Part 6 — The Crucible

On her way to the Crucible, Valentina realized she hadn’t slept in days. She always had the strangest dreams when she visited this place anyway. The Ancients called it the Gallows of Time. Valentina never knew exactly what that meant, but to her it was the place where time goes to die. The FTL engines of the Asterius had worked hard over the last week. Valentina knew that her ship needed some serious attention, and she hoped that Mateo would have a hanger to spare at his home in the remote outlying star system whose name she couldn’t remember. Luckily, she still had its coordinates though after all these years.

Mateo’s place was ramshackle, or at least that’s how it was supposed to look to approaching ships. It was one of many bolt-holes maintained by the wider smuggling community in case one of their own needed to cool their heels. It was bigger (and more armed) than it looked.

Valentina knew Mateo well. They met when she first branched out into smuggling, just after she got ahold of the Asterias. He was a better than average forger, usually had reliable pass-codes, and kept a couple decent mechanics on staff. He had a lot of friends who knew a lot of things. If she was lucky, he may know something about her run gone sour.

Mateo was about as close as any decent smuggler came to a trusted friend. Valentina would go so far as to say she trusted him. “Trust is a dirty word. The dirtiest,” her mentor used to say. She was reasonably sure she wouldn’t be betrayed, but that didn’t stop her from keeping a close eye on her surroundings as the Asterius came in for landing.

Valentina set the Asterias down on one of Mateo’s many empty landing pads. Mateo didn’t entertain very often, and he didn’t like most people enough to let them use his personal landing pad. Still, she took the liberty of front parking, rather than the larger pad out back, the one reserved for clients.

“Still got that bottle of brandy I gave you?’ Valentina called in a teasing as she wandered into the house, knowing full well that he drank it long ago. Under the cover of its rough outsides, Mateo kept a tidy space. She wasn’t just being cute, she was announcing her identity in hopes that she could avoid getting blasted by a security bot. Mateo took his security very seriously. “Picked up heat and I don’t feel like fighting today.”

“Valentina Barbaro, running away from a fight? My goodness, is the End of Times on us already?”

Mateo’s rough, gravelly voice drifted out of his living space, so Valentina pushed the beaded curtain out of the way and stepped into the large kitchen where the man was waiting. He was a short, stocky old man with a wild beard and a nervous twitch to his hands.

“Little more heat than I like to tangle with,” Valentina chuckled as she stooped to kiss his whiskered cheek. She felt a strange tenseness in Mateo when she moved in close. “Something the matter?”

“This and that,” Mateo told her with a wave of his hand he was attempting to play off as casual. “Let me see what I have in the cooler. I know you like fresh fruit.”

He was dodging the question, and that wasn’t like him. Mateo liked the sound of his own voice too much to ever keep quiet. Once his back was turned, Valentina’s eyes took a quick attentive stroll over the table where he had been sitting. A lone data chip sat not far from Mateo’s data pad.

Without quite knowing why, Valentina snatched the chip. She knew it wasn’t the best idea, but curiosity got the better of her. She justified it as payback for their last encounter, when Mateo’s foolishness had cost her a handsome payout. No room for mistakes like that. She jammed the chip into her own data pad and downloaded the content quickly, then set it back exactly where it was just a moment before.

Glancing at her pad , she could make out coordinates of some kind, maybe something valuable even? Valentina promised herself a better look once she was back on the Asterias.

“So, tell me about the fight you don’t want to fight,” Mateo said when he came back from the kitchen, a plate of cut fruit in hand. “Anything that’s too much for Valentina Barbaro is my kind of story.”

“Thought it was a normal run,” Valentina told him, just a little bitter as she took a piece of fruit. “Last stop took me through Shepherd’s Void, and you know how they get about smugglers. I was hoping you maybe heard something?” The fruit was bitter too.

“Plenty of chatter in subspace but nothing about you, Valentina. I think you have the right of it, Garrison hates smugglers, nothing more, nothing less.”

“Well it’s good I got paid in advance then. I’ll be steering clear of House Space for a long while.”

And with that, Valentina has left the Ember’s Grace star cluster, meaning that claims there are no longer available until she returns. Perhaps the next chapter of her story will reveal her next destination.

Stay tuned for more of Valentina’s adventure, and the next cluster of the Celestial Claim Land Presale, from Echoes of Empire!

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The Celestial Claim Land Presale begins tomorrow, November 10th. To be notified early via email, sign up at Echoes-of-Empire.Game.

Part 5 — Celestious Nox

Every now and then, Valentina crossed through a region of space that was a little more dangerous than that controlled by the usual penny-anty warlord or trumped up space pirate. In the case of Celestious Nox, it was because of the Miasma. Empire Cartographers had studied the Miasma for generations and were largely uncertain of its purpose, sentience or even its composition, except to say that it was made up of a high-energy, viscous, hyper luminous material that lured unwary pilots and ships to their doom. That’s not to say Celestious Nox was a deserted sector of space, there were entrepreneurs aplenty, rich asteroid belts and mining colonies built along the razor’s edge of the Miasma. It even had a space-base or two, hastily built to support the mining communities. One of the largest was referred to as “Old Nox”, an ancient Imperial Hub and one of a handful of Mark 1 tracking stations still online, to this day desperately trying to peer through the stellar Misama that slowly cut off the Empire from the rest of the galaxy.

It was a hard run getting out of House space and into the Ember’s Grace star cluster that led into Celestious Nox. A couple of hastily plotted jumps put some much needed distance between her and the Garrison, landing her dangerously close to the pulsing edge of the Miasma. Valentina hated to push the Asterias that hard, but it was the only way. For a brief moment she even thought she might have given the Garrison the slip but her revelry was interrupted by a loud crack followed by a series of whumps, alerting her to the presence of several Garrison fighters as they dropped out of FTL and raced toward the Asterias. If she was going to make it out alive, she’d need more than just fancy flying.

As you’d expect, the Miasma had produced quite a bit of space debris over the centuries, and Valentina took advantage of it. The pilots behind her were trained for war, but she was a smuggler. Learning to smuggle meant learning to lose a tail. They might be more skilled flyers, but the Garrison wasn’t up to speed on all the dirty pirate tricks that Valentina had learned to live by.

“Right, the first order of business,” she muttered to herself and ran her fingers over the console calculatingly. “Let’s start with flares and mines. See if that gets their attention.”

They were expensive, but worth it. Valentina flipped the switch and watched as thousands of miniature space-mines deployed from the back of her ship. Larger orbs floated among them. A press of a second button triggered the flares, and Valentina smiled to herself. Bright flashes pierced the darkness of space and, as they were meant to, gave away her position.

Four Garrison ships shot towards her. They hadn’t opened fire yet, and she was hoping they wouldn’t until she chased them off. She didn’t want to kill them, but it wasn’t like they were going to try and bring her in alive, no matter what they claimed. She was going to have to cripple their ships, or lose them long enough to jump out of the system.

The flares threw smaller sparks of light in every direction and shot in circles thanks to the tiny rockets affixed to each little sphere. The blindingly bright flares made it very hard to see the little mines Valentina had released at the same time.

With the vacuum of space to buffer them, Valentina couldn’t hear the small explosions, but she knew those mines and she knew what they did when they hit a ship head-on.

When she looked back, one of the ships was gone, and another was listing hard to one side. One of the mines must have hit their stabilizers, because the pilot seemed to be struggling just to keep their ship from drifting further into her impromptu minefield.

Good. It was hard to fly with a ship that wouldn’t go in a straight line.

With two down, Valentina was feeling more confident about her chances. She honestly hadn’t expected to get two of the four ships with the mines.

Now that they were distracted, she took her ship down through the space junk that lined the approach to the Garrison base. It looked like the half-gutted wreckage of a huge cargo ship, and the hull of it was more than big enough to fly through without so much as brushing the sides. Valentina wove through the wreck until she spotted an opening ahead, then cut hard to the left. It was a tight fit, but she hoped that the sudden course change would startle the smaller fighters behind her.

Just to add insult to injury, she fired a second line of flares into the wreck. They were bright inside the thick, crowded darkness, and with luck, the disorientation would be enough to crash another of the Garrison fighters.

When neither of the ships emerged from the wreck, Valentina sighed in relief, but didn’t relax. She hadn’t seen that first ship get destroyed after all.

“I just had to think it,” she muttered when she caught the glint of thrusters and picked out the shape of a Garrison fighter against the nearest star. It was moving slowly, but it didn’t look damaged. Either it had made it out of the wreck, or it had avoided the mines in the first place. Now it was looking for her, and the smaller ship was powerful enough to destroy the Asterias if it got a clean shot. Her ship was a cargo ship with some creative additions, not a Garrison fighter with Military-grade hardware. “Okay, fine. Time to try something different.”

Before she could reach into her bag of tricks again, tracer fire crawled across the bow of the Asterias, and within seconds, set off alarms throughout the ship. The pressure shield clamped into place as Valentina cursed, and cursed again when she realized that the oncoming ship wasn’t alone. The crippled ship wasn’t as crippled as she hoped, and had her dead in its sights. Valentina hammered the thrusters forward, taking the Asterias into a tight roll and heading straight past the second fighter, back towards the wreck. She needed better cover as she warmed up the engines for a longer jump.

Entering the wreck gave pause to her pursuers and just enough time for Valentina to plot an actual course across the ecliptic.

Clearly, something had gone wrong on that last job, and she wasn’t about to let that slide. Valentina punched in the coordinates for The Crucible. While it was still in the Ember’s Grace star cluster, it was a great distance from Celestious Nox and far outside of the Garrison’s patrol range. Better safe than sorry.

Valentina slammed her hand down on the console. She’d head to Mateo’s home at the Crucible. Smuggler stories said visiting the Crucible uninvited was an evil omen, but Valentina had never been the superstitious type. That old information peddler might know why she had a target painted on her back, and that info was worth a visit to red sky.

Part 1 — Kepler’s Remnant

Part 2 — Sovereign Protectorate

Part 3 — Lightspire

Part 4 — Shepherd’s Void

Echoes of Empire is a 4X strategy game by Ion Games. Players will begin their journey in Kepler’s Remnant, a zone within protected House Space. Follow along with Valentina as she traverses a galaxy rife with intrigue and danger.

Learn more at the Echoes of Empire Website, and sign up for the Celestial Claim Land Presale that begins on November 10th!

Part 4 — Shepherd’s Void

Military space was always dicey.

It was more complicated than Sovereign Protectorate, because civilians weren’t supposed to be there, and more stuffed up than Lightspire because of their overinflated opinions of their own worth.

Plus, they all hated criminals, so if Valentina got caught here, it would be a real bad day. She had run afoul of the military once or twice when she was younger. That happened to pretty much everyone in the business, although it was definitely easier now that the Garrison had split off from the Monarchy. It meant they didn’t have the time or the resources to focus on the little people.

As one of the little people, Valentina was perfectly happy about that.

Shepherd’s Void was a constellation of shipyards unlike anywhere else in the Empire. Immense, half-finished ships hung in space, surrounded by the darting lights of thousands of workers, all busy building up the might of the Garrison. Valentina wasn’t here as often as she was in Lightspire or Sovereign Protectorate, simply because there was less work for her specific set of skills.

If the military wanted contraband, they could get it for themselves.

Her delivery here was up to one of the sky boxes, where the major contractors did their planning. It was out of the flow of traffic, which Valentina appreciated, but she appreciated the codes that had come with this part of her delivery even more. Klara had handed them over and mentioned that they were part of the asking price for the delivery. No one could get into Garrison space without the right codes.

This time, Valentina’s crates were full of parts. She was a halfway decent engineer, and strongly suspected the parts were for some sort of high-end weapon. It wasn’t her business though, and she didn’t care enough to try and find out. To get to the skybox, it took three more codes, all conveniently provided with the one that got her past the pickets at the edge of Shepherd’s Void in the first place. Here too, were echoes of the same beautiful architecture and design that Valentina had seen in Lightspire and Sovereign Protectorate. The skybox was built to be permanent, and it hung weightless like a single great pillar of brutal, hard-edged elegance.

“Got a delivery for a Captain Posch,” she told the secretary, who had the dead eyes of someone who simply did not care about their job. Valentina loved that kind of person. They hated everything in the galaxy equally, and didn’t care if someone made a little extra around the edges of the law. Then again, there were also a few who hated everything enough to make everything harder than it should be. It was always a gamble. “I was told he was gonna want it personal.”

The secretary eyed her, but pressed a button on her desk. “Captain. The delivery you were waiting on.”

There was no reply, but the door behind the secretary, edged in gold-inlaid geometry, slid open a moment later.

“I will take it myself,” Captain Posch said. He turned out to be an older gentleman. Clean-shaven and upright, but Valentina figured if he was hiring a smuggler, there was a good chance he wasn’t as upright as he looked. “You. Come with me.”

Valentina rolled her eyes and followed the captain back down to her ship, and the sled of his goods.

“I can drop it wherever you want,” she said. It was hard to be polite when the captain clearly had no desire to do the same, but she had pretty much expected that. “Figure you don’t want me hanging around.”

“I’m certain I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Captain Posch said without looking back at her. “In here. I assume you are capable of unloading the cargo yourself.”

“It’s on a pallet,” Valentina told him. She was glad it was, and that she did that for every shipment. She lowered the stack of crates to the ground, and slid the tongs of her sled out of the pallet neatly. Another button folded the tongs neatly inside the sled, “Right. Need anything else from me?”

“No. That is all,” Captain Posch said. He looked over the manifest she handed him and nodded once. “Return to your ship and leave. You will be monitored until you leave Shepherd’s Void. Do not attempt to find other… work while you are here.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Valentina said, for once, not lying. She turned on her heels and headed straight back to the Asterias, trying not to give the captain the side-eye when he walked beside her. It was a relief to make it back to her ship. She gave the captain a short wave and took off as quickly as she could.

Something was wrong. She trusted that gut feeling. The one that told her that a job had gone sour. She saw it in the way the captain watched the Asterias leave, and in the way a so-called escort fell in behind her ship.

When the first shot skimmed past the Asterias’s viewport, Valentina cursed in every language she knew. When more followed, she knew that her bad feeling had been right. She was stupid to think the Garrison would just let a known smuggler fly free.

With a squadron of Garrison attack ships bearing down on the Asterias, and mere seconds to plot a course Valentina hammered at the console.

Would she choose the safe, but patrolled shipping lanes of Lodestar Haven or skirt the deserted edge of the Galactic miasma found in Celestious Nox to make her escape?

VOTE NOW IN DISCORD!

You decide Valentina’s course of action. Cast your vote in Discord now in the ECHOES-OF-EMPIRE-ANNOUNCEMENTS channel!

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Part 1 — Kepler’s Remnant

Part 2 — Sovereign Protectorate

Part 3 — Lightspire

Echoes of Empire is a 4X strategy game by Ion Games. Players will begin their journey in Kepler’s Remnant, a zone within protected House Space. Follow along with Valentina as she traverses a galaxy rife with intrigue and danger.

Learn more at the Echoes of Empire Website, and sign up for the Celestial Token Presale that begins on November 10th!