Kara King & The Beyonders: The Nightwind Glyder Heist

Chapter Two:

Crew of The Faux

The holo-comms whirred down, and the lights came on in the room revealing a small and simple duranium room with a broken cup of caf on the ground. As the lights came on, a small droid appeared from a hole in the wall to clean up the mess and Kara left with the boarding passes in hand.

The lights in the hallways were a bright white perfectly lighting the polished steel interior. There were teal and orange stripes lining the walls nearest the floor. It perfectly matched the crew’s uniforms and would be seen on Kara’s flight suit down her shoulders and arms if not for the armor she wore over it. The bright colors were added by her team in rebellion of the usually simple grey tones and regal reds, or blues found in military vessels. It perfectly suits their character. Bright, quirky, and defiant.

Kara left the hallway which opened to the common space of The Faux. Ten other hallways did so as well making this wide-open room something like the center of a wheel and each spoke stretching out to a different part of the ship. Each hallway was painted with old Sol ‘Roman’ numerals. It clearly set this room as the heart of the ship, and it looked the part too. On a dining table were a set of gambler’s dice and cards. The sink was piled high with trays caked with old food. Going to have to get onto Zee for that. Pretty sure that’s his chore this month. The room was too quiet and almost completely void of life.

“Wonder where everyone is? They are gambling down in engineering.”

Kara jumped and went to draw her sword only to stop herself short. Hugging the wall in a nonchalant manner was the droid that came with the ship, WHR4. The crew didn’t like that it came with the ship and always felt that the droid was out of place. Initially they wanted to dismantle it for parts, but Kara stopped them. She felt droids were more than the sum of their parts. There wasn’t proper AI since The Asimov Rebellion. The Empire outlawed it. Still, Kara felt droid machine learning and behavior chips, if they had one, allowed them to express enough character to be directly identifiable between identical models.

“Whirr”, or “Whore” as the crew sometimes called the droid, was a hospitality droid. The ‘4’ tagged onto the end of its name signified the number of times the unit had to be reset due to system malfunction or sustaining too much damage to continue operating without logic errors occurring. Hospitality droids were usually helpful beings. They were designed to be like simple protocol droids with the key difference being that they sought to assist others with any task they are asked. Sometimes they have inhibitor chips to keep them under one function group like bartending or translating but Whirr had his removed. Because of this, and several years aboard The Faux with a cocky crew, he had become helpful but always managed it with snarky responses or in backhanded compliments.

WHR4 looked down at Kara’s hand resting on her sword, “I should have known.” He shook his head. “I knew this day would come. Just get it over with.”

Kara looked at the droid standing near the doorway marked ‘II’. “Ugh. No. Whirr, I’m sorry. You just startled me is all.”

“I know. People always seem to forget I’m in the room. I’m guessing your call with The Fade went well. We have a job, and you need the crew to gather?”

“Yes. Actually. To all of that.” Kara waited for Whirr to collect the crew from wherever they were. Instead, he stared at her lifeless enough that she wondered if he powered down without her realizing.

“Well, they’re all in engineering. You’ll probably want to catch them before their fight is over and they disperse. I’ll be there shortly.”

“Oka- Wait, what? Why are they fighting? Is this Zee again or Gamlok? Damnit.” Kara run off down the hallway marked ‘VI’.

Kara emerged through the tunneling hallway to the open room that was the secondary loading dock of The Faux. This room was meant to onboard large equipment like new stabilizers or engine parts. Sure enough, right on the open floor Zee and Gamlok were going at it.

Zee Berstol was locked in a shoulder-to-shoulder grapple with Gamlok. He wouldn’t normally have stood tall enough to do it, but Telothians were semi-humanoid slug like creatures. They had some humanoid form but to get around with most of the civilized galaxy Telothians adapted to using mechanical suits.

Gamlok on the other hand wore no shirt or armor in his grapple against the mechanical foe before him. Morae are naturally large and tough creatures. While most of his race had a dull grey skin, Gamlok’s was slightly greener. Almost all their teeth are visible when they close their mouths as well, giving quite the intimidating impression. His were barred shut making him look like he was gritting his deadly maw, but he was in fact smiling as he slipped out of Zee’s hold.

Kara almost stopped the fight, but she could see some of the crew throwing down credit chits or imperial bonds. “Put me down for three fifty on Zee!” The crew talking and exchanging money all looked up startled at her arrival. Zee and Gamlok kept brawling without so much as a second glance in her direction.

Zee had multiple suits. Some were simple hardsuits matching a human silhouette. These were the most common type of suits Telothians wore in day-to-day life. The one zee wore now was the one he’d most often use in this very room, a C3TT-Lifter. Construction class, hard duranium plating, with large two-pronged forks at the end of each hydraulic arm. Zee’s “Cett” suit had the advantage of deeper penetrating when attacking Gamlok. There were cuts all over the Morae’s face and arms already. This whole affair would have been deadly already if Zee had been fighting anything other than a Morae.

Gamlok, in this fight at least, was more agile than his opponent. That boon had seldom been one he had the fortune of having. Standing over eight feet tall, Morae were the primary reason behind the Empire changing some of the interior design and construction laws. They stood tall and often moved slow, that is unless they chose a life of combat. Most Morae had chosen that life. They can keep up with humans and many other races in the Verse but ultimately would not be able to match any species peak performance. Still, their natural armor helped them with that. Your average Morae can eat a couple bullets while it charges at you. An old human adage was changed after the Humans and Cytherians fought The Morae in The Second Contact War.

“Never bring a knife to a gun fight… Unless a Morae is holding the knife.”

Gamlok saw the disadvantage he had. It wasn’t often he had a foe larger than him, but he deeply relished it. That’s why he loved fighting Zee. His suits always had new gadgets affixed to them that made the battle even more deadly, more worthwhile. Like many large foes, the Kordua on his home planet of Tractar V, The Flying Septor of Raskam, or the transplanted and revived Quillen of Orcus, Zee’s Lifter Suit had a glaring weakness.

Gamlok taunted the mech which stood twice his size. Zee swung his right arm out, but Gamlok went for his left. Zee predicted this as a possibility. Gamlok had been hammering away at the C3TT’s left leg. There was already a massive dent were he had made impact several times. Zee wasn’t sure if Gamlok had seen a fracture in the metal or weakness that he hadn’t but it got him overly defensive now.

Zee pulled his left leg back in a sweep that screeched against the floor, Gamlok rolled under Zee’s right fork and slashed at the tubing between the C3TT’s right leg and torso. He hadn’t cut all the way through with his knife, but had it been a lazeknife, it would have cut like butter. The tubing between the hybrid hydraulic-pneumatic cylinders on the torso and legs was seeping out a hot gas which quickly cooled into oil droplets on the hangar floor.

“Stop! Dammit Zee.” Kara nodded to Canis Odo to take the imperial credits from her account. Kara vaulted over the railing. Sensors in her boots paired to actuators in the armored pieces she wore over her flight suits both lightly pressed into her and sent faint electric signals through her body the optimal shock absorbing movement. Kara moved into a roll while everyone else backed away from the hot gas and liquid eruption. She grabbed the supercooled oil fire retardant and coagulant at the edge of the hangar. The can sprayed a foam that quickly billowed into a cloudy like substance and then hardened around the tube. “Zee. Out. Now. We have need to take a meeting and this thing needs an hour to set as well as we need it to.”

*****

The crew of The Faux stood on the command deck, ‘Room I’. At the far end was the actual cockpit where four chairs sat facing either flight consoles or computers for astrogation and sensor read-outs. Here, just as they entered the room, there was a dais where a ship’s commander might usually stand to overlook a holotable’s projection of their immediate surroundings or a map of their local system. Kara felt uncomfortable up here. Most of the time she actually sat in the cockpit acting as the co-pilot. This, however, was the best place for her to address the seven other members of her crew and pitch the gig.

Zee Berstol stood to her left standing tall in a humanoid shaped suit. A large yellow egglike dome sat at the top where you could just see Zee’s several blue eyes. Gamlok stood next to him, finally wearing a shirt albeit one with several holes and cuts in it.

Sagita Astel-Moaan, Kara knew she would be crucial to this mission in a much different capacity than she was used to. Gita was from the Elvish hold of ‘The House of The Rising Sun and Moon’. The elvish home worlds reside near the Horsehead Nebula. The star called Alnilam by humans was known as Astel to Gita’s people. Of the three primary stars compromising the three elvish home systems, Astel was the least bright. Thus, Gita’s copper skinned people with natural pale tattoo like designs were deemed the ‘Dark Elves’ or in their tongue, The Shedir-Ail. Gita was from a long line of Dark Elves who ran the system. Her family was prolific in both good deeds and number making it ever easier for her to be forgotten. Gita had earned her place as the black sheep of Astel-Moaan by becoming an expert marksman, drinker, and most of all by marrying her husband Max.

Maxwell Thompson stood next to his wife. He was older and looked the part but still nowhere near the age of his beautiful wife. While she stood with fine leathers and a cape bearing her family’s colors, Max stood near her with a clean but well worn white tank top. His pants, belt, and harness were all of paramilitary design which is to say highly efficient and much nicer than imperial troopers gear. He had a tight cut of silver hair which feathered up contrasting a dark brown bear tightly pointed downward. A large scar covered his left eye which had since been replaced by a prosthetic one. His left arm was also mostly made of cobalt chrome that had been painted black. He wore a sensor on his right bicep paired to a device around his hand and the pistol nearby. The sensor would read the same muscle movement as pulling a trigger and send a signal to his gun a fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger allowing him to get a second shot off in the same time as one. Ultimately, Max is who you wanted if you needed something done. Especially if that thing was hunting someone down.

Jennlynn Umbrasong was next. She wore nearly all black or a purple so deep it was almost black and had a long mane of hair to match. Dwarvish runes and equations were tattooed down the entire length of her muscular arms. Her staff, a religious artifact, lay next to the gothic engineer. She was the technosage that The Faux needed.

What made the empire go round or rather what made existing in the verse livable was the ability to travel the stars. Sub-light travel existed long before the Empire began but it never thrived until they met the dwarves. In a relatively fertile set of systems the dwarves, named due to being the first species noted to thrive in a dwarf star system, used the resources around them to explore space. The first place they went was the edge of our galaxy, then beyond that. They returned a changed people. Their tales of what lay beyond the crest of our galaxy became myth and legend eventually. What stuck was their revelation of dark space, how the universe and space expands faster than even light. Knowing of Dark Speed Drives was one thing. Knowing how they work is another. The Dwarves have kept this a secret science, a cultural magic, a religion even. This is how the dwarves made themselves necessary to all beings in the galaxy. You need a Dwarven Technosage on your ship lest you be stranded in the space between systems.

WHR4 stood next with Canis Odo next. Canis was from the Albireo system just over 400 light years from earth. The system had a bright yellow star and dimmer blue star in the same system. The coalescence of light caused the people of Aranak to reflect a red skin color over time. Their people held a reverence over stars often naming their offspring after them. Canis was no exception to this, clearly. He even reveled in it and the nuances of other cultures. Canis was the resident historian aboard The Faux. His awareness of other star systems and the cultures within them also made him the most politically inclined of the crew. His long black hair was tied in a knot behind him. Even so, a large mane rested on his shoulders with beads tied into the ends. He had very angular features with ears pointed out to the side and a beard groomed to three points, the center of which hunger lower with the weight of that same beaded style his hair had.

This is the crew of the Faux. This is the quite possibly one of the only crews in the verse with enough gall to steal from the emperor himself. These are The Beyonders.