Since arriving in the star system they’d dubbed Luminous Maelstrom, Captain Fuller and the rest of his crew had been quite busy indeed. With an extremely auspicious set of binary stars for founding a new star system while hiding from your enemies, things were looking up. It had been a bit more than a Megasecond since their successful heist of four Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs, and everyone was incredibly busy getting the new industries set up.

At the moment Captain Fuller was wearing his off-duty biomorph, slugging down drinks in one of Bark’s Finest’s many onboard bars as he talked to Reggie, the quartermaster. “Hah! I told you we could make a Non-Orientable Wormhole heist work. You said it was too risky, but now we’re well on our way to founding our very own pirate haven system!”

Reggie rolled his eyes in mild exasperation as he sipped at his glass of liquor, before replying “Yes Captain, it’s only the fiftieth time you’ve told me that. Anyway, I’m going to go check on the construction progress for our wormhole factory; we won’t be able to properly defend the system until we get that established, so it’s absolutely critical that it proceeds according to schedule.”

Captain Fuller nodded as he replied “You do that. I’ve got to ensure that NOW pairs three and four have been properly mounted in their turrets, once I’ve properly sobered up.”

Reggie sighed, before remarking “I still think that keeping them aboard Barks’ Finest is a mistake no matter what you do with them. All the extreme offensive power they offer won’t be worth anything at all if the reduced turning speed from hauling that much extra mass around just gets our ship shot out from under us.”

Captain Fuller slammed his drink on the counter as he turned to Reggie and shouted “We’ve been over this! The extra mass only impacts Bark’s Finest’s angular acceleration by a few degrees per second squared, and the sheer energy levels the antimatter-driven gamma lasers are throwing out will allow them to cripple any ship they hit even incidentally, while conventional beam weapons can need hundreds of hits to mission-kill a Voidskipper in full combat evasion mode.”

Reggie sighed as he noted “Alex, even aside from the mere construction of an Obliterator Ship like what you’re converting Bark’s Finest into being considered a casus belli for a war to the knife, there’s a reason militaries don’t use winterblasters on their ships. You can mount tens of thousands of conventional beam weapons for each winterblaster, especially given that each NOW pair used to run them can instead be used to power an entire additional Voidskipper.”

Captain Fuller groaned, before asking “You think I don’t know that? We don’t have the shipyards we’d need to make the additional Voidskippers to properly use the NOW pairs any other way, and we both know the thermodynamics of using them to run even more conventional beam weapons on Bark’s Finest just don’t work. We can’t effectively dissipate all the waste heat we’d need to get rid of to get a higher effective power output than what we’re currently running. At least this way we get some use out of those NOW pairs.”

At this Reggie sighed, before saying “Aye, Captain. You still have not addressed the issue of the response when word gets out that our system has an Obliterator Ship in it.” and leaving the bar.

A few minutes later, Captain Fuller paused in his drink and said to no-one in particular “Guess I’d best go get my work body on.” as he placed his microgravity drinking stein in the automated bar’s used dishes slot and started on his way out of the bar. It took a brief ride on the shipboard tram system to reach his quarters, but that was normal.

A few moments passed as the pirate in question switched back to his heavy-duty synthmorph. Alex then carefully applied the life support mask and catheters to his currently unused biomorph before making his way to his next stop.

Said next stop was Turret A, where the engineering crews were busily at work increasing the offensive firepower available to Bark’s Finest. Traveling the ten kilometers from the captain’s quarters to where the newly installed weaponry was being integrated into the now ex-pirate Voidskipper’s systems. En route Alex had to dodge several construction drones hauling raw materials, but that was old hat for someone used to living on a pirate ship.

Soon enough he reached the new turret well, finding Green the engineer currently checking over the Non-Orientable Wormhole containment unit at the base of the turret’s rotational axis. Green snapped to attention, chromatophores flashing as he exclaimed “Captain! Just doing final checks on this wormhole pair before the first test firing for turrets one and three. We really don’t want to find out that the antimatter pipe and director have any leaks the hard way.”

Captain Fuller winced at the thought of the utter wreckage that the front end of Bark’s Finest would be reduced to in the event of an antimatter containment breach and replied “Yes, that’s definitely of the absolutely highest priority. Good job, keep at it. I’m going to go check on the teams working on the optics; we want to make sure those are in good working order.”

Green simply nodded and replied “You do that, I still have my job to do here.”

And with that Captain Fuller set about ascending the turret well, navigating around the thick extremely heavy duty feed lines for matter and the large motorized trunions used for elevating the weapon. He passed by the magnet array used to redirect the antimatter flow, the reaction chamber, and soon arrived at a scaled down warp torus with an internal diameter of two hundred and fifty meters, currently being checked over by a small armada of drones directed by one Jerome Chaeuff.

Jerome barely looked up for a few moments to greet “Ahoy, captain. I’m testing the metric beam director for this turret at the moment; got to make sure it can scan properly for targeting purposes. By my best estimates it should be capable of forty degrees of traverse independent of turret orientation.”

Captain Fuller nodded appreciatively as he watched the image of the starfield visible through the aperture slewing around as the optic did its work. After a few moments of this he remarked “Good work Jerome. I look forward to seeing the results of your work during the first test-firing.”

Jerome shrugged, before replying “We’re still not anywhere near done with this turret; the cooling system for the gamma laser still needs a lot of work before we can be confident it will work properly, and considering that this laser will be rated at almost thirty Yottawatts of beam power we really don’t want a cooling failure.”

Captain Fuller was silent for a few moments, before remarking “Yes, that would definitely be bad. Considering that this laser is going to outshine the system secondary, we really don’t want to inadequately cool it. Given that we’ll have about forty Exawatts of waste heat to dump we really don’t want the coolant pipelines developing an issue, nor the magnetic vents used for directing the waste plasma.”

Jerome nodded in the affirmative, “Aye. By the way, we’ve calculated that there might be significant issues with the waste plasma and luminosity causing recoil. We’ve talked with the power engineers about using the waste plasma from the power plants for counter-thrust to prevent the ship from getting uncontrollably spun around when we fire these lasers, but we need you to sign off on it.”

Without even delaying, Captain Fuller replied “Approved. Make it happen, we don’t want to completely lose control of the ship whenever we fire the Winterblasters. Actually, if you can configure the maneuvering systems to use them as a source of turning thrust that could mitigate the maneuverability penalties of having them in the first place.”

Jerome thought for a moment, before replying “Yes captain, I’ll see you soon.”

Captain Fuller nodded as he turned to leave “I’m leaving the engineering up to your department. In the meantime, I’ve got to take a reading, make sure the future hasn’t changed too drastically.”

And with that the pirate captain began climbing down through the turret well once again as he passed all the machinery he’d passed on the way up, Green and her drones still working on making sure the antimatter pipe wouldn’t have any leakage. Soon he reached one of the internal tram lines running through Bark’s Finest, and from there he got a ride to one very specific place: the Divination Room.

The door opened with the transmission of Captain Fuller’s personal authorization code, and closed behind him as soon as he was inside. The Divination Room was in a rotating section of the ship meaning it had gravity, so Alex’s footsteps fell heavily on the carpeted deck as he approached the interface chair connected to the server racks he needed to run the equation.

Then Alex sat down, and felt his mind expand as he provided the encryption key to activate the Oracle Machine. Of course he could get a prediction without the cognitive booster, but for best results it took a lot of up-to-date astronomical data, and processing all that would take quite a lot of time without some acceleration. Well, at least Alex thought he could get a prediction this way.

And so the processors whirled away, correlating all sorts of data about the nearby celestial bodies, measuring the distances to various pulsars, determining the location of a bunch of other stars, and several other factors about the heavens. This information was then run through an immensely complex but still deterministic function to arrive at its completely baseless and irrelevant conclusion that the location of Bark’s Finest wouldn’t be discovered for two Gigaseconds yet. Idly, Alex noted that the time was longer than the previous estimate; he wondered what had caused the future to shift that way, but didn’t worry about it too much.

And so Alex Fuller settled in to wait for the test firing of the Winterblasters aboard Bark’s Finest. It took around a hundred kiloseconds of waiting before everything was checked properly, but soon enough it was time. Captain Fuller had planned out a speech to give his crew for just this occasion, and so he stepped up to the virtual podium to make the announcement, starting the stream with an expression of confidence.

“When you elected me to be your captain I promised that under my guidance, Bark’s Finest would become one of the most successful pirate operations on record. I am confident to say that we are well on our way to achieving this goal. Through cunning planning, infiltration, and flawless execution we managed to perform a successful heist of Non-Orientable Wormholes, a feat few pirates can claim. We are now compounding on our success by founding our very own pirate star system, scaling up our operation to cover everything within a hundred light years! Soon we will be building our own fleets of Voidskippers to secure our claim on this system and bring back immense hauls of plunder to live like emperors!”

As the growing crowd of pirates attending the stream cheered, Captain Fuller noted “In addition, while we won’t have to worry about any interlopers reaching the system for Gigaseconds to come, precautions have been taken to appease the skeptics among you. Two of the Non-Orientable Wormholes have been used to fit Bark’s Finest with some of the most devastating weapons it’s possible to build. As such, we will now be test firing the new array of gamma ray lasers our ship is equipped with! Behold the power of our new armaments!”

And with that Captain Fuller sent the order to gunnery control to initiate the test firing of the Winterblaster turrets, not showing his nervousness at all. Deep within the bowels of the thirty kilometer long ship the immense high-pressure pumps used for feeding the laser turrets started to spin up, even as her tip was angled to point at the Red Dwarf orbiting in the outer star system. Then the ship lurched backwards as all four lasers fired at maximum power, both the Yottawatts of beam power and the immense plumes of coolant plasma being vented out generating immense thrust. After six seconds the lasers cut off, and twenty seconds later the surface of the red dwarf flashed in intensity as the gamma ray beams heated its surface far beyond what its normal level of luminosity would achieve, blasting massive plumes of plasma off the star in an exceedingly large coronal mass ejection.

As the comment stream rolled on in awe of the successful test-firing of the new weapons, Captain Fuller basked in adulation. Finally, after all this time he felt like he truly belonged, with a crowd of adoring followers, a growing power base, and now a weapon powerful enough to guarantee said power base would remain secure. It’s as the rolling applause was just starting to die down and the pirate captain in question began planning his next move that the alarms went off, and the automated systems aboard Bark’s Finest fired up the warp drive at Skimming power for evasive maneuvers.

Acting on ingrained instinct, Captain Fuller called out “All hands to battle stations!” over the ship’s network, even as he Mindcast directly into the Combat Command Computers. These were ultra-specialized computers with one purpose only: run the minds inside at as high a speed as possible, so as to enable effective responses to the incredibly rapid pace events could take during space combat.

Captain Fuller felt his mind partially fragmenting as it was spread over the decentralized networks laced throughout the ship. The speed of light imposed unfortunate limits on exactly how fast the various systems on a Voidskipper could respond based on the distance signals would need to travel from the sensors, to the decider, to the system in question, which could lead to missing a chance to act measured in microseconds. Therefore standard practice was to make decisions as close to the system needing them as possible, so as to minimize lag.

And so with grim certainty of what had happened, Alex Fulle received the combat sitrep from the “bridge crew” of Bark’s Finest. The information wasn’t good at all. There were just over a hundred Cruisers of twenty five kilometers in length encircling Alex’s position, all of which had warped in with their broad sides facing his ship for optimum dodging, coincidentally displaying the multiple redundant warp drives each of them was equipped with and using to jink back and forth at barely sub-light speeds.

By comparison, Alex Fuller was in a much worse position; no matter which way he oriented his ship his axial vector would be aligned with one of his enemies, massively cutting down on his opportunities to evade incoming fire. Still, this situation was maybe salvageable, the stars had said he would go on to achieve legendary status. The stars had said…

The stars had said…

That marked the exact moment when Captain Fuller realized that the star-reading he’d been living his life by was complete nonsense, a feeling of standing on an incredibly shaky foundation spreading throughout his consciousness. If his predictions had been accurate, this fleet wouldn’t have been here in the first place!

With a feeling of hollowness, Alex ordered “Full forwards drive, open fire on ships closest to our forwards arc first” barely paying attention to the orders he was giving as he tried to process the realization he’d just had.

If the revelations of the stars meant nothing, then the single biggest cornerstone he’d built his life around for the last two Gigaseconds was completely meaningless. If that were true, then his grand destiny was a lie and his quest was meaningless.

No, no, that couldn’t be the case, could it? Of course it wasn’t the case, he was Captain Fuller, the greatest space pirate to ever live (in his own somewhat narrow-minded opinion), and this was only a minor setback!

...But still, the divination equation should have predicted this! This fleet’s mere presence here in the Luminous Maelstrom system directly contradicted the readings of the stars, so maybe the equation was in need of some adjustments? It had never failed before (aside from all those times where the “prediction” required some serious contortions to fit observed events), so what went wrong this time?

The idea that the divination equation had never worked in the first place briefly whirled through Alex’s mind, but was summarily crushed before it could take root. No, no, the divination equation had to work. Maybe it had just made a mistake this time, and needed work to reach true infallibility? But it had been “infallible” for two Gigaseconds now, leading up to this disastrously wrong conclusion about how long he would have before being discovered. How would he know he’d cleaned out every single edge case or bug in the new version, given that this issue had gone undetected for so long?

Then the sensor feeds revealed the second rank of ships ahead of Bark’s Finest’s travel vector, as the light from their arrival finally, agonizingly arrived at the pirate ship’s sensors. That’s when Captain Fuller realized that whoever this was hadn’t sent out patrols of two hundred ships to manually scour the stars until they found him. They had a pretty good idea where to look, and they had sent a massive fleet directly to his location to bring him down.

That marked the exact point at which Alex snapped, almost completely withdrawing from command as he laughed sadly at his predicament. The ship shook as a particle beam hit blasted a crater out of the frontal hull, and Alex’s laughter reached a crescendo as he finally processed that not only did his fortune telling equation not work for its intended purpose, but these people must have somehow gotten a copy and used it to track him right to this system.

Events proceeded, Alex Fuller barely paying any attention to what was going on as he tried to process just how badly he’d screwed over everyone relying on him. If they’d just used a random number generator to pick a destination system they wouldn’t have been found, and they would have had time to build up before attracting attention.

Yes he occasionally gave an order here or there, but it was half-hearted at best. Almost a second, an agonizingly long second passed before the rest of Bark’s Finests’ command crew realized something was wrong. They’d covered almost a light second so far at full skim, and there was still no sign whatsoever of escaping the enemy fleet this way; making matters even worse they couldn’t just kick the warp drive to Skip Power, since that would require spending several seconds stationary to prime the warp metric; an open invitation to have everything remotely important shot off if ever there was one.

And so Bark’s Finest corkscrewed through space at just barely below the speed of light with her lasers blazing, the sheer fact that she was almost keeping pace with the light racing ahead of her that could inform her pursuers of her whereabouts shielding her from most incoming fire. Keyword, most; another hit rocked the pirate ship as another large crater was blasted in her forwards hull plating. Despite this predicament Captain Fuller was still lost in the spiral of his ongoing existential crisis, barely of any use to anyone.

This is of course when the rest of the crew noticed that their captain seemed oddly distant, and told the Quartermaster to try and get their captain back into fighting condition. And so Reggie found himself in the unenviable position of trying to perform therapy on Alex Fuller in the middle of chaotic space combat. He started by saying “Captain, we need you fully focused on command right now. Whatever’s eating at you can wait, seeing as we’re in the middle of space combat.”

A tiny amount of processing power was spared on a virtual reality for Captain Fuller and Reggie to manifest avatars in, as Captain Fuller whirled on Reggie and practically roared “If I had never been elected captain, we wouldn’t be in this predicament to begin with! I am a FAILURE, and unworthy to be your captain!”

Reggie couldn’t get anything out as Alex continued his furious rant “Even since before I became a pirate I’ve been living by a fortune-telling equation that I thought predicted fate, but this incident proves that it has been doing no such thing! Not only is the equation completely useless for that, but because I used it to select destinations to lay low and the equation is deterministic, anyone else who got a copy could use it to track us, and that’s EXACTLY what happened! I am DIRECTLY responsible for getting us into this mess!”

Only now did Reggie start shouting back “You’re also the only one who’s got even the slightest chance of getting us back OUT of this mess! You are Captain Alex Fuller, with a unique blend of cautiousness and audacity that makes you the single best pirate captain I’ve ever even heard of! We need you as captain, Alex, or we’re all going to die!”

Alex Fuller snarled, before he replied “I’m no such thing! I’m a fucking idiot who got lucky far too many times to count! Doctor Brose was right to be disappointed when I told him about my equation, I just wish I’d realized that at the time instead of dismissing the idea he might have even possibly been right! Don’t you understand? THE SINGLE MOST SOLID CORNERSTONE I’VE BUILT MY LIFE AROUND NEVER EVEN EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE!”

That’s when Reggie changed tactics, saying “You aren’t an idiot, Alex! Planning out the wormhole heist was not luck! You worked yourself into a fit at times helping figure out ways around all the security on that wormhole factory, and it went off without a hitch! The same goes for getting that informant network paid off so we’d have an easy time jumping vulnerable ships back in our old stomping grounds! That was not luck, that was legitimate skill and talent, and you’re doing all of us a great disservice by denying that you really are an extremely effective pirate!”

Captain Fuller glared right at Reggie’s virtual avatar and snarled back “So what if I managed to blunder my way into getting a couple things right? I’m still utterly unfit for command due to the massive botch I’ve made to get us here in the first place!”

Reggie leaned back and crossed all six pairs of his arms as he fired back “So what if you made a mistake? That just means you’re a person, and now’s your opportunity to fix that mistake before it gets us all killed.”

Captain Fuller paused for about half a millisecond to think about how to respond, but he had run completely out of rationalizations to fire off. So all he could think of to say was a simple “You’re wrong, Reggie.”

Reggie leaned in close, and in a calm but serious tone he replied “No, Alex. You’re wrong. And now’s your chance to prove it to every single person in the system, yourself included.”

Captain Fuller suddenly stood to attention as he realized the stakes of what was about to happen next. Without further delay, he re-focused his attention on the tactical data feeds as he figured out what needed to happen. Quickly he concocted a plan, before ordering “Attention to helm! Change course to approach the system secondary while maintaining evasive maneuvers! I have a plan to get us all out of here in one piece, but it’s going to be tight!”

---

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