To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch 66 Shipping Out

              Shipping out

Aster starred into the mirror and flexed some unseen muscle in her left eye and the world went black and white as she shifted her vision into the realm of infrared. Another shift and she looked into the ultraviolet, which was still a very strange experience for her brain. Ultraviolet let her see everything around her in a way that the human brain wasn't necessarily built for, objects had new depth and texture, and some things were in an entirely different shade than what she was used too, she could even see the difference between natural light and artificial light. At first either of these would give her a splitting headache as her brain tried to process what it was seeing, but now after several weeks of acclimating it was finally beginning the feel more natural.

She had even begun to notice that her color perception was a lot sharper than before, she could better differentiate subtle shades of red, or see the patches of wall that didn't get cleaned as regularly. Highland had been very upset to hear that, though there wasn't much he could do to fix it.

It wasn't without its down sides though. Something about the increased color sight and higher definition had made looking at screens very hard. Everything looked both grainy and also off color, which made standing on the bridge a very unpleasant experience. She was constantly distracted by the 'off' quality all the video feeds had and couldn't properly focus on the tasks at hand, which could one day prove deadly. Her solution to this was a costly upgrade to the full-sized displays in the helm, replacing the high-definition pixelated screens with a new kind of screen that promised to be the future of entertainment.

New screens that used a thick plane of glass and advanced electrostatic field manipulation allowed for a picture without pixels. Projectors flashed light through the plane of glass and force fields manipulated that light to shape it into a coherent image with life like definition. This not only seemed more natural to Astarte's new color vison, but also better represented distance and depth, like you were looking out and actual window.

This new technology had been provided by her new business associates at Lockheed, and was just one of the first new technologies they had designed for advanced avionics that they were now adapting for consumer use with Astarte's help. They were also working with the Hellworlder's dedicated military contractors to integrate some of their own advancements in shield emitters and stealth technology to better improve the Hellworlders ships. The next generation of destroyers and frigates promised to be a qualitative leap forward, and they were beginning to consider another refit for the existing ships.

But those projects were all several months away from bearing fruit. Right now she was waiting on some final tests of their new reactor before she could finally ship out again and start making money. Her new council man, Jersey, had fed her knowledge of a grand pirate fleet being assembled in Domnall's name, and of the great hunt he had promised. Apparently just cutting off the slave trade wasn't enough for Domnall, he wanted to annihilate all those who profited off the Confederacy's slave trade, and Astarte wanted a piece of that action. Often times killing slavers and raiding sweatshops weren't worth the effort, she had annihilated Gaw only to make the trade lanes between Sol and other systems safer for her freighters. But now, between the bounty Domnall was offering, and the short position she had taken in a lot of the companies who benefited off the cheap products, now was the perfect time to strike.

But she couldn't leave until all the repairs were done, so until that came she had busied herself with perfecting her control over her red eye, and working hard to recover the strength she had lost after her fight with Kazlum. Gato had been entirely single minded in training after they landed on Mars, and Astarte had decided to take advantage of that focus to fast track her road to total recovery. And now, several months after the Battle for the Confederacy, she and her ship had nearly recovered from their trying ordeal and were ready to get back out there.