Doing the right thing, 2 : Who turned off the lights ?
13 Jan 2022Alysianne
[05 Jan 3308]Aw, turns out my first target’s on the surface of one of two ice moons orbiting around each other – that’s pretty sweet. I slow down a bit as I enter orbital cruise to savour the planetrise over the horizon. Heh, the icy blue marring the white of that second moon looks like Kingfisher’s paintjob.
(I dub this moon... Kingfisher's nest !)
My trusty Python shudders as I exit supercruise and glide down the last dozen kilometers to the surface. As I get closer to my target, a small anxious knot starts to form in my stomach. I might have been a little too confident-looking in front of that Imperial twerp, to be perfectly honest – see, this whole on-foot fighting thing ? With rifles, not hardpoints on a ship ? Yeah. Haven’t done much of that. Uh, well, not at all actually. I mean sure I followed the basic training courses Liberal Command provides its agents, but I never actually fought in life-threatening situations before. And, well, scavengers aren’t known to show mercy. Desperate folk, or hired guns… Either way, they shoot before asking questions.
As I position Kingfisher and engage auto-land a few hundred meters from the settlement, I glance over nervously to my barely used Manticore Executioner, proudly set in its magnetic clamp on the wall. Heh, don’t ask me why I chose a plasma weapon. They’re not exactly the most beginner-friendly, but… Dunno, that model was the one that spoke to me most during training. There’s a certainty to that weapon – regardless of shields or armour, a plasma slug rips through everything. Sure, not as efficiently as using thermal and kinetic weapons in tandem. And you first need to hit the enemy – which can be tricky with a slow-moving projectile. But if I had one gun, I would want it to be that one.
The hydraulics hiss one last time as Kingfisher settles down on its landing gear. Glancing over to the settlement from my cockpit, it looks totally abandoned. I gather my resolve, checking all of my gear one last time : Karma pistol, energylink, scanner, arc cutter, check. Power regulator ? Securely in my backpack. Energy cell, medkit ? In their respective ports on the suit. Alright. I grab my rifle from the clamp on the wall and make my way out of the cockpit to the ramp.
A blast of frigid air hits me as the ramp deploys. The second it takes for the suit to adapt to the temperature is enough to run a deep shiver through my body – damn, that’s COLD. My helmet screen reads 103K outside temperature, and I let loose a long wistle - that’s probably enough to turn anyone to an icicle within minutes. Not to mention there isn’t a molecule of air to breathe.
I feel the ground crunch softly as I set my foot down on the inch deep layer of icy snow that covers the surface and, testing my footing, I feel a solid layer of ice underneath. Gotta pay attention to that, I wouldn’t want to slip over and faceplant in an urgent situation – although thankfully, gravity here is just a fraction of what I’m used to.
Scanning the abandoned blocky buildings for any sign of life, I carefully approach… No one. Not one movement in the frozen, windless landscape. Breathtaking landscape, as a matter of fact – the way the distant sunlight reflects off the field of tiny ice shards into a million little specks of light… It’s wonderful.
I take in the beauty of it all for a second, and stare off to some small mountain raised by a crater in the distance, feeling my breath resonate in the helmet’s contained atmosphere…
Crap, what am I thinking ? There could be hostiles here, life-threatening hostiles. Airhead ! I quickly snap back to the task at hand and glance over the settlement again… Still no movement. Huh, that’s odd – maybe there are just no scavengers here right now ? I clasp my rifle tightly to feel its reassuring firmness. Better stay on my guard either way.
Oh ! Bingo, that big building on the other side has “PWR” painted on its side… No sign of a direct entrance, though – I guess the only way in is that corridor… Running to the complex’s main entrance. Alright. Where are those scavengers ??
I guess if no one’s here I should take advantage of it quick and get this over with. Come on. I take a deep breath and make my way to the main building’s entrance.
Alright, so that official gave me Grade 3 access to all their installations, but without power to run the settlement the airlock doors obviously won’t open. Time to break into the maintenance panel, then. I meticulously cut off the heavy metal plating that covers the panel - without a speck of air to transport the sound, I melt off solid steel with a blindingly bright laser… In perfect silence. A pretty surreal experience, to be honest. Alright, alright, now stick the energylink into the port… Transfer power… There. A second later, the door’s lights suddenly blink on and, after another second to recognize my access level, the airlock smoothly opens. I breathe out. Part one, done. Easy, hah.
So, now, if my reconnaissance was correct, I just need to go straight through the whole thing. I quickly cross the foyer to another sealed blast door, clicking my headlight on to see in the pitch darkness. Glancing through the reinforced window of the door, there seems to be a lab of sorts on the other side. Sigh. Maintenance panel number two, let’s do this. Within another few seconds, the lab’s doors slide open for me.
I cross this second room and glance around to the abandoned equipment on the clean white work stations. A few tools are strewn around, some on the ground, and the glass shards of a broken test tube lie around what seems to be a blackened, molten dip in the floor. Huh. They had to abandon camp very quickly, then, for lab rats to carelessly leave everything all over the place. Those people are usually paranoid about safety.
Thankfully, the door out of the lab has an open energy port, so a quick plug and charge with the energylink is all it needs to open up. I now look down a long corridor strewn with kicked over crates to another sealed blast door. Ughhh. Another stupid maintenance hatch. Takes ages to open, and I'm a mess of raw nerves right now. I don't have the time for this, dammit !
The final pair of doors slide smoothly into the walls, and I’m finally greeted with the settlement’s power core. The large fusion reactor pillar in the center of the room is completely dimmed down and silent, and when I open that one hatch near the base... Empty. I breathe out in relief. Good, just as I expected. The aristos’ saboteur just ripped out the reactor’s power regulator, and didn’t actually damage the equipment. Which makes sense, since damaging its structural integrity could cause a chain reaction and blow a hole kilometers deep on the planet’s surface, taking everything with it – settlement, lab, ships… And saboteur. It would not only be suicidal, but also idiotic. That Cartel likely wants the building for themselves, eventually.
I quickly fit the spare power regulator into the open hatch. Now I just need to power up the command console, and use my access level to start the power core’s booting sequence.
The power regulator slowly slides deeper into its hatch. Ever so slowly, the ground starts to vibrate, then shudder, as the reactor wakes from its slumber. Suddenly, lights start to flicker on. A distant hissing sound gets louder and louder, and suddenly I can discern the settlement’s VAS. “… -tmosphere restored.”
Sure enough, a second later Verity pipes up over the now loud reactor. “Entering pressurized environment.” And another few seconds later I get a blinking message on my InSight watch – that GUC lady saying they have a signal from their settlement, and congratulating me for my work. Phew. Mission accomplished, and without a hitch might I add.
What’s with dual ice moons in this system ? Hah, my second target is on another pair of them, a few hundred light seconds away. I’m not complaining, to be honest. They’re absolutely gorgeous – even if gravity does gets messed up the closer you get to their Lagrange point. Thankfully however, that’s not the case of this second settlement, “Piramal’s Biological”.
It really looks like those Gold Universal fellows have made a specialty of running research centers, heh.
(Piramal's Biological, target n°2 !)
Oooh, geysers ? Maybe explorers found some alien life forms living near them, and that’s why they set up this research outpost here. I swoop low over the settlement, scanning the buildings for the telltale “PWR” markings. There, to one side ! This’ll be really straightforward, then : just melt my way into the building, fix the damn thing, and get out. None of that breaking through the entire compound to get where I need to be, hah.
And then, out of nowhere… “Ship under attack,” Verity calmly says. What ?? Sure enough, little blue specks are appearing on the shields of the ship’s holo-projection on my dashboard. Damn, this won’t be as easy as I thought. Those scavengers are really trigger-happy, if they opened fire on a ship sporting class 6 shields. Well, they will see what they will see.
I engage Combat mode, deploy my hardpoints, and maneuver my large wedge of a ship around in the moon’s low gravity. There they are : three figures with a blue haze surrounding them are camped right at the limit of the settlement, zapping with their rifles at Kingfisher’s shields.
“What in the nine hells do you think you’re doing, idiots…” I mutter as I calmly press the trigger. The multi-cannons start to spin. Faster and faster. A literal rain of metal is unleashed, and the ground around the scavengers explodes in swirls of snow and chunks of ice as the barrage of fire pelts the area they were grouped at. A few seconds later, the sustained rat-tat-tat of the three weapons fades as their magazines run out one after the other. I let go of the trigger. A large cloud of snowy dust now silently rises from the ground, completely obscuring where the three scavs once stood.
After a minute or two, the cloud starts to settle again and I can discern what’s left of the attackers. Two figures are sprawled in the small blackened crater I created. Can’t see it from here, but they’re probably sporting some nasty holes. I mean, you can’t just catch a large-sized multi-cannon round in the chest and walk it off, can you.
The third is nowhere to be seen. I guess now they know I’m here, and that my ship bites back, they’ll keep behind cover as long as I’m in the air.
Shaking my head at their blithering stupidity, I retract the hardpoints, deploy the landing gear and ease Kingfisher onto the ground. Before leaving the pilot’s seat, I redirect all the energy I can to shields – in case they get any more ideas.
The Maverick won’t be enough for this. There are probably more than the three scavs out there, and I’m certainly not experienced enough to run head first into a fight without dedicated combat gear. And so, the Dominus it is.
No other scav is suicidal enough to attack Kingfisher while I’m still in the ship, so the five minutes it takes me to slip out of my Maverick, slip into the Dominus and strap on all the armour plates are totally silent. I’m already formulating plans in my head as I check my gear, fit the emergency painkiller cocktails in their ports and grab my rifle. Keep behind cover. Get to a roof if I can, for an easy vantage point – but make sure there’s something to hide behind, always. Don’t want to stand out like a beacon for them to shoot at.
I barely register the cold blast as the ship's ramp lowers, and as soon as I can I clank halfway down, vault over the side and press my back against Kingfisher’s front landing gear to take cover.
My own heavy breathing fills my ears as I take note of a few things at once. The Domi is noticeably heavier than the Mav, but it sports a very handy exoskeleton movement assist that makes me nearly as nimble with it than its lighter counterpart. The layer of snow here is also much thinner than the previous moon, so I have to pay extra attention to slipping over. And I didn’t see a single shot come my direction yet.
I glance around the corner of the landing gear. Not a movement. No distinctive blue warping light of a shielded scavenger.
30, maybe 40 meters separate me from the closest building - in this gravity, a few bounding steps is all it should take to get there. I tap the panel on my wristband twice, and my suit vibrates slightly as my own shield’s blue aura surrounds me. I heft my rifle. Take a deep breath.
And sprint out.