Excommunication! The story of my fall from Felicia Winter's Grace and my eventual rise.
26 Jul 2020CBerube
Finally i am able to come to terms with what happened five months prior without feeling that intense discouragement that was strong enough to just open the airlock or just disengage safety protocols and fly into the next damn star, planet, or black hole!Due to an ambush, I was quickly forced into combat maneuvers with an Imperial Loyalist in Federal Held Space. At the time, my ship was lazily drifting away from the station of Baladin Gateway at the leisurely rate of 35m/s. When i heard and felt the ever-foreboding slap as the kinetic projectiles fired at me were instantly vaporized against the shield, and the jolt of a laser pulse making it past the shield and hitting the hull plating where it sublimated the composite alloy from a solid to an ionized plasma. I had to sprint from my quarters where i was plotting a course, to the flight deck; spilling my instant space coffee over the controls, and almost tripping and cartwheeling away as my foot snagged with the wires of an exposed electrical panel on the floor. Racing to my seat i grabbed the controls boosting from a snails crawl to speed at an anus clenching 7.8G. Instantly I put all systems into combat mode and deployed the hard points for a fight i was ill prepared for.
As the ships orbital maneuvering system applied full thrust to the fore and aft thrusters to rotate, the ship shuddered, creaked, and moaned while the main thrusters stayed at full throttle to keep the ship in a drifting spiral all while turning to face my pursuer. These two ships were well suited adversaries i could tell, my Corvette against his Cutter. We entered into a slug-fest where we let everything loose. While he had the advantage from the element of surprise, my shields were holding, while my beams and multi-cannons pounded away. As the shields on my Corvette started to wear down, I activated one of my two 7A Shield Cell Boosters. Right when I thought that the Cutter was right where I wanted it to be for the beginning of the end, that's when it fired its engineered weapons designed to destroy SCB augmented shields. All of a sudden my 10 Mega-Watt shields meant nothing, as the bubble of safety fell away.
The somewhat mild sound of my adversaries incoming armaments were amplified to a deafening thunder as the ship violently shook as the Composite Armor was assaulted with relentless resolve. Although I had just taken down the shields of the attacking Cutter and started dealing damage, I knew that the tables had turned for me. My ship was still protected quite well due to the main armor and the secondary angled plate hull reinforcement did its job. The only damage I had at that point was due to effects of the Shield Cell Booster attack. Although only one was in operation, what i later found out was an engineered torpedo tailor made to destroy SCB modules caused catastrophic damage to the entire electrical module, and I was operating entirely on redundant systems.
As we kept lobbing uncountable volley of volley of slugs at each other it became difficult to see him even with sensor data due to the cloud of debris and the spalling and billions of fragmented ship components that acted as chaff. Being on the loosing end, of a battle whose outcome was becoming more certain by the second, I took the opportunity the sensor blackout offered to fly off at full boost as the Cutter's gimbaled weapons fired randomly through the soup of space between us before striking the bridge one more time. The laser blast strafed the view port shattered it destroying a conduit panel on the other side and depressurizing the deck. As I prioritized all distributor power to the thrusters to gain as much distance as possible, the fly-by wire control system failed along with all authority to pitch.
Luckily I was still wearing my REMLOK survival suit as anything not secured down flew out of the gash into the void. I already knew my Corvette the Navis Venandi lost her Frame Shift Drive due to battle damage , so there wasn't going to be an escape via High-Waking out in a flash of light. Turning around to head back into the exclusion zone of my home spaceport was my best chance if a repair could be made. It was 50km away and back in the direction of my attacker who was now again on an intercept course and closing back into firing range. The last option in the book was to perform a full ship-wide system reboot. The vessel went dark as it tumbled haphazardly through space. I counted to 10 and got ready to have at least enough functionality to make my move back toward Baladin Gateway. What was left of the systems came back online, and now all surviving systems were shown on the diagnostics.
I should have had full rotation authority as was indicated. I traced my eyes along the gap between the functioning redundant flight system and the controls when it became clear that the attack on the bridge destroyed the wiring conduits. Now we have been told by all authority involved from the ship manufacturers to the Pilots Federation, that tampering with the main systems is illegal though hard to enforce. I always followed protocol in my half a decade while pledged to Shadow President Felecia Winters as was required by the Federal Command i was enlisted in. With the end near and only one chance to escape with my life and at best a heavily damaged ship, I would have to try anything. I scrambled to the mess of burnt wires that once a conduit mounted to the interior wall of the hull and started to match wires by color as quick as I could. There was no way i could have gotten even a tenth of them back together before I would be under fire again, but all i needed was to get power to the co-pilots seat and enough control would be restored.
My maglock boots latched to the wall as I crouched as I connected wire by wire. At first systems went haywire, with the cargo bay door opening and closing as the exterior lights rapidly flickered on and off. As i kept connecting wires correctly the random actions slowed and stopped. The next pair of wires I tried caused the HUD to flicker on, and the next set powered up the data link and antenna array. After shakily trying another dozen of wires, and matching what color insulation that could be seen, I was tossed to the side as the Reaction Control System came online and stopped rotation.
With haste, I pushed myself off and my feet to the floor and made a dash towards the co-pilots seat and took the helm once again in control. As the throttle was brought back to speed and the ship turned around bright green tracers flashed by along with beams that danced across the hull. I glanced over at the systems screen to see if any countermeasures were available and saw the data link and IFF screen flashing with commands i never heard of before. Most of the characters were corrupted and therefore illegible, but one stood out. It read CLOG for Communications License Override Grid. As the ship continued its rotation towards the stations direction, the Cutter entered full weapons range and fired its full armament. Again i watched in horror as the space around started to fill with parts of the Corvette as rounds penetrated the compartments. I reached over to the systems screen and pressed everything I could and nothing worked; nothing except the CLOG button.
In an instant the ship went dark and silent. There were no longer laser beams burning through the hull, although the metal glowed bright white in some areas. My boots released from the floor and I peacefully floated across the bridge where I started to contemplate if I had died. The brief serenity ended when a colossal crash jolted the ship, sending me against the floor than ceiling once more. It was at this moment that I looked through the forward view port to see the Cutter rebounding from its impact with us. All lights were now off onboard her, and she no longer was firing either weapons or thrusters. As we both drifted back towards Baladin, wondered just what in the hell had happened.
Later, I would find out that the Comms Lisence Override was a covert kill-switch device built in all ships on the order of the Pilots Federation to remotely shut down ships as part of an anti-rebellion contingency plan. My wiring repair had inadvertently activated a factory programming mode. I was rescued hours later as the Navis Venandi drifted past Baladin Gateway, and was treated for exposure in the Med Facility. I awoke later with several senior High Ranking members of Federal Command, and Pilots Federation hovering over my ominously. I was taken into holding for questioning, while the Cutter and what was left of my poor Corvette was taken apart. When the CLOG went off, the Imperial Pilot inside the Cutter died when life support and cabin pressurization shut down. Nobody believed that I had done this by accident and in the end, I had a choice of leaving my command position in the Federal Command and loosing access to the resources afforded to me by Winters organization or appeal to an oversight committee whom saw me guilty already. The choice was clear, but not an easy one for me to take.
In the end, I found I had many allies whom supported me, and may have done more to help me had I stood my ground and requested an appeal. In hindsight, I now realize that inter-organizational politics demanded that outcome for me, specifically since I was found responsible for killing that Imperial Bounty hunter whom turned out to be the first born son of some Imperial Senator. After I was released, I was welcomed by Winters to help her out; though I would receive no protection, or acknowledgment of any kind. Leaving the Federation is something I could never do, even out of spite, so my next move was enlistment with Zachary Hudson. Once a member of his party I was welcomed to the Auxiliary Navy who is responsible for defending Sol and the local area at large against foreign aggression.