Protostar - Error in Transmission

Chapter 2 - The Grand Tour, Almost

Axelle's mouth hung open for a moment before turning into a wide grin. "A flying squirrel?!"

Kane's expression brightened up. "I have to admit, I thought you'd be too young to have come across these birds. Most were decommissioned about thirty years ago."

She shook her head in disbelief at the sight before her. The IFS Protostar did have that flying squirrel look, similar to when the small creature would extend its legs outwards with their skin stretched between their fore and aft limbs as they glided from tree to tree. With the Protostar, its limbs were stubbier and more wing-like, with a total four cylindrical thrusters, one attached to the end of each extension. A spherical connection allowed them to be rotated with a fair degree of freedom to propel and steer the craft through planetary atmospheres and maneuver it around in space. The fore winglets were sloped slightly downwards, whereas the two rear ones were angled upwards, creating a menacing, flattened X-like shape when the ship was viewed directly from the front or behind, especially with its bulky and imposing, mostly olive drab colored body. Eight micro-thrusters strategically placed around the ship allowed for precision positioning, like when docking or cruising at faster than light speeds.

For main propulsion, these support frigates were equipped with two main reactors, one being a redundancy and kept on standby unless needed. The reactor could generate the necessary energy to thin out the fabric of spacetime around the ship, while the two large aft exhaust nozzles could propel it several thousand times faster than the speed of light in a matter of hours. These weren't the fastest ships in the IFS fleet, but could get to where they were needed within a reasonable amount of time, especially if there were no acceleration corridors nearby. And most importantly, especially for the crew, they also powered the inertial suppression systems. All in all, they were fairly compact vessels, just over ninety meters in length, and under sixty wide and tall.

"I've only seen them twice. First time was in some instructional video about preparing for your first spaceflight. A small fleet of them were escorting a large Unallam battleship. They showed the insides packed with troops. And the second time was when I actually saw one launch from Promethei Base on Mars. I remember it had a bright white paint job." She squinted her eyes a little as she recalled the experience from her memories.

The captain nodded. "Probably a trainer. A few of them, those in decent condition, survived decommissioning to be repurposed as such. This one in particular was brought out of a scrapyard and heavily overhauled, including the addition of some advanced tech that didn't exist over fifty years ago when these machines were in their prime."

Kane took a quick sip of his eetall, cup nearly empty. "You can see a couple of the APC's. One fore, one up top, and there's one aft." He loosely pointed at the stubby, accelerated plasma cannons as he spoke. "They also fire 65.8mm extreme velocity, nano-shearing tungsten-boride tipped rounds. Forty-five thousand rounds are stocked. There's also a shrapnel deterrence system in case we need to shake someone off our tails."

Axelle listened intently with her wide eyes glancing between the captain and the Protostar, impressed by his enthusiasm and level of detail. She was about to respond to him, but a finger held up near her face put her on pause.

"But, and I say this with sincerity, I hope we never have to use the dozen antimatter tactical torpedoes she's armed with. Anti-lithium variety. They don't make the largest pop, but one will easily destroy a vessel this size, and half a dozen in the right spots could disable the largest of battleships." His face had a cold seriousness to it as he spoke about the powerful weapons. The captain might have been a highly decorated officer that had seen his fair share of conflict, but he wasn't warmonger. "It's usually enough to just warn the other vessel that we're armed with these and they'll back down. Well, it worked a couple of times anyway." His voice trailed off at the end.