Bluddflagg’s Freebooterz
Aboard
Da Eskape Plan
In
Da Coruscant System
In the space above Coruscant, another hole between realities opened, right as hostility looked like they were about to begin. Reinforcements should have been heartening, but if any sane person were to look at what came out of that portal, they had every right to be confused, concerned, alarmed, or all three. Looking to be made out of piles of red painted scrap, sporting flags adorned with an (inhuman) skulls and crossbones, bristling with haphazard collections of ordnance, and tipped with 4 massive quarter km long blades of all things, the ship likely did not inspire confidence. Neither did the way that several machines on the outside of it exploded almost immediately after ‘touching down’ in real space, sending the ship slowly tumbling through the void.
If nothing else, perhaps it would act as chaff for the replicator ships/missiles, as it had arrived close to the atmosphere of the planet, and thus between them and many of their ‘targets’
Still, despite seeming dead in the water, the ship was not blind to what was coming. Or at least, some things on it weren't. Atop the raised bridge, inside a dome of glass, within dozens of cages and sat on bird patches, a plethora of little red creatures who were 80% head, 20% leg turned their massive, singular, crosshair pupiled eyes (that took up all of their face that wasn't spiky toothed mouth) towards the incoming fighter/missiles, and started chirping. Rather than doing so in any kind of panic as one might expect however, they were all, more or less, doing so in rhythm, making sounds that, if you thought about it for a moment, were almost the same as the beeps of a radar instrument.
In a response to the chirping of the rangefinder squigs, because that was what they where, a pint sized green creature with long nose and longer ears, wearing a bandana on its head, a raggedy waistcoat and pants too big for it bolted upright from where it’d slept through the interdimensional journey here. This creature, a gretchin, looked very alarmed as it followed the gaze of the rangefinder squigs, then confused when it couldn't see anything with the naked eye, before finally pulling a spyglass out of it’s waistcoat and using that to take a look instead. Placing it to its eye it extended the spyglass to zoomed in, instinctively using the chirps to get the a bearing and zoom level right, and then yelped in alarm as it got a good look at the incoming replicator vessels.
It tossed aside the spyglass, and then grabbed an even smaller creature that had kept napping through the alarms, one known as a snotling. It yelled at this unfortunate fellow in their shared crude but efficient language, before physically stuffing it inside a slot in a pipe in the wall. Then it closed a hatch over it, and pulled one of dozens of levers attached to the pipe. This prompted the sound of a wumf of air, and then the hatch opened back up and the little green creature was gone.
As for where it had gone, well, it had gone hurtling through the ship’s internal pneumatic pipe system at an entirely unsafe speed for a living being to be traveling at before coming to a thudding stop, right on its fortunately rather thick noggin. Before it could fully recover, another hatch slid open, it was hauled out of the pipe and slapped into an interrogation chair where one of the grechin running this messaging room demanded it hand over its message.
A few moments later the gretchin scampered out the tube room, and then with a great deal of cunning sneakiness and dexterity, flitted in between the legs of a whole host of greenskins who were all much much larger than it. These orks were filling the corridor and then the room it was headed for, and all of them were hooting and howling as they tried to get a view of a pair of even larger orks currently in the middle of fighting. Cutlasses flashed and clashed till one of the orks (who had a lovely tricorn hat, badass longcoat, and stripy black and white pantaloons on) grabbed a double barreled handgun the size of a human HMG from a holster on a massive ornate chair sat and promptly blasted his foe in the gut with it.
“Any other git wanna talk to da complaint’s department bout me deal with dat der glowy human git?” the victorious ork asked with an accent thick as two piratical ones glued together, waving the gun (his ‘complaint department’) around, silencing the other orks with his authority. That left the gretchin the perfect theater to pipe up “Kaptin, Kaptin! Message from da crows nest!”
“Spit it out then ya git” the Kaptin of the ship replied as he sheathed his cutlass and kicked the body of his attempted usurper off of the dias that hosted the massive ornate chair overlooking the rest of the ship’s bridge he’d gotten the gun from in the first place.
“Shiny missile-fings off starboard Kaptin!” the gretchin reported as it ran up and then pointed through the bridge’s windows in the direction it’d been told the hostiles where.
“See boyz, we just got here, and there’s already a fight ready!” the Kaptin declared jovially as he pulled out a much bigger and financier spyglass than the gretchin up top had used, and used it to follow this gretchin’s pointing.
He found nothing.
A lesser ork Kaptin might have immediately stomped the messenger, but this Kaptin furrowed his brow, muttering “ships.. Turning... Which means…” before correcting his view for his vessel's drifting rotation and the time it would have taken the message to arrive and finding the incoming missiles that way, grunting “der day are” in satisfaction when he did.
He put the spyglass down, grabbed a speaking tube, and bellowed into it “rise and shine boyz! Da shiny bug fings we’ze here ta stomp have sent us a warmup, so limber up ladz, get on yor gunz and shood tem outa da sky!” and finishing it up with a classic cry of “waaaaaargh!” as his command to echo throughout the ship via its only ship wide audio communication system they had (getting messages out from the Kaptin the most important thing after all).
In response to this call, numerous orks and gretchin collectively piled into the two large turret batteries the ship had, punching, kicking and biting each other inorder get ahead and be the one who got to man the actual firing controls. There where, at least, plenty lot of those, as the ship didn’t really have main cannons, and instead had masses of smaller ballistic guns (and indeed sometimes racks of actual small arms ww1 aa guns style) all attached to their own individual small mounts on the larger turrets, giving dozens of orkoids a chance to have a go shooting at there target, and increasing the odds that at least some of them aimed true.
Behind them, gretchin and snottlings started running about, hauling ammo for the guns, while below them, beast snagga boyz kicked their spurs and got a mass of bull sized boar shaped squigs to start trotting, turning the turrets around to face their foe via pure muscle power.
A few moments later, the sound of gunfire started echoing through the ships superstructure as its gunners started to spray the closest target without much concern as to if they were in range at all, much to the delight of the Kaptin and his krew. Dampening that delight for the Kaptin though was his mind wheeling back to that whole ‘the ship is drifting’ thing.
As a result, he then followed up his command by additionally yelling: “Mr Nailbrain! Whot’z you done to me ship that’s got it all driftin and tings!” before pausing, thinking some more, and adding “and why’s da da shimmery field-fing not on! We’z be sitting squigeons here!” when he noticed that the tell tale haze of the ship’s void shields hadn’t wrapped itself around the ship.
Mr Nailbrain, the first mate and ship’s head Mek (read engineer) of course, could not answer directly, but a few moments later another grot burst onto the bridge to report that “Mr Nailbrain sayz da warp’s gone!”
“Gone!? Wotz do ya mean gone?” the Kaptin barked, causing the gretchin to cower and reply rapidly “thaz wot they said he saids Kaptin! Hez tried to turn them shields on when wez got here, case of ambush, and den boom, bunch of bits of em of exploded coz da power didn’t have nowhere to go! Den he testad da warp drive as well and nuffin. No warp. It jus gone!”
The Kaptin boggled at this absurd possibility for a moment, before shaking his head and put that in the ‘future me problems’ category. For now, he barked more orders to respond to this: “listen up boyz. We ain’t got no shields an no warp drive, so batten down da hatches coz dis fight’s bout to get messy. Bonez, get ya Painboys ready for a lotta patients. Mista Nailbrian, work on da warp missing ting later, an get ready ta do damage control! Rest of youz gits, keep shootings make sure we don’t gets hit in da first place!”
Then he slammed down the speaking tube, grabbed the ship's steering wheel (as in an actual steering wheel, made of wood and with spokes and everything) and finally stabilized his vessel, preparing it for evasive maneuvers. Not that da Eskape Plan was any good at those. Mostly it just went forward real good, be it towards or away from the enemy.
