Castors Warlord flickered into existence, on to the surface of a small barren moon. The moon was pitch black, the planet it orbits was deep on the edge of its solar system. The lack of atmosphere allowed Castor to look at the stars unfiltered. No matter how many times he saw it, the sight of the Milky way always gave him frisson.
"Good job, Quanta." He said, like he always did, to his Warlord after a successful jump.
Quanta stretched its sensors out, scanning the area in a lazy way, much like a cat might stretch after waking from a nap. Quanta to some extent could feel what Castor felt, it always liked it when its pilot saw the stars. Its sensors pinged back the all clear as it expected. It filtered that information back to its pilot. It received back the mental equivalent of a smile. It was happy that its pilot was always so polite.
Castor guided Quanta towards the coordinates that the message had provided. He wasn't expecting a trap out here, it was difficult to set up an ambush without an atmosphere. While a Warlord could keep a pilot alive out in deep space for a while, and they even had the ability to recover a human from near death to a stable state, they didn't have a way to keep the pilot fed or watered. Nor did they have a way to deal with the waste humans eventually produced. They were war machines, nothing more, nothing less.
Once they reached the coordinates it took only a little bit of searching for Castor to find a warlord sized hatch buried into a large rocky outcrop. A quick scan revealed it to be unlocked, but it gave a strange reading. Pulling out the data logs, the last time the particular hatch had been open was over 100,000 years ago. This broke Castor's mind for a bit. He was no scholar, but recorded history was only measured in hundreds of years. Everyone knew the Warlords were old, older than humans even. But 100,000 years?
This was too much for Castor to handle or to care about. He had more pressing concerns, like where his next meal was coming from. So he accessed the door and commanded it to open, allowing Quanta to enter.
As his warlord started into the facility; lights began to flicker on, and Castor knew then and there what a treasure trove he had been led to. This moon was a factory moon, a place where drones were manufactured. This was a place of untold wealth, had he some allies and a way to feed this factory with the raw material that it needed - Castor would be able to carve out and hold his own kingdom. He would be able to go toe to toe with any of the outer Kingdoms of the Holy Rellian Empire.
It was a shame he had no allies, of course the thought crossed his mind that this is probably why he was picked by the message sender. Any other knight would probably abandon the mission and make plans on how to best use this factory moon. Castor's best case scenario was that he could trade the information about this place to someone that would give him just a little bit of backing. A place to call home even for a moment.
He scanned the system and requested access to the facilities mainframe. It responded back to him in its overwhelmingly powerful song. It took a moment for Castors Warlord to parse the data and feed it back to him in a form that his wetware could handle.
This place was fully outfitted with tech one drones and had a specialization in tech two assault mechs, those mechs being designed to handle more unique situations.
The next list he looked through was the moon's inventory. It had three jump ships fully constructed and each was fully outfitted with a full contingent of drones. He picked the jump ship that had an outfit most to his liking, sixty four infantry drones, a dozen heavy armored tank drones, thirty two anti air units. Sixteen heavy assault mechs and eight striker-bombers. Plus it had a number of smaller scout and kamikaze drones. It was an outfit designed to handle a land war, something that Castor specialized in.
There were only two machines able to fold space-time around itself and travel between the stars. Warlords and jumpships. Even then a jumpship couldn't do it by itself, it needed a Warlord to guide it or it was basically a massive useless hunk of metal.
Castor guided his Warlord into the cavernous hull of the jumpship. Even though it had been sitting here for one hundred thousand years it remained pristine. The lack of atmosphere plus the facilities upkeep machines had kept everything in perfect condition.
Quanta made itself comfortable near the head of the jumpship. Slotting itself into its data stream, taking command over it and all the drones in its contingent.
Castor pulled up the first map from the message, on closer expectation he had never seen anything like it before, the map was so detailed. With this amount of information this was going to be the easiest jump assault of his life.
Jump assaults were normally a nightmare of planning and recon and just plain dumb luck. Getting information about a planet and its defenses before jumping there was extremely hard to do, and normally required a number of spies on the target planet feeding back information about the planet's defensive positions, and possible jump zones, that were outside of sensor range.
But this map gave him the positions of everything, and not only that it seemed like everything on that planet was out of position. Seemingly pulled to one little village on the outskirts of populated area.
He assumed the girl he was after was probably responsible for that mess. It was going to be quite an upset to all the knights in the area, he looked around the map and found the bunker fortress of the closest knight. That would be the most sensible place to take her. A hostage rescue was always a tricky affair, you couldn't go in guns blazing, in case you killed the hostage. And he had to be careful of any family members of the girl as well, this whole job would be much easier if the girl came willingly and didn't hate him in the process.
He scanned the planet's sensor net and found a dark spot near a range of mountains that he could park a jump ship into without being noticed. From there he could scout the area on foot and hopefully get the lay of the land before starting his assault.
He punched the coordinates into Quanta and fired up the jump coils of both his Warlord and the jumpship. Space folded and he disappeared from the moon. The facility turned itself off.