Samus Aran (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
onemorebounty) wrote2016-06-22 03:44 pm
onemorebounty) wrote2016-06-22 03:44 pm
Music of the Spheres [Fic via Prompt]
*Samus could respect quality and skill, even when they were being used against her. Although her current hunt had taken an unfortunate turn, she was nonetheless impressed by the havoc the raiders had wrought on her ship.*
*In the past month, a half-dozen ships had gone missing in the Vuralis system; two had managed to get out garbled distress signals before they went quiet. The missing ships had several details in common: all traveled by jump drive, all were flying similar routes between the same two jump points, and all six had well-maintained navigational arrays integrated with their sensors and central computers, yet whatever had taken them came as a surprise to all. It was a puzzle, so Samus found the next ship due to fly that route and persuaded him to take another, while she flew the original path with a duplicate of the freighter's transponder.*
*The attack had come when she was passing near a small gas giant and its large, ice-and-rock moon (the pair nearly a quarter-orbit out of position, according to Wikistronomy, which suggested someone had been playing with the edit history to hide a base). Out of nowhere, a pulsed particle beam had splashed over her shields--by the power output, it was from either a heavy corvette mounted with something at the very upper end of what it could power and drag, or the main gun of a light capital ship of some kind. Her own gunship was over-engineered to the point of conceivably holding its own against capital ships, so the shields held, but she suspected that even the freighter she'd replaced wouldn't have been holed in one shot.*
*What made the attack impressive was the effect it had had on her ship--her HUD had immediately scrambled into gibberish, her navigational array assuring her that she was moving simultaneously in three different directions while simultaneously rolling both left and right. The particle beam, she realized, had been very carefully pulsed to transmit a message, one her primary sensors had picked up from the resonance of her shields and transmitted to navigation, which was connected to her tactical display. If she had been like most people, integrating all ship systems through a central computer, the virus would have had everything. As it was, she would have to take the HUD and navcom both off-line until she could scrub them out, which left her to navigate by sight alone.*
*Or not alone. The enemy would be expecting her to be blind and helpless, but Samus hadn't allowed herself helplessness in a very long time. She just had to be clever, had to leverage the assets left to her to the utmost. Navcom and tactical were gone, but she had a secondary sensor array and the means to tie it into her ship's audio. Formation-fliers often used the trick to "hear" other ships moving in their blind spaces without shifting their attention to a tactical display. Prodding the system to life, Samus frowned. Quiet.*
*Too quiet. Of course--a cloaked ship wouldn't register, and the ship must have been cloaked to get the drop on every target so far. She turned up the sensors' gain, filling her ship's cabin with a sound like an endless, eternal sigh, or a choir holding a note: the background noise of the universe. She let her eyes slowly close, her body relax, as she identified each part of the whole, scrutinized it, dismissed it. The background hiss from stars in the distance? No. The strong note of the system's primary star, light-hours away? No. The nearby gas giant, echoing the primary mutedly, its dull note soured to dissonance by the constituents of its atmosphere? No.*
*Ah, but the moon. The silica-heavy rock and methane ice rang like a bell under the primary's light, reflecting it clear and bright and close--and there, buried in its midst, was the faint scratch where the cloaking device didn't quite blend with its electromagnetic background perfectly. She'd found them. Grinning fiercely, she gunned the engines, swinging around to engage her startled prey.*
*In the past month, a half-dozen ships had gone missing in the Vuralis system; two had managed to get out garbled distress signals before they went quiet. The missing ships had several details in common: all traveled by jump drive, all were flying similar routes between the same two jump points, and all six had well-maintained navigational arrays integrated with their sensors and central computers, yet whatever had taken them came as a surprise to all. It was a puzzle, so Samus found the next ship due to fly that route and persuaded him to take another, while she flew the original path with a duplicate of the freighter's transponder.*
*The attack had come when she was passing near a small gas giant and its large, ice-and-rock moon (the pair nearly a quarter-orbit out of position, according to Wikistronomy, which suggested someone had been playing with the edit history to hide a base). Out of nowhere, a pulsed particle beam had splashed over her shields--by the power output, it was from either a heavy corvette mounted with something at the very upper end of what it could power and drag, or the main gun of a light capital ship of some kind. Her own gunship was over-engineered to the point of conceivably holding its own against capital ships, so the shields held, but she suspected that even the freighter she'd replaced wouldn't have been holed in one shot.*
*What made the attack impressive was the effect it had had on her ship--her HUD had immediately scrambled into gibberish, her navigational array assuring her that she was moving simultaneously in three different directions while simultaneously rolling both left and right. The particle beam, she realized, had been very carefully pulsed to transmit a message, one her primary sensors had picked up from the resonance of her shields and transmitted to navigation, which was connected to her tactical display. If she had been like most people, integrating all ship systems through a central computer, the virus would have had everything. As it was, she would have to take the HUD and navcom both off-line until she could scrub them out, which left her to navigate by sight alone.*
*Or not alone. The enemy would be expecting her to be blind and helpless, but Samus hadn't allowed herself helplessness in a very long time. She just had to be clever, had to leverage the assets left to her to the utmost. Navcom and tactical were gone, but she had a secondary sensor array and the means to tie it into her ship's audio. Formation-fliers often used the trick to "hear" other ships moving in their blind spaces without shifting their attention to a tactical display. Prodding the system to life, Samus frowned. Quiet.*
*Too quiet. Of course--a cloaked ship wouldn't register, and the ship must have been cloaked to get the drop on every target so far. She turned up the sensors' gain, filling her ship's cabin with a sound like an endless, eternal sigh, or a choir holding a note: the background noise of the universe. She let her eyes slowly close, her body relax, as she identified each part of the whole, scrutinized it, dismissed it. The background hiss from stars in the distance? No. The strong note of the system's primary star, light-hours away? No. The nearby gas giant, echoing the primary mutedly, its dull note soured to dissonance by the constituents of its atmosphere? No.*
*Ah, but the moon. The silica-heavy rock and methane ice rang like a bell under the primary's light, reflecting it clear and bright and close--and there, buried in its midst, was the faint scratch where the cloaking device didn't quite blend with its electromagnetic background perfectly. She'd found them. Grinning fiercely, she gunned the engines, swinging around to engage her startled prey.*