In the dark void between galaxies, two spaceships made their way forward. One was an armed vessel, a battleship, with the sole purpose of protecting the other that trailed right behind it. The second one, a much larger spaceship was in fact a supermassive spacefreighter carrying immense tons of cargo in its holds.
That by itself was not a strange sight. Cargo ships especially of that size needed protection to undergo journeys between galaxies. Many things could happen and most of them would be unfortunate for the hundreds of crew manning the two space fairing vessels.
The journey to their destination had brought them out in the open. No star systems populated their immediate surroundings. It was a lonely solitary trip that would last the better part of a standard Terran year.
They were not that far out however, it was still early in the journey, and behind them, the outskirts of the Tilgar galaxy still shone brightly. To their left Cerebrus galaxy appeared in a distant brilliant gathering of stars.
The two spaceships accelerated. They were almost at the tipping point for post-light speeds. Just another day of constant acceleration and they would reach it.
Yet as if the prey had finally made its way to the jaws of the waiting predator, their engines suddenly snuff out without warning. A suppression field had shut down their electronics, and despite the navigator crew’s best efforts to reroute the power supply, their systems were constantly bombarded to failure.
Inside the control bridge of the battleship, their comms lit up with static. Electronic warfare specialists attempted to rain in the damage but intrusive malware kept their hands full.
The Captain pale and anxious scanned the surrounding area from the bridge’s viewing window. He saw nothing of the threat attacking them.
From the cold darkness of the void, two previously invisible Dreadnought class battleships shed their phantom cloaking and emerged into their path.
Despite the desperate hails over the comms, the Dreadnoughts didn’t hesitate one bit to engage in battle.
----
Amon wasn't meant to die.
That thought burned itself into his mind. His eyes were tightly shut, pressed hard over his eyelids. At that moment he felt keenly the tightness of his skin above his cheeks and the bridge of his nose as it pulled against his troubled expression.
Even there, in the darkness of his sight, the optic’s Head-up Display flashed red as the forward corps' fatalities added up. He could see the digital display of the frontlines, blue dots getting obliterated as they touched the enemy battleships' rebound shields and bounced off, unable to penetrate.
Closing his eyelids was a feeble attempt, the reality before him could not be denied and made little difference to the biotechnology nested above his cornea. The HUD assisted by the optics provided all the required information without direct line of sight. Blue dots, the Spacediving Marines, his comrades in arms, turned red when the weaponry from the enemy battleship evaporated them to nothingness.
He wasn’t meant to die. Amon repeated silently as if fate would listen and take him away in a comforting warm embrace.
Flying in the void while approaching the enemy battleship at speed with only the inadequate protection of his biosuit had him close to a panic fit. Space was a cold and utterly deadly mistress for all Spacediving forces.
Spread before him the first wave was getting obliterated and unfortunately for him, he was close behind it. The Spacedive Forward Corp's second wave would impact the enemy rebound shields in less than a minute. Amon finally opened his eyes just in time to see the approach.
A soft tag of acceleration was the only sensory feeling he had. His boot thrusters pushed him forward against weightlessness and the silence that drowned him. Feelings that a Spacediving Marine knew too well.
A net-like hexagonal forcefield membrane covered the enemy battleship from the bow to the engine thrusters at the back. It radiated a blue vibrating light. He focused on it as the second wave approached swiftly.
With the speed they tore through space, it looked as if the battleship grew before them unendingly. It was a massive vessel housing hundreds of troops.
Unfortunately being still some distance away had them within range of their heatlaser. The red beam of energy combed through them, evaporating any Marine it touched.
There were no dying screams or curses assaulting his hearing. No praying mumbles or panicked laughter. The comms were eerily muffed as if everyone flying around him was already dead, and he flew among corpses.
But that was a standard tactic to protect troop morale during the first contact with the enemy battleship. When the fatalities shot up, listening to the death cries could send anyone's mind into a deep slimy gutter.
Around Amon the second wave was spread wide, making the enemy attacks less likely to hit. He tried to take his mind off the imminent approach and the rebound shields that pulsed and vibrated with power.
When a burst of white light washed over him, he sucked a deep breath and knew that at least a few made it through the first line of defense. However, the rebound shields still retained their hexagonal shape even when one of the membrane patches got overwhelmed and that barrier was only the first hurdle to overcome.
He was seconds away from impact now.
With the help of his biosuit’s built-in propulsion, he spun himself like a screw. The motion was similar to a head dive but with the added spin, almost like a drill bit boring through a metal hull. He had learned it from a fellow Marine who had survived more than ten Spacediving battles. He was not even close to that number yet, but he was here and that fellow was now dead.
When he made contact with the rebound shields the soft forcefield membrane stretched inwards, its hexagon design pulled downwards by the forceful impact. It felt like a net, slowing his momentum, and in moments, when the forces negated each other, he would be hurled the other way, back into range of the heatlaser.
Thankfully it was then that the automatic shieldbreaker from his biosuit took effect. He vibrated violently which didn't help with the vomit he’d been trying to keep down. Resisting the urge he smothered the nausea with a gulp of saliva.
With a flash of white light, the shield popped blinding him momentarily and he was through.
It was a 15-meter fall to the ship’s hull and he'd slowed down enough not to break himself on the hard metal armor of the battleship. Still, he didn't want to hit it head-first despite the nanomite’s healing running through his bloodstream. He brought his feet forward and braced for impact.
He heard a thud through the silence of space, but it was more his weight on the boots than anything else. Sometimes, his body surprised even him. A TechGenome, 2 and a half meters tall, close to 150 kg man; he should have felt a bit of pain landing on a hard surface like he did.
Amon felt nothing but pure adrenaline as he crouched and engaged the manual drill embedded in the backstorage compartment of his biosuit. Its chuck started spinning fiercely, showering him in a glowing orange hue.
Despite the freezing temperature of space the battleship's metallic armor overheated from the contact with the drill. He pushed it down hard and scanned the surrounding area for any defensive drones closing into his position.
The kilometer-long hull was a landscape of smooth metal. Several other orange lights on the battleship indicated further attempts at breaching its outer armor. His optics tracked blasts here and there where Marines engaged with the battleship’s non-stationary defenses, but luckily no drones converged on his location. Not yet.
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It might have been the stress but sweat was starting to form on his brows under the helmet, which prevented him from wiping the constant itch away. After the drill hissed out a gush of air that signified the outer armor was pierced, he moved it sideways to enlarge the hole to a size that could accommodate his body. The sludge of melted metal was piling and freezing fast on the sides and he was careful not to step on it and get extra weight stuck under his boots.
His mind tended to wander during physical labor. It processed these situations too fast to keep focused. As the Marines of the SFC fought and died above him, trying to pierce through the battleship's shields and the supermassive spacefreighter it was protecting, he thought of home.
He thought of House Arthas.
—-
The docking station's deck always bothered him. It was the metallic clang it produced when he walked over it that did it, and it did so with every conceivable footwear he had tried on thus far.
The only solution? To go barefoot. But he would die before exposing himself to such humiliation.
Every time he walked around the station the deckhands gawked at the slightest glimpse of his presence. At only 10 years old he could challenge most adults in height. He often wondered if he looked out of place; a child’s face occupying the bulky body of an adult. Maybe that was the reason why he had difficulty making friends his age, to begin with.
His parents, conscious as they were for projecting their status and noble image, had instructed him from a young age to proper behavior and suitable attire. They dreamed he would go far, leading the EL'Arthas family branch to success and glory. A hope that was both medicine and poison alike.
Being of a side branch of the main Arthas family held a lot of responsibility but little actual power. His father, Odmund EL’Arthas like his father before him, was responsible for the smooth running of an artificial moon, a mobile port facility, Point C3X1DF, engaged near the planetary cluster home to the House Arthas dominion.
It was by all accounts a very comfortable setup for his father and the branch family. A busy port that oversaw supermassive bulkcarriers and spacefreighters of all kinds arrange their loads, swap crews, or head to the repair bay for needed maintenance.
It was also why he had been studying NeoEngineering, Biocomputing, and Techphysics his whole young life. Preparing in case he inherited his father’s obligations as was the norm for such postings in the Arthas dominion.
However, by being of the side branch of the main Arthas family held a lot of privileges but a screw-up could just as easily downgrade their family’s ranking to nothingness.
Yet the privileges his parents had been offered had all gone to him and to his embarrassment, he didn’t nearly feel the necessary appreciation for their gifts.
Even before he was born, he was made a Genome. Altered biologically, enhanced to the extreme limit of humanity. The gene editing gave him size, gave him strength, and good looks. Made him healthy and resilient against disease. Made him smart. The branch family's bloodline would rank even higher when he took over as the head of the EL’Arthas household overshadowing his parent's humbler roots.
Then, if that weren't enough, he was stuffed with nanomites that would push his mind and body even further–A TechGenome as was the correct term in the medical circles. Enhancements that would take him a step further away from the human limitations.
For this reason, House Arthas limited and controlled the use of bioengineering on the population. They liked to have capable hands, but not too capable, and only provided the honors when someone proved themselves useful enough. That was how difficult bioaddons were to accrue even for a side branch of the main Arthas family, at least if they wished to attain them through the proper channels.
But it still wasn't enough for his parents, however. Hopes and dreams of grandeur poisoned their thoughts. In his early life, barely a year old, he had been given DNA-mutating drugs. Highly sought after, and highly illegal inside the House Arthas dominion territory. For good reason too.
Since the Great Genome Wars a thousand years in the past, people have been killed to get rid of the death-defying aspects of Growthium that now saturated his organs. Where his parents had acquired it even now he didn’t know. As he took his tentative first steps, inhuman rejuvenation was already a part of his cells.
When he turned 20, at the end of his schooling years, he passed the General Cognition Placement Test alongside his peers from around the Cerebrus galaxy, the center of power for the House Arthas dominion. To the immense satisfaction of his parents, he placed first in the whole galaxy.
Yet in that test, among the hundreds of thousands, millions even, of young men and women, was the heir of the main Arthas bloodline, juiced to the brim with any conceivable enhancer. The young star fated to lead House Arthas in the years to come came in second place.
Amon strongly believed that was where all the shit started.
As his father had once wisely told him. Amon, never rest in the shade of others, the brightest star in the galaxy can only be one.
—-
The hole was large enough for Amon to go through but he waited at the edge, dumping inside a score of miniscout drones to check for an ambush. Drilling through the battleship’s hull was a noisy affair for the ones inside even when he heard nothing at all on the outside.
Amon expected the non-combat personnel to have already fled and the rest to be waiting for him to come through; their weapons ready and pointed in his direction. He may be a mountain of a man but he would die like any other at the face of a plasma onslaught.
The miniscout drones would helpfully warn him of any such dangers. His shell-shaped creations with the plasticated metallic chassis, and the small battery-powered thrusters, were stuffed with sensor and tracking processors, an inexpensive alternative to dying.
To adequately observe the infiltration the miniscouts were equipped with a transmitter that sent a live feed connection to his HUD. He had it placed at the top left corner of his sight. If he wished he could switch easily between different feeds merely with a thought. A feature of the applications running in the background on his brainchip. The brainchip, a HiRON5 model, had the extra capacity to run several apps simultaneously, compliments of his parents, and it was holding out well enough through the stress of battle for a civilian grade.
Moments passed and he was surprised to find there was no contact with the enemy on the inside. His drones without delay started mapping the battleship’s corridors, mindful of any thermal signatures that would indicate enemy personnel.
***BZZZT***
The static of his short-range comms came alive and a few seconds later a female Marine landed right next to him. Amon jerked up more from the nerves of battle than actual surprise holding the hot drill stiffly in both hands. Not a moment later another Marine landed a few meters away, this time sideways hitting the hull with force. Amon grimaced at the inelegant display of a landing.
It appeared the third wave was underway and the battleship's shields had finally been overwhelmed. With the backup arriving just in time, it was time to find out what the inside of the enemy vessel had in store for them.
Her emotionless synthesized voice came through the short-range comms.
“S-Sergeant, your o-orders.” She heaved the words out, looming uncertainly above the hole in the hull. Amon with a quick scan of his optics looked for her ID. The file came up on his HUD, noting her rank as a Private. It was her first spacedive, right out of the SFC's basic training.
If she survived the battle she might rank up with the losses they had acquired so far. A lot of the Marines did since space warfare was so deadly postings opened up quite frequently. Not that it would matter much.
He took a moment and looked with pity at her hunched form checking the hole's interior. Flying through open space while targeted by a heatlazer required nerves of steel that no sane human was equipped with. Even he struggled with it. The mood stabilizers they were fed were not enough to dampen the terror.
When he didn’t reply she looked up at him but saw nothing of his feelings but his helmet's slick black facemask.
Her hands struggled to unhook the standard blaster she was issued with from her right hip. Amon wondered if she dreamed of surviving to a rank where she wouldn’t need to man the spacediving waves.
Little did she know, there was no way for a mercenary company like the SFC to allow Marines to rank up to the higher command posts. It was, after all, set up to crush the debtors and criminals populating its lower ranks. To let any of them live comfortably would go against them in the long run.
The SFC was where you were sent to disappear. Just like what they had planned for Amon. And he had dug through their mainframe. He had seen who had sold him to this hellhole.
Seraphina Arthas. Sister to the Arthas heir.
“You may enter first, Private. I have scout drones mapping the inside of the ship. No resistance from the enemy as of right now." Amon said and her head jerked back her attention to him. "Check your HUD at all times for updates, I’m uploading the mapping in real-time on the main battleserver. I suggest you mind your positioning, be careful, Private.”
“Erm, Sir, I don’t have any optics. I’m Lowtech.” She admitted, hesitating to take the first step into the hole.
Amon cursed inwardly. A slip of the tongue. Even when he knew that most of the SFC marines were Lowtech, and he had scanned her information he had glossed over the fact. No one would care for poorbred deaths, and they made the majority of the fatalities list. “Never mind, help your fellow Marine up, I’ll enter first. Watch my back, Private.”
“Yes, Sir,” She said and the voice synthesizer left out any emotion she might have had. He didn’t know if she had been afraid or relieved.
Amon pushed through the hole and the battleship's gravity pulled him the rest of the way in.
There wasn't anyone waiting for him on the inside and despite the hole in the hull, the artificial gravity had helped greatly in keeping things grounded.
Instead of moving forward, Amon scanned the room with his optics; a storage space with crates arranged neatly in metal casings. The HUD highlighted several interesting objects and he rubbed his gloved hands together in anticipation.
The piece of technology he was looking for was installed on the walls of the ship itself. Artificial Magnetic Atmospheric Fields were an over-the-top technology that nullified the dangers of breaches in the battleship’s structure.
The pocket of chips and wires his optics registered as the core array in the room held a metasphere that made all this possible.
It was needless to say that he wanted it. His mouth salivated at the thought of what he could do with a score of those.
The bad news was that holding a metasphere close for an extended period would mess with his nanomites to a degree that he might shut down, and faint, as the sum of his nanos converged on a single point inside his body.
Thankfully Amon had more than enough Lowtech personnel to choose from.
“Privates,” he called in the comms, and in moments the two marines dropped through the hole.
“Sir?” the female Marine asked, crouching with her blaster finally out and pointing around the room as she took stock of her surroundings. Amon winced as she pointed the weapon at every shadow in the room.
“Cease whatever you are doing. New orders, here catch this,” Amon threw the metasphere at her. “Identify yourselves. As of now, your sole purpose is to carry what I throw at you.”
“Private Igor Fin, Sir, of the F567 company,” The second Private answered.
“Private Gardenia Ilky, of F567,” added the woman. “Is it...dangerous, Sergeant?” she asked, holding the little metallic ball in her fingertips as if it might explode at any moment.
“For you, none whatsoever, and I expect you to keep it out of sight,” Amon said, making a circle with his thumb and index finger, the universal code for credits. Digital currency or not, the sign made his intentions clear. Sharing a look of understanding, the two marines nodded in union.
It was time to lift some tech off the hands of the Helion Syndicate battleship.
