Humanity Endures

Part 8 - Preparations | Chapter 6

Her protective harness deploying around her and her personal quarter's chair, securing both of them to the point where she couldn't move if she wanted to, Farlina gritted her teeth and grasped the arms of her seat as tightly as her hands would allow — violent deceleration was a brutal, lethal thing, if one didn't prepare for it. Forcing her eyes shut in anticipation of the imminent action of the ship's thrusters, Farlina felt herself instinctively seize up, her breathing being reduced to fearful hyperventilating as she became all the more aware of the claustrophobic confines of her chair.

Across the entire Ruthless, each and every crew member was undergoing the same experience, bracing for a deceleration they had only been informed of thirty seconds before. Another instant, and Farlina, her thoughts pushed from her mind, was violently thrust forward in her seat as the Ruthless began decelerating, her harness doing much to mitigate the damage while her body, having been genetically engineered to survive ridiculously high G forces, did even more. Countless personal items — anything that wasn't bolted to the floor or a wall and was not stowed away as combat regulations required — soon found themselves falling to the ground; the nuclear grenade that Farlina had ordered made and sent to her office could be heard bouncing across the floor, and a cursing Farlina had to remotely disable its charge to prevent it from accidentally detonating in her office. It became clear to Farlina, who felt her bones straining desperately against the sudden thrust, that in the face of such overwhelming kinetic power, one could not do anything other than brace oneself, and try not to die — a remarkably difficult task when such a vicious maneuver was being performed on such short notice. Around her, anything that was not bolted to the floor — on a warship, there were surprisingly few objects like this — was hurled into a corner of the room, and though most of the weapons she had affixed to the walls of her office were spared this fate, the chilling sound of the Ruthless's creaking superstructure did nothing to assuage Farlina's rapidly-multiplying fears.

As her genetically-enhanced heart forced sufficient amounts of blood to her brain, defiantly standing against the forces of physics that would otherwise knock her unconscious, the rapid acceleration sent waves of pain rolling through her beleaguered form, the physical stress of the act threatening to tear Farlina in two while the entire ordeal generated no small amount of mental trauma. However, her strained mind a blur of agony, Farlina was not capable of feeling the more subtle emotional wounds by this point; she strained as hard as the ship around her in an attempt to stay in one piece, but under such impossible forces, it sounded like both her ship and herself were losing their respective battles. It was only after three more minutes of unimaginably violent deceleration that Farlina and the rest of the Ruthless earned reprieve, the ship began to speed up again at a gradual rate, and one no longer needed to be strapped into a chair to stay alive. Her breathing heavy, her body shaken, and her head a foggy mess from the ordeal, Farlina, loosening her harness, sent a textcomm as curious as it was furious to Quenthal directly, demanding to know why the Ruthless had decelerated so suddenly, and, from her admittedly ignorant point of view, without reason.

An instant later, and Farlina, coughing and sputtering as her body strained to recover from the deceleration, received an answer — a wayward Nahmatiixian escape pod had been located in the path of the fleet, broadcasting a desperate request for help that was all but silenced by the surrounding Remnant. Rather than condemn the poor sod, and whatever information this poor sod possessed, to a death within the Remnant, Xertaza had decided to bring them aboard, though this action had required a rather abrupt deceleration.

According to the textcomm Farlina had received in reply, the ship's acceleration would be far more gradual than its sudden deceleration, and that as a result, Farlina was able, if not encouraged, to leave the safety of her chair. Eager to escape the clutches of her sweat-stained harness, Farlina, detaching herself from her chair, momentarily relished the feeling of being mobile once more; the next moment, standing from her seat and grunting in pain as she did so, she resolved to witness the interrogation of the escape pod's occupant in person, for she was now both shaken and curious past the point of productivity. Doubtless, she was high-ranking enough to attend the "event," and as she strode towards her office's nearest hypersphere, stepping over fallen articles of miscellany or damaged display items that littered the floor, she observed the opening of the battered escape pod through the lens of interior cameras. As she knew the layout of her office down to the smallest detail, Farlina didn't even need to switch between looking through her own eyes, and looking through the hangar's internal cameras, as she navigated on superior instinct and boarded the nearest hypersphere. Soon, she was underway, heading towards the brig where the prisoner would certainly be taken; Farlina's curiosity surged as a torpedo-like escape pod was carried from a shuttle, and set down before the rifle-sights of roughly two-hundred marines. However, as the escape pod was dropped to the ground, and when it burst open immediately afterwards, the identity of the person within being revealed, Farlina's emotional state shifted within the space of a breath from one of intense curiosity, to one of utter incredulousness, and, finally, to one of great concern.