A friendly warning
- Thread starter killerofstars
- Start date
Nice story, well written. Have some rep.
Looking forward to the next one.
Looking forward to the next one.
Thanks guys, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I had intended to leave it there, but I had to know what the black ships are. So, maybe in a few days there will be another friendly warning.
I had intended to leave it there, but I had to know what the black ships are. So, maybe in a few days there will be another friendly warning.
I have always wondered if I should not park several Asp Explorers, fitted out for long and self-sustained travel, at each major faction home planet. Sol, Alioth, and Achenar should be last to fall...
On the other hand, out there, in deep space, shouldn't be the likelihood of such encounters be greatest...
Great read, wish this could be in-game on the bulletin boards.
On the other hand, out there, in deep space, shouldn't be the likelihood of such encounters be greatest...
Great read, wish this could be in-game on the bulletin boards.
Reavers!
.
Not been flying much recently due to paperwork overload, but this really does inspire me to dust down the clipper - especially since I have a new paint job to put on when I final get a chance.
.
Might have to round up a few friends and find a sharp stick to see what's out there.
.
Not been flying much recently due to paperwork overload, but this really does inspire me to dust down the clipper - especially since I have a new paint job to put on when I final get a chance.
.
Might have to round up a few friends and find a sharp stick to see what's out there.
Doesn't excuse terrible or lack of punctuation. Kids now a days.
"Flying around the rim" Hahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Yes, I'm that childish!
Gilmour
Banned
Ramble much?No, I’m not drunk, this is just to take the edge off. If you’d been there, you’d want a few edges taken off too. Now shut up, and I’m going to tell you something you need to know, if you like to fly out around the rim.
Everybody tells stories every now and then of strange stuff on the edges. I’ve heard some crazy things, like the guy who claims he hit something in witch-space, or that lady who swore her docking computer gained sentience and then stole her ship. You spend long enough staring into an endless night I guess you start to go a little off. But this isn’t some isolated thing that happened just to me, and a lot of people died because of it.
I used to fly around doing cargo runs and bounty hunting missions like anyone else, but eventually I made enough that I could take my leisure out in the edges. I flew around in a cobra with a lot of special components. Yeah yeah, I know there are bigger and better ships, I’ve flown them, but I wanted something maneuverable that had decent bunk space in it. Something I could sleep in comfortably between stations and planets as I wandered around, taking in the sights.
I made something of a home for myself in the Epsilon-265 system, at a medium sized station called Saudade Hub. No, you haven’t heard of it, and no, I know there isn’t a station there now. Funny that.
I was...living my life, trying to convince a smoldering lady in a mostly translucent dress made of webs of sparkles to let me buy her a drink...and show her around my ship. The bar was a pretty popular one, it had a view overlooking the main docking area and was a favorite for pilots. Classy place, but not too classy that you couldn’t show up in your flight suit and look out of sorts.
If you like to pick up bounties, you learn to notice the little things out of the corners of your eyes, like the lines of beam weapons sweeping around wildly in the distance, indicating a fight. The lady...I...honestly, I can’t remember her name, was patiently listening to my attempt to tell a joke when I noticed all the military boys get up and leave. All of them. At once. I mostly flubbed the punchline but the lady snickered anyway, and gave me this look...amused? Wistful? I think she was about to open up, tell me something important. I think I was about to get a chance to connect.
An alarm sounded, echoing through the metal halls of the station, bouncing around the room.
“Alert: A large number of unidentified ships have entered the system and are on an approach to the station. There is no cause for alarm, but until we can ascertain their intentions, any pilots with combat skills should report to their ships. All takeoffs and landings have been temporarily suspended to prevent any misunderstandings. Should a hostile situation develop, combat pilots will be cleared to launch. Thank you.”
The voice was calm, but the thought behind it wasn’t. I smiled at the lady, and asked her pardon. She nodded politely and raised a glass. I glanced back at her as I walked through the door. Her back was to me, she was looking out through the window into the hanger.
She was a silhouette against a sudden flare of lights in the hanger, sparkles lighting up around the edges.
I’ll never forget that sight.
I was sealing the glove of my flight suit and walking...but not running...from the locker room attached to my landing pad towards the hanger my ship, the Autumn Wind was warming up inside when the second alarm sounded.
The deckplates under my feet trembled. I could have sworn one of the three massive light tubes that stretched across the hanger and pulled kilowatts from the station’s power supply must have flickered.
Two loud, sharp horn blasts sounded before a message, this time from a female voice:
“All combat capable pilots, please proceed to the main hanger. You are cleared to launch. The station is under attack. Repeat: The station is under attack. All station personnel, report to duty stations or combat shelters.” An alarm started sounding this time, and didn’t stop. My toes bit into the deckplate and I ran. I was less than a meter away from the the ramp into the safety of my ship when I felt, very clearly a second shudder go through the station. Listen, Saudade station might have been on the smaller side, but that’s a LOT of mass, It takes something pretty spectacular to make a station vibrate. I think I jumped up the first four stairs of my landing ramp.
“Get me into the air!!” I shouted into my mic as I pulled my helmet on.
“You’re on the expedited pre-flight.” A distinctly shaken voice came back from the pad’s control tower. “Standby.” I slammed my hand into the ramp retract as I slid into my chair.
“Come on...come on…” I muttered, drumming my fingers on the flight stick. Another ship rose up through the landing pad’s lift from deeper into the station ahead of me...a Vulture.
The pad dropped back down, and I was sliding into the lift. My fingers twitched nervously on the stick.
The air in the central hanger was chaos. Ships were lifting from every pad. the ships that got into the air were boosting at the airlock, blasting through the narrow opening at full throttle. There was no que, everybody just wanted out and into the fray, or their chance to run for it. I watched an inexperienced pilot clip the edge of the airlock in his haste to get out, his sidewinder spinning around in a death spiral to slam into the outer wall. I think I saw him eject. Sometimes your eyes play tricks on you.
The station released me. My gear barely made it into hull before I hit the boost. Unlike the unfortunate pilot in the sidewinder, I skimmed right through the lock, but I was a lot closer to the glowing field emitters embedded in the rim then I would have liked to admit.
I had thought things were chaotic inside the station, but what was outside…
Sorry. It was...there were...too many contacts for me to count. Dozens? Hundreds? More security forces were frame shifting in from other places in the system. Others were clearly making the short jump up from the planet.
It wasn’t enough.
There were...black ships. Weird looking things. Anacondas, Pythons, yes. Some other stuff I’d never seen before, bigger, military looking cruisers. But...strange. All of them, covered in struts and braces that were...odd...gave them an alien look.
I had immediate problems. Some of the larger ships were firing directly on the station airlock, destroying everything managing to escape. Something larger, I never gave it a proper look, took a salvo for me, whether by serendipity or intent. Either way, I’m grateful. It kept me alive, gave me precious seconds to get into the fight.
But it wasn’t a fight. Listen to me, it wasn’t a fight any more than it’s a fight when a machine beheads chickens to sell their carcasses.
I tangled with something. It looked kind of like a viper. In another life, maybe it was. I’ve spent a lot of money on my weapons. I have some of the best you can fit onto a ship my size, and I’ve paid some extra to some friends in the military over the years to put in a few bits you can’t buy commercially.
I burned through shields that pulsed and flickered in weird ways, carved bright, gleaming scars in that black hull. The other pilot just ignored me, and tore apart one of the military defenders. A vulture I think.
A shockwave rattled my cockpit, slammed my teeth against each other. I glanced out the canopy to my left. To my horror, I watched the spinning hanger section of the station split apart i, inertia carrying the heavy inner sections out to smash through the outer habitat ring. For a second, my radio traffic flared with screams, the main traffic control office, maybe some of the smaller pad towers. A statistical representation of all the screams that must have been given voice, but had no one to hear them.
I felt something like a fist squeezing me in my gut, and it wasn’t inertia. I thought of the lady in the sparkling dress.
Escape pods, emergency shuttles, construction pods, whatever had a solid shell and maybe some maneuvering thrusters were jettisoning from the broken, exploding sections...and I watched lines of deadly light from the black ships sweeping through the darkness, like fatal search beams, extinguishing them.
There was a big ship, maybe a federal cruiser. Something bright and fast hit it mid ship, and explosions started to blossom out from inside it.
I lit up with scan warnings. There weren’t a lot of more heavily armed security craft left. My shields strobed.
That was it. That was enough. I’d had it. I dumped everything into my engines and jammed my throttle against its stop. Listen, I would have liked to avenge those people. They were my friends damn it. But if I’d tried, I’m certain I wouldn’t be sitting here, telling you this story.
So I ran. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t see what the hell else I could have done.
I barely made the frameshift. Too much mass in the area. My shields were almost gone. I throttled up, but almost immediately I found myself fighting an interdiction, my ship twisting around as the frame drive struggled to cope. Thankfully, I was the better pilot that day and wrenched out of it’s grasp. I grabbed the nearest system as if I was drowning man reaching for a rope and slammed into witch-space.
My ship roared back out. I sat there a second, skimming near the star, trying to process what had just happened...trying to figure out what to do next.
Then the night light up with blue and the vice grip of another interdiction.
Once again, I was a hair faster than whoever was trying to pull my ship into normal space. Once again, I jumped to the first thing I could lock onto.
I don’t actually know if it was one of the black ships, or just an run of the mill pirate who decided to see what I had. But surely, if it had been a pirate, there would have been better targets than a heavily armed, nearly empty Cobra?
I ran two hundred light years across human space. Nearly ran my main tank dry. Then I flew to the nearest station, sold my precious Autumn Wind, bought an asp and had them stuff the biggest frameshift drive they could into the damn thing while I twitched nervously the entire while. Every rumble of the station, every time an air vent caused the wall to vibrate slightly when it kicked on, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
They asked me if I wanted a similar paint scheme to the Cobra I’d handed in. I didn’t. I wanted it stock, and I paid them extra to laser off the serial numbers, and extra again to forget who they’d sold it too.
That was a few years ago. I don’t stay anywhere too long, and I don’t try too hard to make friends anymore. I don’t sleep on stations. I sleep in deep space, running silent, with a handful of alarms rigged to scream bloody murder if anything comes within a few light seconds.
I hear whispers sometimes. I’m not the only one who’s seen these things. Sometimes I hear stories, from those like me, lucky to get away. And those screams...they’re still out there. Crawling out through space at the speed of light, a terrible monument to the dying, sound entombed in energy and silence.
So that’s why you’ve never heard of Saudade. Take a friendly word of advice. You see a black ship with some weird struts on it?
Fly. If you’re lucky, maybe someday someone won’t believe you either.
-Frontier, consider this my official pitch for station defense missions.
No, I’m not drunk, this is just to take the edge off. If you’d been there, you’d want a few edges taken off too. Now shut up, and I’m going to tell you something you need to know, if you like to fly out around the rim.
Everybody tells stories every now and then of strange stuff on the edges. I’ve heard some crazy things, like the guy who claims he hit something in witch-space, or that lady who swore her docking computer gained sentience and then stole her ship. You spend long enough staring into an endless night I guess you start to go a little off. But this isn’t some isolated thing that happened just to me, and a lot of people died because of it.
I used to fly around doing cargo runs and bounty hunting missions like anyone else, but eventually I made enough that I could take my leisure out in the edges. I flew around in a cobra with a lot of special components. Yeah yeah, I know there are bigger and better ships, I’ve flown them, but I wanted something maneuverable that had decent bunk space in it. Something I could sleep in comfortably between stations and planets as I wandered around, taking in the sights.
I made something of a home for myself in the Epsilon-265 system, at a medium sized station called Saudade Hub. No, you haven’t heard of it, and no, I know there isn’t a station there now. Funny that.
I was...living my life, trying to convince a smoldering lady in a mostly translucent dress made of webs of sparkles to let me buy her a drink...and show her around my ship. The bar was a pretty popular one, it had a view overlooking the main docking area and was a favorite for pilots. Classy place, but not too classy that you couldn’t show up in your flight suit and look out of sorts.
If you like to pick up bounties, you learn to notice the little things out of the corners of your eyes, like the lines of beam weapons sweeping around wildly in the distance, indicating a fight. The lady...I...honestly, I can’t remember her name, was patiently listening to my attempt to tell a joke when I noticed all the military boys get up and leave. All of them. At once. I mostly flubbed the punchline but the lady snickered anyway, and gave me this look...amused? Wistful? I think she was about to open up, tell me something important. I think I was about to get a chance to connect.
An alarm sounded, echoing through the metal halls of the station, bouncing around the room.
“Alert: A large number of unidentified ships have entered the system and are on an approach to the station. There is no cause for alarm, but until we can ascertain their intentions, any pilots with combat skills should report to their ships. All takeoffs and landings have been temporarily suspended to prevent any misunderstandings. Should a hostile situation develop, combat pilots will be cleared to launch. Thank you.”
The voice was calm, but the thought behind it wasn’t. I smiled at the lady, and asked her pardon. She nodded politely and raised a glass. I glanced back at her as I walked through the door. Her back was to me, she was looking out through the window into the hanger.
She was a silhouette against a sudden flare of lights in the hanger, sparkles lighting up around the edges.
I’ll never forget that sight.
I was sealing the glove of my flight suit and walking...but not running...from the locker room attached to my landing pad towards the hanger my ship, the Autumn Wind was warming up inside when the second alarm sounded.
The deckplates under my feet trembled. I could have sworn one of the three massive light tubes that stretched across the hanger and pulled kilowatts from the station’s power supply must have flickered.
Two loud, sharp horn blasts sounded before a message, this time from a female voice:
“All combat capable pilots, please proceed to the main hanger. You are cleared to launch. The station is under attack. Repeat: The station is under attack. All station personnel, report to duty stations or combat shelters.” An alarm started sounding this time, and didn’t stop. My toes bit into the deckplate and I ran. I was less than a meter away from the the ramp into the safety of my ship when I felt, very clearly a second shudder go through the station. Listen, Saudade station might have been on the smaller side, but that’s a LOT of mass, It takes something pretty spectacular to make a station vibrate. I think I jumped up the first four stairs of my landing ramp.
“Get me into the air!!” I shouted into my mic as I pulled my helmet on.
“You’re on the expedited pre-flight.” A distinctly shaken voice came back from the pad’s control tower. “Standby.” I slammed my hand into the ramp retract as I slid into my chair.
“Come on...come on…” I muttered, drumming my fingers on the flight stick. Another ship rose up through the landing pad’s lift from deeper into the station ahead of me...a Vulture.
The pad dropped back down, and I was sliding into the lift. My fingers twitched nervously on the stick.
The air in the central hanger was chaos. Ships were lifting from every pad. the ships that got into the air were boosting at the airlock, blasting through the narrow opening at full throttle. There was no que, everybody just wanted out and into the fray, or their chance to run for it. I watched an inexperienced pilot clip the edge of the airlock in his haste to get out, his sidewinder spinning around in a death spiral to slam into the outer wall. I think I saw him eject. Sometimes your eyes play tricks on you.
The station released me. My gear barely made it into hull before I hit the boost. Unlike the unfortunate pilot in the sidewinder, I skimmed right through the lock, but I was a lot closer to the glowing field emitters embedded in the rim then I would have liked to admit.
I had thought things were chaotic inside the station, but what was outside…
Sorry. It was...there were...too many contacts for me to count. Dozens? Hundreds? More security forces were frame shifting in from other places in the system. Others were clearly making the short jump up from the planet.
It wasn’t enough.
There were...black ships. Weird looking things. Anacondas, Pythons, yes. Some other stuff I’d never seen before, bigger, military looking cruisers. But...strange. All of them, covered in struts and braces that were...odd...gave them an alien look.
I had immediate problems. Some of the larger ships were firing directly on the station airlock, destroying everything managing to escape. Something larger, I never gave it a proper look, took a salvo for me, whether by serendipity or intent. Either way, I’m grateful. It kept me alive, gave me precious seconds to get into the fight.
But it wasn’t a fight. Listen to me, it wasn’t a fight any more than it’s a fight when a machine beheads chickens to sell their carcasses.
I tangled with something. It looked kind of like a viper. In another life, maybe it was. I’ve spent a lot of money on my weapons. I have some of the best you can fit onto a ship my size, and I’ve paid some extra to some friends in the military over the years to put in a few bits you can’t buy commercially.
I burned through shields that pulsed and flickered in weird ways, carved bright, gleaming scars in that black hull. The other pilot just ignored me, and tore apart one of the military defenders. A vulture I think.
A shockwave rattled my cockpit, slammed my teeth against each other. I glanced out the canopy to my left. To my horror, I watched the spinning hanger section of the station split apart i, inertia carrying the heavy inner sections out to smash through the outer habitat ring. For a second, my radio traffic flared with screams, the main traffic control office, maybe some of the smaller pad towers. A statistical representation of all the screams that must have been given voice, but had no one to hear them.
I felt something like a fist squeezing me in my gut, and it wasn’t inertia. I thought of the lady in the sparkling dress.
Escape pods, emergency shuttles, construction pods, whatever had a solid shell and maybe some maneuvering thrusters were jettisoning from the broken, exploding sections...and I watched lines of deadly light from the black ships sweeping through the darkness, like fatal search beams, extinguishing them.
There was a big ship, maybe a federal cruiser. Something bright and fast hit it mid ship, and explosions started to blossom out from inside it.
I lit up with scan warnings. There weren’t a lot of more heavily armed security craft left. My shields strobed.
That was it. That was enough. I’d had it. I dumped everything into my engines and jammed my throttle against its stop. Listen, I would have liked to avenge those people. They were my friends damn it. But if I’d tried, I’m certain I wouldn’t be sitting here, telling you this story.
So I ran. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t see what the hell else I could have done.
I barely made the frameshift. Too much mass in the area. My shields were almost gone. I throttled up, but almost immediately I found myself fighting an interdiction, my ship twisting around as the frame drive struggled to cope. Thankfully, I was the better pilot that day and wrenched out of it’s grasp. I grabbed the nearest system as if I was drowning man reaching for a rope and slammed into witch-space.
My ship roared back out. I sat there a second, skimming near the star, trying to process what had just happened...trying to figure out what to do next.
Then the night light up with blue and the vice grip of another interdiction.
Once again, I was a hair faster than whoever was trying to pull my ship into normal space. Once again, I jumped to the first thing I could lock onto.
I don’t actually know if it was one of the black ships, or just an run of the mill pirate who decided to see what I had. But surely, if it had been a pirate, there would have been better targets than a heavily armed, nearly empty Cobra?
I ran two hundred light years across human space. Nearly ran my main tank dry. Then I flew to the nearest station, sold my precious Autumn Wind, bought an asp and had them stuff the biggest frameshift drive they could into the damn thing while I twitched nervously the entire while. Every rumble of the station, every time an air vent caused the wall to vibrate slightly when it kicked on, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
They asked me if I wanted a similar paint scheme to the Cobra I’d handed in. I didn’t. I wanted it stock, and I paid them extra to laser off the serial numbers, and extra again to forget who they’d sold it too.
That was a few years ago. I don’t stay anywhere too long, and I don’t try too hard to make friends anymore. I don’t sleep on stations. I sleep in deep space, running silent, with a handful of alarms rigged to scream bloody murder if anything comes within a few light seconds.
I hear whispers sometimes. I’m not the only one who’s seen these things. Sometimes I hear stories, from those like me, lucky to get away. And those screams...they’re still out there. Crawling out through space at the speed of light, a terrible monument to the dying, sound entombed in energy and silence.
So that’s why you’ve never heard of Saudade. Take a friendly word of advice. You see a black ship with some weird struts on it?
Fly. If you’re lucky, maybe someday someone won’t believe you either.
-Frontier, consider this my official pitch for station defense missions.
Yes! Excellent; quite a yarn. When we can walk in stations and on ships, have 'Cantinas' in the stations; THIS ^^ is what were talking about...
PS. I read it to my wife while she was PvPing in 'RIFT'; she loved it.
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"PvPing in the Rift, she loved it" Hhahahahahahahahahqahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahqahahahahahahahahahaha...Oh god,tears are streaming down my face!!
