The Beginnings of CMDR Hrafnblod's Independant Pilot Career
23 Mar 2021Hrafnblod
"Commander Hrafnblod?"The shower of aura smeared meteors streamed past his eye, searing the patterns of a psychedelic dance into his vision. Each path slowly fading into a colour-negative before being overlaid by fresh arcs, bleeding their luminescence into the hazy night sky. They seemed so close, too close, like he could literally reach out and touch them.
Every so often, where the eddies thinned the mist, he could make out the black ink of the void beyond the protective atmosphere of his home, that deep deadly nothingness staring back, daring him into its embrace. That empty mistress, so absolute and indiscriminate in her violence, so swiftly riled into a pique of silent rage, so insatiable in her thirst for life and death, there exists not a single barrier she would not eventually breach with her icy tendrils of entropic decay.
Yet we have come to court her on a daily basis. With interstellar travel we mock her prowess. We mistake her dichotomous indifference for permission, her vacuous fury for substantial beauty, her omniscient potency for majesty and her simple singular goal for a complex set of mysteries to be unravelled and meta-philosophised. And when she casts her gaze upon us, we can only hear the beauty of her rhyme, an invitation for us to explore her garden, reap her fruit as our rightful rewards. To bask in delirious glory under the Eye of Mother Ether and lament the Infinite Song of the Siren of the Eternal Black.
He imagined he could see that Eye, blazing into being, its focus converging in an attempt to cut through the clouds of vapour and smoke, to pierce the atmosphere and spill the planets life essence into the Eternal Black, just so She could gorge on our misery as we dared to celebrate life and the achievements of the Empire. He met that challenge in stubborn defiance before its intensity rose to unbearable levels. His instinct to raise his arms, to block out that blinding stare, found an encroaching fear crawling over his spine with its instinctive needle feet at the realisation he could not move his arms. Bile began to rise in his throat, choking his breath ragged.
No sooner had he diverted his gaze from the reach of that photonic lance, his sight dimmed to a crimson hue and he could see the dazzling chaos of the fireworks display once more. The sense of imminent danger continued to gather momentum as some other part of his consciousness was clamouring for his attention He fought the incessant tugging, choosing instead to concentrate on holding steadfast, determined to not being beaten into submission under the beam of the Mistress of the Void.
More and more senses were begging, no, demanding, an audience. His audioception screaming alarm, his nociception electrifying his nerves, his mitochondritic celium firing into overdrive, chewing through muscle, fat and sugars alike, spiking his body temperature and visibly shrinking his physique. His genetic flaw became his saviour as his bodies systems focussed, his logiception peeling away his stubborness, allowing enough of his consciousness to explore the incessant cries for address.
At first, he realised he was not back on his home world celebrating Empire Day, and that the firework display was not in celebration, nor was it that kind of firework display. Next dawned the realisation he couldn't move, he didn't know where he was, but it was chaotic, yet serene, claustrophobic yet vast. He felt he was in grave danger. He trembled from the extreme reaction from his biological chemical factories, rushing through him surges of agents, delivered via his highspeed arterial shippinglane, each baring their mark on his sensory experience, from which he deduced the sensation denoting he was also seriously physically injured. Pulling himself more and more from his stupor, as molecular squads of his chemical army honed the edge of his mind, he saw that he was in a small ship, and that he seemed to be pinned to his chair, there was smoke all around him, sparks flurrying around, their motion almost matching that of the passing stars beyond the cockpit's canopy.
Tracing an edge of the canopy frame from the corner of his eye and drawing back in from a point of reference, his sight crosses a blurred animated shadow, blinding his view of the canopy. Willing his eyes into focus, he searches the associated sensation that would allow him to directly pull his lens' into near field true. His sense of vision is off by some degree, and as he searched within his vista, resolving directly in front of his face was the comms panel, where it should not have been. Something with this picture is very wrong. The shape of the cockpit was wrong, he felt wrong, everything was just wrong.
Evading the rising terror, he wracked his memory, tracing from the last thing he could clearly remember through the shattered scraps lying about the forefront of his experience, drawing to one of two onclusions. He is now actually dead, and his current experience is his life's energy patterns deformation imprint on the etherium, desperately refusing to accept the inevitability of the former's demise in coherence at the hand of the latter's elasticity, or, he is still alive, the Voids cruel caress teasing out his life's salt, grain by torturous grain.
The last he remembered was finding a solid lead to those whom might have abducted or killed his mother, some self declared pirate lord whose name he couldn't currently recall. He had taken his recently acquired Eagle MKII into one of the anarchy systems surrounding his mothers original home system. After having ambushed and destroyed one of the suspected pirate gangs vessels, and badly mauled another, he had flown to what he had believed was the pirate lords base orbital platform, to demand the return of his mother and honourable satisfaction should she not be.
The mercenary he had hired from his mothers home system, with whom he had been tracking this pirate lord, and without whom, his plan for escaping alive would likely fail, did not appear when he should have, nor could he be contacted once his plan had past the point of no return.
The sudden flash of anger and promise of vengeance prompted a spontaneous bloody cough, spattering the inside of his helmet visor with ichor and cutting short his mental addition of that toad faced traitorous mercs name to his black list.
He was about to call out to COVAS, to assess the severity and immediacy of his predicament, when presciently, COVAS called out his name.
"Commander Hrafnblod!"
"That's not LEO," thought Hrafnblod,
"Commander Hrafnblod. If you are still alive, you dumb shit, which my sensors tell me you are..... in a technical sense of the word....,"
He suddenly realised who this might be and a renewed rage boiled forth, cutting through his other senses, urging him to respond, but as he tried to speak, all that he could offer was an unintelligible rhyme of heavy wet breath, bubbling into another explosion of visceral fluids.
"Ah, and conscious too. Good, I didn't want to have to bother sitting here all night, waiting for you to die, or come round, or make a recording. I do hate making recordings, they're just so.... impersonal. That and it takes too long to get to savour their response." said the voice over his ships coms.
He sounded vaguely polite, but as though he was concealing irritation through joviality whilst wishing to appear nonchalant, like he'd been waiting to deliver a punch line to a joke he'd told a thousand times, but that this time the audience was ruining the timing for its delivery.
"And please do be quiet, I can't imagine you can afford to lose too much more of what it sounds like you're losing, and if I have to keep repeating myself.....well, we will be here all night, and if you don't die, I may just kill you out of frustration." he continued.
The voice over the eagles com system began to boom in a raging self righteous indignation, "And I want to harvest your salt for years to come. No-one jumps into MY system, shows up MY loyal crew, invites themselves to MY stations and then proceed to make demands from ME, THIS IS MY UNIVERSE, MY GAME!"
"You disgrace yourself, you insult me and every other pilot by daring to fly your paper toy here, or indeed anywhere another pilot can see you. You're just like all those other privileged care-bears whose nice rich mummy and daddy gave you a shiny new ship and told you to go play nice with all the other boys and girls. They sent you out as a sheep amongst the wolves. Here, there be dragons. Here, in the open, there is only one rule, be the killer, or be killed. This universe is dangerous son, didn't your mother and father tell you that?"
The voice took a deep breath and gave a derisory snort before adding, in a stark low-key contrast,
"But then again, your father is the lowest of the low isn't he? Owned not only by a state, but a slave contract, put there by his own dishonourable actions, costing you your inheritance, your family estate, your place in the Imperial Navy, and even your patronage'", he'd placed derisory faux-comedic emphasis on the words 'dishonourable', 'Imperial Navy' and 'patronage'.
Surprise and alarm temporarily overthrew his growing shame and anger, "How the fuck does he know this?" Hrafnblod thought.
"And your mother is just a whore who cant keep her sweaty palms out of the federations trousers.....or mine for that matter. Maybe, if I ever see you again, you'll find you have a branch of half brothers stretching all the way from here to Sol!" The sound of perverted glee in the voice did not fail to cut deep into Hrafnblods soul.
At the mention of his mother, a surge of enmity seethed through him, cascading into a maelstrom of adrenalins and opioids flooding his system. Though this prompted a fresh eruption, adding depth and detail to the vitae art spread over the canvas of his visor, in his dogged determination to be heard, he managed a guttural few words,
"....find you.....kill you..", before being completely absorbed by a train of rattling sodden hacks.
After, what seemed to continue for hours in Hrafnblods experience, a cacophony of jeers, mocking applause and thunderous rolls of insidious laughter boomed from the coms, before the voice verbally motioned silence and continuing with,
"Go and git gud kid, you never know, by the time you get back here, you might have taken my advice. You may even have gitten gudder, learnt to play the game how ive come to learn it need be played, see I'm right, and prove yourself worthy of joining my crew."
"Maybe, you'll gitterer even gudderer, defeat me and take my place, and then, you'll see, my quest to force everyone play this game how I see fit, as a righteous cause. I am The God's police!"
More laughter broke out over the coms before the voice channel was cut and replaced with what Hrafnblod later discovered to be an old pirate song. However, all he remembered hearing of it before losing consciousness and waking in an Imperial medical facility, as he would later recant, not necessarily in the same order each time, was,
"something something git gud something something care bear something something call spear something something cry salt something something paper ships something something my way or the rebuy"
Six weeks following his being discovered and rescued, he had mostly recovered from the majority of treatments. Reading the report on his case, it states how he had been found by bounty hunters who were responding to the distress signal he had setup to ambush those pirates, who had then promptly called in search and rescue. He briefly considered the incredible odds that the place he was interdicted when trying to escape the botched job was near enough to the very place he had set that ambush, and that in his haste, he had forgotten to recall/de-activate the emergency beacon. Fortunately, no connection was made by the authorities between the illegal beacon and himself.
The report went on to explain, using quotes from the search and rescue team, "he had become one with his ship" and "bless the holy spaghetti monster, looks like its only him and repair strips holding this bucket of shit together"*, search and rescue had to cocoon his Eagle and "glue" it to another rescue ship they had to call in especially, so they could frame-shift the lot to dry dock.
His head had been impaled through his right eye and cheek by part of his coms console, pinning him into his chair. He had also lost his right arm due to the injuries from the console, time and partial loss of cockpit atmosphere. His right leg was severed by the console, and found buried in a bulkhead rupture, and several other places, which, according to the chief technician during forensic assessment, "...had this not have been exactly here, and here, and over here, and over there, he would likely not have been alive long enough for rescue, this ship would almost certainly have suffered catastrophic explosive failure."
He had also suffered major organ trauma and they had been required to induce stasis lest the risk of trauma shock, blood loss and toxicity kill him.
His Eagle was a complete unrepairable write-off and its blackbox damaged and corrupted beyond decipherability.
Even though his clone bank storage within the family estate had been forfeited after his fathers trial, he did have the basic military coverage, which, despite his leaving the navy on a special extended leave** and the circumstances surrounding that, before he left, his basic medical cover had been reinstated, with a value just over his length of active service. This, along with an Imperial loan secured against his fathers servitude in slavery, just about covered his medical care, replaced organs and right arm. However, the remaining funds would not cover more cloned grafts, thus his leg and eye were of the bionic variety, not much favoured amongst well-to-do Imperial society.
He had a few visitors during his time in recovery, several of the search team members, including dispatch had visited. He felt they were mostly glory hunting, getting holos to show the rest of the staff and friends. They insisted on him signing some regalia, remnants of his Eagle, which technically belong to the insurance company now, but they somehow acquired.
Some of the emergency medical team also visited, as did a couple of rather unsavoury characters from the press. Once they had realised they weren't getting much of a story from him, they began with the usual veiled threats of making up their own story, but one were he wouldnt be viewed in such a heroic light, "Not good for ones family title" they said. Hrafnblod chuckled to himself and smiled moronically at them until they left thinking that they obviously hadnt done their research, there wasn't much more besmirching to be had on his family title lest he lose it altogether.
"Back home we called those types 'Nobbeds'". he would remark to the medical staff.
He had hoped that one of his siblings might have been contacted and visited, but no family came. Except one. Someone he have never met before, nor hear anything of. It wasn't until after she had left, and he was deliberating on just what exactly was the strange looking gift she had given him, that he realised she hadn't even stated where in the family she was. As in, just who was it she was related to. She seemed to imply it was on his fathers side, however, on reflection, could she have been subtly telling him she was related to his mother? He had never met any of his mothers family, and only briefly heard a few childhood stories. Father did not let us speak about mothers history or family, and in any case, most imperial children don't spend enough time with their parents to have those kinds of conversations, in any kind of unofficial capacity. Maybe when one is older, and can be trusted with secrets, but rarely ever, and certainly not as a child.
It was on his way out of the medical facility in the Mandh system, planning on heading straight out to the quarters he had temporarily afforded himself in Gaensler Station, that one of the facilities staff caught up with him before he reached the lift for the transport dock. After what seemed an humble and heartfelt apology, and an awkward couple minutes for Hrafnblod, the staff member handed over to Hrafnblod a small box and told him that the commander that had originally found him had visited and had left with the medical staff this box to give on recovery.
The box was made from a thick luxurious white leather, with an intricately patterned stitch in a deep regal purple. Embossed on the front was a stylised imperial eagle, under which was stamped 528 over the letters LL in relief. As Hrafnblod handled the box he felt more tooling on the underside of the box. He ran his finger tips over the pattern, experiencing the softer edges of the tool work were the leathers fibres provide the slightest change in texture, conjuring in his mind, images of him as a young boy stroking the resident wolves fur, watching his fingertips skiing on the slopes of the short fur on their heads, imagining he could feel where the change in colour occurred by touch alone. Probing the points of his tips into the crevices feeling for their depth, trying to notice the subtle change between the silky smooth drag of where the wax still lies in corners and edges and pores, and where it has been worn away and polished into the skin. He tried to determine by touch if some of the smoother areas might be a subtle embossing, or where the surface of the leather has been polished with wear and realised that the leather felt waxed are particularly exquisite.
Closer visual examination revealed that the tooling looked to have all been done by hand, to a high degree of craftmanship,
He looked up at the staff member who seemed completely oblivious to any and all but that box. His eyes bored intently as though willing himself some kind of x-ray vision, hoping to discern its contents.
Hrafnblod coughed. Then once more a little more furtively, but still, the medical staff worker stood transfixed, unconsciously wringing his hands, "probably to stop himself from reaching out, snapping it from my grasp and tearing into that box himself, " Hrafnblod mused.
He looked to the man's chest, locating the button that would display his identification details and made the wide eye gesture than would have the details displayed holographically before him.
"Mr Bell."
"Mr Bell, erm, thank you for your assistance. I shall be leaving now." Hrafnblod stated, gesticulating with his free hand.
His eyes were glazed over, locked on the box and Hrafnblod noticed that the corner of the man's mouth had started twitching. As Hrafnblod finished his hand waving, and began to turn away,Mr Bell placed his hand on Hrafnblod shoulder and feverishly asked him if he wasn't going to open the box.
Hrafnblod considered telling the man that he had over stepped his social duties, was bordering on rudeness and that he should bugger off minding his own business. Then he wondered what it was he might be trying to protect, he had nothing left, all of his possessions were gone, the last of them lost in his Eagle and its not like he had anything to hide, no uncovered secrets, and his family name and reputation was trashed.
"Just open the damn box" he thought to himself,
"Just what I was thinking commander Hrafnblod", replied Mr Bell
Hrafnblod gave him a half frowned side long glance as he realised he must have spoken out loud. The look on Mr Bells face told the commander that the staff member had also unintentionally spoken out aloud.
He felt the box once more over its faces as he began to position his hands to open it. Lifting the front side, he noticed that where he had repositioned his thumb, he'd left a darkened imprint and his hands felt they'd begun pushing pine needles through his pores as they opened beading moisture. Clammy. Flicking his view to the side caught him sight of Mr Bell positively trembling in excitement and anticipation. Hrafnblod himself felt the same, he paused.
"This is bloody ridiculous, its just a box, a get well gift....." there was the sudden emergence of a pair of doctors, stalling mid conversation as they pushed their momentum out from the lift and, though the commander and Mr.Bell were not blocking their passage, paused in their step as though they indeed were. Hrafnblod looked fully at the doctors, turning his gaze from one to the other, before the flash of the holo behind that new comers head designating the lifts stops caught his eye.
"I need to catch my ship or I'll be late for the sign in and hand over for my quarters in Gaensler station", he blurted as he opened the case file he'd been given at the hospital and carefully dropped the box within.
"Good day Sir", Hrafnblod smiled, gave the slightest bow and turned to walk off.
After a couple of steps, twisting from his waist he regarded a distraught looking Mr Bell with a salute and a "Long live the emperor", before straightening up and marching off down towards the transport dock.
*This was part of the dialogue recorded by the first search and rescue team on location in the Eagle, the rest of which involved some crude humour surrounding some of the personal effects found in the ship and the state in which they found Hrafnblod. He viewed the dialogue in poor taste and requested it be removed from the official records, this quote is all that remained of that particular dialogue.
**this is basically a complicated way of allowing the navy to relive themselves of an embarrassment that they might not be able to dishonourable discharge, and give that same individual the opportunity to fade out of the navy honourably but with out being able to claim most of the respective financial packages. That individual also ends up on an equivalent reserves list for longer than they would have if honourably discharged.