The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome 4 new Novices and 3 new Operators! The following are our most recent additions:
Novices YEET BOIII, deezapril15, FrigigPandaz, and momo.
Operatives Brock Kron, Jamie Klod, and returning Operative Moritz Gleich
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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The standby-blue glow of the medical chairs cast long shadows across the ruined medbay. Mark knelt on the deck plating, his massive body hunched over the small and fragile Lyra. She was clinging to his neck, her face buried in the thick collar of his leather jacket.
For a quiet moment, Mark allowed himself to just hold her. He let the steady rhythm of her heartbeat ground him, pulling him back from the edge of his own fury. It was as if he was standing at the orphanage all over again, about to give her up to be somebody else's problem. Then she had called him Papa. That single word had completely rewired the architecture of his soul.
But as the adrenaline from the ambush began to recede, the harsh and unforgiving reality of their situation pressed in on him. He was a father now, yes, but he was also leading the remnants of a battered fleet stranded in the dead expanse of the unconquered systems. By all means, he was technically the commander of the fleet, and under his command, the Shepherd had been severely damaged, two hundred people were dead, and the element of Void Vanguard that he'd hired was scattered and crippled.
If they were going to survive the week, he couldn't stay on his knees.
"Lyra," Mark whispered in a gently firm voice as he slowly pulled back, keeping his hands on her small shoulders. "Look at me, sweetheart."
Lyra sniffled, her large, expressive eyes looking up at him. He had cleaned away the dried blood beneath her nose and ears, and the terror that had gripped her was fading, replaced by trust.
"I need to go fix the ship," Mark told her, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "The bad men who hurt us are gone, but the Shepherd took a really big hit. The engines are hurting. I have to go down into the dark and put her back together."
Lyra's lower lip trembled, and her hands tightened on the lapels of his jacket. "You're coming back?"
"I will always come back," Mark promised. He tapped the center of her chest, right over her heart. "But while I'm down there, I need you to be brave. Father Michael is still sleeping in the machine, and he needs to stay there until his head is better. I need you to go out into the hall and stay with Sister Elara and the other kids. Can you do that for me?"
Lyra looked past him, her eyes lingering on the unconscious priest in the second medical chair. She looked back at Mark, gave a tiny, brave nod, and wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. "Okay."
Mark smiled with pride as he stood up, took her hand, and walked her out of the medical suite.
The primary habitation corridor was a chaotic scene of flickering emergency lights and swirling smoke. The fifty orphans from St. Jude's were huddled together, clutching blankets and each other. Sister Elara stood in the center of it all. The gash on her forehead had stopped bleeding, leaving a dark streak across her face. She was in the middle of issuing quiet instructions to the junior nuns, keeping the panic locked down.
When Elara saw Mark step out of the medbay with Lyra walking under her own power, a massive breath of relief escaped her lips.
"She's good to go," Mark said as he approached, gently nudging Lyra forward. "Trauma is fully healed. Father Michael took a massive blow to the back of the skull, but the chairs have healed him as well. He just needs time to sleep it off and let his body produce more blood."
Elara reached out to Lyra, pulling her into a brief embrace before looking up at Mark. Her dark eyes swept over his bruised and exhausted face. "And what about you, Mark? What is the status of this vessel?"
"Well, we aren't venting any atmosphere, which means the primary hull held," Mark replied, his tone shifting instantly from father to shipwright. "But the internal network is a mess. We have no engines or sensors, and the rest of the ships are probably flying blind out there as well. I have to get down to the engineering decks and physically restart the reactor."
"We will stay here," Elara promised, her voice hard and uncompromising. "You go do what you do best."
Mark nodded and took a step away from the children, but as he did, a wave of vertigo washed over him. The adrenaline that had kept his body moving was rapidly burning away, leaving behind the crushing reality of the head trauma he had sustained when the Shepherd breached the jump node. The edges of his vision darkened, and he swayed heavily, having to brace his arm against the corridor bulkhead just to stay on his feet.
"Just... give me five minutes," Mark grunted, squeezing his eyes shut against the spinning corridor.
He turned back and stumbled into the medbay. Father Michael was still resting peacefully in the second chair, the soft yellow light steadily repairing any other internal injuries. He walked heavily over to the first chair and sank into it, letting his head fall back against the contoured headrest.
The chair instantly recognized his presence, and the standby-blue shifted into a pulsing yellow. For a normal human, recovering from a severe concussion and the deep tissue bruising of a shockwave would take about an hour. But Mark wasn't a normal human, and the moment the chair's microscopic sensors engaged, his alien biology was thrown into hyperdrive.
It only took him five minutes for a rush of restorative energy to flood his system. The splitting agony in his skull dissolved into a dull ache and then vanished entirely. The bruised, torn muscle fibers across his ribs and shoulders knit back together flawlessly, and his heart rate steadied. The dark fog that had begun to cloud his mind was forcibly scoured away, leaving him in absolute clarity.
The yellow glow faded back to blue, and Mark stood up. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the power return to his limbs, and eventually walked out of the medbay without a hitch in his stride. He offered a reassuring nod to Elara and a smile to Lyra before continuing down the dark corridor toward the central transit junction.
As soon as he was out of sight of the orphans, Mark reached his right hand up to his chest. Resting against his collarbone, he felt the little bit of the pendant that remained whenever he used it to wear it as clothes.
He only had to think about wearing his armor, and the pendant liquefied instantly. His current attire rippled in the dark, and more metal rippled outward over Mark's chest like a living, metallic fluid, racing down his arms, across his back, and down his legs, weaving itself into a highly articulated, heavily armored undersuit. Once that was done, thick, angular plates of armor bloomed into existence over his vital organs, his shoulders, and his shins. Finally, the liquid metal surged up his neck, encasing his head in a predatory helmet.
The interior HUD flickered to life, and a stream of diagnostic data washed across his vision, glowing in a soft red. The air inside the suit was instantly scrubbed and purified, cutting off any toxic smell from the damaged circuitry of the ship. If the lower decks had decompressed, the armor would be able to keep him alive in the vacuum for twenty-four hours.
The elevators were dead, their magnetic tracks completely disabled by the electrical surge. Mark ripped the grate off the emergency maintenance stairwell, and began his descent into the bowels of the Shepherd.
Every once in a while, the ship let out a terrifying groan followed by clanks. The shockwave from the Volanti Rail Cannon had reverberated through the entirety of the 335-meter frigate, and unfortunately for Mark, this was a universe where warfare was dictated strictly by armor and rail velocity. Energy shields could have helped, but they were still in an experimental phase. Every single ounce of that energy transfer had to be absorbed by the superstructure of the ship itself.
Mark dropped down three decks, his armored boots ringing against the metal grating. As he walked, sparks showered from ruptured overhead conduits, raining down against his armor. When he reached the landing of Deck Five, just above the primary reactor containment, his suit's audio receptors picked up the sound of dragging footsteps.
Mark rounded the corner, his hand instinctively dropping to the kinetic wrench he had magnetically slung to his thigh.
Through the swirling smoke of the corridor, a figure emerged. It was Kenjiro.
He looked like he had been put through a meat grinder. His white shirt was soaked in grease, coolant, and blood, and he had a massive gash running across his forehead, the blood matting his dark hair to his skull. As Mark scanned his body, he realized that his left arm was in a much worse position, bent at an unnatural angle between the elbow and the wrist, the bone clearly broken as it hung limply at his side. He was using his right hand to guide himself along the bulkhead, his teeth gritted in absolute agony.
"Kenji!" Mark called out, rushing forward and catching the man by his good shoulder before he could collapse.
Kenjiro let out a breathless laugh, looking up at Mark's terrifying armored visor. "Oh, hi, Mark. Good to see you're still walking."
"What the hell are you doing out of the engineering bay?" Mark demanded, supporting the man's weight. "You have a broken arm, man."
"Had to... had to secure the primary coolant lines," Kenjiro gasped, wincing as a spike of pain radiated through his broken arm. He leaned heavily against the Mark, his chest heaving. "When that slug hit us... the shockwave ripped right through the deck plating and threw me straight across the command console. But I didn't let the reactor destabilize. I dumped the excess thermal load into the secondary sinks and dropped the fusion core into a hard standby. She's stable for now."
A wave of respect washed over Mark. In the middle of an ambush, while his arm was broken, Kenjiro had stayed at his post and single-handedly prevented the frigate's reactor from going critical.
"You did well, Kenji," Mark said. "We're all alive because of you. But your shift is over now. I need you to get up to the secondary crew decks where Sister Elara is holding the children just outside the medbay. Head straight past them and into it. The chairs are powered up. Strap yourself in and let it work its magic on that arm."
"But... the repairs..." Kenjiro argued weakly, his eyes darting toward the dark stairwell. "The right wing is a mess, Mark. The data before the boards blew showed a massive structural breach. Four of the starboard railguns are completely offline. You can't fix all of that by yourself."
"I'm not by myself," Mark replied, gently pushing Kenjiro toward the stairwell leading up. "I've got the swarm. Now go. That's an order, Chief Engineer."
Kenjiro offered a tired smirk, nodded once, and began the slow climb up the stairs. Mark watched him go until he was out of sight, then turned and continued his descent into the primary engineering bay.
The reactor room of the Shepherd was massive. It was a cavernous chamber that spanned three decks, and in the center sat the colossal containment unit of the reactor. It was just barely even letting out a glow, humming with the low tone of standby power. Around it, the room was a disaster. The shockwave from the glancing blow to the hull had caused massive internal spalling that ended up shredding the delicate optic fiber bundles and secondary power relays lining the walls.
Mark stood in the center of the sparking room, completely alone.
"It's time to go to work," he said to himself, taking a deep breath and centering his focus. He summoned his inventory, and the empty space around the reactor containment suddenly filled with a deafening, synchronized mechanical hum of one hundred utility drones as they dropped out of the dimensional void and materialized in the air.
"Marcos," Mark spoke into the suit's internal comms, hoping the AI could hear him. "I know the primary mainframe took a hit and that your processing power is bottlenecked. But I need you to try to connect to the swarm."
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, the optics on all one hundred drones simultaneously flashed from a standard standby blue to a sharp, vibrant red.
"M-M-Mark..." Marcos's voice crackled through his suit's speakers. It was heavily distorted, but the pitch fluctuations were gone. Marcos was using the physical drones themselves, decentralizing his consciousness and using their collective processing power as an ad-hoc neural network to bypass the Shepherd's damaged internal servers. "Swarm... network established. Processing load... distributed. I am... here."
"Good to have you back, buddy," Mark breathed, a genuine smile crossing his face behind the visor. "We have a lot of work to do. Give me a damage assessment on the starboard flank."
A dozen drones immediately broke away from the main swarm, their thrusters whining as they shot down the dark access corridors that led out toward the Shepherd's right wing. Seconds later, a crude schematic of the ship popped up on Mark's HUD.
"Assessment complete," Marcos reported, his voice growing slightly steadier as the drones funneled data back to him. "The slug struck the lower sweep of the starboard wing. It did not breach the inner hull, so we are not venting oxygen. However, the kinetic transfer was catastrophic. The S-Alloy plating buckled inward by precisely three meters. We have a massive dent."
"And the guns?" Mark asked, already summoning his plasma torch out of his inventory.
"The structural warping crushed the magnetic loading tracks for railguns six, seven, eight, and nine," Marcos explained, highlighting four massive weapon emplacements on the schematic in flashing red. "The barrels are intact, but the feed mechanisms are donzo. They cannot draw munitions from the magazines and are effectively dead weight. Furthermore, the main power lines running from the reactor to the sub-light engines were severed by internal spalling, which is why we are dead in the water."
Mark stared at the schematic. To fix the railguns and pop the massive dent out of the wing would require them to dock somewhere and weeks of labor. The four guns were a lost cause for now. But the power lines? Those he could fix.
"Alright," Mark commanded, rolling his armored shoulders. "Marcos, take sixty drones. I want you to prioritize the local electrical fires and any ruptured coolant lines. Seal them, weld them, and isolate the damaged sectors. Take the other forty drones and have them begin hauling the spare conductive cabling I left in the cargo hold. We are going to build a physical bypass for the severed main lines."
"Roger that," Marcos replied. The swarm instantly scattered, dividing into organized squadrons, their welding torches igniting in a blinding chorus of blue light as they descended upon the damaged engineering bay.
But Mark wasn't going to just stand there and supervise their work.
The main power lines were buried deep within the ship's skeletal structure, threaded through claustrophobic and heavily armored crawlspaces designed solely for the flow of immense electrical current. The drones were too bulky to navigate the tight space, which meant that this was a job for a human.
Mark moved to the far wall of the engineering bay, prying a warped access panel off the bulkhead and tossing it aside. He stared into the pitch-black, narrow space of the primary access tunnel that was barely wide enough for him.
He activated the floodlights on his helmet and crawled inside.
The next fifteen hours were grueling and physically tormenting.
The interior of the crawlspaces was a nightmare of twisted metal and suffocating heat. Without the primary life support pushing scrubbed air through the access vents, the ambient temperature inside the ship's skeleton skyrocketed. Even with his suit's environmental controls fighting to keep him cool, Mark was drenched in sweat within the first hour.
He army-crawled through the dark, dragging diagnostic tools and a massive spool of replacement conductive wiring behind him.
By the time he reached the primary break, three hours had gone by. The shockwave had sheared a massive bundle of heavy power lines in half, with some of the cables melted and fused, still sparking weakly in the dark.
Working in a space so tight he couldn't even fully extend his arms, Mark began the process of repairing the Shepherd's power system.
He used his kinetic wrench to pry things apart, his muscles burning with exertion as he physically bent parts of the crawlspace back into shape to give himself room to work. He unspooled the thick replacement cables, dragging them through the wreckage.
Mark ignited his plasma torch, the blinding blue flame illuminating the cramped tunnel in a dancing light. He cut away the fused ends of the severed lines, then grabbed the massive lines and physically forced them together. The cables were stiff, resisting his pull, but the overwhelming strength of his enhanced biology won. He held the thick copper and metal weaves perfectly aligned, engaging the torch with his other hand to fuse the conductive elements back together.
It was agonizing and deeply tedious work.
"Mark," Marcos's voice buzzed in his ear after Mark reached the seventh hour. It sounded much clearer now, and the drones had successfully rerouted auxiliary power to the secondary mainframes. "Coolant leaks on decks three and four have been contained. I am reading a massive spike in your suit's internal temperature, and your core biometrics are elevating. You need to hydrate and rest."
"No rest for the wicked," Mark grunted, his teeth gritted as he wrestled with another massive cable, the smell of vaporized copper filling his helmet. "If the Volanti fleet realizes we didn't disintegrate in that jump and manages to track our exit vector, they'll jump in behind us while we're dead in the water... I have to get the engines online."
He kept going, and ten hours blurred into twelve as the physical exertion of maneuvering in the crushed space began to take a toll. His shoulders screamed, and his hands were trembling beneath the armor. He crawled from junction to junction, systematically hunting down the severed lines, splicing the cables, locking down the magnetic relays, and wrapping the exposed wires in electric shielding.
Outside the crawlspaces, the ship slowly began to be repaired. Marcos and the drone swarm worked tirelessly, sealing the minor atmospheric micro-fractures, extinguishing any electrical fires, and resetting the tripped capacitors.
By the fifteenth hour, Mark reached the final junction box directly beneath the engine containment. He dragged the final cable into place, his arms trembling from physical exhaustion. He locked the thick clamp into the receiving port, grabbed his kinetic wrench, and torqued the massive bolt down until it shrieked in protest.
Mark dropped the wrench and lay on his back in the cramped space, his chest heaving.
"Marcos," Mark rasped, closing his eyes. "The bypasses are complete and the lines are fused. Spin up the reactor. Let's see what we've got."
"Initializing primary fusion core sequence," Marcos replied, a note of deep anticipation in his voice.
Deep within the ship, the low, sullen vibration of the standby reactor suddenly changed. It deepened into a profound thrum that resonated through the deck plating and directly into Mark's bones.
Inside the crawlspace, the dead cables surrounding Mark suddenly hummed with immense current.
"Reactor output at twenty percent," Marcos reported. "Forty percent... sixty percent... stabilizing at seventy percent output. Mark, the bypasses are holding. The sub-light engines have power."
As if to confirm the AI's words, the dim, flickering backup lights in the engineering access tunnel suddenly flared to a bright white. The air scrubbers kicked into high gear, sending the sound of rushing air through the silent ship.
Mark let out an exhausted laugh and slowly dragged himself backward through the tunnel, eventually tumbling out of the nearest access hatch and landing heavily on the deck of the primary engineering bay.
The drones were hovering in neat, standby formations. Things were fixed, and the containment of the fusion reactor was glowing with a steady bright blue light that illuminated the walls, which were scarred by the spalling.
Mark's helmet unsealed and let out a soft hiss as it retracted back down into the collar of his suit. He took a deep breath of the newly scrubbed, slightly ozone-scented air.
"Seventy percent," Mark muttered, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair.
"That is the absolute hard ceiling for our current condition, Mark," Marcos confirmed, his holographic avatar appearing over the main console. He looked whole again, the digital static completely gone. "The bypasses you constructed are great, but the physical damage to the power grid's infrastructure is too severe to push the reactor any higher without risking a catastrophic feedback loop. Furthermore, the four starboard railguns are permanently offline, and our top sub-light speed is reduced to about sixty percent of our normal output due to the damage done to the ship's power lines and our reactor output."
Mark nodded slowly, accepting the stark reality of the situation. "It's as good as it's going to get. We can't fix everything without stripping her down to the bare bones in a dry dock. But seventy percent power means we can fly, have life support, sensors, and the engines are ready to push us out of here."
Mark slowly stood up, his muscles aching with every movement. He walked over to the primary engineering console, tapping the comms array. He had to find out exactly how much of the fleet had survived the blind jump, and he had to officially take command of whatever was left of the Vanguard mercenaries.
"Marcos, open a wide-band channel," Mark ordered, his voice heavy with the grim expectation of talking to a survivor. "I need to speak to whoever is acting as the Vanguard commander now. We need a complete sit-rep."
"Opening ch-" Marcos started, but the AI's voice was suddenly cut off by the blaring shriek of the Shepherd's proximity alarms.
"WARNING. MASSIVE SPATIAL ANOMALY DETECTED. RANGE: DANGER CLOSE." Mark's blood ran cold. He slammed his hand against the console, bringing up the external feeds.
'They found us,' he thought. 'Those Volanti bastards had tracked our wake.'
But the space outside wasn't filling with a fleet of corporate warships.
Less than two kilometers off the Shepherd's starboard bow, the vacuum of space tore open, unlike the clean and stable jump space rupture Mark was expecting. It was a chaotic vortex of blinding violet and blue energy, snapping and sparking like a dying star.
And then, something was spat out of the tear. Mark stared at the monitors in stunned silence.
It was a ship, but it was fundamentally wrong. It was tumbling wildly into real-space, venting massive clouds of frozen atmosphere, coolant, and debris.
It was the Rod's Belle. Or, more accurately, the front half of it.
The heavy destroyer had been dead in the water, its engines annihilated by the Volanti Rail Cannons. But Juan Rodrigues had already synced his jump drive to the Shepherd's telemetry. Which meant that when Mark had initiated the emergency jump, the Rod's Belle's jump core, buried deep in the mid-ship, had possessed enough power to engage and follow the tether.
But the blind jump was unforgiving, coupled with the fact that the destroyer's structural integrity had been compromised by the massive hit to its aft section. The overwhelming gravitational shifts of the spatial transit had ripped the dying ship apart. The entire rear section, including the engine block and the aft magazines, had been sheared off somewhere in the dimensional void.
Only the front two hundred and thirteen meters of the destroyer remained, leaving a cross-section of sparking cabling, damaged bulkheads, exposed decking, and severed hydraulic lines bleeding into the vacuum.
The spatial tear snapped shut behind it, leaving the severed piece of the massive warship drifting silently in the dark.
"Marcos," Mark breathed, his eyes wide. "Scan that wreck. Are there any life signs?"
Before the AI could process the request, the comms console chirped with an incredibly weak radio frequency.
Mark hit the receiver, and static hissed through the engineering bay. Then, a voice broke through, strained and laced with pain.
"Shephard," Juan Rodrigues coughed over the line. "Tell me you have a magnetic tether strong enough to catch half a destroyer. Because my stabilizing thrusters are in a different dimension, and we are currently in an uncontrolled spin."
A breathless laugh of relief tore out of Mark's chest. "Juan. Ho-holy shit! You made the jump."
"Barely," Juan rasped. "The emergency bulkheads slammed down just behind the bridge, right before the hull sheared. The forward command center and the primary medical bays held atmosphere. But I lost half my crew. And we are running on fumes here."
"Hold tight, Juan. You couldn't have come at a better time. We just finished repairing the Shepherd. I'm coming to get you," Mark said, his hands already flying across the console, engaging the Shepherd's tethers while Marcos assumed control of the Shepherd, bringing it around to catch the tumbling wreckage.
"What's our status, Shephard?" Juan asked, the sound of grinding metal echoing in the background of his transmission.
"We lost five civilian ships and your two corvettes. The rest of the rustbuckets are battered," Mark said, his fingers flying across the console as he fired a spread of magnetic tethers.
Thick, high-tensile carbon-weave cables shot across the void, their magnetic clamps slamming into the destroyer's forward plating with a resounding thud that reverberated through the hull. The Shepherd jerked violently as the winches locked tight, groaning under the immense strain as they absorbed the momentum of the dead ship, slowly dragging its uncontrolled spin to a halt.
"And the bastards from House Volanti? Where the hell are we, Shephard?" Juan asked, the sound of grinding metal echoing in the background of his transmission.
"The Volanti bastards are gone. The emergency jump threw us completely off our original vector. They can't track this," Mark confirmed. He looked up at the holographic stellar map, hoping to see a familiar cluster. Instead, the display was a chaotic mess of unrecognized constellations and deep-space static. "As for where we are... I have absolutely no idea."
"I believe I can shed some light on that, Mark," Marcos chimed in over the comms. He rematerialized over the central holotable, looking grim as he processed the newly restored auxiliary sensor data. "Though the news is far from optimal."
"Give it to me straight, Marcos," Mark said, leaning heavily against the console.
"The kinetic transfer from those Volanti bastards' rail cannon, combined with the uncalculated jump space rupture, acted as a dimensional slingshot," Marcos explained, manipulating the stellar map to show a massively long line projecting outward into the dark. "According to my preliminary astrometric readings, we completely overshot Aurelius II and punched straight through the unconquered systems deep into the galactic fringe. Local sensors indicate we are currently drifting at the very edge of a completely unmapped and unexplored solar system."
"How far out, AI?" Juan's voice crackled, laced with a new kind of dread.
"It is difficult to be exact without a stable navigational beacon, Commander Rodrigues," Marcos replied, his tone clinical. "But based on the cosmic background radiation, I estimate we are approximately five months of travel away from the Aurelian system. And to be perfectly clear... that five-month estimate is based on the Shepherd making the journey alone, hauling absolutely zero cargo, operating on an uninterrupted full burn with the main drives pushing one hundred and twenty-five percent capacity."
A suffocating silence fell over the channel. With a crippled civilian fleet, half a destroyer tethered to their hull, and the Shepherd currently capped at seventy percent power, that five-month trek might as well have been five lifetimes.
"We'll figure out our next move after getting you all to safety," Mark stated.
"Copy that," Juan replied.
Mark killed the comms. He stared at the daunting, uncharted expanse on the map.
"Marcos, get us a good position, and then activate the extraction bridge," Mark said to the AI and felt the Shepherd begin to shift as he started making his way back up the decks to Lyra.
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