The fine line between tourism and espionage
09 Oct 2020Eagle 5
*** DOCKING RESTRAINTS DISENGAGED - SHIP RELEASED ***With a quick burst of manouvering thrusters the Liberty floated toward the middle of the docking ring section of Oterma starport. There was a buzz of ships coming and going as commanders from across the bubble converged to this Imperial station to pay respects to the late Harold Duval but also to further their own agenda... whatever that may be.
Mules would be seen scurrying across the drivelanes delivering needed supplies to the ground crews working at the docks and on the platforms repairing, refueling... and rearming.
This was station ops 101 everything was a concerted effort to keep people and goods moving as effortly as possible. From the uninitiated's prespective everything ran like clockwork, but spacers know full well that it just looks that way. Nothing short of the station being on fire, the way Cemiess was, will alter this perception.
I wonder how things got along there after I left?
A quick look at the starmap shows that Kamitra would only be a few jumps away, 5 jumps or so, which should go by relatively quick.
... then again space is quite unpredictable for a naval intelligence operator posing as a cigar trader.
Shortly after leaving the safety of the dock I found myself once again faced with hundreds of contacts and two very bruised battlecruisers undergoing emergency repairs to my starboard. As luck would have it, the station's rotation placed me almost exactly at the same spot I entered just a few hours earlier thus giving me the opportunity to retrace the route taken through the drydock, but this time in reverse.
The hope was, that a repeat of my flight path would appear more like tourism... rather than espionage.
The flight path was amply deliberate but straight to the point. I made it a priority to keep enough of a distance from the cruisers to appear as if I was going for a sightseeing tour than scanning for transponder signals... which had been conveniently disabled the whole time I was there.
>Leo. Any signs from the IFF system or the scanner?
"Negative. Mass reading positive no identification"
>Hmm.. If it wasn't for the mass readings you'd think there was nothing but empty space here. Guess we'll have to do this the hard way.
The hard way, as you would have it, was skimming the cruisers' hulls trying to ping a signal to any of the redundant failsafe systems to attempt a callback which would then allow me to backdoor into the identification's system.
I've known Slone long enough to know he wouldn't want me to waste time coming back until I knew who was staging in the area... and who was giving the Empire a bloody nose.
Clear....
FRAMESHIFT DRIVE CHARGING..... 4.....3......2......1..... ENGAGE