Z
Zack
ON> Workshop
*BOOM*
The distinct sound of rocket-power could be heard in the distance as Uso came in for a landing just outside of the workshop, the CRT organs built into her shoulder blades slowing her fall with an intense blast.
"ARCCOS!" Uso shouted, making her way towards the door, "You ready to go to space yet!?"
The grounds around the workshop had taken a different appearance over the last few months working on the Lament, no longer an irradiated cratar of glass-burnt sand, it was resembling something fully industrial. Huge stacks of scaffolding were piled around the little mid-way workshop, and beyond that even huger piles of what looked like little cannon-ball sized spheres made of dozens of different materials. Some stacks even stretching up two or three times the height of the squat workshop itself.
As Uso shouted, the door opened, a few Junkers tottering out and dashing off towards the now... Mostly patched up Mothership. Closely followed by Arccos who appeared quite decidedly different. Her usual sheriff's gear had been replaced with a tight-fitting black bodysuit reinforced across her body with flexible metallic strips, worn under a long coat trimmed with some sort of local furs. She tapped at her datapad a couple of times without looking to Uso.
"Yeah. Been ready for a couple months now, Actually."
"Well.... why didn't we launch!" Uso said, "We could have been tot he great lighthouse and back by now a dozen times!...... and uh, am I going to need a radiation suit?"
Vier was nearby as well, though instead of making a noisey entrance, she was setting up a power armored suit for Uso, while her Junker drones finished their deliveries to the white Lament.
"I don't know. Are you immune to radiation?" Arccos said, starting the walk towards the zone marked with signs reading 'DANGER, PROXIMITY TO SHIP WILL MELT YOUR FACE OFF'
"Highly tolerant to, but I don't know how much the Lament is putting out." Uso admited.
"Just wear the suit Uso." Vier spoke up, "You have been telling everyone else to anyways. "
"..... fine," Uso would head over to one of the few Impulse power armors the group had left and begin suiting up. "How come you waited this long? If we could have gone sooner we could have gotten more of those ships out of the blue rift expanse?"
"Ship wasn't ready." Arccos said loudly over her shoulder, not really stopping to wait for Uso to don her armor. "I meant more I wanted to leave."
"BAH! You know what I meant!" Uso said, closing the green armor around her body, and then placing the helmet over her head with a soft 'clunk'. "I've got a small fleet of drones ready too.... The people planetside are going to go nuts seeing all this stuff lift off!"
"Vier coming along? I gotta ask her something."
"I will get another suit." Vier replied, having one of her junkers fetch another power armor.
"You two don't talk by spacer-radio all the time?" Uso asked, "I mean, you're both robots right? Or, I guess 'people who prefer the machine-side of things'?... " Uso huffed a bit, "Is Robot even a useful term anymore?... you know what, unimportant. Lets get to the ship!"
It wouldn't take long for one of the Green junkers to drop off a power armor for Vier's more humanoid body... the woman suiting up in short order before approaching the Arrcos and Uso.
"I didn't know she was even compatible with my mindware. It's coming as a surprise to me that she needs the radiation protection right now." the two power armor clad women were led onwards into the blast zone left by the crashed mothership. Each step causing it to loom upwards above them. The whole thing was at least a kilometer long, and studded with individual intertialess systems that would dwarf most of the buildings from this planet alone, the whole thing softly floated with a near inaudible hum that rested in the back of the eardrum like a basso tinnitis. Up ahead a small service hatch lay open, a dangling rope ladder brushing against the sand below...
"Guess I've been kind of busy working on this and all the policing stuff..." Arccos scratched her neck under the rigid metal collar of her new model voidwalker, looking a little sheepish for some reason.
"Though this body is entirely artificial, it is made with mostly human-derived components." Vier said, "I am not filled with self-repairing nanomachines like you are Uso, and my systems are not as fault-tolerant as Spacer's."
"I think we've all been busy," Uso said, "But this is a time for celebration. You've got your first real spacer ship for your spacecaseness." She would take a moment to appreciate that something so massive was just kinda floating there... and that, "This whole rope ladder setup really makes the place feel homey." With a quick rocket assisted jump, Uso would bound up to the service hatch, leaving Vier and Arrcos to follow.
"There was something you wanted to ask?" Vier added, her full attention turned towards Arccos.
Arccos stopped at the foot of the ladder, seemingly not as mobile in this suit compared to her actual power armor. Putting one foot on the bottom rung, Arccos hooked a hand on to higher one, and turned to Vier with a look of grave seriousness.
"It's just something I've been wondering for a while. Personal." She raised a hand, pointing it loosely in Vier's direction. "Are you single?"
Without waiting for an answer, Arccos opened her hand with a snap as though dropping an invisible microphone. Her face splitting into the biggest, dumbest grin anyone had ever seen on her, as Uso would see the junker holding the ladder in the access shaft quickly start retracting it. From Vier's perspective, Arccos just shot straight up into the air. She'd been sitting on that 'brilliant' joke for months now. Perfect delivery. Mission accomplished.
Vier looked upward as the spacer shot into the sky, held by the White Lament... Uso sounding like she was dying from laughter on the group comms.
By the time Arccos was hauled into the service hatch, it looked like she was at about the same proximity to death from laughter as Uso was. The hatch shut behind her automatically with a loud clang, leaving the two in the dark for a second before a reddish light flicked on. Arccos straightened herself up after a few snorting laughs and tapped her hand on the side of the next bulkhead.
"Alright, take us up to stationary orbit." She said aloud, seemingly addressing the ship itself. The whole thing jerking as Arccos suddenly became more grim about the whole ordeal, a little whiff of air sounding from her as though she took a deep breath without lungs.
Outside, on the ground the city once known as Osman saw the gleaming white double-pyramid hull of the lament rise above it, slowly and steadily.. The air rippling over the city as the inertialess drives distorted the ship into a weird darkening rainbow in the process of lifting a ship nearly a kilometer long. Dust and cold air blown up high with it was pushed back down, chilling the city streets. Maybe pleasant in the afternoon sunlight of the desert world. This was cut by the sudden crackle of static as the ship's light sail array burst into being and steadily hauled the ship upwards to vanish into the sky.
The great hulk full of spiders had finally left the people of 188604.
In the opposite direction from the city, was the landed ship Pumpkin Eater, and the long stretch of ground that the I'ee had covered in concrete. This starship landing field had been dotted with Hexagonal ships that began following the white Lament's lead. Their anti-gravity systems would slowly lift them up a few hundred meters above the ground.... no doubt most of the people in the city were focused on the White Lament at the time as they all silently lifted upwards... Then came the loud rumble as the ships used their rockets to accelerate upwards, blinding light and an all-pervasive rumble swept over the city.
Luckily, it seemed that the population was getting used to loud noises and large, terrifying sky-things.
As the rumble of the Lament rising started to cease, Arccos led Uso out from the maintenance access shafts, and into the crew halls. Each movement would turn on another light, and shut off another behind them. Beyond that, the ship seemed deathly silent beyond the odd skittering of the Junkers in the walls. Moving about in their own maintenance tunnels. Everything was blank metal, unpainted, and lit with a dull light giving the whole ship the feeling of being caught in a mausoleum.
"So... Uh... There are places where the radiation should be low enough that you can leave the suit safely. I'll chart us a course to Freehold..."
"You know what. I'm happy with the suit.... it is like you built this ship with the intent of using it in a horror movie." Uso said, occasionally having to pause to get her bearings... even with her innate senses it seemed like the spacer ship resisted traditional concepts like, Up, Down, Aesthetics, and crew safety. "We doing this Freehold mission alone? Or did you want me to bring the troops? I can have Vier spraypaint our combat drones, have them look like spacer-ships in no time."
"There's some crew, they're just not... Set yet." Arccos said, looking down one end of the hallway then the other. To her, the Lament couldn't have looked more different. The whole thing was alight with color and shifting lights that indicated everything from power, to heading, to the flavor of nutrient mix available in the cafeteria. Little notes were scribed virtually on just about everything by the last crew of the ship, and had been retrieved when Arccos had restored the ship from its backups. But now they were mostly meaningless.
"Troops would help once we get to Freehold. The drones getting repainted would also work, but I should be able to do it in transit with the manufacturing unit. It'll be a different matter once we get to Null and Void, though. Anyone not a Freespacer will be pretty obvious without a lot of work, and I've got a... Well, I guess it's a plan."
"Well... our more fleshy friends will need more than a once over with spray-paint to look like a spacer.... What'd you have in mind? Dolling up their power armors?" Uso asked.
"Just tag them with little transmitters to give them a false polysentience signal, and slap them in a voidwalker" Arccos said, "And we're going to sort of do a con job to steal the fleet after causing a fuss with the Freehold wreckage."
"I can do con-jobs... but I thought we just had to ask? What happened to 'we need your help to save the poor defenseless bugs?" Uso asked. "Do we need to make the threat sound worse? Or are we talking about some more complicated con here?"
"Not so complicated, just more grandiose." Arccos' voice echoed down the corridors as she led Uso out to an open arcade with small vaulted areas that looked like living quarters for a crew. All of them were empty. "If possible, we want to get a crew and some others to come and help with all this, so you need to appeal the spacer way. Cause a fuss, do it in style, that sort of thing."
"I thought the spacer way was to not have a way and just do it your own way.... which... I guess is how I'd do it anyways." Uso tapped her head with her hand, "So hide the cat ears, pretend to be some poor Nepleslian woman, and make grand pomises about how we're going to save lives?"
"Well, you're weirdly spacer for a Nekovalkyrja. In some ways." Arccos shrugged, finally making way through the recreational arcade to where what looked to be another Freespacer was sitting. It wore a suit similar to the one Arccos wore, and white robes. Not far away sat two of the inert automata of roughly the same make as Truffleclub, one half-painted similarly white.
"I want to try and I guess trick people into thinking I'm something much bigger than I am." Arccos explained, "This is a lost mothership of the Exiles, who no one wanted to leave. We're returning to re-establish the Polysentience link lost at Freehold. Then we're rocking in to the great graveyard to bring back the very oldest things the Freespacers hold sacred... Essentially from there I want to make a big enough splash that we can get people to not think twice when we appeal to the Misanthrist. That would essentially give me control of a pretty big chunk of the automata assets of the former IWL."
"You should have lead with that..." Uso said, turning on her all hands comm channel. "Hey, Everyone who's got a ship... except for the Icepick I guess... Icepick stays, everyone else I need you to come with the white Lament. Destination co-ordinates will follow."
She'd then turn her attention back to Arccos,
"We'll have the ships painted up, that gives you 8 combat drones, 4 freighters, a Nepleslian-looking cruiser, one large freighter, and assorted small craft. Is that going to be enough or do we need to scrape together some more ships? There's a few hundred missile drones we could launch that'll look like small ships and hm.... I could Buy a few more small freighters off the Internep. Have them show up on the way there."
"Really, as long as the lament turns up, we shouldn't have a problem. We just need the support stuff to haul out the mothballed 'spacer ships, and maybe a few to watch our back in case shit goes disastrously wrong... The real danger doesn't start until we get the Misanthrist involved." Arccos said, looking over at Uso. Wrenching her eyes away from the assorted automata units around her. "If things go smoothly, I'll have the Free State's greatest Misshu killing engine on side, and you'll get to call yourself savior of the I'ee."
"Right, I should have asked what the Misanthrist was the first time around....." Uso said, letting her voice trail off a bit.
"IWL Strategic Operations Mainframe. Commanded at least one million Militant series automata." Arccos informed. "Free State didn't want to get 'poisoned by the passions of warfare', and decided to make a machine for the pure purpose of manifesting hatred as violence. Was intended for Yamatai, but got turned on the Misshu after the Great Lighthouse went down. Still exists out in the Blue Rift, and has probably been boiling away for years now with nothing to do."
"Is this one of those things where we're reasonably sure giving it something to kill will satisfy it? Or is this one of those things where we're probably going to have to fight the homocidal super-computer?" Uso asked. "... Not that I mind! I just want to know before going in."
"Its connections are tied to a very specific kind of Polysentience connection. We'll have a manual killswitch for it the whole time, as long as we're outside of Free State space; the Lament will be generating the connection medium." Arccos said, patting Uso on the pauldron reassuringly, "Besides, I thought you were a risk taker? Don't tell me you're afraid of the Deoradh InterNEP hate machine."
"I'm a huge fan of taking risks,... When I know what the risks are,... and when I know I'm going to win anyways.... I like cheating to win at games of chance." Uso replied, "I'm going to need more of my own killer robots sooner rather than later.... but I suppose that's my problem and not yours."[/quote][/quote]
