Restock
01 Apr 2022Rixses
After the recent events, most of which I can't remember due to the coma. I decided to stop by one of my old holds and pull the Jester out of mothballs. I parked the courier away a long time ago following the death of my old life. Just in case a need ever came up. Considering my brother's disappearance and only finding a black box with an encrypted data shard and an abandoned Elite patch.
Considering the recent realization that the Shadows are real and my brother was obsessed with them.
And considering almost getting killed when looking into them myself, by some mysterious force I can't remember anything about.
I think this qualifies as a need.
I hauled the old girl out of where I parked her on a drydock near The Founders World. Retooled most of the systems while working through the pain of the HMI regrowth. It helped that I still had prescription drugs to numb the pain away. Physical pain is easy to mask or just turn off with modern drugs. I changed out a few trims to help with the new plasma accelerators I've fitted. And changed the registration and paint job to keep anyone that knew the old me from looking too closely. All said and done, she was lean and mean again. Now if I could just do something similar to my brain and the HMI. Looking at what I had left in the hypo, two days' worth, I decided to swing by and restock.
I pulled up the data feeds through the traditional physical interface, no need to stress the HMI, and found a nearby system having pirate troubles. Toxandh, military, pirates, security issues. Perfect.
I jumped into the system and was immediately set on by pirates. I shot up an extra dose of my prescription and submitted to the interdiction.
Contacts. Two vulture class. Competent and Dangerous.
I set on the Dangerous rated first and targeted the power plant. I boosted and flipped around to face them flying backwards. The grin creeping onto my face as I let the ingrained training and instinct take over. I let the extra speed burn off so they could catch up and bring them into range of my laser. I started to pace them just enough to give me time to take the shields out on the one as we closed. Ignoring the inane threats from the pirates, I tilted my approach to encourage the breakoff angle up and away in order to get the belly shot as I passed. Sure enough, just as soon as the shields drop my target pulls their nose up to clear me and put on distance faster. I hit my boost and cut a hard pitch and roll to maintain the belly alignment as they pass and pull away, now shieldless from the laser fire.
I can feel the exposed belly of the ship as it opens to me. I grit my teeth with the force of the maneuver and... Plasma fire. One burst... Two... Three and I see the shots plunge through the hull and watch the flickering of ship death wash over the ships systems as it loses all attitude control, spins and explodes.
The other vulture started bugging out almost as soon as the first blew up. I carelessly fired some lasers at it just to make sure it continued the retreat. Nothing but some scrap parts left of the first vulture, and a body floating in the darkness of Rimlok stasis.
I collected the parts as I knew I would be needing them once I got around to rebuilding the She'dre. Turned, and set course for the station. I had no interest in setting in my scanner waiting on reports of issues while my HMI proceeded to tear my head open from use of the interface. So, I turned in my one bounty and started asking around. It took another day before I got word of an installation under attack by pirates, and they needed relief.
I flew over and landed outside the installation. Loaded up my ranged gear and took a walk. About 1500m to the hill overlooking the combat zone. I setup and watched the pirates go to work and both sides were faring poorly. Every time the pirates started to overwhelm the defense force I would open fire and bring things back into balance. And I sat there. Watching as both sides slowly eliminated each other.
In the end the pirates won. I made sure there were only two left when the firefight came to an end, but they won... Or so they thought. I opened fire in earnest and quickly eliminated the first of the two remaining pirates. It was easy since they were low on shield from the fight with the defense force. The other pirate managed to get a bead on me as I was no longer trying to hide myself and sent some blaster fire my way. After lighting up their last buddy I started to approach and cornered them near the power plant.
The entire engagement was anything but satisfying. Just a slow and methodical death of both sides, neither of which stood a chance. Because that's how I wanted it and they were in no position to change that. The installation was a drug manufactory and I figured with the focus on the military economy I'd have a good chance at getting what I wanted here. With everyone dead, there was no one left to complain if I helped myself to some product before I left. Military grade stims. Pain management, battlefield rapid regrowth enhancers, combat performance enhancers. I loaded up a few cases before restarting the installation. Mission complete.