Post by drakadorchaos on Jan 14, 2024 16:59:04 GMT
I Hate
Installation 67743
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not really,”
Yankovich gave her a look of what she decided was disapproval. Later, she wondered if it had been more concern than disapproval, but at the time and with the stress of the upcoming meeting she settled on disapproval. She gave him a scowl in response and he raised an eyebrow and turned his gaze away.
“Are you taking anything?”
“Stims,” She answered with a shrug.
“What kind,”
“Uh,” She dug in her pocket for a moment and pulled out an orange plastic bottle. She squinted at the label and then decided she wasn’t even going to try and pronounce it. Instead she held it out to Yankovich. Wordlessly, he took it and read the name of the drug.
“Don’t these cause dissociative episodes?”
“Do they?”
“You can’t just take go pills forever,” He said handing the bottle back to her. “You have to sleep at some point,”
“There’s too much to do,” She said, pocketing them once more.
“Then delegate Scrimshaw. I can do this meeting. APS and the Quosx both dealt with Felix more than you. I can talk to them while you go sleep,”
“No.” She cut him off as the elevator came to a halt and she stepped off. “This is too important. I have to go in there and somehow sell them on the idea of fighting instead of running off to the OCCCA with our tails between our legs. If I give that to you, and you fuck it up, I’ll hate you forever,”
She rubbed her eyes.
“So I’ll do it myself. Can’t be angry at you if I’m the one who fucks it up.” She cast a glance down at herself and then up at Yankovich. “How do I look?”
“Like shit,”
“Then I’ll have to be all attitude,” She took a moment to think about how she wanted to present herself. What message she wanted to send. She wanted to seem cool. In control. Not like she was stretched to the limit and on the verge of breakdown. She was Scrimshaw. Punk rock princess of the Overdrive Raider Clan. She pressed a button and the metallic doors slid open with an audible hiss.
The room she had chosen for the meeting to take place was located on one of the outer facilities of I Hate. She had met with the APS’s guy already, but the Quosx admiral was new and unknown. She didn’t trust her enough to let her any deeper into the defense array, and she doubted the Admiral would trust her enough to go deeper anyway. At one point the room had been some sort of storage area, but when Scrimshaw and her pirates had first occupied I Hate, whatever had been stored there had been cleared out to make space for the most important part of any Black Sail facility: a bar.
The bar itself was something the pirates had obviously put up quickly. Tables had been made from pieces of scrap metal bolted to crates, the chairs were all either uncomfortable folding chairs, or slightly more comfortable camp chairs scrounged up from who knew where. The bar itself was the most ‘put together’ part of the whole affair, constructed from several metal containers that had been pushed together around a rickety looking metal shelf and then ringed with bar stools that looked (judging by the lettering stenciled onto the seat) like they’d been stolen from at least three different establishments.
But the most noticeable part of the ‘bar’ was its pronounced state of disarray. When the questions had struck, or shortly after, there had evidently been a rather brutal firefight in the bar’s close quarters. The bodies had been removed, as had any blood or other fluids that posed a possible biohazard… but that had been the extent of the clean up efforts. Spent shell casings were scattered across the room, bullet holes pockmarked the walls, nearly every table and chair had been overturned, and the floors were sticky. Broken glass audibly crunched beneath Scrimshaw’s boots as she walked to the bar where her two guests and their respective entourages were already waiting.
“So a pirate, a mercenary, and an admiral walk into a bar,” She said with a mirthless chuckle. “Sounds like the start to a lame joke,”
She turned and hopped up onto the bartop between her two guests.
“Duck,” She instructed Rutha a moment before spun around and dropped onto the opposite side of the bar, briefly lifting her legs over the Admiral’s head to make the move possible. Once there she retrieved the only two unbroken bottles from the shelf behind the bar and set them on the bar.
“Looks like we got rye or…” She popped the cork on the second bottle and sniffed the contents experimentally before grimacing and setting the bottle back down. “Bathtub gin I think. I’d offer you glasses but well…”
She gestured broadly to the surrounding chaos and then leaned heavily on the bar.
“So I suppose I’ll be blunt about it. Panopticunts fucked us. They fucked everyone. I don’t know what they did or how they did it but there isn’t much in the way of coordinated efforts against them at the moment. Best I can tell, everyone is running for whatever they perceive to be a safe harbor. I dunno that this place will stay safe for long but being frank,”
She paused, and took a swig of the rye, set the bottle down and stood up with her arms folded across her chest.
“I’m getting pretty sick of running. So that’s where I’m at. How about you two?”
Gardreid chuckled humorlessly at the note about the Mercenary, Pirate and Admiral.
"Was just thinking the same..." he noted, though judging by his absent looking expression he may just have mumbled it to himself.
When he had entered the room, he had picked up one of the chairs and sat down, disregarding the insulted sounding creaking and had yet to move from that position since. With an empty expression he observed the two bottles, as if in deep contemplation, like his life depended on this very decision, his brows furrowing and wrinkles forming on his forehead.
His life did not depend on it, he did not care about the drinks (in fact alcohol did absolutely nothing for him) and in fact, at the current time he couldn't care less about the Panopticon, the OI or Corona as a whole.
He was in deep contemplation though.
Since the incident he had been thinking a lot about what he actually wanted, who he was, how everything he knew and had been was, in a way, a lie. Even if one that he had know of all along. Though it takes time for this stuff to sink in, for someone to really realise what it meant.
...and here he was.
What he had found out was that he didn't want to die. Unfortunately, neither whatever was roaming Borealia right now nor his Benefactors may be particularly beneficial to that desire currently.
He'd been spending the last couple days roaming the station, occasionally having some meaningless smalltalk with the crew and Scrimshaw at the times when she hadn't locked herself in her room, avoiding talking about any of the big and important topics or the obvious elephant in the room and he had been overall very quiet. It wasn't really like him sitting around doing nothing, he knew there was probably stuff to do, somewhere but... was that really ' not like him'? Who was he? He said he wanted to be real but what did that mean?
He grabbed the rye downed about a glass without any notable change in expression and put it back on the table, now staring into the wall, as if his stare would either add or remove more bullet holes.
"I don't know, worked so far. Kind of found out I like being alive, even if 'being alive' is a whole lot of existential bullshit right about now."
Rutha quickly lowered her head to avoid getting kicked by the woman who had invited the two here, and she let out a huff of irritation before casting a look towards the bottle.
A pirate, a mercenary, and an admiral walk into a bar.
"If how my head feels is any indication, yeah, it feels like I did." Muttered the Liintrix woman as she leaned back. Working with pirates was not what she expected after her experience with the Questions. The fact that she was alive at all wasn't what she expected.
The Gaze, Arthur Thieto, the Knife, Reggie... All of that happened over the space of eternity and yet in a single second.
A wound she thought healed years ago reopened.
"Even if I wished to flee, myself, I don't want to leave behind unfinished business." Rutha replied after a few moments of contemplation, looking over to Gardreid and Scrimshaw. "My fellow admiral betrayed me and the soldiers serving under him to the Army of the Panopticon, and I cannot allow him to escape this place, and I have reason to believe that he's not the only one who's turned coat." She shifted forward, now leaning against the bar itself. "We don't stand a chance against those strike fleets that now roam Borealia. But there must be something we can do to weaken them."
Scrimshaw unfolded her arms and leaned on the makeshift bar. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, silently glad that Rutha at least didn’t seem keen on running. She wasn’t sure about Gadried, wanting to live and taking runs at AOTP seemed to be objectives that ran counter to each other at the moment. She ran a hand across her mohawk and sighed.
“Well ideally we would have access to a big psionic disruption weapon but it appears to have been misplaced. So we’ll just have to put a pin in that for now,” Scrimshaw said. She moved the bottle of rye in front of Gadried and pulled the stopper out of the gin. She sniffed it again, grimaced, took a swig and nearly choked.
“Fuck me that is awful…” She muttered after what looked like a rather painful swallow. “Well cards on the table. Resources wise this facility is designed to allow for the remote control of Coronan vessels. Most of the ones we had have been destroyed but my people assure me that any others we can acquire can be rigged up from control through here. The challenge obviously is that if they turn one of their battlegroups on us we can’t really hold this place against them…”
She stroked her chin and momentarily traced the pattern of some faded print on the bartop.
“I also have a computer virus,” She said finally. “It’s highly adaptable, built on some crazy learning algorithm or something. It learned against Coronan systems so that’s what it’s most effective on. We started teaching it other systems just before…” She trailed off. “You know. Before.”
She shook her head and rubbed her eyes.
“Haven’t tried it against the Panopticunts. Might cripple any Coronan vessels they’re using, might cripple any of your ships your rogue admiral made off with…” She pushed off the bartop. “My thought at the moment is we lure them into a trap. If we can do enough damage with the autonomous vessels they’ll eventually send something here to destroy the facility. If we can lure them in maybe we could… I dunno… Collapse the star or something suitably catastrophic and wipe out the whole force.”
Gardreid scratched the table quietly as he listened and then watched the paint under his fingernail as he answered.
"Well, now that doesn't sound very... 'staying alive', y'know?
...and how do you wanna collapse the star anyways?"
He breathed in deeply and then sighed, not looking at either of them though this time he seemed to be actually thinking or so it seems or maybe he did the entire time, who knows? He certainly didn't.
"So... Hm. I only have the ships I brought with me. The rest... well, guess there were other people in the command chain who had more dire need of them. Master Blaster? Who knows where it is now."
He shrugged. He genuinely didn't know, though, that being said, there wasn't a lot he knew right now overall.
"We can't move the Coronan ships out of the system or we lose connection to the whole place here and they go inert. Not exactly something we want and yeah, they won't be doing much against the Panopticons own ships, you seen those things? Probably, I guess."
His head turned towards Rutha, looking her up and down a couple times as if it was the first time he was really looking at her.
"You said you wanna take down your now not-so-fellow Admirals fleet, what did you bring for that? Better be more than hopes and dreams."
'...not that they had much else left right now.', he added in his mind.
"So we have a missing superweapon and a valuable Electronic Warfare asset that might not work against the core of the enemies we're fighting. We also cannot stay in one place for too long, or else we risk one of their primary strike forces cutting us down." Rutha leaned forward and leaned against the bar once more. This was a difficult situation. A trap against any traitors that turned towards the army of the Panopticon might work, but it depended on threading a needle between getting the attention of them and not any more dangerous AOTP assets.
"There are too many unknowns to form a proper plan, unfortunately." She finally replied, looking up with a furrowed brow. "Our first priortity is intelligence. Finding out where your superweapon is. Finding what this virus of yours can do. Figuring out who else might have turned coat." She turned her gaze towards Gardreid. "I've directed one of my fellow admirals to Annwyn to figure out how best to set up communications between us and any allies out there myself, see how many of my ships have survived there. I've got a fleet of sixty ships, two Spectrum-class battleships amongst them, not counting well the assortment of twenty or so ships from other nations that managed to survive to join us. It's not exactly a grand fleet, but it's not nothing. Provided we avoid the main fleets, at least."
Scrimshaw had to resist the urge to snap at Gadried. It was already endlessly frustrating that the most powerful weapon she should have had was missing and her only point of contact with the last organization to have it didn’t have any idea what happened to it. Add on top of that, that he seemed more concerned with skipping town and she really, really, wanted to just snap.
But she was trying to get the two of them on side.
She swallowed the rage, and did her best to suppress her short temper. She needed to make friends. Or at least co-conspirators.
“Ball park on numbers for me is a hundred,” Scrimshaw said. “My limitation at the moment is manpower rather than a lack of ships,”
She took a deep breath and leaned onto the bar with a sigh. For just a moment the Raider Chief looked every bit as exhausted as she felt, but it was only a moment. She had a front to maintain, a character to play…
“Intel is the next move,” She agreed, turning her gaze to Gadried. “If staying alive is your priority then you want to play to your strengths and hit your enemies where they’re vulnerable. Which means we gotta figure out where they’re vulnerable.”
She drummed her fingers on the bar for a moment.
“I’ll test the virus,” She said finally. “If it works then maybe I’ll get prisoners that can be questioned,”
Then she turned her gaze to Rutha.
“Now, what can you tell us about your traitor admiral?”
Gardreid still sat effectively motionlessly with his head laying sideways on his crossed arms looking at Scrimshaw and Rutha dispassionately.
"Looking at what is going on outside, I don't think trying to find that superweapon is anywhere near reasonable for the limited amount of people we are, if it's still alive, you're probably gonna see it somewhere in the disk once all of this is over..."
He paused and mumbled.
"...if it's ever going to be over.
On the other hand, that general of yours or one of his friends..." and he pointed towards Rutha.
"...is likely going to find us eventually, if we don't find them first. So, if we're not going to run, we should probably get to preparing for that, but what do I know...?"
He rolled his eyes, he was well aware either Scrimshaw or Rutha were probably about to punch him though on the other hand he didn't really care. He knew this Rutha person was probably not exactly getting the best impression of him though he didn't care about that either. He was already threading the needle between the eastern front and the disk as it was right now and honestly he wasn't really sure where to even go from here. Staying wasn't an option. Leaving was just postponing. Maybe he should just run away with one of the two, though as things were the Benefactors would probably find him eventually anyways.
He rolled his head over and proceeded to stare into the table surface. If he knew being alive and independent would be this complicated maybe he would've just killed himself.
One hundred and eighty ships at the best. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what was prepared to finally strike down the AOTS-K, and now they had the Horsemen proper to deal with. She didn't think they could handle a single ship from one of those fleets, never mind a full task force, and that wasn't taking into account the AOTS and traitor forces that might be bolstering the Horsemen.
Gardried was a bust as well. Her temper didn't flare quite as much as Scrimshaw's did, but she let her disappointment known with an annoyed exhale, her brow furrowing.
When Scrimshaw spoke to her, Rutha looked up and nodded. "Admiral Gargan-Lemuel. Depending on who you ask he was either complicit in a brutal dictatorship or a weary old man simply fighting for what he believed in." She took out a holographic display and set it on the bard, displaying the three-eyed mechanical face of the Dysonian Predecessor.
"'Gargan' technically isn't a name, it's a model line created by the Future Party, the former leading power of the Dysonians before Miridij's revolution overthrew them. They were Predecessors designed exclusively to power the military. Infamous mercenaries like Gargan-Eil, Gargan-Saftah, and Gargan-Lamen come to mind." The display shifted between different robotic figures, one with a horrible grin of jagged metal and a single red eye, a faceless robot with what appeared to be razor blades along it's arms, dozens of different models, different silhouettes, different purposes, but all for war.
"Most of them were destroyed, but a few either escaped or were rehabilitated. Lemuel was one of the latter, finding solace in religion, more specifically the Orthodox Church of Sayyadina, believing if he prayed for forgiveness at the end of each battle he fought, perhaps he could finally find peace when he finally bit the dust. That's why I believe he volunteered to be among the first sent to Corona, he wished for this war to be his last."
She furrowed her brow once again. "He had a powerful reputation in the Coronan theater. Salvaging the initial disastrous deployment with the help of the Black Sail Organization, helping close the northern pocket, his command ended up earning Quosx forces the nickname of the Bleeding Eyes in the first place, commanding both devastating ground campaigns and naval engagements and specifically getting calls for support from all over the front. Then the Questions hit. Then he decided to turn and join that bastard Laikos."
“Ain’t the Panopticunts all about some weird religious shit?” Scrimshaw wondered aloud after listening to both Gadried and then Rutha. “You think maybe religious types are more susceptible to flipping sides?”
She shook her head and sighed briefly, rubbing her eyes. She tried to think of what she could say next. Felix was the one that had dealt with both the Quosx and the APS before. All of this was new to her, and she felt very much out of her depth.
“Right, well…” She said finally. “I guess we gather what intelligence we can, test if this virus is any good, and decide what our next move is from there. We have repair facilities set up if any of your ships are damaged. My guys are spread thin though, so if either of you have your own repair crews we could pool them all together.”
She picked up the gin and tossed it over her shoulder, letting it shatter against the wall behind her without so much as a look in its direction. It wasn’t really worth drinking anyway. She took the rye and placed it between them.
“I’m not sure how we’re going to find your traitor,” She said finally. “But if you do get a solid bead on him I would just love to crack some Panopticon skulls.”
Gardreid sighed in response and lifted his head off his arms.
"Well, guess I'll be doing re..."
Then he suddenly stopped mid sentence as if frozen, his eyes opened wide and his head jolted up, listening intently, as if some sort of higher power had just descended from the ceiling, though that ironically wouldn't be the first time in the last couple weeks.
"What in the...", how was this possible? Why now?
Gardreid suddenly seemed to be fully 'there' he struggled to jump of from his chair which in response to the sudden movement creaked insultedly and then promptly gave out. The Android, now on the floor did not seem to care much though still stared up at the ceiling at something that didn't seem to be there, then jumped up and ran out of one of the doors to their impromptu bar and mission room mumbling expletives.
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, how did they...? By the fucking stars... Shit, shit, fuck..."
...only to come back seconds later having noticed he ran out the wrong exit.
"Fuck, fuckfuck fuck, shit fuck, fuck. FUCK!"
On the brink of running out the other doorway he suddenly turned around to Rutha and Scrimshaw, looking as if he had seen a ghost.
"Get ready, I... I just got a distress signal, it's from the Blaster!"
Rutha nodded. "I'll let you know if anything comes up." She winced as the bottle shattered, wondering if that would ever be cleaned up, but, given that no one planned on staying here for any longer than a few months, she supposed that job would be left to whichever interstellar horror 'won' the war left to be fought in Borealia. "If you have any questions or requests for me in the meantime, just let me know-"
She was interrupted when Gardreid suddenly got to his feet, cursing to himself and running out of the room.
"What the hell's gotten into him..?" She squinted and got to her feet, walking over to where Gardreid had exited, only for him to burst out of the doors and rush back into the room.
"Calm down, calm down." Said Rutha as she placed a hand on Gardreid's shoulder. "The Blaster, that's your superweapon, right? What kind of distress signal? Can you tell us if there was anything specific?" She spoke calmly, trying to get Gardreid to settle a bit more. Time clearly was of the essence, and he wouldn't be able to efficiently tell the two what they needed to hear if he was in a panic over it.
"Location, if there was any message packaged in with the signal, anything like that."
Scrimshaw watched Gadried run back and forth with a bemused smirk. She gave Rutha a shrug when she asked what might have gotten into Gadried, and took a swig of the rye when the Admiral went to try and calm him down and get a coherent response from him. She swallowed and cleared her throat once Gardreid finally said something that was understandable.
“The details don’t matter,” Scrimshaw said. “Well… they do but they…”
She shook her head.
“Let me start over: the Master Blaster is what most nations would consider a class one weapon of mass destruction. Without getting too into the weeds it produces strong gravity waves which the APS upgraded. Provided it works, it should disrupt psionics in an area of effect. Jams them I guess…”
She came out from behind the bar, bringing the bottle of rye with her.
“So if you were, for example, up against a fleet who’s biggest, baddest, most fucking annoying ships were seemingly powered by and armed with psionic weapons they’d be in a pretty bad position if you could disrupt psionics all around them. Like bringing a rock to a paper fight. So it doesn’t matter how vague the message is or what kind of distress it’s in. It’s too valuable to ignore. If we have a lead on it, no matter how shit that lead is, we have to go after it,”
She locked eyes with Rutha first, and then Gadried.
“In that sense the details don’t matter. We’re going, and we need to go now. So,”
She held up the bottle of rye.
“A toast, and then we can walk and talk. To… one more dance along the razor’s edge.”
She took a swig and then held the bottle to whomever would join her toast next.
Gardreid seemed erratic, quite unlike he had been before, his eyes darting around the room, if he found the Blaster he could use it as a bargaining chip with the Benefactors, though there was a not insignificant chance, they would run into them right then and there or maybe worse.
What to do?
What to do?
His eyes caught Ruthas several moments after she had approached and only now he felt the hand on his shoulder.
Questions. Orders. That was familiar. Focus, you're still a soldier.
He seemed confused at first though then calmed his expression slowly growing cold, emotionless, a far more familiar expression to what Scrimshaw had experienced with others like him before. His eyes seemed to be searching for something in Ruthas though what it was even he himself could not tell.
"...
South. No messages. Not sure why though, usually you'd send a distress call when something's off or probably try to contact the APS, BSO, Benefactors directly."
He paused. Looked at the bottle but then shook his head.
"I... will go prepare. To whoever's going to get out of this alive."
Installation 67743
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not really,”
Yankovich gave her a look of what she decided was disapproval. Later, she wondered if it had been more concern than disapproval, but at the time and with the stress of the upcoming meeting she settled on disapproval. She gave him a scowl in response and he raised an eyebrow and turned his gaze away.
“Are you taking anything?”
“Stims,” She answered with a shrug.
“What kind,”
“Uh,” She dug in her pocket for a moment and pulled out an orange plastic bottle. She squinted at the label and then decided she wasn’t even going to try and pronounce it. Instead she held it out to Yankovich. Wordlessly, he took it and read the name of the drug.
“Don’t these cause dissociative episodes?”
“Do they?”
“You can’t just take go pills forever,” He said handing the bottle back to her. “You have to sleep at some point,”
“There’s too much to do,” She said, pocketing them once more.
“Then delegate Scrimshaw. I can do this meeting. APS and the Quosx both dealt with Felix more than you. I can talk to them while you go sleep,”
“No.” She cut him off as the elevator came to a halt and she stepped off. “This is too important. I have to go in there and somehow sell them on the idea of fighting instead of running off to the OCCCA with our tails between our legs. If I give that to you, and you fuck it up, I’ll hate you forever,”
She rubbed her eyes.
“So I’ll do it myself. Can’t be angry at you if I’m the one who fucks it up.” She cast a glance down at herself and then up at Yankovich. “How do I look?”
“Like shit,”
“Then I’ll have to be all attitude,” She took a moment to think about how she wanted to present herself. What message she wanted to send. She wanted to seem cool. In control. Not like she was stretched to the limit and on the verge of breakdown. She was Scrimshaw. Punk rock princess of the Overdrive Raider Clan. She pressed a button and the metallic doors slid open with an audible hiss.
The room she had chosen for the meeting to take place was located on one of the outer facilities of I Hate. She had met with the APS’s guy already, but the Quosx admiral was new and unknown. She didn’t trust her enough to let her any deeper into the defense array, and she doubted the Admiral would trust her enough to go deeper anyway. At one point the room had been some sort of storage area, but when Scrimshaw and her pirates had first occupied I Hate, whatever had been stored there had been cleared out to make space for the most important part of any Black Sail facility: a bar.
The bar itself was something the pirates had obviously put up quickly. Tables had been made from pieces of scrap metal bolted to crates, the chairs were all either uncomfortable folding chairs, or slightly more comfortable camp chairs scrounged up from who knew where. The bar itself was the most ‘put together’ part of the whole affair, constructed from several metal containers that had been pushed together around a rickety looking metal shelf and then ringed with bar stools that looked (judging by the lettering stenciled onto the seat) like they’d been stolen from at least three different establishments.
But the most noticeable part of the ‘bar’ was its pronounced state of disarray. When the questions had struck, or shortly after, there had evidently been a rather brutal firefight in the bar’s close quarters. The bodies had been removed, as had any blood or other fluids that posed a possible biohazard… but that had been the extent of the clean up efforts. Spent shell casings were scattered across the room, bullet holes pockmarked the walls, nearly every table and chair had been overturned, and the floors were sticky. Broken glass audibly crunched beneath Scrimshaw’s boots as she walked to the bar where her two guests and their respective entourages were already waiting.
“So a pirate, a mercenary, and an admiral walk into a bar,” She said with a mirthless chuckle. “Sounds like the start to a lame joke,”
She turned and hopped up onto the bartop between her two guests.
“Duck,” She instructed Rutha a moment before spun around and dropped onto the opposite side of the bar, briefly lifting her legs over the Admiral’s head to make the move possible. Once there she retrieved the only two unbroken bottles from the shelf behind the bar and set them on the bar.
“Looks like we got rye or…” She popped the cork on the second bottle and sniffed the contents experimentally before grimacing and setting the bottle back down. “Bathtub gin I think. I’d offer you glasses but well…”
She gestured broadly to the surrounding chaos and then leaned heavily on the bar.
“So I suppose I’ll be blunt about it. Panopticunts fucked us. They fucked everyone. I don’t know what they did or how they did it but there isn’t much in the way of coordinated efforts against them at the moment. Best I can tell, everyone is running for whatever they perceive to be a safe harbor. I dunno that this place will stay safe for long but being frank,”
She paused, and took a swig of the rye, set the bottle down and stood up with her arms folded across her chest.
“I’m getting pretty sick of running. So that’s where I’m at. How about you two?”
Gardreid chuckled humorlessly at the note about the Mercenary, Pirate and Admiral.
"Was just thinking the same..." he noted, though judging by his absent looking expression he may just have mumbled it to himself.
When he had entered the room, he had picked up one of the chairs and sat down, disregarding the insulted sounding creaking and had yet to move from that position since. With an empty expression he observed the two bottles, as if in deep contemplation, like his life depended on this very decision, his brows furrowing and wrinkles forming on his forehead.
His life did not depend on it, he did not care about the drinks (in fact alcohol did absolutely nothing for him) and in fact, at the current time he couldn't care less about the Panopticon, the OI or Corona as a whole.
He was in deep contemplation though.
Since the incident he had been thinking a lot about what he actually wanted, who he was, how everything he knew and had been was, in a way, a lie. Even if one that he had know of all along. Though it takes time for this stuff to sink in, for someone to really realise what it meant.
...and here he was.
What he had found out was that he didn't want to die. Unfortunately, neither whatever was roaming Borealia right now nor his Benefactors may be particularly beneficial to that desire currently.
He'd been spending the last couple days roaming the station, occasionally having some meaningless smalltalk with the crew and Scrimshaw at the times when she hadn't locked herself in her room, avoiding talking about any of the big and important topics or the obvious elephant in the room and he had been overall very quiet. It wasn't really like him sitting around doing nothing, he knew there was probably stuff to do, somewhere but... was that really ' not like him'? Who was he? He said he wanted to be real but what did that mean?
He grabbed the rye downed about a glass without any notable change in expression and put it back on the table, now staring into the wall, as if his stare would either add or remove more bullet holes.
"I don't know, worked so far. Kind of found out I like being alive, even if 'being alive' is a whole lot of existential bullshit right about now."
Rutha quickly lowered her head to avoid getting kicked by the woman who had invited the two here, and she let out a huff of irritation before casting a look towards the bottle.
A pirate, a mercenary, and an admiral walk into a bar.
"If how my head feels is any indication, yeah, it feels like I did." Muttered the Liintrix woman as she leaned back. Working with pirates was not what she expected after her experience with the Questions. The fact that she was alive at all wasn't what she expected.
The Gaze, Arthur Thieto, the Knife, Reggie... All of that happened over the space of eternity and yet in a single second.
A wound she thought healed years ago reopened.
"Even if I wished to flee, myself, I don't want to leave behind unfinished business." Rutha replied after a few moments of contemplation, looking over to Gardreid and Scrimshaw. "My fellow admiral betrayed me and the soldiers serving under him to the Army of the Panopticon, and I cannot allow him to escape this place, and I have reason to believe that he's not the only one who's turned coat." She shifted forward, now leaning against the bar itself. "We don't stand a chance against those strike fleets that now roam Borealia. But there must be something we can do to weaken them."
Scrimshaw unfolded her arms and leaned on the makeshift bar. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, silently glad that Rutha at least didn’t seem keen on running. She wasn’t sure about Gadried, wanting to live and taking runs at AOTP seemed to be objectives that ran counter to each other at the moment. She ran a hand across her mohawk and sighed.
“Well ideally we would have access to a big psionic disruption weapon but it appears to have been misplaced. So we’ll just have to put a pin in that for now,” Scrimshaw said. She moved the bottle of rye in front of Gadried and pulled the stopper out of the gin. She sniffed it again, grimaced, took a swig and nearly choked.
“Fuck me that is awful…” She muttered after what looked like a rather painful swallow. “Well cards on the table. Resources wise this facility is designed to allow for the remote control of Coronan vessels. Most of the ones we had have been destroyed but my people assure me that any others we can acquire can be rigged up from control through here. The challenge obviously is that if they turn one of their battlegroups on us we can’t really hold this place against them…”
She stroked her chin and momentarily traced the pattern of some faded print on the bartop.
“I also have a computer virus,” She said finally. “It’s highly adaptable, built on some crazy learning algorithm or something. It learned against Coronan systems so that’s what it’s most effective on. We started teaching it other systems just before…” She trailed off. “You know. Before.”
She shook her head and rubbed her eyes.
“Haven’t tried it against the Panopticunts. Might cripple any Coronan vessels they’re using, might cripple any of your ships your rogue admiral made off with…” She pushed off the bartop. “My thought at the moment is we lure them into a trap. If we can do enough damage with the autonomous vessels they’ll eventually send something here to destroy the facility. If we can lure them in maybe we could… I dunno… Collapse the star or something suitably catastrophic and wipe out the whole force.”
Gardreid scratched the table quietly as he listened and then watched the paint under his fingernail as he answered.
"Well, now that doesn't sound very... 'staying alive', y'know?
...and how do you wanna collapse the star anyways?"
He breathed in deeply and then sighed, not looking at either of them though this time he seemed to be actually thinking or so it seems or maybe he did the entire time, who knows? He certainly didn't.
"So... Hm. I only have the ships I brought with me. The rest... well, guess there were other people in the command chain who had more dire need of them. Master Blaster? Who knows where it is now."
He shrugged. He genuinely didn't know, though, that being said, there wasn't a lot he knew right now overall.
"We can't move the Coronan ships out of the system or we lose connection to the whole place here and they go inert. Not exactly something we want and yeah, they won't be doing much against the Panopticons own ships, you seen those things? Probably, I guess."
His head turned towards Rutha, looking her up and down a couple times as if it was the first time he was really looking at her.
"You said you wanna take down your now not-so-fellow Admirals fleet, what did you bring for that? Better be more than hopes and dreams."
'...not that they had much else left right now.', he added in his mind.
"So we have a missing superweapon and a valuable Electronic Warfare asset that might not work against the core of the enemies we're fighting. We also cannot stay in one place for too long, or else we risk one of their primary strike forces cutting us down." Rutha leaned forward and leaned against the bar once more. This was a difficult situation. A trap against any traitors that turned towards the army of the Panopticon might work, but it depended on threading a needle between getting the attention of them and not any more dangerous AOTP assets.
"There are too many unknowns to form a proper plan, unfortunately." She finally replied, looking up with a furrowed brow. "Our first priortity is intelligence. Finding out where your superweapon is. Finding what this virus of yours can do. Figuring out who else might have turned coat." She turned her gaze towards Gardreid. "I've directed one of my fellow admirals to Annwyn to figure out how best to set up communications between us and any allies out there myself, see how many of my ships have survived there. I've got a fleet of sixty ships, two Spectrum-class battleships amongst them, not counting well the assortment of twenty or so ships from other nations that managed to survive to join us. It's not exactly a grand fleet, but it's not nothing. Provided we avoid the main fleets, at least."
Scrimshaw had to resist the urge to snap at Gadried. It was already endlessly frustrating that the most powerful weapon she should have had was missing and her only point of contact with the last organization to have it didn’t have any idea what happened to it. Add on top of that, that he seemed more concerned with skipping town and she really, really, wanted to just snap.
But she was trying to get the two of them on side.
She swallowed the rage, and did her best to suppress her short temper. She needed to make friends. Or at least co-conspirators.
“Ball park on numbers for me is a hundred,” Scrimshaw said. “My limitation at the moment is manpower rather than a lack of ships,”
She took a deep breath and leaned onto the bar with a sigh. For just a moment the Raider Chief looked every bit as exhausted as she felt, but it was only a moment. She had a front to maintain, a character to play…
“Intel is the next move,” She agreed, turning her gaze to Gadried. “If staying alive is your priority then you want to play to your strengths and hit your enemies where they’re vulnerable. Which means we gotta figure out where they’re vulnerable.”
She drummed her fingers on the bar for a moment.
“I’ll test the virus,” She said finally. “If it works then maybe I’ll get prisoners that can be questioned,”
Then she turned her gaze to Rutha.
“Now, what can you tell us about your traitor admiral?”
Gardreid still sat effectively motionlessly with his head laying sideways on his crossed arms looking at Scrimshaw and Rutha dispassionately.
"Looking at what is going on outside, I don't think trying to find that superweapon is anywhere near reasonable for the limited amount of people we are, if it's still alive, you're probably gonna see it somewhere in the disk once all of this is over..."
He paused and mumbled.
"...if it's ever going to be over.
On the other hand, that general of yours or one of his friends..." and he pointed towards Rutha.
"...is likely going to find us eventually, if we don't find them first. So, if we're not going to run, we should probably get to preparing for that, but what do I know...?"
He rolled his eyes, he was well aware either Scrimshaw or Rutha were probably about to punch him though on the other hand he didn't really care. He knew this Rutha person was probably not exactly getting the best impression of him though he didn't care about that either. He was already threading the needle between the eastern front and the disk as it was right now and honestly he wasn't really sure where to even go from here. Staying wasn't an option. Leaving was just postponing. Maybe he should just run away with one of the two, though as things were the Benefactors would probably find him eventually anyways.
He rolled his head over and proceeded to stare into the table surface. If he knew being alive and independent would be this complicated maybe he would've just killed himself.
One hundred and eighty ships at the best. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what was prepared to finally strike down the AOTS-K, and now they had the Horsemen proper to deal with. She didn't think they could handle a single ship from one of those fleets, never mind a full task force, and that wasn't taking into account the AOTS and traitor forces that might be bolstering the Horsemen.
Gardried was a bust as well. Her temper didn't flare quite as much as Scrimshaw's did, but she let her disappointment known with an annoyed exhale, her brow furrowing.
When Scrimshaw spoke to her, Rutha looked up and nodded. "Admiral Gargan-Lemuel. Depending on who you ask he was either complicit in a brutal dictatorship or a weary old man simply fighting for what he believed in." She took out a holographic display and set it on the bard, displaying the three-eyed mechanical face of the Dysonian Predecessor.
"'Gargan' technically isn't a name, it's a model line created by the Future Party, the former leading power of the Dysonians before Miridij's revolution overthrew them. They were Predecessors designed exclusively to power the military. Infamous mercenaries like Gargan-Eil, Gargan-Saftah, and Gargan-Lamen come to mind." The display shifted between different robotic figures, one with a horrible grin of jagged metal and a single red eye, a faceless robot with what appeared to be razor blades along it's arms, dozens of different models, different silhouettes, different purposes, but all for war.
"Most of them were destroyed, but a few either escaped or were rehabilitated. Lemuel was one of the latter, finding solace in religion, more specifically the Orthodox Church of Sayyadina, believing if he prayed for forgiveness at the end of each battle he fought, perhaps he could finally find peace when he finally bit the dust. That's why I believe he volunteered to be among the first sent to Corona, he wished for this war to be his last."
She furrowed her brow once again. "He had a powerful reputation in the Coronan theater. Salvaging the initial disastrous deployment with the help of the Black Sail Organization, helping close the northern pocket, his command ended up earning Quosx forces the nickname of the Bleeding Eyes in the first place, commanding both devastating ground campaigns and naval engagements and specifically getting calls for support from all over the front. Then the Questions hit. Then he decided to turn and join that bastard Laikos."
“Ain’t the Panopticunts all about some weird religious shit?” Scrimshaw wondered aloud after listening to both Gadried and then Rutha. “You think maybe religious types are more susceptible to flipping sides?”
She shook her head and sighed briefly, rubbing her eyes. She tried to think of what she could say next. Felix was the one that had dealt with both the Quosx and the APS before. All of this was new to her, and she felt very much out of her depth.
“Right, well…” She said finally. “I guess we gather what intelligence we can, test if this virus is any good, and decide what our next move is from there. We have repair facilities set up if any of your ships are damaged. My guys are spread thin though, so if either of you have your own repair crews we could pool them all together.”
She picked up the gin and tossed it over her shoulder, letting it shatter against the wall behind her without so much as a look in its direction. It wasn’t really worth drinking anyway. She took the rye and placed it between them.
“I’m not sure how we’re going to find your traitor,” She said finally. “But if you do get a solid bead on him I would just love to crack some Panopticon skulls.”
Gardreid sighed in response and lifted his head off his arms.
"Well, guess I'll be doing re..."
Then he suddenly stopped mid sentence as if frozen, his eyes opened wide and his head jolted up, listening intently, as if some sort of higher power had just descended from the ceiling, though that ironically wouldn't be the first time in the last couple weeks.
"What in the...", how was this possible? Why now?
Gardreid suddenly seemed to be fully 'there' he struggled to jump of from his chair which in response to the sudden movement creaked insultedly and then promptly gave out. The Android, now on the floor did not seem to care much though still stared up at the ceiling at something that didn't seem to be there, then jumped up and ran out of one of the doors to their impromptu bar and mission room mumbling expletives.
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, how did they...? By the fucking stars... Shit, shit, fuck..."
...only to come back seconds later having noticed he ran out the wrong exit.
"Fuck, fuckfuck fuck, shit fuck, fuck. FUCK!"
On the brink of running out the other doorway he suddenly turned around to Rutha and Scrimshaw, looking as if he had seen a ghost.
"Get ready, I... I just got a distress signal, it's from the Blaster!"
Rutha nodded. "I'll let you know if anything comes up." She winced as the bottle shattered, wondering if that would ever be cleaned up, but, given that no one planned on staying here for any longer than a few months, she supposed that job would be left to whichever interstellar horror 'won' the war left to be fought in Borealia. "If you have any questions or requests for me in the meantime, just let me know-"
She was interrupted when Gardreid suddenly got to his feet, cursing to himself and running out of the room.
"What the hell's gotten into him..?" She squinted and got to her feet, walking over to where Gardreid had exited, only for him to burst out of the doors and rush back into the room.
"Calm down, calm down." Said Rutha as she placed a hand on Gardreid's shoulder. "The Blaster, that's your superweapon, right? What kind of distress signal? Can you tell us if there was anything specific?" She spoke calmly, trying to get Gardreid to settle a bit more. Time clearly was of the essence, and he wouldn't be able to efficiently tell the two what they needed to hear if he was in a panic over it.
"Location, if there was any message packaged in with the signal, anything like that."
Scrimshaw watched Gadried run back and forth with a bemused smirk. She gave Rutha a shrug when she asked what might have gotten into Gadried, and took a swig of the rye when the Admiral went to try and calm him down and get a coherent response from him. She swallowed and cleared her throat once Gardreid finally said something that was understandable.
“The details don’t matter,” Scrimshaw said. “Well… they do but they…”
She shook her head.
“Let me start over: the Master Blaster is what most nations would consider a class one weapon of mass destruction. Without getting too into the weeds it produces strong gravity waves which the APS upgraded. Provided it works, it should disrupt psionics in an area of effect. Jams them I guess…”
She came out from behind the bar, bringing the bottle of rye with her.
“So if you were, for example, up against a fleet who’s biggest, baddest, most fucking annoying ships were seemingly powered by and armed with psionic weapons they’d be in a pretty bad position if you could disrupt psionics all around them. Like bringing a rock to a paper fight. So it doesn’t matter how vague the message is or what kind of distress it’s in. It’s too valuable to ignore. If we have a lead on it, no matter how shit that lead is, we have to go after it,”
She locked eyes with Rutha first, and then Gadried.
“In that sense the details don’t matter. We’re going, and we need to go now. So,”
She held up the bottle of rye.
“A toast, and then we can walk and talk. To… one more dance along the razor’s edge.”
She took a swig and then held the bottle to whomever would join her toast next.
Gardreid seemed erratic, quite unlike he had been before, his eyes darting around the room, if he found the Blaster he could use it as a bargaining chip with the Benefactors, though there was a not insignificant chance, they would run into them right then and there or maybe worse.
What to do?
What to do?
His eyes caught Ruthas several moments after she had approached and only now he felt the hand on his shoulder.
Questions. Orders. That was familiar. Focus, you're still a soldier.
He seemed confused at first though then calmed his expression slowly growing cold, emotionless, a far more familiar expression to what Scrimshaw had experienced with others like him before. His eyes seemed to be searching for something in Ruthas though what it was even he himself could not tell.
"...
South. No messages. Not sure why though, usually you'd send a distress call when something's off or probably try to contact the APS, BSO, Benefactors directly."
He paused. Looked at the bottle but then shook his head.
"I... will go prepare. To whoever's going to get out of this alive."