My Name is Rawley, And I have no idea what the frakk I'm doing...

I have no idea that the frakk I'm doing.

Those are the words I've repeated day in and day out as I showed up for my shift as a mechanic working on hydraulics for whatever spaceship happens to dock here at 'exciting' Wohler Station out in Kremainn. I don't know how my family found the means to move up here but when I was old enough I cut loose and....within weeks was broke and out of a place to sleep. Typical teenage stuff, right? Yeah. We'll go with that. Anyways, I ended up finding work and with that came a paycheck and a place to sleep. It wasn't much. Things were looking up. I got good at handling a wrench, started with engines and ended up with hydraulics. I'm not sure why I'm so good at it, probably because it's simple stuff really when you think about it. Now, I'm not sure who built these stations, or how much real maintenance gets done on them. I've always heard it was 'a lot' and 'Not nearly enough'. Well, my parents lived by the docks, Best views o the ships they always said. Must have been a fantastic view when that Type-9 and it's drunk pilot plowed into the station and fused itself to their apartment. Well, ok there were other people who lost friends, family and such but my parents were really all I ever had, you see? I know, this is a horrible tone to set my story off.

My boss gave me a few weeks off, advanced me some pay, funeral services were short and sweet, they were, really. I received a lump sum of insurance. And that promptly vanished. How? Pretty damned easily actually. After the taxes, the funeral services and everything? I think I had a hundred credits left. Whoo. So you can imagine when I showed up for work and some suit is standing there with my boss, who promptly singled me out and dragged me and Mr. Suit to his office. That wasn't weird, I did tend to sho up sloppily drunk pretty often. If I wasn't so good at my job he'd probably have fired me about the third time.

I think that pretty much sums up my backstory a bit. Does it? No? Well, alright. So. There I am, standing out in the docking ring, hung over and staring at a clipboard the head mechanic (My former boss) is handing me. Yep, that's my name on the ownership papers, That's my signature at the bottom stating I fully accept responsibility of said ship. And thats my bank account. One thousand credits. It said one hundred thousand that morning when Mr. Suit showed me the numbers. That was before docking fee's, Maintenance fee's, Insurance fees, Estate holding Fees, Oh..and Paying off my parents debt fees. And my parents debt. Thanks Ma'n'Pa. Love you guys too.

Ok where was I? Oh right. My Sidewinder. I own one, an I gotta tell you, it's probably seen better days. When I cracked it open I could swear the dust was thick enough to fill a kiddie pool. After working harder than I think I've ever worked before I cleaned house, got the place looking good again, and managed to do it all on a hundred credits. Even overhauled the reactor, and apparently ironed out the wonky hydraulics. Dad must've parked it and went cold turkey, he never said anything about owning a ship. Mum never said anything either, My childhood could have been way better. If I'd known. Oh how I wish I had known the strings that came attached to this thing. See, My dad was Federation Navy apparently. Not a bigshot, A pilot. Whoo, My dad was a pilot and when he left the Navy he had enough to buy the sidewinder I'm sitting in right now. He didn't do much, he ran short haul cargo and If the secret compartment I found is any indication, less than legal cargo every so often as well. I say found, what I really mean is that I'm staring at a black box and getting awfully worried about why the hell it's hidden here. I was trying to see if there was any way to expand the cargo bays a bit, mebbe even fit a small refinery in here. I could pull a decent haul of ore out of the nearby belts.

My dad had plenty of time to sell this thing off, and he never did. That worried me a bit to be honest. It didn't take me long to come across someone who could look into it for me.

In hindsight? I should have just left it alone.
 
Wrong area.

Not sure what you mean?


Right, so where did I leave off? Oh yeah, that black box. I know nothing about them, I know they're illegal so I got in touch with my boss and he knew a guy, who knew a guy. You know the deal. He sent a guy over, quibbled with me about the price and I let him walk off with it. And a few thousand more credits. Good riddance to trouble.

Not a chance in hell. Seriously. I woke up the next day to a Fed Navy suit kicking in my door and holding me up at gunpoint while a team searched my place, and then they escorted me to my sidewinder, where they tore it apart making sure that was it. You ever want to know what it's like to be handcuffed and held at gunpoint? Smuggle some black boxes. It'll do wonders to get ya on the straight and narrow. When ti was all said and done they hauled me off to jail, sans rights, and left me in a room with a table and a Doxie Cup half full of warm water. I was asleep when the suit wandered back in, slammed the door shut and woke me up from whatever the hell I was dreaming about, being a hotshot fighter pilot or something. He sat down and cracked open a file and started listing off legal mumbo jumbo, charges against me, secrets of the state and all that. It all amounted to a lot of trouble for me if I couldn't prove my innocence. So. I word vomited. I told him everything. Twice. then he had someone come in and I repeated it all for a third time. And then they dumped me back in the hanger. They wanted to know where the Black Box was, and apparently it meant a lot to some very important people. I don't know what it was all about but in the end I wound up staring up at my sidewinder trying to figure out if I should scrap it and go back to busting hydraulics. Chief, my former boss showed up sometime later sporting a shiner and obviously nursing a bruised ego as well. He put me in touch with the guy who I sold it to and I found out through him the thing was on a transport leaving in a few hours. Type 6's aren't all that hard to track down, So, I got a hold of the Fed. He told me to go fetch and if I did get it back My record would be wiped clean. Fair enough. Quid pro quo they say right? A little bit of this for that.

They didn't tell me it had an escort. Two sidewinders in addition to the Type six itself. When I dropped out of super-cruise at their drop site I wasn't too excited to be staring down six sets of guns. Now even I wanted to know what the hell was on that box.
 
Dropping out of supercruise onto the Type-6 and two Sidewinders was... enlightening. I learned a few things that day. I had enough credits to buy it back, but they weren't selling it. So... I did the stupidest thing I've ever done. I opened up and damn the reactor full speed ahead! Now, I've spent enough time in combat simulation to earn my license. I had to, I wanted to be a Federation combat pilot. So what if the bird I was in wasn't exactly top of the line. It was when it was parked, that was for sure. The thrusters weren't too bad, and it only slid to the left a little bit. That was easy enough to correct, trim output on the right engine by a hair, bam, straight as an arrow. My shields held up surprisingly well, they got me in close where I latched onto the first Sidey and mixed it up a bit, the Type six was attempting to pivot and put it's lasers in me but, hey - those things aren't exactly nimble. Ever watch those old movies of blimps trying to move? yah, kinda like that. So while I danced with my two partners I learned something else about piloting. Adrenaline and tunnel vision. They can go hand in hand. The two sidewinders were so focused on me they never realized they'd been jockeying around to both get the kill that when they collided it was like shooting fish in a barrel, their shields went down and I just opened up. Wasn't until they both went up that I realized the type six had dropped my own shields and I was taking hits of my own.

The brick had some tough shields, must have been upgraded cause it took me a bit to break them, and I give the pilot credit, he did everything he could to prevent me from blowing his cargo hatch. But, big ships, big hatches and out popped a load of junk. I scooped the box and jumped. Leaving him to handle his friends and limping off myself with less than fifty percent hull integrity. No, the cargo hauler hadn't kicked my ass, the two sidewinders did. I'm not proud of what I did. And I never will be. I docked up, paid up my repair bill and signed off on stowing it. I'd picked up a few other items of interest while I was scooping up the box, and sold those as well. Bought me a shiny new Eagle. Why? Because after that run in I wanted something a bit faster and could turn on a dime... And Eagles are cheap.

Getting the box back helped my rep with the Federation a bit, I was going to be a freelancer for them, which I didn't mind really. I dropped into the local fed office and handed the box over, whiped my history and snagged a list of local bounties that had been posted. The local miners were hiring protection and well, I had an Eagle. They didn't ask any question and told me to be ready in the morning, they were heading out to the local Reservation, their lingo for their claim in the local extraction belt. It was a haven of claim jumpers, mining ships and of course, pirates. A never ending stream of them to hear the miners complain. System security patrolled the RES's pretty often but as soon as they were gone, everything climbed out of the rocks. The work would pay my bills and I would get some time in the hot seat. We'd be gone a few days, so I made sure to get some things for an extended stay in the cockpit, filled up my datapad with plenty of stuff to read, some food rations, and a pillow. you might laugh a bit now, but after a few hours everyone starts getting tired. I stowed my stuff in the ship where I could get it all and met the miners out the next day after a quick inquery about that black box, Got zero response and told to forget I knew about it. Ever have a bad feeling about something? Yeah, I had that too. And hoped it was just nerves or something. I set out for the nearby belt with the Miners and settled in for what I was sure would be a long boring two days of mostly sleeping and reading while parked around the Res.

Poor, Stupid, Naive me...
 
Right. So. It's been awhile since I last updated this. I only woke up a few days ago so I'm still working through the insurance paperwork. The Miners are alright, they made it back nice and clean and here I am staring at a shiny new eagle, kitted out just like the last one. I guess it Put on a good show for the miners while they booked it but those two days out in the belt were pretty rough really. The eagle I bought kicked the bucket around the middle of the second day. Had a pair of Vipers drop in on us. Wouldn't have been so bad really but they did outgun me by one extra weapon each. I've never fought in an asteroid belt so you can't really blame me for having plastered my ship to the side of one. I took them both out, and the bounties off them both more than made up for the loss of the eagle, and so did the money we made mining. I can't complain even if I have a headache for being in a coma for a few weeks. I cashed out the shiny Eagle for a Cobra. And a few upgrades left me right back to why I hooked up with the miners in the first place. Credits. Everything always leads back to the credit train. I picked up a few odd jobs here and there, kept fueld costs down by scooping at the sun. And, I'm not ashamed to admit it, but I started pirate hunting.

Everyone always makes fun of bounty hunters and I have no idea why. I had been in my Cobra for a few months now mind you, clearing the local belts of pirates. I'd even hooked up with the local security guys and got myself an interdiction and kill warrant scanner. Yeah, yeah I became a deputy, this place isn't exactly a model location of la an order. No system with Resource extraction belts are. You get miners and then you get the guys who think they can scrape in a few cheap credits by shooting up the poor miners. So I kept at it, because honestly I was paying the bills, and paying for upgrades. I left the scorch marks on the paint job, repaired the armor plating of course but left the scratched, dings and holes right where they were. Call it a statement really. You can do whatever you want to me and my ship, but we'll get our man.

Upto a point anyways. Ever fight a Elite Anaconda pilot? The moment anyone mentions that my targets flying anything larger than an imperial clipper? I stop them, thank them for their time and head right back out the door. Even vultures are iffy for me. They hit hard no matter what weapons they're packing. The guy looking to find the black box I'd delivered to the Fed piloted one. Blew my canopy out and almost left me for dead...
 
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