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WARNING: NOT TL;DR FRIENDLY. WALL OF TEXT INBOUND.
The text format for the forum doesn't support indents, so they don't show up, sadly. It's formatted all nice and pretty in the file.
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The forest was rather bright, but shaded just enough to give an edge of mystery to it all. It seemed to stretch on for kilometers and kilometers, without an end. The most jarring of it all was the utter silence. There was not a trace of wind rain, or any show of weather than the occasional weak spear of sunlight peeking through the canopy. It seemed quite peaceful, restful. A log laid in the grass next to a small stream nearby, also silent. He didn’t think to argue, it didn’t appear to matter. He walked over, the only sound now being his bare feet giving under the grass. Sitting down, he stared at the water, seeing the canopy reflected in it’s perfect, mirror-esque surface. He let out a long, slow sigh, feeling whatever tension he had fall away like a heavy weight.
Just then, he heard a second sound. Like someone walking across the grass. It appeared that he wasn’t alone. He tensed, preparing for anything. He felt the tension he just lost returning with irrational alacrity. He was usually a laid-back person, but now all he wanted to do was flee, quite unusual for him. It started to dim, although that may have just been his imagination. He could not be certain.
The footsteps were close, now. Very close. He stared at the stream like a man inspired, consumed by a completely unexplainable dread as to what in all the worlds was going on. He even started to feel his hands tremble. He clutched them in a vain effort to stifle their shaking. It was of no use. Whatever or whomever was inspiring his fear was standing almost right behind him and by now he was intimately acquainted with fear. He could not even tell what kind of fear it was. Simply an irrational terror, almost akin to a child’s fear of the bogeyman.
He felt more than he heard the person sit down next to him. It was getting noticeably darker the closer she, for the figure was assuredly feminine, came. Why was he so terrified of her? Whatever did she do to scare him like this? It was bizarre.
He nearly jumped when she murmured his name in a voice that sounded familiar, but for a reason he could not explain, sounded different. He could not explain it; it was as if he did know, but his memory was being blockaded. It only amplified his nervousness. The female giggled a bit, and murmured his name again. She sidled close to him, and he recognized part of the fear as lust, or desire. It was not a feeling he was familiar with.
The light was virtually gone now; it was getting very hard to see. On impulse, he looked at the stream, trying to see who the woman next to him was. He looked at exactly the same time…
His alarm went off. He sat up in the bad, grumbling to himself. Same dream, again. It had been coming back repeatedly for a while now, he couldn’t quite remember when exactly it started, but it’d been a long time, to be sure.
“Leo, for the love of God dude, wake up! It’s almost noon.”
Leodogan Kenthis couldn’t, quite, keep the annoyance out of his voice. His head hurt and he did not feel rested one bit. “I had half an hour left.” He said, glancing at the digital clock in the corner of the room. “Need some sleep meds or something.” He grumbled under his breath.
His door was flung open. Many spacers preferred the simple privacy one with a classic style locked door provided in their bedrooms to the sliding bulkhead door throughout the rest of the ship. In walked in the voice outside the hall, Selira Mazan. She co-captained the ship with Leodogan for nearly two years now, and she was well aware of his erratic sleeping patterns.
“Bad again, eh?” Almost everyone who knew him knew Leodogan had troubles sleeping. Not that it made them more sympathetic to his tendency to sleep in late. ‘Unprofessional’ they called it. As if they were captaining a Geisepi dreadnought in the Emperor’s Fleet! He bit back a sharp retort. It would only make it worse, with Selria. She was a bit hot-tempered, just as space is ‘kinda big’. It was sort of endearing at times, but at others, an utter pain in the ass. He climbed wearily out of bed. Another thing that irked him was her seemingly cluelessness in terms to social situations. Only she would find nothing wrong with barging into people’s rooms. No warning or anything, just going right in without a second thought or care. Knocking was a great thing.
He realized he was just cranky and tired, and was mentally taking it out on her. He shouldn’t especially since she helped him run this tub for so long, and was one of the very few people Leodogan Raanier Kenthis counted as a trusted friend.
Cracking his back and neck, he grabbed a pair of shorts and a belt. Selira just leaned against the wall and curled her lip a bit in amused annoyance. Technically they both co-captained the ship; in reality, it was actually correct. The free and easy nature of Rhonik military hierarchy and society in general was enough to induce horror in the more prudish members of the Geisepi Empire’s social mass and apoplexy to damn near all of the Terrans’. As far as what most Rhoniks sneered at as ‘batshit insane old ladies’ were concerned most of them could make a solemn vow of chastity and live as a hermit in the woods and they still would cry that they’d fooled around with someone. It was a classic example of culture clash. Compared to it’s neighbors, the Rhonik region (composed of Selira and Leodogan’s native nation Gourholl, it’s sister nation Ceruliia, Karvenke, Jordamünka and various single-system nations) was much more open and blunt. Terrans, on the other hand, were mocked by a great deal of the human race owing to their sometimes reactionary beliefs. It was bad enough for the generally old-fashioned Geisepis to ridicule them, although this was not saying much as the Geisepis weren’t really all that old-fashioned so much as conservative. Why would they? Their methods had won them the power-brokership over the human race as a whole for all practical purposes. It’d be lunacy to change that just for the sake of change, even Leodogan could recognize that.
Not that it made him hate their guts any less. Them or the self-righteous Terrans for that matter.
He ran himself through the shower and brushed his teeth and hair. Feeling somewhat rejuvenated, he headed up to the kitchen to get some food in his stomach. He decided to head for the mess hall instead of the private kitchen; it was a longer walk, and it’d let Leodogan stretch his legs. Leaving the private quarters, he felt the chatter and noise of a fully operational starship, along with the banter and informal cheer of what most would sneer at as a ‘pirate’ ship. Leodogan found ‘pirate’ to be such a dirty word; he preferred ‘privateer’. Selira didn’t give a shit either way, being her usual blunt, crude self. Leodogan thought she may be right.
Getting there, he looked around, raising his hand and grinning at the yell of greeting form the ship’s crew. He headed over to a case full of plastic containers, which had labels on them saying what was in them. He pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the case and pulled out one with a sub sandwich, salad, and an apple. He shut the cold-foods case and sat down at one of the nearer tables, grabbing a bottle of vodka on the way. He sighed happily and went to work on his food, knowing it was a matter of time before somebody bugged him. He took a bite, noting the sub’s flavor, almost authentic Old Earth Italian; pastrami, pepperoni, ham, provolone and a crap-load of other things he didn’t much care about. It tasted good and it went down well with the strong Rhonik vodka he was drinking and that was all that mattered.
He got two-thirds of the way through the sub when he saw Selira come in, along with the ship’s first mate (or executive officer, if one towed to the formal government regulations set by the Geisepis and Terrans both) Roan Garack and Issak Kurzmän, the Chief Maintenance Officer. Leodogan slumped forward a bit, trying to go undiscovered.
No use. He didn’t really try anyway. They’d spotted him and without preamble headed over to the table. Selira got there first, her stride was the longest of all of them, being the tallest. She was only a few centimeters shorter than Leodogan at one-hundred-ninety-six centimeters to Leodogan’s one hundred-ninety-nine. Her height was very unnerving to most people at first, but Leodogan and everyone else on board was used to it. Although their discomfort probably also stemmed from her belligerent, forward nature and crude sense of humor. She was clad in her favorite brown leather long coat and had a pair of black sunglasses on her head. She wore the coat and shades a lot on the hotter and sunnier planets because of a condition she had. She was, to put in crudely, border-line albino. Leodogan did not remember the technical name, but it was common on her home world. She had quite pale skin, despite her grandmother being black, which burned easily. She also had rather striking, bright purple eyes instead of the blue she was supposed to due to the same condition. This was because the people of her native world were genetically modified to suit their plant’s conditions. Her purple eyes could see better in the dark at the sacrifice of being vulnerable to bright sunlight, hence the sunglasses; the skin simply was because her home planet was known for being quite cold. Together with her pin-straight, almost painfully intensely black hair, it created an ensemble that might have been odd but worked, if the looks she got from most men was to be judged.
Rown looked exactly like what his title called to mind. He was a native Karvenki, with the features a pre-space human would have called ‘mulatto’ to prove it. Short black, wavy hair that looked almost suspiciously Gespic, olive skin that was rather impressively scarred in a few places, a perpetual scowl, and very alert eyes. He was in reality much more amiable than his exterior suggested and was the second person Leodogan could trust as a friend, having known him for a long time. At times, he was almost a father figure to Selira and Leodogan, being eleven Terran years older and having obviously seen man things, most of which he did not tell. Neither Leodogan nor Selira were actually above thirty T-years yet, Leodogan being twenty-five and Selira twenty-two. In a society that had undergone and accepted the ‘genetic remapping’ program many years ago, jacking a person’s life span securely into the two-hundreds, that was mind-bogglingly young. He also had a tendency to tease his technical superiors about the minor fact that they were of opposing genders, much to their embarrassment and everyone else’s mirth. Leodogan did not know what planet he came from, though he suspected it was on the warm side of the spectrum as he frequently whined about the cold.
Lastly there was Issak. There was not a whole lot to be said for the mahogany-skinned Chief Maintenance Officer for there was not a whole lot he was willing to volunteer. Part of it was that he came from one of the outlying Rhonik states that were now under Geisepi control. Part of it may also lie in just his nature, as he was an almost stoically quiet man, though this gave what he had to say extra weight. However, he was very good at his job, and while not being expressive, was actually good-tempered and quick-witted. He was a very reliable CMO and a large man, having the kind of build that suggested he could bend Geisepi matrix titanium with his bare hands. CMO’s were worth more than their weight in gold, especially in Free Trader/Pirate ports; most of the time the first mate would have doubled, making both duties suffer, but Leodogan and Selira were among the luckiest ones as that had not only got a full-on CMO, but a good one. Most were little more than rev-head grease monkeys or laid-off mechanics that fell on the wrong side of the law. Issak served aboard the Kradian research vessel St. Martin before deserting and joining his countrymen.
Selira was grinning as she reached Leodogan’s table. She reached over and snatched the apple before Leodogan could get to it. Leodogan shook his head and gave her a wry look as she took a large bite out of it, looking triumphant at her small victory. She was incorrigible sometimes. Leodogan chucked a wadded up napkin at her, she smirked and batted it away with her hand. Soon Rown and Issak caught up to her. Rown was smirking at the antics of his captains. Issak looked innocently neutral but there was a glitter of amusement in his dark eyes.
“Thought we’d find you here.” She mumbled through a mouthful of apple.
“So are we gonna harass you about doing your job now or when you’re finished?” Rown asked blandly.
“Later man, you see me trying to eat.” Leodogan said. He grabbed his fork and started on the salad.
Issak nodded his head, quietly said something about needing to check on the engineering crew and left. Selira just shook her head and tossed the half-eaten apple back to Leodogan. She turned around and headed out of the mess hall, waving her hand dismissively. “A’ight, see ya, spoilsport.” She bent her head back, grinned and left.
Leodogan gave a mock scowl in return, taking a bite out of what was left of the apple. Rown leered and said in an obnoxiously cutesy, sing-song voice. “Aw, innit cuuuuute, you’re sharing.”
Leodogan looked thunderous at his second-in-command for a second. “You’re reading way too much into shit, you know that?”
Rown smirked. “Oh, quit bellyaching and grow a hide. What the hell do you think I’m gonna tease you about? The fact my two superiors -happen to be of differing genders provides limitless entertainment potential for me. That and you two share food.”
“Just because you’re scared of cooties doesn’t mean I have to be, you know. And how the hell is this-” he held up the apple “-constitute as sharing food?”
Rown laughed heartily. “Just shut it man, you’re digging yourself into a hole.” He kept on laughing and walked off.
Leodogan glared at his retreating back and finished hid food in peace and quiet.
After Leodogan was done with his food and everything else; he was deliberately procrastinating, having no interest in the mendacity of ship maintenance, but he couldn’t stop time any more than he could shut Rown up. After he was done he got to the bridge in the ships’ heart and was surprised to see that only Issak and the usual crew terminal-jockeys were there.
Issak smiled thinly. “The others are not up yet, sir. I recognize the tedium of the work, trust me, I really do, but it just wouldn’t do for the inertial dampener to fail mid-jump, would it? It would cause such a mess.” His eyes glittered, and Leodogan smiled a little sickly at the thought. Moving several thousand times the speed of light and having the one device that made it all practical by forcing physics to look the other way go and pack up would make pretty much everyone on board resemble overcooked pasta instantly. Not a pleasing thought; and it was that kind of dark humor Issak used to get his points across.
Leodogan held up his hands. “Yeah, sorry man, I was stalling, I know. But hey, being around you ain’t easy.” He grinned.
Issak’s smile turned into a smirk; considering his personality, that was the equivalent of uproarious laughter. “I know I have a tendency to preach captain, just as you have a tendency to sleep in.”
Leodogan clapped a hand on his heart. “You cut me to the heart. Touché.” He bowed dramatically.
Selira came in next, her hair damp, and new clothes than the ones she had before on. Nothing more formal than a pair of cotton shorts and a tee-shirt, with a pair of flip-flops she dug up. “Sorry, was takin’ a shower.” She greeted Leodogan by throwing her towel at him. She grinned. “Here, make yourself useful and hold this.”
“Do you insist on being a bitch at every opportunity? Why do you do it?” Leodogan asked dryly, holding the towel in one hand.
“Sure. It’s very liberating.”
“Then why me?” He whined pitifully. He even had the puppy-dog eyes down. Selira snorted with laughter at the ridiculous sight.
“You’re convenient.” Her grin gained an almost nasty air about it. “And it’s just plain fun to pick on you.”
“You’re mean.”
“Thanks” She said almost sincerely, as thought he were paying her a compliment.
Rown came in almost right after her, just long enough to catch the tail-end of the exchange, and he was trying valiantly to hide his smirk. He was not succeeding. At least he had the decency to not giggle or tease like he normally would have done.
Leodogan dropped down on the couch, tossing the towel over the back to dry. Selira sat down next to him, propping her legs on the table and crossing them. “A’ight, let’s get through with it. What we got?”
Issak cleared his throat. “Well, sir, ma’am, I’ll start minor. There seems to be a small issue-”
It went on for a time, probably half an hour, more or less. Issak was just finishing up. “The ammo for the missile tubes are running a tad low, sir. It’d be advisable to refill our stores next time we dock. Shells for auto cannons are fine for now, but I would suggest on stocking up on those as well. One can never be too careful. Medical and food supplies are of moderate capacity, and we should look at getting more of those as well.”
Leodogan tilted his head to the side a bit. “So a general restock is what you’re suggesting?”
Issak nodded.
Selira looked thoughtful. “How about our armor? Nothing too big hit us from that last raid, but I would definitely feel better getting a general refit as well. Never know when we’re gonna run into the wrong side of a Geisepi missile frigate or Terran battlecrusier.”
Issak nodded again. “That would probably be a good idea as well. The minority situation’s tight enough that we should be able to cover all of it and still turn a profit from the last few raids.” He smiled thinly at that last word, and everyone listening did too. Rhonika had become much more dangerous lately, with the war between the Terran Federates and Geisepi Imperials having finally showed up on their doorstep. They both had annexed large chunks of territory, justifying it with their own excuses, and separatist movements abounded, as well as crime and ‘privateering’. Leodogan and Selira were among those privateers.
These separatist and rebel movements were funded primarily by sacking the supply convoys from the home nations to their forward outposts scattered throughout Rhonika. By capturing these supplies and using them themselves or peddling them to whoever wanted them, the Rhoniks were able to work up an enviable level of money and supplies for their efforts. Overt gifts from friendly governments or governments that just wanted to see the Terrans and Geisepis dealt a bad turn also helped considerably, too; indeed, it was almost as important as the raids themselves.
Leodogan and Selira’s own ship was a heavily modified version of the Thor class of Missile Frigates. It was a misleading title, as a Thor was about the size of a dreadnought. The Thor class was built for long-rage engagements, and had missile pods all over it’s keel as well as some torpedo launchers to give it some serious heat. Leodogan and Selira’s variant, dubbed the Ephidna, which was Rhonik for Wolverine, was a very different animal. Instead of the regular variety of torpedoes it had EMP torpedo tubes (which were very illegal in most governments), an improved keel with much heavier armor, better missile pods, improved engines and two more railgun batteries. All in all, it was superior to it’s sisters and it’s construction gave Leodogan and Selira both a reputation as gifted ship designers.
The Rhonik naval forces, being forced to project their influence throughout a large amount of space with few ships and superior enemy forces, was based primarily on long-range combat, utilizing the lighter, more effective if not slightly more expensive option of missile tubes instead of the heavy, large rail gun the Terrans used and the Torpedoes preferred by the Geisepi Empire on the ships they wanted to fight with at a distance. They were faster and more maneuverable than their counterparts, although they were more lightly armored. What use was armor when if you fought properly, the enemy couldn’t even hit you?
Calling Selira and Leodogan, and the rest of the organization they belong to ‘pirates’, was not only unfair but inaccurate which was why Leodogan ragged on Selira for it. They engaged in piracy, true, as well as assassination, gun-running, and mercenary work; but they only targeted caravans running supplies for their Terran or Geisepi foes. They were determined to win their independence; if they cracked a few eggs, so be it. Indeed, the Guorhali branch of the rebellion movement, dubbed the ‘Timberwolves’, despised actual pirates for the murderers, rapists and thieves that they were and killed them without mercy or hesitation. It was so much that rebellion-controlled territories were better-policed than ones ‘held’ by the ‘government’ forces.
They had been in a deserted system, with no stellar objects of any real use, just a couple of gas giants and some ice-based dwarf planets, for the majority of a day now. The system did not even have the dignity of a name, just a call number. They were going to enter hyperspace in a little under an hour, heading to Dufladki in the Drengr system. They were now mostly making sure there were no gravity wells nearby. No one wanted to enter hyperspace near a gravity well (such as a planet or star) for the consequences would be dire. Many scientists were trying to find a way around this, especially the ones working for the military, but it was an immutable fact of life.
Leodogan had his men pass the time by practicing on passing asteroids. Rown looked a little cranky at first for ‘pushing up costs’, but Leodogan firmly believed that shooting actual weapons was vastly superior than sims in testing a crew‘s efficiency, even if the targets didn’t shoot back. Selira was dismantling a laser rifle and putting it back tog-ether. Leodogan chuckled inwardly at the thought. Not a very lady-like hobby, but nobody in their right mind who actually cared complained. Leodogan personally thought it was quite pragmatic. Useful skill.
They’d finally reached the safe hyper limit. As always in such situations, the bridge was a barely-controlled chaos, with people scampering all over the place. Anyone standing in the way was going to get jostled aside. No exceptions. Several times Selira was forced to juggle a critical part because some jumpy ensign bumped into her, in which case she snarled at the aforementioned nugget while he or she looked as small as inoffensive as possible.
The engineers had now gotten the ship moving at the pace they wanted to enter hyperspace. Entering hyper at full speed was not a way to guarantee one’s survival. The massive amount of energy involved meant that putting undue stress on a ship was entirely likely to rip it apart. Not a thought engineered to make one sleep easy. Thusly it behooved one to turn off the regular anti-matter thrusters for sub-space travel when the hyper-drive was working.
“Beginning transition, captain.” One of the rating’s said, staring at the flowing figures on his screen. “We’ve got maybe a minute left.”
“Good.” Leodogan tightened his grip on his end of the couch while Selira leaned back and closed her eyes. It was really hard to get used to these.
The ship suddenly began accelerating. A hole into hyperspace opened up in front of the nose. Leodogan stared at the beautiful, silent fury of that window into hyperspace. Then the ship entered it, and with a heave of shock, they entered hyperspace.
The views from the cameras that lined the ship was mesmerizing. No sane ship designer put the bridge anywhere but the center of his vessel. Due to the ways ships were constructed nowadays, it defied all logic, as it would wipeout the bridge in the first moments of battle, as long as screw with a ships’ internal gravity. The ship was built around a core consisting of the bridge, the hyper-drive and the structural support centers. As such, it was put in the heart of a ship to keep it from being damaged as much as possible. A captain ‘saw’ using a range of internal and external optical cameras (zoomed in of course), gravatic sensors, and almost every other conceivable way of seeing another object.
Right now, those same cameras were seeing the silent chaos of hyperspace. Cracks of pure ionic energy, manifesting itself as bright-blue and thunderbolts. Most of the sensors were going berserk and so a tech had turned them off to save energy and keep from doing them undue damage. The optics, however, provided a scene that had mesmerized captains ever since hyperspace had become a common method of travel.
Due to only being able to use optics, they could only see about a kähtä in any direction. The kahta was a part of interstellar measurements initially created by a Geisepi scientist called Jäni Tehän. A kahta was around one million kilometers; a kutnä was about five million. The hrünka was the first of two hyperspace units, being about one kahta in hyper, and an amount Leodogan never bothered to learn in normal space. Forty-trillion or a light-year and a half, or something. He knew they based it on the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri, for some odd reason as they were both very, very far away. Inter-dimensional math was one of Leodogan’s less favorite subjects. That was more of Selira’s forte.
Leodogan shook his head and got off the couch, cracked his neck, and told everyone he was heading for the gym. Being as this was not exactly a government ship, formality was at a minimum; he only got a round of assents and he headed down the corridor. It would have been dangerous in the eyes of a firm naval crew, but for the Rhonik purposes in general and the Ephidna in particular, it worked. The crew had formed a form of blood-pact and when the shit hit the fan, it was all business.
He got to the gym and headed towards the locker room. He guessed he’d start with whaling on a punching bag for a while.
Selira finished the last touches on the laser rifle she was overclo-cking, well aware she was breaking at least half a dozen laws and conventions in doing so but not really caring, and tested it out on the three bags of sand on the other side of the firing range. Modern laser-based weapons were not like those seen in the holos and old-fashioned movies. They fired a red beam of light mainly for the shooter to see what they were doing, and the effect of a concentrated beam of energy moving at light-speed was much like that of a bullet, but nastier. Laser-wounds were not neat little holes, but ragged gashes weeping blood, a wound that looked much like a cross between a gunshot and knife wound. They were efficient, deadly weapons, with no kick whatsoever. With three quick successful shots at a range of around fifty meters, all of them exploded satisfyingly. The range was an affectation on her part. Most ships used a simulation, which had the advantage of flexibility, but Selira preferred actually seeing what she was shooting and feeling the rifle in her hands. She knew people called her a brutal psychotic behind her back, and she bragged about it. Regularly.
Then again, whenever she got the opportunity, she made a jab at established society and it’s beloved ‘tradition’. If they’re going to call her a rebel, why not go all out? It’s not like those armchair statesmen and ‘wheeler-dealers’ ever did anything but be a bunch of blowhards. She realized she was just being cynical, but she’ll stop being a ‘cynic’ when people stopped giving her reason to be cynical.
She didn’t even know what got her started on this tirade. It might have been reading something over the news about the Terrans being up to their usual bullshit. The country was technically supposed to be a ‘direct democracy’ but it was closer to being a corporate plaything than an actual star nation. It was utterly economically and politically dominated by the merchant and mining cartels who, whatever they said, everyone knew paid to maintain their power and kickbacks. They hated and feared the military and tried their level best to keep it as weak as they justifiably can; all while being able to (in their mind) defeat the militaristic Geisepi Empire.
It was a policy that made Selira smirk nastily whenever she thought about it. And giving her a headache. How could anyone be that blatantly militarily retarded? Effectively handicapping your own armed forces and forcing them to take on a navy that outnumbers something around thirty to one? And that’s ignoring the fact that the Geisepi military has a tradition of success and a lot of combat experience to call upon. On the face of it, the Geisepis should have rolled over the Terrans without even so much as breathing heavily. How did the Terrans manage to be so amazingly arrogant yet seem to ignore the fact that the Geisepi had so many more advantages to them that it would be an utterly lopsided curb-stomp?
Politics. That’s what it is. Bunch of suit-wearing pussies with no balls. She thought to herself, fiddling with the laser pistol’s settings. The Geisepis were undoubtedly stronger than all the other current human nations combined, to be sure, and Selira hated them for how they were turning her homeland into a war zone in the name of politics. She hated that word everything that went with it. The Terrans, whom she outright thoroughly despised, managed to weasel out of getting their ass handed to them by getting everyone to gang up on the Geisepis. The Geisepis had to spread out their forces throughout their enormous empire to protect against incursions from the Kradians whom had their own bone to pick with the Geisepis; the Arkadians, who were generally isolationist but did make incursions against the Geisepi Empire to protect their interests, and the many, many single-planet nations that formed the Confederated Star Nations, which, of course, was more fiction than fact. She went down another mental pathway at that last one.
The Karskians were probably the only part of the Neo-Confeds that represented anything close to a threat. Their native planets being basically death worlds, they were a group even Selira would have cheerfully called hardass. Located in the Karskis system, their core worlds of Aukhamer, Strevich, and Aenkhridge were all in their own way, violently difficult places to live. She might be able to make a claim on Aukhamer, with it’s volatile weather and sometimes cruel cold, but it’s extreme axial tilt and high gravity would finish her off with little trouble.
Then there was Strevich. Of the three, it’s axial tilt was the most extreme and it’s gravity the heaviest. A person could stand the surface pressure on Aukhamer for a little while, ten minutes or so if suited. Not so on Strevich, where they have to live on the plateaus and mountains for survival. Luckily, all three planets are huge compared to something like Old Earth. Strevich’s weather was temperate, if that was not a rather amusing term. This was, of course, ignoring the regular hurricanes that curl an Old Earthling’s toenails and blizzards that‘d freeze everything else.
And then there was Aenkhridge. It was the general galactic consensus that being a Aenkhridger automatically made that person the biggest badass in the room. Aenkhridge was enormous. It was also barely habitable by any human on a good day. Any sane person would avoid it like the plague. It was nearly the size of Sol’s Saturn, with the same cloud colors. It looked chronically polluted due to it’s clouds, sky and dust being various shades of a sickly pale yellow and the same dust on top the mountains and plateaus being loose and easily kicked up. It was legendary for scorpions growing to be as big as people, and for there being a large market for food and water there due to the fact that any native life on Aenkhridge being further down, and nobody wanted to know what kind of abominations survived down there.
Diklad, her home, was pretty harsh sometimes. It got viciously cold during summer nights and the forest cover was so thick and dark the people suspected they’ve been genetically modified to see and survive better there, like she has. The predators were swift and mean, and they could survive on human meat. But Diklad, and really virtually any Rhonik planet was a happy paradise compared to the Karskians’ core worlds.
She shook her head and stopped wool-gathering. She fiddled with the laser pistol some more and nodded as she got it where she wanted. She put it on safety and slung it over her shoulder and headed towards the kitchen to get a drink.
She saw Leodogan snuffling through the fridge. She couldn’t help but smirk. His (and her) eating habits were enough to make Rown bang his head against the wall and wail like a lost sheep.
Leodogan emerged, carrying an armful of cold-cuts and condiments. He did not look like what one imagined a pirate captain to look like. Then again, neither did she. He was tall enough, sure, but that was about it. He was wiry, had long, over shoulder-length blond hair tied into a ponytail, wire-and-box-framed glasses over pale green eyes and a goatee. The goatee and especial the anachronistic glasses were affectations to help alleviate allegations he looked like a ‘schoolboy’. There was easy corrective eye surgery nowadays; one just had to look. But he kept them anyway. In all honesty they fit him better. Selira was amused that she was not the only one who got catcalled to mud-side. There were a fair few drunk female sailors who made their opinions known as readily as the more traditional sort did at her.
She didn’t really think about it much. Just the way he was. She also knew that the one thing he was not, was a ‘schoolboy’. She’d seen him kill people before. With a grin on his face. The two of them sometimes competed over how many thugs they can thrash in a bar.
She kicked the fridge door with her foot slightly, and said with a slight smirk: “’Ey, pig, try not to eat all the grub, a’ight? Throw me something.”
Leodogan tossed a bag full of apple slices. He mumbled something about the rest being on the counter. She went over and made herself a sandwich. A large one, as she freely admitted her appetite was at least as endless as Leodogan’s.
“Mmph. How long we gonna be in hyper?” Selira mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich.
“Prob’ly the rest of the day.”
Selira shrugged and took another bite out of the sandwich. In many ways, the inactivity of being on spaceship drove her stir-crazy. In others, she always felt rather uncomfortable mud-side because she spent so much time here. She favored being on a space station most as it provided the best of both worlds. Plenty to do without the physical discomfort any long-time spacer was going to experience.
Space Stations had their downsides however. Their were hives of scum and villainy and a female of Selira’s attractiveness was going to attract unsavory attention. That hardly worried anyone, least of all her, because only a lunatic would mess with her if they had even an inkling of her fighting ability. Such occurrences are rare, as they usually land on one of two or three space stations regularly, and it did not take long to establish one’s ‘informal’ dominance over a port and the scumbags that prey on the little guys that try to get through with the least amount of fuss.
Leodogan smirked at Selira and hit her upside the head with a wadded-up napkin while she was looking away. She turned and gave him a thunderous look. He stuck his tongue out at her.
“You immature-”
She got cut off my another napkin hitting her square between the eyes. Leodogan snickered visibly. “Serves you right.”
She slugged him across the shoulder and returned to her sandwich, trying (unsuccessfully) to project an aura of offended dignity. She swallowed a bite of the sandwich and gave Leodogan a raspberry while he pretended to pout.
The rest of the day past uneventfully. There was not a whole lot to do for most people while in hyperspace. A lot of the navigation techs worked their fingers off, of course, but for the combat techs, marines, and the ship’s captain(s), it was mostly a case of finding busywork to occupy oneself. Next to anything, including paperwork, was preferred to sitting there and letting cabin-fever creep in.
There was also, of course, the gym. The things were built standard in any spaceship worth calling the name nowadays. Also, it was the most useful of all in burning off excess energy. Both Selira and Leodogan practically lived in it during times like this. The sparred against each other regularly to keep their unarmed combat skills at their peak. One never knew when that would come useful.
Leodogan dropped to his knees to avoid a sweeping clothes-line from Selira and took her legs out from under with a sweep of his leg. She dropped to the floor and rolled quickly, regaining her balance. Leodogan was already on his feet and made a move to put her in a headlock, which ended in her grabbing his arms and heaving him bodily behind her, throwing him to the floor, again.
He leapt up to his feet and grabbed her foot, which was directed straight for his chest, and threw it upwards, wrecking her balance and making her land on her rump with little dignity.
“All right, you win. This time.” She added that last with a conspiratorial grin.
“Serves you right for dislocating my shoulder last time.” Leodogan said with commendable gravity.
“That was an accident!”
“Still hurt.”
Selira just sat there and pouted. Leodogan laughed heartily, savoring his triumph while it lasted.
As it had been since the dawn of time, the time to hit the sack came far to early. They had another twelve hours before they got out of hyper, so around the time either Selira or Rown dragged Leodogan out of bed.
Selira smirked at the though as she flopped on her own bed and closed her eyes, placing her sunglasses on the desk by the bed’s foot. It was so much fun throwing him out of his bed bodily after he hit that damn snooze alarm a half dozen times. Three hours after everyone else woke up.
It was not that she was jealous exactly; she knew Leo had trouble sleeping. He never stated why, and her and Rown’s questions have met with a grumble and a change of the subject. It was a subject she never really pushed.
She shifted mental gears as she pondered why Sven called them to Dufladki. Sven was the leader of the Timberwolf Association, a rather innocuous-sounding title for a tight-knit organization of pirates, assassins, mercenaries, guerillas and spies all working towards freeing Rhonika from the foreign generals and admirals using it for a playground.
They were minding their own business, looting government caravans as usual, when a messenger ship, little more than a core and communications array, burst into the system. It dutifully sent it’s message and was off on it’s way to god knew where and for what reason. It was prudent to keep a lid on such curiosity.
So they finished up with the caravan, it’s escorts, such as they were, were on the other side of the system, half of them heavily wounded and bleeding atmosphere. Once they got their money and cargo, they plotted a course for Drengr. Drengr was a good three hrünkan away, so it’d be a while.
They stopped in that deserted system way back for a technical reason. Ships traveled along hyperspace ‘dumps’ or paths, of which there were a limited number for any system. It was theoretically impossible to go from one dump to another without reentering normal space, so a ship had to basically leapfrog from one system to another. It was another technical limitation that drove physicists and merchantmen mad.
It could be inconvenient for someone with Selira’s occupation as well, as it was possible to lay an ambush for an enterprising pirate by having a fleet waiting placidly, disguised to look like merchants, waiting to strike in some deserted waste with no value or worth. It was a favorite tactic of marauders on anyone unfortunate to cross their path.
Hence the call to return to Dufladki. Selira knew that a local pirate, the real deal, not attached to an association or anything, but a by-god vulture, was causing a lot of grief in the local systems. Some tosser named Grenek Hurkan. Hurkan was running an operation out of some mud-ball with no real reason to exist and striking at anything he thought he could take and loot, with little to no regard for whom he was attacking at the time.
She really wondered what was going through the stupid motherfucker’s microscopic mind. Was he really dumb enough to think that he was going to get away with this? Whatever it was, she’d deal with it when the time came.
Edited by Areze, 10 July 2010 - 15:39.
