07 – To set the ball rolling
When the group arrived at the site of the crash, their morale sank. The Rapid Claw was obviously beyond repair and would be of no use for leaving the planet. Parts that had been ripped off by the force of the impact lay scattered in a radius for up to two miles around the wreck.
As soon as they had landed and left the shuttle, they noticed that the place also began to reek of death. Several corpses and torn off body parts could be seen lying around in the debris. When they searched the wreckage, they found some tracks leading away for about 200m. At the tracks end they found another crash victim. A bear-like humanoid had obviously survived the crash, crawled away and died later due to severe internal injuries.
“This is a Kagoth.” Chraron informed them “He was the doctor of the Rapid Claw. Despite their immense physical size the Kagoth are extremely pacifistic, without exceptions. She had great honour for serving on a military vessel only to care for the wounded. I will bury her.”
After rummaging the site Boris made an inventory of the usable things they had found. Several personal weapons, ammunition, grenades, digging charges, energy cells, suits of personal armour, food that would last them for several weeks, survival kits and tons of trivia. And they had found the wreck of their own jump ship. The drive seemed to be beyond repair however.
When he was done, Rico motioned him to come into the shuttle.
“What’s up, Rico? You could have used your headset, you know?”
“No, I don’t think so. Before I…switched bodies, I think I saw something white speed inside the shuttle. Now I took some time to search it and I think I found something.”
“Well?” Boris grew impatient. A mad pilot that now started hallucinating. Wonderful.
Rico led Boris towards the large block of metal, Chraron had brought aboard the shuttle before they had left the Rapid Claw. But now there was an opening at one side of the cube.
“Don’t touch it!” Boris whispered. “Chraron? Please join us in the shuttle! Boris over.” “Acknowledged”
A minute later the three were inspecting the artefact.
“Any idea what happened and why?” Boris asked. “What is this thing good for anyway?”
“I don’t know” the Tulgar woman admitted. “I only had the duty to protect it. Let’s see what’s inside.” She went to her knees to reach inside.
Suddenly she could hear panting from the inside, like from some small animal. She made a noise she hoped to be soothing and looked inside.
About 20cm away from her face sat a small white dog, wearing a blue shirt, smiling broadly. * (I included a picture of him at the end of this post)
Wagging his tail he stood up, walked towards her and licked her cheek.
Chraron stood up again, carrying their new acquaintance on her arms. A large “1” was printed on the back of his shirt.
“Looks to be friendly. Where did he come from?” The dog raised his right paw, pointing towards the sky.
“Oh! You understand us?” The dog nodded.
“Did you help us?” The dog nodded again.
“How?” The dog pointed at the artefact.
“Can you help us get away from this planet?” Rico threw in jokingly.
The dog turned to look at him, nodded slowly, jumped from Chrarons arm and sped inside the cube. A moment later he reappeared and the block of metal changed. It seemed to melt, forming a silvery puddle on the shuttles floor. Then the floor dissolved.
“Everyone out! And take our “friend” with us!” Boris shouted as he fled from the shuttle. When Dodger arrived about two minutes later, the shuttle was half gone and parts of the silvery puddle were flowing uphill, towards the wreckage.
“What the heck is going on here? I leave you alone for some minutes and you destroy our shuttle?!” she yelled at Rico.
“Actually that dog did it!”
“Ha! Hiding behind some small animal, that’s typical for you!”
“I would say we all calm down and wait to see what happens. How about some lunch?” Chraron interfered. “By the way, his name is “Wusel”.”
“Wusel, eh? How do you know that?”
The Tulgar just shrugged.
“Well, I think Chraron is right. It seems to be getting dark and we all need some sleep. We’ll have one watch, two hours each. Maybe tomorrow things look different.” Boris agreed. They put up some tents and soon snoring could be heard.
---
The next dawn came and with it a small miracle. The debris was gone, as were the corpses. But nobody really cared for these facts, they were all focusing on something else. In the middle of a plain part of earth stood the lower third of some kind of star ship. And it was getting more complete with every minute.
“By the emperors a**. That must be frickin’ nano-technology! It’s only known as an insane theory!!!” The Oort exclaimed. Dodger had to lift him up to stop him from entering the silvery puddle that was swashing around inside the partial ship.
Boris turned back towards Wusel and gave him a close look. The small dog was all grins.
“Very well, good that I suppressed my first urge to shoot you, when our shuttle dissolved.” He mumbled.
Wusel tried to hide between Chrarons arms, whining.
“Leave him alone!” Rico stepped between. “I can’t wait to see what I get to fly here! Thank you, number 1!”
“I think this dog is suspicious!” Dodger growled. “He is running around the whole time and he is still white. Look at his paws! That’s too strange for me. I say we lock him up in some crate.”
“When he has technology that builds star ships from scrap metal, he can also have something that cleans him constantly.” Rico reasoned.
---
At dusk the ship was complete. Most parts were identical to those of the Rapid Claw, but some others were unknown to the Oort scientist. Aside from that it had everything a star ship needed and even had the guns of the imperial ship. Very peculiar was the fact, that also the jump-drive of their old ship was installed, but in an appropriate size.
But again no member of the group cared. They only wanted to leave as soon as possible, just in case some other imperial ship could drop by and discover what was going on here. So they hurried to stow away their salvage.
“We are ready for take-off.” Rico told the others, when everything was done and started the engines. Without any problems they took off and left the atmosphere.
As they were flying away from the planet, Rico took some time to inspect the ships systems more thoroughly.
He had taken a liking to the small dog and had him sitting on his lap while toying around with the touch screen in front of him.
“Hey, look here, we have a starmap on that screen and some green and yellow lines between star systems! And four are highlighted, two green ones and two yellow ones.”
Chraron, who had some experience in flying star fighters, took a look at the map.
“The green lines are obviously jump-gate connections between star systems. I know some of these routes, the highlighted green lines go through the jump gates of this system. Both lead into imperial space. I don’t know what the yellow lines are, though.”
“Ok, we can find that out later. Any idea where we should go?” Boris asked.
Wusel turned his head and nodded towards Boris.
“Ah, our saviour speaks” Dodger suspected. “You can’t let that dog do everything that it wants! None of us knows what it is up to!”
“Well, so far he has gotten us away from that planet. So, what do you propose, Nr.1?”
Wusel touched one of highlighted yellow lines. The ship began to alter it’s course and a mere second later they had entered hyperspace.
Boris had been caught off guard. “If I ask you something, dog, that is no free license to do anything. I wanted to know what you wanted to do, and not that you do what you did!”
The dog looked at him and Boris could have sworn he heard it chuckle. Of course dogs can't chuckle.
“Seriously, dude, where are we going?” Rico asked Wusel.
Some paw pads later the screen showed an asteroid field, highlighting one of the bigger ones.
“Ah, that’s his home!” Rico exclaimed.
“How do you know that?” Boris inquired, but Rico just shrugged.
“Ok, can’t do anything about it now. We will use the time until we get there to become familiar with the ships controls and functions.”
---
Twenty hours later their ship dropped out of hyperspace, exactly five minutes after a humming sound had awakened all those who were using the time to catch some sleep. They could see an asteroid field that looked nearly like it had on the screen. Only that there was another spaceship at the outer rim of it.
“I am scanning a second ship inside the field. It masses about 600 tons, the one we can see weighs a little more than 1000 tons. Both are armed. They look like pirate ships to me.” Chraron informed the others. “Space is beautiful. Oh, I really love this big screen! Middle sized imperial ships don’t have those, they fly solely by their sensors.”
“Really? Why is that?” Rico inquired.
“It’s considered unnecessary luxury.”
“Ok, anyways, I will now call them to see what they are doing here. Can you open a channel, Rico?”
“Right away, Sir.”
“Hello, my name is Boris! Can you tell us, where we are?”
After a short static noise a cold voice told them “Nice trick, imperial scum, but we won’t fall for that. Prepare to die!”.
The bigger of the two ships turned towards them and the smaller one made it’s way out of the asteroid field.
“No, really, we are not imperials! We only want to talk!” Boris tried again.
“Hah! Sure thing! Do you think we are idiots? Your ship is equipped with blaster cannons – the like used by imperial gunboats. Thus you are imperials.”
“Listen, if you give us time, we can explain how we got to these weapons. We really don’t want to fight!”
“Ah, let me guess, you only want to dock with us so we can talk?”
“That’s a good idea! Exactly! Talk, that’s what we want!”
“Mhmm and as soon as we open the airlock your boarding crew will storm my ship. No, thank you, I prefer to kill you and take your stuff or what’s left of it! Or you could surrender…”
Boris took a deep breath and turned towards Rico, switching off the radio.
“Can you shoot their engines without destroying their ship?”
Rico shrugged. “I don’t know these weapons, but I can try.”
“If we aim properly, they should survive” Chraron mentioned as she sat down at a gunnery console. “But we should do it right the first time. You know, space fights with ships like these don’t take long, usually.”
“My screen indicates they are entering our fire range in 3 seconds. Permission to fire?”
“Granted.” Boris acknowledged.
Rico, Martha and Chraron opened fire simultaneously. Rico’s shot destroyed the ships forward manoeuvring thrusters, Martha vaporized the other ships gun turret and Chraron hit a vital spot – the energy distributor. Thus the other ship drifted on, weaponless and running only on emergency power.
(The group really was astonished by their success, disabling the other ship in the first round completely. They first cheered but then someone asked, what might have happened if they had not won the initiative roll. I only grinned and they discussed about how to avoid future space fights. Hehe.)
They were hailed.
Boris motioned Rico to accept the call.
“Damn you, imperials! We will not become your slaves! When you try to board us we will self destruct!”
“As I told you before, we are not imperials and we have no notion of boarding you…” Boris tried again.
“Lies! Only imperials shoot that precisely!”
Boris cut the transmission again. “These guys really are morons. Call the other ship, Rico.”
“Listen, maybe you are not as stupid as the other captain, we are not imperials and we do not want to fight or board anyone.”
“Yeah, whatever. Mind if we just take the others into tow and leave?” a female voice answered.
“Permission granted. Just tell me one thing - what were you doing here?”
“Oh, we had a look at the roids, but they are no good for mining. Thank you for letting us go – if you ever come to the station in the Fortress-system and need something, contact Klaus in the Marina-Bar, he can help you find us, Boris. Bye!”
Some minutes later the small ship had dragged the damaged vessel out of close sensor range and another thirty minutes later, the energy system obviously had been repaired, both were accelerating away from them.
“Mark their course, Rico. Now, I say we wait until they leave our sensor range and then we look for that “home” of yours, Number 1.”
Wusel nodded and smiled broadly.
---
Either they understand that you're playing the character, or they don't...
