The hunt begins
07 Nov 2016Ryan256
6.83 Million credits.... whoa!Ryan shook his head in disbelief. That had to be a mistake. Some error in his calculations. Ryan reran his searches making sure each one was accurate and double checked his figures. 6.83 million credits. Nope! It wasn't a mistake. Between all of the corporate contracts and government bounties from multiple systems this pirate had one of the most massive bounties on him Ryan had ever seen.
Ryan continued digging through the data he had. It looked like from the guy's fuel purchases he was flying something very big. More than likely an Anaconda. A T9 doesn't exactly fit the bill of 'pirate command ship'. And it was very unlikely this pirate would have been able to get his hands on a Cutter or Corvette. Though.... not completely impossible.
Damn... and recently this guy has been rather careless too. Usually he makes an effort to mask his movements but lately he hasn't. Ryan had been able to track him without much difficulty. He's been going all over the place. Traveling to multiple systems. A bit more examination of the data showed that his travels seem to be in a 200LY radius from Chuuku. It's like he's searching for something, or someone.
Now normally pirate hunting wasn't Ryan's thing. Sure he would take out targets of opportunity to collect their bounties. But hunting down a single target? Only very rarely. But this guy was special. First there was the massive bounty. Then there was his hatred for illegal slavers.
Ryan had heard of this pirate a few days ago during a visit with his father, Duke Ronald Gilbert. Everything had gone well enough. Though his father just couldn't help but make the occasional remark or two about how Ryan should formally join the Imperial Navy and how he'd be a high ranking officer in no time and yadda yadda ... No thanks, Dad. Ryan was perfectly happy leading the life of a freelancer. Although having the Imperial connections he did certainly were beneficial. After all, they were the ones to thank for this mountain of data he was currently sifting through. Ryan's conversation with his dad had wandered to the dossier of a particular pirate/slaver that had come across his father's desk. There were several reported instances of this pirate raiding Imperial transports of Imperial slaves and selling them off as illegal slaves. Even though they were Imperial slaves these people were still Imperial citizens and they deserved better than that. Efforts to recover any of them had been stalled due to the fact that they were often very difficult to find. And when they were located they were in systems where the Empire had little to no jurisdiction. Just like the systems where this pirate tended primarily operate.
"In some ways it's a good thing you have no official connection with our Imperial forces. This frees you to act without any politics getting in the way. He's worth quite a lot of credits and you'd be doing the Empire a real favor." his father had said as he passed Ryan the file and data. Ryan had been reluctant to agree at first. But he hated pirates and slavers. That combined with the size of the bounty made him decide to do it.
But with as much as this pirate had been moving around lately ambushing him wasn’t going to be easy. Then there was the problem of actually taking him out. Ryan had destroyed several Anaconda’s with his Python before. But they were usually very hard fought battles. Plus this pirate was likely to run once engaged rather than stand & fight. He’d need to bring in some assistance to make this a quick kill. Ryan pulled up the comms data for another freelancer he knew and trusted.
He sent him a message:
<Got a contract for a target. Enemy of the Empire with a big payout. Likely an Anaconda.>
<Let me know if you’re interested>
Hopefully he’d respond.
Now for the hard part. Trying to predict this pirate and lay a trap. He continued searching through the data for something that might help him in this. Then he noticed something. The pirate had made an 18 hour stop at Kemurdzhian Terminal in HIP 1914. Twiley.
A little rat of a lowlife. But he somehow knew everything that happened on that station. If the pirate passed through there Twiley was bound to know something about him.
“Looks like I’m headed for HIP 1914.”