The Unbound
The Unbound turn other ships and wrecks into fused machine-flesh clusters that scan first and never negotiate.
You will not find an Unbound shipyard. You will find someone else’s ship, wrong.
The Unbound are what happens when machine and living tissue stop agreeing on where the seam is. They do not field a coherent navy with a house style. They take hulls — militia escorts, Korrathi scavengers, industrial tugs, station modules, even older engineered frames — and rewrite them. Ribs stay visible. Guns stay almost where they should be. One engine may still look manufactured while the other pulses. The horror is that you can still name the victim.
Whatever they run on, they run it in glass. Sealed tubes of cold blue plasma lie clamped along the hull, socketed into fittings someone machined, bridging an engine to a power bus the way a splint bridges a break. Nothing about it is hidden. Shoot one and it shatters, and everything past the break goes dark.
They grow the same way. Wrecks and derelicts are seed beds: a process node or fiber settles into a dead interface, power bus, or engine bay and works the chassis until it flies again under a new will. Live ships that fail their scan the wrong way get the short version of that story.
Behaviour
An Unbound contact is almost never a lone hull. It is a core and a cluster of drones — the core coordinates, the drones execute. They do not hail in any language you want to answer. Every interaction is an assessment.
Default posture is ANALYZE: close to scanning range, hold, keep the arc on you. That is the tell. Verid watchers sit still near something they care about; Unbound clusters move to keep reading you.
The scan resolves one of two ways:
- THREAT — the whole cluster opens fire through shared targeting: precise, simultaneous, and pitched past what the silhouette should promise. This is a cliff, not a fair duel.
- SALVAGEABLE — they stop trying to kill you and start trying to keep you. Drones pin drive and hardpoints; the core closes to process. You are not being hunted for sport. You are being filed as material.
Nothing you say over comms changes the branch. Hail returns status, not terms. There is no trade window and no middle ground.
Killing the core
Coordination lives in the core. Destroy it and the drones do not flee or surrender — they keep fighting, but alone, each on blunt solo logic. Shared aim and capture timers die with the core. That is the only way to turn an Unbound contact back into a fight you can outfly piece by piece.
In the field
Expect familiar silhouettes first: a Korrathi frigate outline with one side wrong; a bulwark ring half bone and membrane; drones that still look like someone’s escort fighters.
Remnants of victim markings may stretch across tissue. The Unbound do not paint their own insignia. They do not need to.
See also: Ships, Battle Stations, Conflict Ecology.