Forsaken Ruins: Part 2 (508 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Craig Williams <thetyrant82.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2005-04-22 08:49:09 EDT
The lead Arch Angel Scout exploded just as Trald's fleet arrived. Mattias activated one last blistering burst of signal-scrambling electronic noise towards the third Arch Angel Scout—now just 12 kilometers away—before randomly selecting a planet on his navigation list and activating the warp drive. Mattias thought he saw a flash erupt from the direction of the Warlord a half-second before the Blackbird's computer registered near-catastrophic hull breaches all over his ship. It was such a powerful impact that Mattias swore he could actually feel the shells slam into the hull from inside his pod.
That's it, thought Mattias. This is how it finally ends.
The Blackbird's thrusters were still trying to correct the ship's course from the devastating impact. The first spread of cruise missiles from Trald's ship began arcing towards it.
"My regards to hell's keeper, Mattias," said Trald. "Good bye."
Mattias rotated the camera drones around and focused them on the ship of his enemy. He always told himself that when the time came, he would stare death in the eyes, and take the hatred for his enemy to eternity. Severing the communication link between himself and Trald, he allowed his mind to let go of the ship's controls, and waited for the inevitable to consume him.
But instead of greeting death, he saw the image of Trald's Seraphim-class battleship yanked away as the Blackbird miraculously accelerated into warp. Mattias nearly swallowed more of the pod's ectoplasm, and had to make a concerted effort to control his breathing through the nose tubes. For the time being, he had survived, and the subsiding adrenaline rush from his near-death experience nearly left him incapacitated with nausea. The ship's vital signs projected a grim image onto his mind's vision:
Shields: 8% and rising.
Armor: 0%
Structure: 4%
Capacitor: 2% and rising.
Come to your senses, Mattias thought. Think. The capacitor was almost completely drained. Wherever it was that he set course for, his ship would come up well short of the target destination.
"Mattias, check in." Matuno had made it out! I need to be strong here, he thought.
"Roger that, Matuno, still alive. Are you with Kirlana?" The Blackbird was decelerating from warp. He was beginning to get his shaking under control.
"I'm here with him, Mattias," she answered. "We're in orbit around the 5th planet in the system. Hull and armor levels are negligible, diagnostics are red across the board."
"Must be that lousy Amarr engineering." It was a half-hearted attempt to relieve some of the tension with humor. Mattias sensed it didn't work, and the Blackbird was nearly out of the warp tunnel. "Make sure you keep moving, and warp to my location as soon as your capacitor will let you." Mattias checked his weapons inventory: no extra missiles other than what was already loaded in the launchers, and 34 total antimatter charges for the Blackbird's 250mm railguns. Mattias grimaced underneath the mask covering his eyes. "How are you two on ammo?"
"A dozen fourteen-hundred shells and a handful of six-fifty rounds, no missiles," replied Matuno.
"Radio crystals loaded, multi-frequencies in the hold, bingo missiles," answered Kirlana.
Great, thought Mattias. Here's where I come up with something brilliant to get us out of this. The situation could not possibly be any worse. His fleet would not survive another engagement with Angel Cartel forces, or any other adversaries for that matter. Some said that Trald Vukenda was the most powerful man in all of unregulated space. Whether or not that was true was debatable, depending on which pirate you asked. But they would all agree that Trald was definitely the most powerful man in this region of space. As the head of the most notorious pirate organization in existence, it was well within his means to seal off entire systems to prevent anything from coming in or leaving. This space, and everything in it, belonged to the Angel Cartel. Mattias knew that the longer they stayed here, the tighter the noose around their necks became.
In the bounty hunting profession, lofty ambitions bear enormous risks. Mattias was the one being hunted now, and he had placed the lives of the people he cared for most in great danger. Why was doing the right thing always so damn difficult, he asked himself. Why is it that so few of us find the courage to fight for the unpunished injustices of our time? Mattias focused the drone cameras on the Blackbird, inspecting the massive gashes in its hull. Judging from the metallic carnage, he estimated that sections of at least 6 decks were now exposed directly to space. Somewhere beneath where he was sitting, hundreds of crewmembers were sealing off compartments, fighting electrical fires and desperately struggling to keep his ship's vital systems functioning. How many of them died because of this, he wondered. As the captain of the ship, he was sealed inside a pod made of an ultra-strong, Jovian-manufactured alloy and neurologically connected to the Blackbird's systems. Inside of it, so long as the ship was intact, the captain was immune from harm. It was the Jovians who had introduced this remarkable innovation, and it had changed the face of naval warfare forever.
Mattias began contemplating the Jovians and their technology. As spectacular as the pod was, it was also emblematic of the traits that defined the entire Jovian race: hyper-intelligent, but utterly and completely numb to human emotion. Modern day starships are massive and incomprehensibly complex. Before the pod, there were so many points of failure between a captain's decision and the execution of his orders. The ability to create a direct neurological connection between a human mind and a ship's systems reduced those points of failure to zero. Commanding a starship was now a natural extension of the mind's will. All a captain needed was to just think about what he wanted his ship to do, and it was done.
To Mattias, it was all so impersonal. Because of the technology, a captain could skipper numerous ships over the course of a lifetime without ever meeting a single crewmember from any of them. Mattias was one of the few who made an effort to meet at least some. It seemed like the least he could do in exchange for their unquestioning faith in his abilities, and their trust in him to keep them alive.
As the Blackbird's warp drives shut down, Mattias expected to find himself surrounded with the vast expanse of nothingness that exists between celestial objects within solar systems. Instead, he saw that the ship had exited the warp tunnel just 40 kilometers from the surface of a colossal rock formation the size of a mountain range. It was surrounded by several small asteroid fields, and looked almost serene against the greenish-black nebula backdrop of the E8-YS9 solar system. Mattias was no geologist, and was at a complete loss to explain how such a bizarre formation could have formed. He willed the Blackbird to cruise towards it, contemplating the idea of using the range as a place to hide from the Arch Angels.
"Mattias, we are en route to your destination," said Matuno. "Be advised, Arch Angels warped to our location just as we got aligned."
"You guys aren't going to believe what I just found," Mattias answered. The formation was growing larger as his cruiser approached. The Blackbird's avionics registered the arrival the Omen and Tempest.
"Whoa..." breathed Kirlana. "Is this formation mapped?"
"Negative, but it does appear on scanner, which rules out using it as a place to hide," said Mattias.
"I'm not sure the Angels have ever been here," said Matuno. "No debris, no containers, no mining equipment...no signs of activity anywhere along the range."
Mattias rotated the view 180 degrees away from the rocks and watched as his two comrades pulled their battered vessels alongside of his own. The Omen was about the same size as his Blackbird, but the Tempest was much larger than the two of them combined, with more than twice the number of crew onboard. Amazing that the three of us are still in one piece, thought Mattias. The three ships were cruising above the rocks, still trailing long jets of fire and plasma behind them.
"No, something was definitely here," interrupted Kirlana. "Look closer at those pinnacles directly beneath us...can you see that flashing?"
Mattias swung the camera downwards and zoomed in closer. Yes, there it is. The sides of some rock pinnacles jutting outwards from the formation were being illuminated intermittently. He slowed down the Blackbird's speed almost to a stop and altered course just a few degrees to try and find the source of the light.
User Reviews
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2005-05-10 10:46:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
didn't see there were more of these.
Submitted by Williams_2004 (user info) at 2005-04-24 12:11:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by mbstateside (user info) at 2005-04-22 16:58:52 (#)
Ranking: 2
Why has this got only 1 review and a couple of hits?
Keep going Craig I want to see how it ends.
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Thanks mbstateside, I got a few more chapters completed but I dont want to post them just yet. I'll try and get the time to post them next week sometime, I'll probably post 1 or 2 a week. But the story is almost completed. Thanks for the good review.
Submitted by mbstateside (user info) at 2005-04-22 16:58:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Why has this got only 1 review and a couple of hits?
Keep going Craig I want to see how it ends.
Submitted by Jeanneee (user info) at 2005-04-22 11:40:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
good stuff