CMND Log :049 "Dude, I'm just here for coffee."
12 Feb 2022Switch Killington
Last week I was fighting Thargoids. Well, got bored, went back into the bubble, looking for trouble. I was helping repel Federation forces for some old friends of mine when the all commander alert, community thing came over the comms. Seemed like something I'd get into. I've made my fortune exploring, I'm part of an exploration squadron, helping set up these bridge stations to Colonia is on brand for me. I hop in my my freight ship, Awling Hass, and pick up some coffee and head over there.Now, I've done plenty of these things before. My pro move is once I'm in system with my first delivery, use Inara's little database thing to find a station thats just barely far enough away to be a pain in the aft for a sane Commander to visit, and just run a line back and forth between them. I've been burned before, chasing nearby stations that have stock on Inara, but have been cleaned out by the time I get there. I also have to worry about large pad sizes and what not, anyway I found a station that suited me, cut on some tunes, and started flying.
Well, that station, some touristy thing, was too far out even for me, I'd done a couple lines and was sick of jumping. So, I pulled up Inara again and took a closer look, messed with some filters, you know how this works. I found something close by that looked promising. "Glushenko Hydroponics" in the nearby Adenets System. It had a stockpile of something like 2k tonnes of coffee. I did notice that it hadn't been updated in 20 days, but figured with it being a surface station and having such a backlog of inventory, and other commanders trading with fleet carriers and orbitals stations, maybe, there would be some coffee there. Only 2 jumps away I could easily move whatever they had fairly quickly.
I fly over there, making my final approach. Honestly, I'm not paying much attention because my vid I got going was getting good, but when I drop out of glide I get back in my chair. Request docking, and my ship spits at me about 15 seconds of gobbeldy gook.
You see, I had the bright idea to switch my COVAS to something that sounded sexy, so I picked some cool language, I think it's turkish or something. I've been flying for years, I don't actually need it to tell me things I've heard everything it has to say a million times over. But now, with dead air coming in from traffic control and no landing pad lit up, I kinda did need it to tell me what was going on in English. I drop the ship on the landing pad anyway, since I wasn't getting any warnings or anything for pad loitering. Maybe its a broken transmitter who knows.
I get out of my ship and meat walk my way over to the Hydroponics building and turn the corner, and there are like twenty soldiers in a straight up warzone. My helmet lights up with "Conflict Zone" warnings and faction info, the whole intel packet is like dumped on me. These soldiers are not happy either, they all turn to me and start screaming to flag for my side, shots are firing, explosions, and I'm there trying to navigate my Insight to see what's going on. The guy nearest to me screams, "Soldier, you need to identify right now! Are you friend or foe!"
"Dude, I'm just here for coffee!"
"Friend or Foe!"
He gets all heated and draws down on me and screams at me again. I tell the guy to chill out, but he isn't having it. Usually I like to download the factions political manifestos and decide which faction is more in line with my personal beliefs, but this guy is being rude. "Fine, Foe." I draw on him, and blow the guy away. Trust me, it was really cool. Apparently 3/4s of the people around me in this firefight were that guys buddies, so that wasn't so cool, and I was too busy looking like a stone cold killer to have switch my shield on yet, so it didn't really end up as cool as I would have wanted, but one medical redeployment and ten minutes of battle later, and I, along with my mystery friends had cleared the conflict zone. I took a look at the debrief to see who I happened to be laying my life down for. Alliance. Great.
It was kind of awkward afterwards too, they were all cheering and hugging each other, clapping me on the back. "Woo go team player that's me, but did you guys see any coffee around here? Do you know when this war is going to be over, so I can get some coffee?" I mean, they are Alliance, they can understand capitalistic greed, right? Nobody really told me, so I'm camping in my ship just outside settlement border, watching the lasers and explosions pop off, hoping in the morning it will be back to business as usual so I can get some beans.