Nataly Martinez is trying to kill me
11 Jan 2020DrPillman
The hell is going on with the Workers lately? Their situation is dire, sure, with the Alliance Office´s aggressive expansion leaving them almost no breathing room, but still.
Nataly, my local contact, keeps sending me almost entirely on salvage missions, which is already a bad sign to start with. But it doesn´t end there.
One of the "perfectly legal"- black box salvages got me attacked on my way back. Unprovokedly. By an "Alliance Office of Statistics"-Viper. A faction I am otherwise allied with. I didn´t even shoot back, I just wiggled myself out and made it home, still my reputation with the Office took a drop. Of course I was furious. How dare their robot pilots attack allies?? How agressive is this expansion? Someone set their drones to "full retard, blast away, ask later"??
Now that is enough to get suspicious, and I told her so, asking whose black Box it actually was I "salvaged", but of course, that is none of my concern, sorry for the inconveniences, here take this, have a beer. Then she came with a "special assignment". When I got to the place, she nonchalantly told me, the whole thing was about killing 8 civilian tourists. At which point I politely texted her back to stuff it.
I mean, come on. There are limits. I may have elastic morals, but enough is enough. And over all, we are the Alliance, not a bunch of ruthless savages aren´t we?
Next thing I knew, on my next mission I got a call "Oh, eehhr, there might be some other guys, take care", and -BAM- I was jumped by a pirate wing of four, including a fully decked out Fer-de-Lance.....Makes you wonder. For example, how much of an inconvenient witness I have become lately.
What little cargo I had to deliver, was either for the Office, as if nothing had ever happened (of course, I mean, who else is there to trade with in Gateway, hm? So maybe better not pee in your own frontyard, Ms Martinez? Hm? Maybe?), or some obscure, albeit democratic, FEDERAL parties. REALLY? Ok they were liberal to left-leaning democracies, but it has an aftertaste. Sure it could be they try to pull them over to the Alliance to replace the friends they lost with fresh ones of their own. They are desperate after all.
Or it could be really, really worrying.
How desperate and/or rotten are the Workers oGfE and/or Nataly Martinez in particular?
Something fishy is brewing here, and I don´t like it. I don´t like it at all. Better stay low and go for that mining trip now, maybe look after Helix a little.
Btw, "Referent" Martinez: Is that a permanent position? I wonder if the station council knows what she´s up to lately. I really wonder.
So better be out when manure hits the ventilator.
P.S: Nimble was nowhere to be found. He sometimes does that, just vanishes, only to appear weeks later with a smug smirk and a bunch of weird artefacts he picked up somewhere in the void. Never saw a pilot´s licence on him though. Who knows? I texted Nimble about the docking computer. He wrote back the next day he doesn´t think it´s the computer itself, at all. As far as he is concerned, Vulture (the guy he introduced me to, who had the "slightly used, otherwise shiny" computer for sale, i.e. in his backpack in a bar at 2 am) may not be the most trustworthy or reliable guy, but his gear usually was. And a "send/receive"-error would point him to the hardware connections as the most likely source, so I should first check all the pluggings and wiring.
*sigh*
That means I am to dive behind the cockpit panels again. Last time, I got stuck with my elbow between a ventilation duct and the communications panel wiring, and my wingman had to literally pull me out at my ankles, which wrecked both the wiring and my jacket. Lakon ships are not built for convenience or easy access. Maybe I really should have taken the time to solder the contacts properly, instead of just jamming them into their sockets and be done, but I was in a hurry back then. Little sins to haunt you...