Persephone Astrid's YarrJournal

Persephone Astrid’s Atron, the Pants on Head, made a blur of space as it crossed the Eszur solar system. Persephone flew as the lead scout for a mixed fleet of nearly a dozen Hellcats and Bastards, and she couldn’t be more delighted to be back in her favorite fleet role. For this patrol she had chosen the tiny and speedy frigate with tissue-paper defenses in a superstitious attempt to break her recent bad luck. In two days’ time she had lost a cruiser and two interceptors. Today she recklessly dared to fly with nothing but her skill to protect her body from the vacuum of deep space.

Her Atron glided out of short-range warp and soundlessly passed near a Minmatar control bunker. There was no sign of the battlecruiser she’d spied on the ships’ scanners from a few million kilometers away.

“He’s not here,” she radioed to Nova Blackadder, the fleet commander. Persephone glanced at the system chart and evaluated the best place to resume her scan of the system for potential targets.

“Copy,” Nova replied in clipped verbal shorthand, ever the professional. Persephone loved to scout for Nova, and hoped to become as skilled at fleet command some day.

“I’m going to–” Persephone advised, then stopped abruptly. Five Hobgoblin Mk. II drones had suddenly appeared within five kilometers of her position, and five aggression warnings sounded as one in her ears. Immediately the speedy and agile drones began to circle her ship, firing at it in rapid succession, overwhelming the tiny frigate’s defenses. Impossible! Persephone thought. She scanned wildly in all directions, but could see no enemy ship. Where did those come from?

Persephone firewalled the throttle on her Atron’s drive engines and afterburner, but the drones were easily four times faster and kept up effortlessly. Dual klaxons sounded less than a second apart. The first low-pitched tone indicated that her ship’s shields had been completely shredded. The second tone, a high-pitched warble which Persephone knew well, indicated that the ship’s armor was similarly wrecked and that her frigate’s structure was being pounded. From the corner of her eye, Persephone saw a Pilgrim force recon cruiser release its cloak and become visible.

“I’m under attack,” Persephone reported hastily on the fleet channel, setting aside her own survival. A scout’s duty, she had learned, was to report everything she could see. “Taking fire from five drones and a Pilgrim, uncloaked out of nowhere–” Her broadcast abruptly cut off as her capsule ejected from the Atron and fired its escape thrusters.

“Warp to Persephone!” Nova commanded the fleet, unaware that her scout’s ship had already exploded. A chorus of acknowledgements flooded the channel as the Hellcats and Bastards raced to the rescue.

Now thinking only of her own survival, Persephone quickly selected the nearest planet and activated her capsule’s warp drive. To her horror, it failed to respond to the command, and the capsule drifted slowly at the center of the swarm of drones and the still-glowing wreckage of her own ship.

Why aren’t they shooting me? Persephone wondered as she continued in vain to implore the warp drive to respond to her will. “I can’t get away in my pod,” she said on the fleet channel, forcing herself not to panic. “I could really use some help here.” On her capsule’s scanners, she could see no sign that the Pilgrim was disrupting her capsule’s warp engine, but it stubbornly refused to acknowledge her commands. Without warning, the drones resumed their attack, and the capsule shuddered under the barrage and quickly cracked open.

“Hang in there Persephone!” someone responded, but Persephone could scarcely identify the voice over the shriek of the capsule’s hull breach alarm, the last sound a capsuleer ever hears. Persephone’s ears popped painfully as the capsule’s viscose amniotic slime vented into the vacuum of space, and to her horror she realized that the neural scanner had failed to detect the hull breach. Normally at this moment the scanner would automatically activate, injecting a lethal nanotoxin into the pilot’s body and disassembling her brain at the molecular level so that it could be transmitted into a new clone body. This time, however, it had failed to activate.

Persephone felt her consciousness quickly fade as the capsule vented to space, and the oxygen boiled from her bloodstream with the abrupt drop in pressure. Her thoughts became dream-like, and she understood that she had only fleeting seconds of life remaining. Scan, God-dammit! she thought fiercely, directly commanding the neural scanner to kill her. Had the scanner even survived the destruction of her pod, she wondered in black despair. If it had not, she would die in the next moment. Her pulse roared in her ears like dual waterfalls, drowning out all other sensation as her life ended. Neural scan: fire! Scan! Scan! Scaaaaaaaaaaa–

To be continued.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under IC Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.