Lylat System, Deep space

7 ALW (after Lylat wars)

Cornerian exploration ship Pathfinder

Updated April 3rd. Hi all, this fic was originally rated M, but I've decided to bring it down to a T rating to attract a wider reader base. I know the first few chapters are messy, but they get better as they go along.

Deep space exploration was considered by many to be a fruitless and treacherous endeavor to partake in. It was always said that the tech to allow a ship to venture too far away from the Lylat system didn't exist, or even if it did, the ship's crew would eventually go insane from being trapped in a metal can for the months it would take to reach the nearest star. Other things like random debris, asteroid fields, and extreme levels of radiation frying the ship and/or crew was also something to account for when it came to deep space travel. Despite the risks and cost on the taxpayers, the CNV Pathfinder was launched.

It's mission was fairly simple, it's planned route was a long haul of three months to Lylat's nearest stellar neighbor, a class-G star named Vega. While it wasn't technically the closest star to Lylat, it was the closest one that could potentially support life. The actual nearest star to Lylat was a nasty little (relatively) pulsar called Siras. Siras, for some reason gave out almost immeasurable amounts of cosmic radiation in a rather small area, right in the planned route of the pathfinder. In order to solve this rather deadly problem, Beltnio toad and his engineering team had cooked up a new metal alloy that was rather good at soaking up radiation. Good enough to pass along the edge of Siras's stupid radiation field without frying the crew and the ship.

As of now the Pathfinder was cruising slowly through the sparse asteroid field that separated Lylat from Deep, uncharted space. The vessel itself was a long stick of a ship, it's main hull a long metal truss with giant cylindrical fuel tanks near the rear along with the main engines. Mounted to the front of the truss was a vaguely rectangular hull section housing the bridge, crew quarters, engineering and hydroponics bay, and life support along with a small hangar to launch shuttles and other support craft from. Along the main hull were various antennas and sensors, completed with a metallic gray paint job. It had no real weapons, only point defense weapons in the form of small laser turrets to swat down any debris that threaten to come near the ship.

Sitting in the bridge's command chair overlooking the various crew stations for controlling and monitoring the ship's systems sat a red vulpine, wearing the standard issue Cornerian military uniform with a golden captain's insignia. With a datapad in one paw and a cup of coffee in the other, Captain Richard Donnelly stared through the front view port into the infinite void of space. They had only been traveling for a few days now and were nearing the edge of the Lylat system itself, soon they would be clear of the sparse asteroid belt and into deep space. Once free of the belt they could fully utilize the main engine's extreme power and fuel efficiency. Until then however, they had to crawl along though the belt in order to minimize the threat of being detected by the pirates and criminals known to prowl around the outer belt. It would only take a quick burst of full thrust to rapidly increase the Pathfinder's thermal signature, it's fusion shunt drive was powerful but ran incredibly hot. Hot enough to be easily detected by even the cheapest of sensor systems.

Richard took a long sip of his coffee, draining almost a third of the cup in one go. The bridge was in-between crew rotations, with only two critical personal manning the sensors and engineering crew stations, not counting the Captain himself. The flight had been fortunately uneventful so far, minus some anomalous energy readings while passing through the Meteos asteroid field. The ship's sensors read it as a "High energy detonation" of no less than "15 megatons". It didn't matter to Richard though, it was too far away to be of concern. "Just another thing to log..." he thought. Sitting at the sensors terminal was another vulpine, the soft glow from the screen faintly illuminating her solid white coat of fur and military uniform. The screen she was stationed at displaying multiple sensor readouts from the ship's highly specialized (and expensive) sensor array. Nothing out of the ordinary yet, just the occasional asteroid a few hundred thousand kilometers away along with clouds of ice particles floating in the void.

"Anything interesting, Lieutenant?" the Captain called from his chair.

"No sir, just the usual nothing." Nora said back.

Nora Stevenson had been very fortunate to get a spot aboard the Pathfinder, while she had above average marks in the only military academy that was willing to take her, she only got the position because of a mistake by the recruiter in charge of finding candidates for the Pathfinder's crew. She got lucky again with her position aboard the ship as bridge crew, only thing that was needed was to watch the sensor readouts all day, and the only one she answered to was the Captain. She continued to watch the screen, only half awake.

"We're not gonna find anything out here." Nora told herself.

As if just to disprove her, the screen flashed with a new message, along with a droning male voice that blared through the bridge: Warning, impact imminent. Readjust flight vector.

"Full reverse! Now!" the Captain yelled across the bridge.

The helmsmen, a grey Husky, raced his paws across the touchscreen to throw the main engine into full reverse. At the back of the ship, the large engine's exhaust changed it's shape to force the thrust backwards, the sudden change in speed overwhelming the ship's G-diffusers entirely. Reaction control systems fired forward and right to desperately throw the ship off a collision course with whatever they were about to run into. In the distance, an object could be seen through the bridge's front window. It was still getting bigger and bigger. The bridge crew could see it now, it was no asteroid. Richard toggled on the ship wide announcement system and screamed into the microphone.

"BRACE FOR IMPACT! NOW!"

The pathfinder slammed into the black object, the desperate last second maneuvering having paid off and preventing a head on impact. The ship blew past the mystery object, it sideswiping the entire right side of the pathfinder, shredding outer hull plating and pulverizing expensive equipment unlucky to be in it's way into shiny scrap metal. The main truss the fuel tanks were mounted to was spared, however, the object plowed into one of the six fuel tanks. It was torn open, the mixture of propellant spraying off into space then rapidly freezing from the extreme temperature of the void. The black chunk of matter then wedged itself halfway down the split remains of the fuel tank, thankfully still attached to the ship. The impact caused the entire pathfinder into a slow but steady horizontal spin. Captain Richard was thrown forward from his chair from the impact, his head slamming into a railing separating the elevated captain's chair from the lowered crew stations, knocking him out cold.

800,000 kilometers away...

This particular area of space was home to a giant particle cloud, a good 15,000 miles across in some places. These clouds of ice particles were pretty common in the outer belt, being the leftovers from when the Lylat system was still being formed a few billion years ago. Full sized asteroids did exist out here, just being in extreme orbits and rather rare. Deep within the cloud, another ship floated along. From a distance, anyone even slightly familiar with space travel would recognize this ship as a Lakon class heavy freighter. These ships were commonly seen hauling vast amounts of bulk goods in the system's loosely established shipping corridors between the inner and outer planets. A closer look would reveal this freighter had a more sinister purpose.

It had a blood-red paint job, with a large stylized canid skull painted in bone white on both sides. Rows and rows of shipping containers mounted to the central hull had been haphazardly welded together to make more usable interior space, with plates of old industrial-grade steel bolted to the side for armor. Anything that could be bent sticking out from the side of the hull was folded at various angles to form jagged spikes. Numerous battle trophies were mounted to the hull, some being the remains of smaller ships. Others being hull plating from larger targets, one being a scrap of plating from a Conerian destroyer, the CNV Treadstone.

Along the side of the hull, a small army of turrets were bolted, welded and strapped on. These were a mixture of old ballistic autocannons, missile pods and blaster turrets.

This was the Galleon, a ship 'owned' and operated by the ruthless and exclusively lupine pirate gang The crimson dawn. They were well known and feared among the outer reaches of Lylat where the Cornerian navy rarely operated. While they weren't the largest pirate group, they were one of the most brutal and effective in all of Lylat and had been a thorn in Corneria's side for years, even during the war. They were known to attack all but the most hardened of military targets, stealing and kidnapping who and whatever they could and just killing and destroying what they could not, survivors of their raids were rare. Too rare.

The Galleon's bridge was similar to the Pathfinder's, a central chair with crew stations sunk into the floor. Sitting in the captain's chair was, as expected, a giant of a lupine. This was Captain Vladimir 'Butcher' Petrov. Vlad was wearing an old venomian general's uniform, no doubt looted off the corpse of one of Andross's head generals shortly after the war. Despite Dr. Andross Bowman being dead and Venom firmly under Cornerian occupation, the remnants of the Venomian Empire still fought on, mainly using guerrilla tactics to avoid being obliterated by orbital bombardment. Some of their ships had escaped the Cornerian 5th, 6th and 9th fleets during the final siege of Venom to escape and hide all around Lylat. One of these ships had been unlucky enough to run into the Galleon.

Vlad took a long drag of his cigar, puffing out a cloud of smoke across the bridge. They had just attempted yet another raid, this time on a freighter hauling military supplies to the fleets stationed at Venom. The ship appeared unarmed when they approached to fire to disable it's engines, however this ship was packing a nasty surprise. It had disguised heavy military-grade nuclear torpedoes mounted inside shipping containers. When the Galleon and it's other support ship, the Cutlass got close, the freighter let loose with a barrage of nuclear torpedoes, 20 kilotons each. They were forced to flee, the Galleon's powerful engines able to outrun the atomic fire, however the Cutlass was unable to outmaneuver the attack and was caught in the blast.

Now, with an empty cargo hold and low on fuel, Vladimir was getting desperate. He needed to return back to base with something in his hold. Until they found someone to raid however, they were stuck tying to find an ice asteroid to convert into fuel. Him and his crew had been itching for a fight.

"Hey capn', I think I got something!" Said the black wolf watching a sensors readout screen dressed in a stained Cornerian navy uniform, with the markings and insignia's torn off.

"Big-ass heat sig just popped up, we gonna check it out?" Vladimir spoke with a thick, Venomian accent,

"Yes, perhaps we will finally be rewarded for our... persistence." He took another long, smokey drag of his cigar.

"Full throttle ahead." Vlad spoke into the console for the ship's communications system.

"Attention all crew, we have found a potential target, prepare your weapons and gear for boarding action."

Captain Richard awoke to the sounds of the ship's blaring klaxon and flashing red emergency lighting. He slowly picked himself off the deck with a groan and took a look around the bridge, all he remembered was the impact and getting thrown forwards into the railing. The familiar sounds of small-arms fire echoed through the ship, followed by a faint boom. "Warning: major hull breach detected."

"Damnit..."

Another explosion rocked the whole ship, nearly throwing Richard off his feet. The ship's automated system droned again: "Warning: Atmosphere lost in decks three, four, five and seven." Another moan came from the deck, it was Nora trying to pick herself off the floor. The Captain immediately noticed the trail of blood flowing down her right leg, a shard of glass from the terminal she had been watching—now just a shattered frame, was embedded in her left leg below the knee. "Wait, don't stand on that." said Richard, looking at Nora, who then leaned against one of the bridge railings to take weight off her injured leg. Every major room in a Cornerian navy ship had a wall-mounted field medical kit, which thankfully had remained attached to the wall, directly left of the heavyset blast doors separating the bridge from the rest of the ship.

Nora gave out a pained yip as Richard pulled the glass shard out of her leg. He was about to start shoving as many gauze sponges into her wound as he physically could when Richard heard a barrage of footsteps and voices in the main deck corridor behind the blast doors. The sound of a heavy cutting torch igniting, then the orange glowing dot of the blast doors being super heated from the other side followed soon after. The bridge had a small weapons locker—now wedged upside down behind another computer terminal. Richard stormed over to the locker and practically tore it open. There wasn't much inside, a handful of fragmentation grenades, one AR-19B blaster carbine and a pair of S&K E-19's: the standard issue Cornerian military sidearm. The pistol was known for it's good balance of stopping power and accuracy, as well as it's ability to fail when it was needed most. None of that mattered this instant though, the Captain carried his own personal sidearm, an old 44. magnum passed down from his father.

Richard grabbed two grenades and the carbine, which he then tossed across the room to Nora, along with the gun's two extra power cells. She caught it with her free right paw, the other one still wrapping an adhesive bandage around her leg. She flicked off the weapon's safety and shouldered it at the door. Whoever was cutting though the door was almost done, a black trail of burnt metal, still glowing a faint orange from the heat of the cutting torch as it made it's way around the door frame. Richard twisted the hand grenade's body to set the fuse to 'impact' and readied a toss at the door. The cutting torch finished it's job, the blast door, now free from it's frame fell forwards and slammed into the deck. Richard hurled the grenade towards the jagged metal door frame, immediately taking cover after throwing it. The frag went off almost instantly, it's deadly payload of shrapnel fanning out everywhere. The screams of the boarders followed immediately afterwords, despite their full suits of combat armor designed to absorb blaster shots eating most of the grenade's payload, the powerful pressure wave and spray of shrapnel taking out the pirate assault team.

Anyone who survived the blast was torn up by Nora's carbine, streaks of white ionized gas tore into whoever was left, their broken armor doing little to stop them. The hallway was clear now, the ground scorched from the grenade with a black blast mark mixed in with sickening red stains. With the bridge defended for the moment, Richard ran back to his command terminal to assess the Pathfinder's systems. He began to watch the readouts of the ship's still functional systems, his face going pale and fur standing on end.

To put it lightly: It wasn't good.

Only a few critical systems were still operational, power was only being supplied by the backup fuel cells. Oxygen recycling was offline entirely as well as communications, the engines were no longer responding to any input commands either.

None of the other decks were responding to comms, most of them had been breached anyway, anyone who had survived had most likely been overwhelmed by the pirates. To make matters worse, multiple electrical fires had started aboard the decks that hadn't been breached and were slowly spreading out. The ship's reactor had also been punctured and was no longer operational, it's built-in shutdown system was the only thing preventing it from going nuclear.

In other words, the ship was doomed.

With a drawn out sigh, Richard spoke: "That's it, we're abandoning ship." Nora, still watching the door—what was left of it anyway, with her carbine. She spoke up.

"Sir?"

"That's an order Lieutenant, we need to get out of here." said Richard as he checked his magnum, noticing the slight objection in her voice.

"But sir, we might be the only ones left! We have to at least try and look for them!"

"Dammit Lieutenant, we don't have time for this! It's either us, or nobody!"

Nora gritted her teeth in frustration, she stared down at the deck in deep thought, contemplating the Captain's painful decision.

"Y-yes sir, let's go."

"Good, we need to find ourselves a shuttle." Richard and Nora took off down the hall, the ship effectively collapsing around them as they ran. Pipes along the hallway ruptured hot steam into the corridor, singeing exposed fur as they ran through. The hallway conveniently ran straight along the length of the ship, too bad an electrical fire had other ideas. The two foxes came upon of of the ship's bulkhead doors that had been propped open with a shelving unit, jamming the door only halfway closed. The gap was big enough to crawl under. Richard went first, laying down on his belly as he crawled under the door and to the other side. Nora went after him.

The metal shelf begun to audibly groan, it was beginning to be overwhelmed by the door's hydraulic mechanism. Nora panicked and scrambled to get through the gap, only just standing up as the heavy door completely squashed the metal blockage, missing the very tip of her tail by just a few inches.

They continued running until they reached the hangar near the middle of the ship. Inside was the bloody leftovers of a gruesome battle between the crew and the pirates. Crates had been stacked up to serve as cover for the defending crew, whose bodies littered the hangar deck along with multiple pirates. The defenders initially had an advantage with their small wall of crates for cover and that the pirates only came in with shuttles—who's deployment doors served as a deadly choke point. They quickly lost it however when the pirates bought in heavy weapons—one of the bodies was clad in a suit of power armor with a large automatic grenade launcher on the floor nearby, it's drum of 40 millimeter high explosive ammunition laying next to it; he was caught reloading.

Near the back of the hangar sat a shuttle, it was one of the navy's larger models with a separate cockpit and troop bay. It was, thankfully, intact. Only a few black marks from small-arms fire dotted it's hull, but nothing appeared blown off or otherwise missing. Another explosion rocked the hangar as the two ran towards the shuttle, throwing Nora off her feet. A literal wall of fire poured out of the doorway they used to enter the hangar, giant fireball filling the large open room. Richard hauled Nora off the deck, practically pulling her to the shuttle's rear door as the Pathfinder's hangar bay began to collapse around them.

"Can you fly this thing Lieutenant?" Richard asked as they both sat down in the shuttle cockpit's adjacent pilot seats.

"Sort of, I was never too good with these things!"

"Doesn't matter! Get us out of here!"

Nora flicked the switch mounted to the front panel marked 'Startup sequence', the shuttle's two engines began to warm up. The various screens in the cockpit lit up, displaying the transport's system status, none of these were too important at the moment however. What did matter was the bar gauge indicating the ship's fuel supply—reading a healthy 83 percent. Nora gripped the throttle lever and flight stick, pulling it slightly back to angle the shuttle up and out of the hangar. She shoved the throttle forwards, the whole shuttle vibrating as it's twin engines shunted it forwards out of the hangar and into the endless void of space.

Author's notes:

This will be the beginning of my (hopefully) first full-length story. Yeah, I know the writing isn't top notch or bleeding quality, this is only the second thing I've written just for fun, so don't expect it to be as good as some of the other fics here. I'll try and improve my writing as I update this, any feedback on this is welcome and greatly appreciated! Well, helpful feedback anyways...