Hard Day's Ride
11 Dec 2019SkyaLykos
It's been a long one again. I'm ready to put a fist through my central console, swear to God. Get ready for a long read, I've got a load on my mind. Let me sum up with this: Never trust a desk jockey to give you a straight answer.I've never seen such slow progress working towards agreements. An entire system has more people than an entire city back on Earth, even relatively new ones. Understandably, people are going to have different ideas of what's best for the system. I have a hard time agreeing with those that use their position to tout policies that work against the lower brackets of the population. I happen to like the idea of raising ourselves up by raising up those at the bottom. I also notice that they majority of systems in anarchy or those run by iron fists tend to have the highest mortality rates and the highest levels of resentment out of the whole of the galaxy.
Now, since I'm on the topic, I might as well come out and say that I back Shadow President Winters for a few reasons:
1) I'm no gunslinger. Not to say that I don't enjoy a good dogfight from time to time, but it can get hairy, and I haven't got my Python off the ground yet. A good pilot needs a good workhorse. The Cobra's where I cut my teeth in combat, sure. T7 has more than tripled its own value in successful deliveries. Hell, even the Keelback digger I threw together has made me my fair share of Opals profit.
But therein lies the issue. I need something that can handle a variable workload. One pilot can't separately run 5 ships. My Dolphin hasn't run in over a year. I sold the Vulture shortly after buying it, on accounts of my lack of funds for outrigging. I figured the Python would cover most of the bases and leave me a spare slot or two in the Hangar for other, more role-heavy ships. Can't wait to fall in behind the controls of a Corvette. Wouldn't mind trading in the Dolphin for a Beluga. The Python is small enough to occupy a medium pad, but it also has the versatility of my top-3 ships rolled into one. The reactor leaves a little to be desired, but it'll work out eventually.
2) I can't stand to see oppression. We've seen the rise and fall of countless empires on Earth. We've seen what works and does not, and we know why. I have a hard time believing that Dictatorships and Communisms stand in the Galaxy for the sake of the people beneath them.
Dad used to tell me stories about the Old World. I've come up to see that his stories weren't as wild as I originally thought, although there's no G-D way he carried the Easter Bunny out of Vietnam on his back with a shrapnel wound in his leg. FDR really did help to put to rest three massive governments that had no business rising in the first place. Churchill really did smoke a big ol' cigar and did actually have a prescription written for a nightly glass of whiskey. Even Bill Clinton, in all of his hedonistic glory, managed to put together some form of functioning budget, although it definitely seemed pretty sketchy, then and now alike.
If Communism worked anywhere outside of China, why wasn't it more popular? If a Dictatorship is so great, why can't we have a laugh at our leader with egg on his face? We watched China have its wonderful implosion in the early 21st, and that was caused by a lack of general rights and a wholesale disregard for human life. So, out here, on the final frontier, with bugs on all sides and pirates cruising freely and happily on the profits of the bloodshed they bring, do we really want to waste our time with Chairman Mao's great failure? Hard pass.
3) A community walks as fast as its slowest member. That doesn't mean we leave them behind or kill them off, that means we do what we can to hurry them along, if possible. We have all of this outrageous technology, which, looking back only a millennia, would seem truly impossible. We have developed medicines to eradicate crop blights in the current day and age, which could have entirely wiped out families, colonies, entire systems. Who's to say what we can't accomplish? And yet, we bicker over failed forms of government that have no place in a modern age such as this. There must be a better way.
All that in the air, it's difficult for me to say that the whole debate is so heavily one-sided. Sure, a communism could work well within an exceedingly small community. Fine, a dictatorship could work in a pinch for long enough to get another functioning form up and running. I'm not here to debate, I'm here for a paycheck. I can't say Winters' tactics are the most profitable by any means, but at least my money comes from a place I can say I'm proud of. It does also come with the occasional chance at a good scrap.
I figure the less time spent behind the sticks of that rickety old T7, the less likely I'll go mad from the constant wash of Witch Space. I get plenty of system-flight during cargo runs usually, but the run from Rhea 1 to Ito Orbital is so short you basically don't have time for Minute Rice and it gets offended every time you mention "Dwarf" stars. I keep meaning to repaint the old mule but the wear-in on the Tac White just looks so good on her I just can't bring myself to do it. I lost count of the runs I made with her today, god knows I broke the rating requirements at least twice over for this week, so I might as well do some work to earn the money back I spent on pack expedites .
Local pirates running wild, short supply in food stores, your usual cornucopia of dogpile work orders. Most lucrative runs today involve picking up 20t of clothing and 9t of synthbeef. Payout totals around 3M. Guess I can't argue with the money, but seeing they're for the same faction, I have to wonder what the hell they're doing with that much pink sludge and clothing. I suppose I was hauling Federal Aid packages and orders here, so maybe they're doing something about their lower brackets? I can only hope so.
I dropped off my second load of goods and picked up my check, and by then I was so wound up from boredom I was about ready to start playing with the idea of an ungrappled spacewalk. I picked up a contract for a smalltime wrecker, I can't even remember his name. A bounty is a bounty, after all. I hopped out and found him, blew him out of his ship, and came back.
Ed Mahon has a tendency to send runners through Winters space, for some godforsaken reason. He has this affinity for sending unfortunate souls our way on a regular basis. I swear see his name in my system traffic ledger almost as often as Ms. Winters herself.
I caught one by the collar and reign him in for a good-ol' toe-to-toe. I didn't have any information on him, just his identification frequencies. Ed Mahon agent, no name, no stated intentions, of course. A Vulture. Knowing a little about the ship, I can honestly say I thought twice about it. I just had my Cobra. Not the beefiest by far. Certainly no Gunship or Vette. I reeled myself in behind him and settled the stick in for some high-G flying.
I was hoping for an easy ride, but I knew better. He had the armor advantage on me, but the pull certainly didn't go that way. He bucked hard. I don't think I've ever seen so much fight in an Alliance pilot before. He came close to kicking me off twice, taking a couple close passes at a moon not far from the Class 1 Gasser at the prime of LTT 12360 and a curve or three passed Bordage Landing, which I assume was meant to hurry the FSS response a few seconds. A minute or so after pulling the trigger, we tumble out of hyperspace.
I've got my distributor regeared for wep-eng and my hardpoint bulkheads opened. By the time the ship came back into my crosshairs, the lasers were primed and ready. The gimballs are gliding so smoothly you can't even hear them, and there's no grinding in the target stick in the gunner seat next to me. Still haven't figured out why it grinds there. Pretty sure I should have that checked out...
We made a couple jousting passes at each other. My lasers burned heavy holes in his shields, but they just kept bouncing back. I didn't bother checking the subsystem list, or I may have seen the cell bank he kept spinning up, but I also would have seen the utter lack of point defense as well, long before I fired the first missle.
After the fourth pass, his shields were gone, and mine stood at a modest 70%. The fight was decided. I punched in the control swap to the missile racks, and launched the full rack. He'd decided he'd lost as well, and was turning about to try to escape. I readjusted my distributor for eng-wep, punched the afterburner, and watched as each missile bit off another chunk from his hull.
It was almost like fireworks. Every couple of seconds followed up with another flash, an eventual resounding thud of ordnance rocking the Cobra. Each burst ripped out more of his hull. The third crippled his lasers. The fifth blew out a massive chunk of his FSD. The sixth, clearly sentient and bloodthirsty, buried itself in and dug for the heart, rupturing the fuel tank and reactor.
The sudden tearing of the barriers followed by a rapid fusion of Hydrogen into Helium. As the color flashed again from the fuse, the ship's hull reflected back a response, from three large pieces, leaving a trail of metallic dust behind them, dozens meters beyond the flash site.
I turned in the voucher the FSS agent radioed me from the flash site. The jockey on the other side of the window picked it up, looked it over, and coupled my comms to his console without saying a word. He matched up the case numbers and said, very flatly, "thank you for your patronage."
I was standing there thinking about what I needed to put money toward. I know he was just a regular agent, no more special than your average copilot hire, but he had a good sense of space. Each pass he made came within a few feet. I could see the pilot clearly on our passes. I could see him enjoying the rush of the fight as much as I was.
I checked the transaction over as he started packing up his station. The voucher only paid 11k. I asked him why before he could leave. He shrugged. I asked him again. He shook his head, adjusted his spectacles, and said again, "thank you for your patronage," and shut his window.
At least it'll get me a meal and maybe a beer after I restock.