Collection 30

Collection

Chapter 30

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

Claybrooke, Free Worlds League

3003 September

It took me over the course of three months to finish the mothership, and I had to say…

There was a fucking reason that so many people didn’t like Minmatar aesthetic in EVE Online. Like, I get it. If you were the rough and tumble, then you wanted to show the people that you were a rough mofo. 

But there was a difference between rough and shoddy, and the Minmatar appearance bordered on shoddy than rough. 

A good example of this was the Minmatar frigate, the Burst-class support frigate. 

It literally looked like someone took three rods and welded two ships together at the ends of those sticks. And the solar sails. Those were auxiliary power support for Minmatar ships because they had such horribly inefficient power reactors that they used a system that no one else in that universe used by the time of the Minmatar Republic’s birth. They needed those sails to bleed off extra heat, otherwise, the pilot and anyone else inside the ship would get cooked. 

Thankfully, the Nidhoggur-class Carrier that I based my mothership off of didn’t have that kind of nonsense, mostly because Minmatar wasn’t lacking in advanced technology for their more important ships, just poor as fuck that most of their ships had to deal with crap.

I had my Nidhoggur upgraded with everything I could put into its massive hull. 

Nidhoggur-class Mothership

Class: Carrier 

Tech Base: Inner Sphere - Persean Sector

Cost: ~20 Billion C-Bills

Mass: 1.4 Million tons

LWH: 1,200, 250, 160 meters

Safe Thrust: 5 G

Max Thrust: 15 G

Armor: 2,500 tons of Titanium Diborite

Armament: 20x Rapidfire Large Laser, 40x Siege Missile Launcher, 1x Flux Shunt Cannon

Bay Wing 1: 15x ASF or 1 dropship

Bay Wing 2: 15x ASF or 1 dropship

Bay Wing  3: 15x ASF or 1 dropship

Bay Wing 4: 15x ASF or 1 dropship

Cargohold: 200,000 tons (max) or 1 million m3 (max)

Ship Maintenance Bay: 2 dropships (max)

Crew: 10 minimum; 1,000 maximum

Escape Pod: 40

Heat Sinks: 4,250 Singles

FTL: Yes, New Eden Warp Drive; Yes, New Eden Jump Drive; No, Inner Sphere Jump Drive; Yes, Stargate Hyperdrive

Special Ship System: Flux Shunt Cannon (vent all stored up heat are conducted toward the forward facing Flux Shunt Cannon. Locks down all other systems except the essentials [piloting, life support, inertia dampener] for the charge duration. Venting 1,000 single heat sink worth of heat provides one charge.)

The most impressive thing about this mothership was not the special ship system but the fighter bays. 

While fitting sixty ASF bays into a warship was not really a feat in and of itself considering just how few weapons it had, what was more impressive was what I’d done with them.

See, each and every single one of those bays have been fitted out with Wasp-specific microforges, and since each bay could fit six Wasps for space that one ASF could fit in, this carrier didn’t carry sixty ASF.

It carried two-hundred forty Wasps, each of which can and will under my command kamikaze an ASF for a one-to-one kill. And since Wasps could fly at some pretty high speeds even when compared to ASF, even warships weren’t safe from mass kamikaze runs from Wasps that I could replace as long as I had the materials for them.

This meant that nothing short of ComStar’s full armada could stop me in the Inner Sphere. 

And then there was the Flux Shunt Cannon. 

It was my attempt at incorporating the flux shunt system found in the Persean Sector, but something didn’t quite work out even with my literal supernatural engineering skills and knowledge, so I’d done what I could and assembled it into something that did work. 

The Flux shunt Cannon essentially took the heat, transferred them into the forward facing plasma cannons, and let it rip.

Against shielded targets, it wouldn’t do too much damage.

Against unshielded targets? 

Which was everything in this universe? 

A well placed plasma burst might just break a warship in half. 

I won’t have any chance to test it out, though. ComStar was too skittish to send any of its flotilla after me, and the Clans weren’t going to be in the Inner Sphere for half a century.

“Umm, Ed?”

I paused my train of thoughts and looked over my shoulder. It was dad. He’s been doing his best to help, and recently took up the communication officer role. 

“Yeah, dad?” I asked. 

“We have someone on comms saying they are a representative of the Duchess of Andurien…”

… Huh. 

Did I want to meet a duchess? Who was going to try to cajole me into doing something I didn’t want to do? On top of that, this was probably Duchess Humphreys, the most anti-League Leaguer, the woman who wants to gain independence for her duchy. 

… Well, she sent someone to meet me. The least I could do was tell them no in person. Over the radio.

“They said they’re here with the duchess.”

That complicated things a little bit. Even here within the Free Worlds League, a commoner doesn’t just get to snub a duchess without consequences. 

“Arrggghhh,” I moaned and my dad chuckled at my misery.

-VB-

3 days later…

Duchess Catherine Humphreys

Claybrooke, Free Worlds League

3003 September

“Oh my God,” someone muttered as they came upon the sight that left everyone shocked and terrified. 

When Catherine chose to come here in person, she did so because she knew that her presence would carry an extra weight that her representative did not. She was Duchess of Andurien, and not even the Captain-General can ignore her. In fact, it was she who threw objections at the Captain-General, not the other way around. 

But as she took in the sight before her, the confidence that came with her position, power, and lineage felt … a tad bit smaller. 

“That’s a warship,” Catherine hummed speculatively. “Does anyone know what class it is…?”

The dropship pilot looked like he wanted to turn the ship around and start deceleration right now. He glanced down at the computers surrounding his station and gulped. “Unknown design and make, Your Grace,” he reported. 

“I thought so.”

Though she was maintaining her decorum and calm outwardly, she was half-panicking on the inside. 

“Your Grace, a message from … The Maw.”

As if to punctuate the point, the dark ship’s thrusters flared and it turned its prow toward them. 

And what a cavernous maw it was. 

The triangular opening in the hull glittered with lights of what had to be aerospace fighters inside of it. But instead of looking like an airfield or even the insides of a dropship, it looked like the mouth of an alien god filled to the brim with needle-like jagged teeth. 

Like a maw ready to swallow them all. 

That’s when a pair of dropships launched from the side of the ship instead of the maw and swerved around with surprisingly acceleration, deceleration, and maneuverability. 

“That’s impossible,” the captain muttered as he stared at the dropships. “T-Those ships should be killing inside of them with how quickly they’re accelerating and turning!” Considering that the ships came to a hovering stop at each side of the giant warship, this obviously wasn’t the case.

“And the message, captain?” she asked impatiently.

“R-Right. Umm…” he gulped. “Luke 10:5. When you enter a house, first say, ‘peace to this house.’ That’s it, ma’am.”

She wanted to snort but felt too nervous to do it. It would come out as weak. Scared. “If they want to play at being a devout, then send them this message. 2 Thessalonians 3:16. Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in every way. The Lord be with you all. End of message.”

There was a pause. 

And then the lights within the ship’s maw lit up in fluorescent orange.

She wished they hadn’t, because she saw rows and rows and columns up on columns of fighters ready to go and savage whomever Arlaoskas’s ire fell upon. 

“Jesus Christ,” someone else muttered. 

The captain looked down at his computer when it pinged. 

“Ma’am, there’s an instruction… for us to fly our dropship into the middle of … that.”

The dropship she came in was a Union, one of the many that was held by her duchy and its armed forces. 

It was … it was small enough to fit into the maw. 

She finally felt a natural snort coming out of her. 

The Maw. 

“The man has a twisted sense of humor if he wants us to enter his Maw so willingly,” she drawled. “Go ahead.”

“O-Of course…” the captain really didn’t look like he wanted to but obeyed her order. 

Slowly, her dropship flew across the void and into the maw of the giant warship and came to rest inside of it. She noted how the fighters she saw were hanging from the giant slanted slates that adorned the front half of the warship on either side like wasps hanging under a wall. There were hundreds of them, too.

“Duchess, they sent a shuttle to pick us up.”

“Very well,” she said as she pushed herself up from her chair. “Let us go meet this … Fleetmaster.”