"...and we cracked that question wide open. I deduced that quarks do not exist in this dimension alone and they could in fact be in many places at once - we simply do not know where." Keib told Mel'an, who was leaning in, perplexed and engaged by Keib's discoveries. "Its just a matter of putting them all in one place."
"Keib, Oers'tad, that's wonderful! How did you come up with that?" She was an Occhestian woman about Keib's age at the time with a rounded face and a little mole beneath her left eye and cherry red eyes. She had long naturally black hair - such an appealing thing for Keib, as he had a head of it himself.
Beside her empty plate and napkin was a notepad full of beautiful handwriting and script that always drew Keib's eyes and attention. She was not a patron of the sciences like the rest of her kin but that's what Keib loved about her.
"Keib."
"You see, Oers'tad and I just put our heads together and compared notes." Oers'tad told Mel'an "Our brains are resilient things."
"Something's got the ship spooked."
"'course there was a duq or two!" Keib laughed and Oers'tad threw his head back to chortle in unison as the mad doctor held up his glass and motioned for Oers'tad and Mel'an. "I see a great future for the Occhestians with this breakthrough."
"She's locked me out and won't talk to me."
"I'll drink to that!" Oers'tad held up his glass and set a collision course with Keib's glass.
"I'm ... open to suggestions."
It approached rapidly as Keib reassessed his mind and believed his own lie. It would never work. It was never meant to work. It was a fabrication - it wasn't a breakthrough on par with Aether.
CLINKclinkclink...
It was something else entirely.
The vibrance and pomp had died as Keib gasped and grasped his forehead as a knifing pain shot through it. He remembered: his name was Mar'zhaz Keib 'Howler' New Tur'lista, not Mar'zhaz Keib 'Howler' Occhestian. He peeled his ear off of the door and turned around. "Wh-what?" Keib asked Aiesu for clarification.
The L'manel immediately began fishing through her messenger bag for whatever painkiller she could find.
"Now is not the time for an aneurism over some college fantasy, Keib" she grumbled to herself. Akahar is shitting bricks."
Keib took the painkillers and popped them into his mouth without so much of a second thought, swallowing them without a follow-up glass of water.
"Er, command 'revoke all * /core/akahar/sdb7; aria_ck /core/akahar/sdb7', or something." Keib mumbled in reply as he felt the lorath drugs begin to work on him. The command would disconnect all current users to the system and run a check on the Akahar's ARIA system.
"Thankyou" Aiesu stated flatly, sighing with an unwanted look of concern in her eyes - feigning disinterest. "So ... Who's Mel'an?"
Who indeed. Her name was dust in the wind now. Her body along with hundreds of others now laid the foundations for Matriarchy made housing for their obedient servants. "Later." He hissed in reply. "How's the check going?" From behind the door he could hear nothing. The room was now silent. Whoever was talking on the other side to Hakahn had cut the line - or did Keib just cut it?
She wrinkled her lip, grumbling again as glanced back from the panel. "The door was nearly open until the ship decided it'd had enough of playing ball. You're going to have to force it. But its vac sealed. Whoever's on the other side has the computer thinking the decks have been decompressed. She won't talk to me Keib. I don't like it."
"Bridge, status on hull?" Keib asked. "Anything with its arse to the wind?"
"Negative. There is a small, self-contained hull breach on deck four - a tether walkway of some sort launched by the pirate ship. I saw an unidentified person go through it just a couple of minutes ago."
"What'd she look like?"
"She?" The bridge stumbled before resuming with a cursory description, "Bright purple hair-"
"I
think she's on our side. Keep an eye on her if she comes back." He then looked back at Aiesu. "Here's one to override a door. 'sec od 3 36'." Simply put, the command would go into the security interface, open a door on deck three, door thirty six. AKA: The one in front of them.
Aiesu tapped something into the door and a slow thud sounded. The lock unhooked but the motivators that should have opened the door didn't move.
"Odd... I think its been shorted. It isn't going anywhere without a wedge or something."
Keib bent down at the knees to look at the door's overrides. Now that the door was unlocked, it would've been possible to pull it open if you opened the little hatch on the left side, gave the release a pull, and put your fingertips to the rightmost edge of the door and started pulling.
The door opened as Keib put his back into it, and once there was enough room for him to put a second hand through and start pushing against the door he pushed it open and looked inside.
All Keib could see in the room was Hakahn's desk. Behind that desk was the back of Hakahn's chair illuminated by all of the monitors that he'd installed behind him, showing him the action around the Akahar as it unfolded. Some screens were peppering with white noise and others redirected to completely different feeds, including hardcore Nepleslian pornography, laughing Yamataians, a Lorath soap opera and some children's cartoons about cats.
The smell of burnt flesh and lingering sweat was hanging heavy in the room, as though the ventilation had been sealed to contain whatever had taken place in here.
Unperturbed, Keib walked in first as his shadow followed behind him into the darkness with his pistol raised. The light from the monitors kept on changing as they switched from scene to scene, bathing Keib in neon lights and redirecting his shadow as he stalked towards the chair. All of this screamed distraction to him. He swivelled the chair around to find it empty.
Cerise eyes followed, brows furrowed as the construct remained behind Keib, anticipating the worst again - dread building sorely in her throat.
Keib's hands trembled on his pistol and he squeezed the trigger at the chair. The suppressor of the weapon prevented a majority of the pistol's sounds from being heard, but the sounds of the slide and the bullet casing ejecting and falling to the floor in addition to escaping gasses were still obvious and plain as day.
The construct eyed Keib, an odd look -- hands up covering where her ears would have been with an expression which couldn't clearly be explained -- the bang of the bullets themselves almost deafening as they struck the metal back of the chair. Her lips were moving but Keib couldn't make out what she was saying, grumbling as her arms slumped as the rounds went silent, her ears still ringing. She watched with a grumble. The man couldn't stand still.
With that, he walked out of the office. Held limply by his side, his pistol had been completely emptied and the action was open and begging for a fresh magazine. The look on his face was furious. His eyes looked around for targets, his mouth was affixed into a scowl and his knuckles could be heard cracking on his other hand just by clenching his fist.
Clicking her tongue in distaste, she followed. It was all she could do.
-
Rae and Veronica's elevator had just stopped at the middle deck of the pirate's ship and they could see they knew how to get to the Captain's room easily. He always made it abundantly clear never to invade his private room. Veronica had heard rumours that this wasn't the captain's first crew - and he'd gone through a few. They died from a total wipeout on the job, murdered under suspicion of mutiny, or even left on their own accord because they could smell the blood in the air.
Without ceremony, the duo pushed the door open to find him at his desk watching things unfold on his computer monitors. He saw how every man in their Demon Armour had died frame by frame, and he was watching Ross be subjected to Nepleslian cartoons and being unable to move whilst groaning for it to stop.
The captain had no chin. You couldn't cut his neck because of how difficult it was to tell where his chin ended and his neck began. It wasn't even a double chin; it was more like a smooth surface within which his extra supply overweening arrogance was stored for the winter.
"...wasn't part of the deal!" Was all chinless could be heard yelling into what looked like a mobile phone as his voice kept on undulating through his massive chin. "We were going to split the treasure when we found it."
"Tough duq. Bye~" An unfamiliar Lorath voice could be heard coming from the phone before it went offline and disengaged. An uneasy static hung in the air before it faded away.
As Veronica's footfalls into the room signalled her presence, the captain and all six pounds of what alledged to be a chin turned around. His father obviously didn't fuck a giraffe. "V! The fuck are you doing here?" He reached for his pistol on the desk, having to lean backwards awkwardly. "I thought I told you to get shit under control!"
Beneath them, the sound of a shuttle could be heard leaving the vessel. The Akahar, meanwhile spotted one last vessel that simply zipped into hyperspace before it left. They assumed that it was the captain of the pirate ship.
-
"I'll explain later - incoming!" Gough yelled as he and Yar'mak moved next to Bastion, hiding behind her. Yar'Mak laid down on the ground with his shotgun as Gough went into a kneeling position with a handgun pointing at the stairs.
Bastion and Merril were poised and ready as they saw a bullet hit the ceiling above them, fired from an errant rifle that had a mind of its own. A whole group of stupid according to Merril was advancing up the stairs with their randomly firing guns pointing towards the away team. As one head came up over where the stairs met the floor, Yar'Mak fired and the lead balls turned the man's head into a red divot. He pumped his shotgun by pushing the stock forward and back across the slide rather than pulling the slide. He didn't have the elbow room for that.
Gough, meanwhile was firing his pistol as they came further up, aiming for the legs and making deliberate shots to make them trip over and cause further chaos and confusion. As they fell, Bastion snapped into action and fired into the crowd.
The pirates' initial volley was in tune with Pratima's footsteps, and the beat of that dance had now segued into different tune. Now it was moving with the heartbeat of the other most powerful entity on the ship that rivals the native ARIA. Aiesu.
Caught unawares, Shrie'Keng caught five bullets, two hit his legs and thigh, two struck him in the chest and the last one struck him through the jaw, shattering his bone and sending a red lashing through the air and staining the walls with red. His brain and head were intact, but his jawbone was shattered by the bullet.
BAM BAM ... BAM BAM! It was short, controlled burst fire in its purest essence before a command from Aiesu shorted out their guns in an attempt to get control of the system from Pratima. A stray bullet flew into the freespacer's metal shoulder and left a hole, sending sparks up into the air. Her connection to the ship was still in limbo, vying for control after Aiesu had booted her out, thinking that she was an intruder. The freespacer got this helpful message from the Akahar's ARIA.
Code:
01001000 01101001 00101100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01000001 01001011 01000001 01001000 01000001 01010010 01001001 01000001 00101110 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110011 01101011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101001 01100011 01100101 01101100 01111001 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01100001 01100011 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 00101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100011 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100001 01100011 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101111 01101110 00101110 00001101 00001010 00001101 00001010 01010000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101110 00100000 01110101 01101110 00101101 01110001 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101001 01101100 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 01100011 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100010 01110101 01101001 01101100 01110100 00101110
The freespacer could see a meter slowly filling up in its peripheral vision. It was currently sitting at 33% as it got account privileges sorted out.
The pirate’s initial assault had left three of them dead by Gough and Yar'Mak's shooting and three more were down by the Away team. Two were dead from Bastion's strafe and one from a snap burst from Merril. In the back of Merril's head, she could hear a voice.
McDoshAlmighty said:
You FOOL! It is a MAGAZINE, not a CLIP!
The pirates dispersed from the stairs into engineering room and started hiding behind consoles and pipes as they pulled the magazines out and tossed them away, putting fresh ones in as they pulled the trigger without the magazine, and collectively beamed as they realised that their guns were no longer malfunctioning. By Bastion's count, there were five left, and no sign of the Demon armour.
The unfortunate Demon Armour was now subject to the second episode of Phoenix Man, and he could hear and see it in full 10800p and surround sound. He could also feel his temperature control failing, and the interior of the armour began to become uncomfortably hot.
"Status report away team, I hear gunfire!" The bridge radioed the remaining away team.
