Month One -- Navigation PhaseTravel on a Rapid-Pair Ship is not, relatively speaking, a very fast process. In absolute terms, of course, it is
blazingly fast, with Rapid-Pair Ships traveling spaces light-years wide in a mere couple of months, but to travellers used to the instant transportation between systems within sectors courtesy of Pair
Stations, well, the wait can seem interminable indeed. After all, while a normal, fixed-orbit Pair-Station simply transfers objects around it to being somewhere around its partner, from one station to the other across star systems instantly, Rapid-Pair Ships take advantage of the limited relative movement involved there to essentially teleport each other (relatively) short distances a very, very, very large number of times, very rapidly. That's typically several million teleportations, in the longest cases billions, and no matter how blazingly fast Rapid-Pair Ships can make those jumps, that's going to take a while.
On the bright side, though, when you're on-board a Rapid-Pair Ship you live like a king, to a degree that is barely an exaggeration. Docking space on a Rapid-Pair Ship has a cost that even empires wince at, and this is the result of the cost of maintenance of the absurdly complex drives and the equally absurd reactors that power them. Therefore, amenities in the passenger parts of the ships like supremely comfortable accommodations, a bevy of unique, varied, and delicious foods, many forms of recreation, and immaculate service all are so cheap in comparison that commercial Rapid-Pair Ship providers find the cost-benefit analysis to be an easy one, and Exploratory Systems Incorporated is no exception.
It's just a shame that the Knights Reliquar Expeditionary Force didn't get to enjoy it for more than a week.
Žaneta Vasiliauskas had commanded several deployments over the course of her fourty-eight years of life. These deployments had ranged from trivial, like a home deployment around the
Avalon that turned out to more or less just be providing security for a long political summit, to long, grueling slogs -- Gurney III was neither the first nor, likely, the last of those. She'd fought in jungles, fought in desolate mountains, fought on arctic ice, fought on barren moons, fought on asteroids... and so this all meant that she was finding herself
very ill-at-ease in the royal comfort of the
Sojourner.Ultimately, whereas Moos went for the recreation deck immediately, and Diesel... did... whatever a spirit does on what is effectively a cruise, Žaneta wasn't sure, Žaneta found herself in the lounge by the dining area. It had ended up becoming a bit of a demented conga line of Knights Reliquar -- because Žaneta didn't feel the need to have recreation time, she was the one who informally took on "Christel Duty", following her second-in-command around and making sure she didn't get in trouble proselytizing people. ("Do you have room in your life for a god -- any god?") Jalen followed along, very obviously just wanting to get to stare at Christel some ("Do you ever feel that you need someone to protect you as you fight the good fight?"), and then Yana followed after him, out of what Žaneta suspected was just opportunistic desire to be around the commanders and her fellow pilot. But the end result was that Žaneta was sitting in the lounge with most of the major personnel of the Knights Reliquar, feeling like rolling her eyes out.
But that changed when she heard a commotion -- turning her glance over to one corner of the lounge, she saw people shrinking back from Jalen's position, as Jalen appeared to be squaring himself to get into a fight with a fifteen-year-old. Wait... said fifteen-year-old seemed familiar. And she was saying something... "I do not
believe it! We leave Gurney and we
still can't be rid of you! Years on that stupid planet and I leave and here the Arehans are again! Oh, this can
not stand! Maybe you think I can be dealt with easily because I am young, but I am an
Unrivalled Princess!"
Oh. It was
her. Princess Rivalla's image was quite public on Gurney, and it had not been a conflict good for anybody there. And lo and behold, the Princess' tune changed very fast when Žaneta started approaching, Yana following. She hauled
ass right into the dining room, where she appeared to be asking for somebody's help. Said person was a dark-skinned man of fair height and a military set to his shoulders, who glanced coolly back at Žaneta and her pilots before returning dismissively to his business.
Only when Žaneta was nearly within an arm's length of him did the commander of Rivalla's Retinue finally turn around, looking at her impassively. She wasn't sure if to be insulted by his demeanor, or to be impressed by how bold his response had been, but either way, Žaneta knew what she had to do. If their crews were brawling with each other throughout the trip, her people would never be safe -- so she was going to prove her point and settle things right here and now. "So... if the 'Unrivalled' Princess has run to you, I assume that means that you are an officer in her company?"
His arms crossed, the Unrivalled commander replied to her with the same sort of stoic iron that had been so impressive. "I am. Commanding field operations. Captain Lanre Adebayo."
Žaneta smiled a little -- despite herself, she liked this opposing commander Lanre a little. "Alright, then. I am Commandeur des Chevaliers Žaneta Vasiliauskas, leader of this detachment of the Knights Reliquar. I commanded when we fought you on Gurney -- and I cannot tolerate your presence here. But a wide brawl would be too destructive -- let us settle this for now one-on-one. I challenge you to a fistfight, right here, and right now. How do you respond to this challenge?"
Lanre turned back and addressed who must have been another one of his crew. "Mihail, please hold the Princess back. I accept. L--"
Žaneta rushed him before he even finished his sentence. Sure, it was a little bit of a dirty trick, but Lanre was about twenty years younger than her and rather larger, so that was the sort of thing she would need to win. Žaneta had learned during her many campaigns that sometimes, aggression done very suddenly and targeted well could turn the tables on just about any disadvantage. And, indeed, at first things seemed to be going very smoothly, as even Lanre, as stoic as he was, seemed entirely unprepared for the hurricane of blows she dealt to him. She had always made sure to exercise heavily and keep much stronger than her wiry frame would communicate, and the end result was that Lanre seemed to wither under the blows dealt all over his body. Too late, though, she realized that she had allowed herself to become overconfident, as Lanre had been playing into her perception of weakness... and she realized this after a haymaker of a right hook that slipped past her guard and caused stars to pop into her vision for a moment. "You're stronger than I expected," her foe spoke, "I'll give you that. But this won't be too easy."
Žaneta responded with a grunt and a nod -- he was right, there. She'd gone and underestimated her opponent. She still felt that aggression targeted well could make up for disadvantages... but it had to be targeted well. So Žaneta focused on doing exactly that -- she leapt at him again, but when he attempted to strike her, she instead wove around it and grabbed his arm, slamming the rear of his elbow twice with the heel of her palm, something Žaneta could tell the man felt thanks to the pained grunts he let out. And she made a pattern of that, dealing out blows to his arms and shoulders whenever he wasn't striking at her, and grabbing his arm and punishing it whenever he did. Once again, it worked beautifully, until she grew predictable, and one grab of his arm was suddenly punished with a pull that brought her off balance, and then a brutal SLAM of his skull against hers.
It was hard to think, but one thought was this: "Damn, he's as opportunistic as I am." Still, his arm did look broken to her... so she just had to press that,
twist, and he'd be forced to submit.
And that's when the ship's security hauled everyone involved away in front of a shocked crowd of onlookers, which earned the entirety of the Knights Reliquar a ban from the interior of the Sojourner, leaving everyone stuck aboard the frigate and shuttles for a solid four months, growing impatient and frustrated. And it turned out that Žaneta had suffered a severe concussion, making her the first injury of the expeditionary campaign.
She was weirdly jazzed about that.
With the long wait, spirits among the crew were quite high when the
Sojourner finally arrived in the system and released
Le Bouclier, the backdrop of stars flashing back-and-forth potentially seizure-inducingly quickly (to humans, at least, spirits don't usually have epilepsy, or nervous systems) finally replaced by the more serene backdrop of a stationary system. The system had five planets, but the inhabited one was quite easy indeed to pick out and navigate to -- two of the planets were gas giants, one was on the verge of being a dwarf planet very far out, one was a nearly molten rock right near the sun, and the sole remaining planet was a ball of mostly green and brown a mite closer to the sun-edge of the habitable zone than is typically considered comfortable. Once in orbit over the planet, closer inspection reveals the nature of the planet's, well, nature.
The central third or so of the planet is the most uniform, being mostly a band of wide, scorching desert that seems mostly uninhabitable, with only occasional mountain chains and their associated lakes and streams providing oases. Moving towards the mid-latitudes the terrain begins to vary, sahel terrain broken up by more green savannahs around rivers, in turn spawned and broken up by the mountains, plateaus, and highlands which the planet has in fair abundance. Oceans appear in these mid-latitude areas; small ones, which make up the minority of the planet's surface, but oceans nonetheless, and with them comes a bevy of more temperate terrain -- plains, forests, etcetera. In the north, the largest ocean exists along most of the northernmost latitudes of the planet, but still leaving a thick inlet of land to extend all the way north, transferring from jungles to forests to taiga to icy, mostly-bare land at the pole. In the south, there are a smattering of smaller oceans, which leave most of the southern hemisphere of the planet sahel/savannah and arid, except for the areas of green that branch out from the areas around the oceans, where you do see warm forests and occasionally jungles, but also much of the arable plains of the planet, especially around the freshwater lakes. A ring of taiga exists around a small ocean at the south pole, though most of that ocean's surface is taken up by the glaciers of the south pole, leaving only a small ring of water.
At night, the patterns of lights reveal the inhabitation of the planet -- quite sparse, with some small towns around the oases in the deserts, with larger cities near to the oceans. Most of the areas around the small southern oceans are largely rural, with one or two cities shining brightly and dominating these oceanic areas, lights thinly scattered beyond them. The two most densely populated areas are the northern inlet, which has several cities and town spread across its jungle and forests, and the largest of the southern oceans, which has an extra-large city shining brightly and a cluster of cities and towns around that city, in addition to the rural population seen around the other southern oceans. There are also a surprisingly large number of mobile settlements that appear to move a little day by day. These are all the steady white color and setup of electric lighting... but those electric lights almost completely vanish around the taiga. Around the pole are tightly clustered setups of a purple haze -- lighting that appears to be magical and ritual in nature, which appears almost nowhere else. Only a few, small, adventurous settlements of either technological or magical nature exist in the taiga, sometimes clearly intentionally set near each other.
Apparently this system is called the Chopta system, at least by most of the people for whom this was the destination who were overheard during the week inside the Sojourner system.
A conversation Christel had with one of the Exploratory Systems employees checking on them two months after the ban revealed that the system has been ruled for several decades by the Sommet Empire known as the Empire of the Fifhurst Crown. Apparently, this Empire of the Fifhurst Crown, known more casually as the Fifhurst Empire, Fifhurst Crown, or "the Fifs", operates on a purely technological basis, and although it has been occupied by fighting on its homeworld known largely as "Metropole", it is nominally the largest of the Sommet Empires and maintains a now very limited presence here.
Despite the sparse population, there are apparently several different origins of the inhabitants, and a lot of fighting from factions seeking to establish themselves in the power vacuum.
You haven't been here long enough to establish yourselves in the system, yet.
Destroyed Laser Weapon
Mech Left Arm Scrap
Mech Right Leg Scrap
Mech Scrap with Complicated Electronics
Mech Scrap with Advanced Metals
Destroyed Fireball Weapon
Magic Left Leg Scrap
Magic Head Scrap
Magic Scrap with Conjuration Ritual Components
Magic Scrap with Demonic Essence
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Topic: Ramshackle Titans - Knights Reliquar Thread - M2 Deployment (Read 9849 times)