Prologue
#1 of Nightingale
Prologue, Nightingale
Trade ships passed through the void of space to and from border station Ne'Ki at a flow that sometimes rivaled planetary city traffic. The station was posted in a lightly fluctuating orbit around a hydrogen and oxygen rich gas giant that the station was named after. The nearly three kilometer long station supported a crew of 7nearly one thousand workers, military and civilian staff, and only two squads of swat troopers. The station had served for over two hundred years as a border station to only the Vectors, Lo'Kar, and Ca'zeze, but only within the past eighty years having to act as a border station with the Terran Federation as well.
In the last ten years the station had watched many assault groups from the Terran Federation pass on the edge of their scanner ranges on the way to assault Vector space. The Ca'zeze government had refused every offer to sell the station to the Terran Federation, keeping the station as a free and safe haven for any travelers and traders that passed between control zones.
The Terran Federation has also been putting more pressure on the Ca'zeze and Lo'Kar governments to force out the White Sun Coalition, a pirate military group that had gained control of numerous fringe systems. The fringe systems were usually colonies that had been started by the Federation and then abandoned by their government or not given proper resources.
Something that seemed to outrage the Terran Federation more than not being able to purchase the station, was the fact that the White Sun Coalition had been allowed to stay aboard the station, even though the Federation knew that the Ca'zeze used the station as more of a free port than a border station. There wasn't much that was contraband aboard border station Ne'Ki, letting the pirate traders flourish among the crowds.
Tradesmen among the pirates wasn't as rare as many would have thought, especially since the White Sun Coalition had originally been rebelling workers and farmers sent to worlds that had been too far away from Earth for the Federation to truly support them. And that is where my family comes into the picture, more than eight generations worth of ship mechanics and five of those generations being pirates and raiders. My great grandfather Noah O'Connell had been the captain of one of the first and most successful pirate frigates, which my father was now captain of. And this is where my story truly begins.
I was born in 2236, a half breed child of a human pirate and the Ca'zeze Exarch's daughter, which made my childhood rather...interesting. Thankfully my mother had gotten permission to be stationed out on Border Station Ne'Ki, one of the few free ports that my father could come and go as he needed. Not that my father was afraid of persecution, he could out fly or outgun most pilots that tried to catch him. Being raised aboard a massive trade station, I had to quickly get used to a lot of races
At nine and a half I got in my first serious accident, and if it hadn't been for a power line getting wrapped around me I'd be space debris. I spent almost three months in the infirmary of Ne'Ki station. I lost almost my entire left arm reaching for a tool, and for my tenth birthday I got my first prosthetic arm. Within a month of that I'd torn the twitchy piece of hardware apart and rebuilt it to be more...functional for myself.
My dad blamed that accident and the prosthetic for me deciding to take apart four of his worker droids and "borrowing" half the left over parts from one of his old assault droids.
I can't help but smile when I remember how I'd stumbled and tripped my way through stuffing as much programming into that droid as I could, but at that time I'd wanted to be thorough. I used the larger assault droids processor core and routed two more droid cores through it, added in twice as much shielding to the bodywork, and added in tools and custom built a chassis. I'd made the head to resemble ancient an ancient Terran dinosaur with ship grade armor and composites. I'd managed to work the chassis to be a quadruped, which got some jokes about me making myself a dog, but dog's didn't come with a micro thruster tail or rivet driver built in.
My father insisted on using an empty freighter bay to bring in the Nightingale to "assist" in powering up the droid, but I knew he just wanted to have her guns able to turn my creation into scrap if it went berserk. After three hours of finishing touches and a charge that made the lights dim in the bay, I was ready to power my first droid up. I'd been so focused that day on the "trial" start up and tests that I hadn't noticed the gathering of people that ranged from the stations elite swat group, to techs from the labs, not to mention a few White Sun members. I still remember that moment when I finished the last connection and uttered the power up command, which was a numerical code in seven different languages.
"Rex" as my dad called it slowly powered up, rising up from its tracked sections of leg to its electromagnetic clawed feet. It was marvelous for me as it moved it's "tail" which was a micro thruster unit in case it was blown out into the void of space. I just wasn't ready for the reaction the swat team would have to it engaging it's back mounted mark seven rivet driver, which I had turned into a fully functional turret.
"Get down, it's engaging!" I remember the captain saying as he and three of his team leveled their rifles on my creation. I screamed the word "No", I swear I remember doing that. But none the less the team all fired at Rex.
Sadly what I had screamed was a command. "Disarm!" Rex took the command like an assault droid would, disarm the enemy. I never ever thought a rivet gun could ever fire as sure as Rex fired three rounds, tearing the weapons from their owner's hands and nailing them to the wall. It felt like within half a second my father had appeared beside me and Rex, the droid lifting a single foot to its Jurassic styled head.
"General O'Connell, commander of the third pillager regiment, and captain of the Nightingale. Have you requisitioned my rebuild?" Rex's voice module crackled for a moment before the droid shook its head like a human trying to shake away thoughts.
"Negative, my son has used most of what I could salvage from your wreckage to build a prototype. Your new designation is Rex, Model and marks one. You are to serve and protect my son so long as he lives."
"As you wish General."
My father then turned to the swat team and nodded once to them. "You men will pay to replace your weapons in installments for the next year, and you will have to undergo two weeks of droid training and procedures. You didn't even scratch its paint!"
I smiled and winked at Rex. "Um Dad, I snuck in a kinetic shield unit into Rex while you were asleep last night..."
All my dad could do was turn and smile at me, and then ask me repeatedly over the next few months if I'd planned on building the droid for work or war. And honestly I couldn't answer him on that one.
Since my creation of Rex, I'd had to keep any and all "creations" I came up with in the duel level engineering bay on the Nightingale, by order of my mother. And no matter what language you use, saying "But, Mom!" doesn't work with a station commander.
I was apparently some form of Heir to the Ca'zeze throne, meaning I'd had to undertake military training and by order of my grandfather at the age of thirteen I was transferred from any and all station repair to the main tech and repair module of the station. No one ever understood that I'd had no control over short outs and minor hull breaches in the stations outer hull, but after losing half an arm and having another near death experience. I was in no position to argue.
I had been working with Rex in an outer section of the stations wall; the access shaft had been reliable beforehand. A relay blew out in a passing tug and caused it to slam along the outer hull at full burn, cracking the rivets and opening up a half inch gap along four plates. I was in shock and bleeding from my eyes and ears by the time Rex was able to drag me to the nearest med bay.
Before then I'd never had an implant other than for my prosthetic, even though most of the stations crew got them for just working in space. I had to have implants put into my lungs and throat, the cold of the vacuum having burnt my vocal cords so that I could barely grunt. They also put implants into my skull to fix my severe loss in hearing, thankfully the plants also worked as translators. My eyes were damaged as well, earning me even more plants, almost all were new designs about to be put into use by the navy.
I'd gotten used to dealing with a good deal of Terrans and Ca'zeze in my younger years. Humans were always an odd mix to deal with ranging from good to psychotic, to reasons other races had eugenics programs. Space did help weed out the incompetent though, after all the void was an unforgiving mistress of mine.
The Ca'zeze were a very canine oriented race that tended to range from a meter tall to at times two and a half meters, the latter being rare. My mother being of more a wolf and took to the den mother and alpha female role like a Lo'Kar to water.
One of the other races that I got to deal with a great deal was the Lo'Kar, a race of humanoid mammals from a planet that was 80% covered in water. Normally standing at 1.5 to 2 meters tall with dense bones and muscles that made them tend to stay rather athletic looking. Their bodies were hairless and very smooth skinned, making it very hard to actually grip them when they wanted to be let loose. Lo'Kar also didn't have a nose, instead having a single vent on their foreheads that sealed much like a Terran dolphin or whale. The race like others had leftovers from evolution, fins being reduced down to hard ridges on their arms, legs, and back. Lo'Kar are also one of the only multi-system empires that is Matriarchal in nature still, with males having a much lesser role in their society.
The Varren were one of the largest humanoid races that had been found in the last hundred years by the major factions in our galaxy. The Varren home world was hot compared to others, letting reptilian life flourish. Ca'zeze settlers stumbled across the not even industrial Varren by accident, finding the largest continent's swamps and marshlands to have hidden towns and small city works. The Varren were highly territorial and it took 20 years before peace was finally brokered and the reptilian race was brought into the Ca'zeze empire's fold. Thick hides of heavy scales protected even the smaller females that stood at no less than 2 meters tall as adults, males sometimes reaching over 3 meters. A warrior based society led the Varren to join the most heavily into the Ca'zeze military, some even venturing into the ranks of the White Sun Coalition.
(((more work here me thinks))))