Chapter 463 - Far Future Ch. 173 – And Now Like Smoke (1/2)
All our Swords got busy locking down the spatial coordinates on the other side, while we got busy plying said Swords against the startled drow guards lazing about there, and their cyber-slaved mechtoys, and murderhounds and reapercats and random corsair reinforcements and merc guards and...
Well, let's just say that nobody who saw us on the way out got to live, and their cameras were going to have trouble recording more than blurs, anyways.
The girls would have no problem whatsoever getting back into the city, and were going to do just that. Their jobs were to find as many such Portals as they could and get the coordinates for them. Mine was to get shit started on this side of the Rift, despite how much resistance I was likely to get.
My duel with Madam Liloth was going to have to wait a while. That said, all three of the girls hit Melee/11 with me after living through that grand celebration of the drow, and killing things bigger and older than we were.
I was going to hit Rantha Thirteen as soon as I delivered this message, maybe higher. After all, I had me some ambitions.
We were in a pirate port, a place where the dark sides of the galaxy came together to deal and get dealt with, aliens and the scum of existence side-by-side in a don't knife me, I won't knife you (right now) kind of standoff suitable for dealing with the kind of unspeakable stuff you just didn't find with your normal merchantman.
We could all see the heavy cruiser in orbit, with its attendant modified transport trailing after it. Data matched the lines of the ship of our target, his fleet was probably back in safer space, not wanting to make quite the trip this was, and probably covering for their boss.
While doing something coy like Airwalking up there was a possibility, or even jetting, that would be visible, and I wanted to be subtle-like... plus it was a long damn way and my fly speed was in miles/hour, not miles/second. I would be taking the local transportation.
The transport that Marquis de Krov had brought his cyborg slaves down on was gone, but his personal transport was still here. Getting off of here was going to be as simple as going invisible, holding onto the damn hull of the ship, and letting my Vajra deal with air resistance as it flew up into the void and delivered me into the heart of his ship.
And then, well, I had plans for the bastard.
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The girls vanished back into the starport, zipping through Riftcuts back into another part of Gloomheart, there to continue their explorations and additions to The Map. I blended into the top of the Marquis de Krov's private flitter and waited for him to come out.
It didn't actually take all that long, if you were the patient sort. Nobody was clambering over the top of this thing to check it out, that's what cameras and monitors that couldn't see me anyways were for, and of course the guards were stationed at the entry points, not the roof.
About twelve hours after I sat down, him and his cohort of n'er-do-wells and paid throatslitters swept up, complete with a few house guards of his drow sponsors to make sure none of the watching pirates got any ideas. Once he left orbit, anything went, of course, and I assumed that whatever was being traded had already been sent up and out by other means.
The drow didn't actually send some ships up to escort him, there being a very strict limit to how nice they could possibly be to a human, even one that would work with them so unscrupulously. He and his crew boarded, made sure that nothing had been strapped to, seeded on, or otherwise affixed to his ship, and then it was blasting off with rockets and anti-grav. There I was, still clinging to the top of the ship.
The air was hissing past me hard enough to cut steel as it rapidly picked up speed, but Vajra, frictionless, it zipped right on past me even more smoothly then it would the flitter, so there were no handling problems, it was probably even a little bit smoother than normal. It didn't take long to break out into space, but the ship was big enough to have its own small gravity field, and a residual atmosphere clinging to it.
I watched his ship growing before me.
For all eye-peeping I'd done and continued to do, I had not personally been up in space before, nor seen a ship like this up close. Oh, I recognized all of them from having watched through the eyes of the kids and Marked a zillion times, but there's always the first time for yourself, y'know?
Axiomatic Modal Tech demanded some freaking stupid, yet impressive architectural styles. It was meant to be blocky, domineering, tyrannical, intimidating, conveying a massively powerful physicality and implacability to the enemies and members of humanity alike.
I mean, seriously, you don't need to put cathedral towers on a starship, statues of worship, mediation chambers, and that incredibly blocky style of construction, rune-patterns of assembly forming a greater purpose of Law that helped ward off the presence of the Warp, especially when the Throne field went up.
I imagined that statue of the Emperor wasn't really intact at this point, but who knew? I wasn't going to go over and inspect it.
Just a rake of the ol' Rantha-peepers was enough to see that this ship had been in a lot of fights. Miniscule differences in alloys made the replacement plating stand out, and there was a lot of it. Carbon-scoring; not quite perfectly matched and patched replacements; breaks in the AMT pattern that might be dangerous in the Warp, might not. Likely, this sot didn't believe or didn't care about the profound nature of the stuff involved, and just had it dealt with as needed.
Well, it wasn't something I could do anything about, so, eh.
Of course, the bloody thing was big, a couple kilometers long, with main gun barrels a hundred meters long facing forwards, massive side-mounted batteries of missile launchers, mushroom-like clusters of point-defense turrets, and the beehive stacks of the ship's shields. The religious iconography was everywhere, but not maintained all that well, and lacked the continuity that would make it truly useful.