((I think Ill pull an Ax maneuver and not divulge everything at once....
))
Kelran Pulled his sword and sash off his shoulders, un-fastened and shed most of his armor, and flopped down on one of the sunniest rocks, looking much the same as a lion on one of those Discovery channel shows, but at the same time looking like an eagle on his perch.
"You know, for a mammal you have a good instinct for habitat." Kelran chuckled.
Then he sighed and seemed distant for a few moments... "I'm exhuasted, so Ill make this brief and tell the whole story later when we have everyone else..."
He ruffled his feathers and re-positoned his wings slightly.
"I don't suppose you've ever heard of the Kelbrid? no? nasty brutish people... there are two subspecies of Kelbrid, Kelbrid-thane and Kelbrid-nas. The Kelbrid-Thane are huge, imagine one of your kind, but twice as tall, immense musculature, and a red-granite-like rough gravelly armor tough skin. Their intelligence factor is renown for being extreemly low.
The 'nas are a different story entirely, a very rare strain of Kelbrid, they are thin, wiry, angular faced, soft skinned, and incredibly intelligent. As you might Imagine, the 'nas rule, the 'thane serve and fight. We have never known a 'than to command a starship, or a 'nas to fight hand to talon."
Kelran sighed... "But if you meet one, either one, youll be doing the universe a favor if you gut it in the most painfully efficient manner possible. The 'thane are blood-lusting un-scrupulous killers, living only to make others die, and the 'nas are even colder and far more calculating.... Id like to think I killed at least 800 of them the last time we met...."
Kelran's voice had been getting lower and lower... Even Jason, who didnt know him especially well, could see that he was angry at the Kelbrid. very angry.
The Gryphon relaxed a little and continued... "Despite being a warrior race, we are also a race of curiosity. One of our latest projects was the Gravitic Vector Gate, a device that would use a graviton saturated verteron matrix of particles to foce a co-herent z-space tunnel and..." Kelran stopped, ****ed his head, "You have no clue what I just said do you? Very well, to put it simply, it would cataplut a ship as much as half a galaxy in little less than an hour. And it would do so undetectably and unstoppably. Needless to say its a technology with many applications. Normal Slipspace drives are fast, but not 1/300th *that* fast."
Kelran ran one claw through his head feathers, much the same way any person runs their hand through their hair, the sun glinted slightly off the iridescent patterns on his head, making him look for a split second like some character of a new fantasy video game...
As he continued, he stared off down the mountainside into the thick trees and underbrush, far away he could hear the sounds of some kind of vehicle traversing a road.
"While we were performing tests of the GVG, the Kelbrid launched a surprise attack, with numbers far in excess of ours. I was.... assigned to a ship called the Legacy. Another prototype, it uses Multi-Vectored assault technology..." Kelran paused to see if Jason knew what that meant, he sighed and explained, "It allows the ship to split into several differently sized sections with independant weapons and power, effectively tripling the firepower provided by the unit.
As I said, there were still simply too many Kelbrid, at least a full attack wing. But I knew I couldnt let them get hold of the GVG, if they did their tactical assaults would be undetectable and unstoppable, and they could reach every corner of every galaxy in our cluster...
I... erm.. stole the forward section of the Legacy. I docked with the GVG, and used my slipspace drive at the same instant.
I was fairly certain that the tachyon grid of the drive would produce an explosive reaction in the gate's verteron matrices. Turns out I was right. I didnt even expect to survive, but somehow the gate's z-space corridor and my slipspace field merged and actually worked... well.. somewhat. When I arrived in orbit I was too damaged to even discover where I was, and so I crashed."
Kelran desperately hoped Jason wouldnt wonder why there were apparently no crew in the section of the Legacy he stole, and that he would ask more about the SFC, or Kelran's 'rank'
The Gryphon yawned, an oddly amusing sight, "So tell me about this world... what is it called? and how long have you had Faster Than Light space travel?"
Jason got an odd look on his face, and somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach Kelran knew what the answer to his question would be.
