Look Ma, no hands
29 May 2022EasyFraggle
Just the other day I was going about my business jumping from outpost to outpost searching for pre-modified flight suits and other personal equipment.As usual, I was hoping to find a Pioneer Supplies store where "having the best stock" wasn't just a marketing slogan and "if I don't have it it's not worth buying" was actually true.
When I checked the available missions at the station, I noticed that all minor factions in the system seemed to have something against a small pirate faction in a neighbouring system.
Many missions were offered with quite lucrative bounty and material rewards, so I didn't hesitate long and quickly reached my mission limit.
My plan was simple: I would switch to my T10 equipped with massive shields and turreted long range lasers, and bring along my trusted ship launched fighter pilot Kaitlyn Simmons.
The jump to the target system was uneventful, witchspace was as mesmerizing as always and soon we found ourselves sitting peacefully in a planet ring at a local mining resource site.
T7s and Keelbacks were laser mining, system police patrolled the site with several Anacondas and smaller ships too. So I never thought that any pirate with a working mind would show up.
Kaitlyn and I were having a nice chat debating the pros and cons of the Gu-97 over the F63 Condor.
She was teasing me over my outdated flying style and the one incident when I had to vomit after I experienced the g-forces in the Gu-97 (Kaitlyn's favorite fighter model).
Out of nowhere some scum scanned my ship, noticed the 8 tons of gold I had forgotten about in the one and only cargo rack on my T10 and demanded over radio that I should drop half of my cargo or otherwise they would "melt my bulkheads".
The pirate only gave me 15 seconds to react, but I never planned to have myself bullied into giving up parts of my cargo.
Good thing Kaitlyn already had launched the fighter and I had weapons deployed and shields fully charged.
We quickly finished this wanna-be pirate and had one down for the missions I had accepted earlier.
That night wave after wave of pirates scanned my ship and demanded some cargo.
What should I say? Kaitlyn did a marvellous job and thanks to the turreted lasers I never even touched my flight controls.
We had some help from system police too, but held our spot clean.
In between the pirate waves the T10's shields could regenerate and Kaitlyn only lost three fighters over 8 hours.
We fought single novice pirates in Eagles and wings of pirates in Anacondas and in total blew way over 1000 ships into obliteration.
The next day I returned to the outpost where I had collected the mission stack.
Payment was done with no issues and it appears the mission givers were surprised that Kaitlyn and I only needed a day to complete the full stack.
All in all I collected ~500M Cr and ~50 mats. Kaitlyn took her usual 10% cut and went on a shopping spree to Pioneer supplies.
Later on we celebrated in the bar.
I was already collecting the next batch, but I didn't tell Kaitlyn before the next morning as I know she did most of the hard work killing those pirates and deserved a full night rest without worrying about another batch of missions.