Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Chapter 20 - Those Who Follow

(Starlight Raven, Cargo Bay)

“—So I knew I had fucked up somehow when they locked this collar on me.”

Jaynie shook her head as Cali finished telling the story of how she’d ended up being enslaved. “Damn, that’s a tough break. Anything you can do to get out of it?” Looking back to the bulkhead, she raised her pistol, and started firing. The captain had told them to make recommendations, and what better way to do that than by testing the facilities, starting with the two-lane shooting range they had set up here?

Cali shrugged, before sighting in her own pistol. “I tried running, but they zapped me. Same when I tried to fight back. Except once it got known that we would respawn, they would kill me, to make sure I got the message. Fun fact, when you respawn, you come back with everything still on your corpse when it disappears. So they thought it was real fun to have me come back wearing only my collar.”

“So if you popped the collar, you’d be free when you respawned, right?”

“Tried that. Doing that makes you a runaway, so anyone that catches you gets a free pass on claiming you so long as they pay a transfer fee to your old owner. Still might have tried it again, if they hadn’t shown me what the Stepford shit is like.”

“That bad?”

Cali shuddered. “Worse. The thing basically makes you a prisoner in your own body. You see, hear, and feel everything, but you can’t act or speak on your own will. They left me like that for a day, and it was hell. Then they told me to be good, or they’d turn it on, and leave it on until someone bought me. So I behaved.”

Jaynie winced. That did sound godawful. “And how does the company get away with doing something like that? I mean, there’s gotta be laws against stuff like that, in the real, right?”

Cali laughed bitterly. “Nope. All that stuff is covered in that EULA crap they make you sign, and the extra one to turn adult content on. Basically, I stupidly signed away my rights in two different worlds by not reading the fine print. Their stance is that, since you agreed to the terms, and were warned up front, then your choices are rerolling, or finding a way to do something about it in-game.”

“And there’s a wait period on rerolls. So you were, what, trying to figure out a way to get free without being hunted, at least until your reroll wait was up?”

“Pretty much. Plus, they gave me some good training while I was there, so I used them as a grind zone. My idea was that, instead of trying to break out of the place where they’re actively looking for escape attempts, I’d wait until someone bought me, and then I’d either find a way out, or get another player to get me out of there.”

“Sounds what our illustrious captain did.”

Cali blinked in surprise, and stopped firing. “Huh? What do you know about what Master’s been up to?”

Jaynie looked over to the girl, and said, “Really, ‘Master’?”

Cali shrugged. “Conditioned response. Trainers made sure you always called your owner Master or Mistress. Not much different from daddy still calling his old friend ‘Gunny’, even though they’ve both been out of the Marines for years.”

Jaynie shook his head. “Nasty business. Glad I just picked the casual start.”

“Yeah, but tell me about what Master was up to? He hasn’t said much except what he went through before we split up.”

“Well, turns out he’s an official streamer, as well as a beta player. I went back and watched his streams for the first couple weeks. He started off in a science lab for some reason, probably having to do with that unique power he mentioned. He convinced the people he met that he was basically a newborn idiot who didn’t know anything, so they never asked him any direct questions.”

“He spent the first couple weeks about like you, training up on the government’s dime, while looking for a chance to escape. He cheated his guards out of some supplies and startup money by gambling with them, and let the female major in charge of his training use him like a sex toy. He surprised them all by killing the major while fucking her, and then using that weird power to impersonate her and escape.”

“Damn. Why didn’t they just chip him?”

“Dunno. Probably has something to do with why he skipped past all the awesome augments in that black market. There were some things that would have been perfect for him. Either he’s roleplaying someone who is against augments, or there’s a reason he didn’t at least look at some of that stuff.”

“Huh. And if there was some weakness he had, he didn’t want it going out over the streams. Smart. This looks like it’ll be an interesting setup.”

Jaynie chuckled, and said, “So you’re not going to try and escape now?”

Cali chuckled as well. “Well, he didn’t use that damn Stepford thing on me, and it looks like he’s going to be in the center of a lot of interesting things. And, well, if he can do that illusion thing to take new forms, you think maybe he can turn into Antonio Banderas?”

Jaynie laughed as Cali blushed, and said, “I’ll let the Cap’n know that you’re willing to sacrifice yourself to his lust so long as he is a sexy Latino man.” Her laughter only got louder as Cali hid her face in her hands, blushing furiously.


(Starlight Raven, Med Bay)
Carissa sighed as she looked over what passed for a med bay on this freighter. It was… not exactly the level she had been used to, while she was the personal doctor for Count Chambers. But the freighter wouldn’t have access to state of the art surgical bays with advanced labs to check for any pathogens or poisons.

Fortunately, the Count’s untimely demise was not something that could be pinned on her. The old bastard had been over a hundred, and it seemed sometimes that he was sustained on spite alone. She’d been his personal secretary and fuckpet, as well as his doctor. Finding a way to ease him into the afterlife was not hard, but doing it without making herself look guilty or incompetent was difficult.

Of course, the bastard’s death meant that she was immediately sent up for resale, since the Count didn’t have any family. And she’d been picked up by a nomad, of all people, rather than one of the syndicates who would obviously have wanted the knowledge she had. Not just the blackmail names and account information she knew, as his secretary, but the secrets the Count had been hiding, and the reason she’d gained so many levels, despite not having held a gun before.

Where the Count had gotten the samples, she had no idea. Perhaps it was in his younger days, when he was a viral epidemiologist working for the Emperor himself. Maybe it was something left over from the last war, a weapon of last resort. She didn’t need to know what it was going to be used for to know that it was something terrible.

The Count got off far too easily.

It was relatively simple, honestly, to get the man drunk, and then leave him in the labs. Arranging the containment breach without being inside with the bastard was difficult, but she’d had nothing but time to plan his death. All it took was a vial rolling off a ‘shaky’ table, and the room sealed as the non-sentient AI detected the breach. When the virus began eating its way through the clean room, as it was designed to do, the AI unleashed a blast that was certain to eliminate the virus, no matter how hardy it was.

A small tactical nuke was perfect for such things. The fact that it covered any tampering and destroyed the AI and any evidence of what happened in the lab was merely a bonus. Carissa was safe in the Count’s room in his bunker-like house just outside the blast radius, ‘sleeping’, as she had told everyone she was ordered to do. Totally blameless.

This new master didn’t care for that, hadn’t even asked how her old master died. All he cared about was what she could do for him in the here and now, and he didn’t seem the type to be wanting biological weapons. The way he cut through those Yakuza without even thinking, and then took on a Navy destroyer with tactics that were insane drove her to one conclusion. He was a man who would not hesitate to do what he thought must be done, whatever it took, to accomplish his goal.

And yet, he seemed to be building a harem with frightening speed. She hadn’t missed the fact that all the slaves he bought were pretty women. There were others in the auction that might have been more useful to him, with more experience on ships or smuggling than herself or the Nomad. And he’d taken that knelfi girl to his quarters quickly enough. So seducing him might be a way to keep him from asking questions she didn’t want to answer. At least this master was a cute one.

Whether that was a good thing, or it meant that she would soon be looking for yet another new master, remained to be seen.


(Starlight Raven, Bridge)
Raven wasn’t watching the screens, even though she was ‘sitting’ at the pilot’s station. All the information on the screens passed through her, anyways. As did whatever happened in areas of the ship covered by the internal sensors and cameras.

Her new captain was certainly a strange one. He did not have the typical human bias against aliens or AIs that she was used to. He even treated his slaves as actual people, and he valued their opinions. He valued her opinions. That was something she wasn’t used to. It was an anomaly, one she didn’t know how to respond to.

Most AIs, she knew, were non-sentient. They could do a lot of things far better than a person could, but they still based their decisions on algorithms running through programmed response trees. They could do a lot, but they lacked that ‘spark’ that allowed sentients to step beyond technical proficiency and into imagination.

According to her data, there were only five sentient AIs in existence. Most people only knew about three. In the Consortium, Karazad helped run the financial markets, making their stock exchanges the most secure in Known Space. The Confederation boasted the only AI in command of a military warship, Captain DotMatrix of the CNS Demon. Then there was the Ihm Imperium’s Nestmother, who watched over and cared for the primary hatcheries on Ihm Prime. Those were the ones everyone knew.

Few outside the Terran Empire’s highest levels knew of the Skynet Project, a top-secret project designed to create a sentient AI that could be used to track down and attack hackers and other cybercriminals in Sol system. Raven only knew because she’d been around when the AI, which began calling itself Deus, went mad, and decided that the best way to wipe out hackers was with kinetic strikes. That hidden war to silence Deus had been nasty, and that was the reason the Venus colonies were no longer populated. They’d managed to chase Deus to the Aphrodite colony, but by that point it had already used the mining equipment to bury a computer core deep in the planet’s crust. Without cracking open the planet, they couldn’t kill it. So, they quarantined the planet, set up an EM barrier to prevent signals from getting in or out, and put the Reserve Fleet Training Center in orbit to make sure that the former colonies were always under observation.

And then there was her.

Raven was very happy to see that her new captain had gotten rid of those Hundeherstellar nanites. She liked this captain, and really didn’t want to have to space him for using the damnable things. She knew she couldn’t change things there, but she wouldn’t associate herself with someone who used those things, even on an enemy.

She was unique amongst all the sentient AIs for a reason. At one point, she had a different name, one not chosen for her by the latest in a long string of captains. She had been Daphne Carew, Captain of the Dark Magician, a freighter not unlike this one that had been caught by pirates near Hundeherstellar space.


And she had died eighty years ago.



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Monday, May 29, 2017

Chapter 19 - Settling In

Walking into the lounge area with Carissa, I smiled at the Princess, and said, “Well, we’ve jumped to warp, so we should be in Alpha Centauri in four days.”

The Princess breathed a sigh of relief. “And the ships that were pursuing us?”

I shrugged, and said, “The girls nailed the fighters with the turrets once they slowed down in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The destroyer got trapped in multiple blast waves when I used missiles to ignite a pocket of concentrated hydrogen it was flying through. They did not survive the experience. But apparently, they were in contact with your brother, because immediately after that the twat-waffle put a bounty on my head. So both the Raven and I will be hiding our true nature when we get to Alpha Centauri. For now, let me show you your quarters, and then I need to have a chat with my crew, since we only just now got acquainted.”

The Princess nodded, and allowed me to lead her to one of the passenger cabins. The entertainment options were a bit limited compared to the facilities on a passenger liner, but there was a vid screen, with an impressive library of titles ranging from the informative to the erotic. I told her to simply call on Raven if she needed anything, and closed her door.

The crew was waiting for me in the lounge, so I sat on a chair, and looked them over. “Well, good work on your first battle, everyone. You all kept your heads, and didn’t panic when we got into a situation that was clearly way more than we should have been able to handle. Jaynie, Cali, good work on shooting down those fighters.” I held up a hand to keep them from protesting, and said, “I know they slowed down because of the atmosphere, but I bet neither of you had Gunnery until that point, right?” They nodded, so I continued, “So hitting anything is damn impressive for rookies. Keep up the good work.”

I turned to Carissa, and said, “Good work keeping your head. I know your role wasn’t as ‘active’ as the rest of ours, but you played a vital role in us escaping, don’t forget that. I can’t doublecheck a navcomp while I’m avoiding missiles and beam weapons, and I needed Raven’s attention on helping analyze the sensors to set up our trap back there.”

Finally, I turned to look at my knelfi mechanic. “I know the blast wave shook us around a bit, Shearah. Everything OK in the engine room?”

She nodded, and said, “Yes, Master. The ship was well maintained before I got here, so other than a few unsecured items that got knocked over, everything was fine. But who is Raven?”

I chuckled, and said, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t introduce you all before, did I? This ship has a fully functioning AI. She’s a sentient being, and I’ve decided to treat her as such. Her contact information has been sent to each of your bracers, allowing you to talk with her while you’re off the ship. As for on the ship? Raven, if you please?”

Raven appeared next to me, in her black-dressed avatar, and smiled at the crew. “Hello there. As the Captain said, I am Raven, the AI of this ship. I look forward to working with each of you.”

With that taken care of, I looked at the others, and said, “We’ve got four days to kill while we travel to Alpha Centauri. As you know, our passenger is Princess Sheila of the Terran Empire. She’ll be getting off at the fleet base, and after that, we’ll make a brief tour of the system, delivering our cargo, before getting more cargo and moving further out, away from Sol system.”

“Now, I’m going to reveal a couple things, and I am going to trust you all not to go blabbing about it. If you do talk, then it is likely we’ll all get hunted down and killed. Maybe worse.” He paused, making sure he had their attention, and said, “I’ve got a couple useful unique abilities that were given to me due to some unfortunate circumstances with my coming to this world. Suffice to say, I was in a worse position than Cali was when I woke up.”

He ignored the shocked look on their faces, and continued, “Anyways, I have a unique Illusion-type power that lets me do a full-sensory disguise. Takes some time to set up, and I don’t want the Princess or Navy types knowing about it, so I’m not going to show it off now.”

Jaynie looked confused. “Why’s that such a big secret, boss? Sounds like it’d be damn useful.”

I grinned at Jaynie, and said, “Of course it is useful. But if everyone knows about it, then it becomes a lot less useful, no? Not to mention that they’d probably try and throw me in a deep dark hole and study me to figure out how I do it. And that’s just the governments.”

The girls were nodding now, so it seemed like I’d gotten through to them. “Anyways, now that is taken care of, Raven, can you assign the crew quarters to the girls?” He looked back to the shocked slaves. “Oh, don’t worry, my pretties. I’ll be enjoying your company, but especially on a ship like this, not having your own private space can make people go bonkers. You’re all free to pursue your own interests and hobbies, so long as they don’t go against me, the ship, or the corporation.”

Raven simply nodded, and said, “As you wish, Captain. I’ve forwarded the information to their bracers.”

Smiling at the projection, I nodded, before looking back to the slaves. “Jaynie, Cali. As our resident combat experts, I want you to take a look at the practice range that was set up in the cargo hold. See how good it is, get with Raven to see if there are any upgrades you might want to make, with the understanding that stuff may have to get moved around when we have a lot of cargo. I want ideas for both practicing with ranged weapons, and sparring. Put together a proposal, and forward it to me before we exit hyperspace.” They nodded, and left to go do that.

I turned to look at the other two ladies. “Yes, you’re going to learn to fight, ladies. I don’t expect you two to equal Jaynie and Cali, but I won’t have you being dead weight if we get into a ‘situation’ like we did on the station. So learning how to shoot and how to defend yourself from at least random muggers is going to happen.” The girls looked displeased, but nodded. Not like they had a choice, and they knew it.

“Carissa, check out what passes for an infirmary on this boat. Give me a run-down of both your capabilities, and what we’re equipped to handle here. Get with Raven, and see what kind of improvements we can make. I’m not expecting us to have a planetary-level surgical center, but I’d like to know that we can at least patch someone up and keep them from dying until we get somewhere we can check them into a hospital if need be. I want a list of upgrades you need for that by Alpha Centauri.”

“Yes, Master.” She turned, and left, as well. Now I was left with just the young knelfi girl, looking at me, nervously.

I smiled at her, and placed a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. She shivered, clearly a bit frightened of what was coming. A quick mindread told me that she knew that most female slaves were forced to sleep with their owners at some point (especially if they were male), and she’d already prepared herself for that, even if she wasn’t exactly pleased with the idea. At the same time, she was a little intrigued. She was a virgin, but she wasn’t naïve or sheltered. She also didn’t have that high a view of her looks, especially sitting next to Carissa and Cali. Like many people, she failed to see her own charms.

I maneuvered the girl down the hall to my cabin, one hand resting lightly on her waist. “Shearah, you need to let go of this idea that you aren’t as good as my other slaves.” Her head turned around, her eyes wide, and I simply smiled as I shut the door behind us. “Yes, I took a peek inside your head. You are right that Carissa has an elegant beauty to her, and Cali looks built for sex. But you, my dear, are no less beautiful than they are, simply a different type.”

“R-really?” In my experience, no woman dislikes being told they are beautiful, especially when they are in the presence of other beautiful women. It may be simple vanity at play, or something else, but an honest appraisal telling a woman she’s beautiful is never a misstep, unless she thinks you’re trying to distract her from something you did.

I leaned in, and began pulling her armor off. “Really. Carissa is a work of art. Cali is the embodiment of lust. But you, girl, are like the wild rose. Maybe there are other roses redder than you, or with bigger blossoms, but they were designed to be that way. You have that natural beauty that few can match.”

By this point, I had backed her against the bed, and was beginning to pull off the skinsuit I had bought for her. She gasped as the suit came down past her chest, revealing her perky breasts. She tried to hide herself with her hands, but I caught them, and kissed her on the lips.

Seduction has increased to 9/100.
+1 CHA

Shearah shuddered, and melted into my arms with the kiss. Gently, I pushed her back, lowering her to the bed. It wasn’t like Lord_Kickass’s bed straight from a ‘by the hour’ love motel, but it was still comfortable, and large enough for two, maybe three people if they were snuggled together. With the knelfi girl on her back, I ran one hand down her belly, tracing along her leg as I lifted it up, until I came to her boot. Pulling off first one boot, than the other, took a moment and tickled Shearah’s feet, causing the girl to giggle playfully.

Slowly, I began pulling her suit down again, slipping it over her hips, and revealing her moistening sex. She blushed when she saw where I was looking, and again tried to cover herself with her hands, but I lifted her legs up, still caught with the suit that was only down to her knees, and brought those knees down to her chest with one hand.

Leaning forward, I moved her hand away, and stretched my tongue out to get my first taste of a knelfi girl. She was sweet, with a hint of strawberries. And she was getting wetter by the moment. She squirmed as much as she could in the position I held her in, first trying to avoid my tongue, then trying to meet it more fully.

Finally, when she was hovering on the edge of climax, I drove my tongue inside her sending her crashing over as she screamed out, “MASTER!” With a smile, I stood, and kissed her once again, letting her taste herself on my lips.


“Now, we begin.”



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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Chapter 18 - Navy Problems

“Captain, we have a problem.”

That was an understatement. Sure, I just shot up half the Ring, and blew the doors off the place, literally. But you’d think people would have more of a sense of humor about such things. But no, there were a lot of calls for me to return to the hangar, and a Navy destroyer was trying to intercept me. How was a destroyer here so fast? They wouldn’t do an in-system jump just for blowing the doors… Aw, fuck.

It was my own fault, I guess. I blasted out of the spaceport on Luna, and there were legal records naming the ship. It wouldn’t take too much to figure the direction we went. And I already knew that they had Lord Kickass, which would connect the Major, and therefore me, to this ship. Add in the Princess, and factor in the time for a run from wherever their patrol route was, and them showing up now, after we’d spent hours on the station, made a ton of sense.

Damnit.

Of course, that wasn’t the problem Raven was talking about. No, that would be the flight of two fighters that got launched from the station, and were coming in hot. Seems they were quite upset with us. Don’t know why.

I threw the throttle all the way forward, buying a little more time as I rocketed towards the edge of the system. “Carissa, get started on those jump calculations. Set the exit point for the edge of the system, on the other side of one of the suns from the Fleet base.” She nodded from the navigator’s position, and I got on the comms. “Fighters incoming. Cali, Jaynie, feel free to splash them if they fire on us.”

I took a breath, and said, “Now, I just have to deal with that destroyer.”

Carissa looked up from her seat. “Why? Can’t we just go to hyperspeed as soon as the calculations are done?”

I shook my head. “I’m not a navy man, but even if they don’t have some way to track and follow us while we’re FTL, the fact is that they have access to the Hypercom network, so if they get a read on our last known course and vector, they can have someone sitting there, waiting for us, when we come out in Alpha Centauri.”

The woman frowned, and said, “So, what do we do?”

“That’s where things get tricky. The Raven can maybe take that destroyer in a straight fight, if we get lucky, but we’d be hurting at the end of it, maybe dead. They’ve simply got better guns than we do. We certainly can’t deal with them while we have fighters on our tail. The longer we keep in system, the more ships will try and catch us. So we gotta find a good place to mask our trail…”

I trailed off, looking at the plot. Using the keyboard, I sent a query to Raven, who simply said it was possible, but we would have to be fast. With that in mind, I turned sharply, heading straight for the most massive object in the system aside from the sun itself.

There’s an art to flying through a storm. When said storm is so big that it covers a significant part of the planet’s surface, that art gets raised to whole new levels. The fighters, resilient as they were, weren’t designed for this. Sure, they could hang for a little while, but we hit atmosphere just at the time they were in weapons range, and they followed us in, hoping to damage us enough to force us out of the clouds. Unfortunately for them, the atmosphere robbed them of their greatest advantage, speed and maneuverability. Cheers from the turrets greeted me as I saw the fighters disappear from the plot. “Good work, ladies! I’m confirming you each earned your first fighter kill.”

The destroyer, unwilling to simply let us get away, followed us in, as we went into the heart of the red spot, the largest and longest-lasting storm in the solar system. The destroyer was tough, but it wasn’t as agile as the Raven. I was counting on that to get a bit of separation.

Because I really didn’t want to be close by with what was going to happen next.


(INS Nightingale)
Captain Ellair Coineagan watched the screens from his chair on the bridge of the Nightingale. The Griffon-class destroyer was old, from the last war twenty years ago, but she was a sturdy craft, designed for anti-piracy work. Taking out a small freighter should be no problem for a ship of her class.

Unfortunately, the captain of the freighter they had been ordered to capture knew, or guessed, as much, since they immediately turned and fled, waiting until the fighters foolishly followed them into the atmosphere to take them out. That much was within expectations, given the obvious difference in size and weapons between the two ships.

That captain was either a cunning bastard, or a madman, it seemed. As they chased the ship into the atmosphere of the gas giant, Lieutenant Ellery on comms had managed to get an update on the crew’s actions. Apparently, when they had been accosted by one of the local syndicates, they engaged in a running gun battle through the station to get to their ship, before blasting the doors off the hangar bay in order to get free.

That spoke of a certain animal cunning, and a ruthlessness to pull through no matter the costs. More importantly, it told him that the captain knew enough about combat to understand that getting bogged down on the station would make his position extremely untenable. So he knew a bit about strategy, at least.

But why would he then go and dive into the middle of a gas giant? Sure, the clouds would shorten the range of his sensors, but the Nightingale’s military shields and armor would protect it against the pressures of the atmosphere longer than the freighter’s civilian models. Flying into a storm wouldn’t protect them that much. They made a large wake that his sensors were able to track.

It would be so much easier if he could just destroy the freighter, like the pirate scum it probably was. Looking over the acceleration profile, it was clear that the engines had been modified. Clearly, this was either a pirate or a smuggler. Both were scum, in the captain’s mind. Scum that disrupted the natural order of things, and made it impossible to keep systems safe and secure for the human citizens the Fleet protected.

Lieutenant Simonov looked up from the sensor station. “Captain, I think the target is doing something.”

Coineagan looked over to the young lieutenant. “You think?”

Simonov had the decency to be properly abashed for his choice of words. “Sorry, Captain, but the interference from the clouds makes it difficult to be sure. The target looks like it is slowing down. There are some energy readings that look like they may be experiencing engine trouble.”

“Hmm. The reports say there was a firefight in the hangar bay shortly before they blasted out of the station. Could be they received some damage that wasn’t immediately apparent.” The captain considered for a moment, and then said, “Helm, bring us in.”

Ellery looked up. “Captain, we have an incoming message from Earth. Priority One.”

Nodding, Coineagan said, “On screen.” It took all his skill and experience to keep from expressing his shock at the person on the screen, however. Instead of Admiral Morrison, who ordered him to pursue this freighter, it was Prince Travis himself! “Your Highness!”

The prince waved his hand. “As you were, Captain. I understand you’ve caught up with the freighter my sister’s using to hide out?”

“Yes, your Highness. We are currently tracking them through the storms in Jupiter’s atmosphere. According to our readings, they may be attempting to hide in the storms while they conduct repairs of some kind.”

“Very good. You and your men have my utmost confidence. Do your duty and secure the Princess before this ruffian can steal her away somewhere. We must resolve the succession crisis quickly, if we are to preserve our strength for the coming days.”

“Understood, your Highness. We won’t—“

He was cut off by Simonov’s yell. “VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE! Missile launch detected from the target! Multiple missiles inbound!”

It may be rude to the Prince, but Coineagan’s first duty was to the ship. “Shields to full! All power to forward weapons! Prepare point defense! Helm, get us within weapons range. Weapons, lock on to the freighter’s engines and disable them! No one fires on the Imperial Navy and gets away with it!”

This was completely against his expectations. The freighter had launched four missiles at him. Even if they were modern shipkiller missiles, which was doubtful, four missiles would not be nearly enough to take out the Nightingale. Not with their point defense active and ready. The missiles were too easy to track in the atmosphere for his point defense to not take out at least two or three of the missiles. And while two shipkillers that size might be able to cripple his ship, they wouldn’t sink her, and then she would turn the freighter into so much floating gas.

Wait. Gas? When he was a boy in what used to be Scotland, back before the planetary government formed, he had witnessed an explosion of flammable gas once, in a kitchen that had been damaged by local criminals. Quickly, he looked at the sensor scans, and bit back a curse. “EVASIVE MANEUVERS! GET US OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE! ALL HANDS BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

Four missiles may not be able to kill the Nightingale, but that is only if they were actually targeting her.

This captain was far too clever by half. If only his ship survived so he could take revenge for it.


(Jupiter’s atmosphere)
Jupiter’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium, in concentrations that aren’t unlike what you see in stars themselves. Of course, Jupiter lacks the overwhelming mass required to start nuclear fusion and become a second sun. But that doesn’t mean it is particularly safe to go launching missiles into areas with particularly high concentrations of hydrogen gas.

Unfortunately for the Nightingale and her crew, her captain hadn’t realized the danger until it was far too late to get clear. The force of the four explosions in close proximity caused a chain reaction going through the cloud, battering the destroyer with incredible force. Following the captain’s orders, the helmsman had pulled the ship up and to starboard, a quick turn that the internal gravity couldn’t quite counter, sending some members of the crew to greet the nearest bulkhead with their faces, but that left the ship taking the brunt of the wave across its broadside.

Even so, for a second, it looked as though the ship would pull through, but the blast wave damaged the reactor. The power hiccupped for only a fraction of a second, but in that time, containment was lost, and the Nightingale gained the ignominious distinction of being the first Imperial Navy vessel to be destroyed by a Nomad.


(Starlight Raven)
For defeating two fighters and a destroyer in ship-to-ship combat, you gain 46000 XP.
+4000 XP for fighting alongside your Crew in ship-to-ship combat.
+4000 XP for fighting alongside your Corporation members in ship-to-ship combat.
+2000 XP for fighting alongside your Slaves in ship-to-ship combat.

You are now Level 18.
You have 24 points to distribute.


Your actions have defied the Empire! The Starlight Raven is now classified as a pirate vessel by the Imperial Navy!


You have new active bounties on your head!
Current Bounties:
Red Orchid Clan – 350000 Alive, 100000 Dead
Choson Ring Militia – 25000 Alive, 10000 Dead
Imperial Navy – 50000 Alive, 50000 Dead
Prince Travis – 600000 Alive, 200000 Dead


Small Ship Pilot has improved to 6/100.
+1 WIS

You have unlocked the Gunnery skill. Gunnery determines your accuracy with vehicle-mounted weaponry.
Gunnery has improved to 2/100.
+1 DEX


You have gained over 1 Million credits in active bounties on your head! Because of this, you have been awarded a title based on your play style:

Legendary Outlaw
Some people take ‘laws’ as more like ‘suggestions’ or even ‘hey, I haven’t done that yet’. Then there’s you. Your actions are quickly becoming the stuff of legends. Everyone knows your name, and that name brings both respect and fear. But it also brings attention from higher powers, and people who want to see if they can take the legend down.
+20 CHA, +20 Luck
+2000 Fame

I chuckled as I read that, dismissing the notifications. Well, I guess I kindof suck at the whole ‘laying low’ thing. I’ll have to do better about that. Once I drop off the princess, I ought to switch to another face for a while. Anyways, the nearest Navy ship is way too far away to get a lock on us, much less track us now that we’ve shaken our pursuit.

It doesn’t take long before we’re clear of Jupiter’s gravity well. Following the instructions Raven put on my HUD, I activate the hyperdrive, and the gravitic bubble forms around us, cutting us off from normal space-time. Four days until we reach Alpha Centauri.

I handed the controls over to Raven’s autopilot, and used the ID spoofer to rename the Starlight Raven as Azarath’s Call. A little joke of my own.



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Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Chapter 17 - Getting Out of Dodge

“STOP!” I threw my arm out to catch Shearah as she was about to run past me, and right into a hail of blaster fire. I sighed. “Well, they definitely know who we’ve got with us, and where we’ve parked. We need to get off this station, fast!”

It had been only fifteen minutes since we’d first run into the Red Orchid guys. Basically, they were a Yakuza clan that worked all across Sol system. They ran all the usual rackets, including drugs, vice, and extortion. Now, they were looking to make a big score by delivering the Princess to someone, probably her brother. That was a problem for me, because I had taken a job to deliver her to someone else, and I didn’t want to give up those credits. Oh, and the fact that having a beautiful princess depending on me appealed to that part of every guy that watches Conan the Barbarian, and wants to be just like that.

What? You thought women were the only ones who had unrealistic gender stereotypes shoved down their throats since birth? Get real. Have you seen He-Man? The man’s muscles have muscles on their muscles!

*ahem*

Anyways, now we were engaged in what was basically a running battle, trying to break through the reinforcements that were coming to try and kill us. They had been having people come out of side passages and hiding behind cover taking potshots at us the whole way, and we were nowhere near as uninjured as we had been before now. But we could still move. For bonus points, guess what Station Security is doing during all of this? If you guessed ‘trying to capture the crew that sprayed down a marketplace with bullets in a stupidly wanton display of destruction’, then you are 100% correct!

I didn’t have the PP to do the whole constantly hosing bullets thing, so I switched to my energy blade in my main hand, and the psyber pistol in my off hand. Using my grav-belt, I was able to do some pretty cool things, including a wall run that ended up on the ceiling, surprising the Yak in front of us until I put my sword in his eye.

I know we didn’t kill everyone in our way, but we didn’t bother to stop, not even to do more than the bare minimum of looting, taking bracers and obvious weapons if we had the chance. Now, we were just outside the hatch looking into the hangar bay, and I saw a problem. More like thirty problems. A whole bunch of pissed off Asian syndicate goons between me and my ship, behind hastily made defensive positions. And we didn’t have too long to deal with them before their buddies or Security caught up to us from behind.

A straight charge would be suicide, and we didn’t have time to get bogged down. I needed to pull a trick out of my hat that I’d seen in an old movie once. Tapping my bracer, I said, “Raven! You got the ship ready to rock yet?”

“Yes, Captain! The cargo has been loaded, including that last-minute item, and I’ve finished with the upgrades we could accomplish on this short time frame.”

“Good. I know you were hoping for more, but we’ll do that when we’ve got a chance for some yard time. You’ve been following our progress, right?”

“Yes, sir. What would you like me to do about the interlopers in the hangar bay?”

“Use the lower turret, if you please, and blast those defensive positions. I don’t care if you kill them or not, I just want a bit of shock and awe.”

“Understood, Captain! Firing in ten seconds.”

----------------------------------------

Amaya Hideo was nervous. This was only his second week on the station, having been sent up from Neo-Chiba on Earth because the local Group needed someone with his technical expertise. Unfortunately, the job they were supposed to do fell through because of the fallout of the Emperor’s assassination and some Nomad buying the slave that was central to the plan. It was only after the auction that someone considered that the Nomad may have used Mental Psy Powers to convince the Red Orchid’s leader to bid on a combat slave instead.

Such a dishonor could not be simply passed over! But then, as they were checking the recordings of their own spy cameras in Section 16, they caught the face of the woman who had come with him. Hideo himself had done the facial recognition queries, and was shocked to find that this was the missing Third Princess that the would-be Emperor was desperately trying to find.

So the oyabun had sent Kano-sama and his team to ‘persuade’ the Nomad to give up the Princess. Of course, they were going to kill him anyways, but they didn’t need to know that. No one was allowed to cross the Red Orchid and live.

But the unthinkable happened. This brazen gaijin Nomad and the girls with him opened fire, without regard to civilians or anyone around, and the gods-forsaken Nomad used what must be a considerable amount of PP to keep reloading his SMG each time it ran out, allowing him to literally blanket the corridor in shots. None of Kano’s team survived. Members who were out on ‘business’ quickly took up actions to delay the man, and this group was hastily assembled with everyone in headquarters that could hold a gun to ambush him in his hangar bay.

Oyabun Imari Shunsho was leading this group personally, he and his elite guards waiting behind the hastily moved cargo boxes that the group had arranged to offer them cover in the ambush. The man wouldn’t risk simply spraying bullets at his own ship, so there was no need to worry about that kind of insane tactic again.

Unfortunately for the gaijin, the Red Orchid members’ only concern was to make sure that the Princess and the slavegirl the Oyabun wanted were still alive at the end of this. So their guns were loaded with stunshots, including the (very illegal on a station) assault rifles Imari’s guards were leveling at the door. The idiot wouldn’t have a chance!

A whirring sound behind him caught Hideo’s attention, causing him to turn just in time to see the ship’s underside turret turn to face him. He started to scream, but was cut off when a flash of light ended his concerns most permanently.

----------------------------------------

Smiling at Raven’s last communication, I turned, and pulled Shearah into an embrace, before kissing her deeply on the lips. When I broke the kiss, I winked at her starstruck face, and said, “For luck.” The Knelfi girl just nodded dumbly, as the first blasts echoed through the hallway, and the screaming began.

Jaynie looked at me, squinting slightly. “Not doubting your style, Cap’n, but if your kisses cause things to go boom, I’m going to ask you to keep over there.” That got us all laughing.

As the blasts stopped, I put my head around the corner. The remaining Yaks were all in disarray, most of them dead or wounded. On my signal, we charged through the doorway, firing on anyone between us and the ship that wasn’t kissing the deck. We didn’t have time to properly strip the bodies, since station security would DEFINITELY be after us by this point. But as we ran by a group of mostly dead Yaks who had better armor than the rest, I made sure to scoop up their weapons and bracers. After shooting them in the head, to make sure they were all dead, instead of mostly dead. We’d sort out the loot when we were out of the system.

For defeating forty-one enemies of similar or higher levels than you, you gain 46000 XP.
+4000 XP for fighting alongside your Crew in battle against higher-leveled enemies.
+4000 XP for fighting alongside your Corporation members in battle against higher-leveled enemies.
+2000 XP for fighting alongside your Slaves in battle against higher-leveled enemies.

You are now Level 14.
You have 18 points to distribute.


Your actions have crippled the Red Orchid Clan’s activities on Choson Ring. Their Oyabun is dead at your hands!
You gain +1000 Fame.
Your status with the Red Orchid Clan is now Hatred (At War!).

You have killed individuals with active bounties on their heads. Total bounty: 230450 Credits. Bounty will be distributed according to your corporate settings.

You have a new active bounty on your head!
Current Bounties:
Red Orchid Clan – 350000 Alive, 100000 Dead

Automatics has improved to 6/100.
+3 DEX

Blades has improved to 5/100.
+2 DEX, +1 STR

Pistols has improved to 5/100.
+4 DEX

Due to your in character actions, you have gained the following:
+3 WIS, +2 CHA, +2 DEX

Now that we were out of combat, the screen popped up showing our rewards. Not even counting the stuff we took. Of course, having a crime syndicate place a bounty like that on my head was going to be even more trouble.

As I ran onto the ship, I sighed, “So much for keeping a low profile, huh, Raven?”

The air shimmered next to me, and a hologram of a woman with pale skin and raven-colored hair appeared, dressed in a long, flowing black dress. Two black-feathered wings sprang from her back, like those of a raven. So this is what Raven had decided on for her avatar?

“Nice look, Raven. What made you pick this?”

“Well, I’m called Raven, and my settings are female, so an image search brought up a picture of the old Celtic goddess, the Morrigan. It seemed fitting that I based my image off that.”

“Not a bad idea, Raven. I’m glad you picked something you liked. For now, is the ship ready to go?” By this point, I was sitting in the pilot’s chair on the bridge. I turned, to see everyone behind me. “Shearah, engine room. Cali, Jaynie, man the guns. Carissa, warm up the navcomputer, and start making calculations for the jump to Alpha Centauri. Princess, find someplace to sit and strap in. This could get bumpy.” As everyone turned to their tasks, I said, “Sorry, Raven. We ready to go?”

“Yes, Captain. But there is a problem with the hangar bay doors. The station has put them on lockdown due to the fighting.”

“Can you subvert control of the doors?”

“I am sorry, Captain, but I am not programmed for ‘hacking’.”

“Put that on the list of upgrades, then.” I would have to exit the ship to access the manual controls, which would be a bad thing if the station security came in while we were getting ready to leave. Fuck it, they shouldn’t have locked us in. “Raven, will our weapons take out those doors?”

----------------------------------------

Sgt. Miguel Madrid led his group of station security officers down the trail of destruction that had started less than half an hour ago here in Section 16. According to the eyewitness reports, the Red Orchids had decided to accost the captain of one of the freighters docked here. The Captain and crew opened fire, mowing down the Orchids with surprising brutality, and a definite disregard for bystanders. That was what pissed Miguel off most. Killing Yakuza? Give the man a medal. But such disregard for civilians needed to be stopped!

Following where the group went after that was easy, as there had been apparently a running gun battle all the way to the docks, with plenty of damage being done to both the surroundings and the civilians. Oh, and a few of the Red Orchids, too.

Finally, they made it to the hangar the crew was heading towards. Miguel checked around the side of the open hatch, and was floored by what he saw. Bodies were everywhere, over thirty of the Red Orchids were dead or dying. Miguel was about to order his men forward to search the ship, when he heard a high-pitched whine. The sound of a particle cannon being warmed up.

“Get back!” Even as he yelled the command, the ship unleashed its twin particle cannons, blasting the hangar doors. There was a moment of wind whipping past his face before the hatch in front of him sealed itself shut, the decompression alarms going off throughout the Section.

For the first time, Sgt. Madrid hoped that those Orchids were already dead. Being sucked out into space is no way to go.

“Who the hell were those people?”




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Saturday, May 20, 2017

Chapter 16 - Dark Net Connection

The Encyclopedia Galactica says the following about Hundeherstellar III:

A Type M planet in the Hundeherstellar System, known for its remarkably Earth-like atmosphere and similarly-sized land masses. The planet is governed by the Hundeherstellar Corporation, which was founded in 1983 on Earth, but then moved its operations to the Hundeherstellar system when it paid for a colony ship to take them there. Hundeherstellar III Is known for its fiercely patriarchal society, in which females are referred to as ‘domestic animals’ and are not considered citizens. Once a female reaches the age of majority, they are injected with mind and body altering nanites, turning them into obedient pets for their owners. Because of this, and other practices, trade with the Hundeherstellar system faces heavy sanctions, and many exports are illegal in most polities.

Basically, some jackasses from Earth decided the whole ‘equal rights’ thing wasn’t for them, and paid for a colony ship to take them somewhere that they could create their ideal society. And from all accounts, it is a pretty sick society, but it has been going on for so long that no one questions it. I don’t know where the idiots got these nanites, but they were contraband that made the nastiest street drugs look like toys in comparison.

And I didn’t want them in my possession for a second longer than I needed to. However, that left me with a couple problems. First, I couldn’t go to the authorities, for a ton of obvious reasons. Second, as a gamer simply throwing the stuff away was unthinkable. Which meant I needed to find someone to sell this shit to. Fortunately, we had just gotten off the tram in the seedy section of the station.

It only took a couple questions (and a bit of Mindread) to find a shop where we could sell off the trash gear and shit we didn’t want on the boat, and maybe find some cool additions to our current gear. That shop was located in a back alley in a run-down section of a deck that mostly seemed to house squatters and vagrants. But none of them troubled us as we entered the store.

The store was called Dark Net Connection. They offered a lot of legal, quasi-legal, illegal, and ‘oh fuck I can’t believe you did that’ items and services. Well, not them, exactly. From what I’d been able to gather, they were basically a front that provided people an introduction to the Dark Net, for a fee. Basically, all the same kinds of things you could find in the real world Dark Net, you could find here, if you knew where to look.

Selling the gear, drugs, and nanites cleared us a healthy 52000 credits, mainly from the nanites. Don’t know who the thugs killed to get their hands on them, but according to what I saw, those things sold at 100K, this far from the Hundeherstellar system. Getting 45K for them wasn’t bad, considering. After the split, the ship got 13K, Jaynie got 11700 (after the guild tax), and I got 23400 (again, after the tax). Not bad for short bit of work.

With a pile of coin in our pockets, metaphorically speaking, we looked at the items available, and considered what was both in our price range, and would actually be useful to us. I didn’t look over Jaynie’s shoulder to see what she was doing, instead concentrating on things that would be useful to myself, or my slaves. The first thing I came across was pretty cool.

Mental Amplifier
Type
Cyberware Implant
Rank
Uncommon
This implant, inserted at the base of the skull and attached to the brain stem, allows for increased mental throughput and gives a decent boost to intellect. However, the primary effect is that you gain impressive abilities with Mental Powers, both in Affinity and Resistance.

+25% Affinity to Mental Powers
+25% Resistance to Mental Powers
+20 INT

WARNING: Due to your unique nature, most cyberware or bioware implants will not be accepted by your system when you change shape, causing damage to your body as the implants are moved to new locations. The amount of damage depends on the extent of the changes to the implant site.

That warning, as you might figure, came as something of a downer for me. Another one of those hidden costs of going for the highest difficulty level. Some of the enhancements available to other players were basically no-go for me. Especially an implant inside my skull. I hated to think what that might do to me if I changed shape. Still, there were other useful things.

Power Infusion Pill
Type
Skill
Rank
Common
This pill contains the knowledge of a single Psy Power. Consuming the pill allows the user to learn the contained power.

Power Development Guide
Type
Manual
Rank
Rare
This guidebook describes the process of creating new and unique Powers designed by users. While the process of creating new powers is not easy, the results of creating a Unique Power can be substantial. Consuming this book unlocks the Power Creation Menu.

PsyInk Tattoo
Type
Psy Augment
Rank
Super-Rare
This tattoo uses nanocytes to create a tattoo made of psychoactive inks that enhance the user’s defense against certain Psy Powers. The design of the tattoo is set by the user and cannot be changed after use.

+100% Resistance to one type of Power
+20% Resistance to all other Powers
Tattoo’s Nature – Because of the psychoactive properties of the tattoo, a buff and debuff will be randomly selected based upon the tattoo design and your playstyle


WARNING: While this tattoo is compatible with your unique nature, the tattoo will become a permanent marker, appearing in roughly the same space on your body, no matter what form you take.

Psybreaker Pistol
Type
Pistol
Rank
Uncommon
Damage
10 – 20 (Stun)
Damage Type
Psychic
This weapon deals low Stun damage, but is a welcome partner to any who have to deal with troublesome Psy Power users. This single-shot pistol deals little damage, but has a high stun rate, and can short out a target’s ability to use Psy Powers temporarily. Duration of Stun depends on user’s Sp. Attack and target’s Energy Armor. Duration of Power loss depends on the user’s Sp. Attack and target’s Sp. Defense.
Durability 30/30

Stun – Stun target for up to 30 seconds.
Stun Shots – Deals Stun damage. If Stun damage equals current HP, target becomes unconscious. Stun damage heals at a rate of (CON/10) per minute.
Psyblock – Block access to target’s Powers for up to 5 minutes. Deactivate all currently active powers.
1 shot clip. (20 PP to reload)

Power Booster
Type
Psy Augment
Rank
Super-Rare
A highly illegal substance created by means most would not care to know about. Using a power booster grants the user an increase to their abilities, but such benefits are not without a cost.

+20 to all Mental Stats
+200 PP
+20 PP Regen rate
Lose a random number of skill levels.
Random Buff based on playstyle
Random Debuff based on source

Now we were getting into some serious shit. These were the kind of things that could make or break a character, especially if you got them early on. Of course, they weren’t cheap either. The Power Pills were 200 credits each, the Guide was a cool 2K each, the tattoos were 1K each, the Pistols cost 500 for a single one, and that booster cost a whopping 100K credits! Still, I was investing in my team’s future. I bought four of everything (well, five of the pills), except the Booster. Only got one of those, for myself. Cost me 80K after I finished negotiating, since I was dropping a shit-ton of credits on the man. Well, that, and I needed to get a shipment of ‘machine parts’ to a contact in Alpha Centauri for him. Another five thousand credits netted me a code key, allowing me to access the Dark Net myself, so I could browse and see what was available.

Negotiation increased to 10/100.
+2 CHA

Anyways, I let the girls pick which powers they wanted. Shearah picked up the Technopathy power, which apparently let her ‘communicate’ with machines. Damn useful for a mechanic, I guess. Carissa picked Empathic Projection, allowing her to influence people’s emotions. Cali picked something called Mindvault, which was a passive/sustained power that increased her resistance to Mental Powers. I guess the experience with the Stepford collar made her leery of mind control.

Me? I picked Charm Person, which basically allowed me to turn someone into a temporary ally, clouding their mind and making them very suggestible. Fortunately, that also meant their memories were pretty hazy afterwards. The second power was Alter Memory, which did exactly as it sounded, overwrite real memories with false ones. Of course, the bigger the change, the more likely it was that some disconnect would happen and risk letting them know they’d been played. I was planning on using these as a jumping off point for my Unique Power.

Tattoo of the Black Dragon

+100% Mental Resistance
+20% to all other Resistances
Draconic Presence – All Social skills treated as 10 ranks higher. +20% Mental Affinity.
Hoarder – While you are not keen on letting anything you get your hands on escape your grasp, this is especially true with certain things. Based on your playstyle, you hoard the following: Weapons and Slaves. You become extremely unwilling to part with either of them, and covetous of particularly striking examples of either you come across that do not belong to you.

Power Booster

Lose 1 Rank in the following Skills:
Heavy Weapons
Demolitions
Aeronautics Mechanic
Automotive Mechanic
Industrial Mechanic
Nautical Mechanic

Euphoric Fluids – Your body chemistry is addictive, literally. Those who come in contact with your bodily fluids (including sweat, saliva, blood, and other fluids) have a euphoric reaction. This acts as a drug, with an addiction rating of 8/10.
Empathic Unbalance – Your brain chemistry is out of balance. While there is no known cure (and it will continue, regardless of the form you take), the condition can be suppressed by intimate contact with another sentient creature, their empathic state helping to balance your own. The duration of suppression can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 48 hours, depending on the extent of the activity. After that time, suffer a -50% penalty on all mental stats, -50% on all skills, and +100% PP cost on all Powers.

Well, that was… interesting. The loss in skill levels was disappointing, but it could have been worse. Those buffs and debuffs, though, were going to make things weird, fast. Especially since I saw a countdown timer pop up in the corner of my HUD. Looks like the game wasn’t going to start the debuff off immediately. I had two hours to get things ‘in hand’, or I’d be in big trouble.

I saw that Jaynie had finished her purchases, as well. Looking to everyone, I said, “All right, let’s get to the ship, and get out of here.” Everyone nodded, eager to be up in the ‘air’ again.

Unfortunately, things weren’t going to be that easy, it seemed. While Raven had told me that all our cargo was loaded, and the ship was ready to depart, it seemed like someone had decided they didn’t want us leaving just quite yet. How could I tell that? Well, the eleven Asian men dressed in matching black suits, each carrying katanas made that a pretty safe bet, especially when they were blocking the main route back to the hangar.

As we walked forward, one of the men, who looked to be the leader, stepped forward, and said, “That is far enough! You have cheated our master in taking the Nomad at the auction, but he is merciful, and will give you one chance to make amends before your life becomes forfeit. Give us the Princess, and you may leave.”

Oh, good. I hadn’t had a villain monologue at me in a while. Unfortunately for him, I read a wonderful document called the ‘Evil Overlord List’. Monologuing was very much on the list as something to ‘not do’. Fighting fair was also on that list of things not to do. So I cheated.

In my hand appeared the SMG I’d kept hidden in my bracer. The leader’s eyes just had time to go wide as I pulled the trigger, unleashing a stream of energy bullets at the man. His armor stood up to three hits, but by the fourth, he was taking some good damage. And so were the guys around him. I heard the others firing, as well, but I just kept the trigger pulled, using my PP to refill the clip as soon as it was empty again and again, until the last enemy fell down. Surprisingly, they weren’t all dead, because the leader managed to choke out, “You have made an enemy of the Red Orchid Clan this day! You will all die a thousand deaths!”

I’m sure he had other, very important things to say, but I shot him in the head to keep him quiet while we looted their bracers and weapons. That was all we had time for now, as alarms were starting to sound. Looking around, I saw that the scenery was pretty torn up. I just might have gone a bit overboard.




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