The Path to Retribution
13 Nov 2019ParkTyGreen
The past week or so has been torture. The Tiberius has been recovered, thank the gods, but there’s one thing I can accurately say about her condition:The ship looks like shit.
Apparently the damage was far worse than I ever imagined. The crew that dragged the ship from those rings reported they’d lost three men in the recovery, destroyed by a Federal Corvette hovering above the Tiberius’s wreck. One of them managed to get a scan. The commander’s name was ExaltedHierarch, according to them, and it seemed to me highly likely that he was the one that attacked Kaylyn and I. He seemed to be waiting for me to try and recover the ship. A couple of the recovery crew managed to sneak aboard and fit a rudimentary power source and sneakily move the ship out of range right under the Vette’s nose. Then they painstakingly hauled her across the system back to the station. The repair job was good enough, at least to get her back up and running. But inside and out, the ship was trashed. It went without saying that it would take lots of repairs to get her fixed up completely.
For a while now, it’s been undergoing extensive repairs. Basically being reassembled at this point. The starboard engine still looked barely attached to the ship when I last saw it. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with myself. While the ship is getting fixed up, put back into working order, I’ve been falling into disrepair myself. Spent a good part of yesterday getting drunk on fine Lavian Brandy. I’ve been having nightmares, too. I keep seeing what happened over and over. I’ve been unable to sleep and when I do, I wake up in the middle of the night screaming in terror. And the words Laylyn said to me before we left that day still keep bouncing around in my head. “Your call, boss. But just to let you know, I’m not sure about going into a dangerous hive of death in one of the most dangerous systems in the galaxy. You’re responsible for what happens there.”
And I was. And that’s what makes this so horrible.
Later
Some time ago repairs finally stopped. The crews said they’d gotten her back into working condition, but any further repairs were above their pay grades. (Remember I payed them half my credits to do this.) So the ship is functional, but far from ready for space. There was some work that needed to be done for her to be spaceworthy. I called Sloane over, who grudgingly arrived an hour later. We pried open the warped and scratched door to Kaylyns quarters, hoping to find a message letting us know what to do in the case of her death. After some searching through the ruined quarters, we found a document on a shattered comms screen.
Sloane tucked it away and refused to show it to me, grumbling something along the lines of ‘your fault.’ For the next hour or so, Sloane having left, I strapped up in a harness and lowered myself above and below the ship to fix up any remaining damage with my limited engineering knowledge from flight training. I’m no engineer, not like Buck, but I’ve been around my ships long enough to know how to fix them up. The Tiberius is no different. But this was something else entirely, the damage she’d gone through.
It was gruelling, but I got the outer plating in one piece, fixed relays, and repainted the ship’s name onto the hull. The inside was another beast entirely, though, since the whole ship was trashed. The repair crews put more focus on functionality than anything else. After a while, I got the ship into basic working order, but the interior was still trashed. Lights hanging by a single wire, flickering, walls patched with a quilt-work of metal panels.
But the Tiberius is ready now. And now I’m planning to prove myself. I’m going to hunt this bastard that nearly killed me and killed Kaylyn down.