"It is simply an ability which some members of my species manifest naturally."
Thaddeus sighs and turns his face away.
"And not interesting again. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to meet aliens who can just 'do' things?"
Oh, don't be a science
snob. If you could do that, you'd take
full advantage of it, processes behind it bedamned.
Lantern Nax looks like she's not quite sure how to take that. Goodness knows that Thaddeus hasn't made any sort of effort to make friends since coming on board. I was half-hoping that meeting a fellow mad scientist would make things easier for him, but it looks like our vivisectionist just isn't on his level.
"Isn't finding out how we do things-"
Gee, you'd think Tad would
want to make friends via extreme science? Intellectual peers who he can enjoy being around?
"Density-sensitive telekinetic phasing isn't that interesting."
"-what… Makes it interesting…" Nax blinks.
Evidently his Sivana blood makes him
just that good.
<shudder.> Flashbacks to the TTS review of 'Inquisitor'...
"Especially when it's built-in."
"Have you encountered other people with this ability?"
...Oh, since she's not doing it by pure science alone, she's not worth your time, Tad?
"Not this exact ability, but it's not…" He frowns. "Why am I still talking to you?"
And then he turns around and heads off to one of the analysis stations.
Ugh. Maybe mention this to Thaddeus senior? Let
him knock a bit of sense into that big-brained head? "You do
not pass up useful assets, boy!"
"Oh." Nax stares after him for a moment, then looks at me. "Did I say something wrong?"
"No, Thaddeus just has extremely poor social skills, and no incentive to improve them."
Maybe if he has
reason to improve them he'd bother. Like, say, working on amazing new weapon designs with a certain alien
babe weapons designer.
"Would it have helped if I said that I only believe it is a natural ability for some members of my species because that is what my parents told me, and they were the only other members of my species I have ever met?"
"I doubt-." I give her my full attention. "Really?"
...So, are her parents
atypical of her species, or just not interested in hanging around with the rest of the mad scientists? I wonder...
She nods twice. "They told me that there weren't any interesting test subjects back home. After they died, I was stuck on a planet with no way to try and find others like me even if I wanted to. And now that I am a Lantern, I have a job to do."
"Yeah-yes, but we're not keeping you prisoner here. If you want to take a couple of months to visit home-."
"No. Home sounds
boring. There's plenty of strange and unusual subjects to study
here."
Lantern Natu shakes her head.
"I already tried that."
Yes, but
your homeworld had a rather bad experience with a Lantern, and have a raging hate-on for them now...
"Since I've never met another member of my species, I don't really miss them. And…" She glances at her mentor. "From what I have learned about morality, I… Don't think my parents were very good people."
"Well..." I nod. "No, but that doesn't mean that the rest of your species are like them."
Still betting
against that likelihood. Her parents might just have been
really bad.
"Then what would I have in common with them?"
I raise my hands. "It's your life. As long as you're-"
Hey, if she doesn't
want to, talking her into it is going to be nearly impossible. Let it drop, OL.
"Bridge to Illustres."
"-happy, that's the main thing." I raise my ring. "Illustres here."
"We're as close as we can safely get to the first target."
So, let the sneaking mission begin. Hope you've got a
sneaking suit handy, OL. <Metal Gear intensifies...>
"Oh, you're making me actually work today?"
"Yes, that's… Why we're here."
...Ah, right, Lotta's basically lost her sense of humour through disuse.
I roll my eyes.
"Seriously, less time around Phil. I'm heading to a deployment tube now."
To be fair, I doubt Phil's had much time for humour in his career...
"Understood."
This isn't a huge ship, so I don't have far to travel to get to my launch zone. Being a stealth ship, we can't exactly just jump out through a big warm electromagnetic-radiation-rich hole in the sensor-defying armour when we want to get out. Any sort of shuttle is completely out of the question. Instead-
Yeah, I can't imagine it's easy. I mean, the Reach
might not be paying attention on an easy post like this, but better to be paranoid then dead
again.
My stealth power armour appears around me as I head for the exit.
-we… I am going to have to exit a series of locks very carefully, and take care not to give the ship's location away. Having reviewed the capabilities of the ships I'm going up against, I shouldn't need to retreat, so the main thing is to avoid my targets being able to send ships this way while I'm busy.
That can be fixed with a few well-placed low-speed crumbler shots on the way there. What with Isaac Newton being the deadliest sunnuvabitch in space...
I step into the first stage chamber and bring my stealth systems online. Given the relatively low speed of light visual stealth isn't the most important thing, but it's still a consideration. Preventing space-time ripples by neutralising my own mass profile is far more important, and I can do that. Heat, electromagnetic, phasic…
I rise off the ground slightly and look out into the launch control room. The Darkstar in charge presses keys, causing the sensor systems where I'm floating to try and detect me. A few moments pass and he shakes his head. Not that he can see me, but I appreciate the gesture.
The tech is probably
used to people walking out while cloaked... Rude as that would be...
Then the aperture to the next module opens and I float on through. Another round of scans, then a light turns go-purple. Then it's through an aperture covered by an environmental filter, the door closing a moment later and the air being completely evacuated. And only then does the exterior door open into deep space.
We're not hiding in an asteroid 'field', because those are actually extremely diffuse and… Frankly, the first place anyone looking for a ship that's hiding is going to look. We're not in a nebula-. No, actually, we technically are, but those are defined as having slightly more dust than normal space. They're even less dense than asteroid fields. I don't think there's a single grain of dirt in my visual field.
Indeed. Like the book says, Space is
big. Anything closely-packed enough as a
fictional asteroid field is shown to be would soon condense into a solid clump thanks to gravity.
Space, the final frontier.
Both my ring and my armour's computer have my heading, so I turn in that direction and activate my empathic vision.
Though if the fleet's occupants are as mind-whammied as you think they are, there's not going to be much to see, even up close...
These are the voyages of the Orange Lantern Corps.
I wonder what it would be like if… I'd been able to found the Corps in a time of relative… Peace.
Probably a lot less interested in your help. Or you'd be patrolling Maltusian space as a 'peace-keeping force'...
Its continuing mission: to scout out well-charted worlds. To seek out Reach life and allied civilizations. To boldly destroy what no one has destroyed before.
Or something.
Don't forget the 'boldly coming' with alien ladies. Something
most Star Trek captains were talented at... (Or the alien
fellows, as Janeway showed...)
There they are. Looks like there are a no Reach citizens in the mix, and the desires of the crews are just as dimmed as I thought they'd be. They're still there though; they're not the biomechanoids I thought they might be. I can't tell more from here, and I can't risk a scan until it's time to stop silent running.
Time to go.
Hmm... Odd that they've left these fleets unguarded, with not even a Reach commissar to keep them friendly. Can you be sure they're hostile? OR perhaps they believe they're loyal and true citizens of the Reach empire...
I accelerate, space rippling as I bend it to accelerate my passage and then force it to snap back to reduce the risk of it being detected. The amount I'm bending it is tiny compared to what I do when I fly long distance. It's pretty small when compared to what most Lanterns do. But I'm not travelling all that far and there's no real deadline. Dox isn't expecting me to hit every single one of these fleets. If I'm too slow, we lose some investigation opportunity and I'll have to move at higher speed.
I'm sure Dox has other teams running their own investigations in the more distant sectors. Their chances are
lower though, because they're not the protagonist...
But I do want to know what they're doing. Because if the Reach isn't quite as brutal as we'd been assuming… Maybe we could negotiate something. Not now, obviously, but before we're forced to bombard their worlds from orbit. But that doesn't seem to track with what we've got good intelligence on them doing.
Curiosity's a sneaky bitch, isn't it?
I want to know what they're playing at.
And I'll find out in… Four hours and seventeen minutes.
Joy.
Time to pull up a game of solitaire on the HUD, then.