Ruins of the void ship, Foxy Lady
Light pours through the hull breaches of the Foxy Lady, pale starlight bleeding into the dark, icy hull of the yacht, time seemingly frozen within it. Whatever isn't nailed down floats in gentle repose, glossy with ice, and tells some sort of tale of the people who had once been upon it.
Framed images of long-dead people float underneath the pale starlight, glinting as they twist and turn. The photos themselves are of happier times: couples holding one another, families gathered, holding one another by the shoulder, smiling at the camera. Others are of a more material nature, such as gems and jewelry, their luster hidden underneath a frosty coating that contains a luster in itself. They bob and wriggle with ghosts of whatever force caused them to fly from whatever case they had been in.
Other personal effects float among them, yet a glitter can be seen in a dark corner of what had been the foyer of that ship. It shines bright in the stark dark and bobs slightly, held by an unseen tendril. This is no treasure; it is bait held out by a mechanical predator.
The machine is a Jorogumo, named after a spirit that would lure men to their death; that is only half of its function. Its maker, Arashi Robotics, created the beast of iron to act as a guardian of scrap - its home was found in the hulls of ships that were earmarked for salvage. Inside its conical body, a low-frequency tracker allows its owner to keep tabs on where their precious scrap is in the ever-flowing void. As well as keep others from poking around within them. The machine did this with long, weaponized tendrils designed to pierce the void suit of would-be thieves. It could even feed upon the bio matter of said unfortunates, which this one, the one aboard the Foxy Lady had already done three times.
It had no emotions about it; such machines were only allowed so much intelligence, so it could not contemplate its own existence, or so Arashi claims to avoid any accusation of manufacturing malicious machines. The truth is the Jorogumo did have the desire to prey upon unwitting voiders; it was programmed to find thrill in its hunt and relish the feasting on organics. So, as it waits in the void for another salvager to come by, it waits with anticipation.
Something stirs on the ship; the Jorogumo's other tendrils, locked onto the wall of the Foxy Lady feel subtle vibrations go through its hull. Someone, or something, has come aboard its hunting ground. The foyer acts as the ship's central hub, so whatever comes aboard the vessel has to pass through it. Its eight sensors spread out, the bait tendril kept outward to draw whatever unexpecting salvager into the light and into the Jorogumo's sucking maw.
Something else is in the shadows now, the Jorogumo's sensors picking up trace amounts of ion radiation. This perks up the hunter as its sensors follow the signature as it grows closer to the bait. It slowly sways its bait with ease, the light on the tendril gleaming in the dark like a fisherman giving its bait a tug.
The signature grows closer, and now a shape can be mostly seen in the deep black of the Foxy Lady. It's large, far larger than the Jorogumo is used to seeing aboard the vessel. The shape fills most of the hallway, leading into the broken remnants of the foyer. There is, perhaps, a tinge of apprehension as the Jorogumo pulls the bait back slightly, the size alone causing it to run through possible evasive actions it can take.
Suddenly, three eyes shine back at the Jorogumo from the darkness as the shape powers up fully. Instead of catching the attention of some bottom feeder, it caught the glare of another predator. Jorogumo can see it now as the suit powers up. The thing is two meters tall, encased in void steel armor, no power armor. One arm begins to charge with power, and the Jorogumo's data banks are used primarily to judge the worth of scrap, identifying it as an Mrk II Ion Lance. Primarily used by Bellators during the War of Survival.
Bellator. Star Knights. Extremum Verbum.
A dying breed, the ones who held off the Ravenous and helped usher in the Great Reconstruction. They're legendary; even in an age of cyber-soldiers and mech jockeys, the Bellator is still a respected and feared foe. And the Jorogumo has now realized it's lured one right to it. As the Bellator enters the pale starlight, its features become clear.
Its helmet holds a grinning maw of teeth, and its three lenses shine a dull blue. Its armor is black as the void. A 'Q' framed by hearts rests over its chest, the armor wielding the ion lance burgundy red. It's a killer, a soldier, something the Jorogumo isn't cut out to fight, but this is its hunting grounds, salvage, and it will die protecting them.
A star is born as the ion lance fires, glassy ice flash melting as the bolt of energy strikes out at the Jorogumo, which can barely evade the strike, the blast sundering the bulkhead. It scuttles further into the ship, attempting to find an advantage in the tight halls of the yacht, but the Bellator does not relent. It bursts through the wall and fires another charged shot at the Jorogumo, which is only just able to avoid, losing two limbs under the fire of the Bellator.
The machine realizes that running won't save it; it has to fight back.
It turns and launches towards the intruder, the serrated tips of its tendrils lashing out at the Bellator. The soldier evades the strikes with an ease that causes the machine to feel something akin to anger. While others would struggle to maneuver in the void of space, the bellator flows gracefully through it. As the Jorogumo tries to bite it with its maw, it's met with a kinetic maul, the blast from it bursting two of its legs off and crippling two more. It skips and scraps across the bulkhead before coming to rest against the bulkhead. Its remaining sensors see the last ion blast before it no longer functions.
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Domitia looks over the floating debris, waiting for a moment before confirming that the Jorogumo is, in fact, dead. She glides forward on her ion thrusters, halting before the machine and inspecting the molten scrap. She finds the tracker within the remains of the beast of iron and crushes it with her hand, ensuring it can't alert its friends. She has a good idea who planted this here, and it frustrates her as it's yet another dead end.
A friend, Sheriff Wilkson, had contacted her and her partner for help - reports of fake distress signals had reached Mayden Station, luring good-natured sailors to their doom. The ask came with a good sum of cash, so the bounty hunters had little reason not to do some patrols in the Big Empty.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
This had been another dead end; the last one had been a broken terminal with a virus that kept playing the same song over and over again. There had been a brief discussion about bringing it on board to see if it could be repaired, but Domitia lost her nerve upon the fifteenth playthrough of the song and blasted it into oblivion, solving the problem once and for all.
Admittedly, the Foxy Lady had been a far more interesting endeavor. Ships like this were commonly found in big empty spaces. Overpriced boats bought on loans that were defaulted on during the Horizon Crash had led many captains to try and evade the long arm of the Coalition Revenue Service by simply living their lives as far away from civilization as possible. This often led to the discovery that many of these yachts were not void-worthy, and the hull integrity was found to be not worth the price.
Still, even as the Jorogumo floats away as molten scrap, Domitia knows she's not done yet. If this thing had been on here, its kills would probably still be aboard. She ventures deeper into the ship, passing through frozen halls, and finds the only room with a closed door. Domitia finds out that the hinges have been bent into place to keep it from floating off. As she pushes into the room, she finds a tomb.
Three bodies float lifelessly in the void; multiple breaches can be seen across their void suits, indicating they were victims of the creature. Other wounds are deep gouges where flesh has been sucked away, not by decompression, but by the biting maw of the Jorogumo. Their void suits tell a story of who they are. One of them had been a veteran, his Coalition Marine Corps patch on his arm still on display, the pistol still in its holster, a classic P1119 service weapon. His void suit is a deep blue, with ferro-ceramic plates glinting under Domitia's lights. The other two are in matching void suits, orange with black gloves and grey helmets. 'Orson's Salvage' is written on a tag on their chest, indicating they were with a company. A company that left them for dead aboard this floating tomb.
Domitia finds sheets and blankets within the room, figuring this had been the master bedroom of the Foxy Lady. She takes them and wraps the corpses in them, attaches them to a tither she keeps on her belt, and pulls them out of the darkened room. She pulls the dead from the Foxy Lady, taking the tithers and attaching them to the hull of the ship, allowing them to float in gentle repose in the pale starlight. It's not much, a sailor's burial, and while she does not hold any faith, she hopes that whatever God or Deity they would've worshipped would take them from this frozen hull.
The Bellator looks up, seeing a boxy, stub-wing freighter floating above her. It's a battered old workhorse of a ship. Converted from military to civilian use during the Reconstruction, it's a relic, but more in the sense of a coin minted some time ago. Interesting, but not valuable, a novelty, but not noteworthy. It is the Providence, her and her partner's ship.
"Done down there?" The grainy voice of said partner comes over to her in the built comm unit, "Got places to be."
"Be up in a second, Dell."
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Aboard The Providence
The airlock of the Providence pressurized and began decontamination of Domitia's armor. After a moment, she steps aboard the vessel and removes her helmet. Her light blue hair, a side effect of becoming a Bellator, shines with a degree of sweat. Her copper eyes blink a few times as she adjusts to looking through them rather than the lenses of her helmet. Her face is angular, her skin tone slightly tan, the left side of her face is scarred heavily, and her right side remains unscathed, for now. She stomps through the ship, eventually arriving at the armory.
There, she finds the harness for the armor, which she steps into. The harness then grabs ahold of the armor, and Domitia powers it down. The backplates part and then pull upward and downward, and with practiced grace, she steps out from the armor, still encased in a black undersuit. She pulls it off, and as she does so, she takes the Queen of Hearts card and puts in her suit on a strap of the armor.
She then takes a shower, washes the sweat off, and puts on fresh clothes: a loose-fitting cream sweater, black pants, and boots. Finally, she arrives at where her partner is, at the bridge. It has something akin to a view, though her enhanced physiology means she has to bend down a bit to see out of the bubble cockpit. There, sat in the seat, is a grumlian, a short, stout humanoid with a long and strong tail dressed in thick red and blue coveralls, which, in a pinch, can be pressurized and used as a part of a void suit. He has a large pompadour, which he takes extremely good care of. He looks up, his eyes obscured by a pair of sapphire-tinted goggles.
"Well, nice of ya to join me at last." Dell greets his partner.
"Needed a shower, can't blame me for that." Domitia takes a seat next to Dell, but the chair does not exactly fit her.
"And yet you still stink, somehow," Dell clicks a few buttons, "Picked this up on the long wave, thought you might be interested."
He flips a switch and a mess of static starts buzzing out of the speaker. Yet after sometime, Domitia starts to hear something, a voice, or something she assumes is a voice.
"This... Hyaline... Distress... Eliza... Send..." The words are difficult to hear but are there in the mess of things.
"Might be our guy," Dell supposes, "Think about it, if he did this over Liminal Channels, a lot more than just us would be able to hear it."
"Would be at least system-wide, would attract too much attention." Domitia surmises.
Dell snaps his fingers and points at Domitia, "Bingo. Heard it from another pilot that Rust Stalkers are in the area. They love doing shit like this."
Pirates come in all flavors, but the clans are the real movers and shakers. They all descend from the War of Fallen Stars, a war that birthed the new age of piracy and killed any further colonization efforts in this part of space. Part of Domitia hated them; most of them were the worst kind of folks, killers who had no qualm doing whatever it took to make a dime. On the other hand, she has sympathy for them; after all, had Corps like Horizon not been so heavy-handed and exploitative, there wouldn't have been a war.
"They're clanners, open season on them," Domitia says with a hum.
"Right with you on that. Rust Stalkers are a special kind of awful, too. Shit, I'd do it for free, fucking monsters." Dell says bitterly.
"Would you now?" Domitia asks.
Dell laughs, "No! Of course not. You think I'm a bounty hunter for the love of it?"
"I thought better of you," Domitia smirks and looks away.
"Oh, come on," Dell starts punching in coordinates, "Listen, the way I see it, I'm stuck doing this, and so are you; if we gotta hunt down folks for the law, we might as well target the real scumbags." The Providence comes to life as the engines roar and the Liminal Drive warms up, "Alright, I got a good idea of where this is. Odds we're walking into an ambush, so I made sure to drop us a good light year out of the target area. Scope it out, see what we can find."
"Hopefully, it ain't another Oni Bot." Domitia growls.
"Shit, that was what was on there?" Dell remarks, "Fuck, should've just told me, would've blasted that thing to pieces."
"Wanted to handle it personally. Make sure it died." The Bellator says something deep within her resonates with that.
That deep part of her is the Legacy. It's the core augment, the very soul of a Bellator. After it's implanted, initiates are then placed into a coma, allowing the Legacy to augment the host. It contains combat data and muscle memory from its previous bearers, allowing for training to be rapidly accelerated, as well as giving Bellators a reactive mind that aids them in the heat of battle. A side effect of it is that the Legacy has a mind of its own, and a Bellator must keep the peace between their own mind and the soul of the Legacy or risk losing themselves to it. Some, like Domitia, treat it as a weapon, one that needs to be kept in check lest they lose their humanity. Others see it and embrace it as a spiritual guide, believing the First, the First Bellator, guides them through it, as she has numerous times down the Genetic Chain.
"Weird, but alright," Dell clicks another switch and pushes forward a lever, "Let's get some more money then."
The bubble cockpit's protective visor begins to pull down, shielding it as the ship begins to fold into space-time and then slip into Liminal Space.