The Jaws of Dawn Star

Jaws

Beyond the Empire's borders, where the stars are simply pinpricks in an endless black, a monstrous amalgamation of ship and factory, a cosmic predator prowls.

Many call it "Jaws," In truth, the ship is called Dawn Star, a name meant to take away from the fact its job was to hunt asteroids pregnant with ancient metals and minerals. The jaws refer to the colossal twin clamps, tipped with plasma arcs, that would ignite and tear the ancient prey apart. No rock in the universe could resist the ship's ritualistic consumption. The crew would call this part "The Communion," a grotesque sacrament of violence where heaven's detritus is turned into credits.

This moment of contact is violent. Spiderweb fractures form across the asteroid's surface while the superheated plates liquefy exposed veins of metal. Everything is digested into the ship's core, where grinders the size of city blocks chew all into gravel. Vibrations shudder through the Dawn Star's armoured spine. Liquefied metal and coolants intermix, creating hellish halos of fire and steam.

The automated sorters weave a deadly dance, dissecting the spoils: Karillion, platinum, palladium, rare earths, and lakes of frozen water, which, like the other waste matter, are ejected in perfect spirals, blooms of glittering clouds, a temporary nebula marking the Dawn Star's grim passage.

The observation deck hums with each cycle, the silence broken only by the tally of cosmic history reduced to market value. Screens flash ore prices, purity grades, projected yields. Efficiency hovers at 97.8%, a cold, calculated number in a cold, calculated enterprise.

Yet, even here, in the heart of industrial and technical efficiency, space occasionally fights back. Silent and deadly asteroids can slip through the ‘perfect’ Imperial scanners. One of these unnamed remnants of universal creation only last month had shattered ‘New Moon’, Dawn Star's sister ship to scrap. All hands gone, but more painful for the Empire, an uncalculated hit against this cycle's bottom line.

And that day, did Dawn Star stop to mourn its fallen comrades? Of course not. Stopping costs money and risks reducing peak efficiency. Only a decree signed in duplicate by Kovosh Deadheart The reigning patriarch. could stop the cosmic harvest, and hell would freeze over before he’d ever do that. So where next for Dawn Star? The Magnus Heart cluster, Celestial Crown or Stellar Dominion. No matter how fabled the asteroid belt, none would escape the cull, as systematically all of history is reduced to a tonnage report