Posted: 23 Jun 2021 04:50 AM PDT

Where can I find this Free mantis merchant?

https://preview.redd.it/0sbitmwa70771.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=6669fe2568279f235ce85cead2572abd40b69fc4

submitted by /u/Deadly-Phantom
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Multiverse Travelogues: Sector 2—S-96-L [Liberated]

Posted: 23 Jun 2021 06:20 AM PDT

Starlight was distorted in hyperspeed, stretching long and thin. It gave the illusion of immense speed, but FTL drives were more than simple thrust. More complicated, and some would say more eldritch. Those who truly understood the mechanisms behind the drives were always off in some way. Space madness, they called it, that odd variety of mental conditions that arose when too close to an FTL drive for too long. Federation safety regulations stipulated that anyone living in an FTL-capable craft must disembark for at least one cycle in a hundred for that reason. When people started ignoring those regulations, entire sectors would suddenly fall prey to piracy.

Bloch shook his head. Too long alone and he tended to retreat into his own head, often thinking on the hows and the whys of the multiverse. Some would call his thoughts traitorous, and he … well. He wouldn't disagree, exactly. The federation from his home universe was the same organization in name only, and if he could admit it was much improved as it was now, he could also imagine a universe where there was a focus on stopping the ever-expanding battles entirely rather than just making war more efficient.

"So. Justin. The atlas says we're heading toward separatist space. What's it like?"

A sigh came through the comms system. The sound kind of reminded Bloch of a violin. "Much like any sector dominated by your own species, I imagine. There is no data uplink I can access, as that would allow a vector for reinfection from harmony."

Lisandra waved their … fronds? The pattern apparently meant something, as Bloch's translator buzzed to life soon after. "I have a cousin who broke from harmony! She had to dehydrate many parts of herself, but a few years of rehabilitation and she regrew into a glorious artist. I tried to mimic some of her best pieces on the walls. This one is Light That Breaks and Scatters," they said, pointing to an empty stretch of wall near her console.

Oh yeah. Invisible paint. Bloch shrugged. "Right. We're coming up on the entry beacon, everyone prepare for hostiles."

But as they jolted back into reality, nothing met them. They spent most of a cycle searching around for any loose scrap, but there wasn't anything worth salvaging either.

Not the most auspicious start, that. No one to say hello, nothing to find, only them and the beacon. It was rather eerie.

He scheduled the jump.

An engi outrider-class ship sat at the next beacon. As soon as the sensors picked up its presence, Justin became … agitated. Its nanites spread out and started vibrating, sending a faint buzz through the comms. Then Bloch's console lit up with an incoming hail. He sent a note to Lisandra's console to check on Justin, then focused on the screen in front of him.

There was only audio, a short request for supplies so it could hunt for traitors. As for the specifics … they didn't even have what it was asking for, and he said so.

A new voice took over. "Then give us everything you do have, yeah?"

If a fight was what they wanted, a fight was what they'd get. Bloch took a look at the internal sensor map. Justin was diffused back into the weapons systems, Lisandra tweaking the engines. Good, that left him just enough time to avoid the bolt of ionizing energy heading for the ship.

Or not. It fizzled against the shields with a dull noise, the systems fizzling as they struggled to dump the excess heat before it fried anything. One layer left. He dodged away, cursing under his breath as a stable green sphere of energy arrived after the ion bolt, locking down the shields entirely. Then another of pale blue impacted above a corridor, the energy grounding out to no effect.

Their own weapons fired, two, four, six lasers streaking across the void. The engis had a basic defense drone operational, and it picked off one of them while one more broke against the shield and two missed. The final two took the ion weapon offline, leaving the ship without the firepower to continue acting as a threat. The next volleys slowly shredded more and more systems, until the entire vessel was nothing more than a floating heap of scrap.

They stayed only long enough to salvage the wreck.

The rebels had taken over the next beacon. A marauder-class ship steered toward them, a dual laser and a nasty-looking hull weapon lighting up. Then a hail came through. Bloch looked on in bafflement as the captain on screen prepared to … recite poetry. Or so she claimed.

"Ahem: die. That is all."

Okay then. Weapons were online, everything pointed at the rebel's own weapon system. Justin performed its role admirably, and their own volley went off before the rebel's. Just like that, the enemy's firepower was reduced to nothing. The AI was picking up panicked hails from the small rebel station.

The other ship was broadcasting surrender. The other captain appeared on screen, looking rather less upbeat as she spoke. "You know your chances. If you let us bring you in, you and your crew will live the rest of your lives in comfort. This offer is authorized at the highest levels. Three other crews from your universe have already accepted."

Bloch raised his eyebrows. "That was an interesting bit of poetry, earlier. Makes me feel very inclined to hear you out."

She grimaced. "Bah. Fine, have it your way."

The station blew apart with immense force, destroying or scattering every bit of potential salvage. Her sour expression turned into a grin. "When this is all over, and my corpse is drifting between the stars; imagine me laughing."

A marauder-class always left a good bit of salvage behind. They scooped it up before the jump.

There was no time to react. An engi cruiser was hammering a small pirate frigate to smithereens—it wasn't even a contest. At the same time, the alarms blared as a heat signature teleported aboard. A mantis, wearing a uniform of all things. That couldn't be comfortable. Before Bloch could draw his pistol, the mantis got down and begged for sanctuary. Then a hail came through. The engi were offering a sizable bounty in exchange for giving up the mantis.

Bloch cleared his throat. "Okay. Makes sense. Problem is, we don't exactly have this guy restrained, and he's said he'll work for us." Not explicitly, but it was implied. Besides, the ship could do with a mantis. Having someone beat his brain halfway out of his skull once was more than enough.

"Then you will die."

Somehow, the engi ship had gotten a teleporter lock on the mantis and beamed him away. Then they teleported a bomb straight into the engines. Bloch jerked the ship away, but it was sluggish. The engi fired a heavy bolt of ionizing energy into the shields, bringing them down in one blow. Then a laser hit, lighting a section of the corridor.

"Opening airlocks!" he yelled, before venting the entire port side of the ship. Then their own weapons brought down the engi vessel's shields and took the ion weapon offline. A repair drone launched into orbit about the enemy ship in response, liquifying, smoothing over, and patching the damage. That was … annoying. To make matters worse, their shields hadn't recovered from the ion damage, and the engi laser was still online. It hit the engines, making Lisandra flail about in pain before she started to gingerly rewire the system around the molten components.

Finally, finally the shields were back up. And the fires had gone out without doing any significant damage.

The rest of the fight was a slog. The engis couldn't keep their weapons fully online for long enough to do any damage from that point forward, but the drone was keeping them functional well after they should've been nothing but a shattered hunk of metal. When they finally blasted the ship into oblivion, there was no sign in the wreckage of the mantis they'd taken prisoner. Lisandra visited the medbay, everyone avoided talking about what had just happened, and then they were off.

A formation of engi ships had set down on a moon near the beacon, drones erecting a series of semi-permanent structures. Two ships were stationed in a gentle orbit around the moon, a defensive screen of drones active and alert for any attack.

Bloch hailed the closer of the patrolling ships, which broadcast a request. A sizable reward in return for taking down a nearby separatist ship. When he tried inquiring about the details, all the engi told him was that it was 'dangerous.'

Right, well, if they couldn't prove the separatist had actually done anything, he wasn't going to hunt down and murder someone just because they didn't want to be part of a hivemind. In fact, if he did agree to the engi's request, odds were Justin would straight-up desert at the earliest opportunity.

"Sorry guys, no can do."

The engi immediately distanced themselves and became unresponsive to further communication, leaving them a little time to themselves to discuss where to go next. Bloch wouldn't call himself an expert in engi body language, but the rotating swarm of nanites that made up Justin's form seemed a bit calmer.

"So that's what a harmony link looks like," he said to himself. A planet's worth of nanobots, all swirling and dancing together.

"Hey, Justin," he said, loud enough for the comms to pick up this time. "This thing won't try to … er, get you, will it?"

He got a laugh in response. Some other separatists had managed to reprogram the entire structure, which you could apparently tell by some minute detail of how the nanobots moved. This link was disrupting harmony links in this sector, leaving all engi with only the substrate they brought with them.

They drifted about for a while, Bloch admiring the massive arrangement, until they came within range of a separatist ship. He hailed the other vessel. The engi responded with a request for missiles.

"Uh, yeah, why?"

They sent over a data packet. Bloch opened it. Those were certainly … words. And numbers, those were there too. "Hey, Justin! Can you read this for me? I just found out I'm illiterate."

Right. So, they wanted to test military-grade explosives on a small portion of the link to, essentially, see what happens. Justin seemed rather annoyed at that summary, but he didn't disagree, so Bloch decided it was accurate enough. It seemed pretty harmless, and they had more than enough missiles to spare, so he gave the order to transfer fifteen to the other ship. The separatist ship sent back a drone schematic and a bit of scrap. The drone looked quite ugly, really. It had the same crazy lattice structure of wires around it that engi ships generally had, but to an extreme extent. However, despite it looking more like a piece of garbage than a drone, it only required a minimal amount of power in exchange for slowly forming thick layers of energy about the ship comparable to a zoltan shield.

No drone system, though. Maybe they'd pick one up somewhere along the way.

They were down to three more jumps worth of fuel.

Two engi ships were engaging in combat, engi and separatist. Bloch hailed both. The harmonic engi were … trying to brainwash the separatists. There wasn't even an attempt to reframe it, the engi on screen simply stated its goal and gave them a time limit to either help or get out. Bloch gave the order to engage, and the harmonic engi expressed absolute astonishment at a federation ship's refusal to allow a fancy technological version of slavery.

An ionizing blast of energy brought down a layer of shielding. Not that it mattered. The engi ship had a simple ion weapon and a pike beam, and even operating together they stood no chance of breaking through their shields. Victory was swift and sudden.

The separatist ship requested to dock alongside their ship, citing severe damage. Bloch agreed, and another swarm of nanites entered through the airlock. Unlike Justin, this engi called itself L-6437; though when Bloch asked, it agreed to be called L for short.

They spent the rest of the cycle seeing if it might be possible to get L's shape back into working order. The answer was a solid maybe, granted enough time, specific resources, or the right expertise. Since they had none of that, L offered to work on the ship. No one objected, so L took up the empty position in the shield bay.

Two fuel left. An auto-ship floated about, inactive. Trying to break into its systems was risky, but after a quick conference everyone but L agreed it was a risk worth taking.

Turned out L knew what it was talking about. The auto-ship had a mind control module, which Bloch noted before he took out his pistol and sent a shot into the console in front of him. He burned away a few more components before a nanite cloud formed around him and started blocking the shots. In response, Bloch shifted his strategy and focused on eliminating as many nanites as possible. Distantly, he recognized the roar of nearby ship-mounted lasers going off, as the explosive detonation of a bomb rocking the ship.

He gasped, dropping his pistol. That was decidedly unpleasant. He'd imagined mind control would be more of a struggle, but no. It was more like he'd changed his mind and was just very, very sure of what he now had to do, until he wasn't.

The auto-ship was blasted into scrap soon after. It left behind a single intact fuel canister amidst the wreckage.

Distress beacons were prioritized, and when they found a civilian vessel floating near the beacon with a request for two fuel canisters, there was only one thing to do. Their own ship was capable of fending off any pirates that might take advantage of them, unlike the civilian vessel. The other ship thanked them and sent over their scans of the sector, leaving them stranded.

Bloch turned on the distress beacon.

A rebel skirmisher-class ship appeared in a flash. The fight was inevitable. A missile flew by, missing by the barest of margins, and then their own weapons struck, crippling the piloting and weapons.

It didn't last long after that. They salvaged three canisters and jumped to the exit beacon.

An auto-station was positioned near the beacon, black with glowing red lines announcing its presence as clearly as possible. The designs on its hull marked it as a predecessor to the auto-ships of the rebellion. The flagship had a key piece of technology onboard that had allowed the rebels to enslave most of the sapient AI that had been floating about, but it looked like this one remained under its own control. It was selling repair services, which Bloch gladly purchased.

Then they were off to the next sector, a single jump's worth of fuel left.

submitted by /u/Lightwavers
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First Hard Zoltan C win and first no damage win

Posted: 23 Jun 2021 04:48 AM PDT