Title: A Second Chance at Honor<br/>The Players:<a class="username" data-user-id="815" data-username="@Wendium" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/815/">@Wendium</a>&<a class="username" data-user-id="205" data-username="@Miss Mori" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/205/">@Miss Mori</a><br/>Tags: scifi, space, fxm, romance<br/><br/><div class="bbCodeSpoiler">
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<span>Spoiler: <span class="bbCodeSpoiler-button-title">Prologue</span></span>
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<div class="bbCodeBlock-content">In the distant future, humanity had successfully colonized the stars. Starting with the Moon, then Mars and the moons of the gas giants. AFter half a millennium advances in technology created the first generation gravitational impeller drive and inertial compensators, allowing travel at several hundred gravities of acceleration without peril and with that, the stars themselves became reachable.<br/>
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More centuries later the breakthrough into Faster Than Light travel was made by scientists working in the Tau Ceti system. A massive antimatter reaction created an artificial singularity which a ship generating a modified impeller field could surf through hyperspace dozens or even hundreds of light years at a time. The first true interstellar colonies were founded and trade times between Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani and Sol dropped from decades to weeks.<br/>
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The second diaspora spread humanity further afield from their home system. Eventually nine systems were settled by mankind, first as colonies of one of the ‘Trinity’ systems and then as sovereign states. A loose government formed between the various worlds and star nations: the Solarian League was little more than an overstretched, overly ambitious political entity with no real power save to enforce interstellar trade laws and keep the various nations from coming to blows.<br/>
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Through it all, the Interstellar Trade and Communications Company, ITC, held the monopoly on the jump gate technology and the network of ‘black boxes’ carried by all interplanetary spacecraft that received, buffered and retransmitted thousands of terabytes of data per second through the void, facilitating interstellar communication between systems thanks to boxes carried on starships making transit through the gates.<br/>
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With increased trade came trade disputes and piracy as the Trinity systems used their status as hubs to enforce their will on the smaller systems. ITC’s exorbitant tolls on the trade of military hardware to the smaller systems further kept the independent systems from becoming free from ‘Trinity’ rule as they became dependant on the Trinity Alliance Starfleet for anti-piracy protection.<br/>
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Eventually one system, at first thought to have been a lost cause due to a dozen ships making transit and never returning, emerged as an interstellar powerhouse. The Gemini Protectorate, a three-world star nation located in a distant binary system burst onto the interstellar scene 400 years after the first starships made transit from Sol, their founders vowing to break the stranglehold of the Trinity. Their non-ITC-controlled jumpgates and powerful Navy and merchant marine made them and their three former-colony systems a force to be reckoned with, nearly upending the balance of power.<br/>
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For over 200 Terrestrial Years after that the GSN was the most powerful navy in space, but eventually complacency set in. With ITC lobbying relentlessly the Geminese Parliament eventually decided to downsize their Navy and turn over control of their jumpgates to ITC. Scores of Heavy Cruisers and system patrol craft were destined for the scrap heap, barred from being sold to the trade cartels by new laws preventing the Navy from selling its assets to foreign and domestic corporations large enough to maintain them.<br/>
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The Navy and the Ministry of Commerce, forced to comply with Parliament’s wishes conspired to do what had been previously unthinkable. The Navy exploited a legal loophole allowing them to set the price of a ship and stretched the letter of the law to its limit, offering entire cruisers to their captains for a day’s pay and granting them, and any crews who retired in-situ massive bonuses. At the same moment the Ministry of Commerce used a long-forgotten law to issue Letters of Marque to those Captains, pledging them to protect Gemenese and Allied shipping and leaving them free to seek other opportunities with crews of their own making.<br/>
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Parliament never lived it’s greatest blunder down.</div>
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</div><br/><b>01 - Tin Can Castaway</b><br/><br/>Ten years on from the day he and his ship left the Geminese Navy, Captain Sam Harkness and the Gemenese Merchant Ship<i>Manticore</i>had fared better than most of her sister privateers and had been turning a profit for eight of those years and had the best crew in space (or so her captain thought) to show for it. After years of anti-piracy runs all over League space he’s finally snagged a plum gig: protecting the convoy run between Gemini’s capital planet of Grissom to the adjacent Virgo star system and its sole inhabited world, Conrad.<br/><br/>The incredibly rich Bean Asteroid Field had turned Conrad into the richest of Gemini’s former colonies and the sheer scale of their mining operation left no place for pirates to hide, making it the safest picket for any privateer and thus, the most profitable.<br/><br/><i>Manticore</i>materialized in normal space after the jump from Gemini and Sam resisted the bout of nausea FTL travel induced. Around him his senior staff worked their stations as sensors reported their position. Outside, the 500-meter-long cruiser’s grav sails burned brilliant blue for a hundred kilometers in all directions as its sails bled the energy of transit.<br/><br/>Sam leaned forward in his command chair and looked at the enormous holo-display at the front of the bridge that was slowly populating with their new system’s layout and the ships and satellites surrounding ‘Conrad 5’, the gravitational dead zone trailing planet Conrad in its orbit by 120 degrees.<br/><br/>“Jump complete, Skipper,” the pilot reported from his station.<br/><br/>After a moment the man seated across the bridge from him spoke up, the master plot refreshing again. “No wave sigs detected out to one light minute, Skip,” the young ex-PO said leaning back comfortably in his chair.<br/><br/>They didn’t expect anything on the milk run, after all. They were escorting a convoy of a half dozen megafreighters, to the safest of ports.<br/><br/>Sam yawned and ran his fingers through his hair in thought. “Easy money,” he said in a stage whisper before clearing his throat. He stood up. “Anyone for coffee? Tea?” They had an hour to wait until the rest of their convoy made transit and until then he didn’t have much to do-- his people knew their jobs.<br/><br/>The Astrogator, the youngest member of the bridge crew retched for the third time into a strategically-placed bag and stared daggers at him. He smiled at the girl, took a breath and straightened his tunic. “Alright, Rabbit, you know the drill, reconfigure for impellers, take us out of the drop zone, and let me know when the last hauler drops in and is ready to get underway.”<br/><br/>The pilot turned to him and gave a mock salute. “You got it, Skip,” he said, turning his chair back to his console.<br/><br/>30 minutes later, Sam returned to the bridge early, having been summoned by a cryptic message from the weapons officer. What greeted him was a pair of blips on the main plot in addition to the three blue dots of their in-system consorts. One, with identifying marks, was green and the other flashed amber and red. Sam furrowed his brow in confusion. “Is that an unidentified impeller signatures, Wizzo?” he asked. “Did you forget to refresh the IFF code list?” he joked, patting the ex-petty officer on the shoulder.<br/><br/>The kid shook his head, the joke sailing over his head. “No, Skipper, she’s not broadcasting an IFF and there's no record of her signature in the database,” he pointed to the dot, “the other reads an an ITC-registered relay tender, she’s holding station on top of where the C5 sunward comms relay should be.”<br/><br/>More confusion in sam’s mind. He stared at the plot. “There’s nothing unusual about that,” he said, stroking his chin., The unidentified signature gave him pause,<br/><br/>“Yeah, but look at the bogie, from her power curve and vector, she’s gotta be gunning for that tender,” the young man's voice was excited, but concerned.<br/><br/>They’d both seen similar tactics countless times, especially when it was something far enough off the trade lanes civilian sensors would never see them. “Time to probable missile range on the friendly?” Sam curled his lip at calling an ITC ship ‘friendly’, but tenders were filled with working-class stiffs, not executives.<br/><br/>Wizzo worked his terminal. “Looks like 15 minutes.”<br/><br/>Sam sighed, wheeling around. “Bee, Rabbit, how fast can we get there?”<br/><br/>The two had been crunching numbers on their console since before Sam got back to the bridge. “30 minutes for a zero-zero on the friendly, 15 to missile range on the bad guy,” Bee replied, her hoarse voice carrying across the bridge.<br/><br/>Sam considered the options for an instant then moved to his chair and activated the intra-ship comm. “All hands, this is the skipper, we’ve detected an unknown hostile and possible ship in distress. All hands to General Quarters.”<br/><br/>The GQ alarm sounded and he turned back to his bridge crew. “Alright, everyone, as an old CO of mine used to say at a moment like this, let’s be about it.”