[Freebuild] Yseult Brenneaux

[LucByard]

Previous chapters can be accessed from the Andromeda's Gates player list.

Chapter 22: Yseult Brenneaux.

The Forwarder stood tense, one hand behind his back, plasma pistol charged and ready. The yard foreman hadn’t warned him they were coming, he hadn’t had a chance, or a choice. The Forwarder had picked them up on his tap into the freight yard’s security system. Fortunately, his own system was better than the yard’s at flagging suspicious activity. Years of input and tweaking had achieved that. He remembered the feeling of dread and inevitability when he spotted this one. Little more than a feint shadow off the quarter of a bigger vessel; traffic control probably wrote it off as an echo and so it slipped by. They’d have been more wary if the signal had been stronger as it could easily have been another vessel but ships don’t give off signals this weak... And so it slipped by.

But the Forwarder saw it and the Forwarder knew. The corporations preferred those fancy cloaking devices; heavy, cumbersome and power hungry, they worked but weren’t seen by everyone as a practical way to go unseen, especially those who were here before. Once the ship was within scope a visual scanner, The Forwarder trained every resource he had onto it as it glided gently towards the Freight Port’s cargo terminal... Nothing, just blackness. A glint of light flashed, a shimmer emerged, then disappeared, bad memories returned and the outline of a black ship became apparent. Despite the feeling of dread, he couldn’t help but smile. Of course. He thought. The corporations had recently agreed a unilateral order to leave Andromeda due to some kind of anomalous radiation coming from the Galaxy’s centre. With everybody used to corporate control, who would step in? And who would stop them? The ship put down behind a hangar, tucked away. He did his best to follow the three figures that disembarked but they split up, rejoined and split up again, leaving a silent and unseen trail of bodies behind them. From what he could see, they were working their way across the freight terminal through every line of defence to... Here. Every set of eyes he had in the yard were as good as blind. Even he didn’t see most of them until it was too late. They would be here soon. He swallowed, suddenly finding it something he had to think about doing. He activated a control on his terminal and folded it away, the conference table lowering in its place. He removed his plasma pistol from its holster on the underside of the table and stood, tense, one hand behind his back, plasma pistol charged and ready.

They didn’t knock. They didn’t need to. The door to the Forwarder’s container office gently swung open and a figure stepped in, slender, wearing a black flight suit covered in metallic and bright green attachments. He’d never seen the design before but the helmet the figure wore... That, he knew. Black with a luminescent yellow/green visor, the inside of which was a constantly changing display of data and information for the wearer. The Forwarder’s arm tensed. He fought the urge to draw his pistol too early, the figure stood just inside the doorway, analysing him, assessing him, no doubt aware that he was armed. The figure didn’t carry a weapon in their hands. They don’t need to. He reminded himself so as not to foolishly think he had the figure out-gunned.

The figure’s hands raised to their helmet, there was a click, a release of pressure and hands raised the helmet off, short pitch-black hair around a pale face with high prominent cheekbones. and sharply-pointed eyes. The tension in his arm disappeared, his brow un-furrowed, but his breathing remained unsteady...it always did around her. Why is she here? After all this time. He thought. “You look the same.” He said. He wasn’t sure what else he could say and certainly didn’t have anything more pertinent. The woman looked at him, her thin eyes thinning just a little more as she assessed his appearance.

    “You look different.” She replied.

    “Four years is a long time.” The Forwarder responded, apologetically. “A lot has changed.”

    “Not so much.” the woman calmly replied with definitive confidence as she took a step towards the Forwarder. His nerves jolted.

    “I don’t do business with you anymore.” He said in instinctive reaction, a cautious assertiveness in his voice. The woman looked around the confined container that had become his office, that had become his life.

    “Everyone does business with us.” She responded calmly, her eyes inspecting every corner, every nook, every shadow. “The only difference...” She added, her eyes returning to the Forwarder. “Is whether or not they know.” She placed her helmet on the table and activated a control on her suit. A moment later, two additional figures entered the container behind her. One had already removed his helmet, A man the Forwarder didn’t recognise in a similar suit to the woman. The third wore a different black suit with piping and metal work around it. Its helmet was still on but the visor was opaque black and unlike the other two, it wore respirator tanks on it’s back. The woman sat down in the chair beside her while the man surveyed the container with equal attention to detail. The third figure stood in the entrance, sentinel-like.

After a moment, the man nodded to the woman who in turn nodded to the third figure. A variety of quiet gentle electronic whirrs went silent and the figure reached up , activating a control on its helmet. The black visor raised, allowing a thin cloud of super-chilled air to woosh out and curl into a feint mist in front of it. As the mist dissipated in the warm air, the face of the figure became seen, or some of it did, being mostly covered in metallic augments and devices. Sections of exposed facial skin contorted and pulsated as it breathed. It’s still alive under there. The Forwarder thought as he viewed the assemblage of metal plate and technology that now constituted the wearer’s face. He wasn’t sure if it was looking back, it just stood there, watching presumably. The Forwarder knew about cyborgs and AI mechanoids, Kawashita were known to utilise them for their most dangerous missions and assassinations but he’d never seen one integrated like this... He’d heard stories though, about experiments that left the subjects in such pain, only constant supplies of anaesthetics allowed them to function. This one, he noticed, was using a respirator and he wondered what gaseous concoction was within those tanks.

    “So.” The woman said in a contemplative tone, her gaze fixed upon the Forwarder. “Tell us about the pilot.” The question caught the Forwarder’s attention and brought his gaze back from the augmented cyborg in the corner. He sat down and cautiously replaced his pistol into its holster under the table.

    “The Galaxy is full of pilots.” The Forwarder replied, trying to be clever.

    “Unfortunate incident.” The woman said, appearing to change the topic. “Those two Octan ships over New California... What were they doing out there?” The Forwarder opened his palms into a gesture that said ‘I don’t know’.

    “The minutiae of the corporations is beyond my ears.” He said.

    “They weren’t lost to a malfunction.” The woman said in a stern tone, her eyes fixated on the Forwarder. “They were pursuing a MANTIS ship... Which was pursuing our consignment.” That caught the Forwarder’s attention. The woman was right, the difference was whether or not you knew. He liked to think that he was the one in the know, that he had more information than whoever was across the table from him. He didn’t like being out manoeuvred, out strategised. Maybe that’s why he stopped doing business with them, or had tried to at least. “The pilot was a red-haired woman.” The woman added. “We’re interested in her.”  That’s bad news. Thought the Forwarder. “So.” The woman continued. “Tell us about the pilot... Tell us about Yseult Brenneaux.”

    “Brenneux.” The Forwarder corrected her. The woman stared at him, silent, considering her next move. Her eyes thinned again.

    “There is no Yseult Brenneux.” She replied. The Forwarder’s face changed. Following his meeting with Yseult, he’d done his research having been corrected himself. At first, probably like so many would, he just assumed he’d been pronouncing it wrong or spelling it wrong, the name using a French letter combination, a language of which he had only the most rudimentary knowledge. But the Forwarder was suspicious. He didn’t like that he’d got it wrong and rather than just write it off, he checked it out. That one little letter had allowed the red-haired woman to all but eliminate her past when she joined MANTIS less than a year ago, appearing out of nowhere on Marphacia.

    The woman repositioned herself in her chair. “Yseult Brenneux.” She began. “Appeared in a MANTIS flight training schedule on Aeristus last Junali. She has been connected to MANTIS activity on Donwarr and Freegate but before all of that... She never existed... There isn’t even a record of her arrival in Andromeda... Yseult Brenneaux, on the other hand, was one of your regular freight pilots who captained a ship with a certain... Reputation. Until three years ago, that is... When they both apparently disappeared.” The woman was right, Yseult had just vanished. It wasn’t unusual for that to happen, between accidents and Dust Demons, there were plenty of reasons a ship and its captain could go missing. The captain’s just don’t usually turn up three years later on some classified corporate mission acting like no more than a day has passed.

    “So.” The Woman said, confidence behind her voice. “Tell us about the rad-haired woman... Tell us about Yseult Brenneaux.”

Spoiler

Note: only the new characters are new. The setting is from a previous entry. This is here for story development.

 

Edited August 27, 2017 by LucByard

[Professor Thaum]

Interesting story development...

I think I'll have to see your whole story arc again...

[LucByard]

9 hours ago, Professor Thaum said:

I think I'll have to see your whole story arc again...

Ha ha! I hope it makes sense (There may be continuity errors).

[SpacerSteve]

Awesome to see the story continue. Really ominous development.