"GCV-44 ready for departure on vector 226, estimated travel time is 4 hours, with one hour to scan and refuel expect us back in 9 hours from operation start."
Strapped into the pilot seat, River started the communication's procedure for departure as she charged the Wyrm's drive for a jump into hyperspace.
[Speartip-Delta this is Royal guard command, we copy your last, go for departure, total time on scouting operation is 9 hours… Godspeed.]
Looking to Jessica beside her for final confirmation after communications with the Royal guard command cut out, River punched the accelerator and entered hyperspace.
"... I still don't like this."
Confirming the vector and speed, River let go of the controls and leaned back in her seat before responding to Jessica.
"I don't like it either, but it has to be done and the Wyrm is the best ship for it."
The mission River and Jessica had been tasked with were scouting, more specifically they were scouting out the first system the Royal guard would visit on their journey back home.
Taking the first step for the entirety of the fleet into the hostile unknown wasn't brilliant, even more so because there was a good chance they were already surrounded so River and Jessica might be running into an ambush unlike no other.
"... But in the end, this is our job, unless you want to abandon Mike to his fate."
"I never said that."
It was not lost on River or Jessica that the commander of the royal guard deliberately split up their 3 person team. If River and Jessica ran, Mike would be fucked, if Mike betrayed the royal guard, Jessica and River in their medium-class fighter would be facing the entirety of the Royal guard equipped with tactical-class weapons.
"Right, T-minus 4 hours to arrival… I'll exploit that time to its very limit."
Getting up from her chair, Jessica first got out of her vacuum suit, letting her ears finally fly out instead of getting crushed by her helmet, then she got out of her pants to let her tail fly free instead of being constantly wrapped around her leg and way too sweaty. Liberated from oppression Jessica got down on all fours and stretched her entire body, every single vertebra and joint in her body popping as she did before she laid down on her stomach completely lifeless. The only thing that occasionally moved other than her tail which swayed in the wind from the AC was her ears which stood tall and proud, picking up every new sound the Wyrm made as it travelled through hyperspace. This wasn't the first time River had seen Jessica do this ritual, in fact, she had started doing it as soon as and at every opportunity it was just the two of them since Mike got injured. The reasons for Jessica's sudden changes were as numerous as they were pretty reasonable, first of all hiding her tail and ears all the time was really uncomfortable, the reason she was hiding them was because she got tired of people staring, leading to her ears and tail becoming very uncomfortable. The reason why she had no problem showing her ears and tail to River was that they had fought for their life together, so she was apparently trustworthy.
"I'm sorry, but I still don't understand."
"There's not much to understand, we fought together and won, so we're family… Or something like that, I can't believe your language doesn't have a word for it."
"So if we didn't win you wouldn't trust me?"
"If we lost we would be dead, no reason to worry about death as you can't change what happens after you're dead."
Both River and Jessica were already quite used to this sort of back and forth, none of it was accusatory in any way, shape or form, it was just the fastest way of getting to know each other better.
"Then what about Mike?"
"Mike is insane, so I don't quite trust him."
"Right, can't argue with that."
"But he is quite loyal, so I still don't know… Every time I ask myself if I thrust him I come to a different answer. Don't worry though, I won't do anything."
While River read Jessica's response as she wouldn't try and kill Mike anymore, due to him constantly prioritising her life and wellbeing, Jessica meant something else that River wouldn't realise until far later on.
"So how far did we get last time?"
"To the time of the fourth military hunta I think, that was around the time that the free navy mercenary groups were first established, they are kind of like your pilot's guild, but not as centralised."
"Oh yeah, we have something like that too, they're just called PMC's, or just corpo's, corporate sponsored armies."
To pass the downtime Jessica and River told each other stories of their respective lives, while Jessica generally told her galaxy's history, River had more personal anecdotes about her life as a pirate or about the surprisingly many escapades she had already been on with Mike.
-
While the first pathfinder mission was underway, Mike joined in his first admiral's meeting from the CIC of the Valourant.
"Sir, why exactly am I here?"
Still slightly polite because he was technically working, Mike wasn't entirely civil due to the number of stares he was getting from the rest of the staff officers.
"I believe I speak for the rest of the admiralty when I saw that we would also like to know that commander, he's not even a citizen of the Solar Empire, but just a common mercenary."
Needless to say, the admirals weren't happy that nobody was crashing their little elitist party.
"... Mike, please update us on your recent findings."
"Yes sir, from the pirate attack I recovered a number of prisoners, while one of them died doing interrogation I got a few promising leads. This area of the galaxy seems lowlily populated, but there still is a significant navy presence in addition to a prison."
Following Commander Simmons' example of completely ignoring the other people, Mike started to share his findings.
"A prison? How exactly is that a find?"
"Because the Eden Theocracy normally executes people for misdemeanours like shoplifting, their entire society is basically a meat grinder that sorts the faithful and lucky from the blood they offer to their god. In that case why even have a prison? Because there are people they cannot execute, either because they have information the Theocracy needs, or because they're loved too dearly by their god even after betraying them… That means high-value targets, very important personnel and intelligence galore. I strongly recommend raiding the facility on the way out of this galaxy."
In the span of a few seconds, the admiralty's impression of Mike had shifted from disregard to confusion and mistrust.
"Commander Simmons, how come the Captain can extract intelligence from these prisoners who can't talk our own language?"
"That's classified information, this Captain can talk with the Eden population and has been vetted by myself and her royal highness."
"... If her royal highness has vetted him then that's good enough for me, Captain, what specifically would you hope to find at this correction and holding facility? And more importantly, how would you raid it exactly?"
Still clearly not okay with Mike, one of the admirals nevertheless chose to thrust him when he heard he had her majesty's seal of approval.
"These prisons shouldn't have any major protection as the Eden Theocracy has complete control over its people, but realistically it would be guarded by whatever they could afford to spare chasing us around and taking control over the crown world we're abandoning, so at most, a few destroyers and a dozen or so smaller craft. What I hope to find there is the thin slice of personnel the Eden Theocracy hates but cannot execute, so clerics with critical information mostly, but we might even find a rogue Inquisitor as there aren't that many holding facilities due to the fact the Theocracy wants them to remain hidden."
"What the hell are clerics, not to mention Inquisitors?"
"Clerics are researchers and experts in applying fields of study we don't even know to exist yet, like witch space travel… How exactly did you describe Inquisitors again Mike?"
Having been briefed on the basic governmental structure of the Eden Theocracy by Mike, Commander Simmons still had some trouble wrapping his head around some of the finer details.
"Inquisitors are genetically engineered supersoldier vampires who are basically invaluable and serve directly under cardinals who interpret the will of their god… Imagine what our own forces could do with a former Inquisitor who wanted to see the Eden Theocrasy burn."
-
"We're punching out now… Get ready."
"Mmm, ready."
Having arrived at their target system for investigation and scouting, River punched out of hyperspace travel and into supercruise as Jessica started her scan of the star system.
"A red dwarf brown dwarf binary system with 5 planetoids… I see no contacts on scopes."
"That's because the Eden Theocracy uses a different kind of faster-than-light travel than us, but stay vigilant. I'll go into a low orbit of the stars, use that time to scan the planets for inferred blooms, that'll tell us if there're any orbital stations we need to look closer at."
The by far easiest way to spot orbital stations of any size was through the heat they radiated away doing onboard power production like fission or fusion generators, furthermore, stations with any kind of industrial output would glow even brighter due to the waste heat generated in chemical and metallurgical processes. With the two largest sources of infrared radiation placed in her sensor's blindspot as River started orbiting the two binary stars, Jessica quickly started picking up hotspots, without exception all 5 planetoids showed some sign of an orbital installation of some kind, in addition to something strange.
"There's some sort of strange bloom out in space, not anywhere near a planet."
A strange signal could mean anything from chemicals dumped in deep space to a staging ground for a large fleet operation.
"... Shit, we need to check it out. But we'll save that for last."
"Roger, let's start with the inner planets and work our way outwards, time is short."
With only an hour to examine the target system, River and Jessica only had time to do a surface-level force assessment, although this was also partly for their own safety.
The longer they remained in hostile territory, the higher their chances were that they would be intercepted.
Doing fast passes of each planetoid, Jessica ran all the Wyrm's sensors on full power and got back data on multiple mining and ore processing facilities along with a single trade hub.
"Well, things seem normal so far, but what we really need is a galaxy map…"
"There's no way Eden would just hand one of those over, so we would need to capture one. But that's up to the commander to decide on, we're just doing whatever they're saying until we can leave them behind."
River didn't really appreciate being used against her will, so she had already written the entirety of the Solar Empire off and would take whatever opportunity that came her way to at least fuck with them if not actively harm them after they had taken Mike hostage.
"Agreed, just say the word… But that's still a bit in the distance, right now we have this hotspot to deal with, or we could just-"
"Nope, we're checking it out. Coming up on contact in T-minus 30 seconds, be ready."
With her idea of just deleting the event from the Wyrm's logs and pretending it wasn't there shot down, Jessica trained the Wyrm's inferred, optical and ultraviolet sensors on the deep space anomaly, but as the Wyrm closed in, strange things started happening.
"What the hell is this interference? River do you see this, this isn't the sensors, is it?"
Instead of the high activity, they had spotted from far away, all Jessica's sensors now showed nothing, a void with less activity than background radiation would permit. Before River could even check the data she also started having issues, out of nowhere speed started to drop and the normally humming fusion drive started sounding like a vacuum cleaner that had sucked up a bunch of sand. As error messages of both the audio and visual variety started cascading out of control, the Wyrm's flight control computer dropped it into an emergency FTL disengage.
"FUCK! HOLD ON!"
It was only due to RIver's skill (and a good bit of luck) that she managed to keep the Wyrm's computer from purging the FTL drive core, which was a ship's final solution to a drive that was damaged and overloaded to the brink and at risk of exploding. Kicked out of supercruise with an emergency disengage, the Wyrm's hull was stressed violently as River struggled to regain control of the ship that was in a violent 3-axis spin. Acting almost in instinct as she struggled to stay conscious under the high G forces, River eventually managed to wrestle back control of the Wyrm, when she finally got it to stop spinning she reset the main power bus to the reactor and got the Wyrm's system's back online right in time to notice the numerous incoming projectiles.