Private The Ring Unchained

[Kasmion Duum]

RING OF THE RAPTURE
TINGEL ARM​

The hundred minds in this viewing gallery united in rapt attention, and Kasmion couldn't blame them in the slightest. There were tourists like himself, but also Followers of the Rapture, the cult who'd seen this station's sights a hundred times. He got the distinct feeling that this never got old.

The black hole itself was a profound vista. Its asymmetric accretion disc blazed, jetted, splashed through the ring's ancient rad shielding and washed over the bulk transparisteel of the galleries. And this was the Ring at a normal moment, an intermission.

A gong rang through the vast structure's corridors. All the nearby minds' attention sharpened. The deck hummed under Kasmion's feet.

The Ring of the Rapture had the unique property of being able to leap to hyperspace in a rotational way. It remained centered around the black hole's mass shadow, but whirled faster than light. The Ring jumped: the starscape became the rippling blue-white of hyperspace - brighter than Kasmion had ever seen it - dominated by a rippling inverse view of the black hole, a burning hollow. Viewing hyperspace could have serious mental impacts, so-called hyperspace madness encompassing a wide variety of symptoms and states of mind. Many of the Followers of the Rapture found it ecstatic, transcendent, psychedelic.

Kasmion felt no such impact himself, not after half a lifetime bouncing around the bitter corners of the universe in small old vessels, but he hadn't come here for a high. He'd come here for a test.

Intense emotional states, irrationalities, and sensory experience radiated from most or all of the hundred people here, cultists and tourists alike. Kasmion placed his focus on his telepathic senses, maximizing his sensitivity, and let the torrent of chaos hammer at him from every side. It was exactly what he'd hoped for: a brutal experience that could push him past his limits unless he succumbed. Unless the blazing lighthouse of his mind broke under the waves and the wrath of the storm.

For reasons of basic prudence, he'd come with a pair of bodyguard droids. His first inclination that something was wrong was a droid smashing against him. His focus snapped, and the roaring telepathic torrent gripped him mercilessly, dragged him along past self and sapience. It was tainted now with fear, pain, and anger too. Irrationality spiked.

No, he said to himself, and his own voice was an anchor. A foundation. No, I refuse.

The shrieking thoughts of the crowd grew louder, but he reclaimed his rationality and sense of physical self, and opened his eyes.

---

One of his bodyguard droids was down with a smoldering hole through its head. The other was part of a firefight between, so far as Kasmion could tell, groups of cultists. Some of the viewers were scattering; others stared at the unique hyperspace vista overhead, even when struck. A battlecry rose from one corner: something about truth and reversal.

That was a puzzle piece. He snatched up others as he stalked toward an exit, covered by his remaining droid. Two names, entirely new to him, were uppermost in many minds: the Sons of the Chiliad Serpent and the Inverse Path. Two factions, he guessed, of the Followers of the Rapture. The aggressors, the Inverse Path, felt disgust and wrongness when they looked up at the whirling view of hyperspace. The Sons of the Chiliad Serpent, the defenders and perhaps the more numerous faction, felt a lurching terror as though hanging over a cliff.

Kasmion paused just through a door and got a better hold on his sense of self. He withdrew his awareness, even muffled it, to think things through more rationally in this dark hall. His droid afforded him that opportunity by holding off a pair of Inverse Path gunmen in a last stand sort of way.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

Ring of the Rapture
The Tingel Arm
N O W

The destination came bought from the lips of a Dahomeyan witch-thing, a half-bird half-crocodile antediluvian that was blind save for the sixth eye nestled in a diamond of keratin scales on its brow.

It came from a Skakoan mystic Cato needed to virtually bribe, in the form of an ugly assassination that left his soul cold, dirtied, and ailing.

It came in the form of pseudo-bas reliefs left chiselled within a guarded water-grotto on Tatooine. A holy place for Tusken visionaries that contained inked slate-stone books, bantha-skin tapestries, and a crude star observatory of inter-linked crystal mirrors etched with ancestral constellations.

Grimy whispers from inside the shells of partially destroyed Sith holocrons tried to boast of forgotten pilgrimages to Rapture. Only incredible violence and the threat of further incredible violence pried further secrets from the Massassi ghosts.

It came from a young boy born without pupils or iris, who was said to see creation in strange shades of grey and inky darkness. He pointed Cato towards a patch in the afternoon sky, sunny and cloudless, a 'big, bright clot with a scratchy belt' that sometimes peeked back at him. What the child meant by 'peeking back', he didn't press.

A whisper was added to the growing potluck of hyperspace vagaries and forbidden deep space coordinates from an aged kyber prospector. She herself was uncertain whether or not 'the Rapture' truly existed but knew that once a spacer took the jump past Weken and began gliding on sublight toward the galactic edge, real-space anomalies would crop up with increased regularity, turn entire regional bands into invisible hedge-mazes that required careful navigation lest one steered haphazardly into an unseen gravitic ball.

But true to every parcel hint, prophecy, inkling, and mad gibbering that Cato put up with, the Ring of Rapture waited for him where they said. Secreted behind anomalous fields where the edges of known Wild Space frayed. A vast, omnipresent construction wrapped perilously 'round the accretion-bulge of a silent black hole, the only celestial architecture that managed to dwarf the dimensions of the Ring itself. There was heat. And light. And nebulae of washing beta particles that splashed like tidal spray against the Ring's upraised shield-walls, coating its hulling with ultra-brilliant blue casting. Aboard his diminutive gunboat, Cato could only stare.

Then he toed the starboard yaw-pedal at his feet, canted forward an acceleration lever at the control box to his right, and steered his little gunboat towards an open hangar bay.

-

The hangar interior was dim, vaulted, and the air sepulchral. For a good while, Cato remained seated behind his gunboat's forward cockpit viewport. Through even onboard oxygen scrubbers and hermetic life-support seals, he imagined he could still catch a taste of aeon grave-rot on his tongue. The search-lamps mounted beneath the gunboat's forward nose failed to penetrate the local gloom for more than ten meters. What he could see were metallic bundles of heavy, sheathed cabling pushing up through the deck grilling before arching back into the floor, like the coils of inert serpents. Applied columns of brutalist steel rose up along the walls, paired with recessed arcades that either masked or advertised the complex mechanics at work beneath the bulkheads and seamed walling. Occasionally, something distantly would spark and light up sections of stripped rubble and scrap. There was a constant machine thrum that gently vibrated up through the gunboat's landing claws and rumbled the bottom of Cato's lap.

"Rapture..." He muttered. His fingers slipped beneath his helmet's chin plate, rubbed his eyelids, pulled at the whisker-scruff of his cheeks and jaw. Why are you here, utreekov? What are you looking for? You think answers wait in some lightspeed dream? You don't even know what questions to ask. Cultural memories of Mandalore's Past, leaving to seek out visions of their own, sprang unbidden into the midst of his thoughts. Cato stared hard at the T-visor reflection glaring back from the cockpit canopy. Why are you here?

"I don't know..." Cato answered and unbuckled his crash-webbing, rising.

-

Field kit was simple; a duraplast set of beskar'gam with personal, Asahian flourishes that gave his armour an older medieval flair, paired swords, long and short, anchored securely over his waist with scabbards roped to his belt, an auto-carbine retooled to fit aftermarket attachments, with an accompanying host of scratched bakelite magazines, a slug-thrower pistol further modified to accept heavy cartridges, a fore-arm sheathed tanto knife, and a collection of throwing blades. Light assemblage. Cato fought with his reflection in his helmet's visor 'fore anchoring a rebreather mask over his mouth and nostrils, pulling the helmet down over his brow and chin. An oxygen hose ran over his shoulder to a small tank hidden behind a pauldron-cape.

The gunboat's disembarking ramp tongued down from the ship's belly and disgorged Cato onto the decking. The grilling bounced slightly under his weight. Air-pressure was a curious tug on his frame, as if too humid, though his breath exhaled in short fog-bursts. Condensate immediately beaded and pooled along his gauntlets. When he gave one arm a shake, the moisture popped free... just to spin and snap upward toward the unlit hangar ceiling, as if sucked up by an unseen vacuum. He clicked his fingers experimentally; an echo replied a moment later from the wrong direction, much louder, and filled his temples with unwelcome tension. Jaw now set, he strode towards the hangar's exit doors, pulling his carbine free, snapping the safety to semi-auto.

Cato eased into the passageway, carbine raised and steadied. Light issued from filmy globes cribbed in thin metal sconces hollowed within the bulkheads. Architecture combined brutalism with biomechanical gothicism, rude angles, anthropomorphic touches suggesting androgynous silhouettes. He noted odd 'stretching' in the illumination; paths that twisted and warped where the light and shadow intersected. The Ring of the Rapture felt like an omnistructure built for strange purposes by strange forces that certainly did not have his kind or any other intelligence in mind when the first C-beams had been laid down in the void.

Sounds trickled down from somewhere overhead. According to a few base notes and some rumour, any wishing for the Rapture of pure, unadulterated vision or reveal were to make their way to any of the cyclopean viewing galleries looking inward towards the accretion lights and the anchored black hole beyond. Cato felt he was already late. Something akin to coriolis force was performing faint knots in his stomach, making the ends of his fingers and toes buzz with 'alarm'. Maybe, he thought, whatever was supposed to occur was underway. He adjusted his grasp on his carbine foregrip and began striding up sideways along a stairwell leading upwards to another deck.

The sound rose. Like a ringing coming down the length of a hollow aluminum pipe, just bassier, steady with rhythm. Cato blinked behind his mask when he realized it was vocalizations. He paused on a stairwell landing and knocked his ear closer to a set of smooth tubes bracketed to the wall. That the tubes resembled strips of intestinal tract, he tried to ignore. The vocals were chesty, heavily modal, with stiff multi-pitches that carried weight from the diaphragm. It was chanting, not in a single language, Cato realized, but in several but kept in timed just so that syllabic pauses coincided and the pitches and tones harmonized. Like Noghri battle-cant, he thought, but less efficient. More ritual. Cato stepped along to continue when the hum of sound suddenly broke.

Rising and accusatory voices began to bark down at him through the dark. Astounded but equally vociferous replies followed swiftly. Then a chattering noise, like frozen peas against sheet metal. Followed up with a shrill boom Cato knew only blaster-weapons produced when firing off plasma bolts. Now screams were beginning to issue. Cato drew his tanto knife free and held it akimbo with his carbine, rapidly marching up the stairwell. Already, his breathing was shifting to a certain rhythm, eyes wide behind his helm but with pupils relaxed. Lips were peeled back slightly in a rictus snarl, canines wet and bright. Thought slipped out of his headspace, replaced by that combat emptiness. Mind of No Mind.

Kasmion Duum

 

[Kasmion Duum]

Rhythmic chanting lurked behind the blasterfire. To Kasmion's poetical ear, the chant resolved into two conflicting patterns subtly offset by tempo and tone. Not point-counterpoint, but a contest. Not just songs, but rituals, and each resonated with the flickering of hyperlight. When Kasmion's last droid fell, it blocked the door open to the viewing gallery. The Ring still whirled; the black hole's hyperspatial aspect still dominated the panorama. Bodies cast stark jittering shadows.

Kasmion stretched out and winced at the pain and the distant madness. Few minds around here were anything close to alive. The violence had swept on down the Ring. Kasmion couldn't say whether that meant the Sons of the Chiliad Serpent fought a rearguard defense against an Inverse Path purge, or the Inverse Path heretics were being repelled and suppressed. The megastructure offered innumerable bolt-holes and side passages. Knowledgeable and driven locals could fight here for years and never be fully eradicated one way or the other.

The cultist who'd guided him to the gallery was dead in a particularly nasty way. Kasmion took the man's blaster to supplement his own small weapon and personal shield. The gallery stank of burnt meat and burnt sewage: the scent of a massacre by blasterfire. He lingered, though, because this place was relatively safe compared to anywhere else he might go. He took a moment to enhance his short-term memory, even at the cost of remembering the butchery he'd barely avoided. He pushed through those memories and back farther by half an hour to an hour, for a clearer sense of the route between here and his ship.

He'd seen other visitors come from other passages along the way, presumably leading to various docking bays, some of which were probably closer than his own ship. There was no guarantee any given bay would be accessible. The route had seemed like a central trunk line, well-trodden and interlaced with transit rails. Repulsorlifts didn't work well here. There'd been railed carts for both supply and personnel transit purposes. In hindsight, those had taken a key.

Hiking up the edge of his robe away from the mess, he searched each dead visitor methodically. Datapads and ship security fobs were top priority; he wasn't lucky enough to find a beckon call. He searched the cultists only until he found a transit rail key. When he found someone not quite dead and suffering, a wave of his hand put them to sleep, to die in the closest thing to peace he could bestow. There were several. It was a second massacre of sorts, and though Kasmion had lived through situations like this before, it weighed on him. They'd been so joyful only minutes back. At least some had died seeing transcendence.

Cato Fett

 

[Cato Fett]

Combat came.

Cato did not wish for it nor did he seek it, but it came and found him regardless. In a length of hallway bracketed by ribbed, pistoning machinery, he strode gently forward. Thin light weeped over the narrow armour-cowling above his central visor-bar, from swinging lamplights anchored to the ceiling by lengths of knotted chains. Whatever hyperdrive engines generating power to locomote the Ring round and round the black hole singularity were taxing its on-board coolant systems. Thick, gelatinous condensate dripped and flew off nearby vibrating surfaces, coating and wetting the armour-cloth beneath Cato's armour. He wiped lines of running rivulets off his helmet face-plate, concentrating as he walked to keep his muscles uncoiled and his senses sharpened. The grille-decking shook under his boot soles.

Suddenly, ahead in the gloom, outlines of shape and shadow marched down the hallway toward him. Cato paused and went immediately to a kneel, pushing his shoulder into his carbine's buttstock. "Halt!"

The shadows didn't conversate back. They threw their forms up against the sides of the passage and replied with blaster fire. Hot light bolted over him. Stray shots clipped the edging of his helmet, his shoulder-spaulders. Cato hinged his carbine left and pulled along its sights to the right, depressing the trigger thrice in millisecond succession. The first shadow rocked back and slid down the walling in an ungainly pile. The second shuddered on their feet, pawed at their sternum, before falling forward over their waist onto the decking. The third shadow managed a short cry before their voice cut off, the sound replaced with the sharp punch of splintering bone. Cato leapt out of his crouch, carbine still raised, now marching swiftly as he hunted for further targets along the passageway's length.

-

Past a cross-junction, the passageway opened into a sort of maintenance 'grotto', leading on into a cramped closet/vestibule littered with the detritus of a ragged firefight. Two opposing squadrons had met and brawled in the tight space. Cato looked up from his carbine sights, following chaotic lines of sporadic carbon scoring dented into the bulkheads and ceiling. Half a dozen bodies laid in an ungainly knot on the decking, some partially disintegrated from sustained close-quarters blaster fire, others dead from blunt force and arterial cuts made haphazardly to their throats and unprotected bellies. Cato crouched down and pulled one body over by its shoulder.

"Spast..." He whispered. It'd been a boy, large at the chest with a long face that had characteristic Spacer-sallowness, with gaunt cheeks, a pale nose and brow, large lips that looked almost out of place, framed by matted trestles of blood-washed hair. The boy's eyes were still open; glassy in death but still bright with an inner coal ember of 'hyper-light.' The body still clutched its rudimentary E-12 rifle, dressed in combination spacer haz-suit, jacket, and woollen overcoat. Memory fractals of adolescent's like him, dead or bleeding out in Keldabe and Sundari back alley's, suddenly injected into Cato's thoughts. He blinked, drove the memories aside into a condensed packet, reasserted combat 'emptiness'. He touched the boy's eyelids, closed them, rose and pressed on through the vestibule.

-

-Theme-

Another section of lengthy hallways snaked up to a cloistered hatchway, framed by cabled archivolts arranged like a spreading fan above its hermetic jamb. Cato keyed on a lamp attached to his carbine's picatinny railings and swept its light-cone across the darkly plated mouldings and lines. Again, that tinge of gothicism married to off-putting biomechanical flourishes, where the archivolt bands didn't 'end' so much as ripple and smooth into the bulkheads like brackish liquid. Cato thought he could hear a roar from beyond the hatchway. He eased forward, up a small stair landing, touched his hand to the edge of the hatch and refocused his senses.

The Force carried his intuition through the layers of ancient wall plating and churning apparatus. Into... a wide space. He scrunched his eyebrows, mouth set, plying at his enhanced mind's-eye. A wide space, tall walls, a barred and vaulted ceiling. Something like a feeling of profound emptiness within. Contemplative. Akin to the glass of a still lake, where reality and reflection met and became indistinguishable the longer one looked in. A feeling of... mirrored eternity? Belly shuddering, Cato reeled himself back into his bodily frame. Force-sense required more practice; consciously expanding that intuitive feeling of danger-versus-safety, that he'd previously taken for a manifestation of Haragei, was so unsettling. Keeping his tanto gripped, he shouldered the carbine aside and drew out his pistol, working the hatchway wheel-lock open.

The door swung out, squealing on dry bolt-hinges. Cato entered, knife and pistol held up close in a close-quarters grasp, swiftly sectioning the grand chamber off slice-by-slice with curt visual inspections. The second sweep about the gallery confirmed a current lack of hostiles. What remained were the dead, left in unceremonious piles, dressed in varying degrees of finery and posed in slowly stiffening lakes of sticky blood and death-bile. Some, Cato noted, had come to the Rapture Ring armed. Some not. Most were executed in a shock gunfight that left little time for reaction, torn, shredded, disembowelled in howls of slug and blaster fire. Errant trace-lines of carbon and bullet damage dotted and stitched over the bulkheads, up into naked rafters cloaked with fogs of spent gunpowder, cordite, and plasma-gas. The deep, roiling silence that left a ring in his ears felt strangely tainted, like the quiet had been bought with horrendous sacrifice. A soiled hush. His gaze looked over the long, long gallery space, dominated by the stretched, unbroken viewport fixed with scuffed transparisteel.

Now, finally, Cato turned to address the great whorls of light that had first caught his attention upon entering. The viewport rose tall, cyclopean in its inhuman immensity, sunken into finely welded jambs and aprons of overlapping metals. It was a window onto the singurality fit only for hoards in their thousands or for a few wandering Cthonic titans to pause and take a gander. True to the Coriolis force he could feel tugging at his equilibrium, the Rapture Ring had launched to Lightspeed and was currently hurtling in an anchored hyper-spin around the accretion ring of the black hole. He looked out into unfettered, unfiltered Hyperspace.

Into... nothingness. Transcendence of vision eluded him. Cato glared, pulling his helmet free, stalking up to the transparisteel and thudding a fist against the viewing port. What replied was only the quieting hum of pleasant lightspeed. Like inks spilled into water, thin clouds of cloud white, turquoise, and grey spiralled and flowed in and out of close focus. It had an almost disarming affect, inducing a hypnotic calm the longer one peered into the unpredictable patterns. He looked about, wondering if there was some ritual trick to get the more profound parts of his mind to open up. But nothing. Only speed, colours, and gentling silence. Cato couldn't tell if only the worthy or the mad got the privilege of vision, or if his journey had led him by the nose along the wrong paths. There was no revelation. Nor any ghosts that came striding out of hyperspace to either console or condemn him. Just the dark smudge of his reflection on the viewport, a haunted face looking out into infinity trying to parse together wisdom from dead ancients and voiceless phantoms. A weight began welling in his throat, that made his eyes tear. Heat seared up his spine. Anger. Anger, and sadness that refused to give him reprieve. He smashed his knuckles across his scratched reflection and turned away.

"Maybe you can go to hell too," Cato said aloud, bitterly, to no one. "Don't know what I was hoping for anyway..."

He pulled his helmet down back into place, holstering the pistol and retrieving his carbine. Bloodied prints on the floor's grav-plating led him out of the gallery toward a long processional hall steering toward the Ring's outer edge. Cato clicked a fresh magazine into place under his rifle and pulled at the charging handle, slipping into a slightly hunched stance, leading with his carbine barrel.

"I'm turning this fucking thing off..."

Kasmion Duum

 

[Kasmion Duum]

A dozen access fobs and security keys jangled stealthlessly in Kasmion's robes. He took his time to minimize noise, leaning on his cane, blaster in hand. Step, step-tap. Step, step-tap. His best defense was his feeling of the minds around: their alertness, their direction. The simplest thing was to detour and sidestep and otherwise avoid.

Three broad currents rushed through Kasmion's mind: the overarching patterns of motive particular to those who wanted the status quo, those who wanted to reverse the Ring, and those who simply wanted to leave. But there was a fourth current now, smaller and more focused and close at hand. Shut it all down, that current whispered. This place is wrong. Put an end to it. Turn this thing off.

Those, at least, were the words that the fourth current prompted in his mind; whether they reflected the actual thinking of the person or persons involved was anyone's guess. Just now, Kasmion's awareness was strictly big-picture. Limited, too, by his need to place equal focus on his physical surroundings. Blood slicks, bare wire, booby traps and barricades: not all hazards had usable minds.

He paused at the latter, a jumble of bodies and upended tram carts in a gridded stretch of hyperlight. The fourth current was strong nearby. He found himself wondering just how that mode of thought looked in detail. Just a gloss on the third current — an angle on escape — or did it mean shutting down the structure far enough to let the black hole consume it?

That felt like a waste, not to mention a risk. This place had value. Maybe even significance. Who would want to destroy it, with whom aboard, and could they be persuaded otherwise?

Kasmion headed for that mind. A little detour wouldn't hurt.