Hello, everyone. First and foremost, I owe everyone who has read this story a massive apology. Real Life has been a cruel mistress these past few months, as I explained in my Halo story updates, well, there's been an ongoing domestic situation to which I have been drawn in as one part third party, one part impromptu peacemaker and one part semi-willing legal adviser (and when Party X and Party Y are both at each others throats and both are related to you, it puts you in a very awkward situation, let me tell you). On top of that, my workload's been picking up, and I've actually had a couple of trials under my belt now. Still plenty of room for improvement, but well, that's life. Live and learn and all that.
Hopefully, though, things are starting to calm down, and I can get back to a more regular posting schedule. I've got a lot of this story in rough draft format sitting on my hard drive, but polishing it is the hard part. Indeed, that's been another part of the hold up, conferring with other individuals and deciding which way this story is going to go, based on some of the newer canons. We've decided to make minor alterations to our plans, but to keep going forward for the most part, as, well, let's face it, this story doesn't exactly have the strictest adherence to canon, post A Crack In Time, as it is. I only hope that I can do a good job with this, and that this story is somewhat worth the wait.
Thank you, all of you, for both your patience and for taking the time to read the story. I really appreciate you taking the time to do so, and hope you find it a worthwhile investment of your time. And as always, special thanks to Swordsman289, Boondock Jake, Atlan, Orsai, and Spartan303. Hats off to you, my friends, for all your help with this one.
Chapter Three: New Arrivals
Ratchet grunted as he clambered into the Aphelion and started the warm up routine. The computer systems came to life as the atmospheric thrusters came online. His large eyes looked over the control panels with practiced ease. Green across the board, confirmed moments later by the ship herself. Excellent. He fastened his restraints and triple checked the navigational coordinates that would take him to Ichar III. Solid there as well, the Lombax thought to himself.
"You strapped in good?" he asked as he looked over towards Clank. The diminutive robot nodded in response.
"I am secured," he said. He blinked his eyes a couple of times and then gazed at the coordinates. "Though I have to admit, I do not understand why we are departing so soon. Ms. Cross is not due to arrive at Ichar III for at least another thirty six hours."
"It's going to take us four hours to get there, and I do want to be there early just in case there are some mishaps along the way." Ratchet said as he secured and sealed the helmet of his hyperflux armor. Perhaps it was overkill, but if something happened, he didn't want to worry about decompression en-route to their destination.
"Being a proper gentleman, for once, I see." Clank said with a quiet chuckle, placing his hands behind his head.
"Hey!" Ratchet gave him an indignant look… or at least what Clank thought was an indignant look. Hard to tell with that visor and faceplate in the way. "I can be a gentleman when I want to be."
"Ahh, so this is a special occasion warranting those skills?" he gave his companion a knowing look.
Silence met his response as they lifted up off the ground, the roof over Ratchet's section of the apartment complexes' garage opening up. The Lombax let out a grunt as he shot up towards the sky. Then the inertial dampeners kicked in and the pressure on his chest eased. In seconds, the blue sky of Kerwan had faded away to a black abyss, dotted by motes of white, blue, and red light. The drone of the Aphelion's engines faded into silence with only a faint vibration indicating that they were running at all.
Ratchet let a smile drift over his face as he found himself back in one of the few places that he'd call his "natural" element. He dipped his ship away from the major traffic lanes as he pulled up a local sensor grid. Nothing really out here, but he kept his thrusters at forty percent anyway. Never knew when one of those stealthed police ships was going to be cruising along, and he definitely did not wish to start this trip off with a citation.
"So, have you decided what you're going to be doing when we arrive at our destination?" Clank spoke up.
"Get a room close to where the Megacorp ships are going to be, then get a feel for the place until Angela gets there." Ratchet said, looking back down at his sensor grid and making certain that there were no ships in proximity before executing a turn that took them towards the end of Kerwan's FTL exclusion zone. Like most planets, the Kerwan government had a region around the planet where the use of FTL travel was strictly prohibited. Modern ships had fail-safes that disengaged the warp and hyperdrives if the nav computers detected a large gravitational field in front of the craft such as a planet or an asteroid… but that wouldn't help much if there was a ship in the way.
Ratchet suppressed a shiver, remembering the carnage he'd seen a few times when someone had decided to violate the exclusion zone and been rather unlucky. He was suddenly aware of Clank clearing his "throat".
"Yes?" He looked over at his friend.
"I asked you if you were planning to follow her to Yeedil after this." The robot said.
"Not sure. We haven't seen each other in years, Clank," he let out a sigh. "And I imagine that she's going to be pretty ticked off that her project's getting axed by the board of directors. After all the reports she's going to have to file… well… she may not want to see or speak with anyone." He remained silent for a few moments. "I suspect that there are still some knuckleheads at Megacorp that blame her for the Protopet disaster, and to be honest, I'm worried they're going to use this as a chance to fire her."
"That would be illogical. She is one of their best scientists."
Ratchet shook his head as they approached the boundary line, "Minimum Safe Distance" or "MSD" most called it. "Clank… you've been around organics for how many years, and you haven't figured out that we sometimes do really stupid things that make no logical sense…" he chuckled for a bit. "Hell, you should have figured that out within thirty seconds of Qwark sicing his Blargian snagglebeast on us." Not that self-aware robots were sometimes any better, the Lombax thought to himself.
"True," the robot tapped a finger against his chin. "But I had hope that a mega-corporation would be more inclined—"
"A mega-corporation that has some of its Board positions chaired by those same organics that I just told you can make some really stupid decisions," Ratchet muttered as they passed the MSD line. He reached down and flipped the cover off the Aphelion's hyperdive unit, checked his coordinates one last time, and then flipped the switches.
There was a high-pitched whine inside the cockpit and in the blink of an eye the starfighter had disappeared.
Ratchet glanced at the ship's chronometer, one hour down, four to go, and leaned back into his seat. Aphelion's cockpit was small, but at least her seats were comfy, he supposed. He glanced over to the vidscreen in the central console, rolling his eyes behind his helmet as his companion kept flipping back and forth between the local science channels and watching reruns of his personal show.
Ratchet's gaze drifted outside the cockpit one more time. They'd left Solona behind about forty minutes ago and increased their speed afterwards. The blurred starlight had likewise vanished. In-between galaxies, there was only the black void of space. For a moment, he contemplated about one of his nemeses, Nefarious. The first showdown with the robotic mad scientist had culminated with the Doctor and Lawrence apparently trapped on an asteroid drifting through the emptiness of this void. There was an almost crushing sense of isolation and loneliness out here and he instinctively doubled checked the backup generators' status and his distress beacon.
Clank was chuckling at something, and Ratchet looked over to see the robot's on screen persona thrashing several henchmen that were several times his size while ricocheting laser fire ripped the room apart around them.
"What's so funny?" he asked, arching an eyebrow behind his visor.
"You can't really see it, but there was a blooper during one of this scene's takes," Clank said, still chuckling. "You see, the guide wire system that we were all attached too…" he gestured to some of the acrobatics the actors were pulling as the battle raged, "well… one of the stagehands was very new at that sort of thing…"
"I think I can see where this is heading," Ratchet said.
"Let's see, Lewis and Charles were sent hurtling into one another, Baron von Clouse's actor was slammed into a column…" Clank tapped off the casualties on his fingers.
"And you?"
There was a nervous chuckle and Clank paused the feed. "Well, if you look very closely at this wall right here," he pointed to a corner in the far side of the shot. Squinting, Ratchet thought that he could see what appeared to be a tiny dent in the wall that appeared to look suspiciously like an imprint of Clank's body. He winced a bit. Stage walls or not, that had to leave a mark.
"I take it that was it for the day, and probably that guy's career." The Lombax spoke up.
"Yes to the first, no to the second." Clank said. "We needed a bit of time to get everything straightened back out, and repair the various actors. As for the stagehand, I believe he was simply transferred into another area of the studio. I suspect they reasoned he probably should have had closer supervision."
"I see—"
"Excuse me for interrupting you two, but we are receiving a priority call from a secured channel," Aphelion said.
Ratchet looked down at the console and saw the words 'Incoming Call' flashing across it, followed by a number. He frowned and narrowed his eyes. Why would she be calling him out here?
"Open up the link," he said, and got a look at a very familiar Cazarian face. Dark fur surrounded a feline face, which was framed by an ornamental band of golden metal.
"Sasha…" he said quietly.
"Ratchet…" she returned, her voice rather neutral.
"Greetings, Captain Phyornix," Clank spoke up, his tone rather more jovial. "What can we do for you?"
"It's Admiral Phyornix, now, Clank," her eyes focused on him, a small smile appearing on her face.
"Oh, my apolo—"
"No need to apologize, no harm done," the Federation officer said. She took a step back away from the projector, allowing the duo to see a bit more of her purple uniform and the glistening blue stars that indicated her rank.
"Should have figured you'd go back to being in the military once your tenure as Mayor was up," Ratchet remarked, more to himself than to anyone else. "At any rate, what do you want?" He swore he could see her tail lash back and forth in agitation as she glanced back over to him.
"You're headed for the Bogon Galaxy, right?" she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
"You spying on us?" Ratchet narrowed his eyes.
"I keep tabs on all my friends," her voice was neutral again, before she let out a sigh. "Look… I know that we didn't… exactly part on the best of terms…"
"That's putting it mildly," the Lombax muttered under his breath.
"Ratchet, this is serious," there was a tone in her voice that made him look back at her. "I didn't call you up just to dredge up some memories like a vindictive ex." She uncrossed her arms, and looked down at the floor for a moment. "I have been keeping tabs on you, and my PDA alerted me a while ago that your ship had logged a flight path towards Bogon. The Galactic Federation doesn't officially have any sovereign jurisdiction out there, but that doesn't mean that we don't have contacts and allies."
"Is there a problem at our destination that we are not yet aware of?" Clank spoke up.
"Not officially… at least, not yet," Sasha shook her head. "But the local sensor grids have been going haywire over there over the past twenty four hours. Spatial tears and dimensional rifts have been appearing by the hundreds in both the Bogon and the Polaris galaxies. None of them near populated areas so far, but no one's been able to figure out what the hell's going on over there just yet."
"Hundreds?" Clank muttered, rubbing his chin. "A tear here and there is not unheard of, or all that uncommon. But a spike of that magnitude?"
"I know." Sasha muttered. "My fath… President Phyornix ordered all our forces to standby alert, in case it starts happening here."
"Wait a minute," Ratchet waived his hand towards the screen "All of you?"
The Cazarian nodded her head. "All leaves cancelled, all reserves called up for both the fleet officers and the Ranger Corps." Sasha said. "If he's taking things that seriously, it should tell you something."
The duo shared a look and Ratchet found himself frowning behind his helmet one more time.
"Look," Sasha said, drawing the Lombax's attention back towards the vidscreen. "I know things are over and done between us. But that doesn't mean I'm not still your friend. Whatever's going on over there can't be natural. Be careful, okay?"
His frown softened for a moment, and Ratchet nodded his head. "Gotcha… thanks for the heads up."
"You're welcome. Phyornix out." She said, before killing the feed.
There was silence in the cockpit for a few moments, and Ratchet instinctively looked over down at his wrist, where his storage deck was strapped. "Why am I suddenly glad that I brought you along?" he muttered aloud.
"You know it lacks the capacity to respond." Clank said.
"Rhetorical question, Clank," Ratchet muttered softly. Then he shook his head in disgust. "Why does it seem like every single time that I try to relax and enjoy myself, the universe decides to throw some new hazard at me?" he glanced up at the black abyss above him. "Seriously? Was I some sort of mass murdering psychopath in a previous life? What did I do to deserve this?"
"We do not know for certain that it is something that is going to spark a crisis, Ratchet." Clank said with a shrug. "Hundreds of simultaneous rifts does suggest, as Admiral Phyornix indicated, an unnatural factor at play, but that by itself doesn't mean that another galactic conflict is about to get underway."
"Since when has our luck ever been that good?" Ratchet glanced over at Clank out of the side of his visor.
"Well, you've managed to survive everything you've been through so far. I would say that alone indicates some fair amount of luck." Clank chuckled a bit as he finished speaking.
Ratchet remained silent for a moment. "Touché," he growled.
"At any rate, if you do not mind…" the robot said as he flipped his show back on and leaned back in his chair. Before long he was once again laughing his head off, though whether it was from the events on the screen or remembering things that happened while shooting, Ratchet couldn't say.
Laxor Ar-Zel shook his head back and forth as he pulled himself back up into his command chair. His right secondary limb came down and cradled his head, massaging the top of it through his helmet. "Report" the Shartan chittered to his command staff, the message a combination of short range auditory commands and low-level psychic communication.
"AM generators one, two, four, and seven offline, five and eight damaged, attempting to compensate." One staff officer said.
"Shield layers one and two stabilizing across port half of ship, starboard shields coming back online." Said another one.
"Weapon systems still online."
"Communications established with ten of our support ships, displaying their positions now." The navigational officer said, bringing up a display on a large screen a few meters in front of where the Laxor sat. Ar-Zel's six eyes looked over the information. Four Traxis class light cruisers and a half dozen Omnius class destroyers, the ones that had been closest to Dreadnought when that… anomaly… or whatever it was, had pulled them in.
"Increase scanner range; put as much energy into the sensors as they can take!" He slammed his left fist down on the command chair. That couldn't be all that survived, could it? His task force had consisted of thousands of capital class vessels. The thought that whatever had been unleashed upon them had reduced them to less than a dozen strong…
The seconds ticked by with agonizing slowness for the Shartan commander as other reports drifted in, while his support ships reported their own damage. Finally, he felt the nav officer's mind brush against his own.
"Scans for the next three hundred light years devoid of any of our ships… or any of the enemies'…" he said. There was a pause. "There are strange fluctuations though, and energy readings that seem to mirror that of the tear that we were pulled into."
Ar-Zel clasped his hands in front of his face and bowed his head momentarily. "That is a relief, I think…"
"Sir?" The "voice" was that of Elbron, his Tesarect, second-in-command of the fleet and the primary officer of the ground troops.
"It is possible that our forces have been scattered, not destroyed… even our deployed ground troops may still be partially intact." He looked around at his command staff. Perhaps that was unrealistically optimistic of him, but the hope, however faint, that more of his task force might be intact… "I want full assessments from every ship that's still with us. Shipmasters are to connect to my primary channel in ten minutes. In the meantime, try to expand the scanners, search for anything, ally, enemy, I do not care which."
A chorus of affirmatives echoed in his mind, and the insectoid alien leaned back in his chair. He was tempted to remove his helmet, have a medic see to the concussion that he was certain he'd gotten. There'd be time later, once they'd decided what to do. In the meanwhile, he needed to look over the more detailed reports from the section leaders throughout the ship. He'd start with engineering.
Ten minutes passed quickly and the Laxor was soon in conversation with the other shipmasters of his rather rag-tag looking task force. The reports were better than he dared to hope. Every ship had suffered some damage, either in the battle or when the rifts had swallowed them up and spat them out, but every ship could fly and if need be fight. Navigational data was less promising. No recognized star patterns or other features within several hundred light years of this position. They'd been dumped in some new galaxy. All the more imperative to try and find the rest of his scattered fleet.
"We need to begin a sector by sector sweep of this galaxy and locate the rest of our surviving forces," Ar-Zel said as he looked down at a datapad one of his staff officers handed him. His mandibles flickered in what approximated a grin among his kind and he nodded. One of his secondary arms reached down from over his shoulder, picked it up, and handed it back to his subordinate.
"Laxor, how are we to proceed? Do you wish for us to split up, or do you wish for us to remain close to the Dreadnought?" the voice was Daryiat, one of the cruiser captains. The Laxor clacked his mandibles together and leaned forward as he gazed at Daryiat's viewing screen.
Under ordinary circumstances, when they were not engaged in military action and when there were no clear cut orders from their commanders or the Hives, protocol held to put things to a vote among the command staff of a ship. But this was still technically a military action, and when none of the other captains voiced objections, Ar-Zel knew that they were deferring to his judgment. He nodded towards the viewing screens and let out a mental sigh.
"Our first priority is to get the primary generators of the flagship back up and running," the Laxor said, tapping his four arms together. "Dreadnought sustained heavy damage during the fighting with the Tribunal and the Imperials, and several of our onboard fabricators were damaged. We can repair one of the generators, but for the others, we are going to have to scavenge." He paused for a moment, before sitting back on his command chair. "The good news is that our long range sensors have detected a planet approximately two hundred light years away. Energy readings indicate that the planet has a number of power sources that might be compatible with our systems."
"Are we to attempt trading? Or take them by force?" Daryiat spoke up.
"I would prefer to trade, if only to spare us further combat losses… but I doubt that the locals will be so… hospitable," the Laxor growled. "Our courses are set, fall in place behind the flagship, and maintain proper spacing. We'll be making the warp transition in five minutes."
As one, the shipmasters nodded and began to bark out telepathic orders to their staff officers. Soon, the meager strike force was rearranging itself around Dreadnought. Laxor Ar-Zel sighed as he stared at his ship, eyes roaming over its weapon emplacements as its massive engines rumbled to life. The universe was a harsh, unforgiving place; a cruel and vindictive reality where the strong crushed and the weak died. It was a lesson that history had taught his people again and again and again. How many times, he wondered, had they been discovered by a new species, only for that race to begin to try to take Shartan holdings and assimilate or enslave his people? Two dozen? Three? How many times had their creators discovered that, before they'd eventually succumbed to their fates? Why should they suspect the entities that existed in this galaxy to be any different?
He looked over the weapon systems of his ship one more time and nodded his head solemnly. If it came to battle, the people of this galaxy would learn that the Shartan could more than hold their own.
As the Shartan fleet streaked off towards its destination, what neither Ar-Zel nor anyone else knew was that their ships had been observed by a tiny probe droid. Composed of a special absorbent material and emitting virtually no thermal, electrical, or other such energy emissions, it was invisible to all but the most advanced sensor systems. The feed that it had picked up was transmitted in real time back to the Solona Galaxy via a stealthed sub-space comm. relay network, where Doctor Nefarious tapped his clawed fingers together, his eyes burning as he glanced over towards Lawrence.
"Lawrence, run those ship profiles through our databanks, see if they match anything," he turned towards another one of his underlings, the one overseeing the probe's operation, a small black robot of humanoid design that stood about a meter tall. "You, make sure that drone follows that fleet, and do not lose track of them, or so help me, I'll take you apart and turn you into a trash compactor!" he rubbed his hands together and started to chuckle to himself.
The drone let out a quiet 'eep' and hastily began to pound away on the control console in front of it. Moments later the probe had slipped into FTL… and its overseer let out a screech as the drone overshot its intended target by several trillion kilometers. Nefarious paused and glanced at the readouts, cocking his head to the side.
"What in the…" he growled as he walked over towards the small robot that was operating the probe. His underling quivered as the Doctor's approached, before it let out a shriek and shut down. The robot slumped out of its chair and landed on the floor, making a dull 'thud' as it impacted.
Nefarious sighed and pinched the temple regions of his head. "Good help is so hard to find these days… Why am I constantly surrounded by incompetents?"
"Well, Sir, you were the one who decided to forgo a neural processor upgrade to the PT-7 models…" Lawrence said as he moved up behind his boss and nudged the offline robot. "As it stands, Sir, it seems as though our new friends are much slower than we anticipated." He leaned in close to look at the date readouts. "Indeed, judging by this, they're only doing about a hundred light years per hour, give or take a few billion kilometers."
Nefarious' eyes dimmed. "What…" he said.
"Perhaps our hopes for new technology were misplaced, Sir," Lawrence said, adjusting his bowtie. "Or perhaps they're simply not doing their best speed," he said, sitting down at the control panel and bringing the probe back around to follow the strange ships. "The smaller ones seem to be flanking out and supporting the large one, and I'd wager that these," he gestured to a series of massive, jagged discolorations running the length of the ship, and several other blackened areas that resembled pockmarks, "are probably not for show."
"They got in a fight with something… or the rifts may have done that to their ships." Nefarious muttered as he leaned against the console. He stared closely at the aft starboard region of the ship, where a pair of enormous gashes stood out like great gaping wounds. "Still… I hope that we can get something useful from these newcomers. I'd hate to have gotten myself all worked up for nothing."
"Oh nonsense, Sir," Lawrence said, glad that his boss' back was to him, "I doubt anyone would have noticed a difference in your behavior, anyway."
Nefarious remained silent and shook his head. Was the universe mocking him again? To be the first to have reached the rifts, only for them to have spat out what was the space equivalent of a bunch of backwards bumbling barbarians that apparently hadn't even discovered hyperspace technology yet?
There was a small dinging noise from the PDA that Lawrence was holding and the robotic butler looked down at it. "Well, that confirms our suspicions, Sir," he said, looking back at the smooth, oblong shapes of the strange fleet. "These profiles do not match any known warship configuration in the Solona, Bogon, or Polaris galaxies."
Nefarious said nothing, but merely nodded his head and tried to plot out his next move. He turned back towards the main viewing screen, staring at the eleven ships as they made their way slowly through the stars. The only upside to this situation so far was that these did indeed seem to be warships of some sort. He had a hard time imagining that those bulbous protrusions running along the ships' ventral and dorsal regions could be anything other than some type of weapon systems. The probe's sensors were also showing several regions that seemed designed to open up and separate just slightly, though there was no telling whether that was to disgorge fighter craft or to launch missiles or torpedoes of some sort. And, he thought to himself, there were still several hundred more rifts that probes were still en-route to. Maybe they'd find someone more advanced, or who had something worth salvaging.
The robotic supervillain suddenly paused for a moment and straightened up. Odd… he'd taken that setback in fairly good form. No screaming, no shouting, no harming a minion… he looked down at the PT-7 at his feet. Well, no permanently harming one, at any rate. Perhaps those anger management classes were finally starting to pay off. A fiendish approximation of a grin came over his skeletal visage as one happy thought transitioned into another one. He carelessly kicked his offline underling away as he clasped his hands behind his back and began to walk back towards his command room.
Visions appeared in his circuits as he exited the main chamber. The wreckage of Federation starships burning above worlds, the Phoenix exploding, untold trillions of organics on their knees before him, begging for mercy while acknowledging him as their master. Tearing Ratchet limb from limb in front of his friends' horrified eyes, perhaps reducing Clank to nothing more than his head and a power source. The thought of the little traitor being forced to watch as Nefarious destroyed all he held dear and laid waste to any who opposed him was an invigorating one, and the Doctor couldn't help but chuckle a bit. Perhaps do the same to Ratchet? He still had the blueprints for the biobliterator lying around somewhere. Maybe even brainwash him, turn him against the others? Victory did taste best when seasoned with a bit of irony…
Nefarious shook his head at that thought. No. None of that for the Lombax. He'd underestimated the furry little pest too many times, and Ratchet had escaped too many death traps. Too much could go wrong. He'd have to settle for putting a pulse laser through Ratchet's skull and that being the end of it.
Which would leave "President" Qwark the last thing standing in his way. Fiendish joy transformed into rage in the blink of an eye. That muscle-brained fool… All the tormenting when he was younger, all the foiled plans, all the times he'd been set back by someone who was such an intellectual inferior to him that it had to be expressed in orders of magnitude. Now for that one… for Qwark… perhaps he could take a little extra time with. As with Ratchet, he would have to forgo the use of elaborate and ironic death traps, but perhaps a monologue before shooting him? He'd have to think of something good to talk about, words that would be just as painful as any physical wound.
Nefarious let out another sigh as he entered his main chambers. Perhaps this scheme wouldn't pan out. Perhaps the entities that had been pulled through the rifts were not going to be of much use to him, but in the end it would not matter. He was a machine now, enduring and eternal. His body would not age, not succumb to the teeth of that predator known as time. If it took a hundred years, if it took two hundred, he'd have his vengeance and take his rightful place at the head of the galaxies. And when the time was right, no miserable little would-be hero or his lug-headed allies were going to stop him.
Angela let out a breath as she stared down at the corpse in front of her. They'd finally managed to pry the thing out of its armor, and now it was ready for her examination. She double checked the machinery in the room, and popped her knuckles.
"Right then, let's find out what you are," she muttered to herself.
-0-
Okay, that's it for Chapter Three. Again, my sincerest apologies to everyone for taking so long to continue with this story. I'm going to do my level best to have another chapter up by around this time next week, since I should have a relatively calm weekend to work everything out on. As always, any feedback, advice, suggestions, constructive criticism, etc., are welcomed with open arms. I've never written a Ratchet and Clank story before, and, well, I am curious to know what everyone thinks.
Thank you again, everyone, for taking the time to read this. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Special thanks once again to Atlan, Orsai, Spartan303 and Swordsman289 for their help with this one. Hat's off to you guys, couldn't have done this without you.
To everyone else that has taken the time to read this story, stay safe and have a wonderful day.