! Set the Panoptes system to target Engines. Everyone buckle up, maneuver in three, two, one…”
.
He then configured the ship maneuvering in a small holoprojector tri-dimensional screen, tracing the path that the ship should take along the battlefield with the aid of the on-board computer, which refined the route to become useful. Standardized fuel was injected with haste into the modular engine chambers, and the ship violently jerked upwards and away from the rest of the present ships, producing impressive speeds for a vessel of its size and technological level. The unfortunate Mus’Vanus inside the vessel that didn’t have time to secure themselves were thrown to the floor by the sudden maneuver. Teciron, prepared, wasn’t, and thus, kept track of the outcome of his actions.
As it swerved upwards, the revolving missile pods at the sides of the ships unloaded a rack, and selectively loaded another one up to be dispensed, projectors all along the hexagonal surface of the vessel painted targets at whatever thrust systems they could see within the kamikaze yacht, and the relatively small vessel lit up like a piñata, momentarily obscured by the collective burn of little over 600 swarm missiles, dispensed coordinately from the side of the ship.
The simple Panoptes system then did its work, the swarm missiles detected the painted targets, and immediately set a collision course at full burn, preparing to release their Biocrete Glue onto the target. The revolver missile pods ejected the spent cartridge, which flew away at high speeds due to the maneuver of the ship, and away from the ROMB.
The other two CES ships kept with the Serstine, and whilst the Serstine chose to simply charge blindly into the ROMB, they knew that hastefulness was no grounds for being unprepared, and thus, they kept back, protecting the rear side of the Serstine fleet from any kind of flanking attacks.
The Shiv-class corvettes positioned themselves behind Serestine and in between the flanks guarded by CES ships. As the barely-finished warships, barely held together and scruffy but in large numbers came into sight, alarms were sounded. On board, orders were shouted, power routed to the guns, plasma cannons taking aim and laser turrets locking on while the captains discussed if they could use nuclear missiles without risking more damage to ROMB.
Back on the battlecruiser, the received floorplans were looked over and entry points were discussed by the officers while Raok watched.
While keeping the plans to himself and his forces was tempting, as it would give them an immediate advantage regarding the boarding of actual ROMB itself, it would probably just invite uncomfortable questions once the whole thing is over. Very well, seems like a compromise is in order.
“Send the plans to our forces on a secure chanel… And make sure they don’t give the plans to others until they have men on board ROMB.”
If they could have even a small advantage… It would be worth it in his report, or at least he hoped so, and he was certainly willing to risk loosing a few men in order to secure a greater deal of glory for himself. After all, working as a team is always more efficient, but achieving victory alone is more impressive.
“Commander, there appears to be an issue with the yacht. It appears to be under some sort of cyberattack, at least thats the most likely thing we could discern from the information. CES and pirates are moving in to help, it appears.”
Just as one of the officers stopped, the comms officer began;
“Commander we have spotted numerous unidentified presumed-hostile ships coming out of ROMB! Our captains speculate that they have just been assembled. We have reports of Serestine ships spearheading towards ROMB facilities.”
“Excellent.” Raok said “They will prove to be the best distraction we could have hoped for. Issue a command to our ships; they are to split apart from other groups and launch our missiles towards the assembly lines, if we have a shot. Those things will keep pumping out more ships by the minute, and by using our warheads to direct the radiation to those ships we should be able to at least temporarily disable a large amount of them. Also, tell them to avoid collateral damage if possible, we don't want to destroy ROMB while saving it.”
“What about the yacht sir?”
“We let pirates and CES handle it. Three separate rescue attempts at once will be more likely to interfere with each other than actually achieve anything. When the yacht is recovered tell the executives of what trouble their assembly lines are causing and ask how could they be stopped.”
Back on the front lines, each of the three corvettes launched four missiles towards the flanks as to not damage Serestines,swirling as they approach the enemy ships and detonating in the middle of them, directing the radiation on them in hopes of interfering with their electronics.
RS Przyplw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
“Gamow, what the hell is going on?” Brozowski strained and coughed as he and the rest of the executives were piled up against the rear bulkhead by the G-forces. Chairs, papers, crates of cigarettes and full ashtrays were thrown around the cabin by the ship’s violent maneuvering.
“FADEC is acting completely on its own, I can’t get it to throttle down, sir!” The pilot replied.
In the cockpit, every single light that signaled a problem was blinking. The yacht pilots ran through emergency checklists to no avail, finding themselves incapable of properly resetting any of the flight computer systems. They had to do everything manually, as their neural links were immediately cut to prevent the infection from spreading to their brains. After just a couple of minutes of being hijacked by the unseen threat the throttle valves of the yacht had welded themselves open and the dosimeters all over the ship were starting to ring, all signs that the reactor was completely out of control and was melting through its shielding.
In between straining to withstand the G’s, the pilots could be heard over the intercomms baffled at why the emergency shutoff valves and scram levers were not working. Memories of a hundred cut corners and the words ‘that’ll never happen anyways…’ flashed through the minds of a few of the ROMB engineers onboard alongside a whole lot of regret. Benedykt was the first one to regain his bearings and crawl out of the pile of corpos on the back of the yacht, looking for his wife.
“We’ve got to stop this goddamn thing!” Benedykt huffed, pulling Katarzyna from under a chair. Suddenly his lapel pin started beeping, indicating an extreme level of radiation.
“Pilots, pilots!” Katarzyna strained to reach the intercomm receiver and talk. “You need to get out of here, there’s too much radiation!”
“We can’t leave you, ma’am” The flight commander replied. “We haven’t gotte- Shit!”
Yet another alarm joined the absolute chaos that was going on in the cockpit, louder than all the other ones and with flashing red lights. It was the missile approach warning system, reporting so many contacts that it seemed it was also going insane.
“Missile, missile, missile incoming!”
One of the few systems that still remained nominal, the yacht’s ECM, immediately came online upon detection of the CES’ massive missile volley and began spraying out flares and decoys in every direction possible from small turrets. Yet the glue missiles didn’t actually have much trouble ignoring these decoys since the yacht was glowing much much brighter than its own countermeasures.
The yacht was peppered with glue balls all along its keel. The engines and radiators were hit dozens of times, though at first they were so hot that the glue instantly vaporized off its surface. Little by little they managed to remove enough heat from the radiators, though, and ended up engulfing the reactor section of the yacht. With the nozzles blocked, the reactor finally stalled and shut off, leaving only the RCS thrusters firing off randomly and saving both the yacht and the target of its kamikaze rush.
The only damage to the yacht’s cabin being a few minor air leaks caused by blunt impact, so it was a pretty clean and precise action were it not for the complete panic that it caused inside the ship. The banging sounds of the glue projectiles hitting the hull of the yacht immediately made everyone inside think they were being hit by railgun shells or missile fragmentation and then it was every man for himself.
The pilots and flight crew immediately pulled on their ejection handles, separating the entire cockpit off of the nose of the aircraft and boosting away. The passengers, with no ejection seats of their own, simply stampeded out to the nearest exit and blindly kicked at the door handle until it gave in and depressurized the entire yacht. A cloud of cigarette smoke, coffee, administrative papers and 60-something Strzalan corpos was vented into the void while the yacht continued spinning away. The ejectees narrowly managed to avoid smashing into the rear section of the RS Przplyw but passing near the white-hot radiators burned their clothes off.
Upon getting vented into the frigid void of space around Zyczyn, the old naked corpos froze almost immediately and puffed up like antropomorphic balloons. But as with all Strzalans, they withstood the vacuum and radiation relatively well. Radio beacons implanted in their bodies turned on which, along with the pilots’ emergency pod beacon, would help the incoming BSO light craft to pick them out among the debris.
“W-we need some help over here” Brzozowski transmitted to whoever could hear him. Before their eyes swole shut, they all got a glimpse of their own yacht and realized it was still intact. “I think we’ve made a mistake”
ROMB
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The Serstine ships’ rush into battle did not go unnoticed and all of ROMB’s hijacked systems turned towards the extremely obvious signatures of the incoming bladeships and outriders. Immediately after evaluating the multiple formations of enemy ships the amalgams began getting into their own defensive formation, clustering around the ROMB stations to try and deny the enemy the use of their heaviest weaponry.
Two distinct forms of amalgams began splitting and assuming positions based on their roles: shield amalgams and strike amalgams.
The shield amalgams were the simpler ones, essentially automated tugs fused onto massive incomplete hulls that they had been moving around ROMB before the hijack. They moved to form multiple crude shield walls around the different stations and kept their large plates pointed at the incoming fleet.
Behind them were the strike amalgams, the misshapen and even cruder-looking mechanical blobs fitted with mass drivers. In groups of five, they formed autonomous “firebases”, each one centered around a different ROMB station, that started taking aim and firing upon the Serstine outriders with fused fragmentation shells.
This counterattack was quickly disrupted by Raok’s strike. The volley of missiles was ignored by the amgalgams, initially thinking they had gone wide or failed to acquire their targets and wishing to conserve their ammunition for the capital ships and fighters. But when they all burst out at once, the resulting electromagnetic pulse traveled through all of ROMB’s width in the blink of an eye. The rushed construction of the amalgams was a huge weakness in this first exchange of fire, as many of their internal electronics were badly isolated and ended up shorted by the EMP. Seven of the firebases were brought offline and their shield amalgams started drifting away from each other, creating a hole in the defensive line right in front of the Serstine.
The Haunebu moved to plug this hole for as long as it took a swarm of hijacked robots and improvised engineering amalgams to bring the fried ships back online. Three of the sleek, geometric objects moved into the defensive gap, remaining underneath the ROMB stations and the streams of space junk to further hide itself. To prepare to open fire, the halostone superfluid was drained away from the edges of the octahedral ships, as if repelled by magnetic forces. Next up the Haunebu pivoted towards their target, picking the Mercurial Kite and two of her escorts as the most threatening contacts, and then their entire frontal section folded open.
Inside the completely featureless and unmarked Haunebu was a churning, nightmarish biomass that thrashed and twitched as if it wished to escape the ship but was held in place by cabling and structural beams. The creature was a continuously-mutating blob of cybernetically-augmented flesh covered in eyes and mouths that looked like it’d been starved, as its skin draped tightly over a radically-symmetric skeleton. In the middle of its body was a long and very sharp spine that split into two branches that tapered to a point and coiled together into a helix: a powerful gravitic vortex cannon.
Energy was pumped into the creature from the ship’s reactor, causing it to squirm as more and more kolleronic charge built up in its body before finally releasing an invisible blast of focused gravitational waves at the Serstine bladeships. The energy that coursed through this living cannon was enough to blast the Haunebu backwards with recoil, which it used to relocate itself and avoid retaliation.
ROMB 61
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The stations of ROMB, having to withstand Zyczyn’s radioactive bursts on a daily basis, were so well-shielded that Ariadne and the rest of escapees did not even notice the dozens of high-yield nuclear detonations going on outside. A light flicker of the lights was the only sign of the barrage outside and it went unnoticed by the group, who had just disembarked on ROMB 61 after escaping ROMB 95.
The same could not be said for the Haunebu’s counter strike. The powerful spinal guns of the UFO-like ships caused a gigantic gravitic shockwave to rock all of ROMB stations, passing through the bulkheads like they weren’t even there. Everyone broke their pace and stumbled while Ariadne fell to the floor, gasping for breath. It was like being punched in the gut or hit by a baseball bat, for a moment they all became deaf and blind from tinnitus and getting their eyes defocused. Nasty as it felt for the Strzalans, for Ariadne it was pure hell as her heightened senses were brutalized by the shockwave, nearly knocking her out cold.
It was with decidedly muted amusement that Fred watched the yacht on screen and the subsequent… well, the only word that even began to sum it up was ‘clusterfuck’. The contract broker was well aware that he should have found no amusement in what he initially took to be the death of their prospective employers, and yet he heard muted chuckles among the bridge crew and even the barest hint of a smile played at the corners of Dragovich’s mouth. The yacht had been spinning out of control, then was fired upon by some sort of specialized weapon system, only for the pilots to eject and the corpos to subsequently space themselves.
“Stars and ancestors,” Fred muttered. “Someone tell me I didn’t just watch an entire ship full of people stupid themselves to death,”
He was assured of that some minutes later as the strike craft and boarding party they’d deployed began to pluck the naked, bloated execs out of space. Much to the surprise of the pilots and boarders alike, it seemed hard vacuum was less fatal to their employers than it would have been for the comparatively normal men and women of the Organization. That at least was some small mercy. The bulk of the forces Fred had sent on the rescue mission now busied themselves with scooping up the corpos, and ferrying them back to the lane pirate. There they would be greeted by medical personnel, and a rather bemused looking man with a scarlet mohawk, a denim vest covered in patches for various bands and musicians, and far too many tattoos.
“Which of you is Brozozowski,” The Rooster called from his perch. “Freddy tells me he wasn’t done negotiating our fee,”
Meanwhile, a pair of strike craft and a single boarding pod saw to the yacht. With the reactor offline the immediate threat of meltdown had been avoided. Time was on the pirates’ side and so rather than shooting off the thrusters, the boarders landed on the outside of the yacht. Mag clamps locked them to the hull and they made their way toward the RCS thrusters, looking for some form of manual override or failing that a way to disable them.
While Fred organized the retrieval of the corpos, Dragovich was organizing a battle. Within the bowels of the Mercurial Kite orders were going out and men were being assembled. They formed into squads and platoons, filling magazines, strapping on armour, and going through tests and checks on their equipment. Dragovich intended to join them, once a method of ingress onto the station was established. For the moment the would-be revolutionary busied himself directing the battle. The nuclear weapons launched by another faction had had a noticeable effect on the amalgams, and Dragovich intended to capitalize upon it.
On his order, the Mercurial Kite’s weapons came to life. The relativistic railguns, having calculated firing trajectories, launched their payloads, aiming to destroy the drifting amalgams before they got the opportunity to repair. With flashes of light their payloads were launched, streaking across the void toward the amalgams. With the first salvo away, gunnery crews kicked into gear, loading fresh slugs and calculating fresh trajectories, hurling more munitions at the wounded amalgams. The destroyers, launched nuclear missiles of their own attempting to mimic the effects of the initial nuclear detonations and screen an incoming volley of missiles from the frigates. So it would have continued, a slow advance heralded by railguns and missiles had the churning mass of flesh and metal not appeared and fired on advancing ships. He hadn’t reacted fast enough to tune sensors on the flesh monster, but a weapon that seemingly fired nothing was not something totally foreign to him. None of the things his mind guessed it could be were good but some were certainly worse than others.
He picked up his communicator, tuning to the open channel they’d used to communicate.
“Kite-Actual to forward vessels, report effects of…” What did he even call it? The monster? “Report effects of the flesh-thing’s weapons system, over.”
Already he was giving orders to the helm and his escorts. The three vessels spreading their formation, and engines flaring to full as they accelerated toward the stations. He waited for a report, but he suspected he was about to have a priority target. Something stirred in the revolutionary. Something he’d not felt since coming to this distant galaxy. This was not one of the skirmishes to which he’d grown accustomed in Ancerious. Not a quick raid on poorly defended colonies, or a sudden ambush of an unsuspecting convoy. This he suspected would be a proper battle.
He felt a grin tug at his mouth.
“Oh war how I’ve missed you,” The revolutionary chortled, lighting another cigarette.
The only feeling that surmounted the momentary gladness of the accomplishment of the combat maneuver, as the yacht swerved away from a collision vector to safety, was the abismal look of confusion and dumbfoundedness as Teciron watched the crew of the yacht, as the most well-mannered pirates put it, 'stupid' themselves to death.
He finished the maneuver and traced paths to come close to most members of the evacuated yacht, however, far before the plastical modular engines of his ship could swerve back towards proximity, they had already been saved by the pirates. Not the best outcome, but better than if they died, at least.
He finally had now the opportunity to join back up with the two other ships. The beauty of the reliance of the CES in systems like the IPD is its usefulness in a wide variety for situations. For the battlefield, ships and guns were automatically logged as parametric entities within a simulated shared virtual environment, and thus to the best of each ship's computers, they could plan solutions of best outcome according to the system. Though most of it was a well-informed guesswork of sorts, it allowed Teciron to direct the other two ships from his vessel precisely, without needing to be close to them.
The two other ships in the meanwhile, stuck farther back than the Serstine formation, as such, the gravitational vortex cannon didn't damage them, however, it was detected by the disturbances in the sinarium compasses of their FTL drives.
"Fuck, it's a lot of them...
...
Lucky for us, we got missiles to spare." - The plan of Teciron was to counter the amalgams. He knew that the swarm missiles of the CES wouldn't have enough strength to damage larger ships, however, the unshielded amalgams that were pumped out of the ROMB could only ever hope to meet the ammount of projectiles the CES ships can muster in a single volley.
Thus, the two ships close to the Serstine loaded the AP projectiles in their missile revolver units, and simultaneously dispensed roughly 12 hundred AP swarm missiles into the air, the Panoptes system sprung into motion and a series of projectors painted targets on all of the amalgams present at the line, or that were within weapon's reach. Once again they burned in a collision route directly towards their target, clouding the ships that launched it in their sudden exhaust.
The Bladeships saw the amalgams start to drift away, creating a hole in their defensive lines, watching the EMP missiles do their thing as the amalgams ahead of them lost all coherence and stumbled through the void. They didn't think for a moment, blitzing the opening and braving the Haunebu's gravitic vortex gun shots. A destroyer was tagged in the chaos and started peeling off as its crew immediately felt the effects of the shot, and it began falling out of step with the rest of Rain's fleet. The ships started shuffling to fill in the gap while the Tipping Point surged ahead, no one wanting to take a step back.
As they detected the CES ships releasing a new volley of missiles, they shifted to let the shots through, spreading out and trying to get their straggler back up to pace with the rest of the unit. The destroyer crew was reeling - even the extreme acceleration of Serstine flight wasn't like getting shot by a gravitic vortex gun. It was like being paper run through a shredder but somehow still remaining a single sheet. The fact the ship was even making maneuvers at all was shocking, and a testament to their ability to act through pain. Still, it was quite a disquieting sight to see a Bladeship moving so slowly.
As the missiles achieved their desired effect, cheers could be heard on board Raok’s ship, but on board the Shivs themselves there was no time for celebration, as the more missiles were loaded and plasma cannons were firing in synchronization with the laser turrets for maximum pressure. All seemed to be going according to the plan until The Haunebu was spotted approaching the front lines, providing cover for amalgams to start the process of repairing themselves and minimizing the disadvantage. Seeing this, Raok hastily ordered the ships to resume fire on the disabled amalgams in hopes that other factions would handle the Haunebu itself.
As the orders were sent to the Shivs, they were relayed to their respective crews from the bridge, where each officer had a specific function to fulfill or task to complete in order to maximize the effectiveness. But suddenly, the orders stopped coming to the crew on the back side of the ship… one second of silence, two seconds....
Noticing this alarming silence one of the crew contacted the bridge only for the officers to respond that maneuvers to space the ships apart in a more loose formation must be carried out as a top priority.
Back on the bridge, for a few seconds everyone turned to their screens as the sensor readings spiked and video feed showed the terrible abomination that seemed to be fused with The Haunebu as it fired its vortex cannon at the Serestines.
Back on his main ship, Raok’s eyes widened in surprise to see that Serestines survived such an attack. It was most certainly impressive.
The monster concerned him, but he didn’t change his previous orders to ignore the abomination and focus on the amalgams first. He opened the comms again to inform others:
“This is Raok talking, my forces will focus on those junk ships and keep them from focusing down on you while you target that… thing.”
The Shivs weapons systems started prioritizing the disabled amalgams as the missiles came ever closer to being loaded and ready.
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
The brief analysis of the creatures briefly glimpsed by the BSO ships returned some surprising results. It didn’t look like anything in the BSO’s own databases so the intelligence officers on the Black Sail vessels searched for matching results in the much larger databases of the International Reconnaissance Office and Global Frontline Observer, two large NGOs in charge of classifying the weaponry of the galaxy. Although normally these databases were quite costly to access, a few phone calls to friends of friends, some bribes and a few network backdoors gave the BSO quick and easy access to the databases. As usual.
The IRO database rapidly returned a matching result for the spike-shaped creature. It apparently was an electrogravitic engine used onboard Palm Mirdif’s ships in the Höchlands theatre over fifteen years ago.
Normally these spindly and skeletal creatures were permanently anchored to the hull of the Scornful Flesh’s warships, sentient and filled with the same perpetual and caustic hatred that drove Mirdif as a whole. This one appeared to have been surgically mutilated, however. It was restrained with heavy scaffolding and medically anchored to the inside of the ship. Coils and ancerium capacitors had been implanted into the creature, turning it into a weapon but none of the other equipment and tech inside the UFO matched up with any known ships or weapons in the galaxy. Even though it had a scion of Mirdif at its core, this was new technology made by an unknown and clearly sophisticated enemy.
The good news for the pirates was that they could get a nice bonus from selling the information of this newly-discovered weapon to the International Reconnaissance Office. The bad news was that no one had any idea of what this thing was, not even people whose job was to know every weapon in existence.
RS Przplyw
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
Upon managing to land on the spinning yacht, the BSO privateers climbed their way up to the external fuel cutoff valves near the haywire RCS thrusters, shutting them off for good. The yacht remained spinning along multiple axes due to its angular momentum, slowly pivoting back and forth due to inertial forces and making it quite disorienting to walk along its hull. On the inside of the ship the pirates would find the mess that had been left over from the venting: shards of frozen coffee floating around the ship, a mess of crumpled-up and shredded paper leaking out of trash bins and lastly a grotesque amount of tobacco that had amalgamated together into a giant cloud-like ball due to static forces.
It didn’t take the pirates long to find the traces of sleaziness that were seemingly on every corpo ship. A kitchenette at the back of the ship had its smoke detectors shut off and a cloud of pieces of burnt paper was floating all around a short-circuited coffee machine. A ton of ROMB corporate folders and the yacht’s flight log were among the papers that had been burnt, and recently at that. Near the nose of the yacht the pirates’ attention would be caught by a bright, blinking orange light. It was the ship’s in-flight recorded, its “black box”, and the orange warning light was indicating that it was offline. From the screwdriver floating nearby and the large dents all over the black box showed that whoever had shut it down had done it in a rather brutish way.
The most unusual finding, however, was near the back of the ship, on the outside of its hull. A pyramid-shaped object roughly a foot across had latched itself onto the yacht’s avionics spine. Its surface appeared to be covered in a perfectly reflective, boiling liquid, and mold-like tendrils extended from it to the yacht’s electronics bays, pulsating lightly as they did. This was definitely not part of the yacht, it looked much more like a piece of the UFOs. (edited)
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
It took some time for Brzozowski and the other corpos to thaw, deflate and be able to move again. The first thing they asked for was cigarettes and alcohol, the second was clothes and cancer medication. When he was done recovering his basic faculties, Brzozowski squinted at the denim-wearing pirate and furrowed his brow.
“Freddy’s not done negotiating our fee? Fuck Freddy.” He replied with his raspy, chainsmoker voice, still coughing up some frozen phlegm. “What is this, the Iqzina Economic Forum? Do I need to pledge to empower minority voices and encourage diversity in my company for fucking Freddy to move his ass? Seventy million’s the kind of number pirates suck dick for, now get to work and chase those goddamn things off my shipyard!”
Clad in just an assless hospital gown, Brzozowski then started waddling around looking for Freddy. Perhaps it was a side-effect of the sudden depressurization and lack of oxygen or perhaps it was just them realizing that they were among pirates but all the corpos suddenly went mask-off and reverted to their true nature as Strzalans: fearless, trashy, adversarial, infuriatingly mule-headed. Working hard, cutting corners, complaining, delivering on time and haggling was the way of the Republika Strzala, the small unaligned nation dead in the middle of the Killian Verge’s most heavily-transited trade routes and from where ROMB’s entrepreneurs had come from. And now that they had unexpectedly been given a face-to-face meeting with their new business partner, they all set out to reduce their offers and start walking back promises to find out how malleable the BSO was.
ROMB
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
Shrapnel began flying out in all directions as more and more of the amalgams were either hit by the missiles or disabled by the EMP waves that struck the area. The forces that seized ROMB reacted to the tactics quickly, and the same tugs that had brought the shield amalgams to the front now pulled back their fried and nuked wreckages off the field and threw them at the stations to be cannibalized. The action was ridiculously swift, it practically looked like the dead amalgams had been thrown into a food processor. They were shredded by lasers and immensely powerful electromagnets and sprayed out of the stations in a seemingly-chaotic way. At first it appeared as though the huge cloud of ship parts was just going to tear through ROMB like buckshot but, as in normal operation, what looked like chaos at first sight was actually a tightly-coordinated choreography: every piece that was shot out of the disassembly stations was magnetically nudged with much care into the portholes and line stations of ROMB.
With this inflow of raw material, the hijacked ROMB stations began manufacturing a new type of craft to support their actions, fusing the ship parts with several hundred engineering EVA powersuits used by ROMB’s crew of Strzalans. What came out of this merger was a swarm of nimble voidcraft powered by fission rockets and similar in configuration to the mech-like “standing fighters” of the Little Light. While lacking sensors of their own, they were all datalinked to ROMB’s telescopes and radars via relay craft, which they used to aim ad-hoc laser weapons made out of welding equipment and neutron sources. While the remaining amalgams kept blocking the rescue fleet’s path to ROMB, the pseudo-Standing Fighters focused solely on intercepting the swarms of missiles fired by CES and fighting the Serstine Outriders and BSO light craft.
Another large formation of adapted powersuits were launched off the hijacked stations to begin working on the amalgams, replacing fried breakers and laying copper foam over gaps in hull plating to shield the amalgams. In order to cover the amalgams while they were being repaired, four of the Haunebu opened fire once again, this time directed at the CES ships. (edited)
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
Once again the sidelobe shockwaves of the Haunebu vortex guns shook the walls of ROMB 91 where Ariadne and the rest of the survivors hid from their pursuers. Once again it felt like being punched in the gut and forced the group of survivors to catch their breath in a line monitoring station onboard ROMB 91. The shockwaves had left the survivors exhausted, doubly so for Ariadne, and was causing some electrical failures and air leaks in the station.
“Just what the hell is that thing?” Ariadne huffed. “The station doesn’t seem to be taking it too well so I guess it’s not normal.”
“That’s not ours” The foreman shook his head. “And if I had to guess, it’s coming from that pyramid thing that we saw outside.”
“Well, if it’s starting to shoot do you think there’s someone coming to help us?” Ariadne asked, partaking in the cigarettes that were being passed around.
“It would explain the production chain.” The ROMB work manager noted. “They’re forcing the facility to crap out a bunch of meatshield ships to defend the station. That leaves the question of who exactly is out there, is it your people?”
“No idea. Could be your people.” Ariadne shrugged. “Either way I’d rather not have them go in blind with the invisible ships moving about.”
“And what can we possible do about that from here?”
“Hmm… I think I have an idea.”
From their hideout in ROMB 91, the group of survivors began connocting a plan to warn whoever was coming about the presence of the Haunebu-Geräten. The ships appeared to be moving without much issue through the streams of spare parts and other debris being fired around the Zyczyn system, which Ariadne deduced meant they had priority of way over the ship fabrication line. If this was the case, then there had to be “holes” in the production line opened to let the Haunebu through, and by tracking the number and timing of these holes the position of the Haunebu could be more or less guessed. As it was a way better idea rather than just helplessly waiting for whoever was out there to rescue them, the fugitives quickly set out to work together.
The security guards and IT workers used their personal passes and keys to find what line monitoring systems remained operational and downloaded large amounts of traffic line traffic and parts circulation data from them. Ariadne crunched the numbers with the help of the engineers, covering a bunch of cafeteria tables in whatever they could find to do calculations. The mechanics and workers in the meantime work on barricading one of the rest areas of ROMB 91 to buy themselves some time.
After having to drag the DAMSEL back and forth, it finally started to feel like things were moving and they weren’t just helpless hostages.
The response to the pseudo-Standing Weapons by the Serstine was for everyone to hold on tight and their ships to spread out, suddenly sprawling out in crazy patterns as the Outriders fought these new amalgams. Rain and her retinue were not amused in the slightest, watching everything and hearing their crews calling out positions, trajectories and speeds at characteristically Serstine speeds. Feeds shared between Serstine and overlays covering the whole bridge told the story as the lines describing the amalgams and their movement were joined by a crazy spiderweb of motion, everything moving and twisting relative to their own position, tracers, lasers and missiles drawing ever more scratches in the battlefield.
"They aren't making this easy, are they," Rain muttered. "Whatever is here worth taking must be quite a prize if the userpers taking this station are willing to go to such offensive lengths to defend it."
Norte gritted her teeth and grumbled. "We should cut out their heart fast, before they start welding together Serstine! I should be out there in an Outrider!"
Rain raised an eyebrow and gave Norte a puzzled glance. "Are you truly an experienced enough Outrider pilot for that kind of fight?"
Norte enthusiastically replied with "If I entered such a fight, I would be by the end!"
Rain did a double-take and decided to keep Norte from going anywhere her energy might just get her shot. She grabbed her shoulder and held on tight. "Patience, Norte, patience...if our foes wish to put us on the defensive, the defensive they'll get," she said. "All ships! We should see indeed how well our new friends can actually measure up to the creatures of the Little Light - siblings in holding the sun in their hearts these pale imitations are not. Heatscreens, up!"
She gave the order and the Bladeships and Outriders began changing maneuvers from short, sharp cuts back and forth to spiraling, rolling motions, firing all thrusters and guns to create wide swaths of plasma. They did this again and again until they were belching magnetized, superheated gas in all directions, turning the area around them into one big homogenous blob of searing heat. Tracking them by signature would be much harder now, as they presented like a ship hundreds if not thousands of klicks wide. If they couldn't swat all these targets out of the stars, they could confuse the hell out of them.
On the bridge of the Mercurial Kite Fred and Dragovich both listened to the reports coming from the bridge crew. The creature had been identified, which had furthermore resulted in the identification of the weapon system. Vortex canons. Fred groaned audibly. Vortex canons were a favourite among the more violently inclined members of the Organization, usually to soften up the crew of a ship prior to a boarding action. It wasn’t something Fred particularly wanted to be on the receiving end of.
“Keep recording readings,” He said to the intelligence officer. “Might be worth some pocket change once the fight is over…”
He shook his head and took off his sunglasses, rubbing his eyes as he turned his gaze on Dragovich.
“Plan?”
“Da,” Dragovich answered through a haze of cigarette smoke. “You see what they do? We destroy their little ships, they chop up the wreckage and make more littler ships. We could be out here slinging missiles for a long time before they run out of scrapped ships to throw back at us,”
“So we could nuke the station,” Fred began.
“I’m sure the capitalists will love that,”
“Or we board and try to find a way to shut down whatever keeps spitting out these shitboxes,”
Dragovich took a long drag on his cigarette, leaning back in the command chair and letting the smoke languidly roll out of his mouth. He created the appearance of being in deep thought, but the revolutionary had already decided to go for a boarding action. There was no guarantee they’d be able to take out the ships carrying the Mirdif creatures, but it would certainly be easier without all the scrap heaps crowding the sensors. He opened his mouth to answer but paused, listening as a crewman came forward and leaned down to tell him something. His weak smile became a scowl and dismissed the man with a grunt and a wave of his hand.
“Your mmm guests are asking for you Fred,” He said. “Deal with them,”
Fred sighed, replaced his sunglasses and left the bridge to deal with corpos. Dragovich picked up his communicator, keying into the encrypted communications the Organization’s vessels were using.
“Attention all vessels, rally on the Kite and prepare to deploy boarders,”
The order was met with enthusiastic cries from the various parties. It had been ages since the men and women of Dragovich’s small outfit had gotten stuck in a proper fight, and most of them were spoiling to shoot someone. The small group of ships formed up on the Mercurial Kite. The cruiser and her destroyer escorts led the way, engines flaring to full as they accelerated toward the station. The vessels stopped firing as they accelerated, aiming to avoid notice as they closed in on the station. The amalgams and the creatures were focusing their attention on the Serstine and the CES for the moment, and Dragovich hoped that they may be distracted just enough for him to get a boarding parties on the station.
“Keep sensors peeled for the unidentified ships,” He instructed. “If they open up in our direction unload everything on the Mirdif creature.”
While the Mercurial Kite pressed onward, the carrier and her frigate complement turned their attentions toward the swarm of new, smaller, fighter sized amalgams. They played defensively, strike craft sticking in range of the carrier’s point defence weaponry which provided what cover it could to the growing swarm of dogfights forming as more and more strike craft joined the fight.
Fred meanwhile, had just reached the hangar the Strzalans when the order came down to prepare for boarding. The hangar, already chaotic, became doubly so as Dragovich’s men began filing in and gathering their gear. Weapons were loaded, armour strapped on, thrusters and other equipment tested and organized with a near military efficiency.
Fred paused as his communicator buzzed, an update from the boarding party aboard the yacht. He glanced at the helmet cam feed momentarily before pushing through the crowd to find Brzozowski. It wasn’t hard to find him, of all the Strzalans attempting to bitch, bribe, and bargain, with the various personnel Brzozowski bitched, bribed, and bargained the loudest. Fred paused long enough to snag a cigarette off someone, lit it, took a long drag and then strolled toward Brzozowski.
“Hear you’ve been asking for me,” Fred commented as he approached, waving off the personnel Brzozowski had been directing his efforts at only moments earlier. “Renegotiations I’m told,”
He didn’t wait for a response tapping on his tablet momentarily before turning it to show Brzozowski the feed from the boarders on the yacht, specifically the small device they’d found hooked into the aviatronics. It wasn’t something Fred recognized, and his men were for the moment refraining from messing with it.
“Seen this before?” He asked, watching Brzozowski’s reaction carefully from behind his mirror lenses.
Teciron watched in the pleasing delight to see the swarm of missiles launched from the many revolving missile launchers of the ship filled the air, soon after, the plethora of APS from the amalgamations filled the air, spraying wildly at the hundreds of targets that suddenly appeared, but, like a Hydra, for each head that was cut two more came through, and in the end, even the simple weaponry sported by the CES craft were proven to have a degree of effectiveness in the heat of combat.
However, the delight wouldn't last long. The problem with the combat systems used by the CES is that they are over-relying on the hability to interpret, predict, and simulate the battlefield. Such a thing was not possible against Haunebu-Geräten, as their weaponry had too few characteristics known to the IPD to trackable by their strategies.
The gravitic vortex struck the two forward ships in the CES formation, missing the Serstine as it traced its path. Suddenly, the ships were flung outwards, pieces of their hexagonal hull armour came undone into a plethora of shrapnel, the sight was that like a Lego construction had been struck violently and spontaneously disassembled itself before their eyes, sent into a sudden spinning motion. The rotary loader of the missiles of one of the ships split from its hull, flinging outwards the projectiles and cartridges unprimed.
In a sudden move of planned desperation, two ships moved, one burned towards proximity to one of the stations, its hull in low integrity, hoping to be able to either seek shelter of the station and board it to use its own facilities for repair or use it as a shield, keeping its indirect fire. The other ship spun outwards from combat, avoiding the Serstine best it could to meet back with the leading ship, which hung far back and mimic'ed the movement of the Serstine, though slower his ship was, in hopes of avoiding the brutish action of the gravitic vortex.
Teciron grimaced at the sight of the undoing of his small security detachment, ordering that a new payload be launched immediatly, this time, they'd strike the relativistic assembly lines, flooding it with a payload of nanothermate paste, if not stopping it outright, at least preventing the construction of new amalgams momentarily lest its insides be produced on fire. Much like last time, the whole content of all cartridges was unloaded, as they tried to find a path amongst the fleet in front of them to unload the warhead into the line of extremely fast material
The new bunch of missiles were loaded, their targets acquired. This time however, half of them were shot directly at the masses of amalgams, while the rest were fired for the same effect as the last time, aiming to fry the electronics on hastily assembled ships.
“Interesting. It seems as if both sides are only delaying each other, one from landing transports and the other from producing enough shit to overwhelm us…” Raok noted to himself, and asked others for any updates.
“Sir the enemy has deployed some kind of small craft and is intercepting CES missiles. The destroyed amalgams are pulled back and reshaped into new ones.” One of the officers informed, with another adding; “Maneuver pulled by the serestines might bring inefficiencies to our targeting systems for a while.”
“I see… order Shivs to relocate and approach from a new angle, new targets will include the stations that are actively trying to pull back damaged and destroyed ships. Tell them to aim for incapacitation rather than elimination.”
Before he even finished the sentence, he noticed the console in front of him informing him of the new transmission. With a nod to the comms officer, the transmission was let through and displayed on one of the screens.
“"My name is Maro Carius I am the captain of the HIMS Tempestus of the United Empire of Orbitrarum, we are not on anyone's side in this battle by the way what is the reason for this battle and you were the ones who sent a distress signal?"”
This was annoying. How they were not in the fight and weren't doing anything was beyond Raok but he saw an opportunity and decided to be creative with it.
“This is Leader Raok speaking to HIMS Tempestus. We are requesting immediate aid; The ROMB station was taken over by an unknown enemy that is using it to produce disposable ships with which they are attacking everyone present and stopping us from rescuing our people who are trapped inside. Your help is highly appreciated and it might be rewarded handsomely. If you let them prepare, they will destroy us and come for your ships next!”
He pushed the “end transmission button” and grinned.
Elsewhere, much closer to ROMB and in the heat of battle, Shivs were repositioning on what could relatively be a “flank” in this battle, and the captains were considering the options at hand, in a brief but important discussions between themselves;
Cap1- “The orders didn’t mention this. What you are about to do could be… unwise.”
Cap2- “I must note that by helping our allies, we are in turn helping ourselves. It is in our interest to keep them in fight as long as possible.”
Cap3- “It is imperative to achieve the desired effect. To that extent, I implore you to use minimal amount of firepower for secondary objectives.”
Captain “2” nodded to his closest subordinate, giving him the go-ahead. Continuing with their barrage of missiles and aiming at what were likely entrances and exits for destroyed or newly assembled amalgams along with other two ships, his ship split the fire their other weapon systems, providing equivalent of suppressive fire on any hostile ships approaching the burning CES ship, targeting anything that seemed to fire towards it, even at the risk of drawing unwanted attention.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The ragtag group of engineers and workers had so far achieved good progress in both barricading themselves and trying to support the rescue effort. Life support systems had been isolated to make their safehouse self-sustaining, all while depressurizing the riskiest avenues of attack. This allowed the meager group of security guards to watch over all the remaining entrances in groups of three.
As for Ariadne and her engineers, their notes and calculations now filled whiteboards in the hangar alongside snapshots of the pseudo-Standing Weapons and the amalgams they’d managed to snatch with ROMB-91’s observation optics. They’d become familiar with the perturbations in the production chain caused by the Haunebu and were starting to narrow down on their number, which they’d now estimated down to 20 or less. Led by the industrious DAMSEL, the engineers began to feel quite a bit of hope at what had once been a desperate situation, at least until the alarms came on.
At first it was just an irregularity notice printed out by a small terminal, then a few red warning lights indicating that some production monitors had gone offline, then a veritable flood of emergency sirens carpeting every single system. Something major had just gone wrong, and upon looking out through the optics a chill went up Ariadne’s spine and her eyes widened: the distant ROMB-149 station was tilting several degrees out of alignment and bore an enormous impact cloud.
“W-What the hell happened?”
“Fuck me, the entire production line is perturbed.” The chief engineer threw his hands up. “They’re starting to demolish the place, shit!”
A few distant thumps echoed through the airtight refuge of the survivors, making the Strzalan instantly run off to hug the structural beams of the station and pulling Ariadne in with them.
“What’s that sound!?” Ariadne asked, although her superhuman senses and analytical ability was giving her nerve-wracking hints at what they was. The sound of aluminum being punched through by shrapnel, followed by the decompression of multiple rooms and corridors.
“We’re being hit by the shrapnel!”
The CES nanothermal paste attack and Roak’s missile attack had found their mark, disabling multiple magnetic deceleration guns and laser directors on ROMB-149, one of the assembly points. This had catastrophic results within seconds as the station found itself unable to slow down a large chunk of a shield amalgam that had been flung in its direction and was struck by the hulk at multiple kilometers per second.
ROMB-149 had practically been split in half and completely torn off the tachyonic lattice of the larger station. Thousands of tons of twisted titanium and ceramic had shotgunned over forty stations behind 149, destroying the nearmost ones and disabling a full fifth of ROMB’s total structures. Half of the Haunebu had been caught up and destroyed in this blizzard of debris and the ensuing Kessler-like syndrome as shrapnel from other damaged stations and secondary explosions added to the mayhem. Helical plumes of halostone and Mirdif blood sprayed out from the struck Haunebu-Geräten, briefly revealing their uncloaked forms to the enemy before immolating themselves with low-yield nuclear self-destruct devices.
The surviving Haunebu immediately dashed towards cover, losing their halostone films in the process and making themselves detectable. In a last-ditch emergency protocol, the ROMB shipyard discharged its entire production line, although its hijackers manipulated the systems so that it did so in the direction of the enemy. Hundreds of ships’ worth of material and components was ejected from the assembly line in the direction of the rescue fleet like a barrage of galactic grapeshot, shredding a third of the amalgams as it hurtled towards the Serstine, BSO, CES and other allied ships.
Ariadne’s efforts were now completely undone as the production chain suddenly disappeared. But from her station she could still see the strange hand of the hijackers working through ROMB in ways that not even their designers expected: The remaining 190 ROMB stations began reconfiguring their lattice and deploying every surviving industrial robot at once. ROMB-149 was pulled back into alignment by hundreds of magnetic tractor beams, which then started pushing it against the wreckage of ROMB-61 and ROMB-228. Focusing all of its industrial might inwards, the shipyard began using the wrecked stations, with survivors still inside, as the basis for a single gigantic amalgam bristling with weapons. The pseudo-Standing Weapons set up a delaying action by fully abandoning their defensive perimeter and doing a suicidal rush into the BSO and Serstine fighters’ area of operations, trying to buy the mega-amalgam some time to come online.
Mercurial Kite
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
“No, I’ve never seen this in my life.” Brzozowski bluntly replied, looking at the pyramidal object the BSO troops had found attached to his ship. “But since it’s latched onto my yacht it’s my property, and you better give a good price if you want to keep it.”
He cleared his throat and looked at Fred, puffing out his chest for a session of hard haggling. “And yes I’ve been trying to find you after some of your guys told me some bullshit about renegotiations. The pricewas set an-”
He was interrupted by a shout of horrified surprise from his chief technical officer, Katarzyna, who ran up to him. She’d been following him around trying to calm him down and not get the rest of them shot by pirates, but now she seemed to be far more agitated than he’d ever was.
When Katarzyna showed him the readings that were coming out of ROMB station, Brzozowski’s incensed gaze immediately turned to Fred, bloodshot by rage.
“You motherfuckers! What did you do!”
ROMB Traffic Control Tower
Zyczyn System
Killian Verge
A spiderweb of cracks spread over the meter-thick polymer observation windows of the control tower of ROMB from shrapnel impacts. In a few seconds, gas-fired emergency shutters were lowered over the station and evacuation alarms immediately sounded all over the place. Hundreds, thousands of impacts began slowly eroding the tower’s whipple shields and forced the hijackers to move the tower controllers to a safe room. The huge blow had brought most of ROMB’s communications systems offline, meaning they were no longer capable of jamming enemy comms. With little alternative, escape shuttles destroyed and their VIP still on the loose, the hijackers turned on the frequencies to make their message much more explicit.
“We have hostages. Every ship must leave the system at once or we will start liquidating them!”
The Serstine veered from the impacts as they caught up with what was happening. Their best weapon, from Rain's reckoning, ROMB's perfectly choreographed ballistic dance, was now shrapnel scattering in all directions. The battle group swerved out and away, trying to take stock from this hard left turn in the battle from behind their rapidly expanding and dissipating heatscreen before a reaction to the shift and the hijackers' words finally hit Rain's mouth.
"...what did you do?!" It was never a good sign when Rain, or indeed any Serstine noble, got curt.
Then the hijackers' threat hit the ships, and Norte, nonplussed by yet another battlefield being blown to the whims of the Boost by their mere presence, couldn't hold in her reaction.
"Well, if that's the case, shall we race them to depopulating the station?"
It didn't matter if Norte was joking; Rain was taken off-guard enough to tackle her and try holding her mouth shut, the rest of the bridge dumbstruck enough by the display to not intervene as their princess and her retainer tussled like angry schoolchildren. (edited)
While that fight raged, the Outriders saw the battle shifting just before the battlefield became mayhem with no up or down. They desperately hurtled around the quickly degrading combat zones and let the pseudo-Standing Weapons guide them. If they wanted to rush straight at them, they'd meet in kind, and be vicious.
Full thrust, plasma guns blazing as they changed directions and tracked their targets through the gnashing teeth of ROMB on a direct merge course. Meet speed with speed, l Under the safety of the shadow of one of the ROMB stations, one of the CES ships went by unharmed by the sudden shot-gunning of shrapnel, quickly sticking to the surface of the relatively massive object to protect itself from the wave of shrapnel. The team of Pyrotechnical troopers inside of the ship quickly deploy from the damaged husk, using small thrusters located around the suit as well as magnetical locks to keep themselves attached to the station’s outside. They search for the nearest airlock for entrance and, if found to be locked, create their own entrance through the airlock with the usage of their heavy-duty thermite-based equipment.
Meanwhile, the other two CES ships floated along the Serstine, inside the leader craft that hung farther back, Teciro planned the other steps of the developing battleplan, that is, until he was gobsmacked by what came next:
“Fucking hell.
Evasive maneuvers, sound the alarms! Drive us behind the Serstine, if we even have the speed for that! Everyone put their suits on!”
The image of the ROMB scattering itself, the heaping pile of metal in consistent deflagration torn asunder in a sea of splinters, relativistic buckshot slung with violence, a definite precedent for the small CES ships to take cover. They drive the engines to the maximum to try and further hide behind their much more advanced allies, while the crew strains to get inside their suits, or to secure theirs to see if they are vacuum resistant.
However, despite the best efforts of the ships, they couldn’t keep up with the evasive maneuvers of the ludicrously fast Serstine ships. The shrapnel cloud and heaps of malformed scrap struck the two errant CES ships like a series of shotgun blasts, peppering the ships. The composite used in the CES inherently didn’t shrapnel much, that, added to the sheer kinetic strength of it, made almost every piece of metal overpenetrate the modular ships.
Soon, several alarms rang simultaneously as breeches were formed, and though the automatic systems tried to patch up the holes the best they could, many rooms still were completely turned into a vacuum. Most passengers didn’t suffer much damage due to the small silhouette that they presented relative to the large modular ships, however, the ships themselves were almost knocked out of commission from the sudden blow.
The ships spray wildly in response, the 100mm cannons atop each of the ships spray the enemy with surprising haste, fiering almost the same projectiles as the swarm missile system did, trying to dump payloads of the nanothermate paste upon the sudden large amalgamation being constructed, whilst the navigation system tries to pull the CES ships into a more manageable speed, reviewing which systems are unresponsive, killed by the barrage. like any Serstine should.
Dragovich had made an assumption upon his arrival in the battlespace, and now as large sections of the ROMB facility turned into a haze of shrapnel it appeared that the assumption he made had been incorrect. Dragovich had assumed the if anyone were to frag the ROMB station it would be him. The assortment of corporate brown nosers, national militaries and… whatever one classified the Serstine as, had not struck him as the type to fire off missiles with little regard for collateral damage. But Dragovich had been wrong, and now had a cloud of shrapnel rapidly closing on his position. It was doubly irksome because the shrapnel had, momentarily at least, revealed most of the Haenbu. Dragovich had been ready for a reveal, weapons awaiting firing trajectories, but that had all gone to shit rather spectacularly.
The Mercurial Kite and her destroyer escorts had time for a single salvo at any rate, launching a barrage of missiles and relativistic railgun slugs at the now revealed Haenbu before all effort was turned to surviving the shrapnel cloud. The ships changed course to get out of the path of the shrapnel, while point defense weapons opened up on the incoming projectiles, trying to break up the larger chunks. Fresh missiles were cycled into the tubes and launched at the incoming shrapnel cloud, while the main railguns of the vessels were rapidly retracted to spare them the incoming damage.
But there was only so much that could be done, and in the end there was no avoiding the shrapnel completely. Smaller pieces glanced off the shields, or flash fried as more active defenses came online, but the larger chunks were able to punch through. They pockmarked the armoured hulls, some pieces embedding themselves in the ultradense armour plating while others punched through to the vessel itself. Automated damage control systems came online, sealing compromised compartments, and alerting damage control teams.
Finally the ships’ momentum carried them out of the cloud, but none of the vessels were without damage. Engines were only partially functional, power was spotty across all the vessels, and every one of them was venting atmosphere and dealing with crewmen in varying levels of ‘maimed’.
Fred was apprised of the situation only after the power in the hangar had flickered, gone out for several minutes, and then finally been replaced by the dim red hue of back-up battery powered light sources. He put the cigarette between his lips and sucked on the acrid smoke, using both hands to swipe through his tablet, skimming through auto-generated damage reports and a brief update from Dragovich on the situation.
“The agreed upon compensation is still acceptable,” Fred said to Brzozwski, buying time to review the flood of information. “It’s smaller details that need hammering out. What is to be done with wrecked or abandoned vessels captured by my men for example,”
He tapped and swiped at the screen and then turned the tablet to show Brzozwski the recording the Mercurial Kite had taken.
“We,” Fred emphasized as the recording played back, showing the launch, impact, and subsequent chain reaction caused by Raok’s and the CES’s weapons. “Didn’t do anything. Some of the other parties present caused that little clusterfuck,”
He waited for the playback to end before turning the tablet back.
“Boarding parties will be deploying to the station momentarily but the hijackers are threatening to liquidate hostages unless the attack is called off. So if you’ve been holding back anything that might help my guys regain control of the facility faster now’s the time to tell me,”
‘Momentarily’ it turned out, was a bit optimistic. Thrusters and engines were damaged across the fleet, and it took some time for the pirate engineers to begin getting power and functionality back to them. Though a sloppy course adjustment the ships eventually reoriented themselves and moved to deploy their boarders. The other factions present were firing on the largest amalgam, the surviving strike craft joined the Serstine in charging headlong into the amalgams’ suicide rush, and it seemed the way was open for the pirates to finally begin boarding the station.
Indeed in the hangar itself there was a flurry of activity. A technician jury rigged a power line, restoring enough functionality to get the pirates deploying and they eagerly jumped to it, crossing the threshold into the void and streaking toward the ROMB stations with breaching charges and cutting torches to force their way in if necessary.
Things escalated.
The impact should have, in hindsight, been somewhat expected, but now was too late. There was a chance nothing would crash into ROMB, Raok bet on it and lost. At least it wasn’t Council property. As the shrapnel flew towards his reserve force, the point defence system activated automatically and opened fire on the chunks heading their way, autocannons, anti barrage missile systems targeting the smaller and medium chunks as the biggest ones the ships tried to dodge, given that his reserve force had some distance between it and the fighting, it should be enough to mitigate most of the damage.
The three Shivs however, fared far worse; being among the closest to the shrapnel, explosions and standing weapon platforms, they did not have the luxury of being in a larger group where point defence fire fields could be set up to more efficiently defend themselves, nor were they far away enough for evasive maneuvers to be effective: only things they could do is brace for impact and hope point defence manages to deal with enough flying debris to spare them total annihilation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As Matey woke up, he struggled for a second to remember what was going on; he found himself floating freely above his command console, numerous alarms beeping and flashing lights indicated some kind of an emergency. He turned around in zero gravity and was startled by what he saw; a small, partially melted metal rod 4 meters in length had pierced the hull, wedged itself firmly in place just inches away from his back. If the object was any larger or struck in a different angle, there was no doubt he would have been ejected into the vacuum by all the air being sucked out of the room, objects hitting against the badly damaged wall and causing it to break. Looking around he saw his friend sitting next to the airlock, passed out, his right hand severed by the airlock closing down upon registering a breach, however small, in the room. He pushed himself away from the console and towards the airlock, looking at the screen display in horror as he slowly realised that the emergency life support system was offline in this part of the ship; he had a dwindling supply of oxygen. After a minute of shock, he pushed himself towards the console again and looked at it.
The targeting system was offline, firing system was online, communications were online… but the cooling system was busted, and he had nobody to retract the hul so he could fire. Just as he was starting to lose all hope of vengeance that burned in him, a notification on his console appeared.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Things went to shit.
Most of his reserve forces suffered minimal damage, but it was enough for one of his cruisers to get its shielding damaged, meaning it would perform sub optimally until repairs were complete, which could take longer than he was happy to wait. He spotted the abomination that was under construction before one of his junior officers, which earned the man in question slap on the back of the head by his colleague as they informed the leader of what was going on. The mega amalgam caught Raok by surprise unlike the message received by the hostile forces present onboard ROMB. He might have been in the mood for negotiations before, but the destruction of one of the ships he send forth to battle, which was now unresponsive to all hails and showed signs of serious damage, would inevitably lead to his little adventure being branded as a failure by his enemies back on Malaak; something he could not stand. Until the executives send him a transmission about negotiations and their outcome, he didn’t care; now he was angry.
He looked at one of his subordinates in the eye. “Send one of our cruisers to rescue the survivors of our force ahead and a Shiv for escort, they are not to engage unless fired upon.” Raok then proceeded to personally set the course for his own ship towards ROMB.
“We, however, are going to war.”
The Serstine got antsy as they heard the new plan, and they were immediately on board. Rain and Norte looked at one another, and a smile crept across their faces.
Rain nodded and made her pitch. "Well, friends, we just might have the thing. I highly doubt a Bladeship is appropriate to our current predicament, but its contents shall be far more conducive to our shared objectives. We would like to invite you to witness rocket surgery."
They killed the call, as they had preparations to make now. "Justice for the Nortenas and our honor," Norte said as excitement rippled through the bridge. Rain and Norte left the bridge, keeping it in the care of one of Norte's senior lieutenants. They ran through the bowels of the Tipping Point, rallying Suntouched and Boostkin, and gathering a force of about twenty Serstine, Rain and Norte included. Norte's clean red and silver and Rain's new stark white and black airframe were made battle ready: wings and plasma railguns were attached to Rain's arms and legs once again and Norte's gauntlet shone as it was maintained, sharp and nasty as ever and with its precious mistralium filaments ready and raring to go.
Norte gave a short speech as the throng assembled in the nearest Outrider launch bay, more like the barrel of a gun, and Suntouched started clambering onto Boostkin to ride into the vacuum of space. "This one goes out to the ones who went out against the Bullhead! They may be gone, but the mayhem they whipped up from star to star deserves an encore! Let's clean out ROMB...or whatever's gonna be left of it..." the pause got chuckles from the Nortenas, "...and really show what we can do without teamkilling dogfuckers and nuke-happy psychos ruining our fun!"
A huge cheer went up, and Serstine shot out of the launch bay like whooping, hollering shotgun bullets towards ROMB, braving shrapnel and crossfire to inflict themselves on the hijackers.
A moment or two passed, and then someone else made her way to the bridge, a Boost Shaman in the folded airframe materials common to her station, done in blinding shades of red and white. Her long, elegant shapes and upright posture made her look ladylike and almost delicate, and the scar running across her face showed someone had already tried to put a crack in her - by accident, but a fight was a fight. This was Akina, shaman to those that followed Rain and her clan.
She'd simply gotten the instructions from Rain and Norte as they passed by to "hold down the ship" while they went off to have a fight. When the captain and mates of a Bladeship, or any Serstine ship for that matter, went off to do anything involving acting as an away team of some kind, it fell to the Boost Shamans to keep order. Everyone in Rain's circle liked Akina, and it was easy to see why she was a rising star in Rain's ranks.
Not that any of this factored into her gobsmacked reaction to the Serstine hurtling towards what was rapidly becoming the remains of ROMB. All she could do was shake her head and start doing her job. "So like them, really...I suppose I love them to death for just this reason. Very well...ahem!
Hear me, true brothers and sisters of our clan!" Akina lifted a leg and then stomped on the floor, the daggerlike tip of her foot sending burning sparks across the floor that simply the impact wouldn't. A low rumble shook the Tipping Point as the Shamans beneath her felt her speak to them through the Flame, and they began to concentrate on the ship's fusion engine, turning their Flame to speak to the massive one at the center of the ship's engine.
"Lend us your strength, those who came before! Those who forged this Bladeship, sharp, hot and pure!" Again there was a rumble. The Shamans gathered tighter and tighter around the engine room, less just an engine room and more a huge cathedral, or a massive stage for the Flame to perform on, and with their Flames revved up, gestured and seemed to dance as one. The ship smarted up. Akina didn't think herself much of a commander, and her solution to leveling the playing field was to push Tipping Point to her true potential. "More speed!"
Everyone braced themselves.
"Turn up the boost! Our job isn't done!"
It was clear that the ship was revving up, too, as Tipping Point bled white-hot plasma from every orifice, just daring something to try to fight her while her captain was away.
ROMB 91
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The fire alarms and emergency lights turned the corridors of ROMB 91 into a red and black kaleidoscope of rusted edges and esoteric warning symbols written in Strzalan through which Ariadne wandered defeated, clutching herself as to shield from the frigid cold air billowing out of the station's rapidly-depleting emergency life support system. Sewage bubbled up from between the warped flooring of the facility, groaning in exertion from the damage it had suffered. The Strzalans hadn't said a word, gazes of disbelief and anguish from the workers had been enough for her to understand she'd overstayed her welcome and brought them nothing but ruin. She needed to face this on her own, whatever it was. Had she simply stayed where she was the entire ordeal would have been just an abduction, a minor footnote that would be cycled out of the media spotlight in a matter of days if not hours.
But now ROMB had been all but annihilated, a chain reaction of secondary explosions and spall was wrecking everything that the original impact hadn't taken out. Who knows what was going to happen if she decided to stay in the shelter? If the engineers didn't rightfully kill her then the rapidly-escalating battle outside certainly would. Ariadne had gone past the point of feeling anguished or in fear, now she just wandered the corridors of ROMB 91 wearing a pair of aviators and shifting a cigarette with her lips hoping to stumble upon either the kidnappers or an exploding gas pipeline. It didn't matter either way, and it felt surprisingly liberating. This was a fuckup no human being -or DAMSEL- could possibly come back from, so there was no use in trying. The only way out was through, and just accepting that seemed to change her: normally beings as hyper-sensitive as DAMSELs became squeamish when they were anywhere near filth or disorder -especially Ariadne herself, who had always been a particularily squeamish one- but now she was wading through a mixture of sewage and hydraulic fluid without as much as a flinch, like she was watching herself walk from a third person perspective from which fatigue, odors and cold mattered very little.
She was going to enjoy the hell out of this brief freedom, knowing that the hijackers were just around the corner. After all, this was what she'd looked for for such a long time. Leaving MAIDEN and burning all sorts of bridges behind her years ago, deciding to work independently and getting involved with the S&VF think tank... all in the name of being the master of her own destiny? Not having her life regimented by the programming she was born with or the deep-cutting social pressures of her fellow DAMSELs? Well, if there was any moment where she'd truly been free it must have certainly been then, among the wreckage of the Killian Verge's notorious Strzalan shipyard. Now her schedule had definitely freed itself, she wasn't worrying about her next hair appointment or business conference.
A squad of armed men, shape-shifting silhouettes shrouded in holographic camouflage, eventually found Ariadne trying to pry drinks out of a vending machine with a crowbar deep in a hangar full of crushed tooling. Getting the flashlight shone on her seemed to snap Ariadne back into reality a bit, and she turned towards them and raised her hands.
"Don't move, don't move!" The distorted voice of one of the hijackers barked, made harsher by the device hiding his identity. He and two squadmates crouched to brace their guns while two more rushed forwards, firing a taser that knocked Ariadne to the floor.
"Stop, stop!" Ariadne coughed. Perhaps she wasn't so liberated after all, these people meant business. "You got me!"
"We've secured the objective!" The leader of the squad called. "All units make your way to ROMB 91 and prepare for exfiltration!"
ROMB Shipyard
Zyczyny System
Killian Verge
The remaining Haunebu began dashing towards ROMB 91 all at once, firing off a few last volleys from their gravitic vortex guns and harnessing the powerful recoil to blast themselves across the large -and collapsing- facility in order to make it there faster. As the coalition forces approached the ruins of ROMB more and more -the path cleared by the Serstine and BSO's turning of the tide against the swarm of pseudo-standing weapons in a vicious fight that fed even more shrapnel into the gigantic Kessler syndrome around Zyczyny- the threats by the hijackers were repeated and became more and more insistent. If they kept going towards them, the hostages were going to die. But it was obvious that after some of the damage inflicted the rescue ships were now out for blood, and the mega-amalgam had to buy them some time.
Rallying the remaining pseudo-standing fighters, the mega-amalgam finally began moving and offset itself from the orbital plane of the rest of ROMB. So shoddy was its construction that whenever it went it left a trail of debris and pieces that detached from it, which it used as a way to create an obstacle over ROMB 91 while opening up a massive volley of fire from a myriad scrap-cannons bolted on to whatever portions of its surface had enough structural integrity to withstand the recoil, directing itself against the CES ships and Raok's fleet in particular while slowly rotating to bring more of its guns to bear. As they were hit and jammed in place by the nanothermal paste, the rotation made them cycle out of the line of fire, where some of the remaining engineering ships set out to work to unseal and repair them by the time the mega-amalgam finished its rotating and brought those guns to bear again. Rivets, bolts, doors, longerons and all sorts of small construction materiel were fired out by the mass drivers of the mega-amalgam in a continuous spray, made red-hot by the magnetic induction of the mass drivers.
Despite the efforts of the amalgams and their swarm of point defense fighters, however, the Serstine and BSO rapidly broke through the line and had began boarding the different ROMB stations. In all but ROMB 91, the intruders retreated inwards while sabotaging the stations behind them to slow down the invaders. Those who did land on ROMB 91 were targeted by three of the remaining Haunebu, which however had to get extremely close to the station in order to not just kill everyone inside -HVT included- with their gravitic vortex guns. With their halostone coatings already damaged, the Haunebu were quite conspicuous but the intruders simply couldn't afford the boarders getting near their bounty. The three Haunebu would no doubt end up being targeted themselves, but they hoped they would make a good distraction and delaying force while the troops inside finished barricading themselves, setting up ambushes and moving the hostage away to a tertiary service area in hopes of reaching their evacuation ship: a fourth Haunebu which now stealthily made its way to the station.
ROMB STATIONS-INDOORS
The Serstine rush to the stations was the stuff Rain's clan would sing about if they came back from this victorious. Hell, if they came back from this at all. Their run saw them going through pseudo-Standing Weapons, amongst their own Outriders, and crashed through into ROMB. Pressurized sections howled as they were punctured, and Serstine were eagerly firing thrusters to avoid being dumped out into the void. Others would have said that they had no option but to press forward, but Serstine believed the idea of there being a choice was stupid - they would go forward.
Rain looked for targets as she proceeded with a sort of hunger in her eyes, the sort of blistering search for prey that a dragonfly must feel while looking for meat. She launched herself down hallways and through intersections, trusting that the more she headed through intact sections, the closer she had to be getting to her target. The Suntouched behind her followed dutifully along, and interpreted her moves as an invitation to follow her example as she started steering herself towards boarders and hijackers, whatever moving shapes she thought she was running up towards.
The plasma emitters in the wings on her arms and the engines all over her legs that gave her a very shapely humanoid figure started thrusting, and she began to spin and vector in a frenzied dance. Her balletic gun dance allowed her to stop and turn on a dime, the perfect thing for maneuvering in close quarters without gutting the station further or simply shredding herself all over the inside of the stations. Every step of the dance was improvised and chosen in the heat of the moment. She knew danger was just millimeters away and that her timing had to be exact, and Rain was now exactly where she wanted to be.
Norte saw something else as she caught up. She felt the eyes of the Haunebu on her, a sort of sensation that something that wanted to shoot at them all had the perfect opportunity, and yet weren't. She could only guess that, and started laughing. It was the mean-spirited, raucous cackling of a heckler tearing into a bad comedian, and it reached Rain's senses as she let it fire out on all channels.
"I hear you laughing up a storm back there, this is a little unusual for this time in a fight. What's gotten into you, Norte?" Rain evenly said, more like she was confirming Norte would be at the fight on time, rather than if she was losing her mind.
"You know what's happening up there, don't you? Can't you feel it?" Norte said, excitement building in her voice.
"I believe you should tell me," Rain said.
"We've rattled the fuckers! They're scared!" Norte laughed again.
They were all barreling towards the boarders, ready to take whatever ambush or opponent was waiting for them. They were smelling blood and ready for a frenzy.
ROMB STATION
Akina could now feel the scorching Flame of Tipping Point, fully stoked, engulfing her and everyone else in the Bladeship. It was like they were all suddenly on the same page. It was like their Flames had been replaced by the heart of the ship: their cores pumped plasma and fluids all at once, they blinked, twitched, thought as one. Still individual, but perfectly aware of one another, themselves, and their surroundings. Bare Haunebu were eyeing the station and turning, as if waiting for something.
Fresh meat.
"I see them," Akina told the rest of the bridge, communicating as if in a trance, sounding like her usual lilting, oddly well-adjusted self and yet not. "Take them," she simply ordered. "TAKE THEM, NOW!" Suddenly her voice raised to a furious roar.
Tipping Point turned from the lead ship of the group into a burning white comet. It suddenly outran the other, non-stoked Bladeships and started heading up and over the station, her whole crew watching everything as if in slow motion. Massive explosions of plasma belched from it as it changed angles and searched for a good vector to shoot the three exposed Haunebu from, without hitting the station and the Serstine inside. It was like watching an Outrider blown up to massive proportions, and was a shocking, utterly terrifying display. It was as if the ship had been possessed by a Boost Aspect, and that Aspect was hungry.
That was all from it positioning to find a good firing angle. Once it did, it bore down on its prey, plasma warming up in its guns' barrels.
Once inside one of the ROMB stations, the Pyroclastics started flooding the corridors with their nanothermate, quickly the temperatures rose in whatever place was acclimated as they threaded their way cutting doors open with powerful thermobaric tools and weaponry alike. Threading their path towards where the production line of the station passed by whatever made it continue forwards, likely some kind of array of magnetic coils which accelerated the objects in the production line and kept them going. Ignoring all safety standards, the team hijacked the station controls and began turning the station towards the gigantic amalgam as they aggregated large quantities of scrap material within the station’s production line, aiming to fire it at the amalgam using the production line as a makeshift cannon just as the station did a few moments ago.
Meanwhile,
The ships fielded were never meant for much prolonged combat, despite being fairly reliable. They had to evade quickly out of the firing line of the large amalgam, now without the Serstine to hide behind they were drifting in fairly open space, surrounded by scattered hulls of other amalgams and the recent discharge. The distraught ships used their previous acceleration in foolishly trying to catch up with the Serstine to dash towards the cover of whatever ROMB station still remained alive, the cannons and PD started fiering at the mass drivers of the large amalgam, tracing a path towards large accumulations of debris to serve as partial shielding, however the large malformed metal slugs still hit, tearing holes into the CES ships and knocking them out of combat permanently.
Weapons systems exploded off from their blowout configurations as the engines struggled, one of the ships drifted sideways and decelerated, however, slamming itself into the side of one of the ROMB stations and lodging into it. The leading ship lost all of its weaponry that didn’t had already used all their ammo and hid behind another of the ROMB stations, unleashing their last salvo of common AP missiles and ejecting the clip afterwards. The ships were overworked, damaged almost beyond salvation, and had done the best they could to fight the sudden invasion of the ROMB. Now all they could do is hope that the other forces would win this battle so they could limp their way back to CES space.
The tides of battle ebbed and flowed upon the Mercurial Kite’s bridge and Dragovich soaked them up. He listened to the reports his bridge crew called out to one another, the updates from damage control and the other vessels in his fleet, and he watched the battlespace map pulse and flash as ships were damaged, destroyed or changed positions…
And through the chorus of violence a pattern began to emerge to the failed revolutionary. It was a pattern in the enemy’s behaviour. His boarding teams made their explosive entries to the various ROMB facilities. They cut, blasted, and hacked their way aboard and began the frantic room-to-room battle that so often characterized boarding actions. Not just his men, but the Organization as a whole was good at this. Boarding actions and close quarters were what they lived for. Nothing was quite so exhilarating as the weight of a flechette gun and the uncertainty of what lay around the next corner.
He expected his forces would acquit themselves well, but the way the enemy seemed to melt away on most of the stations struck him as odd, especially when all of the strange unidentifiable craft turned their attention exclusively on ROMB-91 and blew apart those boarders unfortunate enough to have been among the first wave. They were focusing their defense there which meant there was something valuable enough on ROMB-91 that they would sacrifice their gains across the rest of the facility for it.
Dragovich put the call out to the entirety of his force. The fleet, such as it was, turned its full attention on ROMB-91. What boarding parties hadn’t already been deployed were to be sent aboard ROMB-91, breaching in as many different locations to avoid becoming clustered, easy prey for the Haunebu. The beleaguered fleet turned its guns away from the massive amalgam moving to ROMB-91. It was occupied with Raok and the CES anyway. Instead, the guns were turned on the Haunebu around ROMB-91.
Now what I wonder are they so concerned with protecting on ROMB-91? Dragovich wondered silently as he puffed on his cigarette. Their leader could be there, rallying forces to cover their retreat. That was one possibility, certainly… another was that their adversaries could be after something. Holding ROMB didn’t seem to have been their strategy, at least not if hostages were the only thing they were counting on to protect them from counterattack. You didn’t take hostages to deter counterattacks…
You take hostages to buy time… so what were they buying time for?
Dragovich let out a long drag and cleared his throat.
“Scan ROMB-91,” He said. “Search for anything attempting to leave the station,”
As the dogfight began to die down he had fighters retasked to intercept anything his sensor sweep identified, and then as a precaution had his own interdiction fields begin powering up.
“Sir that… thing, its moving!”
“Transmission from Serestines!”
“The ugly shits are moving towards ROMB-91-”
New information was flooding from everywhere, and the enemy forces appeared to be changing their tactics, now trying their best to defend one smaller part of ROMB. That must be where the intruders were hiding, and if his guess was any good, they were getting out. Seeing others manage to get through the thick trail of debris left behind the biggest, ugliest grotesque of a flying wreck he had ever seen, he knew he would have to distract or at least attempt to beat the damn thing. He did, after all, have the biggest flotilla out of them all.
His communications officer once again signalled for his attention, and a transcript of the message sent by Maro Carius appeared. In a rush, Raok sent out a quick reply saying that the help is greatly appreciated and that he would like Maro to focus on the smaller amalgams while his boarding party went to ROMB-91 to help others in their search.
Then Raok raised his voice and issued his order to everyone:
“All available forces, focus fire on the big one.” He paused for a moment, before continuing; “Restriction on use of spinal weapons has been lifted until further notice.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matey knew this was it. The ship was in no condition to survive this but he didn’t care; he was a dead man either way. Having been contacted by Jenna who somehow managed to make it into the busted secondary control room, they agreed on a plan. They were to open up and fire their weapon and reroute all power to it, overcharging it in hopes of delivering one final, last show of resistance against this force they were fighting in a fight that they didn’t sign up for, for a cause they care about and against an enemy they didn’t know. Nobody would ever remember their names, and all their efforts might be futile in the end, changing nothing.
But he did always want to go out with a blast. He got the message, ‘primed and ready for fire’, and waited for the call to fire.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Entire Raok’s force that wasn’t tasked with rescuing survivors of the three lost Shivs was now firing at the mega-amalgam, with Raok’s ship in the middle of the formation sending a volley after volley of plasma cannons and nuclear missiles at it, while the corvettes circled halfway around it, firing broadside as they tried to get into position to line up the best shot, looking for weaknesses.
Elsewhere, where the rescue ships docked to two out of the three Shivs, the final one didn’t wait for its rescue apparently, as the frontal hull retracted inwards to reveal a big barrel of some kind of weapon positioned inside the ship, which has now started spinning up as all lights on the ship went out, before it finally started firing its laser at one of the Haunebu ships closest to it, melting through most of the debris on the way with ease for about 7 seconds before the barrel of the weapon started glowing red as it deformed, causing the weapon to hit the barrel before it left it, resulting in its destruction as reactionary explosions on the inside of the ship destroyed what little integrity it had left, leaving it as a truly lifeless husk now drifting away in space.
Dragovic’s call paid off.
From among the many shattered arms and the ongoing combat a small shuttle took off from the ruined remains of the station. It burned hard, covered in its retreat as the forces bought time for it to withdraw. In its position it seemed like it would be extremely hard to pursue, but the enemy forces were all but broken now, whatever the intruders had wanted at the start they had clearly achieved. The remaining amalgam ships and defences however were little more than an annoyance at this point, most of the scrap cannons had either fully jammed or been annihilated by basic weapons fire. Most of the way forward had been cleared, and with the Serstine and BSO having broken the line and cleared up those vessels holding them back the remains of ROMB were wide open.
Sabotaged corridors, smashed spars and more met the boarders, but not everything was totally lost. Inside isolated shelters people survived to be rescued, grateful that they had survived and been saved in such a nightmarish destruction of their home and workplace. While some Orbeole forces remained to trade off with the allies most tried to exfiltrate, not all made it, simply destroyed by ship weapons. Those who had no way out simply liquidated themselves. With ROMB totally destroyed, while it would no longer produce ships or be able to aid those who had saved it, it could very well help in other ways. Massive amounts of Kolleronic materials had gone into its construction, and all could be salvaged. Large amounts of Nightstone and Dawnstone coated broken spars and sections but the real prize was the broken remains of the Haubenu.
The vessels Halostone coatings enough to kit out a small fleet in stealth coatings, a prize worth dying over in any situation.
The clean up would likely take months or years. But the benefits of helping deconstruct and salvage ROMB was a treasure trove. The allied forces had perhaps stopped its total destruction, but they could absolutely benefit from it.
----
On board the shuttle as it finally escaped Adriane was wrapped in restraints, the Orbeole troopers surrounding her. She had been their prize, ROMB was just collateral, they had taken heavy losses, but the job had been done. A message was sent to Orillia.
Job completed. Package recovered, ROMB destroyed, Abelcain will not be getting his fleet
Mission accomplished.