M.J. Markgraf
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BSE Chapter 3-59
🕑 Added 2025-01-25 13:00:08 +0000 UTCAlexander lifted aside a large chunk of metal to allow the rest of the rescue party through the corridor.
Rescue operations were a morbid affair, but they beat dwelling on how close the facility on Eden’s End had come to being destroyed.
The facility survived mostly intact thanks in whole to the people operating the orbital defense array. Harlow hadn’t fired just ordinary missiles at the planet. Mixed in were nuclear weapons.
Soul didn’t have the tac-display, so Alexander was oblivious to the damage caused by Harlow’s attack. Lucas and the rest of the defenders had managed to eliminate the nukes before they reached the planet, but the resulting electromagnetic bursts from a few of the weapons that had detonated disrupted communications to the planet.
The disruption allowed regular missiles to penetrate the defensive envelope. More than one of those made it to the ground, causing significant damage to the recently repaired facility. These were followed by a hail of railgun darts that did little but leave craters on and around the facility.
For some unexplainable reason, his static field array remained active even after the nuclear blasts, ensuring the projectiles lost most of their punch. The thin atmosphere took care of the rest, and terminal velocity caused most of the damage as the tungsten rounds impacted the surface.
If one of those nuclear weapons had managed to get through, he would not be here helping the fleet rescue survivors from their ships, he would be on Harlow’s dreadnought taking revenge until he found Harlow.
That second scenario wasn’t off the table, but they had yet to start combat operations aboard those ships. It would come soon though and Alexander would not be sitting it out.
Everyone passed the blockage and Alexander ducked underneath before setting the debris back down and following the group as they flashed lights into rooms to check for survivors.
Alexander didn’t even know what ship he was on at the moment. He had given command of Wayward Soul to his Executive Officer or second in command. It really wasn’t clear what sort of military structure he wanted to use. Either way, he had turned over command of the ship so he could do something. Sitting around waiting was gnawing at his thoughts.
“Found one,” someone called from up ahead.
Alexander hurried over and placed a RASP on the man’s suit. The person was already unconscious, so he didn’t bother with the sedatives.
The person was placed on a gurney and strapped down to keep them from floating away. The ship’s power was fluctuating so gravity had and would continue to go out as they worked.
He headed back to the obstruction with them and helped them through before returning to the others.
So far five crew members had been rescued from this ship. It wasn’t much but he felt like he was making a difference this way.
After four more hours of searching, they finally declared the ship cleared. Two dozen crew had been rescued from the badly damaged vessel and he was only one crew of many searching the damaged ships.
Alexander had thought about joining the crew searching Stormbreaker, but he quickly realized seeing the corpses of people he knew would not be good for his current mental turmoil.
The rest of the day went pretty much the same way. Clear a ship, and move on to the next. Nobody was stopping to rest until all of the allied wrecks were searched.
The next day, everyone rested and prepared to board the pirate ships. The first would be Harlow’s dreadnought.
That would be a clearing operation and the only prisoner they would be taking would be Harlow, assuming the bastard had somehow survived. There was the possibility of slaves, but Alexander had his doubts that any slaves had managed to survive a full day in damaged ships.
If they did, well, then they would be rescued, but the priority was to find Harlow and take him in or find his corpse to confirm the man was truly dead.
Alexander stepped off the shuttle and onto Talon’s flight deck. Teams of mercenaries were already gathering by their drop ships. With the loss of so many ships, crewed by the mercenary company, their ranks looked a bit thin. Seeing them so depleted after having done so much for him made Alexander upset.
He pushed those emotions to the back of his mind to help stoke his anger at the pirates. It honestly didn’t need much. He searched around for a dropship that had fewer individuals and assigned himself to them.
The Team Leader nodded silently as he approached. Alexander carried a similar flechette minigun as all the armored mercenaries. He would have preferred something a bit more destructive given his current feelings, but deploying explosives inside a wrecked ship would be a monumentally stupid idea.
It wasn’t until after he boarded the ship that he spoke. “Team Leader…”
“Vochenek,” the man replied.
“TL Vochenek, if possible, I would like to be the lead person for your team,” Alexander stated.
The man stared at him quietly for a moment before responding. “If you were in a normal body, I would deny this request out of caution. You are not a combatant, Mr. Kane, and thus not familiar with how we do things as a unit. I should still deny your request, but I won’t, and only because my team has lost people and I somehow doubt you would listen if I did. That being said, I still expect you to follow my orders while we are aboard ship. I don’t want to have to explain to Captain Bloomright how I got you killed in action.”
“I doubt you will need to worry about me, TL, but I will listen to your orders.”
All over the dreadnought, ships docked and disgorged crews of well-equipped, well-trained mercenaries.
Harlow’s ship was in relatively good condition, so resistance was heavy.
Alexander’s team didn’t even make it out of the airlock before coming under small-arms fire.
His defense field kicked in and he waded into the corridor as fire greeted him from both sides. Alexander ripped off a series of shots from his minigun, cutting down the pirates to the one side, while the other mercenaries dealt with the ones behind him.
Honestly, with the augment suits that Alexander had built for them, the mercenaries had better situational awareness than even he did.
He thought hard to see if he could activate some sort of vibrational sensor within his body, but nothing responded.
“Which way, TL?” Alexander asked, resorting to the next best source of information.
The man nodded toward the direction Alexander was facing and they headed down the corridor.
Over the next few hours, they fought their way through the ship until they reached a closed hatch. Alexander pressed his hand against the door, finding it cold to the touch.
“I think it's open to vacuum past here,” he stated.
Vochenek nodded. “Batten, Sarl, double time it to the last hatch and mark it as checked before sealing it.”
The two members of Vochenek’s team nodded and hurried back the way they had come. They returned a few minutes later.
“All set, TL,” one of the men said.
“Brace yourselves,” Alexander told them before prying the panel off the wall and fiddling with it for a bit. Once he found the wires he was looking for, he grabbed them and applied power.
The door jerked open a few inches and the air rushed out.
Alexander waited until all the air emptied out of their section before shoving the door open with brute strength.
The metal protested the abuse but the mechanism soon gave way. It was made from subpar components, as most of the ship’s interior had been so far.
He doubted most people would notice the difference, but Alexander certainly did. The only thing that impressed him about this ship so far had been the ship’s armor and that was simply due to quantity rather than quality.
It was soon clear why the area was closed off. They had arrived at one of the sections where the planetary defense laser had burned through the vessel.
Alexander heard someone whistle over the radio. “I didn’t get to see the shot that skewered the beast, but I heard about it. I think they underplayed how destructive it was.”
Alexander agreed wholeheartedly with the man’s statement. The damage was far more than he had pictured when he and Lucas had first come up with the idea to link the weak lasers together. A molten hole three feet across was bored straight through the ship from one end to the other and nearly bisecting the corridor they were traveling down.
The diameter of the opening was simply a byproduct of the sheer residual heat and energy provided since the lasers were designed to concentrate all their energy on an area smaller than six inches across at a distance of half a light second. It was the best they could do with so many weapons and the accuracy quickly dropped at farther ranges, but it had clearly been more than enough to punch through most of the dreadnought. The only reason the weapon hadn’t punched through the far side was because the armor over there had held up until the lasers were spent.
Even after a full day, there was still a dangerous amount of heat radiating off of the hole. That spoke of very poor heat dissipation in the ship’s overall design.
“Watch your suits around the hole, it’s still hot,” Alexander stated over the radio, glad he could interface directly with it now, meaning he could ‘hear’ inside his mind space and reply as needed.
“Roger that,” Vochenek replied. “Let’s keep moving. I doubt we’ll find any survivors in this area, but check the bodies anyway.”
They continued through the damaged section, shoving floating corpses aside. None of them were Harlow.
Soon they reached the next set of sealed doors. Alexander thought about how to breach the new area but the Hawks beat him to it.
“Set up a combat seal,” Vochenek said to his people.
The one he thought was named Batten reached into a pack on Vochenek’s back and pulled out a sealed tube of some sort.
Alexander watched as Batten and Sarl moved down the corridor a dozen feet before they pulled out what looked like a rope. They pressed the rope against the walls, floor, and ceiling until it met again on the opposite side. Then Batten pulled a little cube with some metal prongs out of the tube and stuck it into the strange rope.
He yanked a pull cord from the cube and took a few steps back.
If there had been air, there probably would have been a loud popping sound like an airbag going off. Alexander had to play the scene back in slow motion to see what had happened. One second there was a yellow rope and the next second a wall had formed.
The playback showed him that some sort of explosive exothermic reaction took place, forcing the object that he assumed to be a rope to expand violently toward the path of least resistance, which happened to be toward the wall and center of the corridor. The coils that he had mistaken for rope were simply the containment device designed to direct the weird substance toward a desired direction.
Batten tapped on the substance and it didn’t give way or deflect as Alexander had imagined it might. It seemed it had also had some sort of hardener agent in it.
“Seal’s good, TL,” Batten replied as he hurried back over.
Alexander knew what came next and he opened the door.
A very surprised pirate greeted them a few feet down the hallway, but he wasn’t fast enough to bring his weapon to bear before Alexander cut him down.
Clearing the rest of the ship turned into a slog, but they eventually reached the sealed bridge and blew the doors. Everyone inside was dead from self-inflicted wounds or internal fighting. Harlow was not there.
Alexander strode over to the gaudy throne, picked it up, and hurled it across the room. Soon other teams arrived, confirming they had not located Harlow either.
It wasn’t until multiple hours later that Alexander’s radio pinged.
“Kane, we’ve located the target.”
He was surprised to hear Katalynn Char on the other end of the radio. Valkyrie and her crew were not assisting with the pirate cleanup, she had told him that they needed to check something out first.
“Can you bring him to the Talon?” he asked, already making his way back through a non-damaged corridor.
“I thought you might ask this so I loaded him up on a shuttle and it’s already on its way over. Don’t kill him yet though.”
“What? Why not?” Alexander demanded.
“Settle down, Kane. I didn’t say you couldn’t kill him, I said not to kill him yet. There is an opportunity here. Make it public, and transmit it to the network. Imagine seeing some unknown nation doing what the STO had failed to do for over a year. This will give you the recognition you need to keep the STO and corporations away from you. Even better, have Krieger be the one to pass judgment and take the man’s life. Not only will the STO be made to look weak, but they will be made to look incompetent as well since they were so quick to throw the man to the wolves.”
Alexander paused to take in the woman’s words. He would have simply killed Harlow and been done with it, not thinking of any political implications at all. The more he pondered Katalynn’s words, the more he saw the value in her suggestion.
“Thank you for pointing out this opportunity,” he said sincerely. “Please tell Krieger to meet me aboard Talon.”
It was time for a face-to-face with his long-time tormentor.
Comments
Shmooggie
Damn, I was not expecting a chapter on a weekend. A happy surprise. Anyways katalynn x kane, trust!
Silver Beard
I'd like to see akane finally get away from rush jobs on Pirate wrecks and get a real shipyard going; but that's going to take a big investment of resources.
gigin CZ
It is a publicity stunt, it will most likely garner support of the general public and since the STO is still trying to pretend that they are a democracy and not an oligarchy they have to at least appear to listen to the general public. That means this will at least delay any response more aggressive than what they were already doing. Plus I imagine this may give a few more cards to play to our dear vice admiral Fletcher. He could at least pretend that this was all according to plan and thus maintai his position, perhaps even be promoted to admiral.
Hammy
Katelynn suggestion sounds good, but all they going to do is piss off STO. STO is a sleeping giant and if they piss it off enough or the corps nothing going to stop them from wrecking Kane and Asgard. Though I bet if they do a medical exam on him they may find out how the Corps are controlling Harlow
BookwormLich
Well, time to a sadistically satisfactory end of this whole ordeal... Thanks for the chapter
Sindre Wirkola
This chapter was really well written :)
Merlin's Fan
I love the suggestion that Katalynn has. I'm glad Kane didn't notice him leave, I can't wait to see how much the STO start to fear BSE.
