Pyrat King Homecoming 1 of 3: Pre-drinks
05 Feb 2016Monolith Preacher
A lot's happened in the past few cycles, but I think it'll be easier if I start where I left off and bring you up to speed. We'd just sent a good chunk of ALD's forces on a merry goose chase, and were in a pretty good mood. A few bottles of Jaques Queintian Still later, Hammer and I were rambling on about my plans henceforth. LYR would be easy enough to please, I'd just need to pay him for his services and lug some leaflets at the end of the month. ALD would be fed false information within the next few days, and I'd be good to re-join the Archon by early February. The interim allowed me many opportunities, but after discussing a few of the more outlandish ideas, we decided one thing was certain. I would need to confront Springheel Jack once I finally got home.Now most of the boys back home are on my side, but his closest cronies aren't the kind of people I'd want to hear the confessionals of. No doubt he'd sent a couple of his bully boys when I'd failed to deliver the weapons he was expecting. It was only a matter of time before he heard about my recent kingship through his Imperial contacts. By then, he'd be savvy enough to viddy my entire plan thus far. I had to think faster than myself and him or I'd be out of luck. I needed an epiphany.
Luckily, Hammer and I know a secret pyrat technique to force an epiphany when steaming drunk: kill more Feds than you can count. Now, some CMDRs have thought me an Imperial Pyrat, and whilst I may have letters of marque, my hatred of the Federation is a personal vendetta. It all relates back to the boot camp instructor that owned the boarding school Hammer and I attended at Isherwood Dock. In those days, he was an Ensign with thick shoulders, a thicker head, and a voice as loud as his girth. In the early days of my Walkabout, I made sure to gain enough reputation with the Federation doing random smuggling contracts to get one rank higher than he was. When I retuned from the GIMPP I found out he had made Admiral for his cunning plan to take the system.
For as long as I can remember, the Federation lackeys known as the “Revolutionary Party of Gcirthi” has been at war with the local wannabe dictator that owns the Gcirthi Defence Party. I helped my people, the Pirates of Gcirthi, wrest control of the system from the Gcirthi Gold United Group last year, starting with my home at Kent Station. They, and plausibly some CMDRs I have mentioned my plight unto, continued the job and took Steakley Port whilst I was out on the GIMPP, and it was at this time Blix made Admiral. His plan was simple. The Federation paid the GGU to put him in stead as acting CEO in times of crisis, and he ensured that the civil war happened on their gate at Isherwood Dock. This would fund their company and put a strain on our resources. When time come, the Federation would help him to take the system in the name of gold as a puppet. For all I knew he had some CMDRs of his own on his side.
But Hammer and I were drunk, and he informed me of an ace up his sleeve. The CMDR who gave him his most profitable trade route was also my first contact in the Imperium. For sake of his integrity, I shall merely call him “Z”. He had phoned up last cycle claiming he had recently bought himself an “aggressive present” that he wanted to show off, and the civil war was the perfect place to do it. So we decided, if we could help the GDP in their war against the RPoG, then maybe we could put an end to this civil war before it endangered the PoG's recent grip....and I could return a rather triumphant king later on. At least, if I could get these acronyms out the way without people thinking we we're the People's Front of Judea...splitters!
And I had an ace up my own sleeve.
I decided it was time to test out my new Fer-de-Lance.
I told him to find Z and meet me in a high intensity conflict. Blix might want this system, but I doubt he's quite got the sway to get a Capital ship to come down here. I love the place, but we're still backwater enough to be within spitting distance of 3 major Galactic powers and have none of them interested in us. So that's the biggest conflict we're likely to see here as far as I can tell. And I had to make one more right of passage before I turned up.
Orpheus had joked to me about it a few times in the past, but I had never got my combat ranking above novice. Sure, I was a deft hand with a blade when I needed to be, but where space combat was concerned... truth be told I'd had more experience with keyboard and mouse flight sims as a teen than actually flying with a joystick before they sent me out in my Sidey. And I'm a preacher, not a bounty hunter. But that doesn't excuse the fact I had one more thing left to do before I could call my Walkabout complete. I had seen the centre of the galaxy, but I had not destroyed an Anaconda.
So I did what any good pyrat king would do, and took my new golden Fer-de-Lance out to hunt in the old way, with 4 pulses and a plasma accelerator. If the First Space Preacher could've seen me, he'd surely have been happy with my style. The Cobra was the only craft he was allowed to fly, and if there was one thing he wanted beyond the spreading of the Monolith's light into every soul in the cosmos, it was one of those Owndirt recycling facilities. These re-fits by Saud Kruger just make a classy craft even classier, and I could see why the Imperials had considered it a suitable way to finally get me behind the cockpit and pull the trigger. Sorry, Empress, but this baby's all mine, and I'm going to use it for my people and myself.
I jumped in and out of random signal sources en route to Isherwood Dock. It's a good two hundred thousand light seconds odd of a journey, so I had time to get used to how the craft handled as I cleaned up a few bottom feeding Federal patrols that were trying to hassle the locals. And she handles like a beauty. If you've got one, you'll know. If you don't, it's hard to describe. When I fly my Cobra, I've got more speed, and technically I've got more maneuverability. But the smoothness of the lines a Fer-de-Lance cuts as you fly are so graceful you might as well be watching anti-grav racing reruns from back in 2097 before it got banned. And that elegance of flight just makes it easier for me to handle than my Cobra.
I know, I'm gushing, but truth be told I'm surprised at how well it has served me already. When I finally found an Elite Federal Anaconda, I cut through it like butter. Sure, I had to put pips to shields once or twice as I tried to get used to my boost turns and ended up overshooting, but beyond that I was untouchable. There was no CMDR in that craft, merely a staffed vessel of crewmen, and I only turned my flight assist off to help with maneuvering instead of flying the whole fight manually, but I was feeling on top of the world, to use an old expression. The biggest craft I'd killed without Hammer on my wing was an Expert Python, and that took me longer than I'd care to admit even with an Imperial Hammer on my Cobra...
But once I got to Isherwood Dock to re-group with Hammer and Z, I was so filled with fervour by what I saw, I nearly dropped my Hutton Mug. Hammer had turned up in his Pyrat Python. Z had bought a Cutter, painted it black, and fitted it with weaponry. When other Imperials equated the Corvette's superior firepower to the Cutter being an exclusively trading vessel, Z had fit it for combat. The sight was imposing, as it meant he was confident enough in his abilities to make up any perceived difference in the craft's ability against the Federation with his own skill.
As we were getting ready to leave, we sighted a CMDR exiting the dock that must've been lurking there for quite some time listening in. A quick scan showed no allegiance, but this CMDR had numbers in his name. When we become selected as CMDRs, we run a list of names we desire against a database to check if anyone still alive has the name in use. I can't stomach people with such a lack of imagination that they would rather append their names with numbers than find an expression of themselves that is individual. So I did what any good pyrat king would do, and decided to find out where this fish was swimming to.
“What brings ye to arrrrr system?”
Silence.
I ask again.
Nothing.
Then, he begins boosting out of the station in the opposite direction. No time to waste. In times of uncertainty, you can't let a rogue element escape with plausible motive. We chased, and by the time his FSD was half-charged, his craft had been vaporised. We didn't care to search for an escape pod, as he'd made us late to ruin the Federation's day.
We put hours of work in, and felled countless craft in the name of the Gcirthi Defence Party. If Blix wanted to play shadow games, we were determined to beat him. By the time we called it a night, I'd made a few million credits in bounties, and determined that cryptically enough, I had more trouble with Eagles and Asp Explorers than I did with the kinds of craft most CMDRs had warned me about. Maybe I just need to learn how they fly, or maybe it's just the Monolith playing with my luck. The earliest preachers were known for being able to hit a moving target from literally miles away with their SVDs. They were also know for being unable to hit people that stood still behind a barn door quite frequently as well. We all get that to some degree, even now.
So imagine our dismay when all our hard work had come to naught. To begin with, we thought the news just hadn't caught on to the scale of the swathe we cut. We gave it a few days, and still nothing. Z went home to Imperial space, and Hammer went home to hit the bottle. By the end of the cycle, nothing had changed. I decided, for once, to go join Hammer and see if we could find the bottom of it. The bottle, not the plan we had for....what was the plan about? I'd forgotten by the third bottle of the second round of the third day of the bender we'd started before all this began...