Star Hawk Rises

CHAPTER 66: WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!


I smirked as I mentally started sending messages to the control tower through my console informing them we were ready for departure. It took them a few moments to reply and green-light our departure, and we were quickly assigned to a departure window. I slowly shifted the large frigate off the deck. She felt heavy and a little sluggish, almost like the landing pads had a magnetic pull towards the deck. But once I was up, she became light as a feather and I could feel the raw power in her engines. Resisting the urge to test the engines, I went to stow the landing pads when I noticed the 'disengage magnetic locking pads' button next to the stow landing pads button. I made an oops face, and quickly turned off the magnetic locking pads before stowing the landing pads. I gently flew the old girl out of the hangar and into space. Tower wished me a safe trip and disconnected moments after I started pulling away from the station.

A few moments after I had finished angling the front of the ship towards open space, a navigation window opened in front of me. It was displaying the route I needed to take for the most fuel efficient course to the edge of the Solar System, where the green line stopped and turned blue for a few meters, then disappeared entirely. I glanced over at Travis who just grinned at me, I couldn't help rolling my eyes at his smart ass look before I turned the ship to follow the route set by navigation. After a few dozen minutes, I slowly sank back into my chair as I waited for the ship to fly far enough away from the station that I could finally see what this old girl really had under the hood. I was about to complain to Travis about his route taking forever to get out of the station's orbit when the station's flight tower clicked on and announced I had passed outside their orbit. I was free to depart as I saw fit.

I watched the tower click back off, then grinned as I reached down and grabbed the throttle and kept my eyes on the few meters of blue line.

"Engaging fuck off mode in 4… 3… oh fuck it, this is taking too long!"

I slammed the throttle all the way forward and the next thing I knew I was way past the blue line and still heading out of the Solar System at an insane speed that I was having trouble processing. I quickly pulled the throttle back down to where it had been before I stopped and sat there in confusion.

"What just happened?" I asked the bridge.

"Um, Captain, we are currently floating dead centre between one Solar System and the next…" Travis said slowly like he couldn't believe what he was saying.

"Oh shit! I know what is going on!" Brendan suddenly screamed as he jumped from his seat to look around at all of us in excitement.

"Well, get on with it, stop keeping us in suspense." Travis spat back.

"Right, well back when my dad was just getting old enough to get his class there used to be ten ships, they were called the Lost Series, they were built to go far beyond the speed of light." he grinned at us like we were meant to know what the lost series were.

"We don't know anything about that, hurry up with the specs and explanation." Zeo shouted at him.

"Uh, okay, well I will have to do some digging in engineering to figure it all out because I am seventy percent sure not all the systems are turned on yet, so we got unbelievably lucky just now. However, we certainly have the speed from the engines, we should have a shield that can tank any meteorite. And that should also come with an AI that is designed to slightly move the ship around any planets, suns or other things that the shield can not withstand the impact of. But the best part is these ten ships were designed for covert operations, they each had a different function, so when they all worked together they were damn near unstoppable."

"Okay, then why do you know about them but the rest of us don't." Trevor suddenly asked.

"Oh, that's easy, my dad was obsessed with the legend of these ships, no one else actually believed they existed so they were quickly forgotten about, and became even less important during that time that my dad got his class, because that was also the time that the invention of the subspace drive was released."

I was about to open my mouth to ask a question when my HUD suddenly received a holo chat from General Lucas Winch. 'Odd' I thought as I mentally clicked answer and waved everyone else to be quiet.

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"Flight Captain, you should still be in system right, unless my meeting took longer than I thought, ah doesn't matter, I am going to reroute you to a space dry dock, you can toss that old junker into a scrapyard near there somewhere and board your brand-new frigate that I have managed to acquire for you, I had to call in a few favours and do a lot of complaining about your last ship being stolen from your command only for someone to toss a junker at you, so rude. Anyway, I am sending the coordinates to your navigation now. Hope you are a bit happier" he declared as he waved and went to hang up, but I managed to beat him to it by asking a question.

"And if I should want to keep it for myself?"

I saw him freeze up and a look of confusion ran across his face before he slowly lowered his hand and sat up a little straighter in his chair.

"You want to keep the ship?"

"Well, yea it's the first frigate I have been inside, and my home Orbital Station isn't allowed to build military assets for itself yet, and any we do build the galactic federation buys before it's even off the yard."

"Ah, I see, well it's certainly an old ship, and it is about to be decommissioned and scrapped. But even so, I can't authorise the sale of a military asset to a civilian that only holds a rank of Frigate Flight Captain. I am sorry, Flight Captain Mackenzie, you can't have that ship."

"Yes, sir! Plotting course to the assigned junkyard now, we will reach our destination as quickly as we can to offload this ancient frigate and acquire our new one from the dry dock" I replied with a little annoyance in my voice.

General Lucas Winch, nodded his head and then vanished from my Holo screen, and I let out a sigh of annoyance while I waited for Travis to send me the new course. Moments later, I was I received a request to activate the subspace drive. I did so and felt the ship begin to sink without actually appearing to move, moments after that the stars turned into streaks of light and most of the controls on the ship turned off. I sat in my chair watching it all as I thought about this beautiful old ship being turned into scrap metal. I was soon shaken from my musing when the streaks of light reformed back into stars and I felt a lurch as if the ship was rising. The controls quickly started to turn back on.

"We have reached the Solar System, plotting course to junkyard now" Travis called out to the Bridge.

Moments later the line appeared in front of me and I followed it at cruising speed and slowly worked the throttle up, trying not to engage the ultimate speed again. We sailed across the Solar System unaccosted and soon arrived at our destination, I flicked the radio to the correct channel and requested landing clearance of an Ancient Frigate Class Ship, coming in for decommissioning.

We landed in the designated spot, and we all moved to disembark with a slight sadness. However, when I met the guy that was buying the ship to scrap it, I almost begged him to sell it back to me, even going so far as to explain that I thought there was something up with the engines and I wanted to study them. Instead of him offering to sell the ship to me, he asked a question.

"Were you holding down the little button on the side of the throttle when you pushed it all the way forwards?" he asked with a knowing look on his face.

I frowned as I tried to remember, but after a few brief moments, I slowly began to nod my head. "Yea, I think I was, why?"

He burst out laughing, even going so far as to slap his knee, as I stared at him in confusion and was starting to feel annoyed and like a fool.

"Oh, that was a good laugh, I haven't had one of those in a long time. Oh, you don't know?" he suddenly switched his tune when he saw the confusion on my face.

"Oh, uh, well the button on the side of the throttle engages the hyperdrive in these old ships, before subspace drives were invented they used a hyperdrive to get between solar systems, this one was probably top of the range for this model of ship before subspace drives were installed into all the newer ones." he explained.

I let out a loud sigh and nodded my head, letting it go, the ship wasn't the lost ship we had all thought it might be. I slowly started laughing at how foolish the entire incident was.

"Hey, if you want to buy an old frigate class ship, I have one that was commissioned around the same time, sitting over in yard 4D. It's pretty banged up and barely kicks over, not to mention its shield emitters are busted and there is a huge hole in its side. However, you could seal off the bridge, there are working life support systems in there, you could limp back to a dry dock through a gate. I can sell it to you cheap, and it will free up space to store this ship before I export it to the Military Museum."

"Isn't it a military asset like this one?" I asked in confusion.

"Oh, it was, but some rubber neck pencil pushers came by a decade or so ago and stripped a bunch of parts out of it and left it there, telling me to sell it to who ever I wanted because it was no longer a military asset."

I slowly paced for a bit as I thought it over. On one hand, I wanted a frigate ship in my solar system that was mine to fly because they were so cool. And I was getting sick of the Galactic Federation buying everything I built that was bigger than a drop-ship. Plus, I knew that once we got those salvaged ships back into some semblance of working order, the Galactic Federation was just going to buy them and not let us keep any of it. We were basically salvaging it to fix it so we could get paid for returning working ships to the Galactic Federation. I turned to look at the man and nodded my head slowly.

"Alright, here is what we are going to do, Zeo unload our skiff and take it and everyone to the dry docks to pick up our new work Frigate. I'll take Brendan and go look at this playing around Frigate."

Zeo snickered but nodded her head and said "Aye Captain, come on boys you heard the Captain, let's get to work." and they quickly departed leaving Brendan and I staring at the scrapyard owner.

He grinned at us as he turned and started walking towards some floating flat bed looking thing and encouraged us to hope on it.

"Alright, let's go sell a brand new beloved home!" he shouted as he pushed the flat bed thing into gear.

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