I Looked Down At My Pilot's Federation Elite Trading Patch As I Shut Off The Comms
02 Sep 2021User319792
Coral was glaring at me through squinted eyelids. The man in the black suit was shuffling papers on his desk. I'd spent the night at Hahn Gateway, in Nanomam. I'd received word that my dad was there for business so I invited him to spend the night with me on Cortez. He'd been sitting in the cockpit, sipping coffee as he usually does when he's aboard, as Coral, the Man in the Black Suit, and I went over the developments of the past week.
I'd spent much of my time trading, accumulating nearly two billion credits, the thought of which shrunk Coral's face into the squinty, lip-curled sneer she held for the remainder of the conversation. I'd done a few more Imperial assassination missions, did a little bit of free-flying and mining, and a little reconnaissance of various systems I'd never been, monitoring GALNET for any items of interest.
I took a quick break from the cockpit after reading about the Hyford cache in Colonia and, on my way back to the cockpit, I came across an old note Micky gave me during one of our fly-arounds. Something about Raxxla being so close he could smell the gravity pulling him closer to it. The note still reeked of onion-head and I figured I'd send him a holofac request to see if he'd been keeping track of the Hyford Cache discoveries. He said he had and I asked him if he'd want to make the trek over to 26176 and we ended up making the trip over.
I'd been told about a navigation system hack that would plot me a route through a bunch of neutron stars, which I'd been told would increase my jump range. It shortened the route by a huge amount and over the course of the journey, we talked about what he'd been up to.
Apparently, the trinkets and artifacts he'd been collecting had become increasingly rare and he'd begun resorting to piracy to try to obtain them from any of the various sources he'd encountered since we'd last been in contact. Something about the government in the system he usually found them being taken over by a corporate governance regime.
The crew he'd been working with was this huge ragtag collection of odds and ends, most of whom equally obsessed with the Raxxla myth as he and CMDR Doomfacekillah, and whenever I asked about what was going on with the group he'd look at me and squint, before looking over his shoulder and moving on to the next topic of conversation that came to him.
I asked him what they'd been up to and he looked at the Pilot's Federation Elite Trading badge on my arm, jutting his chin toward it.
"I want to know what they've been doing."
I squinted at him and bit my lip, my jaw thrusting rightward as I sucked my teeth.
"The Pilot's Federation? Who doesn't? Me and Coral dropped off a huge file of information over at Achenar a while back, about a code Coral found in Galileo that she thought might be related to the code CMDR Jameson had on his Cobra during his mission and they basically took it and said 'thanks, we'll let you know if we feel like telling you anything about the Pilot's Federation's relationship with The Empire.'"
Micky's eyes widened and he leaned forward. His breathing was shallow and I could swear I saw the onionhead fumes flowing in and out of him with every breath.
"WHAT DID I TEL-," he paused for a short period of time, catching his breath and coughing, "- sorry, I had to catch my breath just then. Cadence, what did I tell you about giving anyone the impression that you were capable of doing anything other than shutting your mouth and doing what you're told? That's how they get you."
I'd always found his particular brand of onionhead-influenced paranoia to be particularly enjoyable and with him saying he wanted to make a run at the PIlot's Federation, I figured there'd be no harm in telling him about what happened on the trip with Scarlet and the days and weeks that followed. He seemed to know exactly what I was talking about, in his own way, and shook his head and smiled at me when I was finished with the story.
"I told you, Cadence. That's how they do it. I've been around a lot longer than you and that's how the Pilot's Federation have done it for centuries..."
I giggled at the crazy person as he went on, while navigating through Hip and the subsequent waypoints that brought me over to Hip 22460. I did a scan of the system, taking note of a few Thargoid signals before heading over to The Overlook. Micky and I looked around for a while before he decided to call his fleet carrier over, leaving me looking at the ruined mass of the evacuated science base before finally settling down for the night, next to a Thargoid structure I spent a little time exploring.
I ended up at Fort Asch, having a brief conversation with CMDR Doomfacekillah, trying to puzzle through the logs that Canonn research had recently published before finally deciding to head back to Cubeo to drop off the intelligence caches, dropping another off with my Universal Cartographics data at Asterope, and another intelligence cache at Rhea before touching down at Hahn Gateway.
"So you're assuming these logs are related to CMDR Jameson's Thargoid Poison missile, Cadence?"
Coral continued squinting as she mumbled the question through gritted teeth.
"Well no. There's no date on the logs so its hard to know just when this Project Seraph was being conducted, but this Dr. Orenn was talking about a fungus of some sort, which was what CMDR Jameson was talking about his magic weapon being, so I figured there might be a connection. Do you happen to know anything about bio-electrical manipulation, Coral?"
She looked at dad through squinted eyes before looking back at me.
"Do you mean like sending an electrical charge through a muscle to make a limb move?"
"No, I mean like the possibility of using biological material as a vector for the manipulation of electronic equipment."
Dad looked at me and squinted. Coral sat, silently for a while, before working her mouth around slowly.
"... Are you asking me if the mycological weapon CMDR Jameson used to take down the Thargoid mothership might have been refined in a way that would have made it possible for the Pilot's Federation to take control of a ship's navigation systems on the targeted chance that a spore makes contact with a specific chemical on one of the ship's computer boards, Cadence?"
I nodded. I said yes.