OT: All That You Can't Leave Behind

[AgentZero]

Preamble? We don't need no stinking preamble!

Brother Malaclypse the Elder sat at his large, sturdy wooden desk and contemplated the work before him. A small data terminal sat on the edge of his workspace, which in turn was dominated by a massive leather-bound tome. Its pages were covered in beautiful calligraphy, transcribed from the logs displayed on the data terminal which detailed the five thousand-year voyage of the Hopeship Atlantis on its journey from the Milky Way to the Muxen Galaxy, near the centre of the Virgo Cluster. The entirety of the Order of Messier had dedicated themselves to this task for the last two years in order to bring their records in line with The New Way of Things. The colony of Sivran`s Hope had been established during the break-up of the Atlantis, when the massive ship had split into a dozen slightly less massive colony ships. Eight of them had founded the Core Worlds, two were lost; one to sabotage, one to accident, and the remaining two, of which Admiral Sivran`s had been one, lost contact with the rest of the fleet. After nearly a year of wandering, they found a suitable planet, and after another year of waiting for the massive terraforming machines to ready it for them, the colonists founded Sivran`s Hope.

The colonists prospered for over a century, thanks to the advanced technologies they`d brought with them. One hundred and seven years after the Founding, the population celebrated the founding of the planet`s second city: Sivran`s Rest. Located near the planet`s only ocean, it became home to the late admiral`s tomb, honouring the old sailor`s request that he be buried near the sea. Another hundred years passed by uneventfully, and the distant Sivran`s Rest grew to rival, and then surpass Sivran`s Hope, thanks to its pleasant climate and proximity to Fyronium and Junkite deposits; two rare resources vital to even the most basic of the colonists technology. Inevitably, Sivran`s Rest`s fortune fostered tensions between the two colonies, and when a disastrous mine accident and the worst winter in two hundred years pushed Fyronium and Junkite prices to prohibitive levels, very few were surprised when hostilities broke out between the two cities.

The ensuing war all but obliterated both cities. Children of a shattered galaxy, the colonists had never thought of not building and maintaining the machinery of war, but none of them had ever thought it would be used against fellow humans. Enormous armoured divisions slammed into each other on the field of battle and hypersonic aircraft split open the skies while above, orbiting warships mutinied and tore into each other like wild dogs. The orbital defence network turned its massive guns inwards and turned the sky red with fire. The war only ended when a rebellion on both sides of the conflict rose up and took control of both Sivran`s Hope and Rest. That spring, the leadership of both cities were hung, and the new government proclaimed that the root of the war had been technology, and thus the colonists would be returning to a more `natural` way of living.

That government was hung the following winter when the majority realised that their technology had been providing them with such amenities as warmth, food, and proper shelter. For a time, it seemed as though another war was inevitable, until the Order of Messier had stepped in and negotiated a compromise between the two factions, resulting in The New Way of Things. They would live in stone houses and prepare their fields with horse and plough, but the stone would be infused with a Fyronium nanoweave that would keep them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, while the plough would use advanced agricultural technology to both till, fertilise, and plant genetically modified seeds, simultaneously, and the horses would be andromorphs that never grew old or tired, and needed nothing but the most basic maintenance.
And so things had gone for close to twenty years, and when scout ships from the Bluestar Corporation discovered their world, they were producing so many surplus crops that they were allowed to maintain their rustic lifestyle in return for supplying food to the Corporation`s more industrialised worlds. It was this same contact with Bluestar that exposed that the Order was still using banned data terminals to store their archives. Malaclypse`s predecessor had managed to avoid a hanging due solely to the Bluestar Corporation`s prohibition on such things, and had escaped with mere exile. Malaclypse himself managed to convince the colonial government that the information in the archives was far too valuable to be destroyed, though they had insisted that only information that was of direct relevance to the colony, or not available elsewhere was to be kept. Thus, the Order had been tasked with transcribing approximately two hundred thousand pages of material onto nanoweave paper, that would, Malaclypse had to admit, last longer and be less succeptible to damage than the old data terminals.

The oil lamp on his desk spat and flickered, and Malaclypse smiled softly. The lamp would never actually run dry, and was easily able to produce a flawlessly flickerless flame in even strong winds, but he had programmed it to spit and splutter at him when it was time for sleep. "All right," he said softly. "Keep your hat on, I`m going." He rose slowly from his chair and made his way to his room, offering blessings of good sleep to fellow monks he encountered on the way. He paused at one of the monastery's many balconies to gaze down at the lights of the settlements below. He was verging on a long, thoughtful, and frankly quite dull exposition on how the settlements had grown, but was saved the effort when suddenly the cloudless night split open with a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder. A split second later, a mighty shock wave crashed into the monastery, and sent Brother Malaclypse tumbling head over heels down the flight of stairs behind him.

Captain Alexis Morrison would have likely found the sight of a proper, dignified monk in a full robe tumbling backwards down a flight of stairs to be rather hilarious, but at the moment was slightly distracted by the four pirate raiders who seemed more than determined to blow her freighter out of the sky. All attempts to surrender had been met with silence, as had any attempts to communicate at all. Six raiders had dropped on them as they made transit into the Maxank system, one of the border systems between the Bluestar Corporation and Zedron Holdings' space. All six had gone straight for Morrison's ship, the impressively-named MF-31, which had allowed her escorts to frag two of them before the other raiders reconsidered and blew the escorts apart. Pleas for help from Zedron Holdings were useless; even if they weren't being jammed, the company had a known policy of permitting limited piracy within its borders, as long as the company received its share of the spoils.

Bluestar, on the other hand, was more than happy to blast any pirate ship it could find to pieces and publicly butcher the survivors in ways that decent people shouldn't think about. Unfortunately, the treaty between the two mega-corporations stated very clearly that any ship crossing into the other's space would become property of the trespassed corporation. Even firing across the border was prohibited, unless in defence of a ship registered with the corporation on the wrong side of the border. The MF-31 was a Bluestar-registered ship, but she was also well outside any Bluestar warships weapons range. Morrison glanced at her sensor display again. A dozen Bluestar cruisers sat with their noses right up against the corporate boundary, and a pair of Zedron destroyers hovered nearby, hoping the attack would goad the Bluestars into crossing the border.

Of course, what neither side knew was that the raiders attacking the MF-31 had no intention of looting her. Just after they'd lost their escorts, the freighter's external cameras had captured several images of the raiders that clearly showed the markings of the Ashclan, a particularly brutal organization of raving psychotics that had no interest in loot or plunder, or even rape and pillage. They wanted nothing more than death and destruction on the grandest scale possible. Their political arm would sometimes mumble something about a desire to upset the established order, or challenge the supremacy of the mega-corps, but their actions showed little sign of them wanting to do anything more than destroy whatever was unfortunate enough to fall into their sights.

The MF-31 shuddered violently, then became eerily silent. “Drive fields have collapsed, ma'am,” Morrison's engineer reported. The sub-light engines of modern spacecraft were ridiculously complex devices, and about all anyone without an astro-engineering degree knew about them was that they generated drive fields, and that when these fields collapsed, the ship would slow to a halt relative to the nearest star or, if shut down properly, the nearest large mass. The MF-31's drive field had not been shut down properly and she was now dead in space, at the mercy of the merciless. The main viewscreen on the bridge, which had been showing the space in front of them, now filled with the sight of the four raiders, swooping in formation to deliver the killing blow. Morrison closed her eyes and waited for the end to come. She waited a long time before she decided to open her eyes again. There, on the main viewscreen, and wreathed in the fiery debris of four destroyers was nothing short of a glowing angel of mercy. Morrison's eyes swept over it's sleek curves and graceful lines, neither of which did anything to disguise the lethality of her still glowing gun ports. It was several moments before she realised that the comm system was beeping with an incoming hail. Robotically, she flicked the channel open, and the bridge filled with the voice of the angel.

“Little ship to big ship. Come in, big ship. This is little ship, hailing big ship...”