Blue Heaven Docks and Maintenance

"Unlimited Ice Works" engages its warp drive, vanishing before your eyes.

Connor Mueller has arrived, coming from Blue Heaven.

Connor Mueller has left the area, heading in towards Blue Heaven Airlocks and Checkpoint.

Carmen Dellevon has arrived, coming from Blue Heaven Airlocks and Checkpoint.

Synthe Gridd has arrived, coming from Blue Heaven.

Synthe Gridd strut casually down the stairs leading from her vessel to the ground. She was glad to not have to worry about paparazzi back here in the private docking station. Someone in a gunmetal flight suit with light blue embellishments offered her a bottle of water. She took it graciously and gave them thanks.

Her first show was in a few days on Terra, the planet below this asteroid station. The label had decided to put her up here for most of the days leading up to the show at her request. Terra was great and all, but she had grown fond of the quiet of the not-city after her writer's retreat.

"So," she turned to the person who had been discreetly following her. They wore a metallic bubble helmet and what looked almost like a wet suit. Despite their chunky boots they were remarkable soft in the step.

"It's not the penthouse, but we have a suite on the almost top floor. How there's a top floor in an asteroid, Sol only knows," Synth chuckled at her own joke.

"Were you going to pop-up at Club 47?" The person with her asked.

"No, god no! I don't know," Synth remembered the executives mentioning something about a grand opening of a club, as well as the hotel. She was more interested in relaxation. Her company, on the other hand...

"Would be a total vibe," they remarked to Synth, but didn't press it. Chances are Synth would get bored and wind up at the club, behind the decks, doing her thing.

Three security officials interrupted their journey on to the airlocks.

"Ma'am,... er," One of them addressed Synth and Company, "We've received notice that this station may need to undergo lockdown for an undetermined amount of time within the next," they checked their digital watch, "Twenty or so minutes. All incoming, ah, patrons of Blue Heaven are advised to depart if such a lockdown would cause an inconvenience."

Synth Gridd frowned. She just got here, what in the heck was going on? The official seemed to read her expression.

"It's unclear if the lockdown will proceed, however-" With a small wave and a smile, Synth silenced the official. She had already calculated that it would cause more stress to stay than to go down to, blegh, Terra.

"Granpaix?" She turned to her associate an asked with a shrug. They nodded and went to turn, then stopped. Synth couldn't read minds, but she knew what they were thinking and said, "Go on, check out the bathroom sinks. Two minutes!"

Synth's companion rushed off to the bathrooms. Synth cracked the water bottle and drained it. They weren't even on Terra yet and already, Terranesque Nonsense. Oh well.

Carmen Dellevon was good at sneaking. Her cloak hood lowered once again, she kept to the shadows and watched the ships coming and going. Mostly coming, which was a shame. Until...

"Ma'am?" A burly security official waited for her attention. She met him with her eyes and graciously smiled.

"We've received notice that this station may need to undergo lockdown for an undetermined amount of time..." The security guard began, but Carmen had tuned him out on the word 'lockdown'. SHIT! She thought to herself. I've been had!

"...routine procedural test," the official continued. Carmen's heart fluttered. She had to get out of here. Carmen tried to stay calm as she looked around for a ship- any ship. Any public ship. Hell, she'd sneak onto a private ship if she had to.

There it was. Carmen spotted the sleek vessel. It was painted as if it were wearing giant chunky headphones. The stairs were down. The door was open. There was nobody on guard.

"Thank you, sir," Carmen said to the official. He dismissed himself with a nod. He had more people to notify. Carmen was over by the painted vessel in an instant. Nobody said anything as she made her way up the stairs. Nobody was at the door to stop her. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, empty. Carmen found a seemingly unoccupied room and settled in.

Synthe Gridd met up with her associate right outside the bathroom.

"You ready?" She asked, flicking a pair of cool blue holographic sunglasses down over her eyes. She had bought them off of one of the working girls in the flight suits, who of course was a super fan. Synth insisted on giving the girl bits- along with the autograph that the fan had initially propsed.

"Make someone's day?" The companion in the silver helmet asked, jerking a thumb to the giddily distracted group of girls trying not to ogle the celebrity.

"Yeah," Synth had already started walking towards their ship.

"Well at least you got something done," Synth's associate joked as the two of them made their way up the ramp. They head straight for the bridge, where the pilot had already received notice that they were to immediately depart. With the press of a few buttons and the pulling of a lever the spacecraft painted with big headphones taxi'd to the exit. Everyone checked their harnesses.

"To Terra," Synth sighed. At least Granpaix was pretty.

Carmen Dellevon felt the ship she was on starting to taxi. She scanned the room, quickly spotting the launch seat discreetly folded into the wall. With quick work Carmen was buckled in. Her heart was racing. She didn't care where they were going- as long as it was as far as you could get from here.

Synthe Gridd vanishes into nothingness, but you get the feeling they are heading somewhere else.

Carmen Dellevon vanishes into nothingness, but you get the feeling they are heading somewhere else.

/write
Delfye was the last of the freighter Yamaya’s crew to disembark. Well, maybe Conrad was still aboard; from the way she talked, he guessed the ship’s owner rarely left her vessel.

The sammaran had said his goodbyes and declined the crew’s offers for drinks and the other distractions Blue Heaven offered. He had not eschewed friendly relations with the others during the weeks in transit, but everyone knew he was a temp, onboarded to fulfill mutual needs. The Yamaya’s--of an engineering assistant--and his--of transit to the colonies.

Smells, always the smells. Delfye had been on Terra a long time. Long enough to convince himself he had forgotten his life among the stars. He might meditate away the familiar thrum of a well-worn fusion drive, avert his eyes from the sprawling starfields out the viewports, or work and sweat away the stomach-churning shifts between poorly-tuned gravitational dampers. The smells though--recycled air, irradiated plasteel, and vaporized synthetic lubricants--those always brought back a flood of memories of before. Memories that unbalanced the sammaran more than the familiar weight of his cybernetic limb. Memories of--

Focus, old man. You’re not here for that.

Delfye took in the familiar terminus of Blue Heaven. Much had changed in a decade, even if it had the same stink. More non-humans. Maybe Sol’s economy was on the upswing again. Hopefully--that would make it more likely for Genecorp to keep her in-system. If Aishe was shipped off via a NLS popsicle hopper, that would complicate things for him, especially if he took a warp ship, and arrived four thousand years before she did.

Haha. Not likely you’d even end up in the same sector if you made that mistake. He thought with a grimace.

So let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, by finding the right person to ask the right questions. He counseled himself. The sammaran crossed from the Yamaya’s gangway airlock to the nearest of the glitchy monitors, then parsed through the information screens until he found a map of Blue Heaven.

Connor Mueller has arrived, coming from Blue Heaven Airlocks and Checkpoint.

Delfye

“For frett’s sake!” Delfye grumbled into his muted comm as he headbutted the “silence master alarm” panel inside the helmet. Either his oxygen was thirty seconds from depletion and death, or it wasn’t. Probably wasn’t, since this was the fifth time today that the suit’s processor had picked that particularly annoying alarm to ring. “Shut the frett up, already!” He counseled the balky bit of tech.
“This is only slightly better than EVA in my underwear.” Delfye groused as he reamed out another injector pintle deep inside the engine of the rustbucket he was working on.

That’s probably not accurate the mechanic reflected. If you spaced yourself in your underwear, at least you didn’t have any expectation of coming back alive. With a third-hand suit like this one--which did, in fact, smell as if its last owner had died inside it--it was more of a 60/40 proposition, and he wasn’t sure on which side of that he’d peg the odds of survival. But this kind of suit was what you wore when your papers were faked by a half-feral orc back in Kashgar, which meant that you worked for one of the shadow economy’s unlicensed and unbonded shipwrights, which meant you worked on vac-docked scows like this heap, which meant the boss didn’t give you a good suit, or even one with functioning emergency systems.

It also meant you better check in with the bridge of said scow every few minutes, to remind them that you were waaaay up the nozzle of their fusion drive, and not to enable the turbopumps or something else lethally stupid. Delfye had helmed tramp freighters like this one before. Its docking papers were probably about as real as his work visa, so it might need to leave on the quick-like. Delfye would like to be afforded at least a snowball’s chance of backing his bulky-balky-suited-self out of their engines before they lit them off and made him an extra crispy tech.

“Oh, of course the yfretting comms are out.” He grumped as he got nothing over the channel--not even static.

…

It had been a minute since Delfye had stepped off the Yamaya. More like three days, actually. He’d spent the first interviewing the Private Investigators on the Asteroid that were within his budget. That had not taken long, since there weren’t many. His pay from crewing up on the Yamaya had been pretty meager, and now it was gone. After buying a network pass for his implant, he’d had enough left to afford the retainer of the prosaic grizzled veteran ex-cop, or the slightly less-cliche inexperienced pretty face, operating out of her flat. He had opted for pretty face. She had seemed hungry for work and not stupid--just inexperienced, which Delfye supposed was just another form of stupid, if a transient one. However, he expected she would at least get out there and get him the publicly-available information on Genecorp drift markers, without leaving his own fingerprints all over the nets. Ex-cop… well, Delfye didn’t have good experiences with law enforcement, and he hadn’t trusted the PI not to “forget” his tasking or forget that he was not supposed to share whom had tasked him with it.

So, pretty face. He was supposed to meet her at 2100 local with the other half of her fee. He should have it in-hand by 2030, the way this job was going. If he wasn’t mechanic fricassee by then, that was.

…

Delfye finished up in the plasma chamber, backed out of the engine nozzle, and clambered back to the airlock stationside without incident. He had the sneaking suspicion that the fusion rocket had not had the requisite gas purge before the boss had sent him in to work on it, but his radiation detector was just as nonfunctional as the rest of the suit safety systems, so there was no way to know for sure.

It didn’t matter, anyway.

The sammaran extracted himself from the suit, hung it--and the shop tools--up, collected his wages, and left the seedy little repair shop. The sweat from the long day in the malfunctioning EVA suit was dry by then, but the stink of his labors clung to him. Well, tough luck. He thought to himself. He wasn’t trying to impress his PI. She’d just have to hold her nose while he forked over the credits if she had done her job right.

Before he continued on to his meeting, Delfye took a moment to pause on the main causeway of the upper section of the docks. Above him, resting on her landing pads, the sleek hull of a ship named “Ravana” gleamed in the station lights. Delfye did not know much about that vessel, save that it was new--it’s keel must have been laid after he disappeared to Old Terra--and very, very fast. The engineer could tell as much just from looking. The ship was a cluster of big engines--warp, exo-and-atmospheric, sublight--with only the minimal amount of pressurized crewspaces. He really wanted to steal give it a thorough inspection.

Can’t; can’t have wants. The sammaran reminded himself, closing his eyes and silently repeating the mantra the master had given him. Focus.

AHSC Esteem
Reverence II Class Planetary Assault Carrier
Imperial Defense Force

CIC

Admiral Hanley didn’t think she would once again find herself back at the Blue Heaven, with the miniscule asteroid prominently displayed within the center of the large, and airy command center within one of the largest, and most powerful Imperial Aschen warships in the galaxy. Her eyes were focused on the Blue Heaven much like a predator’s would be as it surveyed it’s prey. The shimmering blue, red, and green icons denoting various ships coming and going as well as their various vectors were displayed alongside the blue heaven, and the vectors for the Imperial formation that surrounded the Blue Heaven like a blockade, menacing any traffic that was coming, and going.

Hanley kept her hands firmly clasped behind her back, breaking her interlocked fingers only momentarily to push some errant strands of red hair out of her face. She was staring stonefaced at the display, and then she broke her gaze to avert towards her executive officer, Colonel Juergen Belzen, a middle aged, physically fit man with an olive complexion, a man of clear Tauron descent.

“Colonel, take us on a docking approach, use due caution I’d hate for the whole thing to strike the hull. Gravitic distortions or not, we should announce ourselves rather than sit out here, menacing the station. Line it up with Airlock truss Alpha nine.” Hanley added as she looked back towards the display.

“Admiral, there’s what appeares to be a civilian freighter blocking our approach vector. I have not parsed the origin, but it appears it’s make and design are unique.” The Colonel reported.

“Registration inquiry complete, Admiral.” A holographic woman flickered into view immediately on the console besides Hanley, offering her a warm smile. “Registration ‘Yamaya’ Origin unknown, comparing design features with all known vessels.”

While EVE Set to work, and Colonel Belzen set to plotting their approach vector, Hanley settled into her own position at the main console, briefly surveying the hundreds of people within the Esteem’s CIC Going about their functions like a well oiled machine, as was expected for those within the Imperial Military.

—-

All three of the Esteem’s massive plasmic-fusion drives came to life with a brilliant blue-green glow. Gracefully, the massive Reverence class lurched forward through the crowded blackness of space, slipping free from it’s position among the Imperial fleet, and crossing the vast gulf between itself, and the asteroid. The closer the sleek, yet bulbous Aschen warship approached, the larger it seemed to be, clocking in at roughly twenty three kilometers long, and nearly two thirds as wide, and deep. The Reverence II was a self contained city, carrying a compliment of soldiers, logistical personnel, and the manufacturing capabilities to keep an entire fleet supplied on even the longest deployments. It passed within a scant two kilometers above where the Yamaya was docked, and it’s sheer size was now glaringly obvious. It’s hull plating bore the years of battles, followed by refits, followed by even more battles as the iridescent alien material the massive ship was clad in seemed to be new in some places, and worn in others.

One could even make out recessed weapon emplacements that were easily as large as some civilian heavy freighters. These Turbodisruptor batteries were capable of unleashing enough destruction to flatten cities, and their power sources were linked through quick-charge capacitors to the Reverence’s gargantuan Deuterium-tritium cold fusion reactors.

The void filled with a static charge as the warship’s energy shields cycled, armored plates retracting to reveal a modest docking bay where transport shuttles were being fueled, and prepared for departure. It was at that moment a trio of sleek, and angular looking Raptor Talon starfighters passed beneath the Yamaya, rolling to starboard, and jetting along the Esteem’s hull.

While the helm crew of the Esteem carefully maneuvered the ship into position, Hanley watched the Blue Heaven on her display. Her eyes narrowed.

“What should we do about the freighter?” Belzen asked.

“They’ll get the message.” Hanley said, shifting her weight and clasping her hands behind her back once more.

Mueller stares out the docking bay window as he jogs into the docks. Holy- Is that a Reverence? The entire CU Navy had been trained in recognizing opposition ships, and he supposes with the inclination towards "sovereign stateship" or whatever the Aschen were into, they could show up really anywhere. He glances over at the Yamaya, and sees that it's in the way of this massive monstrosity of a ship. Oh, shit. He pulls out his VTC and cranks a dial until he's in Hailing range of the Yamaya. Hey, this is a passerby to the Yamaya, there's an Aschen Reverance-Class trying to shoulder you out. I don't know where you're from but these people don't frakk around. Heads up!
He knew that something bad was about to happen, and he forgets, for the moment, about his task of finding the blue-cloaked woman.

A message blipped onto the comms of all ships docking, and attempting to dock, at Blue Heaven.



After a long moment, the last word popped up to complete the broadcast.

Delfye

Something blotted out the wan light of distant Sol as it approached the asteroid colony.

Jesus Christ, that is a big ship. Delfye thought. He had stolen borrowed a lot of vehicles over the years. He had been the legitimate pilot of a somewhat smaller number. Of those, not one of them amounted to a kitten fart to the hurricane of metal and machinery that was cozying up to the asteroid.

“Ahh… fuck me.” The sammaran muttered yet again, now looking past the Ravana to the large transparisteel ceiling of the pressurized berths, where he could see…a part of the immense warship. Just what he needed; ten thousand randy Space Nazis flooding Blue Heaven when he was already trying to find a needle in this haystack.

If he hadn’t liked Conrad, he might have had a nasty chuckle at the way the Reverence made its approach--like the Yamaya wasn’t even there. But he had liked the captain well enough, and was glad to see how she quickly undocked and used the Yamaya’s maneuvering thrusters to skedaddle to a berth on the far side of Blue Heaven. Good thing she hadn’t been sleeping. He assumed the freighter would redock somewhere else on BH. She certainly wasn’t going to get very far with her crew all ashore. She wasn’t solely held together with chicken-wire and bubblegum, like some of the ships Delfye had worked on; there was some string and duct-tape binding her guts together too. Still, she needed a full crew compliment to keep all her pieces flying in close formation to one another.

Well, better hurry. He concluded. Best find out what his PI had uncovered, before the Aschens arrived. Delfye wasn’t terribly concerned about the new arrivals, beyond their ability to overcrowd the station and generally get in the way. Even when he had been working for Intercorp he had never rated imperial notice. The Aschen high muckety-mucks were racist pricks, but they maintained discipline enough down through the ranks that their presence didn’t crush whoever’s throat they were standing on--unless they wanted it crushed.

With these thoughts in mind, Delfye hustled to the appointed meeting place, off the Blue Heaven Main Promenade.

Unnamed Gymsnor-3 Freighter arrives, as if on queue.

Bartholemew Kerrigan exits "Kerrigan Prime".

Bartholemew Kerrigan looks over the surrounding hustle and bustle with disdain, casting a heavy sigh as he begins the by-foot trek through an as-always busy Blue Heaven.

Another brothel special, I'm guessing...

he mumbled before proceeding through the gates towards the interior of the majestic superstructure.

Bartholemew Kerrigan has left the area, heading in towards Blue Heaven Airlocks and Checkpoint.

Blue Heaven Docks and Maintenance was filled with a loud buzz for exactly 3.14 seconds, followed by a public message. A voice calmly blared through the sound system for all to hear above the din.



Unfortunately, there were just too many vessels attempting to dock. The staff was quickly overwhelmed, doing their best to acommodate those who had been waiting & still follow policy. They figured if nobody went through the checkpoint, they did their job just fine.

The docks began to get jam packed. A line formed at a vending machine over there.

Belle LeTroix has arrived, coming from Blue Heaven.

The small transport ship, ever so covertly popped back into normal space, a process that would have taken hours at least took mere mere seconds. Belle was taken aback, nowhere was Xamoyos anymore and instead she saw... something else coming into view, a stark contrast to the greens and blues of a life-rich planet and instead the artificial lights of a more intentional structure.

Belle didn't know why the systems of the Deep 17 transport reacted to her input, but it was as if it were made for her in some way, or her for it? This chunk of rock in space was her destination all the same for some reason. But she felt many beings collected, a place where she may no longer feel alone, and find purpose. As the lights of the cockpit flickered, a voice came over the control panel.

"Oh woOoow! Seriously, a neoprimordial entity!? Those aren't too common, I think? Can you speak, do you have a naAaame? Also hi, I'm Bashemath, and I'm sooOOoo interested in knowing eEEeeverything about you! Oh and um, you are currently like grandthefting some Deep 17 tech," a very upbeat young woman's voice was heard speaking, and Belle was suddenly curious as to where it was coming from. "Um, how did you know how to operate it, anyways? Like, the bio-metric scanner shouldn't have allowed anything non-human to operate, which meaaans... um... actually you're getting kinda close to the Blue Heaven docks, you dooOOo know how to land... riiIIIiiight?"

Belle has no idea what this voice is talking about, but it is interesting! She poked at the buttons with her thin fingers, hoping that at least one of them would open this flying contraption. Also, why were the lights in the craft starting to flash red, and why was it now making an annoyingly loud whining noise?

Moments later a Deep 17 vessel approaches for landing... and crash lands onto the docks, skidding across on its side before flopping over upside down to a stop.