My patrons keep voting for more of The Last Angel so who am I not to feed their habit? We’re continuing The Serpent’s Garden. A Calnian cruiser has just arrived in-system in several pieces at once. Though it appears to have been an accident, both Red One and her allies are keen to investigate the cause and look for survivors. While they do so, Nanil takes the opportunity to question Red One a bit more. It’s not supposed to be in a Calnian’s nature to anticipate and plan for conflict, but Nanil might not be a very good Calnian…
…or she might be one of the best. For the full story, check out the link above and enjoy!
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“This kind of accident,” the woman began. “Could a Compact vessel have survived it?”
A beat. “Most likely. Compact vessels are built with heavy redundancies and their structural integrity is far superior to Hegemony ships. Assuming that the same systemic failures seen here occurred to our Compact ship, there is the possibility that it would have suffered same level of damage.”
Nanil heard a loud unsaid ‘but’ in her comrade’s words. “And the most likely possibility?” she countered. “Would the crew have survived?”
“Most of them. The vessel would have taken heavy casualties and severe hull damage at the points of system failure and it would have lost any and all rip capability, but something cruiser-scale or larger would almost certainly have retained structural integrity and secondary functions.” A few seconds passed in silence as Nanil considered that.
“The Compact has been an interstellar empire for nearly six thousand years,” Red one added. “They are far from masters of rip technology, but they have had a great deal of experience with faster than light travel and its… peculiarities. Much as I wish otherwise, they are quick to learn from their mistakes and very invested in preventing them from happening in the first place.”
There was another, even longer moment of silence, but then Nanil asked a question that had been on her mind for weeks, but protocol and propriety told her she should never ask, nor even think. She’d been holding it back until now. “Can we beat them?” Part of her wanted to immediately apologize and take back the question, but she clenched her teeth to stop the words from escaping her mouth.
She’d been running threat assessments and simulations ever since she’d learned about the alien nations of the Strife Worlds, a decision that had caused more friction than she’d realized between herself and her first officer. She’d told Unlak that they were doing nothing different than the rest of the fleet; the cardinal overseer’s icon vessel itself was doing the same. He’d said the motivations were completely different. They were studying, he’d argued. She was preparing.
Her mind briefly flashed back to their argument in the gym. Maybe I should have listened more. She quashed the sense of self-recrimination. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It was her duty as a Hegemony hierarch to prepare for any and all threats to her ship, her citizens and her nation whether it was a pale unit preying on Frontier Worlds or an alien empire eighty-years away. More importantly, she knew the results of those trials.
The machine’s icon tilted its head back towards her. “That,” Red One answered calmly, “is the question, isn’t it?”
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