Rage War Incursion 3

The Ochse was one of the fastest ships in the Colonial Marines' arsenal. Specially developed for the Excursionist regiments, the Arrow-class assault and reconnaissance vessel was a product of centuries of spacecraft technological advancement, FTL-drive research, and sheer dogged persistence.
The breakthrough to faster-than-light travel had come hundreds of years before. Breaking through into FTL travel had been akin to the time when humans first left the surface of their planet, in that the technologies required were unique, dangerous, and slow to develop. Some of the early wars in space had shoved development along apace. The limits discovered beyond FTL-in sub-space
planes where traditional laws of physics were usurped and replaced by a science far more complex, and some would say almost eldritch-had always been crippling, in both physical and monetary terms. Wars aside, Weyland-Yutani had the money. It had the resources. And it had the desire to succeed, aggressively pushing the envelope of the Human Sphere at every point in the Company's checkered history.

Once fallen, it had risen to prominence again and taken full control of the Colonial Marines, so that they were sometimes nicknamed the Corporate Marines. This made it not only the oldest and most powerful company in human history, but the most powerful entity, governments included. Since its troubled resurgence, its expenditure of time and money into experimental space-travel technology had multiplied a hundred times. The Arrow class sat at the pinnacle of what was currently possible. While the Fiennes ships of the twenty-second century-great exploration vessels named after the first astronaut to venture beyond the Sol System-relied on light-travel technology, later ships such as the
Titan drophole-builders could travel at small factors of FTL speed.

Most Titan ships could reach five-times light
speed. Some of the more powerful corporate vessels
owned by the Company sometimes reached six or even
seven-times. Arrow ships could travel at fifteen-times the speed of light. The science involved was way beyond Mains, and even Faulkner suggested that there were probably only a handful of humans in the Sphere who even came close to understanding the concept and the mechanics. Fueled by refined and concentrated trimonite, it took several hundred tons of that ultra-rare mineral to provide fuel
for a ship's average year's travel. The cost to build an Arrow ship was staggering. The cost of fueling it-the dangerous mining, transport, refining, and containment that went into production of the trimonite-was horrific. There were more than three hundred Arrow shipscurrently in service, patrolling beyond the furthest extent of a Human Sphere whose outer area was now something like
three million square light years. At full speed it would take an Arrow more than two hundred years to circumnavigate the Sphere, during which time it would require almost a million tons of trimonite. Only just over half a million tons had ever been mined. It was postulated that there were almost limitless reserves buried on asteroids and planets,
but the great irony was that ships, equipment, and people had to reach these places to mine it.
Humanity had still only ventured across one percent
of the Milky Way galaxy. At unimaginable speeds, still the scales of cosmic travel were staggering.

That's where the dropholes came in. While FTL travel still entailed actual movement through space-albeit on planes and levels of existence beyond most people's ken-the dropholes worked on a very different basis. The science had been mooted since the late twentieth century, so long ago, but the reality and the ability to harness the science and put it to work hadn't occurred until a little over a century before. The dropholes weren't exactly holes, but more like the ends of an infinitely long, yet instantaneously traveled tube. They were folds in space, meaning that a ship could enter one end and emerge at the other at exactly the same moment. To Mains, that sounded easy. But the dropholes needed to be built using methods way beyond his understanding involving particle accelerators, anti-matter generators, and other tech he wouldn't even recognize if it landed on him. The holes themselves were contained within
vast circular structures, necessitating huge amounts of materials and years of construction. Even after all this time, only about one in three drophole initiation attempts worked, and around one in fifty resulted in cataclysmic explosions, the first couple of which had taken out thousands of people and dozens of ships. Since then, the moment of implementation was performed remotely. Dropholes only worked one way.

In one hole, out of the other, with no return journey. Matching holes were attuned to the same frequency, and the in-holes all required different activation codes. Thus, they provided rapid jumping points around the Sphere, but there were also huge distances to travel between locations, because two holes could not be created close together. As Titan ships pushed the Outer Rim of the Human Sphere ever further, so they paused to build new dropholes. Over time, communities had built up around these ports. Some were official, manned research and maintenance stations commissioned by Weyland-Yutani and funded by the Company. Many more were unofficial, congregations of people, ships, and space stations, some of them charging for use of a hole, some protecting them. The dropholes became the oases of space. They became home to roving travelers and explorers looking for a place to rest in the company of others-pirates and mercenaries, haulage vessels, and military convoys. Though they used the dropholes, the Excursionists never hung around afterward. They preferred their own company.-pg.37,38,39,40,41 chpt.1

For more than two centuries there had been a cold war between humanity and the Yautja. Occasional skirmishes were recorded, and sometimes the mysterious losses of remote vessels or communities were attributed to Yautja action. In turn, there had been several cases of the alien ships being tracked and destroyed by Colonial Marines Spaceborne units when they strayed too close to human settlements. Thirty years before there had been a series of sporadic battles between Excursionists and a clan of particularly invasive Yautja across the southern Outer Rim, but that conflict had died out as quickly as it began,
the enemy melting away into the void. Captured tech was reverse engineered, incorporated into Excursionist craft and equipment, and then rapidly
became outmoded.

The Yautja, it seemed, didn't like their capabilities being turned against them, and they had an extremely advanced grasp of space travel, combat, and camouflage technologies. They had never been declared an outright enemy, but they were far from friends. Johnny Mains wasn't keen to move in closer to UMF 12-the Yautja habitat-for too long. The cloaking tech they were using was considered cutting edge, developed by the guys at ArmoTech who Colonial Marines affectionately called the Gadget Guys. It enabled ships to blend into the background, sometimes invisible to known scanning methods, sometimes disguised as an asteroid.-pg.70-71 chpt.4

Faulkner was on weapons, and they were all powered up. The Ochse was heavily armed with laser cannons, a particle beam modulator, sub-space limiter, and micro-nukes. It also carried three drones that could be deployed and recovered, and Faulkner and Cotronis had fitted one of them with a cloaking device similar to the ship's. They were fully loaded and ready for a fight, but fighting was what Excursionist missions were tasked to avoid.-pg.72 chpt.4

They were going to crash, and they were going to die. But not without a fight. Frodo had successfully sealed the hull breach and settled the Ochse's atmosphere imbalance, and three seconds later the protective foam layers the ship had
sprayed around each surviving VoidLark had melted
away. The ship was a mess. The Yautja vessel, Bastard One, had straddled the hull with a spray-burst of laser fire, and the Ochse shuddered
and shook as Frodo tried to settle their spin.-pg.133 chpt.10