[Preview]Renegade Ravagers Vol. 3 -- Chapter 3

Last public chapter!  Chapter 4 and onward will be for paid members only.

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Chapter 3 – 01738.083 AA

My schedule was packed. We were set to scuttle the Esprit de Liberté before the end of the day, sinking it in the Albrecht System’s star. I had several tasks I wanted to complete in the meantime.

Primary Quests

Discover the Fate of the Tigre Calme Deux 39th Exploratory Force

Return to Earth

Secondary Quests

Scuttle the Esprit de Liberté

Continue to Restore the Liens Lumineux’s Combat Strenght

Find and Kill the Betrayers of the Star Ravagers, Colonel Grant and Admiral Johanna

Aggy imagined the crew would feel relief when the cursed ship was gone. The other two vessels we’d confiscated, the black ops ships, had already been fed to the Prométhée.

Balan had managed to save the computer of Target One from being purged, but there wasn’t much data to go on. The spook ships had been ordered to search the Chorinth System for signs of any activity, particularly large naval vessels. They had been sweeping Chorinth-F2 after noticing the disturbance in the planet’s atmosphere caused by the departure of the Prométhée.

Did the Saints know Aggy was back? Were they searching for the Liens Lumineux, or were they trying to track down the mobile shipyard?

The crew didn’t know anything. They had all been drawn from other ships and duties. The senior offices had been secretive to the extreme, and the black-clad soldiers had enforced discipline with lethal force.

The dead bodies provided no clues, outside of what we already knew. The soldiers had been highly cyberized, little more than thralls. The human officers had worn uniforms shorn of ornamentation, with no indication of where they had come from.

We had disposed of both ships, tearing them apart and feeding them to the furnaces of the Prométhée. They would be used as the raw materials for the fleet we’d need to take our fight to Principe Divin and the corrupt Saints.

The Esprit de Liberté had been left intact. Xarl and Elspeth had tried to strip it for salvage, but accidents and unexplained incidents had marred their efforts. Even stranger, the drones and automatons they had sent had failed as well, suffering malfunctions that even Aggy could not explain.

Even the memory modules we had recovered from the ship, the fragmented pieces of Aggy’s memory, were corrupt and unreadable. The AI had tried to access the data on the crystalline sheets, but all she had recovered from them was garbled, damaged data. She had ended up quarantining them as she tried to recover the memories they contained.

Republic-trained sailors were not the superstitious sort, but rumors about Saint Charlotte’s vessel soon began to circulate amongst the crew.

Declaring that I would destroy the ship, I personally led the crew responsible for documenting the departed saint’s depravity. We’d need records in order to turn more people to the truth.

I wasn’t one to believe in the supernatural. Even when I had been onboard the Outrider station and plagued by the voices of my dead battle brothers and sisters, I had known they weren’t real.

But I swore that ship was haunted. Things moved in the shadows, and my HUD kept fritzing out, detecting things that weren’t there. I would be glad to see the vessel gone.

Stepping out of the gym, I reached out on the comms. “Xarl, are you just about done with your last sweep?”

The old légionnaire took his job as quartermaster seriously. He insisted on doing one last sweep for salvage or goods.

“Almost,” he answered a minute later, the connection full of static. “I’ll feel a lot better when this goddess-cursed wreck is put to the torch.”

I double-checked my chronometer. “You’ve got two hours, then we’re kicking that thing into the sun, even if you’re still onboard.”

“Roger,” he answered tersely, cutting the connection.

With the time remaining, I wanted to inspect our ongoing work onboard the Prométhée. I began walking toward the nearest tram station. As I did, a shadow began to crawl along the ceiling, following me.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Balan, you can just walk with me.”

The cyborg detached from the ceiling and lightly landed on the deck. Her four mechanical limbs folded along her back.

“How did you know I was there?” she asked.

Even without her stealth sheath, the cyborg was an expert in surveillance and clandestine tracking. She could be practically invisible when she wanted to be.

I shook my head. “You follow me everywhere. I'd be more surprised if you weren’t there.”

Last Wasp wheezed again, but she said nothing.

Balan had decided to be my bodyguard, my near-constant shadow. If I didn’t understand the reasoning behind it, I would have felt insulted. Instead, I had just come to accept that it was her way of coping with the trauma she had endured.

She had never spoken word of her past, but we knew she had spent years as a slave gladiator under the Diaspora Circus. They had usurped her will and completely remodeled her body, transforming her into a hulking, mechanical killing machine. When we had freed Iuno and the others from the arena, the gladiator had joined us.

Aggy had worked miracles, restoring what she could of Balan’s form, but even then over eighty percent of Last Wasp’s body was mechanical. I could see the servos whirling and artificial muscle fibers stretching along her arms and legs. Her eyes were artificial; they glowed like chips of arctic ice under the fringe of her short, black hair.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she finally said, her voice hoarse through the respirator she was forced to wear.

Protecting me, keeping me safe, was her way of asserting control over her life.

That, I could understand. My own life had been ripped away from me, my legion annihilated by cruel, uncaring politics. Unconsciously, my fingers drifted along my arm, tracing the acid scars that ran under the sleeves of my skinsuit.

“We’re going to the Prométhée,” I informed my unwarranted bodyguard. “I think Victor’s been holed up over there, so we can check in with him as well.”

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The Prométhée was a technological marvel. It was a massive, mobile shipyard large enough to accommodate the Liens Lumineux and her sister ships, the Monolith-class vessels constructed by the UTG.

Stepping out of the airlock lobby, I took a moment to inspect the UTG logos etched in the ship’s bulkheads. It depicted ancient Vieille Terre, Earth. The planet was surrounded by a laurel crown with the words United Terran Government stamped beneath the image.

Aggy had once been a senior officer in the UTG, back when they had ruled Vieille Terre – Earth. Witnessing the collapse of humanity’s homeworld, she had stolen the Liens Lumineux, the Prométhée, and as many other ships as she could find, and set out amongst the stars. Using experimental shredder drives, which allowed warp travel via sub-reality, she had led our exodus into the wider Milky Way.

She had declared herself empress of the Imperial Republic. Aggy hadn’t wanted the role and the power, but she saw no one else capable of shouldering such crushing responsibility.

Arriving in Alpha Centauri, the next closest star system, she had founded Principe Divin, our new home. Aggy had set about building a nation based on her ideals of Logic, Justice, and Reason.

Until she was betrayed and murdered.

Her closest advisors, the Saints, had taken up ruling in her stead. For nearly two thousand years they had guided humanity. As old members died, new ones were chosen from the best of the best our species had to offer. Each wore the porcelain death mask of their predecessor, to maintain an undying line of nobility and dedication to the Martyred Goddess.

It was all bullshit.

Boarding the shipyard’s tram, we rode toward the bridge. As we passed the massive reactor cores, I couldn’t help but remember the spider monster we had fought. Aggy had sealed the horror inside before her mortal death. The creature, wearing a fractured Robespierre mask, had nearly destroyed the Prométhée in its quest to slay the former empress.

What were the Saints? Were they truly monsters beneath their masks, like Charlotte had been? What was their connection to the Outriders?

Balan and I arrived outside the bridge. I could see dozens of robotic drones, their cargo haulers filled with books, sitting by the hatch.

“Victor must have done another delve along the main deck,” I muttered.

Entering the bridge, I saw the space was claustrophobic stuffed to the brim with books, tech manuals, and data slates.

Ensconced comfortably in the middle of the room was Victor. My battle brother was a meek-looking man, even with all the scars that ran across his exposed skin. He lounged in the captain’s chair, reading some long-lost book.

“Brother?” I called.

He looked up, then nodded. “Brother James. What brings you by? Is Iuno determined to interrupt my reading time with another sparring match?”

Balan took up position by the hatch. I knew she had been a Republic soldier in her past life, based on the faded and stretched service tattoos that had been inked across her skin. I wondered if she had been assigned bodyguard duty to some high-ranking official.

“Iuno is running Elspeth through drills, but don’t be surprised if she shows up at some point to drag you away from your little den,” I replied.

He shrugged. “She can try.”

Despite his placid demeanor, I had witnessed firsthand Victor’s overwhelming resolve and strength. When we had rescued him from the Circus he had been half-dead, beaten into a centimeter of his life after fighting and murdering several of his captors. Even in his crippled state, he had killed even more during our escape.

Stepping around his seat, I tapped on the command console and checked the status of our automaton fleet.

The Prométhée had already begun stripping the Albrecht System of resources, mining the rocky planets and salvaging any stations or platforms left behind by the previous owners. The materials were being used to construct an armada of ships designed by Aggy and Elspeth.

Already several hundred of the small, autonomous combat vessels, little more than gun batteries and missile launchers trapped to engines, flew around the system as perimeter guards.

We were still constructing the larger ships, which would act as our forward strike forces. The Liens Lumineux’s starfighter bays had already been modified to accommodate them. When we went into battle, we’d have superior numbers and technology on our side.

That wasn’t even counting the Yord bioships and war forms we’d have, thanks to Josefine’s efforts.

But even with all of that, I wasn’t sure it would be enough to defeat the Republic and break through the defenses around Principe Divin.

“James, you know you could have checked our progress via your cybernetics, you didn’t need to come all the way here and disrupt my reading,” Victor said pointedly.

I drummed my fingers against the console.

He shook his head. “I never took you for a worrier, but I knew out of the duo, Gregor was always the joker to your straight-man.”

“That he was,” I agreed.

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Balan and I made it back onboard the Liens Lumineux just in time to watch the Esprit de Liberté be hurled into the star.

“Imperial Champion Browning on the bridge!” the officer on watch declared.

Aggy, standing by the main engineering station with Elspeth, chuckled at my discomfort. I had little interest in titles, but Aggy had insisted upon publicly naming me as her champion. She had made it clear to the crew that she was no longer an empress, no longer a ruler. I was the instrument of our collective quest, joining my need for vengeance with her desire to right the wrongs in the Republic.

“Horde Master Josefine,” the officer announced a moment later.

Josefine had Zoto clutched in her arms as she joined us. “Did we miss the big show?”

“Just in time,” Aggy said.

Captain Shannon Fernandez, the leader of the Republic sailors we had rescued from the Diaspora Circus, commanded the bridge of the Liens Lumineux. She was a serious, shrewd woman who ran a tight ship. She deferred to Lady Agrippa a bit too much, in my opinion, but I guessed it was hard to second-guess someone you had once worshipped as a literal goddess.

As Champion, I could override anyone – even Aggy if I felt it was necessary – but I rarely interjected. I trusted my AI lover implicitly, and I was a grunt, not a naval officer.

The captain was standing by the executive office station, leaving the captain’s chair to the former empress.

“Captain,” I nodded. “How’s it going with our latest recruits?”

The sailors from the two black ops ships who had chosen to join had more than doubled our crew count.

Fernandez grimaced. “Champion, we have them assigned to menial duty for the time being. They’re being supervised by my junior officers. They seem loyal, but we’re keeping a close eye on them. Only once they prove their devotion to Lady Agrippa – and yourself – will they be allowed more important duties.”

The sailors worshiped the decking Aggy walked on. They had grown up only knowing her as the Martyred Goddess, not the mortal woman and naval officer she had been before her death. They still seemed puzzled by my relationship with her, but they were wise enough to obey my orders and avoid asking any prying questions.

If nothing else, Iuno thought it was hilarious, a légionnaire bossing around a bunch of sailors.

“Quartermaster Xarl is back on board?” I asked.

The captain nodded. “All crew have been evacuated, and Chief Engineer Hayes has confirmed the external engines are primed and ready.”

I turned to Elspeth, who gave me a thumbs up. “Let’s torch that bitch.”

Aggy frowned at the other woman’s uncouth vocabulary.

“Commence,” I ordered.

The bridge’s main view screen zoomed in on the Esprit de Liberté, which had been towed into position by one of Aggy’s autonomous ships. Even though its running lights had been extinguished, the haunted vessel stood out starkly against the interstellar gloom.

Engines, strapped roughly to the hull, ignited. We all watched in silence as the doomed ship plummeted toward the Albrecht System’s single star, a dim white dwarf.

Queuing up the Espirit’s external cameras through my cybernetics, I watched as the ship’s armored prow began to blacken, scorched by the stellar winds coming off the star. Eventually, the white light became so blinding that I was forced to kill the feed.

A few minutes later, a notification appeared on the bridge’s display, confirming the haunted ship had been utterly incinerated.

Several of the sailors manning the ship sighed in relief. Captain Fernandez ran a hand through her hair.

“Esprit de Liberté confirmed destroyed,” she said.

“Well done,” Aggy replied.

Zoto barked in agreement.

Quest Complete! – Scuttle the Esprit de Liberté

The communication specialist bent over his console. “Champion Browning, I have a priority encrypted message from you from Harmony Prime.”

“Shit, what does Ramon want now?” Elspeth sighed.

“Let’s find out,” I answered, before turning to the specialist. “Route the message to Aggy’s AI core, we’ll take it there.”