Kensai

Lancer [Mechs, Magic, and Intrigue]

Sharlin Vande Tanne

Sharlin's reply was terse. "Wilco," she said, the single word cool and firm.

The Phantom slid through the vacuum, coasting on tiny puffs of cold reaction mass from its attitude thrusters. It was a wasteful way of consuming delta-vee, but lighting up thrusters meant lighting up your opponent's screens. Instead, Sharlin was running silent, accepting inefficiency in exchange for stealth. The game that she played was all about patience - working the angles, the positions, the probabilities. Everything was calculated, but all too much had to be left to chance.

This time, the odds broke in Sharlin's favour. She'd placed the Phantom between the enemy frigate and the Indomitus, deployed a scattering of remotes - small drones, little more than sensor packs with station-keeping thrusters, but enough to extend her sensor coverage and provide targeting solutions.

The little strike craft burned towards the Indomitus. There was no subtlety about their approach - throttles opened full, blazing straight towards their target, trusting to speed and numbers to get through. Given what they probably had to work with, it wasn't the worst strategy. It gave the least possible time to put up defences. Most ship captains, faced with such an aggressive attack, would turn and burn to open up the range and give themselves more time to shoot down the strike - delaying their pursuit.

But that reckoned without factors like the Phantom.

Now the scarlet Core unmasked, gauss carbine spitting iridium slugs as quickly as it could cycle. Sharlin had spent a few precious seconds setting up her shots in a planned firing pattern. Now the Phantom worked through that pattern quickly, methodically. It spun on its axis, the muzzle of the carbine describing a complex arc that sparked each time a projectile left it, every one directed at a pirate strike craft.

The beam gun was normally a better weapon at long range - its near-lightspeed pulse of charged particles meant less flight time to consider. But its capacitors took time to charge, making for a longer firing cycle. The carbine was less accurate against a maneouvering opponent, but it had a higher rate of fire.

Against targets that were flying straight and level though....

It took a half-dozen heartbeats before the first blossom of fire flared against the dark. By that time, Sharlin had already sent the command for her remotes to self-destruct, which they dutifully did. Their last act of service was to burn out spectacularly, acting as flares that hid the Phantom's signature as it returned to silent running.

Another strike craft exploded, and another. Sharlin allowed the expert systems to keep track, her attention on more urgent matters. If she'd missed any, they'd alert her. In the meantime, amidst everything else, she composed a message to Lucia aboard the Indomitus.

She hadn't actually specified earlier just which order she was complying with, after all.

Another thread of light, an encoded and compressed burst transmission. "Indomitus, this is Phantom. Comms intercept follows."

Austin Is Dead

Sure, I wasn't planning on going into unnecessary detail. But good to know that we can touch on these issues. Heads up - Austin's widow is going to have seen a side of him that perhaps nobody else has.

Austin Is Dead

@LanaStorm

Is any type of content off-limits in this RP? E.g. substance abuse, domestic/gender-based violence, and so on?

Austin Is Dead

What type of characters do you want to play?

@LanaStorm

Dare I say, Austin's ex/widow? Someone who knows a side of him that most others don't.

Austin Is Dead

I like this a lot. Call me interested.

Star Wars - Banshee Down

I'm going to take collabs as they come. There will be a time where a large group of us are together, but we're going to see how we develop as a group.

@Kensai as the current Imperial give me a shout if you need help getting started.

@Colonel Sep

Thanks, I'm working on an opening post that's just about establishing Jayla's personality and position. If you don't mind me taking some liberties with the organisation of Outpost Epsilon, I'll create a few NPCs and flesh out the place a little.

Lancer [Mechs, Magic, and Intrigue]

Sharlin Vande Tanne

Sharlin held back a sigh. She took a deep breath before transmitting to the Indomitus, "Phantom. Roger scanning sector Epsilon-Orange. Redeploying."

She goosed the Phantom's throttle, feeding reaction mass into its thruster chambers. The Core responded gracefully, going into a languid turn that bore all the elegant precision of a mathematical solution. Sharlin hated waste, refused to use more thrust than absolutely necessary. It also kept the Phantom's signature to a minimum. All the thermal baffles and low-observability coatings in the Empire were worthless if you simply vented heat recklessly.

And the less you radiated, the better your own sensors worked, at least in passive mode. And if you were looking for something out there that might be able and willing to shoot back - possibly with much larger guns than you had - you wanted to be able to look without announcing that you were looking.

A twist of a dial activated a small servo arm that deployed a dedicated sensor control deck in front of Sharlin, swinging it out from a slot beneath her left armrest. It was a reassuringly physical thing, with knobs and buttons that could be operated with gloves on, under g-loading, by touch. Through long familiarity, and hours spent configuring the deck just so, Sharlin could tune every aspect of the Phantom's prodigious sensor suite without a glance away from the screens before her.

Sharlin was a spider in the centre of an exquisite web whose strands were streams of ions and eddies in magnetic fields. The Phantom's myriad sensors trickled data into its expert systems, which processed and abstracted it into useful information. Stripped of noise, they resolved into a picture that Sharlin's human brain could make sense of, and direct the Phantom's own computer mind - far larger, far quicker, but literal and limited - to identify among all the possibilities.

It took less time to do so than the other Cores of the Lance needed to get into action.

Sharlin toggled the laser comms on, and another thread of light connected the Phantom with the Indomitus. "Indomitus, this is Phantom. I think I've found what you're looking for...."

Star Wars - Banshee Down

Name: Captain Jayla Vess
Species: Lorrdian
Age: 32
Appearance:

IMG

Equipment: Light blaster pistol, wrist-mounted dataslate with hidden lockpick set
[b]Abilities(For Force Users): N/A
Skills: As an Imperial Intelligence officer, Captain Vess is a highly skilled operative, trained and experienced in the dark arts of infiltration, slicing, and data gathering and analysis. She is aided greatly in this by the Lorrdian mastery of kinetic communication, being able to read the body language and microgestures of most sentients to determine their moods and intentions.
Weaknesses: Confident to the point of arrogance, Vess holds the intellectual capabilities of most others in contempt. While her faith in her own beliefs is not unjustified, it can lead to underestimating friends and foes alike.
The rivalry between Imperial Intelligence and the Imperial Security Bureau is vicious - to the extent that Intelligence operatives joke that the ISB spends more time snooping on them than any other organisation. This is not far from the truth. Doubly so for Vess, who is considered doubly suspicious due to her racial origins.
History: Jayla Vess was born Ja-v'la Na Isha on Lorrd to a family that struggled in poverty. Despite all the disadvantages this imposed, the clever young woman managed to scrape together an education sufficient to qualify her for a spot at the Imperial Academy, which was actively recruiting Lorrdians for the intelligence services due to their special talents in kinetic communication, considered particularly useful in interrogation. Vess grabbed at this opportunity to get offworld and make something of herself, and has served with distinction since.
Unfortunately, the infighting within the Empire is sometimes even greater than its conflict with the Rebel Alliance, and much of Vess' time and efforts have been wasted in internecine struggles with the Imperial Security Bureau. She hates the ISB with a fury that the Rebels cannot evoke in her - she considers the Rebels professional targets, who might be expected to resist her efforts, but the ISB are clumsy, brutal goons that know only how to break things and rile the populace against the Empire.
She has grown increasingly frustrated with the Empire, and how she is treated as a second-class citizen, almost a non-Human, despite Lorrdians being genetically Human. It may not take very much for her to decide that she's had enough of her current posting at Imperial Outpost Epsilon on Tregallion... especially as the lockdown and the influx of personnel means that an entire company of ISB has fetched up on her doorstep claiming jurisdiction over the case, and trampling all over her carefully curated contacts and plans.

Star Wars - Banshee Down

Name: Captain Jayla Vess
Species: Lorrdian
Age: 32
Appearance:

IMG

Equipment: Light blaster pistol, wrist-mounted dataslate with hidden lockpick set
[b]Abilities(For Force Users): N/A
Skills: As an Imperial Intelligence officer, Captain Vess is a highly skilled operative, trained and experienced in the dark arts of infiltration, slicing, and data gathering and analysis. She is aided greatly in this by the Lorrdian mastery of kinetic communication, being able to read the body language and microgestures of most sentients to determine their moods and intentions.
Weaknesses: Confident to the point of arrogance, Vess holds the intellectual capabilities of most others in contempt. While her faith in her own beliefs is not unjustified, it can lead to underestimating friends and foes alike.
The rivalry between Imperial Intelligence and the Imperial Security Bureau is vicious - to the extent that Intelligence operatives joke that the ISB spends more time snooping on them than any other organisation. This is not far from the truth. Doubly so for Vess, who is considered doubly suspicious due to her racial origins.
History: Jayla Vess was born Ja-v'la Na Isha on Lorrd to a family that struggled in poverty. Despite all the disadvantages this imposed, the clever young woman managed to scrape together an education sufficient to qualify her for a spot at the Imperial Academy, which was actively recruiting Lorrdians for the intelligence services due to their special talents in kinetic communication, considered particularly useful in interrogation. Vess grabbed at this opportunity to get offworld and make something of herself, and has served with distinction since.
Unfortunately, the infighting within the Empire is sometimes even greater than its conflict with the Rebel Alliance, and much of Vess' time and efforts have been wasted in internecine struggles with the Imperial Security Bureau. She hates the ISB with a fury that the Rebels cannot evoke in her - she considers the Rebels professional targets, who might be expected to resist her efforts, but the ISB are clumsy, brutal goons that know only how to break things and rile the populace against the Empire.
She has grown increasingly frustrated with the Empire, and how she is treated as a second-class citizen, almost a non-Human, despite Lorrdians being genetically Human. It may not take very much for her to decide that she's had enough of her current posting at Imperial Outpost Epsilon on Tregallion... especially as the lockdown and the influx of personnel means that an entire company of ISB has fetched up on her doorstep claiming jurisdiction over the case, and trampling all over her carefully curated contacts and plans.

Star Wars - Banshee Down

@Colonel Sep

Would it be cool if I made an Imperial who's about to defect? Could play it out with some egregious stuff happening that tips the scales for them.