Tag Archives: Endland

Respect the Drones

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My punisher hung in space over Aice I, 15km from the thorax, as we had agreed. I had been called away from my new day to day duties, overseeing production security at the Carthum factory to demonstrate frigate vs cruiser tactics to some of our new recruits. If it had been a real fight I wouldn’t have been concerned, but I had agreed not to shoot at my opponent’s drones, a dire mistake in these sorts of fights. I double checked my systems.

“Okay, we fight to the hull,” I said over corp com, “remember to pull your drones off of me after it’s over.” It would be exciting in any case.

“3… 2… 1… Engage!”

I pushed my punisher to full speed and began to spiral in toward the cruiser as it launched a flight of hammerheads and sent them speeding toward me. I gave a sigh of relief, I could handle hammerheads for a while. I hoped they’d have trouble tracking my speedy ship.

At 9km I pushed for a direct approach, and realized my mistake as his railguns sheared off the majority of my shields. “Damnit, too soon.” Hesitation would get you killed, and impatience was no less serious an error, but the mistake had been made and moments later my punisher had settled into a tight 1500m orbit. My medium pulse lasers already tearing through his shields.

The fight was now between me and the drones swarming about my ship, the thorax’s railguns completely useless against my fast orbiting ship. I activated my scrambler for good measure, just incase he had a microwarp drive, and sat back, monitoring my my ship’s armor.

It was a long fight, owed largely to my opponent’s armor repair skills. I hadn’t bothered to mount a repair unit, forgoing it for my usual armor resistance plating and a healthy amount of extra plate. After a few minutes my pulse lasers hit hull and I disengaged, my ship at 15% armor.

“See what I mean about tracking problems? But wow, those hammerheads did a lot better than I thought they would. Good fight,” I said over com. We had all learned valuable lessons.

Several spars later I retired to the corporate headquarters to park my frigate and head back to Amarr space. The exercise was welcome, though, and great fun all around. As my pod mounted in my travel executioner I smiled, pleased at the quality and willingness to learn of our new recruits.

I had picked a good time to come back to the sky.

Security Breach

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The space lanes were quiet in Empire. “Ten more jumps Aura, thank God for that.” I urged the massive hull of the bestower into alignment with the next in a what seemed like a never ending series of gates, gave the command to power up the warp engines, and turned my attention back to the GalNet news. Recruitment was going slowly but generally well, and the normally quiet corp com was buzzing with activity, though nothing that needed my attention. I manifested a neural intention to monitor the channels in the background and continued to peruse the news as the industrial, laden with the last of my necessary personal effects pushed into warp.

“So, the combat hanger is empty at the Aice branch.” It was our very new but very friendly branch manager for the Aice office.

The word combat catching my intention filter, I brought the corp com into my attention buffer and rambled out a reply, “no problem, I’ll put an order for additional munitions when I get settled,” and moved the channel back into the periphery.

“Okay. Vinum stole everything from combat. He sent me a message that said LOL.”

I closed my connection to GalNet and put full attention on the corp channel, “Seriously? Why? There was nothing in there but some useless loot from the two rank three missions we flew yesterday and a couple thousand rounds of Iridium S.” I’d taken the newer members, who were mostly miners fresh out of the academy, to see what a decent rank combat mission looked like. As none of them had the ability to salvage, I took care of the salvage and let the Aice people take the loot to begin stocking their combat hangar. There was nothing of value in the hangar, even if they sold it all in a trade hub the return would barely buy net enough isk to afford an unfit Tristan.

“Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s all gone and Vinum is in the process of dropping corp.”

I shook my head, it barely qualified as theft, as the rules were that anything not locked down in the combat hangar was free to anyone with access. Still it was a breach of security, and especially for the sake of our new branch manager, it needed to be taken seriously.

“Okay, I’ll handle it. We’ll keep an eye on him and let any other corps he joins know he’s an opportunist,” I shook my head again, “we were going to buy him a mining barge for God’s sake, he could have at least waited for that before running off.”

“It’s not a problem, it was a trust test and he failed. Anything useful was locked down in General or in one of the secure hangars.”

I smiled. We had picked the right person for branch manager. I brought the R&D department com into focus, “Hi guys, we need another couple thousand rounds of iridium for the Aice branch when you have some time.”

“Wow,” came a delayed response, they were obviously busy over there, “for a bunch of miners they burn through ammo pretty fast.”

“Yeah, something like that,” I smiled.

“Okay, we’ll have someone ship some over when we get a free moment.”

I closed the com and focused back on my ship, 5 jumps to go before arriving at my new temporary home in Pimebeka. New Eden was full of con-men, scammers and opportunists, that was a given. I had just assumed that they were a bit more patient… and ambitious. He’d probably fade into the background, as so many of these small time thieves do, or end up scraping out a living in low-sec shooting haulers and tourists. To each their own.

And Vinum if you ever need some more free ammo, we are happy to oblige.

Time to Completion

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My executioner slipped out of cloak at 3000 meters per second. The skies of Pimebeka were comforting. I was home.

Entering the Tash-Murkon region, seeing the sky change suddenly from the cool green of essence to the deep peach of the Amarr empire sent a shockwave of memory and fear through my brain. My ship shuddered for a brief moment, and I was back in control. The focus training had helped.

I docked at the Carthum factory and once out of my pod took the mag elevator to the R&D level. The freight elevator shuddered as the inertial dampers powered up. Shoddy Carthum factories, I thought as I checked the biometrics monitor on my portable neocom, guess that’s how they keep prices down. The elevator itself was little more than a metal box contained within an open lattice of girders and magnets. It was essentially a rail-gun, with the elevator as the bullet and I was inside. At the speed we were traveling one trajectory deviation would mean a quick ride back to Charmerout, assuming my neocom caught the breach. I checked my neocom again, just to be sure.

The lift came to an abrupt stop, the dampers lessening the jolt significantly but not completely, and the doors slid open with a metalic squeal. It had been a long time since I set foot on a factory floor. It was always breathtaking.

Before me was the skeleton hull of an Apocalypse, enormous like God’s hammer. A thousand drones swarmed about the hull like flies around the caracas of some great beast. In this case, of course, instead of decaying the carcas was being assembled, reborn. Tritanium dust rained from the hull as the drone swarm cut, bent and welded the components into place.

“A person is just a constellation of dust from the stars,” the old childhood poem rolled off of my lips unexpectedly as I walked past the great hull toward the managment offices, “blown by the winds of creation…”

“But Amarr are made from dust chosen by God, and his breath alone is what guides them,” continued a voice from behind me. I turned to see a young Khanid woman, beautiful in the way Khanid often are. She approached me, and tucking a handfull of datasheets beneath her left arm extended her right to shake my hand. “I assume you’re Ghenna, I’ve been expecting you.”

I started to salute, and then stopped myself and shook her hand. Old habits die hard. “Yes, I’ve been sent by corporate to deliver some blueprints and datacores, they are being offloaded now. I’ll stay to see that everything is in order.”

“I’m sure that isn’t necessary,” she replied, shuffling through her datasheets. “Though we do appreciate your dedication to security.” She found whatever she was looking for and offered the datasheet to me, “please, have a look.”

It was a real-time construction status on an Abaddon. It was at 45% completion.

“That is a very nice ship,” I said, handing her the datasheet.

“That’s your ship,” she replied, shuffling the Abaddon datasheet back into it’s proper place in her bundle. Corp is setting up a branch office in Amarr space, and with the Gallente office doing well, it seems most appropriate for you to oversee defense out here, at least until we get on our feet.

I didn’t know what to say, it was a very nice ship, easily the biggest I’d ever piloted. Even in my navy days I’d never flown anything larger than a cruiser. An Abaddon as well, the ship had been a rumor whispered about in dark corners in those days.

“Thank you madame,” I stammered, “I’ll make good use of it.” I saluted instinctively. She giggled.

“You’re not in the navy soldier, no need for all that. We have some tachyons we rolled off the assembly line this morning, they should be in your hangar within the hour. A bit different from what you’re used to I imagine, but with your expertise in gunnery I suspect you’ll get up to speed in short order.”

“Yes madame,” I fought the urge to salute, “I should head back to Charm then, and get my effects in order.”

“Very good, we have everything under control here,” she said tapping on one of her datasheets, “And call me Afwal.”

“Yes mad- Afwal. And thank you.” She nodded, and I turned to head back to my ship.

“And Ghenna,” I turned to look at her, the small Khanid woman standing calmly while a thousand drones swarmed behind her sending sparks and dust raining from the massive Apocalypse hull, now noticeably more complete than it had been only minutes ago.

“Welcome home.”

Good graces

Status

The past few days have been somewhat hectic. I spent the weekend behind my office terminal working on the hypernet presence of the budding corporation that I’ve thrown in with. Things are coming together, but there is still much to be done. It’s a very atypical business model, time will tell how successful it will be.

The few moments I’ve had not jacked into the hypernet backstage were spent running my last few missions for the Federal Administration. My part is now effectively done in gaining standing for the Corp HQ and I can focus on other tasks.

Being in the good graces of the Gallente also has its perks. The federation now holds me in high enough regard to grant me access to jump cloning facilities. Ideally Corp should be able to provide this sort of thing, but we’re new and still relatively poor. Even if I bought a Rorq out of pocket we’d have no pilots for it yet.

Altogether a good, but hectic, couple of days.

Corporate Politics

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Running missions for the Gallente is perhaps one of the more boring endeavors I have ever undertaken. In the old days of Red Cabal I ran a combat crew, we fought things, we defended mining ops and hired out to corps who needed a bit more firepower. Now I mainly do work for the Gallente, doing my part to improve Endland’s federation standing and managing the day to day affairs of the corporate trade account. It’s a desk job, and while I’m not too happy about it, it has been a great help in replenishing my accounts.

But I hear we are recruiting, and that makes me happy. Endland’s recruiting policy has always been to recruit fresh out of the academy. It’s a policy that served the corp well for a long time, and I can see the advantages. Loyalty is the most important quality of an employee, and in my own corporate endeavors I’ve found that training someone from an academy recruit to a veteran combat pilot is a great way to foster loyalty. The downside, of course, is that such recruits are long-term investments.

So now, in addition to my responsibilities as trade director, I’ve been given the dubious honor of being chief of security. Currently that means I have control over an under-stocked combat hangar and can give orders to myself. If recruitment goes well, however, it’ll mean that I’ll be training a fresh wing of combat pilots to protect corporate assets, make trouble in our local neighborhood and generally populate low-sec Gallente space with wrecks. Good times all around.