War & Piracy

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I docked my pod in Ladistier and had it immediately loaded into the unscratched hull of the Arbitrator I had stationed there. My thoughts lingered on the undock protocols momentarily. I forgot the undock, and moved the comms into attention.

“Did you manage to get out,” I asked over the fleet channel.

“Yeah, I’m fine, bouncing between safes.”

“Okay, I got a new ship, I’m in Lad. Going to power down for a bit till things cool off and then go have a look around.”

I moved the comm to the periphery, brought up the black box recording of the recent fight, and initiated playback.

[recording]

I am in a Punisher, cutting a curved trajectory toward a caldari state cruiser at 2km per second. My fleet-mate trails behind in an Ishkur. We have joined up with an allied fleet of Federal Defense Union pilots in a Caldari stronghold. Things seem to be going well. I check the progress of the capture drones. 5 minutes on the clock.

A harbinger appears on scan, Aura identifies him as an outlaw. Beyond Divinity corporation. My alert systems come into the foreground. He is disrupting one of the allied pilots.

The Punisher turns on a dime, I set a straight approach vector at the battlecruiser, and leap the distance quickly. My pulse lasers begin to cycle, as does my warp scrambler. His armor is failing.

Alarm systems assault my attention buffer. One, three, four, more… the battlecruisers flood into the complex. System check reveals them all to be Beyond Divinity pilots. I clear my alert buffer and initiate warp… The harby was bait.

The ship jolts as my warp engines are disrupted. A quick systems check reveals I’ve also been webbed. I am flying through molasses, but still making over 700m/s. I think, “there is a chance, I can still get out of range”.

Shields fail, I overheat my microwarp drive, armor fails.

[/recording]

“I shouldn’t have pulled away so hard, my transversal must have dropped hard,” I said to no one in particular. I perused the rest of the kill report, my mind catching on one line.

The line read: Damage taken: 20

I brought the fleet comm back into attention, “So I just lost a trimarked, plated punisher to 20 damage. That was the biggest 20 damage I’ve ever taken,” I couldn’t hold back the laughter.

I calmed myself and set my arbitrator to undock and rendevous with my wing-mate.

We spent the rest of the evening in low sec, without seeing another soul, capturing complexes for the Federation.

Meanwhile, in Villore, a staff of techs looked over the black box recorders in the rest of my ships.

Stupid, stupid, stupid…

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I approached the wormhole cloaked and took a reading. My systems reported it as roughly stable and leading to known space. Excellent. The exploration team had been operating in the alien system for almost two hours now, and the wormhole we’d come in through was already beginning to show signs of decay.

“Found another way out, if it comes to that,” I reported on the comms, “says it leads to high-sec, gonna check it out.” I willed my engines into life and eased my anathema closer to the quivering tear in reality, dropped my cloak momentarily and slipped through.

On the other side the sky looked very familiar… familiar.

“Son of a bitch,” I activated the cloaking device as my alarms began to bleat warnings. I was deep in Amarr high security, I was in the Gallente militia, and the navy was on its way.

“Cloaking device has failed Madame, something is jamming us,” Aura said in her usual calm tone as an apocalypse exited warp 40km in front of me. I made a feeble attempt to get back into the wormhole, but it seems that this was also out of the question. I needed to get to low sec, and fast, but wasn’t entirely sure how to get there. I aligned to the only station in system, initiated my warp systems, then closed my eyes, sat back and took a deep breath.

The flimsy anathema pulled itself into warp just as the last of its armor evaporated into space. Moments later my ship was docked and a repair crew was busy putting its armor back on. While the navy may not have liked me, Carthum still owed me some favors.

“Aura dump everything but the cloak and propulsion systems, I’ll have someone come pick them up later. Let’s just see if we can get the ship out of here in one piece.” I remained in my pod, watching with camera drones as the various analysis modules were carefully removed from the hull and stored. Finally, a robotic crane removed the crate from my cargo hold, full of materials and information looted from the sleepers.

I had considered having someone come to pick up the ship as well, but decided against the idea. Without it’s probing systems or analysis modules, and with an empty cargo hold, the anathema was relatively cheap. Most importantly it was fast to align and very fast in warp, and while the navy wouldn’t shoot at my bare capsule, any enemy militia would. I checked my navigation computer, I’d be in low sec in 5 jumps. I could make 5 jumps.

“Bring us out of dock, Aura. Then get us aligned and in warp immediately. I’m locking the first leg of the trip into the autopilot now.”

As I undocked I got the standard message from the navy, they were on their way, but I’d be long gone by the time they arrived. My ship swung around toward the outgoing jumpgate, it’s speed increasing rapidly toward the warp threshold.

And then I hit the station.

I rapidly cancled warp, fired  up the microwarp drive and manuvered manually around the random bit of protrusion in my way, then punched warp again. As my covert ops frigate sublimated around me, I couldn’t stop laughing.

God damn station got me.

I redocked, had my pod loaded into the complmentary imparior,  and made the entire trip back to Gallente space without incident in a rookie ship.

Peace & Quiet

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I brought my anathema to a halt ten kilometers from the wormhole and watched as the rest of the fleet began to pour through. The system was scanned, we were the only group around, but I still felt vulnerable as I briefly dropped my cloak. I jettisoned the container of bookmarks, the can clearing my jettison tubes just as my microwarp drive flared into activity.

Moments later I was again safely under the veil of my cloaking device, in warp to my monitoring post while the rest of the team decided which of the locations to explore first.

“Aura, give me a readout of the system properties,” I sighed as the results were posted into my attention buffer. 24 AU in diameter, far too big to monitor with my onboard scanner.

The cloak pulsed, the fragile hull shimmering into visibility for a brief moment, expelling a probe and then vanishing again. Melting into the alien sky.

“Move that probe on top of the raiding group, tightest scan diameter and give me a ping,” I sat back and waited the several seconds for the scan to complete. 4 ships registered, only the ones that belonged there.

“Scanning complete.”

“Good Aura, set the system to ignore those signatures, set the probe on a 64AU wide scan and pull it back out of the system, off axis,” I watched the scanner as the combat probe warped off into the interstellar void. A few moments later the probe came online, nearly 40AU from any marked location in system but still close enough to scan everything important.

“Excellent ping that every few seconds and wake me up if the scan comes up as anything but clean,” I checked the locations of my other probes, “and move the offline combat probes out there as well, keeping formation.”

“Yes Madame, probes in transit” came the reply seconds later.

I kept the system scanner, and comms in my attention, but forgot the rest of the ship systems to free up cortical memory. It would take a few seconds to have remembered if I needed to perform any serious maneuvers, but my ship had no weapons and no chance of being located.

I relaxed in my pod harness, took full control of the camera drones and set about enjoying the view.

You can’t make an omelette…

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I sent another scan ping out to the Old Man Star Gate, which confirmed my previous result. A lone punisher on gate, two Caldari war targets somewhere in system and several of my Gallente allies swarming around. Strategic points had been captured, or would be in a few minutes, there wasn’t much left to do but hunt.

It had been a good day thus far. The militia had captured every site it could in Heydelies, repelling Caldari and Pirate alike. I’d nearly lost a punisher to a rupture earlier in the day, but had managed to escape. No losses, but no kills. I now sat in my trusty vengeance, 100M kilometers off to the side of the gate, watching the lone punisher on scan.

“He’s probably baiting,” I said to myself, “what the hell.” I urged my ship into action and dropped out of warp 20km from the target. Seconds later his propulsion systems were locked down and my guns were biting hard into his thick armor. Meanwhile the superior resistances on my tech II hull were mitigating most of his damage. The fight was over, it was only a matter of time.

“Two targets on grid,” Aura’s voice drew my attention to the local scan as a brutix and a hurricane dropped out of warp on top of me. I checked my own systems. The punisher had me scrambled, there was no escape for me, but his armor was nearly gone.

“Aura overheat everything that does damage,” I shouted as I manually manipulated the power hungry armor repair unit but I found my capacitor reserves dropping much faster than I had expected. Neuts. This was going to go poorly.

I sighed and sat back in my command chair, let the guns run, maybe it’d be enough.

It wasn’t, and in moments I found myself in my pod, looking down at the explosion that was once my ship. I sat in space, hesitating, and one by one the Caldari pilots locked and fired upon my pod. I needed this, I thought to myself, let it go.

A moment of chill ran down my spine.

I gasped for air and sat up in the clone vat, as if awaking from a nightmare.

“Where am I?,” I asked. No one was in the room. I strapped a new neocom onto my wrist.

“Aura, where are we?”

“Mies, Madame. Pend Insurance wishes to inform you that they regret the loss of your ship, and have transferred the agreed upon…”

“Thank you Aura, is the Arbitrator assembled and ready?” I was already in elevator from the medical sector heading to the flight deck.

“Yes Madame.”

“Good, have it prepped for flight. I want to be in space in 5 minutes, and authorize another clone.”

I stood in the elevator in my white clone robe and fuzzy slippers as it silently moved through the station. I brought my left hand up and steadied it. I was shivering with adrenaline, sent coursing through my veins by my confused new body.

The fear was gone. I felt warm.

Evolution

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I took another sip of my rum & quafe and continued to browse through the mess of corporate news. Being alone, cut off from the secured corp channels was annoying. Waiting for a bunch of bureaucrats to decide whether or not I was dangerous to the federation was more annoying. The alcohol helped.

I perused the recent news. A smile spreading across my face.

Corp Pilot was assaulted while on a federation mission in the system of Yvangier. Pilot escaped the situation and returned in a destroyer seeking retaliation.

My lips mouthed the words as I read. My smile growing.

Corp mining operation interrupted by thieves. Mining foreman left operation and returned in a combat craft. Pilot destroyed one potential threat, no losses recorded.

I put the datapad down and took another drink. I remembered the old days, as a mercenary. We protected our fair share of fat weak industrialists. It was a decent living. My work since coming back to the sky had been different. I had been living amongst the industrialists, training, advising… learning.

Times had changed, at least here. These were the industrialists I recognized. They spent far too many hours pouring over ore reports for my tastes, spent far too long training to blast asteroids, melt rocks. But they were different. They were not fat and weak, they were lean and becoming progressively more dangerous.

“You possess only that which you have the capacity to defend,” I mumbled, a quote from somewhere long forgotten. Industrialists certainly, but they understood this.

They were beginning to bare their teeth.