Chapter four: Buttercups and Kinetic Surprises
HarakoniWarhawk
I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.
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No clue what to write so we're back again. Well, that and writer's block.
Music for the chapter.
Ascending the ramp of the freshly-forged Kodiak Assault Boat, Loch Morlich was surprised to find two people waiting for her in the craft. Pike was manning the weapon station, his Uriel Power Armour exchanged for a set of Cataphract Boarding Armour. Andrea waved from the pilot's seat, no doubt already familiarizing herself with the controls. The embodied battleship wasn't exactly sure how to take this development, she'd intended to board the Alastor by herself after all.
"You don't have to come, it could be dangerous and I'd rather not lose anyone this soon." Her attempts at reasoning fell flat as the humans gave her unimpressed looks before going back to their checks.
Putting on his helmet, the crimson sensors on Pike's helmet conveyed his derision... somehow. "We've done boarding operations before, you haven't. Besides, fragging those fighters weren't enough, I want payback and I know the Cap does too." Jacking into the Kodiak, the Marine went still and that was the last word from him.
Pushing her shotgun onto the wall-mounted weapon rack, Morlich slid into the Co-pilot's seat beside Andrea. It took a bit of wiggling to get comfortable, but every seat on the boat was designed to handle PA which gave her plenty of room. Just when she thought the Captain would stay quiet, they spoke, still examining the controls. "Never thought I'd be flying one of these, the Hegemony keeps a strangle-hold on the production line and even that only turns out a few every month."
The embodied warship was still trying to wrap her head around the horrific state the Sector was in, how could something as simple as a Kodiak be rare? "The more I hear about the future... the more I hate what I'm hearing." Controlling her hull while not being on it was weird, but she still managed to trigger the depressurization sequence regardless.
Sealing the helmet of her Voidsuit, Andrea managed to get the craft aloft on gravitics with only a slight wobble. "I always thought these were complex as fuck, but the controls are so simple even a child could operate this thing." As the massive armoured door before them opened to space, a Pike escort fighter took up position on each flank.
Recognizing how badly her Broadswords had been at engaging superior numbers, Morlich had fabbed up a handful of Pikes to act as a screen in the absence of heavier units. Looking through the armaglass before her, she could just make out the glints of an Interceptor squadron running CAP. While it wasn't visible from this distance, she knew the lead craft was her sole remaining fighter from the first battle, damage repaired and kill tallies painted below where the cockpit would have been. Of course, her hull loomed above and behind their craft, close enough to the dead frigate that the running lights were illuminating it.
It hurt the warship to see one of her fleetmates in such poor condition, hull battered by micrometeorite impacts and paint faded from who knew how long being exposed to stellar radiation. As Andrea guided the Kodiak down below the frigate towards the primary airlock, Morlich swept local space for anything odd, aware that the system likely had more Droneships lurking somewhere. The escort was dead in space with barely any power detectable, but that was no problem for the assault boat.
Domain Universal Adaptors ran through innumerable combinations thanks to the nanotech making up the mechanism, extending to the airlock once a match was found. The background hum of the reactor increased in pitch once the seal was formed, power being pumped from their boat into the frigate to avoid needing to force the airlock. While the humans prepared themselves for action, Morlich hopped out of her seat, grabbed the shotgun from its rack and quickly scaled the ladder extended from the roof.
She was confident enough that anything that might be in wait wouldn't be able to harm her, but she kept the shotgun at the ready just in case. A dimly lit hallway greeted her, emergency lights flickering weakly from the current from below. The light clipped onto her gun's barrel fell on a crumpled suit of Power Armour, but she didn't investigate until the humans climbed up and joined her.
With the powerful floodlamps on the Cataphract lighting the area, it was easy to see there'd been some severe fighting onboard. Bullet holes, carbon scoring and the distinctive scoring from flechette rounds marked the deck, walls and ceiling, most centred on the wall opposite the airlock. Making her way to the fallen Marine, the cause of their demise was the hole blasted through the visor of their helmet, half a grinning skull peeking from behind the shattered armaglass. Though their armour had withstood an incredible amount of punishment, the headshot was what had killed the soldier in the end.
While she didn't recognize the markings on the suit, Pike did. "Now I'll be damned, that's a Knight of Ludd." Brushing past the battleship to crouch down beside the corpse, his hand brushed off some dust to reveal a pair of crossed scythes on the dead Marines' pauldron. "1st Gilead Sythes if I'm not mistaken, but what the hell are they doing on this ship?"
Glancing at the blast door the Knight had his back to, Andrea's gaze was considering. "A better question is what was he guarding... and whether his killer is still about." Stretching her new senses to the limit, Morlich's paranoid worry about being ambushed gradually faded as the only thing she heard was the faint creaking of the frigate's hull.
Saving the humans searching for plans, she scanned her warbook for the deck plans of an Alastor. "Through that door is cryo-storage, the designers put it close to the main airlock to facilitate easier rescue in case of need." Being careful not to disturb the corpse, she tried the control panel. "It's also backed up to the Engineering section so the power runs were less vulnerable to internal damage, ensuring the pods would stay online. Power is out on the door though."
"I've got this." Deploying the arm-mounted breaching jaws, Pike shoved the blades into the tiny gap between the blast door and deck.
With a screech of damaged metal, the mechanisms keeping it shut were forced to give ground. With the door slowly rising as the Marine got a better grip on it, Morlich lifted the Knight's corpse and moved them closer to the airlock. If she was human, the body with armour would have outweighed her by at least five or six times, but she wasn't and gently lowered the body to the desk. He'd done his duty to the very end and the least she could do was ensure his body wasn't being stepped over constantly.
With one last cry of tortured metal, the blast door to the cryo-storage was clear to move through, the human's chatter dying which prompted Morlich to see what caused it. Easing past the pair, she wished she hadn't been curious.
At a glance, the twin rows of cryo pods looked intact, the people within shrouded by the ice that had built up on the exterior surface. But every pod she could see had a minuscule hole bored through them at head-height, the cause of that locked in a lethal embrace with a skeleton against the far wall. Pike kept the gangly collection of servos, power units and dagger-like limbs covered with his rotary room-sweeper, the battleship joining Andrea is cleaning the pods to see the occupants.
Ice crystals glimmered in the light from the Marine's suit as she wiped them away to reveal a skull with a few wisps of hair defiantly clinging to fleshless bone. "I... I'd hoped to never see this... this sight again." It had been a favoured tactic for the Proxima drones and these Tri-Tach abominations clearly followed the same playbook.
Morlich's words got the Captain's attention. "Again? When did you see a horrific shitshow like this?" It was hard to tell with their polarized visor, but the woman sounded disgusted and furious in equal measure, the gyro-jet in her hand twitching towards the machine in the corner.
Frantically searching each pod for damage, each skeleton within caused her voice to crack when she finally replied. "During the Proxima war, the Drones there loved to infiltrate ships and do this... this horror... to crews in cryo suspension. If that mad bastard hadn't killed it, the thing would probably have been lurking in the vents waiting to ambush us."
Being the one who was investigating the machine, Pike kept his finger on the trigger in case the robot twitched. He'd seen the worst humanity could do during his time in the Hegemony Marine Corp, but there was something unnerving seeing such depravity performed by an AI. Crouching down with a whine of servos, he could see how the skeleton had killed it, a plasma cutter shoved into the boxy core of the automaton. They hadn't survived the encounter, a drill-arm shoved into their chest where it was still lodged however many years later.
Turning his floodlamps on the pod behind the body, it was open which explained where the corpse had come from. But it was second to last which meant... his lights played over the final pod, a pod which lacked the hole bored in it! "The son of a bitch got the robot before it could kill the last pod! We've got a live one!"
The foul mood infesting the compartment vanished as Andrea non too gently pushed him aside, despite the fact he was in Power Armour, fingers dancing over the control panel. Rather than stand around being useless, Morlich tried the door to engineering which surprisingly opened to reveal the sole fusion reactor that powered an Alastor.
The chamber was empty bar a single body slumped over the control console, still wearing the remains of an Engineering Voidsuit. Curious about the scene, she let the door close behind her and strode over to the reactor. By all rights, these Drones should have been able to reactivate the frigate and suborn it for their twisted purposes... yet they'd left it adrift. Offering the dead Engineer an apology, she reluctantly pushed the bones aside to access the panel, wincing at the noise they made hitting the deck.
The reason the Drones hadn't touched the ship took the form of a single line of code blinking on the still active display, undoubtedly powered by a backup nuclear battery of some kind.
While their very strange embodied warship companion investigated Engineering, Andrea was trying to get a proper ready from the occupied cryo-pod. Despite the fact it was the standard pattern, none of the codes she knew worked to get a readout on the person's health. Gritting her teeth, she slammed a fist into the panel, the display dissolving into static for a moment before returning.
Her initial elation as the vital signs appeared vanished once she saw the brain data; The occupant was braindead. Mocking her, there was a certain kind of twisted irony to finding an intact cryo-pod that had survived when all its friends hadn't, only to discover the occupant was alive but lacking higher brain functions. Feeling a powerful hand land on her shoulder, Andrea glanced at her longtime friend who inclined his helmet minutely downwards. Struggling to find words to say, the lights overhead snapping on very-nearly blinded her.
Accompanied by a faintly-growing whine from the direction of Engineering, she could feel the frigate come alive under her feet... but it wasn't the only thing that came alive. Pike's hand on her shoulder abruptly clamped down hard, his free arm pointing towards the pod behind her.
"Cap... brain activity just spiked." His words were impossible to believe, but when she whirled to study the display, the Marine was correct. No matter how many times she thumped the panel, the multitude of indicators showing brain activity continued glowing a cheery green rather than the red from before. Having no clue what the fuck was going on, Andrea's attention turned to the blast door to Engineering when it opened, Loch Morlich grinning with far too many teeth when her eyes landed on the cryo-pod.
Andrea winced as the hand she held out sank into the warships oversized chest, but it stopped them in their tracks. "The occupant was braindead before you turned on the power... it could be a trick." Watching the other woman's expression turn ugly, she hoped they wouldn't do something rash.
"If it's a trap... I don't care." The barely-controlled fury in her voice had the humans backing away rapidly, knowing exactly how much damage the avatar could do when driven to it. Punching in codes faster than a human could, the pod emitted a cheery ping before starting the dethawing sequence.
Keeping their weapons trained on the pod, the cloud of vapour that emerged did nothing to stop the pod's occupant falling out. Catching the uniformed woman before she could hit the floor, Morlich caught a glance of buzzcut green hair before the person stirred in her arms. Daring to hope, the feeling in her chest grew exponentially as the woman's eyes opened, hazel orbs blearily focussing on the battleship's golden eyes.
The part of Morlich that was the weird avatar side was insistently telling her that she should know the person, but she was coming up blank. Given the occupant hadn't become a disguised robot assassin by this point, Andrea and Pike lowered their weapons but kept scanning the area just in case. The survivor heaved, gooey cyan fluid dredged from their lungs as the oxygenation gel was expelled all over Morlich's feet. The embodied Tyrant didn't even notice, because the woman in her arms finally recovered their bearings and spoke in a voice hoarse from cryo-burn.
"M-Morlich? I-Is... is t-that you?" How... how did this woman fresh from cryo know her on sight... unless... Poking at the feeling of recognition, the knowledge hit her like a bomb.
Helping the trembling woman to her feet, her voice was barely above a whisper and hoarse for entirely different reasons. "Buttercup?" Morlich felt tears drip down her face when the hum... when Buttercup gave her a weak grin and stood up.
Proving without a doubt it was no one else, the Alastor snapped a perfect salute. "DNV Buttercup, Alastor class frigate, reporting for duty." The gesture was undermined by the glop of gel she puked up a moment later, but the trail down her chin did nothing to dim the joy on her face. "It's... it's been a very long time, Ma'am..."
Recovering her wits a few seconds before her companion, Andrea was understandably very confused. "Okay... what the fuck?" Admittedly, she was still struggling to wrap her head around the sight, so the question wasn't a great one.
The Tyrant's avatar wasn't really sure herself but had no intention of looking this gift horse in the mouth. "This is Buttercup, the best damn escort frigate a flagship could ask for." Looping an arm around said frigate's shoulders, he gestured towards the humans. "Buttercup, the tall lady is Captain Andrea Quantum while the Marine is Gunnery Sergeant Pike. It's thanks to them that I'm like this... I think."
Giving the pair a nod, Buttercup's eyes fell on the corpse entangled with the assassination robot. Wrenching herself from the taller ship's embrace, the green-haired avatar drove a fist through the machine's core, her other hand tearing off the drill-arm impaling the skeleton. Expressing a strength a woman her height could never have, her boots rose up and down, reducing the bot to a smear of fluid and shrapnel on the deck.
Wiping synthetic musculature off her boot, the frigate spat on the wreckage that remained. "Fucking abomination snuck onboard when my crew was trying to repair the FTL, they didn't deserve this fate... not after everything." Morlich yelped when her fleetmate grabbed her by the collar and all but snarled at her face. "Morlich, we need to kill the Drones that remain in this system, will you help?"
Standing a safe distance away from the spoopy bullshit, Andrea was at just the right angle to see the battleship's face go dead, like every time Drones were brought up. It was honestly pretty disturbing to watch a humourless grin spread across their face, which prompted her to grab Pike by the arm and pull the man away.
There was an intensity to the Tyrant that had even her fellow ship avatar backing away, nothing physical that could be pointed to... but the light in her golden eyes bore more than a passing resemblance to staring down the barrel of a plasma cannon. Sparing one last glance for the butchered crew of the frigate, she strode out of the room with her greatcoat's tassels trailing behind her.
Fitting Buttercup in her starboard hangar involved a bit of reshuffling which left half the Broadsword squadron hanging off ceiling racks. The frigate herself was entering her hull with bodybags and returning with them filled one by one. Once she laid them on the deck of the hangar, Morlich loaded them into flash-forged coffins and carried them to a waiting ammo hauler. The Domain crew of the frigate were being given the traditional sendoff for any dead Navy personnel; being fired into the closest star.
Of course, not all of her crew had been Navy, the handful of Knights of Ludd were placed in a separate area to be given a blessing by an uncomfortable Lennuel. While Buttercup handled the remaining Luddic bodies, Loch Morlich was happy to see Hot Rod's pilot had emerged from his refuge. She didn't know what her fleetmate had said to the man, but he'd emerged not long after and made a beeline to the Knights of Ludd who'd died defending the frigate.
Resisting the urge to smile at the man when he glanced her way, she offered him a curt nod and wandered across the hangar towards the sole Interceptor that stood out. All her memories were of the craft from the perspective of her hull, which belied how large the fighter really was. Standing beside the nose, the fuselage was nearly two feet higher than the top of her head. Abusing her strength to lift herself onto the wing, the embodied warship traced her hand along the line where new wing met old, the physical marks of such absent as befitting nano-repair. Below her was the five barrels of the 17mm HVAP machinegun, its twin mounted under the far wing.
Where the canopy would be was a solid dome studded with sensors, but gazing at it she felt like something was looking back. The Broadsword might be autonomous, but the feeling she got was what her memories agreed a dog felt like, eager to please and utterly loyal. A tremor ran through her hull as her paired Gauss Cannons fired, the sensation repeating every two seconds. Buttercup had pinpointed the last known position of a heavily damaged Remnant station, which her optical telescopes had picked up soon after.
Accounting for over a hundred years of orbital shift was simple with her computers, hence firing nickel-iron slugs on a ballistic trajectory towards the base. Her nanoforges could keep ammunition supplied easily, but she wasn't actually heading towards the station, merely passing it by. Instead, her fleetmate had identified the site of the systems final battle between the Hegemony/Knights of Ludd alliance and the Tri-Tachyon Autonomous fleet. While it was likely the Drones had slaughtered any surviving crew, perhaps she could recreate her own awakening to find others like her and Buttercup.
Morlich's ruminations were interrupted by movement from the ammo hauler, more specifically the green-haired woman sitting in the cab. Giving the warm plating on her fighter one last pat, she hopped off, took the required minute to get her bust under control and went to deliver the slain Nany personnel to their final resting place.
Tradition was important, even moreso when everything you knew was gone. A battleship never backed down and never gave ground, not in the face of adversity and certainly not in the face of Abominable Intelligences.
We meet Buttercup and find out why the Alastor was derelict.
Sir Isaac Newton is one scary son of a bitch, especially without the limits of game mechanics.
With gauss cannons and nothing to slow the slugs down, cross-system strikes are entirely possible on targets with predictable courses... like say, a damaged Remnant station.
Music for the chapter.
Ascending the ramp of the freshly-forged Kodiak Assault Boat, Loch Morlich was surprised to find two people waiting for her in the craft. Pike was manning the weapon station, his Uriel Power Armour exchanged for a set of Cataphract Boarding Armour. Andrea waved from the pilot's seat, no doubt already familiarizing herself with the controls. The embodied battleship wasn't exactly sure how to take this development, she'd intended to board the Alastor by herself after all.
"You don't have to come, it could be dangerous and I'd rather not lose anyone this soon." Her attempts at reasoning fell flat as the humans gave her unimpressed looks before going back to their checks.
Putting on his helmet, the crimson sensors on Pike's helmet conveyed his derision... somehow. "We've done boarding operations before, you haven't. Besides, fragging those fighters weren't enough, I want payback and I know the Cap does too." Jacking into the Kodiak, the Marine went still and that was the last word from him.
Pushing her shotgun onto the wall-mounted weapon rack, Morlich slid into the Co-pilot's seat beside Andrea. It took a bit of wiggling to get comfortable, but every seat on the boat was designed to handle PA which gave her plenty of room. Just when she thought the Captain would stay quiet, they spoke, still examining the controls. "Never thought I'd be flying one of these, the Hegemony keeps a strangle-hold on the production line and even that only turns out a few every month."
The embodied warship was still trying to wrap her head around the horrific state the Sector was in, how could something as simple as a Kodiak be rare? "The more I hear about the future... the more I hate what I'm hearing." Controlling her hull while not being on it was weird, but she still managed to trigger the depressurization sequence regardless.
Sealing the helmet of her Voidsuit, Andrea managed to get the craft aloft on gravitics with only a slight wobble. "I always thought these were complex as fuck, but the controls are so simple even a child could operate this thing." As the massive armoured door before them opened to space, a Pike escort fighter took up position on each flank.
Recognizing how badly her Broadswords had been at engaging superior numbers, Morlich had fabbed up a handful of Pikes to act as a screen in the absence of heavier units. Looking through the armaglass before her, she could just make out the glints of an Interceptor squadron running CAP. While it wasn't visible from this distance, she knew the lead craft was her sole remaining fighter from the first battle, damage repaired and kill tallies painted below where the cockpit would have been. Of course, her hull loomed above and behind their craft, close enough to the dead frigate that the running lights were illuminating it.
It hurt the warship to see one of her fleetmates in such poor condition, hull battered by micrometeorite impacts and paint faded from who knew how long being exposed to stellar radiation. As Andrea guided the Kodiak down below the frigate towards the primary airlock, Morlich swept local space for anything odd, aware that the system likely had more Droneships lurking somewhere. The escort was dead in space with barely any power detectable, but that was no problem for the assault boat.
Domain Universal Adaptors ran through innumerable combinations thanks to the nanotech making up the mechanism, extending to the airlock once a match was found. The background hum of the reactor increased in pitch once the seal was formed, power being pumped from their boat into the frigate to avoid needing to force the airlock. While the humans prepared themselves for action, Morlich hopped out of her seat, grabbed the shotgun from its rack and quickly scaled the ladder extended from the roof.
She was confident enough that anything that might be in wait wouldn't be able to harm her, but she kept the shotgun at the ready just in case. A dimly lit hallway greeted her, emergency lights flickering weakly from the current from below. The light clipped onto her gun's barrel fell on a crumpled suit of Power Armour, but she didn't investigate until the humans climbed up and joined her.
With the powerful floodlamps on the Cataphract lighting the area, it was easy to see there'd been some severe fighting onboard. Bullet holes, carbon scoring and the distinctive scoring from flechette rounds marked the deck, walls and ceiling, most centred on the wall opposite the airlock. Making her way to the fallen Marine, the cause of their demise was the hole blasted through the visor of their helmet, half a grinning skull peeking from behind the shattered armaglass. Though their armour had withstood an incredible amount of punishment, the headshot was what had killed the soldier in the end.
While she didn't recognize the markings on the suit, Pike did. "Now I'll be damned, that's a Knight of Ludd." Brushing past the battleship to crouch down beside the corpse, his hand brushed off some dust to reveal a pair of crossed scythes on the dead Marines' pauldron. "1st Gilead Sythes if I'm not mistaken, but what the hell are they doing on this ship?"
Glancing at the blast door the Knight had his back to, Andrea's gaze was considering. "A better question is what was he guarding... and whether his killer is still about." Stretching her new senses to the limit, Morlich's paranoid worry about being ambushed gradually faded as the only thing she heard was the faint creaking of the frigate's hull.
Saving the humans searching for plans, she scanned her warbook for the deck plans of an Alastor. "Through that door is cryo-storage, the designers put it close to the main airlock to facilitate easier rescue in case of need." Being careful not to disturb the corpse, she tried the control panel. "It's also backed up to the Engineering section so the power runs were less vulnerable to internal damage, ensuring the pods would stay online. Power is out on the door though."
"I've got this." Deploying the arm-mounted breaching jaws, Pike shoved the blades into the tiny gap between the blast door and deck.
With a screech of damaged metal, the mechanisms keeping it shut were forced to give ground. With the door slowly rising as the Marine got a better grip on it, Morlich lifted the Knight's corpse and moved them closer to the airlock. If she was human, the body with armour would have outweighed her by at least five or six times, but she wasn't and gently lowered the body to the desk. He'd done his duty to the very end and the least she could do was ensure his body wasn't being stepped over constantly.
With one last cry of tortured metal, the blast door to the cryo-storage was clear to move through, the human's chatter dying which prompted Morlich to see what caused it. Easing past the pair, she wished she hadn't been curious.
At a glance, the twin rows of cryo pods looked intact, the people within shrouded by the ice that had built up on the exterior surface. But every pod she could see had a minuscule hole bored through them at head-height, the cause of that locked in a lethal embrace with a skeleton against the far wall. Pike kept the gangly collection of servos, power units and dagger-like limbs covered with his rotary room-sweeper, the battleship joining Andrea is cleaning the pods to see the occupants.
Ice crystals glimmered in the light from the Marine's suit as she wiped them away to reveal a skull with a few wisps of hair defiantly clinging to fleshless bone. "I... I'd hoped to never see this... this sight again." It had been a favoured tactic for the Proxima drones and these Tri-Tach abominations clearly followed the same playbook.
Morlich's words got the Captain's attention. "Again? When did you see a horrific shitshow like this?" It was hard to tell with their polarized visor, but the woman sounded disgusted and furious in equal measure, the gyro-jet in her hand twitching towards the machine in the corner.
Frantically searching each pod for damage, each skeleton within caused her voice to crack when she finally replied. "During the Proxima war, the Drones there loved to infiltrate ships and do this... this horror... to crews in cryo suspension. If that mad bastard hadn't killed it, the thing would probably have been lurking in the vents waiting to ambush us."
Being the one who was investigating the machine, Pike kept his finger on the trigger in case the robot twitched. He'd seen the worst humanity could do during his time in the Hegemony Marine Corp, but there was something unnerving seeing such depravity performed by an AI. Crouching down with a whine of servos, he could see how the skeleton had killed it, a plasma cutter shoved into the boxy core of the automaton. They hadn't survived the encounter, a drill-arm shoved into their chest where it was still lodged however many years later.
Turning his floodlamps on the pod behind the body, it was open which explained where the corpse had come from. But it was second to last which meant... his lights played over the final pod, a pod which lacked the hole bored in it! "The son of a bitch got the robot before it could kill the last pod! We've got a live one!"
The foul mood infesting the compartment vanished as Andrea non too gently pushed him aside, despite the fact he was in Power Armour, fingers dancing over the control panel. Rather than stand around being useless, Morlich tried the door to engineering which surprisingly opened to reveal the sole fusion reactor that powered an Alastor.
The chamber was empty bar a single body slumped over the control console, still wearing the remains of an Engineering Voidsuit. Curious about the scene, she let the door close behind her and strode over to the reactor. By all rights, these Drones should have been able to reactivate the frigate and suborn it for their twisted purposes... yet they'd left it adrift. Offering the dead Engineer an apology, she reluctantly pushed the bones aside to access the panel, wincing at the noise they made hitting the deck.
The reason the Drones hadn't touched the ship took the form of a single line of code blinking on the still active display, undoubtedly powered by a backup nuclear battery of some kind.
FUSION REACTOR LOCKED DOWN. INSERT 3RD FLEET OVERRIDE CODE TO DISENGAGE LOCKDOWN.
While their very strange embodied warship companion investigated Engineering, Andrea was trying to get a proper ready from the occupied cryo-pod. Despite the fact it was the standard pattern, none of the codes she knew worked to get a readout on the person's health. Gritting her teeth, she slammed a fist into the panel, the display dissolving into static for a moment before returning.
Her initial elation as the vital signs appeared vanished once she saw the brain data; The occupant was braindead. Mocking her, there was a certain kind of twisted irony to finding an intact cryo-pod that had survived when all its friends hadn't, only to discover the occupant was alive but lacking higher brain functions. Feeling a powerful hand land on her shoulder, Andrea glanced at her longtime friend who inclined his helmet minutely downwards. Struggling to find words to say, the lights overhead snapping on very-nearly blinded her.
Accompanied by a faintly-growing whine from the direction of Engineering, she could feel the frigate come alive under her feet... but it wasn't the only thing that came alive. Pike's hand on her shoulder abruptly clamped down hard, his free arm pointing towards the pod behind her.
"Cap... brain activity just spiked." His words were impossible to believe, but when she whirled to study the display, the Marine was correct. No matter how many times she thumped the panel, the multitude of indicators showing brain activity continued glowing a cheery green rather than the red from before. Having no clue what the fuck was going on, Andrea's attention turned to the blast door to Engineering when it opened, Loch Morlich grinning with far too many teeth when her eyes landed on the cryo-pod.
Andrea winced as the hand she held out sank into the warships oversized chest, but it stopped them in their tracks. "The occupant was braindead before you turned on the power... it could be a trick." Watching the other woman's expression turn ugly, she hoped they wouldn't do something rash.
"If it's a trap... I don't care." The barely-controlled fury in her voice had the humans backing away rapidly, knowing exactly how much damage the avatar could do when driven to it. Punching in codes faster than a human could, the pod emitted a cheery ping before starting the dethawing sequence.
Keeping their weapons trained on the pod, the cloud of vapour that emerged did nothing to stop the pod's occupant falling out. Catching the uniformed woman before she could hit the floor, Morlich caught a glance of buzzcut green hair before the person stirred in her arms. Daring to hope, the feeling in her chest grew exponentially as the woman's eyes opened, hazel orbs blearily focussing on the battleship's golden eyes.
The part of Morlich that was the weird avatar side was insistently telling her that she should know the person, but she was coming up blank. Given the occupant hadn't become a disguised robot assassin by this point, Andrea and Pike lowered their weapons but kept scanning the area just in case. The survivor heaved, gooey cyan fluid dredged from their lungs as the oxygenation gel was expelled all over Morlich's feet. The embodied Tyrant didn't even notice, because the woman in her arms finally recovered their bearings and spoke in a voice hoarse from cryo-burn.
"M-Morlich? I-Is... is t-that you?" How... how did this woman fresh from cryo know her on sight... unless... Poking at the feeling of recognition, the knowledge hit her like a bomb.
Helping the trembling woman to her feet, her voice was barely above a whisper and hoarse for entirely different reasons. "Buttercup?" Morlich felt tears drip down her face when the hum... when Buttercup gave her a weak grin and stood up.
Proving without a doubt it was no one else, the Alastor snapped a perfect salute. "DNV Buttercup, Alastor class frigate, reporting for duty." The gesture was undermined by the glop of gel she puked up a moment later, but the trail down her chin did nothing to dim the joy on her face. "It's... it's been a very long time, Ma'am..."
Recovering her wits a few seconds before her companion, Andrea was understandably very confused. "Okay... what the fuck?" Admittedly, she was still struggling to wrap her head around the sight, so the question wasn't a great one.
The Tyrant's avatar wasn't really sure herself but had no intention of looking this gift horse in the mouth. "This is Buttercup, the best damn escort frigate a flagship could ask for." Looping an arm around said frigate's shoulders, he gestured towards the humans. "Buttercup, the tall lady is Captain Andrea Quantum while the Marine is Gunnery Sergeant Pike. It's thanks to them that I'm like this... I think."
Giving the pair a nod, Buttercup's eyes fell on the corpse entangled with the assassination robot. Wrenching herself from the taller ship's embrace, the green-haired avatar drove a fist through the machine's core, her other hand tearing off the drill-arm impaling the skeleton. Expressing a strength a woman her height could never have, her boots rose up and down, reducing the bot to a smear of fluid and shrapnel on the deck.
Wiping synthetic musculature off her boot, the frigate spat on the wreckage that remained. "Fucking abomination snuck onboard when my crew was trying to repair the FTL, they didn't deserve this fate... not after everything." Morlich yelped when her fleetmate grabbed her by the collar and all but snarled at her face. "Morlich, we need to kill the Drones that remain in this system, will you help?"
Standing a safe distance away from the spoopy bullshit, Andrea was at just the right angle to see the battleship's face go dead, like every time Drones were brought up. It was honestly pretty disturbing to watch a humourless grin spread across their face, which prompted her to grab Pike by the arm and pull the man away.
There was an intensity to the Tyrant that had even her fellow ship avatar backing away, nothing physical that could be pointed to... but the light in her golden eyes bore more than a passing resemblance to staring down the barrel of a plasma cannon. Sparing one last glance for the butchered crew of the frigate, she strode out of the room with her greatcoat's tassels trailing behind her.
Fitting Buttercup in her starboard hangar involved a bit of reshuffling which left half the Broadsword squadron hanging off ceiling racks. The frigate herself was entering her hull with bodybags and returning with them filled one by one. Once she laid them on the deck of the hangar, Morlich loaded them into flash-forged coffins and carried them to a waiting ammo hauler. The Domain crew of the frigate were being given the traditional sendoff for any dead Navy personnel; being fired into the closest star.
Of course, not all of her crew had been Navy, the handful of Knights of Ludd were placed in a separate area to be given a blessing by an uncomfortable Lennuel. While Buttercup handled the remaining Luddic bodies, Loch Morlich was happy to see Hot Rod's pilot had emerged from his refuge. She didn't know what her fleetmate had said to the man, but he'd emerged not long after and made a beeline to the Knights of Ludd who'd died defending the frigate.
Resisting the urge to smile at the man when he glanced her way, she offered him a curt nod and wandered across the hangar towards the sole Interceptor that stood out. All her memories were of the craft from the perspective of her hull, which belied how large the fighter really was. Standing beside the nose, the fuselage was nearly two feet higher than the top of her head. Abusing her strength to lift herself onto the wing, the embodied warship traced her hand along the line where new wing met old, the physical marks of such absent as befitting nano-repair. Below her was the five barrels of the 17mm HVAP machinegun, its twin mounted under the far wing.
Where the canopy would be was a solid dome studded with sensors, but gazing at it she felt like something was looking back. The Broadsword might be autonomous, but the feeling she got was what her memories agreed a dog felt like, eager to please and utterly loyal. A tremor ran through her hull as her paired Gauss Cannons fired, the sensation repeating every two seconds. Buttercup had pinpointed the last known position of a heavily damaged Remnant station, which her optical telescopes had picked up soon after.
Accounting for over a hundred years of orbital shift was simple with her computers, hence firing nickel-iron slugs on a ballistic trajectory towards the base. Her nanoforges could keep ammunition supplied easily, but she wasn't actually heading towards the station, merely passing it by. Instead, her fleetmate had identified the site of the systems final battle between the Hegemony/Knights of Ludd alliance and the Tri-Tachyon Autonomous fleet. While it was likely the Drones had slaughtered any surviving crew, perhaps she could recreate her own awakening to find others like her and Buttercup.
Morlich's ruminations were interrupted by movement from the ammo hauler, more specifically the green-haired woman sitting in the cab. Giving the warm plating on her fighter one last pat, she hopped off, took the required minute to get her bust under control and went to deliver the slain Nany personnel to their final resting place.
Tradition was important, even moreso when everything you knew was gone. A battleship never backed down and never gave ground, not in the face of adversity and certainly not in the face of Abominable Intelligences.
We meet Buttercup and find out why the Alastor was derelict.
Sir Isaac Newton is one scary son of a bitch, especially without the limits of game mechanics.
With gauss cannons and nothing to slow the slugs down, cross-system strikes are entirely possible on targets with predictable courses... like say, a damaged Remnant station.
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