Futuristic Chasing the Morningstar(Main Thread)

[Nebulous Stars]

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.”

“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.

Spoiler: Extra Details and Credit

Center Indented section written by PixelSymphony

 

[November Witch]

Romanova Wildheart

Status: Bored, curious, impatient.

Romanova was just a little peeved at the moment. She’d had a burst of creativity, and was in the midst of putting those thoughts to paper in the form of lyrics for a song she was writing. But fate is a cruel mistress, and it seems her fate today was to be interrupted for a ship-wide meeting. Something Romanova hadn’t participated in in the roughly two weeks she’d been aboard. So she felt as if it might be serious. Romanova grabbed her guitar and left her room.

However, walking the halls of the ship, her emotions quickly changed from annoyance to what exactly would constitute an all-hands meeting. Something good? Something bad? Her mind wandered from possibility to possibility. Her boots clacked on the metal as she walked, her tail swishing back and forth. The feline wore an orange crop top, a black leather jacket that was cut just as short as her top. Long black boots that went up to her thighs, black short shorts, and of course, fishnets. This was her normal getup she would wear on the ship most of the time.

When she had arrived in the cargo hold, she found a cargo net draped between a few crates. Romanova used it as a hammock, sitting into it, and plucking at her stringed instrument absent-mindedly as others would trickle into the room until everyone was present.

“No more powdered meals? Finally!”

Romanova threw a fist into the air when she heard the good news from Val. Though it seemed that wasn’t why everyone was there. X3 would then go on to explain more. What they were really here for, more specifically. Romanova listened intently as this was explained. She was normally the time to crack jokes and lighten the atmosphere. However, she wasn’t tone deaf. When a situation was this serious, she knew to bite her tongue and let everyone absorb the information.

The following silence was deafening. Five seconds seemed to stretch on forever. At least to Romanova. But she would be the first to break it. Always the icebreaker and people person.

“What are we waiting for then? Let’s go claim it as ours! Is there really a choice to be made here? I think it's a no brainer.”

Romanova laid her feelings on the matter out in simple terms. Though her passion and determination were clear in her voice and sparkled through her eyes like fire.

“Unless anyone has any really really good reasons for us to not go through with it. But I’m all in!”

 

[TheMadIceCreamMan]

FECUND

The ship's intercoms blare their message. Its soundwaves meeting along their silicate shell as micro-bristles on the surface react. The sonic wavelengths converted into a more understandable chemical signature that etch the message into the Fabrilis's mental framework. The guttural calls that other species call 'language' as always serving as fragmented to Fabrilis's minds that speak in long chains of pheromonal scents that can tell interloping stories and information. Lingering in place after being formed as to make each utterance important and to be weighed upon. Unlike vocal words that fade as soon as they are made.

Regardless, Fecund rises from its sedentary position as to engage with the crew on the designated social protocol. Its tipped limbs clink on the metal flooring like dinged glass. Scuttling along in an arachnid fashion as its central body bobs along the undulations of thin cursorial. Its pearlescent shell shimmering in brief flashes of emerald sheen when light hits at a sharp angle. Their presence otherwise marked by the sharp musk of poppyseed and mint that waft from it. Its function unknown to the uniformed.

Wordlessly it takes to planting in a corner as its looming six-foot height converges down to a slim three, their limbs curling inward like swirled centipedes as they settle in. Leaving one thin limb in the air to sway like a cosine as to catch the air waves and 'listen' in as it were. Its hexagonal plates catching more visual centric information.

Processing the data as a complier might file information, they are only one to speak once all information is presented. Its body pulsates, its plates shifting as sounds form through the pressing of air from stoma between its various harder parts. Leaving their voice wispy yet even in flow. Methodical in its rhetoric.

"Within the current reference data I have on the crew I understand the chance of this undertaking is high. Instead, this unit asks what each of you seek through gaining control of this vessel and its capabilities? Such an entity guarantees a sudden and violent change in surrounding political and economic structures within its local sphere of influence as people aim to influence the direction the Morningstar proceeds in. Thus, aiming to influence how these crewmembers proceed in that operational position of power. Your existences will shift into that of political milling with each choice effecting untold masses."

Most of the crew knew that Fecund was nonpartisan. Merely vying for the interests of the Fabrilis species that no matter the outcome would likely get a slice of the pie. What became of the unit know as Fecund was unimportant in that scope. Its words as such, were sharp and clinical. As if diagnosing the side-effects of dosing on such an 'adventure'.

 

[kaalnan]

The ship called for every contributor of the crew to gather for a meeting. Faula Seene opened her eyes as she was leaning on the walls to install peace in her mind. In some way, Faula was thankful for the interruption, because establishing peace was, ironically, becoming forceful and uncomfortable. It must be a very important matter. And they often tend to usually involve danger. Tremendous risk factors.

The cook of the ship ambled to the cargo hold, as she straightened the green gloves, something that keeps her hands as clean as they could get. Nondescript shirt left room for her skin to breathe, which meant it was too big for pretty much everyone but Kreix. The purple rocks twitched on her left cheek, and the cook caressed them with a single finger.

So, yes. The grand meeting. Faula made a slight smile at Val’s remark, before the ship delved into the meat of the problem.

Morningstar.

Murmurs of madmen. Speculations of the sane. Some have said it was merely a ship of gargantuan size, others proposed it was something more. Faula’s conclusion was that it was a mere myth. However, at this point, Faula Seene faced the reality of it: Morningstar, the ship with the potential of the planet. Suddenly, her dreams of a simple restaurant (maybe expanding into a franchise) seemed such a funny thing in retrospect. The potential Morningstar possessed, however, was no laughing matter.

Which always meant bloodshed.

“It’s too risky, is it not? Fecund is right. It possesses great potential. Too great. Even if we get to it, it means declaring ourselves as public enemies.”

Theoretically, acquisition of Morningstar might make her, and the whole crew as well, untouchable. Despite her own words, being untouchable allured Faula Seene. Perhaps, with undeniable influence, she could be free from the feat that haunted her very being.

But, no one is untouchable.

She had proved all those leaders and small-scale despots who thought themselves untouchable wrong. With her own hands.

 

[ChasmOfOrganicMatter]

The second the legend was spoken, they had not paid attention to the rest of what was spoken.

They had heard it yet to hear was not the same as to listen. There was nothing to hear that had not been heard before, ushered in quiet places away from the sterilized civility of comfortable imperium, whether long buried in the dirt of distant nests of insurgency or within the iron walls of once-impervious imperial might. The Morning star was as much a starfarer's tale as it was a venerable relic, yet one whose time had never come.

Everyone knew that. The problem was that everyone also knew that time could very well be at hand.

If such knowledge was so well dispersed, it was also simple reasoning that the Empire would not so kindly leave loose ends of such unscrupulous lives to merely fade into the background. They had slain one of their own upon merely hearing of its existence; one of the Husk's background would not be offered as pleasant a mercy as to merely bleed and suffocate in a quiet, abandoned vessel into a blissful rest. They were too much to merely let pass away into another life. Nobody who had done what they had done was ever allowed a quiet way out.

They did not need to come to a decision; implication had already made clear intent, dangled before them as liberation to the imprisoned. It was not a question that was asked but a quiet order that had been given. For 157, a possibility that would not return if abandoned.

A flicker of antennae, the slow tensing and releasing of small clawed limbs, the near-inaudible scrape of pointed claw-leg against metallic surface - the scattered collection of semi-ovular shapes of innumerable bent limbs and scissor-like pincers, shifted stalked eyes towards the hologram, X3, Val, patient in its wait for the statement of intent to finish. From the ceiling, the floor, the wall - the audience of one-yet-many awaited the answer it knew merely needed little ceremony nor ritual to lock in as inevitability.

 

[PixelSymphony]

From her perch, Val sat and listened quietly as X3 gave her debriefing, a curious brow raising as she revealed just what the magnitude of the find was as well as the unfortunate broadcast of such, before dropping into a furrow as she contemplated the choice she gave them. "Spectres of the Empire's past arising to haunt us once more. I wish I could even be surprised at this point."

As the others voiced their opinions of what they should do given the circumstances, Val slid off the edge of the crate and began slowly pacing with her hands behind her back, a moving meditation as she mulled over the material. "My my my, I certainly seem to have opened up a Pandora's box with this one, haven't I," she sighed, perhaps to X3, perhaps to the rest of the crew. "Welp, I have to agree with X3: knowing the Empire they're not going to simply let this be left up to the whims of space. They've got no shortage of glory seekers itching to get a few more medals on their chest by being the one who ropes in the Morningstar. And I can't imagine the corpos and the pirates aren't the same way; half of them are ex-Empyrean anyway, and trust me when I say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

Continuing her pacing, she neared the hologram X3 had provided of the Morningstar with their ship to serve for scale. "As for our options, well, I can't exactly say I'm feeling misanthropic enough to doom an entire scrapyard to the Empire's wrath, though after last week's negotiations with Vellux Reclamations," she said with a note of distaste, "they're certainly on my short list. And while a cushy aristocratic life sounds good, I can't particularly say I'm a fan of living in a gilded cage, if you catch my drift." She continued to contemplate the hologram of the two ships twirling about each other, symbolically weaving the destiny that now bound them together.

"So I say screw the Empire and similar harsh words to the others. Let us cry 'Havoc!' and let come what may."

 

[Nebulous Stars]

The ship herself remained silent as everyone spoke, her presence as unobtrusively quiet as ever, an implication, an assumption, but invisible. Somewhere deep in the guts of the machine in which all the others stood, lay a deep well of anxiety, fear of the unknown and fear of the known. Yet there was nothing to be seen, a certain lonely and thankful benefit of what she was now. So she simply observed, with none the wiser to her own complicated feelings on the matter.

First to speak was one of the newest crewmembers, Ms. Wildheart. Honestly, the ship wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the young woman. Sure she had dealt with a lot of young people and heavily modded people in her career, hell, by some measures X3 was spectacularly heavily modded herself. Not so much those kinds of mods nor this kind of young woman though, she certainly wasn’t any kind of orderly soldier. It didn’t help that she still remembered the other woman’s younger self with a certain mechanical certainty.

She knew what it was to watch people grow old, to know people died, to see people leave her airlock never to return. This young woman was perhaps the first time she had seen someone grow up, even if only at the beginning and end. Now here the beautiful young woman sat on the eve of the most dangerous mission of her life, no less a member of the crew than any other. She called for the chase with real passion, and this X3 did recognize. X3 would again do everything she could to make sure this wouldn’t be another story of courage eating a young soldier alive.

Fecund’s response was largely as she expected. The Botanicals were one of the stranger aliens she had ever encountered, in war or in peace. As a doctor though their merit was inarguable, and there was little more you could ask for in Rimspace. The question they raised was reasonable, although admittedly no less alien. It was also both partly right and partly wrong. Certainly politicos would come swarming the second the thing was seized, but the freedom it offered was real.

She studiously avoided certain other possibilities, but had to acknowledge that the crew would likely want to bring more people aboard which would itself necessitate the politics. There would likely be ways to lock control and keep themselves safe, but in the end there was no escaping the inevitability. Everyone that made it aboard the ship would essentially be new royalty, with all that came after them and many outside it looking to them as such. With that would come all the politics and cost that being royal took, unless they hared off into unknown space and fled from everything.

Next to speak was Faula, and she was a woman that X3 felt a certain kinship to, in the way of old soldiers, or perhaps old killers. She spoke with a caution that was an expected possibility. All the same, X3 disagreed. The thing to fear was the journey, once they were there nothing short of their own foolishness could unseat them. The Empire would have to spend the majority of its navy to try to destroy them, and even if it worked, their enemies would eat them alive in short order with their army destroyed.


Still, X3 had a sneaking suspicion she knew from where the Havalian woman approached the matter. She had not herself done much with espionage, but she still remembered the procedures their presence aboard had necessitated. With their paranoia around certain aspects of her construction, it had never been a fun time. Still, despite the tendency of the spies to dislike her, she had watched them right back. Faula carried herself in a similar way, and she suspected that was where her objection came from. Still, she didn’t walk like a true Imperial spy, and had earned some measure of trust and consideration of her objection.

Discarding, for a variety of reasons, her own ability to respond to espionage, she turned her focus to the next crew-member. Skitters was a being she felt an entirely different kind of kinship to, the vicious kinship of war-machines, a certain feral familiarity. She looked to it and couldn’t help but think that she saw in it her own certainty in what they must do. Two old war machines presented with one last war, one last hunt, one final battle. She suspected that they both thought of this as do or die.

Val spoke next, X3’s attention quick to turn to her long-time friend. Her response showed much the same thought process, the room circling around a shared conclusion. This set of crew carried a remarkable spread of histories, but they were textured in very similar ways. Blades forged in different ways for different jobs, but still weapons nonetheless. She knew Val, more than just about anyone else, had a full sense of what the other doors would really mean, and she was glad to see they both reached the same conclusion.

Turning her focus away from her horned friend, she prepared to speak, all too aware of the risks she was about to take. Nonetheless her voice was robotic as she spoke from the panel by the door, “I think we know what we must do then. Faula does have a point, but I think that is perhaps something to prepare for as we travel. This is a race now, but we cannot let ourselves be destroyed by the prize. We must be as ready as we can be to take triumph and run with it. For now, see yourselves to your choice of berths. I will set a course for the first nav-beacon. We should get there before most could even get close. Make your peace, make your choices, and get ready. Also get your asses out of the cargo hold before we fire engines, I’ll send pings out to any absentees or nearby off-ship crew.”

 

[November Witch]

Romanova Wildheart

Status: Happy, content.

Romanova was a little disheartened to hear some of the other crew voice their concerns and seem to not want to join in. If worse came to worse, Romanova was willing to go it alone and search for this ship herself if she needed to. But it seemed not everyone was completely against the idea. Soon, X3 spoke and it seemed they would be setting course to the first navigation beacon. She would pump her fist in excitement and head out of the cargo hold, the first out before anyone else.

Once this was finished, Romanova would head to her room. She’d leave her door open and start to work on her hobbies and common pastimes. Anyone outside the room or walking around the halls would hear her instruments and voice ringing out. Pretty and nice to listen to, to some. And maybe annoying or frustrating to those who didn’t enjoy music as much.