Anton Devik stood to address the incoming transmission. It was on the secure frequency detailed to him earlier; short-beam laser, direct line of sight to the ship's communications.
The vidscreen cleared its view of the system's star. The Versailles had halted within the first and second rings made by the orbit of two medium-sized planets, one volcanic and one an icy waste. Its rudimentary survey scanners detected a veritable wealth of natural resources in the forms of metals and rare gases. They had been waiting for half an hour for contact regarding where to drop off the scrapped hulk. Devik personified the feelings of his crew, a ball of nervous anticipation. They wanted to collect their pay and get to something that was familiar, preferably not beyond United Systems space for once.
The transmission winked into existence as the signal was received. Devik coolly regarded the dark silhouette. Figures… these underworld types never have time for the limelight, he thought.
"Good day, Mr. Devik," said the silhouette, using a voice scrambler. "Adjust your course to these coordinates. You will attain geosynchronous orbit above the end destination. Your pay will be waiting upon successful delivery."
As Devik was about to speak, the deep voice blinked out of existence almost as fast as it had appeared. He instead let out an aggravated growl. The data feed commenced to provide the Versaille's ticket out of this unknown part of the galaxy: a Class A Garden planet. The outline of a rather large installation of some sort could be seen from orbit. The Versailles's engines roared into life and started toward the planet, calculating a trajectory to best enter the desired location.
As his eyes began to glaze over the scores of numbers his pilot was currently entering, Anton Devik noticed the name of this planet.
Alia Minora.
/ / / /
Within the dead ship being carried to another final resting place, the spider drone stirred. Its eyes winked on as its destination neared, stasis disabled. It checked over the hypersleep chamber once, ensuring no damage had occurred in transit. Vitals were normal. Brain wave activity indicated that the subject had a dreamless rest. The drone cut out the feed once it reviewed the last twenty-five days recorded, SPARATAN having received satisfactory data.
The integrity of the compartment was intact; the crew had apparently lacked a sense of curiosity of what exactly they were hauling. Then again, it was out of sight, out of mind. The freighter had been modified to seal many feet-thick blast doors to the cargo bay in event of a catastrophic situation. Not that something an obstacle requiring a simple wire bypass could stop this model of drone.
Activating its active camouflage, the drone opened a hatch and exited the compartment. The hatch closed again, being solely a mechanical system that would not register on a typical electrical sensor. The arachnid platform began creeping its way towards the engineering deck, carrying out its directive.
/ / / /
On the planet's surface, an underground hangar opened its massive bay doors, a structure that also acted as a helipad for the local aerial craft on the surface when not performing its intended purpose. A contingent of Maximus construction drones rose up into the air in succession, glorified spheres the size of the standard Terran half-basketball court, six clusters of three arms each assembled in equilateral triangles situated to manipulate six planes of movement, similar to a three dimensional graph, equipped with lockable universal joints for extended range of motion until a grip on an object was attained. The orders to retrieve the hulk, a wealth of raw materials in and of itself even if it was many years disabled, were clear; they oriented themselves in the direction of the star freighter orbiting directly above them up in the far reaches of the planet's atmosphere.
The last drone to leave the confines of the installation, however, was not like the others. It was much larger, about the size of a typical USCM dropship, though its general shape was more curved than the sharp angular faces typically preferred by the military, the pilot's cockpit also non-existent. The carrying capacity had been optimized to carry an eighth more personnel than the trusty dropship, and could carry nearly thrice as much weight.
Lead marksman Marrek Helial shifted the weight of his charge launcher slung over his shoulder to a more ready position where he sat. The vest carrying its odd ammunition, metal spheres marked with a thin band of a particular color wrapped once around its circumference, had begun to grow tight under the pressure of his gun's strap. He closed his eyes, then opened them again to reveal one dark green iris, and one orb as dark as night that seemed as if blind.
Both eyes were used in their full facility to cast about his gaze to the members of his command, a small squad of eight other individuals with their respective Maximus proprietary armaments. Two others carried a charge launcher similar in design to a typical grenade launcher, save the presence of only three chambers designed to hold a much more spherical payload; Marrek loved his gun due to its utility, although the combined weight of weapon and its limited extra charges was sometimes a bother. The rest carried either a gauss rifle, flechette gun, or even both. The gauss rifle was the original staple of Maximus's corporate diet in its infantile stages, having found a niche in many defense departments as a surprisingly non-lethal weapon. These were not those, but ones optimized to fire forty-five caliber depleted uranium spikes with the diameter of a pencil at hypersonic speeds; armor or not, they had the stopping power to blow a target back, or even punch right through bare flesh. Lastly were the flechette guns, courtesy of Daidalos Technologies Corporation, a competitor turned mutual business partner. They applied the same theory as the gauss rifle, yet in a different principle. A cluster of magnetically bound needles, typically blunted or left with point bare, is ejected and separated, with an effect akin to a standard shotgun. It was also a general rule for flechetteers to also carry a few specialized "slugs" as a precaution, miniaturized charges in function but usually performing a safer, non-lethal function.
Marrek's wrist comm. gave a little clicking tone, indicating it was almost time to get down to business. He stood up and walked to the back of the transport, next to the ramp that would lower in about two minutes.
"Listen up: we have nineteen targets to eliminate, and three are being taken care of as we speak. Flechetteers are on point duty. This mission requires a profile of low-tech raiders hitting an easy target. You might as well leave your rifles behind; I know you love your girlfriends, but you might as well leave them behind for this one.
"Flechettes and launchers, load up mock conventional ammo. We need to make this look accurate. The rest of you," he paused, looking intently at each of them before the smirk at the edge of his mouth erupted into a full smile of teeth and a wicked gleam in his eye.
"Get physical. We're pirates, after all, and I hear there's some gals on that steamer."
Marrek shifted around, facing the gang-ramp, having already prepared his own launcher with high-explosive charges designed to mirror the yield of typical low-grade munitions. His men let out small chuckles and cat-calls as they dropped their unnecessary equipment into their respective seats, changing out magazines and charges, and grabbing a melee weapon. Maximus Corporation understood that a good sword, club, or even an improvised weapon such as a chain out-performed even the most sophisticated technology out there in certain circumstances.
In the back, one of the marksmen began to jitter, a tremor rocking his torso and arms as he began to cackle like a madman, eyes wild. His trigger finger was dangerously close to letting a flechette round off in the close quarters of the transport drone's hold. Helial whirled and focused his dark eye on the Maximus tough in question.
"And for the love of God, Jenkins, don't lose it this time! I had to spend that whole week cleaning that blood and other shit off my uniform…"
/ / / /
The Professor had been standing on a field adjacent to the helipad top of the ship hangar when the warning klaxon to clear the surrounding area sounded. High intensity magnetic propulsion tended to be hazardous to biological beings in close proximity.
He looked once more towards the forest bordering the research installation. Alexander had chosen the temperate continent a few degrees above the equator of Alia Minora, as Darkarlov had come to call it, instead of the strange alpha-numeric notation preferred by today's corporate giants privileged to expand into the stars and broker planets. The trees here still bore the scars of a recent fire brought on during the latest incursion of the local xenomorph population. Ben could spot a smoking depression that began to cause a tree resembling an evergreen, several decades old and a few stories high, to teeter, totter, before slowly causing it to fall down with a rolling, almost sad whoosh, creating a resounding crash.
Darkarlov felt the platform disengage and, unprepared for the sudden jolt up, then down, lurched forward to catch himself on the acid-resistant, many feet thick glass that made his cage.
Having earned a short respite from the preparations associated with a new test subject, Darkarlov hoped he could have spent the whole afternoon on the surface, despite its limited amount of activities. Then again, perhaps this was for the best: he would have to then witness another murder of innocent people, a tragedy playing several hundred miles above him in space.
As the walls of the facility provided a solid color for the glass, a holographic display played across the four sides of the cube around the Professor. He always hated when he was forced to endure watching and hearing the latest casualties as a direct result of his work-, No, Alexander's work. Alexander simply used Ben as the tool for his own entertainment, an old relic of a past conquest, in exemplum of Maximus Corporation's honey-tongued recruitment policy. Darkarlov had signed a contract with Faust made incarnate.
SPARTAN's avatar portrait flashed into the upper right corner as he dictated the latest news, a look of bemusement over his inhuman, nearly emotionless visage.
"STATUS REPORT: FIVE PROJECTS, TERMINATED. THREE DUE TO COMPOUND SEQEUNCE DEVIATION RESULTING IN ORGAN FAILURE. ONE SUFFERED SKELETAL AND NERVOUS SYSTEM DISINTEGRATION, EUTHANIZED. LAST SUBJECT, XTCE-0002439, EXPIRED AS ONLY HALF OF BODY UNDERWENT SUCCESFUL TRANSFORMATION; THE REST WAS CONSUMED BY THE CHARACTERISTIC ACIDIC BLOOD. THE AUTOPSY IS AWAITING YOUR LEISURE, PROFESSOR." Ben had shut his eyes before the stream of photographs documenting each gruesome failure began to materialize on each face of glass, in tune with SPARTAN's narration. He had already seen the first five-hundred-and-forty-three. He had stopped looking after that.
The platform had finally stopped, at the level he required. The doors slid open, and the Professor left without a word in search of the subject prep room.
I sincerely hope -, No, I don't know what to hope for any longer. If I fail, this one may be all the better for it. If I succeed, will I doom him to something more horrible than death? Oh Lord, I am not sure, not sure what to do…
Again, the Professor beat back a tear by blinking profusely and stopping mid-stride to put his hands on the wall. He sniffed once, got a grip on himself, adopted that grim visage of purpose he obtained during a tour of duty in the Darellian Uprising, and started on his way again.
/ / / /
As events played elsewhere, the engineer Yvonne aboard the Versailles was close to making a discovery. Ignoring her captain's order, or suggestion as she saw it due to her union rights, she had decided to instead take apart the transponder, destroying it in the process instead of attempting another fruitless attempt to try and fix it.
She finished using the plasma torch, removing the face shield obscuring her face. Yvonne, being of Slavic descent, had the nearly regal looks of some distinct line in old Earth's long history. It was mainly covered up the grime and dust of her profession, as was her bobbed hair.
"Well, hello there, what are you?" she muttered, pulling a small glass-looking plate that had been obscured by some circuitry and wires. Turning around towards her workbench in the engine room, the engineer examined designs imprinted on the plate that looked like they belonged on a piece going into some sort of sophisticated electronics device. What was it doing saddled behind a low-grade commercial grade transponder?
She turned it to look at it from a different angle, and then held it again like a tablet. She did not notice the faint reflection of something large shifting on the ceiling. Yvonne contemplated whether or not to tell Devik about what she had found. The translucent silhouette coiled its eight limbs underneath it.
As she brought her wrist comm. up to her mouth to speak, a faint electrical hum sounded as the Arachnica drone pounced onto the unsuspecting woman. She barely had time to turn around and open her mouth to scream.
Momentum carried the drone into Yvonne, snapping her neck, among other things, over the metal workbench. Her face was frozen with an expression of horror. It had intended to subdue the threat, having already activated a low-yield electromagnetic pulse a split-second after its active camouflage suite was taken off. The foolish creature nearly had the reflexes to avoid it, but alas she only succeeded in saving herself from the raiders that were about to enter with the Servitor construction drones sent to retrieve the metal hulk and its hidden treasure.
The others would not share such an easy accident of fate.
/ / / /
"Mr. Devik," the deep throat began, having made contact with Anton Devik again, "Your payment is arriving in solid twenty-five karat gold bars. I would suggest your entire crew assist with unloading the transport; we were unable to provide our own due to the sheer volume."
Devik's eyes widened for a moment; his entire crew? A chill went down his spine. The Versaille's cargo bay doors had only dropped a quarter of the way down. There was still time.
"McHaddock, abort the descent! Helmsman, prepare for emergency hyperspace transit! GET US OUT OF - !"
No one would know the rest of Devik's escape plan as a bolt of blue-white plasma furled around a sphere of pure metallic mass was fired from above by a Maximus submarine that had been shadowing the freighter ever since it left the United Systems border. The captain, his two bridge crew, and that comfortable chair were incinerated as the sphere of mass ripped straight through the bridge, allowing the plasma to fill and scour the compartment. The force of the blast and exit of the sphere through the bottom of the ship rocked the entire ship.
The sleek craft's cloaking suite deactivated a second later, the strain of both systems having tripped the equivalent of a circuit breaker to reset the power grid. An advanced enough sensor array with the latest early warning detection systems would have had a hard time distinguishing the distinctly human ship's signature from a Predator hunting vessel in that instant. A rippling tidal movement revealed an oblong, oval frame with three firing pods oriented around near the mid-section on its underside, one of which was angled down at the bridge of the Versailles. Rivulets of plasma that had not successfully fired were still snaking out of the chamber. A Trebuchet-class mass driver turret mounted on the top of the stealth vessel activated, rising above the sleek curved surface of the top side.
The submarine maneuvering to get a better shot, the mass driver aimed at the bridge that the torpedo bay had just eliminated. A high-explosive shell had been loaded, optimized to mimic the typical ordinance of outdated weaponry a prospective space pirate may have had ready access to.
As the mass driver fired, the whole Maximus ship rocked enough to send it into a spin. The hammer serving as the driver's impetus was accelerated towards the back of the large weapon by gauss force, extending halfway out of the barrel, then violently released into the loaded chamber by the strong hydraulics that normally kept the hammer compressed against it. A resounding, sudden thud would have been heard in a medium where sound could be heard.
The shell took out the bridge, debris hurtling away from the explosion. The hall containing escape pods, situated behind the bridge, had also been compromised, emergency bulkheads dropping into place to prevent further depressurization.
The Versailles having been disabled, the Charon retracted its turret and reactivated its cloaking system. Vanishing into thin air almost as its forebears had in the days of simple world war, when the concept of millions of lives lost was still regarded as global tragedy, it began to make its way out to open water to keep watch.
/ / / /
Meanwhile, McHaddock had received his orders half a second too late. A Servitor sphere wedged itself in between the massive cargo door, crushed in the process. Its sacrifice allowed the others to gain purchase on the door and begin pulling it down. It would have been simpler to have just cut their way into the bay, door or no door, but SPARTAN's directives were clear: the humans needed to doctor the incident.
The nonexistent integrity of the hold prevented any of the hatches leading into it from being opened. The crew of the Versailles had armed themselves the best they could given the circumstances. A few stood ready in a group, having been fortunate enough to have been locked within the mess hall that also held their small store of firearms and barricading themselves with what sparse furnishings they had. The others had grabbed what they could, or hid.
The bay doors having been wrestled down far enough, the transport drone inserted itself into the vast freighter. On the inside, it barely took up a tenth of the hold length-wise, let alone anything width- or height-wise.
Another Servitor slipped inside before the others let go, the ones nearest to the crushed door jamb doing their best to salvage it.
Thrusters engaged, the transport landed near the jagged gash in the scrapped hulk, gang ramp towards the four or five corridors that scanners showed the respective crew members to be holed up in. The sphere kept in between the cargo bay ramp and the rear side of the rusted heap in which the package's compartment was located, arms deployed to rip into the circuitry of the ship through a metal wall to interface with its circuitry, and to use the cutting lasers equipped on the tips of its arms to extract the compartment.
The atmosphere seal secured as the cargo door locked into place. The bulkheads had not unlocked; Maximus controlled the ship now.
The transport's AI determining that conditions had sufficiently returned to normal, the ramp lowered. Helial and his squad walked down in a line, then arranging into three smaller teams, two gunners, one launcher per group.
Marrek nodded at his comrades, and they started towards the mess hall. The other individuals would be easy enough to handle later.
/ / / /
"Cappin'? Cappin'?! Shite."
McHaddock ceased his attempt to raise Devik on his wrist comm. The explosion that rocked the rest of the Versailles must have sent him to meet his maker, along with Hadsfield and that gem of a pilot the rest of the crew had taken to calling Sushi, his proper name incomprehensible to the majority of the ship.
That brought the number of survivors down to nineteen. McHaddock still didn't know what they were up against.
He turned around to the sound of the blast door responding to a security override, multiple locking mechanisms undoing themselves. He figured his chances just shifted from bad to nil. The Irishman wished he had given a kiss to that bonnie lass back home on Luna. He wished he had pursued her earlier. Maybe if he had settled down after the Kesseler arms run that had set him up for a good twenty years and a healthy retirement fund for his kids to get a good education, he would not have been here. Alas, time and fate did not favor him at all.
"Here they come!" someone shouted. The eight of them had overturned chairs, tables, ducked behind the kitchen counter. They all had some experience with firing a gun, but only one of them was ex-military. That one, Jinnsford, had barked at them to spread out instead of cluster behind one large barricade, adding a few choice words under his breath as he took up the position behind the sofa, closest to the door.
Each figure tensed, aimed at the portal from whence would come their adversary. Trigger fingers poised, they waited for the hatch to open. They heard an odd humming sound emanating from behind it.
Jinnsford blinked, a moment of recognition playing across his features. He whirled back at the others and yelled, "GET DOWN!"
The door opened and a loud metallic thump was heard. Jinnsford barely had enough time to look at his end before the sphere hurtling through the air hit him square in the chest, knocking him back. The red colored band around it activated as he fell, sphere indented in his ribs, causing the color to dissipate and be replaced by a blazing white heat.
The blast knocked McHaddock down, even from behind his place up on a slightly higher level protected by the dining table. He was thrown into the wall and had the wind knocked out of him, the pistol he carried dropping somewhere to his right. The Irishman blinked rapidly, trying to clear the dust from his eyes and shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears. Shards of metal and wood stuck out of the wall he was on; he did not need to look to know that he was also just as peppered. He heard muffled screams, ended by a quieter whistle following the hissing bang. Yet, some of the higher pitched screams just kept on going, stopping for breath only to continue on in greater fervor. The banshee's wail, as it might as well be called.
McHaddock looked up, seeing a man in full combat armor above him. There were no tags, no identifying marks, not even a transparent visor. Just the same color scheme of red, yellow, and black. The figure raised its strange weapon and pointed it at McHaddock's head. He felt the butt of his pistol with his right hand, tried bringing to bear on the unknown assailant. The gunman's trigger finger was quicker.
And McHaddock knew no more.
/ / / /
A disclaimer: "Daidalos Technologies Corporation" is not my own. It belongs to a friend I made some time ago on an old Roleplaying forum.