What's new
  • If you were supposed to get an email from the forum but didn't (e.g. to verify your account for registration), email Wes at [email protected] or talk to me on Discord for help. Sometimes the server hits our limit of emails we can send per hour.
  • Get in our Discord chat! Discord.gg/stararmy
  • 📅 May and June 2024 are YE 46.4 in the RP.

RP: Space Pirates [Deep Space] A Rogue in the Darkness

C

Concerto

Inactive Member
Adrift, derelict, its body battered and its crew suffering under the strain, the lone rogue Osiris spins lazily through the blackness. It is lightyears away from any habitat or civilized world, far beyond even the reach of its sublight engines to bring its passengers to the nearest port alive. The ship itself would survive the journey, decades out of date, but only skeletal remains would be found aboard it, unless something were to be done--and soon.

Out of the night, a shadow comes, obscuring the stars and blocking out the dim coronal ejections of interstellar comets. A drifter, centuries old, a dead mass resolutely striding towards its destination blissfully unaware of the cargo it now carries. It is as the Osiris may soon be, only on a grand scale.

Words painted on the side in a language no longer spoken in the universe, systems working erratically and intermittently to achieve it to its goal. The Osiris drifts into its path, and docking clamps swing out to stall the comparatively minute corvette, nestling the ship to its frame like a mother hen taking a chick under her wing...
 
Luicen, having finished putting the fires out was sitting in his room, wondering what the hell happened. He was sitting at his desk

"Ferst, Ah seive the ship, then ah seive the ship agaien, now the ship is rightly fooked," Luicen said to himself in his most Scottish of accents, "Argh fookin 'ell, we need find a Bothy, and soon."

Then he heard the loud clamping noise, it shook the ship, he fell over.
"What the fuck was that?!"
 
((moved to the appropriate thread, sorry zeph))

Kirio was having a difficult time controlling the ship due to all of the damage they had incurred in the last battle. He had only recently gotten complete mastery of the controls over the Osiris and Kirio considered this a great acheivement, however, the recent battle had made him more reticent about the large scale combat piloting. He preferred the type of battle that the crew had originally faced as their test. Nevertheless, Kirio knew his duty as pilot and knew he would not forget.

Kirio leaned back in the pilot's seat and sighed, he supposed it was time to carry out that sweep Terry had mentioned. It turned out that no one was missing, but the erratic power surges made it impossible to tell with one hundred percent accuracy if the readings were right or not. Deciding a more direct search was necessary to ensure the readings were correct, he resigned himself to allowing the ship to continue its lazy spin.

So he was surprised when the ship was shaken and stilled by some outsider, tossing him against a bulkhead just forward of the stairwell. "What in blazes?"

* * * * *


ANUBIS pinged Terry's personal comm, sounding somewhat stressed. "Sir, there's some...unusual activity on the shortwave. I almost didn't recognize it at first. Whatever just grabbed us is sending a quadratic formula--a sort of handshake gesture. I've sent the appropriate solution, but each time I get a different problem. It's straining my ability." Terry pondered. For the ship's AI to say that his abilities were being strained, an AI capable of mapping exodimensional vectors and navigating the ship through the void of faster-than-light reality, was worrisome.

"Something is trying to establish a sort of...lexicon linkage with our database--what's lef of it anyway. Trying to, I don't know, learn our language. The sensation I'm getting from it is far different than I'd expect from a computer or even an RF module."

ANUBIS sighed inwardly as he tried to process the implications. External cameras showed some kind of object, something large enough to dwarf the lateral view from the port side for several kilometers in either direction. But there was so much debris that had collected on it that the system couldn't identify it specifically. "Should I try to find a docking ring? Something to gain access to?"

Terry pondered more. "We're dealing with something outside of our expertise. Send a shipwide alert, everyone into hazard suits." The name that they had originally called the Goshens sitting in storage lockers throughout the ship...now was a good time to test them out under real world condition.s
 
Shortly after realising what could have happened, Luicen picked up a Goshen Suit hanging up in the closet in his room and swung it over his shoulder, flung his bedroom door open and ran towards the Bridge, eventually finding Terry.
"Sir! What the hell just happened?! My entire room shook!" Luicen exclaimed to the captain as he was exasperated.
 
"Suit up. Something grabbed us. We're going to see if there's anything on the other side of the docking collar." Terry was halfway into a suit, pulling the rest on and sealing it up as he spoke. "I find myself wondering how there could be anything to grab us out in the middle of nowhere. I sent a distress straight to Cairo Shipyards. Nobody should know of our location."
 
Kirio was shaken out of his reverie and nearly fell to the floor. "What was that?!" He yelped. Next thing he heard was Terry's orders to don his Goshen suit and in a minute, he had it on, still wondering what in the eight rings of hell had grabbed them. He hoped to whatever deity was out there that what had grabbed them was not Misshu, or for that matter, anything hostile. Nevertheless, he checked his shotgun and pistols, then his blade as well. kirio wanted to be prepared for the worst, whatever that might be.

Ready to depart, Kirio saluted Terry and waited for his next orders.



((OOC: sorry!! didn't even notice that we had moved to a different area!!))
 
Luicen quickly got his suit on in front of the commander, "Aye sir!"
He then sprinted down to the armoury and picked up a rifle of sorts and slung it over his shoulder and came back, standing next to Kirio.
"Where were you?" Luicen asked the samurai, "Did you feel the clamp as well?"
 
"I certainly did!" Kirio replied, "It nearly threw me out of the pilot's seat!"
He adjusted his suit; Kirio was not used to bulky things such as the suit he was now wearing. He then made sure the bandolier of slugs was snugly slung around himself. Now that the final check was completed, he stood ready.
 
Terry had the rest of the crew--the more experienced members--stay behind and effect whatever repairs to the ship as were possible. Accompanied only by the diminutive but talented James Greenlake, the ship's XO, and of course Luicen and Kirio, he appropriated a belt of ammunition and a carbine from the armory.

Once at the airlock he checked to make sure that there was a seal, and opened it up. There was a slight pop as the air differentiated, and Terry switched on his helmet lantern, peering around at the alien airlock.
 
"Terry..." Luicen said, "What the fuck is that airlock doing in our ship?! I've never seen anything like it!"
 
"Whoever's on the other side correctly identified us as being another starship...we're gonna go see what they want. And steal whatever we can to make repairs."

He raised the rifle in his hands, making a show of arming it and cycling the ammo lock closed. "So let's head out. Stay alert, but stay frosty. Don't start shooting unless you're sure that you're in trouble."
 
"Righto sir," Luicen said as he looked at his rifle and at Kirio. He then gave Kirio a nod, "Now let's pop in for tea, shall we?"
 
Terry sealed his helmet as the airlock doors cycled open. The atmosphere on the other side was a little thin, and the suit's sensors read it as being rather cold and somewhat stale. Advancing slowly he saw that whatever illumination was available had either failed or was on minimal power. It looked like a standard airlock, too, two sets of doors, a reinforced inner door, vents in the walls to purge and pressurize the air in the chamber.

Clicking on his comm he asked Emily for a sit-rep.

The voice he received was exasperated.

"Balancer's shot, no way to extract particles for the main cannons. It got fried when we went to lightspeed. Ancillary nodes are off kilter, so sensors won't be working properly. Power lines to the autocannons are cut, only one of those working.

"The entire machine shop is gone as is the FTL motivator, and as if that wasn't bad enough the cyclical compressor for the gravity drive is fused. No way to get that back online without building a new one altogether. And here's the bad news. The nearest system is a lightyear away. Structural integrity is questionable, so I wouldn't push the ship past .30c and that's IF we manage to fix the fuel ram."

All in all, not good news. Emily started feeding him a list of things to find or extract from the derelict's systems, if any equivalents were found.
 
Hearing the tinny voice of Emily through the communicator, Kirio winced. The ship was certaily not in any condition to make it to the nearest port. They might, if the people on the ship that grabbed them were friendly, they might be able to hitch a ride. However, they couldn't be sure of that.

"Terry," Kirio said, "What do you say we check out that ship?"
 
"That was the plan. Hell, for all I know...ANUBIS, see if you can't get your foot in the door of this relic's systems. If you can establish a lexicon it would come in handy, assuming we encounter any alien writing or speech. Do whatever you can to make us the brain of the derelict. Emily, keep me posted on what you do manage to get fixed. Cannibalize some of the cargo if you have to."

His rifle held in a grip that spoke of his familiarity with close-quarters firefights, Terry took point, ordering the others to flanking positions. "Lights on, cameras on, feeding video directly to the logs. Marcus, I want you on the bridge monitoring the transmission. Tell us if you see anything we missed."

Terry's suit was just a little different. He'd installed a basic computer to supplement the onboard systems--that and all of the suits had had cameras installed to record whatever the wearer was looking at. His suit also had the ability to connect to up to twelve other suits and display their status (and that of the wearers) on his HUD. Useful for monitoring what his crew was doing.

"You'll get a chance to modify your suits later," he told Kirio and Luicen. "Just no pin-ups."
 
Kirio thought that modifying his suit might come in handy, should he ever get the chance to try. He peered into the possibly hostile environment of the alien ship and after a moment's pause, stepped inside.
 
Beyond the airlock was a space littered with debris--pieces of burnt-out wiring, panels that had shaken loose during a collision, broken light fixtures--all in a seething alien red. A color of the spectrum that most designers in known space would stay the hell away from. It almost hurt the eyes to look at, roiling like half-congealed blood in the harsh light of the suits' headlamps.

Screens flickered to life, set into the walls and activated by motion sensors. Off in a corner created by a trio of pipes running from floor to ceiling and vanishing into ductwork a small robot lay listless, its work arm positioned as if it were in the middle of manipulating something when it had been rudely shoved aside.

Further on, the space narrowed into a small room. This one was markedly different. A portal dominated one end, leading into a transit section, but the room itself was littered with dried blood, pale green and brown, and covered in scorches and pockmarks from weapons fire and blunt instruments.

Whatever had happened here, it had been violent, beings using whatever they could get their hands on. Cutting torches, wrenches, pistols--on the floor two feet in front of the irising seal lay a weapon, a long barreled pistol with a scope on the top and a curved magazine feeding into it from below and forward of the trigger guard.

Terry took a picture of the location, then bagged it, tagging it Artifact 1 and placing it into a satchel he had brought along.
 
Kirio flinched at the scene that lay before him; he was not one who could easily stomach blood. "What the hell happened here?!" Kirio said as he walked slowly among the wreckage. He swept his eyes from side to side, looking for any possible threat. His shotgun followed his eyes as he scanned the room, ready for anything.
 
ANUBIS spoke up, tinny voice in Kirio's ear.

"Judging from a preliminary evaluation this battle damage was caused by common work implements. I would say that there must have been a really bad case of space dementia. Or something like that.

"Offhand, some of the damage looks like it was caused by energy weapons. What I've managed to access so far doesn't list any such capability in small arms. In fact there's no listing of weapons at all.

"I'm still working on building a library, I'll let you all know when I've got more. I'll send a proxy to do a more detailed scan in a few minutes. Closing channel."
 
Luicen looked at the environment outside his suit, the red made his eyes water, "Ach... It's so... red... It's sickening," He made a gruff cough with a snort, "What happened here anyway?"

He swung his rifle over his shoulder and put it in front of him, ready to fire then walked into the derelict ship. The first thing that caught his eye was the monitors, he took a look at it while he checked left and right.

"Terry, Kirio, do ya think we can see the security footage or sometin'?" He said over the Communicator abroad, the voice slightly muffled by his beard.
 
RPG-D RPGfix
Back
Top