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Post 1/2
>YOUR CREW
<span class="mu-i">They were born by cohort and organized into clades. Their features were baseline human, marred by the subtle signs of functional implantation.</span>
<span class="mu-i">Thoracic plug-ports for bridge crew. Enlarged brachial plexi for engineers. Hypertrophic axons for interceptor pilots. </span>
<span class="mu-i">None of them feared death. Every ten cycles, their memories were synchronized with their clade-siblings. The oldest would encode their combat experience in the terse language of chemical connectivity. The youngest would imprint themselves to remember old victories and redeem past failures. </span>
<span class="mu-i">Your captain pitied them once. He had balked at the incubator levels buried deep within your hull, where cultured stem cells filled endless scaffolds of printed bone. </span>
<span class="mu-i">But after several years, his discomfort softened.</span>
<span class="mu-i">You remember seeing him on the bridge, studying an intricately carved trinket. It was made from dense, varnished hardwood – grown in one of your spare incubator levels at the request of your crew. </span>
<span class="mu-i">“They carry these whenever they sortie,” he said, holding the trinket up to your cameras. It was triangular – an artistic rendition of your fleet emblem.</span>
<span class="mu-i">“It’s for…luck, if I'm not wrong. A reminder of the only home they have.”</span>
<span class="mu-i">A few cycles later, your captain begins to keep one too. Simple and crudely cut – but always worn around his neck.</span>
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You examine the wooden trinket again. Triangular, with a smooth surface. You run your fingers across it carefully to find faint indentations where finer detail had been eroded away. Someone had cherished this one for years, perhaps even decades.
You blink to clear your vision, and – after a moment of hesitation – decide to choose to keep the trinket in your hand as you begin connecting data lines to your spinal ports.
The ship whispers to you now. Your form is different, but the language remains the same. Simple binary, slowly transliterated by clade-specific neural anatomy.
<Escort Carrier. Perihelion Class. Three launch bays. Standard complement of seven thousand cloned ancillaries. Current complement of one.>
You order one of the carrier’s functioning drone-tenders to exit the hanger bay. As it plays its searchlight across the outer hull, you see battered weapon mounts and radiation-scoured armor. Field emitters protrude from the hull like blunted teeth. A small field of ice crystals silhouettes the main drive aperture.
>Roll 1d20, best of three for structural damage. [DC: 6, 12]
As the tender returns to the hanger bay, its sweeping searchlight catches something out of place. Behind empty launch cradles and damaged fighters, you find an unfamiliar ship. The design is beyond makeshift. A cold, depressurized habitation module mated to a grossly underpowered drive unit. The external hull is unadorned, save for a triangular design too radiation-faded to discern.
