Private Crossing the Gap

[Tathra Khaeus]

Tag: TchKren’Anook

Beyond the Edge of Known Galaxy

The bryn'adul in their unending conquest had prepared for thousands of eventualities, including extra-galactic invasion. In his search for his homeworld, and in defence of the hidden fleet at Kardan, the Titan had faced or observed many extra-galactic threats. None more intriguing and potentially dangerous than the inhabitants of the Xaelesh systems. They had detected an astronomical object of immense size nearly forty years ago. Getting any real scans was impossible, magnetic pulses surrounded the object like a minefield. But even then, it was obvious from their primitive scans that something was changing.

Ramping up. Preparing.

He wanted to know what it was. If it could be used, weaponised.

The Draelvasier needed every advantage possible.

Tathra settled into the hammock, the only thing left of home. Draemidus Prime. So far away. The Xraeldrask cloth was a comfort in this cold, metal cage. No Ra'mak beast growling to match the hum of the engine, just electronic blips to keep him company. The old Drael shifted, eyeing the vial of Torrium on the desk opposite him. Tempting. He could sleep through the analysis. He turned away with a growl, staring deep into the nothing of the metal wall adjacent.

Osam. Galak. Drek'ma. Hrajlmak.

They stared back. Not that he could see, but he felt the gaze over his shoulder. The old Drael stirred, rising to his feet with thundering, uneven steps. Then, finally - something.

The radar blipped.

 

[TchKren’Anook]

Raiding at the far reaches of the known galaxy had its advantages. First and foremost, the risk of running into meddlesome governing bodies was much lower. Far fewer sentients traveled the starry badlands at the edges of mapped territory but those that did were usually interesting. The other benefit TchKren'Anook saw in raiding along these outskirts was to immediately start putting his ambitions into action.

Since the final slumber of his father, the loss of former Elder of their tribe and Kren's recent ascent to power, he had been angling for ways to enact his long-held vision of growth and prosperity for his people. The Neti flotilla was in need of new vessels to grow into and in truth a new home territory to call their own. Nomadic life amongst the stars suited them all well enough but there was something invaluable and spiritually significant about the thought of having a place to finally root down. Kren sought a better life for his people, so he would explore, raid, and even go to war for them.

For the present moment though he was focused on the former objectives and his lieutenant, a formidable shield-maiden, had just alerted him with the whereabouts of a promising vessel to raid.

"Give us a burst of engines in the right direction, then shut down all but essential life support systems, we approach slowly and silently."

The man himself had been meditating at the helm while his crew worked around him, soaking up the rays of full spectrum light their ships were always equipped with. His body shifted and coalesced into a more battle ready form, beskar breastplate moving into place while he hefted his weapons. His lieutenant didn't waste time with words, she acknowledging his orders with a sharp 'click' like two branches hitting together and turned to make Kren's will a reality. Soon they would make to collide with the enemy ship and seek to board.

Tathra Khaeus​

 

[Tathra Khaeus]

Tag: TchKren’Anook

Boarding craft.

Multiple.

The Titan's hand rose from the central controls Mind Stone, securing a neural link between his own and it to keep a constant eye on the sensor feedback loop. There was no point trying to fight off the incoming crafts with the ship's offensive weapons. There was slim chance they would not notice them powering up.

The Titan strode into the middle of an isolated platform, a multi-axis assembly system surrounding him. Massive ton-weight plates of metal moving on mechanic arms. The ablative pauldrons, and breastplate locked into hydraulic clamps on his undersuit. Tathra raised his gauntlet as it magnetically sealed against his flesh.

The portside sensors were not malfunctioning. Indeed multiple crafts, half-hazard designs the Drael did not recognise, moved closer to the lone research station. Draelvasier ships did not typically have boarding hatches by design. Most of their fleets had always been some configuration of landing or assault craft. Though a ship like this was more of a station. Designed for long-term assignments. It had refuel links and hatches in abundance. Though it was obvious his impending attackers weren't aware of the happen-chance of their find. Otherwise, they would know nothing of value was to be found aboard a mostly stripped-down, long-range research outpost designed by Draelvasier and Ungulloi engineers.

Unless of course. They had come for him. A few dozen intruders wouldn't be an issue. The only real threat was to the equipment.

One of the craft had made contact.

The armour rig was connecting calv and knee-points when everything in Tathra's immediate vision was filled with hot white.

The sensors screamed, blazing.

A sudden and powerful gravitational pull exploded out from the centre of his ship. A physics-breaking orange sphere of plasma he could only glimpse for a moment as his eyes bled in their sockets. Everything was pulled toward it, boarding crafts too. Compressed and thrown back with equal force.

A crumpled series of wreckages stretched across a black surface, floating in the depths of space.

 

[TchKren’Anook]

The tribal flotilla had been left behind, with star coordinates logged into the minds of each helmsman of each raiding vessel TchKren'Anook now led into skirmish. When home was ever on the move, it was critical for each of their teams to be able to manage independently should they be separated. He left those thoughts behind to favor the present moment however.

Readying for combat, securing what armor and vac-suits they had, though the latter was less common than the former for the shapeshifting botanicals to posses.

Their approach.​

Seeking to board.​

Then the world shook and seemed to rip asunder. His crew were doubtless just as alarmed as he was by the sudden storm but he knew they'd weather it. They had to. His confidence propelled him onward until suddenly gravity was all wrong and his vision stretched into the endless for a few mind bending moments. The next thing he recalled was creaking, splintering pain, and pain meant you were still alive.

Blinking

Blurred vision, distorted sound.​

TchKren'Anook gripped his spear and slowly righted himself, taking in his surroundings as he rose into a battle ready crouch.

Tathra Khaeus​

 

[Tathra Khaeus]

Tag: TchKren’Anook

The traversal through the portal was catastrophic. It collapsed just as they made it through. Now the raiding ships and Bryn'adul station were strewn across a completely foreign obelisk. Wayward deeper into space than most had ever travelled.

Complex terraces of cold-rolled metal alloy stretched across the astronomical object. Pathways, bridges and crumbling intersections were marked by signs of use. Hallmarks of civilization. Spires drooped and monoliths staggered long since last attended to. Sections of substructure filled the in-closed orbit of the shed scape of manufactured land. New carnage filled the empty space in the fragment. The first life to touch the old metal in quite some time. The collection of raiding ships and the Bryn'adul station had been flattened and pulled into black. Spat back out across the floating piece of black land. The fires rising from the wreckage, the only source of light on the fracture.

It was by the graces of blind luck that anything resembling a ship had made its way to the surface. Survivors were even less likely. The Bryn'adul station had been torn through itself.

It's interior, twisted and scattered like shrapnel among the debris of the raiding ships. The sheer resilience and tenacity of Tathra Khaeus had kept him alive. The Titan woke to the sound of dripping. Jolting to life, body aching still from the portals compression. Instinct drove him to rise. But there was nothing underfoot, his chest and right arm were wedged between the hull of something by a column that had come loose from a the structure they'd collided with. He could not see it nor himself. But Tathra's enhanced senses could smell the foreign meThe light from the portal had overloaded his retinas, the rays oxidized the tissue of his eyes, burning them into a black liquid now dried around swollen-shut sockets.

The Titan shook with a roar that only audibly came as a wheeze. One set of lungs was flooding with blood, the other bruised and fighting against the acidic vomit he was forcing back down. He exerted all his will to try and raise a dislocated left arm. Nothing. No defiant roar, no strength to pry himself free.

Calm yourself.

Survival was the prevailing notion. Over a century of discipline under fire was finally coming to him. His thriving stopped, spitting out bile and blood.

"Pah."

What now.

 

[TchKren’Anook]

It would seem that his ancestors watched over him closely that day and despite the catastrophic anomaly which rendered half a dozen ships scattered across a long forgotten alien industrial landscape, the Neti leader made it through the ordeal generally unscathed. By the grace of happenstance TchKren'Anook was flung from the helm of his ship, disoriented, but ultimately landed safely amid wreckage. He suffered only a splintered side from impact and narrowly escaped impalement on some twisted structural support bars, so all in all counted himself lucky.

The stance he gingerly rose up into favored his splintered side, spear hefted in his other hand without trouble. Kren's many limbed form lending itself to true ambidexterity. His vac-suit's haptic feedback buzzed along his side to belatedly notify him of damage there. A notification also popped up in his suit visor to inform him as he scanned his surroundings, that though extreme, were just barely within acceptable limits for his particular biology. The hardiness of his species lent itself to survival in even the bleakest of environs but this, wherever this was, seemed far outside the scope of even something the practiced traveler had seen.

A sound.

He removed the helmet of his vac-suit with a hiss, long vining locs of hair unfurling as he did, tucking the visor away beneath their mass.

He could smell… iron.

Blood.

Stalking surreptitiously forward, he made his way 'round rubble, familiar and foreign alike. A movement, another sound, the telltale frustration of a trapped creature.

No, more than a creature.

Kren turned a corner and found a fellow warrior, laid low by happenstance which had spared him such a fate in turn. His chest was pinned and it seemed by sheer tenacity alone he yet breathed. For his part, Tathra Khaeus might hear the crunch of rubble underfoot, a pause, then more movement as the Neti stalked near. A brusk clicking sound, like two branches struck together, then a low baritone which rumbled in basic.

"Do you know of this place, warrior?"

Though his voice was calm and he was cautiously open to a diplomatic path forward, assuming the man could survive his wounds, Kren stood over the stranger with his spear held ready for a coup de grâce.

 

[Tathra Khaeus]

Tag: TchKren’Anook

A distant breeze took the behemoth's attention. A breeze on a planet with no wind, no foliage rustling. No something else, drawing closer. It was light footed, cautious. But he could hear it, smell it. Something foreign, living. The planet, whatever they had crashed into - it stank of death, dereliction. Nothing had lived nor breathed here in a long time. Whatever was stalking the shipwreck was either responsible for the portal, or a surviving raider. Either way, a foe. Something in his way.

Just like the column pressed into his ribcage. He grit his inner teeth, mandibles wound shut in silence. The mutagens affixed to his genetic code had already begun to repair what remained of his eye-tissue. But it would be doubtless days before he had use of them again, or half of his organs.

The footfalls of the anonymous observer changed, the material underneath switching from the foreign landscape to the malabast-alloy hull and then... stopped. Tathra resisted the urge to pry himself free once again, with one arm trapped and no leverage - there was little chance of success. All he could now was wait, though if whatever was watching him drew close. He was determined to make it hurt.

Clicking. Vibrations. A large being, the sounds of flora, but close. Moving. Certainly not human. In that, the Drael was thankful. When it spoke, posing a question? One of the raiders no doubt. As lost as he.

"No, Raider." The distaste was scolding, a stringent voice that filled the shipwreck strained to contain itself. The edge of his words filled with a pained growl so low it was more felt than heard, vibrating through metal and bark and flesh. A pained beasts instinct.

 

[TchKren’Anook]

TchKren'Anook took a moment to glance around their bleak environ, unsure what his wisest course of action would be. Gazing back down at the battered creature pinned beneath rubble, he thought it safe to close his eyes a moment and seek inward for answers. To his dismay, the grovemind was distant, his connection strained and weaker than he'd ever felt it even when he'd traveled across the galaxy and left that ancestral anchor somewhere far safer. But now? He could barely sense the songs of his people, and to say that dismayed him was an understatement.

For his part, Tathra Khaeus heard not but the rustle of vines and then stillness. Even if the use of his eyes remained to him, it was doubtful he'd pick up on the Neti warleader's inner thoughts. Stoicism was just as important in crisis as the tools at your disposal and skills built over the years.

"You have the will to fight, even with wounds that appear they'd be mortal on any other."

The baritone voice observed coolly, not yet closing the last bit of distance between them since caution warned that the severed head of a serpent still bites. Kren thought to sate his curiosity while he considered his next steps, prying with a question on the heels of brusk introduction.

"What brought you here and how numerous were your forces?"

 

[Tathra Khaeus]

Tathra huffed through his mangled jaw, the restorative mutagen had been pushed beyond an overdrive compensating for his present injuries. To be questioned by some child of oak and bark made him wish to risk another, but perhaps his large quarry was the only thing that'd pry him free. In a healthy he could've pushed the hull from his chest or shattered the black column at his back with a fist. But in this state, the feat was not possible before something gave way and the wreckage breached his armoured ribcage.

His lower right mandible snapped back into place like a dislocated joint, causing the Titan to wince as it reflexed and stretched the taut muscles beneath the carapace of his face. Even with only one partly good eye, he could see that speech would be necessary. In this state, his mind was all he had to keep him alive.

At the very least he could glean information from the line of questioning. It confirmed that the Neti was not responsible for his current state and that it knew nothing of the Draelvasier, nor their Empire. The Neti had never been a species he studied in detail, they were nomadic and weak militarily. Spread out and passive. Not raiders, not warriors and yet here was a pirate a long way from home.

"What makes a Neti turn pirate?" Defiant and egotistical even in this state, Tathra answered question with question.

TchKren’Anook ​