Ascension (Arc I)

[Mauer]

.: a s c e n s i o n :.​

​

Arc I​

'A Question About Madness'​

Starship Log 01920, 01:03
LSS Crescent Dawn
Linuri, Linuri System

This is Captain Miles Hayden of the LSS Crescent Dawn. While we were patrolling the outskirts of Whitecourt near Linuri's massive glacier, we detected a small anomaly that we are currently approaching. Most of the crew on the LSS Crescent Dawn is asleep, and I am currently manning the bridge while re-reading the holobook, "Linuri's History and Geography." To keep myself awake until our Chief Navigation Officer, Lieutenant Commander Aldhedge, I'll go through and briefly describe Linuri.

Ahem. Now, Linuri's only notable historical record was the Raid on Linuri in 9 ABY, more than 800 years ago, after Garm Bel Iblis's forces were defeated after a failed invasion of the planet's Imperial Navy base. Although being an Imperial victory, Grand Admiral Thrawn's presence was required elsewhere and the base on Linuri was reduced to a skeleton crew, before being abandoned altogether a few years later due to a lack of activity in the Outer Rim during Thrawn's campaign. Linuri fell off the galactic maps, and the only noteworthy event was 400 years later, when a small group of Imperial colonists came and made the military base their home, fleeing from the horrible Gulag plague was decimating the galaxy.

After 400 years of expansion and the arrival of new colonists from the galaxy seeking refuge from the Gulag plague, the planet of Linuri now has 300 million citizens and they eventually reformed their simple governance into the Planetary Federation of Linuri.

The Planetary Federation of Linuri essentially divided Linuri into Regions by their distinct ecological differences, each being managed by a Regional Prefect that reported to the Linuri Planetary Federal Government. These regions were:

• The Whitecourt, a massive landscape of mountainous and densely wooded forests that were populated by the initial Imperial colonists. The former Imperial Navy base, renamed to Northgate, serves as Linuri's planetary capital. 70% of the planet's population reside in Whitecourt, and its inhabitants are unusually wealthy, being descendants of rich Imperial nobles, politicians, and corporate magnates who were able to flee successfully from the Gulag plague. Whitecourt is run by a long-standing political cabal of House Ostyln, whose founder was an Imperial Moff of the Outer Rim. Whitecourt's industries are in the production of luxury items and goods as well as starships, with Blackwing Industries being responsible for most, if not all, of the planet's ship production. Even this ship was made by Blackwing Industries.
• The Mageview is the long coastal and jungle region that borders Violetfield, a vast region of inhospitable sand, from the east, south and west. There are a few tourist spots here that display the beautiful and scenic coasts of Linuri, as well as the vast amount of beautiful, local fauna and flora in its dense jungles. Mageview serves as the tourist center of Linuri and houses many of Whitecourt's private vacation estates, although most of its inhabitants are lower-classed workers who manage these various estates. 10% of the planet's population reside in Bluecourt and its management is assigned to Regional Prefect von Strauss.
• Eastfall is a huge plain region of Linuri that houses the last 20% of the population. Responsible for the planet's agrarian foodproducts, it is assigned to Regional Prefect Blackfair and is the poorest of all the regions. Not much is worth noting about Eastfall, as it is considered a peaceful, idyllic land, and as taxation is relatively low, its population is relatively happier than most galactic citizens.

Although several other regions existed, they were uninhabited due to the extremeness of their environment or simply due to an undesired expense for further exploration. These regions were simply named but have yet to be surveyed or populated, and only 20% of Linuri has actually been scanned and recorded in the planet's datarecords. Planetary scans, however, indicate an extremely diverse and rich ecosystem that has yet to be touched, a fact that most of Linuri's residents have a bit of pride about. A huge, rocky glacier covers one pole of the planet while the other is covered by a massive central desert named Violetfield, which is uninhabitable due to its deadly radiation and scorching temperatures. Linuri is in fact a slightly oblong and Violetfield remains at a fixed position in respect to the Linuri's sun throughout its orbit and planetary rotation.

Liquid water covers 30.8% of Linuri, with 50.6% being freshwater and 49.4% being saltwater. Southwest of Violetfield is a large ocean, which covers 15.2% of the planet's surface. 10.4% of the planet is covered in glaciers that are on the opposite pole of Violetfield. Now, moving on to...

What the hell is going on.

The rapid tapping of Captain Hayden's finger fill the log before a loud emergency siren fills the air.

All systems are being shut down externally, someone hacked into our ship's mainframe. Where is Lieutenant Sullivan, bring him here immediately so he can reboot our systems.

A disheveled, half-dressed naval officer quickly salutes and runs to the terminal, quickly pulling out a few boards, exposing various circuits and wiring. Just as he reaches down into the wiring in an attempt to reboot the systems, the screen shuts down, ending the log.

 

[Mauer]

Three years ago
Outskirts of Whitecourt
Linuri, Linuri system

Mauer shivered in his arctic survival suit, chewing on a ration bar as he awaited for a patrolling Linuri ship to get within range of his position. Counting down the seconds until the Linuri patrol would be the outskirts of the range of his sensor beacon that he placed 90.9 kilometers away, he immediately switched on the sensor beacon for a split second before turning it off. Rising up immediately and spitting out the remains of the ration bar on the ground, he immediately sprinted toward the direction of the ship. As he was coming into view of the Linuri ship, he identified it as an Adz-class patrol destroyer and shot his grappling hook toward the forward bridge.

Precisely landing on the underside of the bridge, Mauer quickly ascended upward and braced himself against the cold, biting winds that knocked him around. Engaging his magboots and magnetized gloves, Mauer quickly climbed toward the housing for the ship's mainframe and began slicing into the hull with a fusion cutter. After a few minutes of dedicated cutting, Mauer climbed inside and huddled next to the circuitry with a datapad and quickly began integrating the datapad with system's mainframe. Fortunately, the Linuri's electronic warfare countermeasures were non-existent, as a slicing attempt into a starship was the least of the planetary defense force's concerns. Mauer quickly began shutting down all the systems randomly to buy him some time, with exception to the starship's propulsion systems, which he began reconfiguring to solely accept input from his datapad and revoking access that any computers onboard had. While he could do little to prevent the crew from shutting down the propulsion system manually, Mauer doubted they were patriotic or crazy enough to scuttle the ship and themselves to stop him.

After gaining complete remote access, Mauer quickly patched up the electronics and began crawling through the service tunnels to reach the ship's armory. Recalling the schematics for the Adz-class patrol destroyer, he quickly identified three potential locations and deduced that the forward storage room would be the most likely, as it was the most isolated, furthest from the brig which was at the rear, and easily accessible by the crew on the bridge. He popped open service door with the help of a few precise cuts with his fusion cutter and quickly entered the armory. The armory itself was no bigger than a few square meters in size and had twelve equipment lockers that had snowtrooper armor sets as well as Linuri-produced E-11 blaster rifles. A weapons rack displayed twelve SE-14r Light Repeating Blasters, two boxes of thermal detonators, and a DLT-19 Heavy Blaster Rifle, while finally, a shelf of ammunition with various sized energy cells and tibanna gas canisters.

Mauer quickly chose a locker at random and began equipping the Snowtrooper Armor and grabbing an E-11 blaster rifle. Shoving the weapons in the now empty locker, he grabbed all the tibanna gas canisters energy cells and divided them equally among the twelve lockers before settings all the thermal detonators to their longest duration possible: 30 seconds. After slinging his backpack onto his back, he immediately activated all of the thermal detonators and placed them within the lockers, before bolting out the door and toward the hangar.

As he ran down the corridor, a confused crew member asked him what was happening but Mauer ignored him and proceeded to the hangar. Inside the hangar, an engineer quickly approached him for a SITREP, but he immediately raised the E-11 blaster rifle to the engineer's face and fired, bodying the engineer to the ground. Going to the door, he took out his datapad once again and began slicing it, locking the door leading to the hangar. Just as the hangar door locked, a loud resounding boom echoed from the other side of the ship, rattling the durasteel ground underneath him. Heeding it no attention, he promptly went over to one of the six TIE fighters and climbed onboard, sitting comfortably within the cockpit. Opening his datapad and accessing the bridge's display console and security cameras, he paused for a moment before typing:

"Your ship is under my control. I will not hesitate to kill everyone on board and destroy the ship if you do not cooperate. Now, gather all the members of the crew to the bridge."

 

[Mauer]

Mauer looked through the security cameras and saw that the captain--indicated by the rank insignia on his uniform--was stationary at his seat, with one of the crew members digging through wiring in what looked to be an attempt to reboot the system manually. Although there were six crew members in total on bridge, they were all attempting to reset their respective stations. Rolling his eyes at the lack of cooperation, Mauer typed once more.

"Clearly you aren't willing to cooperate."

Opening the hangar doors through his datapad, he then hooked up the datapad to the TIE Fighter's main computer and secured it within his backpack. As he was initializing the launch sequence for the TIE Fighter and running through the pre-flight checklist for all systems onboard, he monitored the situation through the security cameras once again. The crew was frantically trying to restore the system and Mauer knew that he needed to show the futility of their actions.

He quickly turned deactivated the escape pods, the propulsion systems, the life support systems, and began stressing the ship's hypermatter reactor by disengaging a few safety mechanisms, causing a ship-wide claxon to warn the crew to abandon the ship as the ship came to a slow crawl. Engaging the engine to the TIE Fighter, he flew out of LSS Crescent Dawn and immediately turned off the ship's repulsorlift systems that were keeping it within the air. The ship immediately began crashing down, and through the screen, the crew was panicking as they desperately grabbed anything around them to brace for impact.

Re-engaging the ship's repulsorlift system to maximum capacity, the LSS Crescent Dawn immediately re-stabilized and shakily ascended upward to its original position. During the chaos, the engineer who was attempting to reboot the system had his head slammed into the floor and now was bleeding out as the crew stood tensely at their stations.

Flying the TIE Fighter directly in front of the bridge for them to see, Mauer typed into the console again and the letters slowly appeared one by one at the command terminal in front of the supposed Captain of the ship.

"Now, where was I. Please cooperate and this will be over quickly. There should be 35 crew members at the bridge. I only see six. The female officer can go gather them here."

The female naval officer shakily arose from her seat and bolted off out from the room. Looking at the other four crew members, Mauer typed again.

"Hello Captain. I need your personal access codes."

The captain looked up and stared at the security camera with seething hatred before shouting, "The LDF will hunt you down like the cowardly frakking dog and kill you."

Mauer emotionlessly looked at the screen as he awaited for the entire crew to gather on the bridge. Counting 35 heads, he displayed on every screen in the bridge:

"Torture the Captain for his personal access codes or die with him."

 

[Mauer]

The crew froze for a few seconds before slowly approaching the captain, some with steeled resolution and others with guilty remorse. While a few crew members stood back and refused to participate, they had all silently consented to the captain's demise. Not that Mauer really cared, as the whole point of this entire ordeal was to spur a radical political movement on the planet of Linuri, allowing him to enter the political sphere with the promise of renewed security measures, better military technology, and expansion of the planet's defense forces. In the end, the lives of the crew were of no importance, but the message was: it needed to be clear that Imperial-based rule of Linuri needed to be crushed, and only extreme acts of terrorism would jar and induce enough fear in those incompetent and inbred fleshsacks to lose a moment of rationality, a moment of logical clarity, to allow Mauer to slip into politics.

As the captain was pinned down by the crew, he was tortured through a series of beatings, strangulations, and eventually, finger cutting through improvised weapons made from the hull. As the torture went on, Mauer turned to the ship's internal databanks and began data mining for any meaningful information: most of it were useless maintenance alerts or logs generated by the system's internal systems, until he found an encrypted datafile containing the personal details and dossiers of those on board. The encryption was easily sliced, as the security standards of the Linuri military didn't even reach the level of quantum encryption, and Mauer scanned through the dossiers.

One particular dossier stuck out among the rest, Warrant Officer Cynthia Hunter, whose personal details were classified and whose name was most likely just an alias. As Mauer recalled, House Ostyln would send their children into the military stripped of their personal identities in order to discipline them and train them as the next generation of military leaders and figures. It was evident to Mauer that captain had high enough clearance to see the blatant discrepancies and classified nature of Cynthia Hunter's dossier, and most likely knew of her familial ties. A more in-depth investigation would be necessary, and although hacking into the Linuri Defense Force's military Holonet would be a hassle, he would need to do it at one point or another. Perhaps a comprehensive scan through the system's fragmented and scrubbed files would provide at least an access code to enter the Holonet, significantly reducing the difficulty and time of slicing.

As Mauer ran the scan in the background, he looked through the security cameras once again to actually inspect the crew members. He specifically was looking at their facial expressions, body postures, and gestures to see their physical responses to a high-stress environment. While most of the crew had the stereotypical reactions, he identified one individual who was mimicking the facial expressions and words of a panicked person. However, Mauer could tell from his posture that his entire body was tensed, as if he were a Nexu quietly waiting for its prey, ready to explode outward and kill immediately. While the other crew members had a subtle shaking to their movements, this man's hands were steady, exposing his true calm and collectedness. Looking around the man, he could identify Cynthia Hunter, who was visibly and truly shaken, cowering in the corner. The man had positioned himself in a way that allowed him to near-instantly protect her, and he would subtly herd the rest of the crew away from her.

Looking back at the dossiers, he identified him as Private Magnus Walker, a soldier from the LDF's Army stationed on board as one the ship's marines. Interestingly, he was only recruited very recently, only a few weeks before Cynthia Hunter had been assigned to the LSS Crescent Dawn, and had joined the LSS Crescent Dawn only a day before she had arrived.

'So a hidden bodyguard,' Mauer thought to himself, 'I'm assuming that Cynthia Hunter is a child of an influential figure within House Ostyln, as no one else would really go through such lengths to protect a mere Warrant Officer.'

As Mauer read through a few miscellaneous reports, it seemed that the captain had expired due to the inexperienced torturing techniques of the crew. The crew looked mortified, not because the captain had died, but more so they had failed in their assignment. He did have to give the captain some credit, as he remained loyal to the LDF until death despite not having any real combat experience or torture resistance training. He typed into the screen once again.

"I only need ten of you. Dispose of the rest."

 

[Mauer]

Although there was a split second of confusion, shock and nihilistic surrender, the five men--who were the main individuals involved with captain's torture and also the other five marines stationed on board the LSS Crescent Dawn--quickly used their makeshift knives to attack the crew members around them. Two died immediately to clean cuts across the jugular, spraying blood across the captain's corpse as well as the rest of the crew. He noted that Magnus Walker immediately body-blocked Cynthia into the corner, being poised ready with a combat knife in his dominant right hand and his left hovering over his leg: Mauer deduced that Walker must have some concealed blaster that was smuggled on board in order to accomplish his duties.

The other crew members quickly banded together into groups, although it was difficult to stop the momentum the five marines had. While the five marines had ample hand-to-hand combat training, the rest of the crew were simply naval officers and engineers who had never seen any real violence until today. And so, it quickly just became a one-sided slaughter for a few minutes, as the marines swept through and systematically murdered ten of the crew members, until the crew were able to steel themselves to band together and charge at them collectively. Three of the marines quickly became overwhelmed and beaten to death with a few durasteel plates and plain old fists, while the other two were just able to fend for themselves. After a dozen crew members were incapacitated or killed, the last marine finally died and the crew finally settled down. Looking around, they realized that there were only seven who were able to stand, with the rest either being killed or gravely injured.

The five who were fighting the marines noticed Magnus and Cynthia in the corner of the bridge and stared at them with hatred, jealousy and contempt, but prioritized treating the wounded. They quickly realized that there were two that were critically injured and five that moderately injured, leaving a total of twelve alive. Looking up at the monitor for further instruction, they were only greeted with silence as Mauer was focused on his data scrapping of the ship's internal database. The crew turned to Magnus and Cynthia, realizing that if they and the critically injured died, that the quota of ten people would be met, hopefully ending the bloodshed and madness.

Magnus coldly looked at the five other crew members and pulled out his concealed blaster from his leg, aiming the blaster at the nearest crew member. "Kill off the critically injured and then, the injured navigation officer and weapon systems officer. The medic and two engineers are more valuable."

Lowering the blaster, he added in a more reassuring and softer tone of voice, "You need my combat and survival expertise to survive. I doubt that this terrorist will let us return home on a ship, and so we need to band together."