Nebulous Stars
A Convincing Mirage
Chasing the Morningstar
The airlock doors closed with a rare finality, the energy of the room rendering the deeply familiar alien. The motions were all familiar, another debriefing after a salvage, a simple meeting in the cargo hold. Under normal circumstances though, only the away and command crew would be here. Instead the entire crew was strewn around the cargo hold, all having filed in after an all-hands call went out, and taken up their choice of perch. There wasn’t much furniture in the cargo hold, but there was a plentiful selection of crates and boxes, most but not all secured down.
The find was an unusually rich one, the nature of a life-support bleedout preserving many of the supplies. There would be less on a non-empire ship, but the Empire had a tendency to plan for the failures that cheapness wrought. If they towed the ship to the right ship-yard they could be set for at least a few years. Yet the air remained tense. The ship was good news, but it alone wouldn’t have warranted an all-hands alert for the debriefing.
The sound of the airlock cycling spurred Val into movement, her boots clanking against the cargo floor as she doffed her helmet. "Hey, hey, the gang's all here; been a while since we've had a family meeting," Val said with a smirk, setting the headpiece on a convenient crate as she got to dragging in the collection of salvage she and Kreixzilir, or "Cracksaw" as she'd taken to calling him, had managed to gather in their last sweep of the derelict ship. "Some good stuff we got here; if nothing else we can take a break from powdered meal for a while. Though I will admit," she added as an aside to the ship's cook," I was starting to get a taste for the fried cakes you were making out them, Faula. Anyway, this is probably the last of the things we can get that's not gonna require heavy machinery or getting Cracksaw drunk; managed to grab a looot of replacement electrical components that might let us keep from browning out everytime X3 sneezes."
The gravlift shuddered to a halt as Val smacked a red button on the side, sending it to noisilly rest on the deck. "But I don't think that's what shiplady wants to talk to us about. I pulled a bunch of data from the ship's cores; way more than I would have expected from just an ordinary empty ship. It's all encoded, but if I know the Empire, they haven't changed their codes since the old days. Diamonds to donuts, there was something in there that's perked her interest," she ended with, climbing atop the crates she had filled but an hour or two prior.
The more talkative space-walkers report made, X3 moved to fill the space, allowing Skitters to do as they may. A panel beside the door lit up, a blue holographic projection opening up and showing the shape of the ship outside, a blocky practical thing opened up to space by the wounds of combat. Massive rents along the side and back, with severe engine damage. As soon as it was fully displayed the ship's familiar robotic voice spoke, “I called the all-hands for a few reasons. First and foremost, we have the full ID docs, and this old clunker has a lot more historical and political significance than I’d like.”The gravlift shuddered to a halt as Val smacked a red button on the side, sending it to noisilly rest on the deck. "But I don't think that's what shiplady wants to talk to us about. I pulled a bunch of data from the ship's cores; way more than I would have expected from just an ordinary empty ship. It's all encoded, but if I know the Empire, they haven't changed their codes since the old days. Diamonds to donuts, there was something in there that's perked her interest," she ended with, climbing atop the crates she had filled but an hour or two prior.
“What we have here is a bonafide Starchaser-Class exploration vessel, assigned to ferreting out the secrets of Rimspace by any means necessary. Captain was apparently a true believer, an aristocrat’s brat assigned to a safe post who felt it was his calling. Wanted to find ancient relics and new planets for the holy empire. More unusually, he succeeded, spectacularly. He found the Morningstar, and the ship records I have found seem to confirm this as true. I had to break the codes on the rest, but from what I can tell he returned to Empire space to report his find. When he got there he was slapped in the face with what the Empire actually is. He fled, receiving heavy damage, but escaping, only to suffer a full life support bleedout. This, centuries later, would be where we come in.”
She paused, allowing room for the information to settle, but speaking before anyone could respond, “We have the full explorer docs required to navigate back. Standard security protocols means that it’s about seven full jumps out, with a good bit of hardspace traveling at several points to find path beacons and the next route. However, breaking the code launched an unavoidable pulse beacon, dumping most of this info back on encoded military channels. Unfortunately they were last actually meaningfully encrypted several hundred years ago. All that information is now in corporate, Empire, and pirate hands all the way back to the Core.”
The hologram of the vessel faded out, replaced by a recognizable gold speck, always used to symbolize X3, albeit usually at a far larger scale. Next to it a vast behemoth of a ship took shape in blue light, showing an unfathomable size difference. As it formed, X3 spoke, “The Morningstar, to get everyone up to date, is a myth, a story told to keep hope alive, that we now know how to find. It is a vast colony ship, designed to act as essentially a mobile micro-planet, which can sustain countless lives indefinitely. Created millennia ago with the full resources of a mining planet, nothing like it has been made anywhere near this region of space.”
The holograms began to slowly chase each other in circles, as X3’s tone changed, a military cadence sneaking in, “We have a few options here, with things as they are. We could get uninvolved as fast we can, haul the old hulk out there to a shipyard we don’t mind seeing destroyed by the empire, sell it off, and run. With this magnitude of a discovery, if we brought the ship directly to the Empire and did some very delicate negotiation we could also all likely get comfortable aristocratic lives in the empire.”
The holograms winked out, and for a moment it seemed like she might remain silent. When that robotic voice spoke again, there was a colder tone, laden with control and nameless emotions, “Or, we could find it ourselves. We would be racing against any Empire ships in the region, several pirate crews, and likely a few corporate ships. Bigger crews, with better armed ships and a lot more resources. Because of the non slipspace travel required, we have time. Even the fastest and most efficient slipspace capable Empire starships would need a week to calculate and charge all the many skips to get out here, accounting for hardspace travel.”
Her voice took on an edge she couldn’t quite hide at the last, something vicious in her tone, “If we get there first, we are home free. Nobody can match us without bringing their full fleet to bear. The Morningstar is currently unmatched military might within a single package. The forces the Empire would need to destroy it from under us would see them immediately eaten alive by the corporations. We have a lead right now over just about everyone else, which is the only edge we’ve got. This would be do or die, a mad dash with an absolute deadline of a month before the Empire is fully mobilized here. It wouldn’t be easy or safe, but if we win this race, nobody can touch us ever again.”
Now finally, silence reigned, the situation fully laid out before them. In moments the quiet would break, and everyone's fates would change, one way or another.
Center Indented section written by
PixelSymphony