Reflections
Starfox: Liberation
Chapter 3: Reflections
Alaric gave a good look as he walked into the ship he would be spending the next few months in. It was a Asimov heavy freighter, they were incredibly hardy ships. That's probably why it was not a pile of scrap even though it had most likely been neglected since before the end of the civil war. Asimov freighters sported a strange design. They had a smooth winged profile, the main body of the ship rectangularly coming to a flat edged point at the tip. Yet the once proud ship did not compare to its older glory days. The color of the hull could not even be seen under all the rust. He thought that if he was unimpressed by the outside, he was undoubtedly going to be equally unimpressed by the interior. This was a correct assumption.
The inside of the ship was a disaster. Most of the bare steel panels were either hanging loosely off their mounting, or missing entirely. Wires hung from broken ceiling slats and three quarters of the light fixtures were broken, and the other quarter only shone dimly. The once clean silver steel walls were a dull grey, there luster having faded over the no doubt many long years of disuse. The vessel also had a dank, musty odor about it, most likely due to Its decay and neglect. He had his doubts wether or not it would even get off the ground.
Hopefully it would, he didn't fancy staying any longer on this shitty world then he had to. So, with difficultly, he headed towards the bridge. It was hard to get there, considering he had to change routs when he found a jammed door or wreckage blocking his path. But with considerable effort he finally arrived at the trashed command center.
It was the least damaged portion of the ship, and that wasn't saying much. Only half of the lights did not work and a few panels were out of alignment. A few of the chairs had completely disappeared, probably the work of scavengers, and on top of it all some of the screens were cracked. But if he was to be thankful for anything, it would be that the main console were untouched and that he could probably fly the ship.
Alaric sat down at the captains chair, and with a groan of deteriorated and rusted metal, fell on his armored ass as it broke. "Son of a bitch!" He growled as he picked himself up off the floor, dusting his plated thighs. They had almost immediately been coated in a thin layer of ancient dust that had been flung into the musty air. "Damn thing is falling apart." Muttering, he started the ships's engines, standing up. Alaric could feel the deck plating begin to vibrate under his thick soled boots. The photon infused plasma turbines began to spool up, sending a barely perceptible constant and relaxing hum throughout the ship. Alaric could detect a ever so subtle hiccup in the noise. He counted himself lucky that he could even pilot the ship, one thing the Sovereign Colonies did do for him was give him training in many fields, flight being one of them.
With practiced ease, he ran a diagnostic on the ships's engines and hull integrity. Deft fingers began to bring up displays on the cracked monitors. The readings were not great, the engines were practically falling apart and the hull was two steps from splintering. Still, it was capable of flight, although it would probably not last very long. He would have to stop at a planet and get some supplies to fix it up. Luckily, he had received some funds for the mission, (the credits had been transferred to an account they set up for him), not enough to do anything serious, but enough to do a little work on the ship and buy some other essential supplies.
As he wracked his brain to try to find a place to go, he thought back to the last few minutes of his "interview" with the leaders of the UEG.
"Where is the Undying?" Alaric asked Ackerman. If he wanted to earn his freedom, he would need to know where the ship was!
"Last transmission pinpoints it at the edge of the Katinian gravity well. I must give you a few words of caution. If any Lylatians you meet on your travel ask about it, its cover story is that of a scientific research team, scanning solar debris at the edge of the system."
"Pretty flimsy cover." Alaric snorted derisively with a roll of his crimson eyes.
"Yes well Lylatians can be foolishly trusting, their government believed the story whole heartedly." Parker replied with a flash of condemnation on her face, clearly she did not have a flattering view of this alien collective.
He looked to her and gave her a death glare, monster he may be, he still disapproved of humanities need to feel superior. "Foolish to you maybe." He muttered with a small growl.
"This is all irrelevant, the important think to remember is to not blow your's or the ship's cover!" Wallace exclaimed, driving the talks back to their original goal.
"Sure old man." Alaric grunted noncommittally.
Wallace just sighed and and rubbed his eyes in annoyance. "Moving on, when you arrive at its last known location, find it, fix whatever problem had surfaced, and report in, can you do that?"
"Already done." Alaric said confidently.
"Good, oh and considering your...absence from the galaxy for the last seven years, the ship given to you will have updated star charts, try not to get lost, dismissed." Ackerman said and waved him away loftily.
So with Katinia as his final destination, he plotted a course for the closest Lylatian controlled world, a planet called Fortuna. Here was the beginning of his journey, Alaric only hoped that it would be a simple and easy one. He just wanted to earn his freedom, go to some peaceful world, settle down alone, and die in his sleep at a nice old age.
With the course laid in, he stood at the controls and began to guide the ship out of the hanger. With the stuttering of corroded engines, The Serpents Lair rose from its decades of reluctant slumber and hovered in the air. Alaric looked out the viewport and watched as the roof of the hanger opened to reveal the afternoon sky, with a small amount of hope, he gunned the old engines and piloted the dilapidated freighter into the stars.
With the course set for the nearest shock point beacon, Alaric took a look around the bridge of the ship he would be using. He sighed heavily, the vessel was more of a space fairing piece of scrap then an actual spaceship. Still, since he had nothing better to do until he reached the beacon, which was several hours away, he cleaned up the bridge. It was a dirty, sweaty, and thankless task. Yet, by the time he arrived at the beacon, it looked somewhat presentable.
He keyed in the information given to him by the UEG, and headed for the Shockring. The massive circular device was several kilometers wide, allowing for all manners of ships to travers through shockspace. It began to glow with a bright pulsing blue aura as it cycled up to its active state. The ring began to spin as the energies reached their peak and when it did, Alaric took The Serpents Lair through.
The bridge viewport was covered in a contorting sapphire bubble signifying that the ship was in shockspace. Now that he no longer had to manually control his vessel, Alaric once more began the process of tidying up the junkyard's worth of stuff aboard the ship. First thing he did was reattach all the panels that had either been hanging loose or fallen off completely. (He had dredged up some tools from a drawer in the engine room to help him fix things up, ironically they were in almost as bad a condition as the ship.) Once he had done that in the vicinity of the bride he sought about getting the crazy wire situation under control. He used what little knowledge of maintenance bestowed upon him by his harsh life under the Sovereign Colonies to put them back where they belonged or just simply removing them altogether if they were to corroded to use. By the time he had been alerted by one of the few still functioning systems that he was halfway to his destination the ship began to look almost as if it was a pile of crap and not a mountain of crap.
With a tired exhalation, Alaric wiped his sweaty scarred brow and fell down to the floor with a dull thud in exhaustion. Even as tired as he was, he found himself to be happy, working in the ship was therapeutic. It was almost as if he and the ship were similar, both having been left to rot after the collapse of the old government, both given a second chance at life. He imagined that all the work he did to fix it helped to heal the deep old emotional wounds he harbored inside his tortured body and soul.
With those thoughts swimming through his head, he stood back up from the deck and went in search of the captains quarters. It took a bit of looking and the removal of a pile of useless materials, but he found it. When the door slid open and he entered, flicking on the lights, he was surprised it wasn't a dump. Sure it was musty and barren, but it didn't have trash or anything inside. It was relatively clean compared to the condition of the rest of the ship.
The room had a proportional oak desk, what appeared to be a small lavatory, a large comfortable looking cot, a closet, a cabinet, and a board to hang things on. The cabin walls had a startlingly clean dark grey finish, and the ceiling held working lights that have the room a homey feel. All in all it was a pleasant room.
So thankful for that small mercy, Alaric took a few minutes to shed the heavy armor off, leaving him in his underclothes, and collapsed on the cot. It groaned softly under his bulk. The only downside to it was that it didn't have a pillow, but compared to seven years of being chained to a wall, it was heavenly. He savored the feel of a real bed underneath him, he almost started to cry at having such a simple commodity to himself. He clamped down on his emotions, he would need to steel himself for the tasks at hand, and faded off into blissful sleep for the first time in a long time. But as all good things, it did not last.
Alaric woke up, disorientated, and looked around in confusion. This was not the cabin of his ship, this was a bunker, a very unsettlingly familiar bunker. He got off the military cot and groaned.
He heard a pair of panicked boots as they rushed over to him. "Commander Alaric!" He looked over to see a face he thought never to see again. Jeremy, one of the many youngster that he led in the final years of the war. The frail bald headed African descendant was looking back at him with worried brown eyes. "The rebels are overrunning the south eastern entrance!" He was wearing the armor of the Hydra's Fangs.
"Jeremy, what's...what?" He mumbled in confusion as he tried to understand what was going on, if memory served, this was the last battle he had fought in before his imprisonment, what was he doing here?
"No time for jokes sir, your men need you!" Jeremy implored, tugging Alaric to the door at the end of the row of bunks.
"What, this is all wrong, this already happened!" He said in alarm, finally having gained back his faculties fully.
"Sir? What are you talking about? The battles only jut started. It is no matter, let's go, your needed at the front line!" Jeremy herded the befuddled Alaric through a series of concrete corridors filled with busy men in the regalia of the 66th, running back and forth down the many hallways. The entire time, Alaric's mind was a maelstrom of confused thoughts. What was he doing back here? Was it possible that the last seven years had been a terrible nightmare? He wasn't sure, but it didn't matter right then, his men needed him, and would rather die then abandon them.
As they ran, the sounds of a blistering firefight assaulted his ears. They rounded a bloodstained corner to take in the horrible sight before him. The giant steel doors to the outside of the bunker had been blown wide open and a squad of blue and grey armored soldiers were taking cover in the rubble and corpses, and firing into the hallway. On the opposite side crouched his men, the black armored warriors had taken a table, laid it on its side, and retaliated with zealous abandon, blazing away at the enemy with their pulse weapons. As ferociously as they fought, things weren't looking good for them, already, half a dozen of his men lay motionless on the floor, leaking their life giving fluid out of the numerous holes in their perforated black armor and onto the cold unforgiving stone.
Seeing the fallen bodies of his own enraged Alaric, he ran into the battle and unslung his old rifle, loosing off a deluge of withering pulse rounds making the now pinned down invaders dive for cover. Unsatisfied with the results, he stashed his rifle away and activated his sword, it assembled out of the hilt and activated with a snap-hiss of deadly energy. With a roar of crackling plasma and his own voice, he bull rushed the hunkered down soldiers. He was among them before they could react to his charge. The most courages of the attackers, wearing the insignia of a sergeant moved to smash Alaric in the face with the stock of his rifle. It was a foolish move, and the consequence of the action was the loss of his life, and his head. Alaric leaned back, making the man's swing go wide, using the opening, he stabbed the energized blade into the neck-guard of the rebel's armor, pulverizing the thick steel and burying it up to the hilt in the vulnerable throat underneath, and then he ripped it back out. With a gurgling rasp, the man reached for the wound to try and stem the flow with now shaking gauntlets. Ruthlessly, Alaric drew his sword back and swung it in a violent arc. The blade decapitated the man, and removed his hands in the process. The deceased headless and handless body fell to the door with the clatter of uncontrolled armor and bright crimson arterial spray, that coated Alaric and the walls in blood. From engagement to neutralization, seven seconds had passed.
Not wanting to lose his momentum, Alaric stepped over the body of his first victim and sliced into the next. The unprepared soldier was gutted from one side of the waist to the other. The searing hot blue blade melted right through the weaker armor of the poor individual before him. The lad cried out in pain and attempted to hold his intestines in his body. Feeling merciful, Alaric stabbed his sword through the man's heart, killing him swiftly. As the body fell off the blade he felt a dozen small and forceful impacts on his side, scratching the heavily modified armor and bruising his ribs. One of the rebels had the gall to shoot him!
Alaric shrugged off the pain and rolled to meet his adversary, the man flinched and tried to evade. The flinch damned him though as Alaric went under his guard and delivered a horrible sword plunge into the unfortunate rebel's kidney, the energy blade liquefying his innards. He heard the man's howl of pain as he collapsed from the mortal wound. Assured that he was down for the count, Alaric leaped to the last one, who was visibly trembling, as he fell to his knees in surrender. Alaric halted the fatal drop of his blade, an inch over the helmet of the quaking rebel, the blade hummed with the potential for death.
He would not kill if he didn't have to, and with no supervisor around, there would be no one to enforce the penalty. Before anything could be done with the prisoner, a trio of cylindrical flashing canisters tumbled in from the breached bunker entrance and came to a rolling stop at his boots. Both he and the prisoner locked gazes at the realization, red eyes to blue visor.
"GRENADES!"
One of his men shouted too little too late. A blinding flash, and the feeling of his chestplate, and ribs cracking under the force of the detonation was all he could grasp as his body was flung violently in the air. He hit the far wall with the painfully loud snap of his leg bones shattering and his spine going numb.
Minutes later he regained consciousness, propped up on a wall, to the trickle of blood flowing from his sliced up brow. He could feel the molten shards of shrapnel in the sundered flesh of his face. The wounds would leave a scar that would persist throughout his life, however short it may be.
He could hear voices talking incoherently, as if he were deep underwater. "....ake the survivors, le....em stand trial." He looked to the progenitor of the voice and saw a heavily ornate suit of armor, with an ID that had WALLACE stenciled on the gilded cuirass. "...s still awake...ck him out." Another soldier entered his filed of view. He brought the stock of his weapon up and smashed it down on Alaric's head.
He awoke to find himself wrapped up in the sheets of the cot and on the floor covered in a cold sweat. He untangled himself from the sheets and stumbled into the bathroom. With haggard red pupils he examined his sorry state. His muscular torso was heavily scarred, although he had no fresh wounds. He brought a quavering hand to the scars along his face, tracing the most prominent jagged tissue that went from his left eyebrow, all the way down to the right side of his chin. That dream had been the most vivid one in years, it had seemed so real! He saw the scar from that day and almost expected it to still be bleeding.
He turned the faucet to get some water to wash his face, but nothing came out. It only just came to his nightmare fried mind that he had no supplies for the ship, not even water. With a sigh he turned the faucet off and left the bathroom.
With reluctance he adorned himself in his armor once more and left the cabin. He would not feel like sleeping for a very long time to come. It only took him a few minutes to get to the bridge, and when he arrived the sight outside his viewport told him all he needed to know. He was at Fortuna. The ship must have made it while he was sleeping. He had no idea how long he had been just floating there.
All that was left was to bring it in, get it fixed up, pick up some supplies, and prepare to head back out. Maybe he would take some time to relax, it had been seven years since he had the chance to. After all, it should take no more then a week to find and get the Undying back. As he flew The Serpents Lair down to the planet, he considered the option even more. It had merit, especially considering it would take at least a few days to patch up the ship and load up on much needed material such as food, water, and the various other things the UEG had neglected to provide. Sure they gave him weapons and armor and such, but they didn't give him anything he would need in deep space, a serious oversight if he had anything to say about it.
"This is Fortuna Starport control tower, please state the nature of your business." A friendly but firm male voice chattered over the thankfully working ship's comm.
"This is Alaric Vladislav of the UEG Serpents Lair, I am requesting the chance to land and get some much needed supplies and mechanical expertise." He replied politely, unwilling to upset the ones who would decide wether or not he could do what he set out to do.
"......your request has been processed and accepted, please allow the control tower to take over navigation and guide you in." The voice answered after a few moments.
"Thank you and copy that, transferring control over now." Alaric flicked a few switches and the flight down suddenly became smoother and easier. As he exited the cloud layer, he got a fantastic view of the first lylatian planet he ever saw.
The planet was a vibrant tropical paradise, with big swathes of sparkling blue oceans and deep green inlands. Now that he saw it, Alaric guessed that it was a resort world, and a beautiful one at that. He began to think that spending a few days he was not so bad, and besides, he needed to get his ship up to scratch.
He neared the settled portion of the world and saw the city and starport. The city was a huge sweeping area of towers and little residential homes, yet they didn't destroy the ecosystem, rather it was built with it in mind. Trees and forests were inlaid with the urban sprawl to make a Eco friendly, yet industrious metropolis. It was a wonderful thing to see for a man deprived of nature's beauty for years. It was just as grand as the starport.
The port had a massive strip for landing and servicing the many ships that came to the planet. Yet it also was surrounded by a healthy leafy green forest that seemed not to interfere with the day to day operations of the busy workers.
Over all, this was the most beautiful and wondrous planet he had ever laid eyes on. As his ship came to land at the port, he drank in the view one last time before going to the captains cabin. A thought had just popped in his head. He walked in and looked in the mirror, wearing the armor would probably not be a great idea, even if no one here knew who he was, it was still intimidating and unfriendly. In desperation he looked in the closer for clothes and was amazed to find a single outfit, out of the many ones that were either ruined or small, that fit him. Granted it was a mite dusty, musty, and old, but a little fresh air should fix that right up. He went in the bathroom and switched into the civi clothes.
Alaric was now sporting a black t-shirt and a pair of black dress slacks, they were a tight fit, making his muscular disposition shine through, but they were the only pair that adjusted somewhat well to his physique so he let it be. He also didn't have any shoes so he just took the boots off his armor and wore them. He looked like a PMC, that was fine with him though. All that was left was to get the belt off his armor, buckle it on, and attach his sword hilt to it. That way he would at least have some sort of defense in case of emergencies. He was pretty sure they would frown on taking an assault rifle out into the general populace.
Now ready to step outside, he headed down to the exit ramp at the back of the ship and pressed the button. It began to slowly descend to the tarmac, lighting up the empty bay. Once it hit the ground he thudded down, his armored boots clanking against the thin metal. He had work to do, and maybe some time to relax, and he wasn't going to waste it.