The Happy Jelly erged at the edge of the Glowing Zone in a lurch. Its oft-repaired and barely functional FTL drive strained to bring the ship into realspace without breaking her apart.
Ves gripped the cushioned pod seat sight at the mont of transition, but everyone else simply shrugged off their nausea and went back to work. They had already beco used to the violent transitions from the higher dinsions back to the lower ones.
"Damnit, this ship will really kill them all so day." He muttered as the seat automatically withdrew the straps that held him in the pod. "Tell you didn’t enjoy the ride, Lucky."
"ow!"
Lucky didn’t look too chipper either. The glowing blue lines of energy between the gaps of his elegant bronze plating burned bright now. Ves surmised that Lucky already accumulated enough energy to evolve from level 2 to level 3. For so reason, the gem cat held back, likely because Ves needed his help if he wanted to make it through the upcoming campaign.
It didn’t help that many of the chs the Whalers used enjoyed less than stellar maintenance. The lack of leadership, the shortage in manpower and the pervasive attitude of doing the bare minimum resulted in a lot of heavily degraded chs.
The ch technicians often dismissed the minor problems that piled up in a ch, unaware that several unrelated errors could cascade into catastrophic faults down the line.
Ves had accessed so of the logs and noticed that the Whalers didn’t fight very often. This had allowed the problems to fester, because the Whalers never really experienced a significant loss arising from a lack of maintenance.
Now they faced a reckoning. According to so of the contingency plans the Blood Claws passed to the Whalers, each ch might be facing an average of six intensive engagents. In these kinds of pitched battles, the chanical state of any ch was of extre importance.
Too bad none of the Whalers really listened to him. The few tis he got hold of Walter, the burly man told him to piss off and bother soone else. When Ves approached the officers like Fadah, they’d tell him that he worried too much.
"Sure, our equipnt is crap. That’s a fact. They’re cheap to get and cheap to use. We break things a lot, so we don’t actually bother trying to keep our gear in shape."
Indeed, over seventy percent of the chs aboard the Happy Jelly consisted of frontline chs. In addition, the Whalers acquired at least half of them through the grey or black market, so their reliability was questionable.
Their only advantage to the gang was that they cost only several million credits a pop. The most basic frontline ch in the Bright Republic could be bought for five million credits. In comparison, Ves thought that so chs looked like they’d been salvaged from a battlefield and refurbished up to a point where the Whalers snapped them up for half the minimum price.
Very obviously, the Whalers could put a lot of chs on the field this way. Most of its mbers consisted of local recruits from Cloudy Curtain who hadn’t been able to attend a fancy advanced academy offworld.
This ant that most of them lacked the training and skills to pilot anything more sophisticated than a barebones frontline ch. It would have been useless for them to pilot sothing as sophisticated as the Blackbleak as they wouldn’t be able to control the ch efficiently.
"That’s still no excuse to neglect the maintenance of their chs!"
Ves wanted to tear his hair out. Even though he kicked the ch technicians assigned to his command into action, they quickly returned to old habits once he walked away. Discipline was nonexistent and playing gas on their comms turned out to be their most frequent activity.
It also didn’t help that Ves didn’t quite fit in with the loose and casual brotherhood the Whalers fostered among themselves. His goodwill for gifting the Blackbeak quickly faded away, and his constant prodding of getting people to work quickly earned him a reputation for being uptight and serious.
He didn’t care about what other people thought. Everything he accomplished now was one thing he didn’t have to compensate for when the Whalers made landfall.
"That’s not far away now. I’ve got to get the fast-reaction squad in decent shape before we touch down. I won’t be able to overhaul these chs on the surface of an active planet."
The Happy Jelly and the rest of the Whaler fleet slowly gathered in a protective formation and began to fly deeper into the Glowing Zone. On the bridge, a large amount of alerts sounded out as the Jelly’s sensors strained to identify all of the active thruster emissions.
"At least five-hundred ships are already burning their way towards the inner zone! Over a third of them haven’t activated their transponders!"
"Hah! Looks like the pirates are scrambling to get a piece of the action as well." Walter joked as he gazed upon the giant projection of the Glowing Zone and the ships they detected so far.
It did not look too good. While the Whalers brought around twelve functional ch carriers and four supply ships, much of those ships only carried a dozen or half-a-dozen chs. Only the Happy Jelly was large enough to receive acknowledgent from the Blood Claws.
Over the next day, the Whaler fleet sluggishly brought their ships towards a random coordinate relative to the Glowing Planet. The Blood Claws along with a handful of smaller outfits already gathered there. The Whaler fleet turned out to be among the last who arrived, much to the consternation of the crew.
"You should have invested more in your ships, then." Ves pointed out to Fadah.
"Every extra credit spent on a ship is one credit less we can invest in our chs."
Ves could have said that their entire budgeting rested upon a flimsy foundation. Sure, they might not have been able to do anything about the quality of their ch pilots, but they should have put more care in the quality of their chs.
Right now, Ves had given up on changing their mindsets. They needed to experience the folly of their ways with their own eyes before they beca more receptive to his ideas.
"When are the Blood Claws setting off?"
"I’m not sure." Fadah shrugged his shoulders as he patted the Blackbeak. He constantly ca back to Ves to demand more adjustnts. "Last I heard, all of the outfits that we know of have arrived. We’ve got over two-hundred ships by ourselves. That’s got to be enough to put the ch Corps to pause."
"I don’t think so. The ch Corps always goes for quality over quantity. The Republic doesn’t have the ch pilots to spare for them to throw their lives away so easily. Just one of their carriers can accomplish the sa things as your entire Whaler fleet."
"That’s a lie!"
"Fadah, even a single fleet carrier outmasses your entire collection of ramshackle converted transports. I can tell, because I’ve been on one."
There was no getting through Fadah’s thick skull. Practically all of the Whalers except Walter only possessed a limited perspective on how the galaxy truly looked like. Walter could have disabused them of their notions, but the gang leader didn’t seem to bother.
The delays annoyed the Whalers and much of the other outfits that answered to Monty. Several other fleets such as those led by the rcenary leaders already flew past them as they made their way to the juicy planet. It galled the impatient gang mbers to see others getting ahead.
That was until one rcenary transport randomly erupted into pieces.
At first, the rcenaries aboard the ship around them thought that soone had sabotaged the vessel. The rcenary commanders quickly acted to stop any trigger-happy rcenaries from firing back.
It turned out the transport had fallen into an invisible curl in spaceti. That quickly halted the vanguard of the fleet. Who could tell if the space ahead hid sothing else?
The transport t its end at a fairly significant distance of three light-hours away from the Glowing Planet. Such a distance should have been more than enough to ignore any possible emissions from the active planet due to the inverse-square law.
"That’s why the Blood Claws haven’t gone ahead." Ves realized. "They’re waiting for sothing that can mitigate the glowing planet’s hazards."
"Do you reckon it’s the ch Corps we’re waiting for?"
"I don’t know of the ch Corps even understands what is happening with the Glowing Planet. My gut tells they’ll borrow the technology from the Coalition or the CFA."
They only had to wait a couple of hours before their answer arrived. The 4th division of the ch Corps arrived with massive splendor. Their large, specialized carriers had no trouble recovering from the transition and quickly ford into smaller elents before they soared into the Glowing Zone.
Hundreds of carriers built for war escorted a smaller number of essential transports. Ves estimated that the 4th division’s fleet brought over ten-thousand chs spread over five unique regints.
All the pomp and circumstance succeeded in cowing the other powers. The 4th division boldly sped their way towards the inner zone without fear for falling into any inexplicable hazards.
Before everyone could scratch their heads and wonder whether the ch Corps had lost their mind, a number of strange transports split up from the main fleet. Several transports moved to each major fleet, including the one centered around the Blood Claws.
News quickly passed on what they contained.
"Those transports are carrying the Republic’s gifts! They’re carrying sothing called a dinsional smoother! They emit so kind of field that anchors local realspace and makes it harder for the Glowing Planet to do its freaky stuff!"
The explanation barely satisfied Ves. The so-called dinsional smoother probably had a better na, but the Blood Claws or the Whalers probably couldn’t wrap their heads around the original aning, so they grasped for sothing simpler to describe its effects.
The na did its job, he supposed. Everyone had been able to imagine the implications of a dinsional smoother. They had to get close to it and hope that it emitted enough power to withstand the Glowing Planet’s mood swings.
The Blood Claw fleet received three transports, which quickly took up a triangular formation. Naturally, the ships under Monty’s the Betrayer’s direct control received the privilege of flying alongside the transports carrying the dinsional smoothers.
The Whalers had been assigned at the furthest edge of the formation. That said a lot about their worth to the Blood Claws.
"They don’t think much of us!"
"Worst mistake they ever made!"
"We’ll show them what we’re made of once we start fighting!"
Truly, the amount of delusion that had infected the Whalers reached a ridiculous level. No matter who he talked to, everyone seed to think the campaign would be a walk in the park, or at worst a slog through a muddy road.
Only Ves thought that the road ahead resembled a treacherous cliff. Sotis, he regretted joining the Whaler fleet. He hadn’t imagined they’d be so incompetent. Then he thought about Raella and the missions he accepted from the Society and the System.
He had a feeling the System knew more about the Glowing Planet than anyone else in this star sector. When the System broke its silence and demanded him to seek out sothing from the planet’s core, Ves received a massive fright.
"There’s sothing about the Glowing Planet that nags . If it only hold a huge amount of junk exotics, how co its emissions are so strong?"
It would have been explainable if a ship ended up dead if it wandered close to the Glowing Planet’s orbit. Yet to be able to influence its surrounding space so much to the point of tearing apart a vessel light-hours away, it must be hiding sothing special.
"I guess we’ll see in a day or two when we make landfall."
Once the Blood Claw fleet settled into place, the huge formation slowly swept forward. All the other fleet resud their journey to the Glowing Planet as well once they gathered around the dinsional smoothers.
Everything seed fine and dandy, until a large number of ships arrived from a different angle. Alarm swept throughout the ships which figured out the identity of the newcors.
"It’s the Vesians!"
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