STARDATE 33050710 - My mistake
10 Jul 2019Mdmaniac
RIP XavierHe started out in life running cargo for the Feds in a Dropship before, somehow, ending up in my employ as a "harmless" fighter pilot. I guess you can only run so much biowaste before you get sick of it. I offered a little more excitement, of course. We bounty-hunted in LHS 20 for flight practice and cut our teeth fighting for the Fellowship of 11 in LTT 17686 against 49 Tauri Interstellar. Before long, he had passed his Expert pilot's test. The Squadron sent us out to Gliese 9106 to help the efforts there and he never once complained about being asked to do.... well, ethically questionable things to wrest control of the system from the venerable corporation Gliese 9106 Partners. Ultimately, we were successful and he earned his Master wings in the process. To celebrate, I bought a new ship - the Federal Corvette! When I took it to Ray Gateway, where I had the hangar bay installed, he was excited to try out the new Taipan fighters...
...And that's where my mistake happened. Scanners and intercepted comms traffic showed some kind of disturbance outside the station. I should've paid more attention. I should've been more cautious. I ignored the threat, thinking that my size and speed would deter whoever was out there from doing whatever they were doing. I wasn't planning on hanging around to find out. It was my first mistake in a string of mistakes. I was boosting away from the station - clearly breaking speed protocols - when the first round of attacks came in. I wasn't panicked, I had seen plenty of combat and I wasn't interested in engaging. I set full power to shields and fired up the FSD for a jump to supercruise, suspecting that the attackers wouldn't bother following me. I still don't know why it was taking so long. Perhaps they had cleverly parked a Cutter nearby? I don't know. I took a second to look for the big ship but I never found it. Thinking I could just boost further away and jump, I transferred full power to engines! That was my second mistake. The FSD never did charge up for that jump so I canceled it and quickly selected a system that I could high-wake to, hoping to avoid whatever was mass-locking me. Shields were getting low, so I deployed an SCB and heatsink but someone hit me with a Feedback Cascade, negating my shield bank. The damn FSD still wasn't charging fast enough! The shields were gone. Despite my 300,000,000 cr armor upgrade, the hull soon followed and I found myself ejected into space by the life-saving pod. It's with such heavy regret that I realized that my co-pilot didn't make it out. Money can be made. Ships can be replaced... but a good fighter pilot is hard to train.
I wish I had managed to keep my cool when the FSD was charging ever-so-slowly.
I wish I had kept full power to shields when I was trying to jump out of trouble.
I wish I had turned to face my attackers - while I doubt that I could've made them pay for the attack, I would've preferred to lose my ship in combat rather than taking hits in the back.
I wish I had done anything but lose my friend, Xavier.