Legacy: Beyond the Veil

Into the deep end

 "We are cleared for departure." Veriss said from her command chair, her voice distorted slightly by the helmet of the hefty null-suit she now wore. "Mister Avel, please take us out."

"Aye commander." Maxin replied, his voice similarly altered by a suit of his own. He especially sounded strange through his helmet, Cai thought. Probably because he was doing his best to suppress his accent.

"Engines are hot, thrusters are vectored." The exo said, running his checklist for what had to be the fourth time in two minutes. With a nod of satisfaction, Maxin pressed a button on his console and sounded the general alert.

"Attention, all hands. Prepare for Catapult launch followed by hard burn in one minute from mark." He said through the intercom, then paused a second, maximizing the dramatic effect before saying: "Mark."

Cai could just imagine his friend's shit-eating grin under his helmet. For a short moment he took some kind of anxious offense from that. This was a serious moment, after all. Perhaps the most important one in their lives. Not a time for their propulsion officer to be overly enjoying himself.

Cai's protest was torn out at the root when he felt an ache in his jaw and realized that he, too, was grinning from ear to ear.

The sixty seconds appeared on the screen of Cai's command center and began ticking down, though every single one of them felt more like an hour. Around him, his fellow crewmates were conducting all manner of pre-flight tests and system diagnostics, just in case something unexpected would pop up before the point of no return. So far all the system conclusions glowed with a reassuring blue.

As the ship's officer of offense, Cai had a disappointingly low workload during launches. One could argue that his very presence on the bridge was unnecessary, but hat didn't mean he was going to be absent for his crew's first real launch. Besides, he needed something to keep himself busy. Something to keep his thoughts away from his little brother, who had so mysteriously vanished on his way home.

He pressed a few buttons on his screen and pulled up the diagnostics menu for the ship's armaments. He couldn't run a full evaluation while they were still stuck in the launching clamps, but that wasn't the point. He just needed something on his hands. To not be the only one doing absolutely nothing.

The control server for the weapons had to be booted first, costing Cai a few more seconds than he'd liked. Then, the diagnostics ran through as many weapon components as it could access in launch mode.

One by one, the results were displayed on his lenses. The Magna-cannons -all six of them- reported back as fully operational. Their rapid-response targeting systems were in tiptop-order, too. Cai only saw one slightly concerning lag spike in one of gun four's muzzle coils. The delay was within tolerance, if barely, but Cai would check on it after the launch anyway.

With the server now running warm, the process sped up, and the remaining weapon checks came pouring in: The bolt launchers showed no faults, nor did the point defense luxes. To test their moving parts while the weapons in question were still tucked away in the ship's skin was where the limitations of a pre-launch check came into play, though. Once they were clear of the RAL-port, he would run a full test on those as well.

For now, Cai was satisfied. He closed the diagnostic screen with ten seconds to spare and switched to situational overview mode.

His helmet lenses connected to the ship's external cameras and let him peer through the thick bulkheads and armor panels as if they weren't there, giving the impression that the ship had turned completely transparent around him. The tight confines of the ship's bridge vanished, instead granting vision of the looming curve of the RAL-port and the mechanical arm that was currently the only thing keeping them from dropping into the swirling clouds of yellow and brown which covered Sindrion Tertus, hardly three-hundred kilometers below