Objective_Campaign82

Sins of the Father Ch69

Pounding, stabbing pain woke Astarte. She felt like she had two little ice picks pounding into her temples. The muscles in her eyelids twitched, and soon she found that she could no longer stay in bed.

The warehouse they had occupied was silent, worn out from the events of the last day and half the pirates had no energy to cause trouble. Even the ones on watch were only half awake.

She sat up and the room swam around her. She stopped and focused her vision until the room held still.

Her headaches had been growing worse and ...

Sins of the Father Ch68

In a park, one whose main attraction were giant twisting metal sculptures, a short unassuming figure stepped forward. It looked to the left, then the right, and then the glass eyes of their mantis mask glinted as two curved blades poked out of her arms.

People saw to blades and began to scream, but it was too late. The Human assassin known by the alias of Reaper mantis tore into the crowd. No matter how fast they ran they could never escape the deathworld cyborg.

She cut, and burned, and tore, and laughed.

Her harsh synthet...

Sins of the Father Ch67

Admiral Tharadun strode onto the deck of the pirate’s vessel, the Astaroth. The first thing he noticed as he stepped through the hatch was how well cared for the ship was. Even though hundreds of dirty feet, hooves, and talons had passed over the floor Tharadun could still see a fine sheen of polish.

When he looked up to the light fixtures and vents, he could only see the thinnest layer of dust and dirt, and he would put down all he had on that dust only being a result of the Station security’s intrusion.

It spoke to...

The Tomb World Ch17

Daniels shifted on the makeshift chair the Gotari had made for him, it was uncomfortable, especially in his black-gold armor, but Daniels refused to complain. Because today the Gotari were finally bringing him and the other captains out of the military hanger and into their actual city.

The hovering cargo pallet jack slowly plodded behind the strange hover tug thing and Daniels took the chance to calm his nerves.

He looked to Foric. “Did the data we sent you help?” he asked, looking for anything to break the quiet tension. 2024-02-03 17:27:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Sins of the Father Ch66

Modius watched the broadcast and felt his heart pound. The little hole in the wall noodle shop was burning fiercely, the fire was so intense that it compromised the structural integrity of the whole block. Alien news speakers were reporting live on the scene as emergency responders were trying to get the fire under control.

On another screen Modius watched as a Zxx’thi anchor stood in front of a very distinctive silhouette of the Astaroth’s hull. The Zxx’thi reported on the situation, “As you can see the pirates have a...

The Tomb World Ch16

Daniels was metaphorically kicking himself in the side for how the meeting went. Eliza stepped up next to him, walking just as primly as always.

“That could have gone better” Daniels muttered.

“What makes you say that, I don’t think it could have gone better if we tried.” She said curtly.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Entirely. Any confrontation between us and the Union was bound to devolve into baseless speciesm and accusations. But this way the Gotari saw the Union picking a fight with us, the people th...

Sins of the Father Ch65

Karega watched as more and more SS officers swarm the Astaroth’s upper decks, completely irreverent of the small gauss cannons meant for shooting down missiles. Just one could clear away the whole infestation. He only held off firing because of the two Union Cruiser vessels over head, their weapons trained on the Astaroth, ready to fire down on the unshielded ship if their guns so much as twitched.

They had been caught off guard by this, moving all the squads out across the station had left the ships crew exhausted ...

The Tomb World Ch15

Fezzen watched Dan-yalz face off with the looming alien with thick pulsing blood veins in its neck. The alien was a whole head shoulders above the hyoomahn and yet Dan-yalz stood with utter confidence.

Granted Fezzen had only met the hyoomahnz a few days ago and hadn’t really gotten a handle on their body language, but he felt like some things were universal. Dan-yalz held himself to his full height, his stance was solid and didn’t shift about on those long legs of his, and he met the alien’s eyes with unflinchi...

Sins of the Father Ch64

The situation erupted into Chaos. Astarte ducked behind a road barrier, the SS officers didn’t even notice her move as they were all searching for the snipers.

CRACK!

An officer fell dead, head blown open.

The SS officers trained their weapons on where the sound had come from. Astarte paid them no mind; she knew that they wouldn’t find anything. She stared down at the metal cuffs in front of her.

CRACK!

Another officer down, this time the shot came from a different direction.

The metal of the cuffs whe...

The Tomb World Ch14

Fezzen stood next to watch captain Foric, as they waited in front of the yunyon spaceship. The council had grown tired of waiting and had ordered his uncle to assemble a force outside their ship.

It wasn’t a threat per say, but the implied promise of threat. Or at least that was how the council representative had phrased it. Leave to a politician to needlessly overcomplicate things.

Even with the assembled force the yunyon people didn’t leave their strange blocky ship. The hyoomahn ships, even the b...

Sins of the Father Ch63

“HEY! Be careful with my microscopes, I have no idea where we’ll get more at this time.” Alwen snapped.

“Yes Sir,” A Marine from the Lucifer responded curtly.

“How far along are the floor tarps?” Alwen shouted.

“Almost done, ten more minutes.” Another Marine retorted.

Alwen was tempted to tell them to hurry up, but she knew that while the Hellworlder marines could be unrepentant meatheads, when it came to jobs they would never slack off.

The combat aspect of the mission was over, the C...

The Tomb World Ch13

The sounds of the city woke Fezzen before his alarm clock. He hadn’t slept well, disturbed by strange dreams he couldn’t remember. He idly wondered if the hyoomanz shared that trait, then he remembered what had happened with the hyoomanz. Dan-yalz had seemed like such an honorable and respectable man, like Foric, but then he had tried to doom the Yunyon to death by swarm. Why?

Death by Swarm was the worst way to die, because not only did it mean that you were eaten by mindless space monsters, but your ver...

Sins of the Father Ch62

Lucile wasn’t a smoker, she had bad memories of addiction, when one craving vanished another took its place and you were enslaved to a different substance. She had fought hard to squash such things and now as a rule avoided any highly addictive substances, even her coffee was decaf.

So instead of taking a smoke break Lucile doing something far less damaging than inhaling pesticides, she was punching a wall. The hardened and reinforced bones of her knuckle pounded into the wall. The pain focused her, and the punching gave her pent up ...

Sins of the Father Ch61

Astarte and Lucile both sat in silence on the bullet train. Both had opted to wear their full armor, and as such every non-human on the train chose to give the two women a large bubble of breathing room.

Lucile was glaring daggers at anyone who made eye contact.

Astarte kept her hand on Tenken, her trusty sword.

“Just to reiterate.” Astarte said breaking their silence, “Gin Hanzo is not my father.”

“I heard you the first ten times.” Lucile muttered.

Astarte ignored her. “And he is offering...

Sins of the Father Ch60

Alwen pulled on the metal grieves, the armor automatically sealing and a foam layer inflating to push against her legs. The new marine space ready combat suite was supposedly an improvement in every sense of the word to the old armor.

Still themed along the lines of Japanese armor from the Edo period, the new armor was sleeker and far more advanced than the previous iteration. The same synthetic muscle like fibers and ligaments the Hellworlders used inside their own bodies was applied to the layers of armor to assist with movement and ...

Sins of the Father Ch59

Astarte watched as the entire world view of two Union born humans was called into question. Both internally wrangled with what she just said.

“You can see why I’d like to get into contact with this half sister of mine. I want to make sure she gets off station as soon as possible.” Astarte said.

She always knew on an intellectual level that there was a none zero chance of her having other half siblings out there. But now that she knew of one for certain she would see that she was safe.

“That is a grave accusation.”...

Sins of the Father Ch58

The violet skinned doctor had helped Rachel into a wheelchair and was now wheeling it along the ship’s cramped feeling hallways. The space was more than enough for human sized creatures, but Rachel spent all her life in rooms and halls sized for much larger species. She guessed that maybe this was actually spacious by human standards, but to her it felt small.

The ship, from what she could tell, was clean. Clean in an almost eerie sort of way, like someone had been scrubbing the floors and walls with a fanatical vigor.

When she...

Sins of the Father Ch57

When Rachel awoke she found herself in an unfamiliar room with a very familiar smell. It was sterile and tinged with the septic odor of a hospital. The lights felt blazingly bright, and the bed she was in had the feel of something well used. She sat up and looked around. She was in some sort of a medical ward with strangely low ceilings, not low enough for her to even touch with her fingers but lower than she had ever seen before.

There were curtains draped around her bed, and an IV needle in her arm as well as a clip on her thumb. She...

Sins of the Father Ch56

Ozzath’s shuttle landed on the grounds of the Heart estate. It had only been an hour since Zera had made her scene. The fire in the hedge mage had been doused, and the gaping hole in the glass doors had been tarped over. The place was swarming with SS officers, none of those thuggish ADCU officers Hanzo had somehow established under Ozzath’s nose, but good normalofficers.

They nodded differentially to Ozzath as he slowly made his way to where two men were standing.

One saw him approach and gave him a short bow.

Sins of the Father Ch55

Astarte had never actually done this before. Only the marines had experience with this particular brand of insanity, and that was under sterile training conditions.

The multi-vector thrust of the drop-ships was a necessary requirement in space were there was no resistance to slow you down. To slow down you needed to apply an equal and opposite force.

That meant compared to a regular ship that operated in an atmosphere they had a few more options when it came to thrust.

As Rachel and Astarte fell the pill bug shaped drop-shi...

Sins of the Father Ch54

Karega checked his watch. It was a tasteful silver wristwatch, it functioned purely off of clockwork gears and springs, and had three hands and only ten number to match Union time keeping instead of Terran.

Most people preferred gaudy electronic watches, but Karega enjoyed the aesthetics of a real watch. It took a great deal of precision and finesse to make something like this, whereas a digital watch only need a bit of wire, a piece of quartz, and a digital display. Where was the fun in that?

Astarte and Rachel had been gone a w...

Sins of the Father Ch53

Seriously, how shitty was the Hearts security? Astarte had stepped out to get some time to calm herself down, maybe break a few things until she felt better, before going back in to face the two men who might be her father.

But then Zera shows up, and for some reason she brought Rachel. Or maybe Rachel had followed Astarte to try and spy on her.

Seriously what even was today.

She usually only dealt with this much crap over the course of several months, but ever since arriving on Unity it had been one thing after another. He...

Sins of the Father Ch52

Rachel was struck by how different this man seemed from her mentor, Judge. How could they both be from the same family?

Judge always held himself upright and with authority. He walked into a room and commanded it with his presence. This man looked better suited to slinking about and throwing tantrums.

And his voice was so slimy, so creepy. This was the person who represented all of humanity?

More importantly he looked nothing like Astarte. If Rachel hadn’t personally confronted Judge she would have believed Astarte to be ...

Sins of the Father Ch51

Astarte was bleeding from her shoulder, the blood soaking into her dress and ruining the fabric. Rachel was hunched over nursing a side that was either badly bruised or broken.

In front of the them Zera loomed menacingly.

This was supposed to be a boring dinner, had did things devolve into an assassination?

~~~*~~~

Two hours earlier

As they filed into the dining hall it struck Astarte that everything about these high society Unionist Terrans was like a bad parody of actual high Terran society. 2023-09-28 17:23:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Sins of the Father Ch50 Outbreak

Alwen read the blood chart again. And again it didn’t make sense. She compared it to the MRI brain scan and also frowned. After seeing both she had ordered a full sweep of tests on Gato and had similarly ordered non-essential personnel confined to separate rooms as she and the other doctors began testing for some sort of unknown pathogen.

Normally this sort of thing would require the captains approval. But the Captain and Lieutenant were off ship. So Alwen had used her full authority as the ship’s chief medical officer to push the ...

Sins of the Father Ch49 Pent up

The soft rhythmic thump of flesh hinting leather was calming. Despite his best efforts Gato only felt calm when he was in motion, and if the motion was violent all the better. This was something he really hated about himself.

He had tried branching out, tried to find other ways to unwind. He tried reading but reading was hard and took a lot of concentration just to read his daily reports, audiobooks were much more enjoyable. The terms ADHD and ADD didn’t really apply to the Mammaloids since those were human conditions, but for all in...

Sins of the Father Ch48

Hard Truths, Soft lies

They walked in silence, Astarte scooping up a glass for herself while Rachel decided to take it slower.

She looked back up to where the pirate had been just moments before to see Judge surrounded by her mom’s fellow vipers looking harried and unhappy. His gaze wandered for a second and saw Rachel with Astarte, his eyes narrowed but he didn’t make any moves to get away or involve her. Obviously he didn’t want her to get involved there.

Her mother also noticed the pirates absence ...

Sins of the Father Ch47

Despite saying that he wanted to borrow Rachel for his undercover mission Judge hadn’t yet called on her. Instead with her main case appropriated and her other cases on hold Rachel got to spend several days alone in her new safe house apartment. Time alone meant time to think, and the only thing she could think about was that heart pounding moment with Astarte on the Iron Tree.

It wasn’t the first time she had met someone else with her…condition. But the last time had been a very different experience. It was con...

Sins of the Father Ch46

The fact that the core of Unity never experienced night time was really disconcerting. When Astarte and Karega left the Astaroth night was falling over that section of the city and streetlights were just kicking on. But one short flight up and they were bathed in the light of a summer afternoon dressed in evening wear.

Sometimes when she had business in Sol, Astarte had to fly to several different cities on both Earth and Mars in the course of several days. Often bouncing between night and day on two different worlds. But at l...

Sins of the Father Ch45

The insectoid machines did their job with the same boring precision as always. Once upon a time a bunch of squishy Xeno doctors had been responsible for Zera’s maintenance, until a servo in Zera’s arm twitched and snapped the head doctor’s spine.

That was her story and she was sticking to it.

Now the Syndicate had replaced the squishy doctors with a robotic servicing facility. Completely automated, and boring. Most days she was all alone when the machines serviced her body, today though she had a guest.

Her guest watc...