The Hunt Begins
26 Apr 2019Cyrus Hade
I bounced into Sharur about an hour out of Mawson Dock, throttling back hard so as not to hurtle to a fiery death in the star before my adventures could even begin. Man that would just be embarrassing. Angling Intrepid IV's fat, stubby nose towards the system Nav-Beacon I opened the throttle again, dropping from super-cruise to sub-light as soon as I'm within scanning range. The scan took about thirty seconds, and the instant it's complete the radar, info-link and COVAS, Eden, all went a little bananas on me. Mission critical alerts, new target contacts flash across the displays faster than I could follow. Hells, even Eden, pretty much a supercomputer struggled to keep up with the sudden influx of data. Ellis hadn't been wrong, the system was crawling with Raven Corsair contacts, they appeared to be openly treating Sharur as their own personal buffet and the limited system security forces were losing the fight to keep their ever growing presence in check. I picked the closet contact on my radar and jumped back into super-cruise. It was going to take a while and my palms were wet with nervous sweat since I wasn't particularly eager to get to that next part, you know, the bit where I have to kill someone, or I get myself killed. I needed to keep myself occupied during the five or ten minutes it was going to take to reach that first objective so I jumped on the info-link to gather a bit of intel about the Raven Corsairs. I would pay to have some idea of what I was flying into and it was something I should probably have done before even accepting the contracts I was about to fulfil. Lucky for me it seemed that the Corsairs were a relatively new organisation, while numbers were on their side, it appeared from previous encounters that many of their pilots were as inexperienced as me.
I dropped from super-cruise in the general vicinity of that first target, a little concerned to find that I had picked on one of the senior leaders I had been contracted to assassinate and that he was flying a Cobra. So basically he was bigger and badder than me from the get-go and to make matters worse he alone, an Eagle sporting the Corsair colours was flying escort. My only advantage was the element of surprise, the Raven had been in system and uncontested for so long that they had become over confident, the Cobra wasn't even running with it's shields up and neither gave any indication that they had noticed my arrival. I deployed my weapons and accelerated to attack speed, targeting the Cobra's engines first. The plan was to disable the larger ship and peel off to deal with the smaller, more manoeuvrable Eagle.
The plan worked like a charm. The target was dead in the water before either ship's had chance to respond to the attack. The eagle was turning a tight loop to bring it's weapons to bare though and got me in her sights even as the Cobra stuttered to a halt. I rolled down and under the crippled ship as the Eagle opened fire, with as tight a turn as I was able to make and a very generous burst from Intrepid's dorsal thrusters I drifted around under the Cobras belly and out the other side with my guns already locked onto the Eagles whose first withering hail of fire tore into his own wing-man's unprotected hull.
I pushed all the ships power to the pulse lasers and returned fire. I continues to burn on the dorsal thrusters to stay ahead of the Eagles arc of fire, putting on some forward burn to close the gap and maybe slip behind it. My shields took some glancing blows, knocking them down to around sixty percent but the fight was over before it even had chance to begin. The eagle's weapons fell silent and it seemed to flounder for a few moments before it broke apart. Ignoring the nausea in my churning gut I returned my aim to the principle target. He had gotten his shields online while I was distracted with his wing-man but it made little difference, I positioned Intrepid above and behind the crippled Cobra and let rip with the guns. It took a while to burn through those shields but the moment they collapsed my lasers hit the canopy and the ship exploded immediately. Wreckage spun out into the void amongst a luminous cloud of vented atmosphere, fuel and coolant. I heard some the debris bouncing harmlessly off my own hull.
That was an excellent, if unpleasant start to the days hunting. Now I had to hope that the rest of the days work went as smoothly.
To Be Continued................