A sense of being hunted.
04 Dec 2020Teafox
The kid earned his keep today, even if it was just with one bright idea. Anyone that knows me knows I'm not too fond of any of the big three powers, but in this case, one of 'em might prove useful. It's seemed like something is following us since a few jumps after Watt Port.The feeling is familiar. I once got to try a holo game where you'd walk through the forests of old earth, and the sun is warm, and you can hear the wind in the trees, and then the birds stop singing, and you don't notice at first, but soon you miss the noise, and you realise that something is behind you.
Somewhere behind us, something is scaring the birds. There's no radio chatter, most blips on the radar that we pass go to high wake at what must be half way along a trade lane and anything that jumps in again? Either jumps out straight away, or presumably is far enough back to not see what it is behind us.
Keeping calm is the important thing here. If they're rigged to chase and observe us, they'll be fast, and reinforcements won't be far behind. If they're rigged for a fight, short term we can out-run 'em, but any stop over, even just to pick up fuel could let 'em catch up. Hiding in an asteroid belt would be exactly what they expect from a belter. If they're well enough connected, they'll know if we switch out to a mining ship and then if there's a fight, we are in it deep.
And then the kid came up with a plan. The alliance has some new kind of terraforming system that apparently will work on ammonium atmospheres which they're planning on putting to use up in the coal sack nebula. There are all sorts of reasons this is a bad idea, but they're looking for explorers to map out some candidate planets for them. Deep space has very few places to land and resupply. Pursuing ships would need to carry fuel scooping equipment and stay light enough to keep a good jump range. There'll be a lot of similar ships making lots of long range jumps deep into the black.
A few sorties into the local area, make it look like we're surveying planets and rotating back to the station to get our pay packet and then, as fast out into the black as we can get and keep going. I've got an Asp Explorer we can rig to run pretty cold, if we jump out nice and close to a star, a bigger ship won't be able to to get near enough to scan our wake and if it comes to a fight, we could take a smaller ship.
And then once we've lost them, we find a friendly carrier we can change ships at, or at worst, we burn all of the paint off in an atmosphere somewhere, blow a hole in our identity transponder and just come back in under a new callsign.
In other news, the kid's getting some colour back in his face. He was being a stubborn little bugger about wanting to go back on the food pills, and how he didn't like anything we'd bought, and then he tried the apple and banana paste. Figures... I was hoping he'd hate that one and I'd get to have it.
Oh, and when we pulled in to Rutherford to switch up ships, there was a message from the ground crew that was assigned to us in that bounty hunting escapade. The empire wanted to officially recognise us with a special honour for our services. The ground crew just wanted to say thanks for helping them all get a bit closer to paying off their indentured debt. Customised decals are rather frowned upon by the pilots federation, but it's not exactly as if they can really poice it, and of course, being such a status symbol of service to the empire, it deserves to be displayed on something designed by gutamaya, right?
... Right, I thought so too.
The only reply from the Miyasaka ground crew was "We love it." and a thumbs up.