With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

24th January
18:17 GMT

What a fascinating sight. The Ungaran Commodore is an ambitious woman. The strongest desire is to seize the drifting hulks, repair them and then spread out from Ungara. I hadn't known this until I saw it written in her soul, but apparently this region had some rather strong arms limitation treaties prior to Devlos Ungol's rampage. She believes that the best way to prevent a repetition of that event is to increase Ungara's military power and that utilising the mothballed ships her fleet guards would be the best way to do that. Even knowing how many ungarans died last time they tried boarding the ships. Respect to her though, she wants to lead the boarding missions in person, so it isn't a case of her being willing to throw other people's lives away.

I step back in

a short distance away from her, my armour's stealth and phasing systems activating immediately. The picket fleet's sensors might have detected something at the moment of my arrival, but I would be very surprised if they can detect me as I am now. No… The ships don't appear to be reacting. I turn in the direction of the largest surviving ship and use my ring's flight system to accelerate towards it. As I'm having the flight aura cover the armour's interior there isn't any visible glow, though I might be in a spot of bother if these ships have still-functional phase-defences.

I activate my armour's fracture-pulse communication.

"Heading to the ships."

"We're coming up to the mining station now. Xor, you alright checking the robots?"

"Yes."

There's a moment of silence before John realises that's all he's getting.

"Okay, I'll interview the crew. If anything's going on, they should feel okay talking to a Green Lantern."

"Either that, or get nervous enough that you spot it."

"I don't think it will come to that. I don't see Ungarans willingly working with the Traitor's fleet."

"Hopefully not. Xor, you got the schematics for the robots?"

"Yes." A slight pause. "What are my orders?"

"We need information more than we need dead pirates, at least in the short term."

"Am I authorised to perform identity thefts?"

"If in your judgement it is necessary, yes. However, I don't think we're under any time pressure here. I can be with you in a moment to brand them, and they don't have anywhere to run."

"Understood. Living prisoners."

"Now hold on. We don't know that anyone's done anything yet."

"I am a soldier. Civil policing is new to me. I want clear orders."

"I was a soldier before I was a Lantern. I didn’t need to be told not to brainwash people."

"I could apply the rules of my people. I do not think you would like them."

"He probably wouldn't. Xor, while Lantern Stewart isn't in your chain of command, he does have considerably more experience of this type of work than you. It would be wise to follow his example."

"Understood."

"Illustres out."

The ship is coming up now. The Traitor's fleet tended to build their battleships as artillery platforms, giving them a much flatter shape than those used by the Citadel. They also have a smaller number of far larger guns, a smaller troop complement in exchange for more powerful shields, better sensors for worse FTL preparation time. I'm slightly reminded of the difference between Imperial Titans and Ork Gargants, though that isn't.. entirely correct. None of that ship's guns are tracking me, though I know from Ungaran records that its point defences are still active in places.

And why not just shoot them out? Or destroy the ships? Well, that's to do with why Devlos Ungol is called 'The Traitor' in the first place. His own people did it because he turned the suit of super-armour his world's military built for him against them-.

I frown. Ring, did the people of Tartarath ever produce any other sun-draining artefacts or similar technology?

No records of such technology exist in this ring's database.

That's suspicious as heck. I mean, they never made more and everyone's been assuming that was because he killed the people who made it and he didn't want anyone around who could threaten him. But what if they received the technology from elsewhere? They didn't make more because they couldn't, they just.. had armour and the question was whether or not to use it at all?

Qward might do something like that, but it seems out of character for other examples not to have shown up by now. And-. The other most likely suspect would be a human if this was happening now, but the gap of two hundred years pretty much puts us out of the running. I can't.. think of anyone else with sun-eating abilities…

Doctor Sivana said that the sun in the Sheeda's era looked wrong-. No, no, Sheeda technology has a distinct look, and there's no evidence that they have conventional faster than light technology. Actual Sun Eaters don't work like that, Wotan was using magic… No, nothing's coming to me.

Anyway, the reason why everyone else calls him that is his habit of engaging in 'population reduction' even on worlds that surrendered to him without a fight. He would gleefully agree to any terms they asked, and then betray them. His general attitude appears to have been that since no one could hurt him he might as well do whatever suited his fancy moment by moment. There was even a record of an uprising on his command ship that he ignored as it went on around him and those loyal to him died to a man and only then did he take action.

Which was activating the ship's self destruct and flying out of the explosion like nothing happened.

This ship is the Sureshot, and is known to have destroyed at least twenty capital ships and three continents. There's a gash where the bridge was holed and craters where several of the main guns used to be, but the ship is otherwise intact. Devlos set the internal defences to kill the crews in the event of his death and only a handful were ever recovered alive.

Mildly depressed that such a total shit got as far as he did…

Copying what the salvage teams did I float in through the hole in the bridge. The first thing they attempted to do was connect to the central computer core through the bridge consoles, which was when they first came under attack. The Ungaran marines destroyed the guns at the cost of five of their number. Other weapons deployed -arc wands and plasma sinks- but they were stymied by the lack of an atmosphere.

Ring, status of ship systems?

No automated repair detected. Known weapons remain destroyed.

Okay. The Commodore knows not to look too closely in this direction…

I phase in, stealth systems still active, and use the ring to take control of the sensors the Ungarans left to monitor the wreck. Not reporting changes. Warship hulls are pretty good insulators so even if the interior does light up it won't be easy for them to detect it.

Unless I trigger the auto-destruct. Though even the Traitor didn't design his ships to be able to destroy themselves instantly, so I should just be able to pop back into the Honden and avoid the blast. The Ungaran ships are far enough away that -based on what is known from the ships destroyed during the war- they should be out of range. And I think should because the man's armour literally sucked stars dry and made him invincible and when that's the known top level it's hard to put hard numbers on the potential output of an explosive you haven't reviewed personally.

I look over to the bridge door the Ungarans breached. They set up an emergency airlock, cut through without much difficulty, and two died as the metal within connected to the ship's power distribution system and electrocuted them. I phase through the outer airlock door and look at the breach hole for a moment. No electricity running through it now, and no sign that anyone has been here since. And since my armour is heavily insulated…

I reach out and tap the ragged cut in the door. Hm, that should have destroyed any sensors the ship's computer had built into the structure of the door, and since I'm still pretty much invisible its interior cameras shouldn't be able to see me. The airlock is keeping the atmosphere in, though it's a little thin…

No electricity.

Okay. I cautiously float through the hole and into the ship's interior.

 

24th January
18:23 GMT

The corridors are wide. On a Citadelian ship that would be to allow large numbers of marines in heavy armour to move from place to place at speed. Here, it's to allow engineers to move parts from place to place without having to clear the decks first. Without a real home base for a lot of the time, Devlos's fleet habitually made repairs in space rather than at anchor. That's probably another reason for the flatter shape, actually: getting components to the interior of a ship can be a pain, so they designed a ship with a reduced interior space. Anything that has to go inside goes in through the closest entrance and gets conveyed down the corridors while anything that can be worked on from the exterior is.

The Ungarans made it about halfway down this corridor before the artificial gravity shot up to fifteen times normal and the turrets deployed to kill them. They were only able to recover the bodies later because the guns have a limited arc of fire and the gravity plates could only sustain that intensity for a relatively brief time before needing to shut down. The survivors on the bridge basically fired grappling guns down from the airlock to drag the corpses out, and that was the last time they tried breaching one of these ships.

Still no reaction to my presence. I take a moment to look at the bloodstains left by the fallen salvage engineers. They died here but their bodies were returned to Ungara-. My eyes move to a stain of a decidedly different colour. And the crew who were murdered by their own ship. The Ungarans took their remains as well. I don't think.. they're a particularly religious people, but the cultural files on John's ring made it clear that they've developed a form of secular ungaranism which involves respecting the remains of the dead. This shouldn't be a case for Hades, but… Perhaps I should get someone to check, just in case.

The ship's sensors are positioned as far away from the main guns as possible so that they aren't blinded by their own weapons' fire. Bridge a little back from the sensors because they needed to make sure that flashbacks from destroyed primary weapons didn't kill the command crew, but also wanted to ensure that the bridge was well protected enough to prevent decapitation strikes. Crew quarters towards the outer hull, because in a fight those are basically an ablative layer protecting the vital systems. Main reactor close to the main FTL drive and main guns to reduce energy loss in transmission.

So where's the central computer core? It can't be too close to the guns for the same reason as the bridge, but it can't be too close to the bridge either because the ship can be controlled from either location but is mission-killed if they're both lost. Tending the core requires highly skilled specialists, but it doesn't require all their time, so the core goes near other parts of the ship that require their skills. In the case of the ships of Devlos's fleet, that generally involved putting waste processing and the ship's workshop there, the first requiring pipe connections to every toilet and kitchen on the ship and the second requiring good access pathways because if one of your primary weapons goes wrong you don't want to make it hard for the people with the replacement parts to get to it.

So it should be near the centre of the ship. The scans the Ungarans took before they abandoned salvage efforts certainly implied that this ship had a standard layout. The bridge computers have already disconnected from it, which is a standard procedure for ships crippled in combat. Since the computer should be relatively intact, I'm hopeful that it will have data on fleet support bases which might still survive. Failing that, it should be connected to the ship's internal monitoring systems, so if anyone has been in here it will have a record of the fact.

Ring, anything here that can't be explained by the presence of known salvage crews and ship crews?

No unidentified biological material present- Images of engineer personnel files and crew autopsies and provisional identifications appear in my mind's eye as my ring identifies them. -which can reliably be identified- Particulates of dead skin which have evaded the atmosphere scrubbers but don't belong to known crew members are highlighted, along with their probable species. -as post-dating the ship's destruction.

Hm.

I take a phasing drone out of subspace and send it directly towards where I think the computer core is. That should confirm the location and status of the thing. Ring, scan all adjacent sections of the ship. Anything stand-

All of the guns in the corridor deploy, and my armour registers the destruction of the drone.

-out?

The guns spray the corridor with fire, particle beams lashing the interior walls more or less at random until one slashes across my right arm. Then they all immediately focus their efforts on my location, even as I abandon stealth and create construct armour around me. Some damage to the armour, but then, that's what it's there for. The internal weapons aren't all that powerful-

I fire off a series of destructive pulses, each one punching through the weak force field protecting a gun and destroying it.

-compared to some of the more powerful weapons I've taken hits from. As far as I can tell, these were only here to slaughter the unarmoured crew. Actual anti-boarding defences -amongst the few places that actually use them- aren't positioned like this, the power connections they require are too awkward for anything with serious killing power. Marines are almost always a more reliable bet, though if Devlos felt differently I'm going to need to be a bit careful when I get closer to the computer core. There are all sorts of things an inventive shit like him could have set up.

But since I'm made anyway…

"Ship, respond."

I destroy the last gun in this section and brace for a follow up.

"Green Lantern. I had wondered what I would have to do to elicit a response from you."

Devlos Ungol's voice. The computer has probably decided that I'm similar enough that it should play a recorded message.

"And if you're too cowardly to face me yourself-"

"Devlos Ungol died two hundred years ago."

"-then I will make this ship your tomb."

"I'm not a Green Lantern and you're dead!"

No, no point arguing with the computer. I create a railgun construct, use crumbler rounds to shoot out the bulkhead blocking the way further into the ship's interior, dismiss my constructs and reactivate my stealth systems.

"Shields are now at full combat power-"

Darn it, there's no way the Ungarans will miss that. Assuming that it's actually happened and isn't just what's supposed to happen in the event of a Green Lantern getting on board. Ring?

"-and my entire fleet has been notified! Your-"

Annoying as it is, I should leave it running. Just in case he says something useful.

"-destruction is inevitable, and all you hold dear will follow soon after! The natural state of the universe is bloody slaughter! All else is deceit and madness!"

Eris save me from the hammy ones. No… No, this probably isn't ham. He probably means every word. It's just that after you hear the same nonsense from enough people it becomes hard to tell which of them are just saying it to sound important and which genuinely believe it.

"When I kill you, all those you protect will finally understand! Know in your final moment, Starkaðr-"

"He's dead too."

"-that your tomb will be my greatest triumph!"

I exit that corridor and fly out into a small room with a heavy goods lift. As part of the internal reinforcement measures the ship is split into sections with thick armour between each one. Having one long corridor from the bow to the stern would introduce a massive structural weakness.

I'd have to be stupid to get into that lift. On the other hand, I can't safely phase through the hull of a ship with phase defences, not unless I want a repeat of the Louvre. I generate a crumbler gauntlet construct and wait to see if that provokes a response from the computer.

…

No, looks like it's decided that it can't hurt me with the weapons it has on hand. I slap the gauntlet forward, crumbling the armoured shutter over the lift shaft. Another couple of slaps on the interior destroy the mechanisms anchoring the lift in place and send it plummeting down the shaft.

Right, there will probably be more guns in the shaft, but it doesn't have a better power supply than the nearby sections so they shouldn't be any bigger than the ones that just did nothing to me. I dismiss my gauntlet construct and float forward and the remains of the lift hit the bottom of the shaft. Bit surprised that they bothered putting artificial gravity in the lift shaft, but it's not like anything else Devlos did makes sense to me.

I drop down the shaft.