While mega-corporations vie for control of Andromeda's precious resources, the very anti-corporate Yseult, surreptitiously recruited into the heavily militarised MANTIS soon finds that the drawbacks of corporate life may be a small price next to the...
Her breath had never felt so loud... Or so deep. Conserve your air she told herself. The adrenaline made it hard. She was sat still but her body was in survival mode... Panic. High above the bright white pearl of Freegate, in a quiet and lonely orbit, just far away enough to touch the blackness and silence of deep space, a solitary Quadstar drifted gently, the planet below and the debris-like specs that were the hive of orbiting Human and alien activity visible through to large dome-like cockpit windows... It was beautiful... The round concave window giving the lone occupant a deceptively wide view of open space and the sheer vastness of even this small section of the Galaxy... Yes, it was beautiful... And scary as Hell.
Over the previous two hours, Yseult had run through all the options a MANTIS agent in a stolen armed Octan fighter had. There was MANTIS activity on Freegate and plenty of it, but with Octan recently taking control, how close could she get in a fighter? Her mission was covert, even MANTIS didn't know she was there. She could go to Octan... She has the ship to get there, but what then? She'd heard that Octan didn't keep prisoners; just took their belongings as a fine and turned them loose. Why pay to keep a criminal when you can profit from one? But that was non-corporates - the contractors and workers who broke the rules... I'm with MANTIS now. She thought. True or not, those rules won't apply to me. She thought of the independent vessels but with talk of spiders and Dust Demons... Could she take the risk?
Her thoughts turned to the GATE drive: If Octan found it will they know what it's for?..Will they be looking for me?. Presumably the missing Quadstar had been reported by now, the fight on Donwarr was so long ago. Her attention was caught as an ominous black outline drifted slowly into the bright light of the planet below. By its relative size and position, it eclipsed a significant portion of the planet. While it wasn't as big as the Jade Sun, the external containers' black clean finish made their size difficult to gauge but it was clearly an old AutoFreight unit of some kind: Harking from the pre-GATE era when trans-Galactic travel was a long and dangerous business, Unmanned freight avoided the risks associated with an occupying crew. The containers were massive to reduce trips and black to make them harder to detect for potential pirates. Only the colour-coded lines belied any information about them at all: Greens for biomass, blues for water and so on. Fitted with GATE drives, they were still used... A big box floating in space... No-one to look... No-one to notice. Yseult recalled her mission on Donwarr: the escort. How had he followed that small freighter through the anomaly?.. She suddenly realised. Of course!
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The large Autofreight unit was underpowered for its size, using multi-orbit slingshots to get up to speed efficiently. Before the anomalies were discovered, ships like that used slipstream to travel between the stars but while smaller types of vessel like the Speedy Owl or Shire class used raw power to reach slipstream velocity, larger bulk vessels took their time using the planet's pull to gain speed. The same is still true today in respect of reaching the anomaly, it's just easier and the freighter might do it in two orbits rather than five. Yseult's only hope was to intercept the freighter, unnoticed and latch on, riding it back to... Well, Lesser Drigo hopefully. If not... One crisis at a time, she thought.
