House Arthas A Space Odyssey

I wasn’t meant to die.

My optics flash red as the fatalities of the forward corps add up. Even through my closed eyelids, I can see the frontlines, blue dots getting obliterated as they touch the battleships' shields and bounce off, unable to penetrate. There is no escaping it.

I’m close behind them, the second wave of the Spacedive Forward Corps will impact the shields in less than a minute. I open my eyes to see the approach.

With the speed we cut through space, that is still some distance away, and unfortunately, the enemy battleship’s heatlaser combs through us, evaporating any it touches.

I wasn’t meant to die.

I repeat, unable to change course, unable to retreat. The silence of the coms is eerie as if everyone around me is already dead, and I fly among corpses.

I suck a deep breath when an explosion of light washes over me, and I know that at least a few made it through.

The SFC has a death rate of 25% on average, per assault. My mind never stops calculating the odds of each. It all depends on how soon we penetrate the shields.

I'm seconds away from impact but I can’t help it, 21% casualties and that is only from the first wave. It's bad, particularly bad.

I wasn’t meant to die.

With the help of my biosuit, I spin myself like a screw. It’s something I learned from a fellow marine who had survived more than ten assaults. I’m not even close to that yet, but I’m here and he is now dead. The motion is similar to a head dive but with the added screwing motion.

When I fall into the battleship’s shields the soft membrane stretches inwards. It feels like a net, slowing my momentum, and in moments I will be hurled the other way, back into range of the heatlaser.

I feel the automatic shieldbreaker from my biosuit take effect. I vibrate violently which doesn’t help with the vomit I’ve been trying to keep down. The shield pops with a flash of light that blinds me momentarily and I’m through.

It's a 15-meter fall to the ship’s hull and I’ve slowed down enough to not break myself on the hard metal armor of the battleship. Still, I don’t want to hit it head-first despite the nanomite’s healing running through my bloodstream. I bring my feet forward and brace for impact.

I hear a thud through the silence of space but it’s mostly my weight on the boots than anything else. Sometimes my body surprises even me, a Techgenome, 3 meters tall, close to 200 kg man should feel a bit of pain landing on a hard surface like I did.

I feel nothing but pure adrenaline as I crouch and engage the manual drill embedded in the backstorage compartment of my biosuit.

The metal armor of the battleship overheats despite the freezing temperature of space. I push the drill down hard and scan the surrounding area for any defensive drones closing in.

Orange lights around the hull indicate where more drilling takes place. My optics track blasts here and there where the marines engage with the battleship’s defenses, but no drones converge on my location.

It might be the nerves but sweat is starting to form on my brows and I’m unable to wipe it. The hiss from the drill indicates it has pierced through the outer armor and I move it sideways to enlarge the hole so I can enter through.

My mind tends to wander during any physical labor. It processes these situations too fast to keep it focused on them. As marines of the SFC fight and die above me trying to pierce through the shields of the battleship and the bulkcarrier it is protecting, I think of home.

I think of House Arthas.

—-

The deck of the docking station always bothered me. It was the metallic clang it produced when I walked over it that did it, and it did so with every conceivable footwear I had tried on thus far.

The only solution? To go barefoot. But I would die before I exposed myself to such humiliation.

The deckhands gawked at the slightest glimpse of my presence. So I had been instructed to proper behavior and attire from a very young age. My parents dreamed that I would go far. A hope that was both poison and medicine alike.

Being of a side branch of the main Arthas family held a lot of responsibility but little actual power. My father, Odmund EL’Arthas, was responsible for the smooth running of this port facility, Point C3X1DF, near the planetary cluster C3X, home to the House Arthas dominion.

It was a nice setup for my father by all accounts. A busy port that oversaw Supermassive Bulkcarriers and Spacefreights of all kinds arrange their loads, swap crews, or head to the repair bay for needed maintenance.

It was also why I had been studying NeoEngineering, Biocomputing, and Techphysics my whole life. In case I inherited my father’s obligations.

Being of the side branch of the main Arthas family held a lot of privileges but a screw-up could just as easily downgrade our family’s ranking to nothingness.

Yet the privileges my parents had been given had all gone to me and to my embarrassment, I didn’t nearly feel the necessary appreciation for their gifts.

Even before I was born, I was made a Genome. Altered biologically, enhanced to the extreme limit of humanity.

Then I was stuffed with nanomites that would push my mind and body even further–A Techgenome as was the correct term. The legal limit for Bioaddons a side branch of the family could wish to attain through the proper channels.

That wasn’t enough for my parents, however. Hopes and dreams of grandeur poisoned their thoughts. In my early life, barely a year old I had been given DNA-mutating drugs. Highly sought after, and highly illegal since the Great Genome Wars a thousand years in the past. Where my parents had acquired them even now I don’t know.

When I turned 20, at the end of my schooling years, I passed the General Cognition Placement Test, placing first in the C3X sector. In that test, among the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, was the heir of the main Arthas bloodline, juiced to the brim with any conceivable enhancer. He came in second place.

I strongly believe that’s where all the shit started.

The brightest star in the galaxy can only be one after all.

—-

The hole was large enough for me to go through but I waited at the edge, dumbing inside a score of miniscout drones to check for an ambush. Drilling through the battleship’s hull was a noisy affair for the ones inside even when I heard most to nothing at all from the outside.

The non-combat personnel would have already fled the other way, and the rest would have been waiting for me to come through with their blasters ready and pointed in my direction. I may be a mountain of a man but I would die like any other at the face of a plasma onslaught.

So the scout drones. They had a live feed connected to my optics which I oversaw over the top left corner of my sight. I could easily switch between different feeds with a thought. My brainchip had the extra capacity to run a number of applications simultaneously, compliments of my parents, and it was holding out well enough through the stress of battle.

I was surprised to find that there was no contact with the enemy on the inside, and my drones had started mapping the corridors of the battleship, mindful of any thermal signatures.

*BZZIT*

A female marine landed next to me and I jerked more from the nerves of battle than surprise. I knew she was coming. Another landed sideways hitting the hull with force a few meters away.

The third wave was underway and the battleship shields had been overwhelmed. It was time to find out what the inside of the vessel had in store for us.

Her voice came through the short-range coms.

“Sergeant, ready for entry.” She said and I noted her rank on the side of her biosuit. A private, it was her first assault then, where mine was the fourth.

In the SFC almost all surviving combat personnel ranked up after battle. Seldom had we any wounded. Space warfare was that deadly.

I looked at her form with pity, but she saw nothing but my slick black facemask. She probably dreamed of surviving to a rank where she wouldn’t need to man the waves. There was no way for a mercenary company like the SFC, set up to kill the debtors and criminals populating its ranks, to let any of us live.

It was where you were sent to disappear. I had dug through their mainframe. I had seen who had sold me to this hellhole.

Seraphina Arthas. Sister to the Arthas heir.

“You may enter. I have drones mapping the inside. No resistance as of yet. I’m uploading the mapping in real-time on the main server. I suggest you keep it in sight at all times.”

“Erm, Sir, I don’t have any optics embedded. I’m Lowtech.”

I cursed inwardly. Most of the SFC marines were Lowtech, and they made the majority of the fatalities list. “Never mind, help your fellow marine, I’ll enter first. Watch my back private.”

“Yes, Sir,” She said and the voice synthesizer took away any emotion she might have had. I didn’t know if she had been afraid or relieved.

I pushed through the hole and the battleship's gravity pulled me the rest of the way.

There wasn't anyone waiting for me on the inside and despite the hole in the hull, the artificial gravity had helped greatly in keeping things grounded.

Instead of moving forward, I scanned the room, a storage space with crates arranged neatly in metal casings.

The piece of technology I was looking for was installed on the walls of the ship itself. Artificial Magnetic Atmospheric Fields were an over-the-top luxury, that nullified the dangers of breaches in the battleship’s structure.

The pocket of chips and wires my optics registered as the core array in the room held a metasphere that made all this possible.

It was needless to say that I wanted it. My mouth salivated at the thought of what I could do with a score of those.

The bad news was that holding a metasphere close for an extended period would mess with my nanomites to a degree that I might shut down, and faint, as the sum of my nanos converges on a single point inside my body.

Thankfully I had more than enough Lowtech personnel to choose from.

“Privates,” I called in the coms, and in mere moments the two marines dropped through the hole.

“Sir, your orders,” the female marine said crouching, with her blaster pointing around the room as she took stock of her surroundings.

“Cease whatever you are doing. New orders, here catch this,” I threw the metasphere at her. “Your names, marines. As of now, your sole purpose is to carry what I throw at you,”

“Igor Fin, Sir,” The second private answered first. “Gardenia Ilky,” added the woman. “Is..it dangerous?” she asked, holding the little metallic ball in her fingertips.

“For you, none whatsoever, I expect you to keep it out of sight,” I said and made a circle with my thumb and index finger. The universal code for credits. Sharing a look of understanding, the two marines nodded in union.

It was time to lift some tech off the hands of the Helion Syndicate vessel.