The Stars shine

[D-viant]

The story of the captain Enric Basset and the crew of the Estrelles Lluir.

Events that occurred around the time of the Reunion weren't exactly the most chivalrous or noble as the commanders up on Marne would've liked them to be. Mostly events in Languedoc system on planet Quillan twisted the fate of war for our men.
Planet Quillan was not exactly a place you would go with a luxury liner and people were indeed living in the poor conditions. I cannot say our landing at the liberated cities brought them prosperity – most of the population died in the riots, but we gave those people a glimmer of hope.
Project CL-14 forced those people to drain as much resources from the planet itself to fuel up the Cause.
Our Taureau along with a Tavros were sent across the planet looking for the underground Royalist bases of operation or at least something useful, but it seemed like a dead end, until Tavros was taken down by an automatic weapon platform. The crew didn't survive the fall, but it took down a nearby oil drill with a huge blast that created a quillanquake and swallowed the whole burning atrocity down to the abyss. In the middle of facepalming myself and trying to figure out how to explain this accident to the superiors, our detector picked up a signal coming from the depth. We used the compressed air to dust of the dirt and with a large hurricane-like sound the ground fell and revealed a seal.
It wasn't Royalist logo, nor any logo our crew knew of. But as we were wasting our oxygen supplies on cleaning it up, the logo became more clearer. There was a metal door with a seal and a sign „Temen les estrelles“.
The frame was crooked, as it was not part of the surroundings as it looked like something that fell down to Quillan two centuries ago.
The scan showed that it was in fact a room-like structure that could be transported in a cargo pod. I've ordered the turrets to take down the riff and we would attach that structure to the back of our Taureau. But as the turrets fired, the land started to collapse and the whole situation got us almost killed.
Few pants ripping moments later we reached the surface as the ground collapsed beneath us. As the things weren't bad already, our ship suffered system damage and the sandstorm was closing in. I've decided to save the power for blasting the sand off when the storm strolls on. Little did I knew, things would change in the next few hours. At that time there were twenty people on board the Taureau class freighter.
< to be continued >