Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus: Chapter 1

The space around the research station, orbiting around a long forgotten icy planet, was ablaze. The endless black expanse that seemed to surround every point in all directions was punctuated here not just by an infinite array of stars, but by the silent staccato of particle beam weapons, the careful glowing rhythm of pulse cannons firing, and by the shredding chaos of point defense cannons spraying shards of metal forth in vain hope they would catch a missile before it could find its desired target. Ships swarmed around the station in aberrant battle patterns, hoping desperately to move too unpredictably for their enemies to target.

Inside the station, the chaos outside was only felt in the occasional shake when some misguided weapon chanced a hit on the station instead of its desired target. Rune made her way through the hallways in a sprint- lit only by the red emergency lighting of a station on fire. Though the battle outside only registered as the occasional shake under her feet, she could sense the desperation- a whole other kind than the boarding action that had brought her aboard the station in the first place. She dashed down the hall, felt the metal shift around her; cognizant enough to know the level of danger she was in, but not the ideal way to counteract it.

"Rune, are you there?" The voice coming out of her headset, barely audible over the static caused by the chaos surrounding her, belonged to Captain Tessala Kestrel, the commander of the ship that had brought Rune to the research station.

"I'm here, Captain. Heading back to the Aurora Borealis," she replied, pushing past a cluttered mess of burning scrap metal blocking a hallway.

"Negative, Rune. We've had to break off to engage the enemy. Find an escape pod, we'll pick you up." Though Rune wasn't surprised, her stomach still dropped a bit hearing the command. Space battles that got this intense were extremely deadly, generally avoided by any smart captain except in moments of extreme desperation or necessity. Rune acknowledged the captain's command and continued forwards towards the outer hull of the station. Her hair stood on end as she walked, the sense of danger circling her like a hawk toying with its prey. Finally, she stopped, pulling out her psyblade- a weapon that allowed her to focus her mental energy into a beam of deadly energy. It crackled into existence in a flash of red light. She could feel the person behind her in absence, a hole carved through the chaotic mess of emotions and fright with a sense of purpose and concentration honed to a point.

"Of course it would be you," she snarled as she lunged.

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Maintenance Six- One Week Later

Viola Venice was a child of a city defined by collapse. Even as the colossal space station had been built, it had been with concerns of decay- the starships carrying ore from the planet below to the shipyards were breaking down, so there needed to be a repair station en route. Maintenance Six had always been a place where people lived to rebuild broken things, a city of repair that could never quite keep itself running properly. Viola had grown up on the streets, a winding city built on the inside of a five-kilometre-long cylinder continuously spinning itself to create the careful facsimile of gravity, witnessing the buildings she walked past every day slowly crumbling.

When she had been a small child, the people of Maintenance Six had risen up and overthrown the people in charge, the representatives of the Hyperion Hegemony that ruled over the station from the far reaches of the Olympus Core. A people who had been taught to repair were finally given a chance to build. It had lasted only two years before the seemingly unstoppable force of the Hegemony returned and crushed that dream, though Viola hadn't been old enough at the time to really understand what everyone had been so worked up about. Now, fourteen years old, she wished desperately she had been able to do something to change it.