Epic stuff.
Demigods amongst the stars. There's certainly ego involved.
And so, roleplaying this idea a little because I think this would be incredibly interesting to seen written about from you, Silas. I'd want to give you a little more of a run for your money. I'll use Isis for the placeholder of Silas's victim, since her clone is deliciously expensive, carries said ego, and would likely end up in a grim fate similar to how you mentioned.
State Protectorate-loyal Typhoon is tackled down by Mr. Bhaalgorn. Shields strip in powerful displays of firepower at point blank, rage torpedoes slamming past hungry cutthroat mega-laser batteries. The lasers peel through vulnerable plating without issue as torps slam against reinforced bulkheads.
Isis fires off the escape pods, ahead of time and empty, further inviting an image that her battleship is unlikely defended. This isn't a crew she cares much for and she's got a score to settle. Wherever that reasoning comes from, she burns all bridges putting full incentive into the defenders.
Ego. It sells you that sweet lie that you're waiting even wishing for. You think you can wrestle down that dragon until the moment it barks on your doorstep…
See, Isis doesn't have any access to her capsule on this battleship. No entries, even emergency ones. She's had bad run-ins with crew who've served on board her ship before. Short of reinforced hull bay doors that are sealed upon leaving a station, she is
completely inaccessible.
Or so she thinks.
Armor plates peel away, teams begin to board. Resistance is light inside the brightly cut portions of the ship, further encouraging the image that the ship is lightly defended. Dual ancillary armor repairers kick in at 30% armor, as the teams begin to burrow. Several teams are cut down instantly by burrowing nanites as entire walls and layers of armor plating suddenly fill throughout spaces originally thought safe.
The teams that get past find themselves against bunkered down defenders, savage Matari crewmen and women. Against raiders, they aren't much, but on home-turf they hold their own with the numbers in their favor.
The aggressors shift their focus, trying to battle toward the battleship's power grid. Textbook, it seems perfect and even puts a sneer on Isis's face as the defenders shift to defend accordingly. What escapes her nanites, and overwhelms her crew, she vents the entire compartments of.
Yet as the aggressors draw closer toward her beating heartbeat of her reactor, the connection to her ship's network becomes more intruded upon, forcing her persona to retract from those portions of the ship to avoid hacked attempts to access her mind and its control of the ship.
She's almost baffled at the number of times the boarders attempt to hack into the ship, as if the greater predator is clawing at every attempt to feel her thoughts prior to her believed demise. She's still confident but the hackings are beginning to overwhelm her, causing her to vent those portions of the ship long before the defenders have been overwhelmed rather than deal with yet another attempt at her thoughts.
Yet these are EVA aggressors, even kicked into space they'll eventually reboard. While her defenders on the other hand don't have this luxury. They're Matari, not Caldari Navy Light Marines. She finds herself killing off more over her crew than the enemy invaders and STILL being required to retract her persona from hacked portions of her battleship.
The light is fading, the dragon is testing her greatly. She observes the enemy battleship dropping below the armor she's still clinging to with her repairers. Yet she's running out of charges here soon. To think her Typhoon could bring down this highly known Bhaalgorn keeps that sneer on her face and her thoughts away from triggering any self-destruct sequence.
Then the alarms go off. A large unnoticed team has begun to cut through the internal walls and layers of bulkheads separating her capsule from the ship. She orders defenders to the junctions hosting the intrusions. Yet her crew are now too few in number or too focused on defending the reactor. She triggers self-destruct… Joke's on the dragon, she thinks.
Two minutes remaining. That reactor has to spin out of alignment, after all.
And that burrowing becomes ridiculous, as if the entire main force of the invaders set up shop in those junctions. A creeping thought that it was the original plan from the beginning…
The light's gone, the dragon reveals it's true form. As if to further incline how so underestimated Isis considered this creature, her foe engages hardeners and its own armor repairers, stealing away any thought that victory was ever in her favor.
She finds herself retracting all of her persona to the capsule and trying to rush the process of the self-destructing, yet you can't will what resides inside your heart.
So you will yourself to eject.
As if the beast is waiting for you in the darkness, ejection reveals the closest hack of all of them, originating in sequence from three different junctions just outside the bulkheads of where the capsule is stored, all wired to your prying command to eject. As if to build the perfect honey pot and before you know it, you feel the cold raw static of intrusive hands and prying eyes of rogue connections.
You aren't alone and your mind is turned against you. Everything hurts.
So you run.
Which short of ejecting isn't very far.
You try to force the brain spike, willing yourself to break away from reality of your extended now-reclusive body to find yourself suspended in that ectoplasm of the capsule. That mortal side of yourself you don't like thinking about, now the only hope of you being able to escape this alive…
But this is your new golden collector's edition of the capsule, you don't have all your optional failsafes a capsuleer with your age would demand. The capsule needs to sense imminent danger. You hope that they're stupid enough to drill into the capsule's shell, for that would traditionally trigger the brain spike.
Forty-five seconds to self-destruct...
You can distantly hear them outside as you continue to force yourself to come to in darkness.
Dread instills as you hear the heavy clangs of several charges being magnetically placed to outside of your capsule. You hear the shrill of the charges spinning up. You aren't sure of the outcome of using explosives to breach the capsule but you take not chances.
You have to pull a cable free, anything.
Thirty seconds.
A loud bang, distant that suddenly leaves you feeling nauseated as the the capsule vibrates lightly for a moment. You feel disconnected from your neocom, no channels to reach out through, no wallet access, everything is suddenly…
gone.
A terrifying thought that whatever was placed on the outside of your capsule is not actually explosives...
A spark from inside the darkness, the sudden shrills of cutting tools. More sparks. Blinding light.
Twenty seconds. That's all you care about, too displaced to panic about how your brain spike hasn't engaged. Or the blinding light is mistaken for the thought of waking up in a cloning bay…
And then you feel the rifle butt. Everything hurts as you feel the hands, grabbing, shoving, pulling. Somewhere, someone pulls your cables free from your sockets. It's too bright, everything hurts and each sensation seems to be worse than the prior.
From the rifle butt to searing lights, to the metal grated floor as your drenched naked form hits it, hard.
You don't even realize you're screaming.
You don't even realize that at ten seconds to self destruct, the Bhaalgorn behemoth has silenced its guns and practically sits lifeless as the capsuleer commanding the behemoth has remotely seized hold of your vessel and now with little effort simply deactivates the self-destruct.
You know how the rest of this story goes...
Author
Topic: Ship Boarding, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the "Yarr" (Read 9702 times)