Rebirth - Part 1
15 Mar 2021ZakMan2409
Death is easy. Making everyone believe you're dead is only slightly harder.
Leaving everything you've ever known behind to start over?
Now that's the hardest part...
My name was [REDACTED]. I loved to fly, fight, drink, cheat, and steal. Life was rough, but I loved every moment of it. Until the day I died. I worked just hard enough to dupe people out of as many credits as I could, the more the better. I owned a fleet of ships, from mundane hauling vessels to top of the line fighters engineered to the limits, with a little bit of everything in between. I smuggled more illicit cargo into Federal space than most people alive could fathom. I worked for the Feds and the Imps, all while gathering as much intel as I could about them both, and turned around and sold it to the other. That's when I found her. It was a mark I couldn't resist. I didn't even try.
Imperial Senator [REDACTED] had invested a fortune in a joint venture with Gutamaya to create the fastest ship ever built. It would outstrip anything simple engineering could touch. She was built for only one purpose. Pure, unadulterated speed. Using Gutamaya's Imperial Courier, they started by gutting its incredibly light frame to a point almost beyond reason. The next step was installing experimental thrust technology that would most likely never see mass market approval. Apparently there were some safety concerns with the technology. Nothing that the right amount of credits couldn't overlook for a big, powerful Senator. After several months, and billions of credits, Gutamaya had pulled it off. The Imperial Ripper was born. The reports included test data that indicated she could travel over 1,200 m/s, and they were afraid to push the throttle further. They hadn't even tested the boost functionality yet!
I had found all of this information in an encoded transmission while running data courier missions for the Empire. Just because I was hired to transfer secure data between installations didn't mean I wouldn't try to read it. They should've known better. I knew instantly that I had to find her, and that she would be mine.
This truly was the beginning of my end.