Never Blob, A Recycler's Story
We were out on the edge of the DarkStart23 empire, a border riding member of the Impalers Alliance. Not a single one of the three of us crewing the D.S.S. Jawz were in good spirits. While not the oldest of ships, our recycler was not exactly running grand. It was in fact a quilt of patch-up jobs and emergency repairs. We knew that if we were to come under fire we wouldn't stand a damned chance.
That didn't stop command from ordering us to Planet Deux for some unnamed and unexplained mission. We had signed up for this job and we would be damned if we failed to follow orders, so we simply didn't. I, as the captain of this bucket of bolts, was required to see to that. A member of one of the smaller recycling fleets we had been rarely sent into a danger zone, so when we arrived at Deux to see the jump gates alight and several leviathans arriving with heavily armed escorts, my pilot and engineer began writing their wills on the spot.
The sheer number of capital ships that we swerved in and out of in the orbit of Planet Deux was daunting. Nearly the whole of the Alliance's fleet was gathered on Deux. Even from our own empire, the number of Dreadnoughts was overwhelming. Some member of the alliance had spared no expense and currently had eight Death Stars circling Deux, apparently for defense first and foremost. It was clear that whatever we were going to be involved in, it was going to be intense.
At least that was our first impression.
When we made it into orbit around Deux, our only orders were to await more orders... so naturally once my men had finished rewriting their wills, I ordered them right back to work purging, cleaning, repairing, replacing, hell we even did more than a little under the counter dealing with other recyclers in orbit trying to get parts. Our ship was a monster made of the parts of other ships.
Though the downtime was prime for repairs we began to notice that as the hours ticked by, commands from above stopped coming in. Hours stretched to several days by Un's standards and before we knew what was going on, we had settled into a familiar rhythm there. Whatever fears each of us may have had in the back of our mind... well let's just say that we found ways to stave them off. Every once in a while we had the closest thing to 'away time' we were likely to get, a visit to one of the neighboring Death Stars which were not all doom and gloom and technology. At least, not these. Room to really stretch our feet was vastly appreciated.
And I didn't mind the mocha chinos made in the northern hemisphere's small food and recreation area. For being such a huge ship, they devoted something like one ten-thousandths worth of space to the people inside, but still this crew had found a way to handle that. It made the impending doom we were bound to suffer bury itself beneath thoughts of duty and reward. Believe it or not efficiency between our little three man crew went up, including my own.
Call us bad officers if you will but perhaps we simply got too complacent. I blame that part entirely on command and its silence and the alliance's unwillingness to make a decision. The first thing I noticed was a small part of the force on the base withdrawing. Small enough not to be a worry though the whole of the fleet from the TauSaur empire. That evening myself and my fleet made its last visit to the Daunting the friendly Death Star we had been long orbiting Deux near. We listened to the rumors buzzing about the small recreation area and we dismissed them mostly as falsehoods.
It was not until that very next day that we would realize just how false those rumors weren't and how foolish we were.
It was dawn for the capital city on Deux. The planet's leaders were waking up and having their eggs and bacon. We were waking up and eating our field rations. They were taking walks through their pretty gardens, smelling flowers, laughing with their children. We were crawling through the access tubes in the D.S.S. Jawz and working on sealing up a leak that had appeared without warning though not without explanation; everything was falling apart.
Neither they in their cozy comfort nor we in our cruel and cramped compartments knew to expect what was to happen. At 09:00 standard alliance time, the familiar double flash that announced warp ships that had been launched through a jump gate glared from all sides of Deux. I witnessed one of the larger of these while talking with the chief engineer aboard the Daunting and we simply theorized that the TauSaur empire had returned.
They fell in on us like a storm of Drekons. Hundreds of thousands of ships released their bay doors and millions of fighters and heavy bombers began to spill out into the orbit of Deux. I managed to call my crew back to the bridge before taking control of the ship myself and making to get behind the Daunting. It was a sight to see, watching that Death Star literally vaporize hundreds of enemy fighters. The best we could do was take pot shots and hope to hide behind it, it was, after all, the size of a small moon.
The air waves were alive with cries for assistance and retreat and moving forward, none of which were coming from out command which seemed to be mute on this sudden and brutal attack. I was able to transfer the responsibility of getting behind the Daunting over to my pilot just in time for a missile to slam into the hull of the ship. The signal that represented my chief engineer went dead on the platform and I was left with a sinking dread as I fought to seal off the damaged and decompressing sections of the ship.
To say we were moving at half power would be an exaggeration. I took control of our gunnery and spewed laser toward the attacking frigate. A disruptor beam shot from the Daunting and wiped it clean out of space. My heartbeat was drowning out the noise over the communications line as we approached Daunting and I took one last look from our port cameras. Like the literal biblical beasts, a wave of leviathans, surrounded by heavy bombers.
I turned back to the line I had open to Daunting's engineer. He was busy in the background of the feed, but apparently he had just been shown what was approaching them. He turned to look at the camera, at me, one more time.
“It's been good knowing you, John.”
Those were the last words he would ever speak. Forty leviathans opened fire on everything in sight, ripping the Death Star apart almost instantaneously in a maneuver a friend of mine would have called an 'Alpha Strike.' The mighty explosion sent Jawz spiraling out of control and it was all my pilot could do to keep us from slamming into a friendly Battleship that was passing behind us at the time. With failing engines we did the only thing we could and made for the surface of Deux. A few seconds after entering atmo, we both fled for the escape pods. A passing beam, whether it came from the battle or from the surface defense systems we'd never know, destroyed our ship as we began the long fall to the surface of the planet where we would land in its largest ocean.
That ocean is probably the only reason I'm alive to stand here in the great hall of the Marx Alliance now to speak to all of you. So let me say it one last time, gentlemen. Unless you're sure you're the baddest mother in the 'verse, never ever blob.