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The ship wasn’t actually a ship as such. Technically it was a 1970 Ford Taurus. There were reactionless attitude thrusters and sensor-arrays bottled onto every seam and joint, all of which were so crusted with plasticrete sealant that there was almost more glue than there was car. Strips of radiation-pitted titanium cladding bound the thing together against the shear-stress of the two nasty fusion-torches bolted to the roof.
There was a closed-loop life-support system where the engine-block was supposed to be, and a navigational array running on a solid-state obsidian monolith had replaced the passenger seat. The trunk-space contained the deflector-array, plugged directly into an ancient Austroavian null-geometry particle-annihilation drive-kernel which was powering the whole mess (and only occasionally threatening to implode into higher-dimensional space).
There was a phaser-bank in the license-plate, which was both expired and stolen, and a degraded- to-the-point-of-unintelligibility Canadian folk-punk mixtape stuck in the tape-deck, which couldn’t be turned off without also shutting off the avionics.
Spiraling hell-for-leather through the void of the Beyond, strapped into the cracked pleather driver-seat of this junkyard monstrosity, Chaos Agent Rory ruffled his plumage and breathed a sigh of relief.
Overall, he was in a pretty good place. I mean, yes, the penguin was being pursued by the blood-drenched followers of the Cult of the Last Emperor, who were pretty peeved that he’d messed up their prophecy for the sake of Syntech’s yearly televised bloodsport, but those d00ds had been following their weird book’s instructions for so long that they had a hard time making decisions now that things weren’t going according to plan.
They were probably still arguing over what had become of their high priest’s shitty car.
And yes, Rory was still hallucinating occasionally, neurological fallout from abusing the Emperor’s aurora-beams and overloading on the eldritch power of the End prior to his unfortunate demise and subsequent resurrection in last years Dante’s Abyss; He’d catch glimpses of scintillating aurora streaming like wounds across the sky, or his old boss grinning at him from the midst of a crowded city-street, but he was mostly good now. Besides, even if Rory wasn’t giant-sized and betentacled anymore the perfidious bird had come out of the whole giant-monster experience with the ability to shoot eldritch lasers from his eyes, so he considered passing disconnects with reality to be a fair trade.
Finally, yes, he was broke again. He’d spent all his money trying to leverage his position as, technically, their messiah, in order to turn the Last Emperor’s cult into a more traditional pyramid-scheme, and it hadn’t worked. It *really* had not worked. He was pretty sure those d00ds were communists now on top of being nihilistic whackadoos, and he was stuck with a warehouse full of religious literature, cultist starter-kits, and t-shirts with his face on them.
None of that mattered right now though. In space, no one can check your bank-balance; All he had to do was find a single Iridium-dense asteroid and tow it back to civilization and he’d be back in the black, mang!
His long-range scanners beeped, and he poked the bank of switches soldered to what used to be the gear-shift with one webbed foot.
A holographic display flickered across the meteor-pitted windscreen. There was a repeating signal coming from somewhere out there in the void. Piped through the dashboard speakers it was fragmentary, garbled even when you accounted for the distorted background-music issuing from the ancient stereo.
After several repetitions, the words ‘Celeste’ and ‘critical’, were just about all the bird could make out.
Given that it was looping, it was probably a distress-signal.
Rory flicked another switch and gripped the steering-wheel with his bill, wrenching it thirty-degrees to the left.
This far out, a distress signal meant one of two things: grateful spacefarers receptive to a competent salesperson or a dead ship full of sweet, sweet salvage. Either way, it was in the penguin’s interest to get him some of that.
The dying mix-tape came around again to the part of the soundtrack Rory liked best. He sang along as best he could to the faded lyrics as his horrible car-ship's fusion-torches flared purple, throttling deeper into the dark, towards his dubious destiny.
“Freeeeee! Doodoodoodoodooo Blackbird… Freeeeeeee! Doodoodoodoooo doooo Blackbird….”
There was a closed-loop life-support system where the engine-block was supposed to be, and a navigational array running on a solid-state obsidian monolith had replaced the passenger seat. The trunk-space contained the deflector-array, plugged directly into an ancient Austroavian null-geometry particle-annihilation drive-kernel which was powering the whole mess (and only occasionally threatening to implode into higher-dimensional space).
There was a phaser-bank in the license-plate, which was both expired and stolen, and a degraded- to-the-point-of-unintelligibility Canadian folk-punk mixtape stuck in the tape-deck, which couldn’t be turned off without also shutting off the avionics.
Spiraling hell-for-leather through the void of the Beyond, strapped into the cracked pleather driver-seat of this junkyard monstrosity, Chaos Agent Rory ruffled his plumage and breathed a sigh of relief.
Overall, he was in a pretty good place. I mean, yes, the penguin was being pursued by the blood-drenched followers of the Cult of the Last Emperor, who were pretty peeved that he’d messed up their prophecy for the sake of Syntech’s yearly televised bloodsport, but those d00ds had been following their weird book’s instructions for so long that they had a hard time making decisions now that things weren’t going according to plan.
They were probably still arguing over what had become of their high priest’s shitty car.
And yes, Rory was still hallucinating occasionally, neurological fallout from abusing the Emperor’s aurora-beams and overloading on the eldritch power of the End prior to his unfortunate demise and subsequent resurrection in last years Dante’s Abyss; He’d catch glimpses of scintillating aurora streaming like wounds across the sky, or his old boss grinning at him from the midst of a crowded city-street, but he was mostly good now. Besides, even if Rory wasn’t giant-sized and betentacled anymore the perfidious bird had come out of the whole giant-monster experience with the ability to shoot eldritch lasers from his eyes, so he considered passing disconnects with reality to be a fair trade.
Finally, yes, he was broke again. He’d spent all his money trying to leverage his position as, technically, their messiah, in order to turn the Last Emperor’s cult into a more traditional pyramid-scheme, and it hadn’t worked. It *really* had not worked. He was pretty sure those d00ds were communists now on top of being nihilistic whackadoos, and he was stuck with a warehouse full of religious literature, cultist starter-kits, and t-shirts with his face on them.
None of that mattered right now though. In space, no one can check your bank-balance; All he had to do was find a single Iridium-dense asteroid and tow it back to civilization and he’d be back in the black, mang!
His long-range scanners beeped, and he poked the bank of switches soldered to what used to be the gear-shift with one webbed foot.
A holographic display flickered across the meteor-pitted windscreen. There was a repeating signal coming from somewhere out there in the void. Piped through the dashboard speakers it was fragmentary, garbled even when you accounted for the distorted background-music issuing from the ancient stereo.
After several repetitions, the words ‘Celeste’ and ‘critical’, were just about all the bird could make out.
Given that it was looping, it was probably a distress-signal.
Rory flicked another switch and gripped the steering-wheel with his bill, wrenching it thirty-degrees to the left.
This far out, a distress signal meant one of two things: grateful spacefarers receptive to a competent salesperson or a dead ship full of sweet, sweet salvage. Either way, it was in the penguin’s interest to get him some of that.
The dying mix-tape came around again to the part of the soundtrack Rory liked best. He sang along as best he could to the faded lyrics as his horrible car-ship's fusion-torches flared purple, throttling deeper into the dark, towards his dubious destiny.
“Freeeeee! Doodoodoodoodooo Blackbird… Freeeeeeee! Doodoodoodoooo doooo Blackbird….”