Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 258 257 - Cargo

Silvia leads Emily through the ship towards one of the cargo hold hallways that Eidecht skipped over during her tour. It feels the same as all the others when they step in, but Emily immediately notices the thickened plating on the walls, along with the faint magical suppression woven into them, resisting a passive machina scan.

"There are cultivation resources and artefacts in the other holds, but this is where we keep our livelier stock," Silvia explains, approaching one of the sealed doors and tapping a code into the screen beside it to pull up a video feed from within.

Emily looks at the image, seeing a small room with magical inscriptions covering the walls. There are a few vents near the ceiling pumping out a thick white mist that gathers on the floor, crawling over the five corpse-like bodies lying there motionless. Three of them are humanoid, one with pale blue skin whilst the others are sickly-white, and the inhuman two look like swollen, man-sized eels.

"Are they… frozen?" Emily asks curiously, spotting the faint misted breath leaving the blue-skinned person's mouth and mingling with the thick vapour filling the air.

"These ones are." Silvia nods. "To prepare the living, and to preserve the dead."

"Prepare them for what?"

"Eating of course," Silvia grins, flashing her fangs. "These fools are my snacks for the journey since we want to claim the bounty on their heads, after they failed to claim ours. They're members of a few small covens from the Federation with prices on their lives within the Guild."

"I see." Emily nods in understanding, having fed enough men to her son to inure her to the idea of storing people for consumption. "Does being cold make them taste better?"

"A little. It makes their hearts work extra hard and gathers blood around their cores, condensing it before it thickens from the cold. It means they don't clot once cold and cut, so I get a nice uninterrupted meal or a slow drain for storage."

Emily hums with interest, considering asking about the taste of extracted and chilled blood as Silvia leads her to the next door over.

"The rest of these, unfortunately, hold cargo for sale, not consumption," the vampire says with a sneer of distaste as she taps a code into a screen, this time opening the door beside it for Emily to look inside herself.

Silvia remains before the screen, not bothering to glance into the cargo hold. She pins Emily with a watchful gaze instead as she steps up to the doorway to peer in. Her brow furrows immediately at the sight.

There are people, most humanoid and a few now-familiar large eels, sitting against the walls and lying across the floor with large metal collars wrapped around their necks. There are a few scattered trays between them holding half-eaten, flavourless nutrient blocks from the cafeteria's stores. Half of the prisoners turn to look at the intruders and the bright light flowing in through the open door, but most of them remain listless and unresponsive, staring at the walls.

Emily's attention is drawn to their collars, the same collars several crewmates suggested using on her and her family. They're made from a muted grey blend of metals Emily can't identify from afar and covered in small, glowing etchings of runes that emit trace amounts of both mana and qi. She also identifies a small bulge on the side of each collar as a battery unit, linked to what look like fine prongs protruding from the top and bottom edges of the restraints, pressed against the skin of their captives.

"What's with the collars?" Emily questions, turning her gaze to scan the restraining formation carved into the chamber's walls.

"They're slave collars," Silvia explains. "They bleed an awakened's main energy resource, so they can't fight back. Awakened-specific restraints like that are generally acceptable for use across the wider universe, but these models are illegal within the Federation and Alliance thanks to the resistance restriction and punishment features."

"Restriction and punishment?"

"They can shock prisoners on command, and they detonate if someone tries to remove them without the corresponding key. More importantly, they interfere with the prisoners' minds to put them in a state of despondence and discourage resistance. With enough time under the collars' influence, and a little personal tweaking from the slavers we sell them to, prisoners' minds can be perfectly bent towards obeying their new masters. Disgusting things."

Silvia's last comment is muttered under her breath, but Emily doesn't believe for a second she didn't mean for her to hear it.

"You don't approve?" she questions with a raised brow, glancing between the Vice-Captain of the ship and its hallway of cargo holds filled with unwilling prisoners.

"Do you?" Silvia fires back, her expression perfectly blank other than the subtle, curious light in her eyes.

Emily goes to scoff and respond immediately, but has to pause for a moment as she realises just how quickly the muted emotions at the back of her focus have switched from indifferent curiosity to abject disgust.

Why do I care about this so much when I've done far worse?

She looks into the pitiful cell and tries to picture the occupants slowly shrivelling away and dying in her ectolyte farm. She feels nothing.

She changes the image to fit her idea of a slave market instead, and sees a large reception chamber with a few sofas and faceless, robed men sitting on them waiting. The collared prisoners file into the room one-by-one, dropping to their knees and letting the faceless men thrust their hands into their heads before ordering them off deeper into their shadowy abode. Emily feels shivers run across her skin, and her eyes widen in genuine surprise as she recognises where her mind went instinctively.

The walls in her imagination gain extravagant detailing made from expensive metals as the bare space is filled with portraits of the dead Mandrago family.

Ah… Does that make me a hypocrite?

Her thoughts drift to Mensacus' wendigos, but she remembers the enslaved servants that were under their command. She also remembers watching the light leave their eyes long before Mensacus imbued them with a fragment of himself, and they became the twisted things that willingly feasted on their old allies' flesh.

"No," Emily finally responds aloud, turning her attention back to Silvia and watching the vampire's lips curl into a subdued smile. "I'm fine with killing those who've attacked you. I have no problem with torture or live consumption, and I'm no stranger to using those who've gone against me to test my creations or even make new ones. But, while my son may practice mental magic, I have a distinct distaste for the permanent removal of another's mental autonomy."

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"Beautifully said." Silvia nods in satisfaction, pressing the screen on the wall to close the cell's door before turning to leave the hallway of captives. "I couldn't have put my own heart into words better. Unfortunately, it's not something with which our Captain agrees…"

***

When the ship finally drops from lightspeed, it only takes a couple of hours for them to reach Xlanax. A notice rings out across the ship's speakers as they approach, and Emily leaves the workshop with Pod to head towards the bridge to get a look at their destination. She shoots Ivor and Mensacus a message as they wander through the ship, but her magical apprentice replies that he's busy mid-brew, and her son turns her down in favour of letting Silica play with some friends she's made.

Emily and Pod step into the bridge alone, their gazes immediately zeroing in on the wall of wide-open windows before them and the sprawling metal monster floating in the dark vacuum of space beyond. Emily's eyes roam the seemingly smooth, twisting spires of metal, nearly half the width of Ulea, woven together to create a slowly spinning helical knot. She picks out hundreds, thousands, of small bumps and ridges that look like imperfections, but upon narrowing her eyes and zooming in further, she makes out the faint forms of what look like gun barrels and rocket launch ports, along with several gaps admitting ships between the connected megastructures.

The self-sustaining space station is surrounded by a sea of clustered asteroids so dense it manages to obscure parts of the structure despite how close they already are, but none of them drift close enough to make contact, orbiting Xlanax at a safe distance and leaving an empty bubble of space around it. Emily spots a few ships docked on the surrounding asteroids as they pass, some in clear view of the station and others hidden, and notices several screens around the pilots popping up with zoomed-in images of the stragglers.

"What are you doing?" she asks Wilder, leaning over the back of his command chair and scanning through the data on his displays, seeing a few reports of direct messages being sent to some of the ships he's scanning.

"Searching for vultures," Wilder responds, glancing up and flashing her a savage grin. "The Mothership's a large, cargo-carrying vessel; perfect target for ratch with more guts than sense."

Emily's brow furrows at the foreign word that sparks a faint sense of familiarity, and she quickly scans through her recently added banks of data for a reference. Eoblattodea rathforns, common name, ratch: a breed of fast reproducing, highly invasive, hardy insectoids that can survive in the worst conditions, including the vacuum of space.

"Are attacks this close to the station common?" she asks, noticing Wilder pausing on a ship's scan before he marks it and sends another message out to a few of the ships on asteroids behind them.

"Aye. Since we're not inside Guild space yet. Only the station itself is considered in any way protected. You'll still see small scuffles and arguments inside, especially if you're carrying a hefty bounty, but you'll find bloodbaths out here if you're not careful."

"Is that why you're contacting others for help?"

"Aye, though it's less asking for help and more handing out orders. These are all our ships," he says, gesturing to the slowly growing list of contacts in range that he's sending encoded requests to. "Waiting to hunt the ratch. The rest of our crew will be on Xlanax already, with a landing bay prepared. They'll come out to meet us once we enter the station's orbital barrier, but for now, let's enjoy the show."

Emily watches Wilder pull up tens of video feeds focused on The Mothership's wake, some fixed to the ship itself and some drifting away on small, unmanned recon vessels. They show dozens of small and medium-sized ships detaching from asteroids, firing up their engines and pointing themselves towards the cameras.

A few of the trailing ships have similar colourings to The Mothership, with black, grey, and silver covering their bodywork, but most don't. Lights spark as all of the ships bearing the crew's colours, and many more that don't, prime their weapons at once, plasma gathering in some barrels while sparks flicker around others. The shooting starts without a clear signal, beams of light suddenly leaping from ship to ship as thin energy barriers flicker into sight to block them.

Several beams of charged plasma shoot towards their camera feeds, but only one of the scouting vessels blinks out of contact, and everything else is blocked by The Mothership's thick blue shield, without even the faintest shudder reaching them in the bridge.

Emily watches with rapt attention as the ships foolish enough to attack them take fire from behind. Their shields hold for a few seconds, but the first falls after sustained fire from three uninterrupted beams of plasma. The beams slice across the ship's armour plating, melting deep furrows into its shell, but they flicker out before cutting too deep. In their place comes a hail of kinetic rounds that punch through the armour like a knife through butter, filling the ship with holes and hitting something important quickly, causing the ship to erupt into a silent ball of fire and shrapnel.

The other vultures meet the same fate, their shields dropping one by one as they're outgunned. When the last ball of fire directly in their wake fades, leaving a growing field of scrap in its place, Emily gets a clear view of their protectors and notes that sixty per cent of them bear no obvious resemblance to The Mothership or the other small craft flying with them.

The protectors quickly turn their guns towards the surrounding asteroids, and Emily watches several of them open fire on a few of the ships still docked, including the one she watched Wilder mark earlier.

"What made them targets?" she asks, nodding towards the docked ships failing to successfully fight back. "They didn't look like they were moving to attack us."

"Some were priming weapon systems as we passed, and some were in contact with those that primed engines to follow," Wilder explains, pulling up a few of his scans and flashing her the data. "And a few of them I just recognised from last time we swung by. They may not have attacked us, but no one who hangs around Xlanax's asteroid field for that long will be missed, and the fewer people that know we're coming from Federation space, the better."

The silent explosions behind them finally peter out, and their pursuers catch up not long after, falling into guard positions around them. Emily counts just over sixty ships in their swarm, and her eyes don't stop moving as she takes in their assorted weapons and forms, her fingers twitching as the desire to get proper scans and blueprints rises.

They reach the asteroid-less void around the station without further issues, and Emily can feel when they enter the orbital barrier through her spatial senses, detecting a distinct pull towards the centre of the station's twisted structure. She tries to find the source, but it's hidden somewhere within the station's thick metal spires. Her attention is quickly drawn away by Wilder scanning through a message from one of their escorts and changing The Mothership's course.

They angle down towards one of the points of the station, just above where the twisting spires meet. There are several open slots in the station's plating, and ten ships bearing the crew's colours float out through one to meet them. Wilder follows their lead, approaching the station without hesitation, even as the closest weapons poking from its surface turn to follow their path.

The closer they get, the larger the 'small' gaps in the station become until it's clear even The Mothership will fit inside with room to spare.

Wilder receives a communication request from the station itself once they're a few hundred metres off their destination. He accepts it before rattling off a series of confirmation codes and a pre-booked docking report that they accept without fanfare, cutting the call the second the ship is cleared to enter.

The ship slides into the port, passing through a thin, barely visible film of energy and entering an open chamber already housing just over twenty ships fixed to a single surface. Wilder lines up the bottom of The Mothership with the rest of the ships and touches down, locking the landing gears into place and sending out a ship-wide alert to inform the crew that they've arrived.

"Shields dropping, decompression in progress," the pilot mutters under his breath before shedding his neural link and turning to face Emily with a wild grin. "Welcome to Xlanax: trading post, and overall shithole in the middle of nowhere. Care to explore?"