A little backstory for everyone, by the way.
November 5, 2942 Anno Domini / 772 Argon Era / 4 Reunion Era
Outside the armorglass cabin screen, there was only faintly glowing grey.
It was a strange sensation, being still whole and correct to your own eyes when the universe outside is condensed and moving at scientifically impossible velocities past you. The grey of the warp was almost like a soft liquid, a nebulous pool or fog, which would sometimes be interspersed with bluish or greenish flashes, lances of light that would leave a thin, paint-brush streak across the ghostly cosmos. It was almost silent- but warp space, wherever it existed, could faintly carry rumbles across its eerie tunnels. Passing traffic would leave small sound wakes behind them, a flitting murmur that would accompany a barely perceptible ripple. All ships traveled at the same velocity in warp-space; or rather, the universe moved at an equal velocity from all vantage points within warp-space.
At least, this was the sensation felt during a simple gate-jump. The jumpdrive was a device that could lock on to a gate, any gate in the universe, so long as you either knew its spatial location relative to your own, or its position on the “gate grid” relative to your own. A jump locking onto a gate by spatial location was prone to a very long list of problems, the most obvious of which was a failure to properly lock on to the target gate- a jump in this situation would be impossible to break out of, and warp-space, while mesmerizing and harmless, was quite uninhabitable. It was also enormously energy inefficient as opposed to grid-jumping. Such jumps were usually undertaken after a large and diverse team of scientists had pored over and thoroughly calculated the situation until they found a solution that would at least probably work. A grid-jump was a rather routine procedure, by comparison. At launch, the drive would take advantage of known gates within its own system and “skip” off of one into its connecting gate. It would ride the already existing passage between these gates until its emergence on the other side, when it would “skip” again to the next gate, and so on until the destination gate was reached. The sensation of each skip was a bit jarring, as the grey of warp-space would flash to black quite suddenly, and the nearly inaudible constant hum would suddenly cease, then return.
The gates, as such, were quite a blessing, even more so than when they were first discovered. Almost a thousand jazuras ago, at the launch of the Greater Centauri project, Man first tried its hand at gate-craft. The brightest human minds had unlocked a secret that defied all logic- a device that enabled unerring superluminal travel between two points. This, of course, was only the beginning. The human race was changed forever when they discovered their greatest creation had already been achieved, a few billion jazuras prior. A webwork of space gates, elegantly impossible, spanning the skies in every direction. Literally millions of them.
All civilization had grown around the gates. They were the valves of its arteries. The jumpdrive had allowed the distance between gates to be reduced to nearly zero. Travel was still not instantaneous- only the Kha’ak could manage that without fault- but the energy costs associated with long-range travel were extremely low, thanks to the still-functional relics of the Old Ones. To construct such hardware to last for billions of years and beyond- that was Godliness. A few gates were wrecked at the expense of gigatons of firepower at various points in history, but the gates were stubbornly hardy, sporting a resistance against massive meteor strikes and a type of impulse field that made them quite difficult to move from their chosen orbits or spatial locations.
Gate-space was where Thrk suddenly found himself. The jumpdrive seemed to be operating fine, and the power shunt, while reckless and quite hurried, had done its job well. The ship had been struck a few times by a Rhonkar fighter’s pulse beam emitter- this on top of the power shunt had the ship’s energy shields voicing their displeasure in no uncertain terms. They were safe now, though.
Thrk forced himself to exhale. He gave Jane a sidelong glance. Her hand was still firmly planted on the rear gun’s joystick. Her grip was steadily relaxing.
Thrk opened his mouth to speak, only to be interrupted when, with a mighty wind-up, Jane slapped him viciously across his cheek bone.
“Thrk, what the hell was that?” She fumed.
He rubbed his cheek, wincing a bit. “Jane… what the… Jane, in case you have forgotten in the last two stazuras, I have just murdered more than twenty Rhonkar warriors and stolen a civilian vessel to rescue you from…”
“Dammit, Thrk, thank you. Thank you, really.” Her expression hadn’t changed.
“What… you’re welcome.”
“Good. But Thrk, what the hell kind of plan was that? Have you completely lost your mind, or is getting run down by the entire goddam Split Imperial Navy the best you could honestly come up with? You practically blew up the trading port. Terra’s towers, Thrk, is this a stunt of some kind? Where did you even come from? And Faustos! I looked on every station between here and Ceo’s Buckzoid for the damn lizard!”
“And looked under the Split’s iron curtain. Jane, what were you thinking?” Thrk’s expression hardened. “How did this even happen? Did you insult Ka t’Ai Rhonkar’s mother? They’re cruel and disgusting bastards, but they don’t just scrabble up every pilot they find and throw them into a slave pen. I know that.”
“I… Thrk, honestly, I was looking for Adrian.”
Ah, thought Thrk. That made sense. Of course, Adrian ought to be quite dead, after the events at the palace station of the Baron of Danna’s Chance. The Baron, self-proclaimed monarch lording over Danna’s Chance shortly before the Reunion Era began, had begun manufacturing and stealing materials for a battle fleet the likes of which would stress the entire Commonwealth Collective Fleet to near destruction- the crew of the Osprey-class vessel Cossack One, captained by Adrian Carter, and her fighter wings were swept up into the Baron’s nefarious plans when Thrk’s brother, T’ach, had turned coat and opted for the Baron’s heftier pay. Aligning themselves with the cause of the Gencore Technical Alliance, a high-technology and arms research company, they tracked down the Baron and his lackeys to their palace station deep within the asteroid belt of Danna’s Chance, and in a mighty battle were able to bring down the station from the inside. The losses were great, but the cavalry arrived in the end- in the form of the Argonia Navy, three destroyers and their escorts.
It wasn’t that simple, of course, for many reasons; the Baron’s men and ships were far too well equipped for an Independent faction under embargo from all five Commonwealth races. This hinted at either corporate sponsorship or something even more sinister. And T’ach was there, at the station’s destruction- Thrk had witnessed the floor collapse from beneath his brother, who was not wearing a space suit. His brother was dead. And then the unimaginable happened. The planet cracked. Danna’s Rock simply split down the middle, right there in plain sight. Ships’ reactors started to overheat alarmingly, and the station began to collapse. The Baron had some kind of weapon, and this was his last-ditch effort to thwart the combined forces that assailed him. He crushed the station. Thrk had barely managed to escape- and he had lost contact with most of the other crew members until recently. Quite a lot had managed to jump away, many more than he’d previously assumed. He should have been relieved, but one thing haunted his mind, constantly.
His brother. As he had jumped away from the station, he had seen the body of his brother, which should have been destroyed after such protracted exposure to vacuum- but there was not a scratch on him. And he was breathing.
Jane continued.
“After what happened on the Baron’s palace station I wasn’t going to just leave him for dead. I know we never found Siegfried One after the Cossack was destroyed, so I thought he might have taken it. Well, I thought I’d found him, three jazuras ago. The trail led through Rhonkar’s Clouds. I found a few of the old Cossack’s crew, your marines. Well, something went wrong. I was arrested. I don’t know why.”
“You’re lucky one of those marines is still in contact with me. He surfaced three mazuras ago and told me you’d been imprisoned, and that you didn’t end up in one of Rhonkar’s public affairs prisons- you dropped off the map completely. It took me a mazura to track down Faustos, and him another mazura and a half to locate you.”
“He just surfaced?”
“Yes. The others are dead.”
“…what?”
“Yes, my marines are dying. The rest that had met you in Rhonkar’s Clouds were dead by the time my contact came around. He’s been in hiding.”
“…Thrk, what’s going on? Hiding from what?”
“I don’t know.”
Jane flung herself back into her chair. “Terra’s towers. Was he being followed?”
“I think so. At least, that’s what he indicated to me.”
“Then you’re right, I was an idiot. Leading up to my arrest I had a feeling I was only one step ahead of something the whole way. Something was following me, Thrk. A ship here and there between the gates, people out of place on stations. I… I think whatever it was, it engineered my arrest by Rhonkar.”
“I think so too. We’ll discuss that later, Jane. You’re going to come down from your adrenaline shortly. I suggest you use the bunk.”
“Faustos, is he…”
“Yes, he jumped ahead of us. So did Conestoga.” He turned to the grayish glow of warp-space. “We’re going to Hatikvah’s Faith.”
“Why?”
“We need to rescue Adrian.”
Jane smiled- she was indeed losing energy and that was all she could muster at the moment. But he was alive. "Thrk," she said.
"Yes?"
"For the love of Terra, the next time you need to spring me from jail, do it without SQUASH mines."
"Deal. I need to check on the passengers. Please rest."
. I'm glad you've forgiven the 13th paragraph of the last part...
Yeah, I'm going to fix that.
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