The main issue with classifying the ship-creations of the Maw was that they didn't follow the systematic construction that virtually all organized groups utilized when building any sort of vehicle in numbers. It didn't help if every plane flew differently, every car needed one's driving to be re-learned, and a well-practiced mariner could just as easily sink a boat as a drunk amateur. So you had organizational groups. This ship was a schooner, and this one a galleon. This wheeled vehicle was a sports car, and this was an all-terrain vehicle. This was a tank, this was an APC, and this was a jet, and in sub-groups, this was an M-1 Abrams Tank, this was a ZTZ-99A Tank, this was an M47 Patton Tank, and so on.
Not so for the Maw. Every ship creation was like a fingerprint, and an oddly terrifying mix of pick-up and incomprehensible depending on the whats, whens, and whys of their construction. It would have been troublesome if the Ravage, the fleet of the Maw, was the size of a traditional navy, but it wasn't. It was a smaller collection of highly unusual and many times, highly unusually competent beings. Perhaps this was best demonstrated in the fact that while the Maw could launch in excess of 1500 'space fighter ships', in the vein of the X-Wings and Arwings of other fictional stripes, only about 60 of them had pilots. The rest were smaller drone ships, operating on a semi-hive mind and a semi remote control mechanism. Even the Maw ships had a classification system, though theirs was far more basic. The ships were either Drones or Piloted. After that it was just sub-categories of the two. Drone fighter ships, drone carrier ships, piloted carrier ships, drone support ships, etc etc.
Some people might think having so many remote piloted 'vehicles' was a mistake. A constant refrain in the Star Wars universe that expanded greatly on the spaceship battles was that while drone AI brains could be churned out faster and cheaper than living pilots, they were simply too rigid in their design. They lacked the creativity, and in some cases stupidity and insanity, of living brains and could be fooled far more often than even a halfway competent living pilot. More than one battle had been lost when a lone drone had been hacked and made to fire on its own forces, and the remaining ships had identified said own forces as the enemy and ended up more or less doing the space battle equivilant of falling on their swords.
But the Maw defied most traditional problems. That likely lead to more unusual and unique problems, but those were tales for another time. For now, at least in terms of spaceship battles, the main spear of the Maw was a mastermind ship linked with a swarm of drones that acted like fictional piranhas, swarming and overwhelming, drones sacrificing themselves if needed. The Maw had faced down serious opposing threats a total of six times since Requiem Rose had begun forging her path, and those tactics had proven highly effective five of those times, and hadn't done too badly in the lone exception either. The Ravage had numerous skilled pilots and a larger group of just 'good' and 'passable' pilots, but when it came to battle amongst the stars like the clashing of blades and armor in days of yore, one stood above the rest. His personal drone legion, the Scour.
And his personal battle ship, the cancer to the Maw's viruses, the pandemic to their infection. The Maw's ace of aces, and his trump card. The Black Death.
His real name was mostly unknown, and those who did know it thought it was something like "Cignurd" or "Siegnerd". It seemed he preferred to keep his past and family life private. And considering the sheer number of tallies stamped onto the side of his ship, that seemed like the best idea. And it looked like he was going to need a few more notches on that belt, as his ship was damaged and still smoking as he flew it into the Maw's main hanger equivalent.
"Oh no oh no!"
If one looked in a mirror and projected his idealized self, it would probably look a bit like this for the robotic being known as Dubble.
Like the fact that when he started running for the ship, he tripped over some wires and did several tumbles before ending up upside down. He righted himself with the skill of much practice as the central orb of the Black Death cracked open, the pilot not waiting for any sort of ladder or stairs, instead just hopping down to the ground as Dubble ran up to him.
"Are you okay Mr. Storm? Okay?"
"I'm fine. Nothing that I couldn't handle." His voice was a metallic rasp, which was more a side effect of his combat uniform than any deliberate attempt to be menacing. The Maw had crafted his outfit, after all, and the Maw's creations pretty much all came in 'menace to society' designs.
His name, though...THAT he'd picked himself.
Cytokine Storm.
Which was a bit of a mouthful, and not everyone, like Dubble, deemed to call him something like "Mr. Storm". Most people just called him "Sickle" or "Sicko", relating to his ability to cut through enemies like the oft-used allegory of wheat under a blade, or as part of his disease theme. Which ironically had begun due to a typo: someone had written his name as "Cykotine", and by the time it had been corrected, it had mutated further into a bad mispronunciation of the messed up word as "SICK-KULL-TINE" (it would have more accurately been "SIGH-KO-TINE", as the actual word as "SIGH-TO-KINE"). He generally preferred Sickle if someone didn't want to trip over his nom de plume. Which funnily, Dubble never did. He just tripped over most everything else.
Hell, Dubble himself was going by a name that wasn't his. His actual name was something like DW-88BL, being from a sapient robot species that seemingly had no need for anything resembling traditional names. He'd taken the mondegreen of "Dubble' eagerly, though more than a few called him "Dumbbell" behind his back.
It wasn't really his fault. From what Sickle had grasped, the mechanical beings on his planet were supposed to be immensely skilled in one task and one task alone. Dubble was an anomaly: he had some skills in a variety of areas instead of one specialty. And he was, half the time, REALLY BAD AT IT: his clumsiness and constant pratfalls had led to the mean joke that the Maw didn't eat him because it would make it sick and Requiem wouldn't expel him because she thought he'd destroy her whole ship by accident by trying to leave while extremely upset. And so Dubble, however he'd come to be on the Maw, served as a general go-fer and menial task doer, as well as someone for Syde to yell at and smack upside the head when she was feeling frustrated. Dubble seemed to take it in stride, being good natured to the point of passive madness. If Sickle was a philosopher, he may have suspected that Dubble was so desperate to belong somewhere that he'd put up with mostly anything.
Then again, he was hardly the only misfit reject on board.
"Your mask, Sicko."
There was also Syde Yummel, the ship's main designer and engineer.
There were a lot of 'close to humans but not quite' species out in the wide world of existence. Sickle was one, Requiem herself was another, her boyfriend Abel was yet another, and Syde was as well. And like Dubble, she was an anomaly. Her species, the Kaons, were born with four arms normally. Syde was born with two, condemning her to be seen as a lesser, worthy of basic labor at best, as the Kaons had a societal bent based on building and crafting. Despite lacking those arms though, Syde definitely had a mind for her species' talents, and had built herself what she lacked. The cruel irony was that she lived down in the equivalent of the slums, or Olympia's undercity, and after she'd made herself some extra arms to replace what a quirk of genetics had taken from her, said slums had actually accepted her after that, some even beginning to think the idea of less arms being lesser was wrong...and then high Kaon society, which had a different set of priorities, had gotten wind of the mutant who'd tried to make herself one of them. Syde didn't know the finer points of the religious and sociological factors that had prompted so much RAGE from her and what she'd done. All she knew was that they'd come to murder her, she'd lost one of her real arms in fleeing and been left abandoned in space to slowly die until Requiem had come along. And oh, had the Kaons regretted their decision.
It was why she snapped and smacked Dubble. It was force of habit, and usually not serious. Usually. Worlds knew she treated him better than some of the others on the ship.
"Thank you." Sickle had begin removing his pilot outfit, laying it out on a greasy table before he snapped the breathing mask on.
He didn't need the mask, truth be told. He liked clean air, but he could breathe without it: his lungs weren't damaged to any high degree. But he preferred the impression that he did need it. A false weakness to know who your true friends were. Requiem demanded, if not camaraderie, for the members of her crew to not bother each other if they didn't like each other, and any sort of betrayal or backstabbing or general interference with others of any stripe was grounds for severe punishment if not outright execution on the spot, the black mark of how she'd come to be captain of this ship. But the Maw and the Ravage were, no matter how you dressed it up, pirates. It didn't attract the best sorts, and some simply had too much desire and too little inhibition, if not common sense.
"Help, sir?"
Ah yes. If Dubble was around, then it was almost certain that Duty'd be there as well.
Duty was...
Well, it was very hard to describe in traditional relationship terms. Duty could be considered Dubble's son, defining achievement, brother, or distant relative depending on just what sort of familial or group structure you tried to apply to his species. Whatever he specifically was, he was attached to Dubble's hip, and Dubble building him (to put it super simply) had apparently been the last straw for his society, for...some stupid reason. Probably the equivalent of the so-called blasphemy that had tried to kill Syde and cost her one of her real arms, though she'd quickly made a superior replacement. Stupid is as stupid was...
And in his own way, Duty was 'stupid'. Dubble could do a lot of things but he'd fumble and screw up a fair chunk of them. Duty could do tasks without issue, and often quite well...but he would do what he was asked right down to the letter. Like a certain destroyer, and also a certain maid of children's books, wordplay, metaphor, and the like simply didn't process in his head. If you didn't give him ultra-precise instructions, he was liable to go put something 'away' by putting it in the possessions of a crew member whose named sounded like 'Away', or 'get you a bite to eat' by finding food, biting a chunk out of it, and returning to try and put it in your mouth personally. Troublesome, but not insurmountable...but Duty also had some issues remember extended lists of instructions. If he forgot one, he'd proceed to the next without trying to recall it. Needless to say, removing steps in a process rarely ended well.
Even his name was an insult over that. He'd taken the name 'Duty' as he did a lot of duties, much like his friend Dubble, but it was suspected that whoever had used that name first had meant another word for feces, and that said word had been hononymed by kinder sorts.
"Place my clothing in my locker by opening it, then close my locker and use the lock to lock it closed, when I am done placing everything on this table, which I will confirm I am when I raise my two fingers like this."
"Understood!" Yeah, annoying, but like Dubble, Duty was so good natured, almost 'simple', that you had to be a bad sort to look down on him. Then again, they were space pirates. Bad sort was a constant resume line.
"What did you run into out there?"
"Frogs."
"Frogs?" Syde raised an eyebrow.
"Yeah. They had an interesting ejection system. When I destroyed their ships, they were left in these clear bubble spheres that just sort of floated around. And all their ships were frog themed. It was ridiculous. Like I was fighting a mass of avatar-types, except these ships were not very high quality. Numbers game. Enough to score some lucky hits."
"Did they give a name?"
"My translator just gave me a general 'surrender or die'. When I said no, they started shooting."
"Frog-esque aliens...there's the Incurseans, but they operate three galaxies over. It could be a scouting force, but it sounds too large."
"Whatever it was, they're all dead in the void now. Well, dead as in with no ships and in little bubbles. I thought about shooting them one last time, but I hate fish in a barrel. If they don't have immediate rescue or some way to move, well...that'll teach their people to build better."
"The wheels of progress are often oiled in blood." Syde said. "You should report to Captain Rose anyway. She always wants to know about possible threats. Especially since we're heading to take leave."
"That was the plan. Later Dubble, Duty. Don't get underfoot."
"Of course not! Course not!" Dubble did a salute, which knocked him backwards as he accidentally smacked himself in the head. Oh yes, and he tended to repeat short sentences. A lot. Quirk in his programming? Adapted habit for his name? Who knew. Sickle wasn't the type to care. He lived for two things. Improving the Black Death, and turning equally skilled foes into brilliant flashes in the dark, signals of his glorious talent. His frog attackers had proven deeply dissatisfying.
Oh well. Couldn't win 'em all.
Including when it came to talking to the boss. After a long trek through the tunnels and levels of the Maw, including a stop off at the Site, Sickle arrived to find someone else waiting to talk to Rose as well.
"Well well. You ain't gonna be chased off by some mean looks. I can tell."
McCulloch. One of the more recent joinings of the Maw's crew. Whether that was his first or last name, no one knew. McCulloch, like Sickle, much preferred his job title.
And unlike Sickle, nee Cytokine Storm, he was as human as he looked. He'd been a mercenary on Earth who had headed into space to seek his fortunes when things had gotten too hot for him there. Being a 'normal man' didn't seem to slow him down much; he could shoot like a terror and blow things up better than a volcano. He also had some mild ambitions to take a place by Requiem's side, though Sickle only vaguely knew that and once again, didn't care. As long as he had access to the Maw's crafting, Syde's brilliance, and fellow aces to battle across the black seas with, he was fine.
"I need to talk to the captain."
"So do I."
"And you were here first?"
"Technically yes, but we're not children now, are we? What are you here to tell her?"
"That's for her ears first, McCulloch."
"As you will, Psycho."
"Sickle."
"Sickle." Wild Dog 'corrected'. "It's not about where we're going, are we? Because I believe that I know that possibility moreso than you. I come from that planet, and I know what could cause us trouble."
"We'll deal with the trouble the same way we deal with all trouble that decides to come our way."
A new speaking voice. The door had slid open silently, and Abel Gunner had stepped out. Rose's sword-peer, almost as good with a gun as Wild Dog, and her lover, though they kept that quiet.
"We'll chew it up and spit it out. Okay come on, Wrecks needs to take the wheel so you can both come in. Make it quick, if you can."
Wild Dog just nodded, heading in. Sickle was behind him, though he was a little slower, turning the master mercenary's words over in his head. What sort of trouble could come their way that he'd feel the need to mention?
...maybe it would actually bring something interesting. Because as a child's book Sickle had once scanned boredly in a stack of plunder, the Maw and the Ravage had a lot of very, very big sticks.
And they would make sure their troubles had trouble with them.
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