Since we last uploaded, the House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome 16 new Novices and 7 new Operators! The following are our most recent additions:
Novices Ben Richards and Luke The Duke.
Operators Pall Fox and Andreas Loft
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
IMPORTANT:
We Are So Back! (Modified schedule of 1 chapter a week on Tuesdays for the time being, finals are here, and I don't even have time to sleep.
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"Lyra!"
The silence of the bridge was suffocating. It pressed against my eardrums, a physical weight that made the metallic taste of blood in my mouth infinitely sharper. The emergency backup lumens cast long, distorted shadows across the deck, painting the shattered holotable and the sparking consoles in a flickering red.
I scrambled across the deck, my boots slipping on the plating. My head was splitting open, a concussive beat of agony radiating from where my skull had connected with the holotable, but the pain was distant and muted by a sudden, all-consuming wave of terror.
I reached the co-pilot's chair and dropped to my knees.
Lyra was slumped to the side, lying motionless. The protective leather straps of the crash webbing had kept her from being thrown across the bridge during the violent impact of the Volanti Rail Cannon, but the unforgiving G-force of the uncalculated slipspace jump had taken its toll. Her small and delicate hands were no longer gripping her plushie. The toy had fallen and been tossed somewhere in the shadows of the bridge.
"Lyra, hey, hey, look at me," I pleaded, my voice cracking.
I reached out with trembling hands and gently cupped her face. Her skin was freezing cold, and her eyes were closed, her long lashes resting against her pale cheeks.
And then I saw a thin, dark line of blood tracking down from her left nostril, pooling at the corner of her mouth. More blood, darker in color, had leaked from both of her ears, staining the collar of her jacket. The instantaneous pressure shifts of the emergency jump, combined with the shockwave that had reverberated through the Shepherd's hull, appeared to have ruptured the delicate blood vessels in her head.
"No, no, no, no," I repeated over and over as my thumbs gently wiped the blood from her cheeks, but it just kept coming, and she wasn't waking up. Her breathing was shallow and ragged, unevenly hitching in her chest in a way that sounded like dry leaves scraping together.
I needed help. I needed to get her to the medbay of the ship.
"Marcos!" I yelled, throwing my head back, my voice tearing through the damaged bridge. "Marcos, answer me! I need a diagnostic on the med bay! I need life support! Marcos!"
The acoustic arrays mounted in the ceiling cracked, letting out a burst of piercing, high-frequency static that filled the room, making me wince.
"M-M-M-Mark..." The voice that came through the speakers wasn't the smooth, synthesized, casually confident tone of my AI, but a broken and heavily distorted sound. The audio skipped and staggered, the pitch fluctuating wildly between a deep grind and a high shriek.
"Kzzzt... structural... kzzzt... massive kinetic trauma to primary processing... kzzzt... blind jump caused cascading electrical... kzzzt... trying to route... trying..." The audio feed collapsed into a whine before cutting out completely. The Volanti slug hadn't managed to pierce through zones that held vital systems, but the kinetic transfer had scrambled the frigate's internal network. Marcos was alive, buried somewhere in the surviving databanks, but the ship was severely compromised, and therefore, he couldn't help me.
I was entirely on my own.
"Okay. Okay," I breathed, forcing the panic down. Panic meant death. Panic meant I would lose her. I'm not sure how I did it, but I managed to get my Strathari DNA to surge, flooding my system with a cold and hyper-focused clarity.
I reached into the chair, unbuckling the crash webbing, and slid my arms under Lyra's small body, supporting her neck and spine as I lifted her against my chest, her weight being negligible.
I turned away from the chair and sprinted for the blast doors leading out of the bridge.
The doors were stuck, and it appeared as if the hydraulic tracks had been warped by the impact. I didn't have the time for this. I shifted Lyra entirely into my left arm, holding her tight against my chest. With my right hand, I grabbed the edge of the thick door, dug my boots into the deck, and pulled.
The metal shrieked in protest, and the muscles in my arm bunched, the Strathari DNA burning with power as I physically tore the blast door off its locking mechanism and shoved it back into the recess with a deafening crash.
I stepped out into the corridor to what could only be described as a disaster zone. The sweeping hallways of the Shepherd had been turned into a nightmare of sparking conduits and billowing smoke. The scrubbers were whining at maximum capacity, trying desperately to filter out the toxic smell of vaporized copper and burning insulation. Bulkheads had buckled inward in several places, and the sound of metal groaning reverberated throughout the ship.
But I didn't stop to look around, and continued to move, my boots pounding against the grating, eating up the distance as I navigated the winding, smoke-filled corridors toward the secondary crew decks where the med bay was located.
As I rounded a corner, the sound of groaning metal was finally broken by the sound of human voices, releasing a chorus of absolute terror as fifty children were huddled together in the center of the wide corridor. The emergency bulkheads to their individual quarters had automatically sealed during the battle, locking them out of their rooms and leaving them sitting on the cold deck, clutching onto each other as they sobbed hysterically in the flickering red light.
Sister Elara and the three junior nuns were in the center of the chaos, their clothes ruffled up. Elara was bleeding from a nasty gash on her forehead, but she was ignoring it, moving from child to child and speaking in a calm and unwavering voice, desperate to keep the panic from evolving further.
When Elara saw me sprint out of the smoke, carrying Lyra's limp and bleeding body, the color drained from her face, and the iron-clad composure of the former corporate executive shattered for a fraction of a second, overcome by the sheer horror of a mother who had already seen her very own children die before.
"Mark!" Elara gasped, rushing toward me, her hands hovering helplessly over Lyra. "Merciful stars, what happened to her? Is she...?"
"She's alive. I'm guessing it's pressure trauma from the blind jump," I grunted, not breaking my stride because I couldn't afford to stop. "Keep the children here! Do not let them wander the ship! The lower decks might be venting atmosphere! Just keep them together!"
Elara nodded frantically, her jaw setting into a hard line as she turned back to the screaming orphans, her own fear pushed entirely aside by necessity.
I pushed past the huddle of children, my eyes locked on the double doors of the medical bay at the end of the corridor.
But a dozen yards away from the entrance, I saw Father Michael lying on his back against the bulkhead. He must have been thrown violently against the wall during the impact. His legs were splayed at an unnatural angle, and his eyes were rolled back into his skull, showing only the whites. A massive pool of dark blood was slowly expanding outward from the back of his head, seeping into the grating beneath him.
I skidded to a halt, dropping to one knee beside the priest.
"Father Michael," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I couldn't feel a pulse through his thick collar, so I placed my hand flat against his chest, and for a terrifying second, I felt nothing. Then, a weak and shallow flutter pushed against my palm, signaling that he was alive, but he was fading fast. The volume of blood he was losing from the head trauma meant he only had minutes, at best, before his brain simply shut down.
I could carry them both, but if I did, then I would risk further injury to Lyra. But I couldn't leave the man there to die.
I shifted Lyra carefully into a secure hold against my chest with my left arm and reached out with my right hand, grabbed Father Michael firmly by the thick fabric of his cassock near the collar, and stood up.
I dragged the unconscious priest across the metal grating, his dead weight being almost meaningless to me, though he left a dark streak of blood trailing behind us as I hauled him toward the med bay doors.
"Open," I barked at the door, but nothing happened.
The electrical grid was fried.
I gritted my teeth, I let Father Michael down carefully, and then lay Lyra down with care. Then I turned to the doors and managed to wedge my hands in between the gaps, forcing the doors open as they let out a mechanical whine.
I then scooped Lyra back up and dragged Father Michael inside, moving past the standard triage beds and directly toward the medical chairs. They didn't look like anything found special, skeletal in shape, but hell did they work miracles. This was Strathari medical technology, after all. It was probably something along the same technology that had rebuilt my body, and it had already proven itself by giving Lyra the ability to see and hear.
I gently laid Lyra down into the first chair. Her head lolled to the side, and the blood from her nose dripped onto the white material. I quickly pulled the restraint straps across her chest and legs, locking her in place. The chairs required absolute immobility to function properly.
I turned back, grabbed Father Michael, and hauled him up into the second chair. His head slumped forward, exposing the massive laceration on the back of his skull. I strapped him in tight, securing his head in the brace to prevent any further spinal trauma.
But the chairs were dark.
The soft, pulsing glow that usually indicated their readiness was absent. The internal power grid to the med bay had likely been severed during the jump.
"Marcos!" I roared at the ceiling, my voice echoing off the sterile walls. "Marcos, I need power! Route any emergency reserves! Shut down life support on decks five through eight! Shut down the secondary sensors! Take it from the engines! I don't care where you get it, give me power to these chairs right now!"
The silence of the med bay mocked me as I stared at the dark chairs with a crushing wave of despair threatening to drown me. I had built the most advanced ship in humanity's history, and I was going to watch my daughter and a friend bleed to death because a wire got pinched or severed.
I slammed my fist against the examination table. "Marcos... please... God... if you're real, please... please don't do this shit to me... please give me a miracle..."
As if answering my prayers, a mechanical thunk echoed from beneath the floorboards as soon as I finished speaking, and the lights overhead flickered wildly, died, and then returned at half-strength. The air scrubbers in the room shut down, leaving the air utterly still.
And then, a soft, low hum began to emanate from the medical alcove.
I looked down as the pearl-white material of the two chairs was slowly beginning to pulse with a warm yellow light. I didn't know if it was Marcos or if God had been the one to answer my prayers, but someone, something had heard me and allowed every stray volt of electricity from the non-essential systems to be funneled directly into the chairs.
The yellow glow slowly intensified, washing over Lyra and Father Michael, as I watched, their pale skin began to faintly mirror the light, creating an ethereal and almost ghostly luminescence. The microscopic sensors within the chairs had engaged, and whatever the hell these things did had already started analyzing the trauma, stabilizing them, and immediately going to work reconstructing the damaged tissue, sealing the ruptured blood vessels, and repairing the cranial fractures.
"You're going to be fine," I said, as my breath hitched with relief. The tech might be ancient, but it was ages ahead of anything humanity had.
The adrenaline that had been keeping me standing suddenly evaporated, leaving behind a cold and hollow exhaustion that sank straight into my marrow.
I stumbled backward, my knees shaking, and practically collapsed against the sink on the opposite side of the room. I gripped the edges of the basin, my knuckles white and my chest heaving as I sucked in uneven breaths of the air.
I slowly looked up, and mounted above the sink was a piece of technology acting as a mirror, a high-resolution reflective display screen tied to the room's diagnostic systems.
I stared at the man looking back at me.
My face was covered in a mix of sweat and a thick smear of Lyra's blood across my jawline, where I had held her. My eyes looked empty. Behind me, perfectly framed in the reflection, was Lyra. Her small body strapped to a machine, glowing with an unnatural yellow light, broken and bleeding because she had trusted me to keep her safe.
A low, guttural noise ripped from the back of my throat in self-loathing, tearing past my vocal cords, echoing off the walls as a primal scream of absolute fury.
I pulled my right arm back and slammed my fist directly into the center of the mirror.
The reinforced glass of the display shattered instantly under the force of the blow, and a spiderweb of deep, jagged cracks exploded outward from the point of impact. The digital display sparked violently, hissed, and died, leaving me staring at a fractured and distorted version of myself.
Blood dripped from my knuckles, dropping into the sink. But I didn't feel the pain. I couldn't feel anything over the crushing weight of my own stupidity.
"I should have known," I said as I leaned my forehead against the shattered glass, closing my eyes as the bitter memories flooded my mind.
Three years ago.
Three years ago, I had been led into an ambush. It had been different then. I had been a younger man, trusting that the information I was given was true and accurate. It was the ambush that had left me stranded on a desolate planet, the ambush that had led Anahrin to find me and offer me a second chance, or I guess, a third chance at life through Strathari DNA.
I had promised myself on that day that I would never be a victim again. I had promised myself that I would rise to the top of this galaxy.
And yet, here I was. Once again standing in the ruins of my own fleet, having led eight hundred innocent people straight into a slaughterhouse.
I should have seen this coming.
Gregorio Volanti, that simulacrum son of a bitch.
How could I have been so incredibly naive?
The silence from SIGS over the last six months. The complete lack of retaliation followed by an attempt to try and play the role of peaceful mediators. It had all been a facade. A meticulously crafted illusion designed to make me feel secure. Gregorio knew he couldn't touch me on Mechanicus Station. He knew I had the backing of the 7th Fleet and the public eye of the IUC holding a shield over my head.
So he simply waited for me to grow confident. He waited for me to gather everything I loved, pack it into a convoy, and fly out past the borders of civilization, deep into the unconquered systems where the Navy wouldn't follow, and where law didn't exist.
And that ship trailing us... I was so fucking stupid. I should have known I was walking into an ambush.
Everything about that ship had screamed danger. Marcos had warned me. The tachyon echoes had proven it was a military-grade vessel hiding in our shadow. But I had brushed it off, assuming it wasn't going to do anything because I had a small fleet surrounding me. I had been so utterly blinded by the promise of a better future, so deeply intoxicated by the idea of Aurelius II and the peaceful colony I was going to build, that I had completely ignored the fundamental rule of this universe.
Peace was a lie created for the weak.
There was only power, and the willingness to use it.
I had walked into a firing squad with my eyes wide open, and I had dragged a fleet of helpless civilians in with me.
3rd Person POV
The violent and unpredictable currents of the blind slipspace jump had spat the surviving twenty-six ships out into the frozen void of an uncharted sector, far from the intended path to the Aurelian system.
They were more akin to a graveyard drifting in the dark than an actual fleet.
Similar scenes of chaos and desperation were playing out across the three remaining frigates of the Void Vanguard. Juan Rodrigues's flagship and the two escorting corvettes were gone, and though the surviving Vanguard captains were hardened mercenaries, the sheer brutality of the ambush and the catastrophic nature of the blind jump had left them reeling.
Aboard the Vanguard frigate Iron Clad, the bridge was filled with thick smoke. The emergency jump had overloaded their primary capacitors, causing the entire command consoles to violently rupture, showering the deck with sparks and shrapnel. Medics rushed through the darkened corridors, hauling wounded gunners and burned technicians to the triage centers.
The armor of the frigates had protected them from the brunt of the Volanti artillery, but the internal damage from the uncalculated spatial displacement was immense. Engines whined in protest, life support systems choked, and the surviving leaders shouted hoarse orders into static-filled comms, desperately trying to re-establish a defensive perimeter in the pitch-black void.
Across the vast, scattered expanse of the civilian formation, the terror was of a different nature.
The Volanti fleet had fired indiscriminately in their opening volley, vaporizing five ships, but once the Shepherd and the ships of the Vanguard had returned fire, the corporate warships had entirely shifted their focus to the military vessels. Because of this, the remaining twenty-two civilian rustbuckets had miraculously survived the firefight relatively physically intact.
But the blind jump had wreaked havoc on their already frail systems, leaving agricultural haulers and decommissioned mining barges drifting silently, their external running lights completely dead. The immense forces acted upon them from slaving their archaic drives to the Shepherd's emergency jump had fried their electrical grids.
Inside the freezing and darkened cargo holds, hundreds of civilians huddled together in terror. They were physically unhurt, but they were trapped in metal coffins floating in the abyss. Husbands held their wives, parents covered their children's eyes, and engineers worked frantically with flashlights and hand tools, desperately trying to manually reboot life support and scrubbers before the oxygen grew too thin.
They didn't know where they were. Didn't know if the Volanti fleet was going to jump in behind them. They only knew that two hundred of their friends and families were gone, and they were at the mercy of the unforgiving void.
POV: Mark Shephard
An hour had passed, though it might as well have been an eternity.
I hadn't moved. I just stood there, staring at the shattered mirror, the fragmented reflection of my face a representation of the current status of my fractured soul.
I noticed the soft, pulsing yellow light behind me suddenly began to fade, and I turned around slowly, exhaustion pulling at my muscles. They dimmed further as they cycled down into a cool blue.
Father Michael's breathing was no longer a shallow gasp. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. The laceration on the back of his head had been sealed, the tissue knit back together, leaving only a faint, silvery scar hidden beneath his hair. He was deeply asleep, his body resting as it recovered from the massive blood loss.
My eyes then drifted to where I feared looking, down at the first chair, at Lyra. After about five minutes of staring at her sleeping form, Lyra shifted.
A soft and confused groan slipped from her lips, and her small hands, no longer pale and freezing, twitched against the restraints. The dried blood was still crusted beneath her nose and ears, reminding me of how close I had come to losing her. But that was all over for now.
Her eyelids fluttered, struggling against the glare of the backup lumens.
I stepped forward and stopped beside the chair, holding my breath as I was terrified that if I made a sound, the illusion would break and she would slip away again.
Lyra's large and expressive eyes slowly peeled open. They were glassy and unfocused for a moment as she stared up at the ceiling. She blinked, her brow furrowing in confusion before she turned her head, her gaze finding me. She looked at my bruised and exhausted face and the blood on my hands.
The fear and confusion in her eyes melted away instantly, replaced by an unshakeable sense of safety. She didn't care about the events that had gone down. She only cared that I was there.
"Papa?" Lyra whispered, her voice tiny and rough.
I felt a hot tear break loose and track a clean line through the grime on my cheek.
I wanted to say something, but words refused to leave my lips as a tight knot settled in my throat.
I reached out, my hands trembling as I unbuckled the restraints across her chest. I gathered her into my arms, lifting her out of the chair, and hugged her so tightly I was afraid I might break her all over again, burying my face in her hair as a shuddering breath tore out of my lungs.
Lyra wrapped her small arms around my neck, resting her chin on my shoulder, completely oblivious to the weight of this moment.
I held her in my arms, rocking her gently in the dim light of the ruined medical bay. As I did so, I felt the last remaining vestiges of the naive, optimistic man I used to be quietly die.
The man who had wanted to build a peaceful colony, the man who had thought he could simply walk away from the corporate scum and start from the ground up, farming the dirt on Aurelius II, was gone. He had been murdered by a volley of railgun slugs in the unforgiving void of space.
I pulled Lyra even closer and closed my eyes.
Right there, standing in the ruins of my own hubris, I made a vow. I swore to the empty void of space, to the two hundred innocent souls who had died in the dark, and to the little girl in my arms, that I would never, ever allow anything like this to happen to my people again.
I wouldn't make a colony, I would make a fucking fortress. A heavily armored, impenetrable bastion of absolute fucking defiance. I wouldn't only build things that would make life better. I would build dreadnoughts. I will build planetary defense cannons. I will unleash the full, terrifying, unrestricted potential of the Strathari nanoprinters, and I will build an armada that would make each and every single one of those fuckers tremble.
And when the time was right, I would return to the IUC, and I will hunt down House Volanti. I will burn their fleets to slag. I will tear down their corporate spires, and I will stare directly into Gregorio Volanti's eyes as I wrap my hands around the fucker and personally crush his simulacrum cranium into flat, lifeless sheets of metal. I will make each and every single person who has ever fucked with me pay.
And just as I finished my vow, a blue holographic screen appeared in front of my eyes.
*Hidden Quest Complete: A Shepherd's Resolve*
System Booting Attempt # 1...
System Booting Attempt # 3,720...
System Booting Attempt # 13,092...
System Booting Attempt # 7,643,873...
System Booting Failed. Complete the remaining hidden quests to unlock the system.
System Name: S#e^&e@d &^ H&*@n(#y
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