The Aeternitas Job
10 Dec 2016Tisiphone Moreau
I was bringing the Type-7 back to home port in Alioth when a big opportunity flashed up on GalNet. The Aeternitas Industries corporation was putting out a call for mercenaries and bounty hunters to help clear out a pirate problem that had been attacking their transports in their home system.Despite the risks, these kinds of jobs almost always wind up like a small miracle in my credit balance. I'm a little low these days after fitting out the bulk freighter, and with the recent upgrades on the Inverse Proportion being complete it's hard to turn something like this down.
The more I fly this Viper Mk IV the more I come to appreciate it. There's a deep, throaty purr within the engines and compared to the Redemption it maneuvers like a dream. She can skip across dozens of light years in a single go and in no time I was on approach to Houtman City in Aeternitas.
Some days I wish I could reach back through the centuries and shake the hands of the people who originally designed these orbital stations. It seems like each week brings me a new reason to admire the uniformity of layout and the consistency of function. For example, if I dock on pad 16 I can basically walk on autopilot to the local System Authority bureau to check in. It's always in the same place in these things.
I love that. I've docked at thousands of stations. I can't imagine trying to remember my way around in each one.
I've never seen an Authority bureau so busy, though. Usually it's a handful of professionals cashing in their tally and a few independents like me who just happened to pick up a claim or two on the way in. The bureau on Houtman City was wall to wall bodies in RemLok suits of every color I can imagine. Easily a hundred pilots, maybe more.
Obviously I wasn't the only person to get this brilliant idea.
It took me longer to get my number called and to sign in at the bureau than it did to dock in the first place. They were at least helpful enough to explain where they'd been having the worst trouble, but I knew right away that those spots would all be covered by twenty or so other pilots each. I was going to have to be clever to get the kind of pay I came out for.
The first thing they teach you in flight school is to always know where the nearest friendly port is. Well okay, actually the first thing they teach you is how to operate the safety harness on the chair but the thing about the port is a close second, so I took a gamble that these pirates had to be operating from an outpost somewhere in the region.
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Drifting in open space above a shipping lane, with nearly everything powered down except life support and sensors, is quite possibly one of the most dull and eye-wateringly boring ways to spend four hours of your life. It's not my nature to wait for things to happen, but I didn't know how else to get a lead on the pirate gang. I had to wait for the right freighter to come by that would pull a wing of pirates down. It took a while but I was not disappointed in the end.
The freighter put out a distress call that it was being interdicted and under attack. Houtman City responded that it was dispatching a response wing. It's an exchange I've listened in on more times than I want to count. I've even been the one making the call from time to time.
The professional bounty hunters in the area got to the scene much sooner than the Authority ships. Predictably, as soon as the fight wasn't in their favor a couple of the pirates tried to run. My readouts showed that one had a bounty of about 25,000cr - nothing to shout about, but the other pilot had a price of over 100,000 on his hull. They were already battered and damaged and I probably stood even odds on beating them both, but I sat cool and silent and watched their ships disappear in a frameshift flash.
Behind them, long white wake ribbons pointed right to what I needed to know: a system called Mulachi.
I have to give credit to the Crimson Posse - as I'd later find out they called themselves; preying on Aeternitas shipping was a smart move. It wasn't a surprise they'd made the corporations desperate enough to put out an open call for help.
First, Mulachi is about 24 light years from Aeternitas; just far enough outside of most ships' jump range to make it an unlikely destination. Obviously the pirates were using boosted drives to make the leap, but that kind of distance isn't a problem for the Proportion either. Secondly, Mulachi has a subordinate stellar body more than a half-million lightseconds from the main star. 500,000ly isn't the kind of trip that bounty hunters tend to make on a hunch, and I'm honestly surprised that the pirates - by and large a lazy lot by any measure - had that much discipline to build a station so far out.
But me? Well, once you've made the trip to Hutton Orbital everything else seems just a hop, skip and a jump.
So I jumped.
The GalMap showed that Mulachi had plenty of legitimate commerce and traffic going on and I wasn't worried about being detected. I didn't even need to follow the Posse ships directly - I already knew more or less where they were headed. I simply needed to get into the neighborhood and confirm what my gut was already telling me.
The Inverse Proportion is a cold blooded snake. It's another reason I'm starting to love her. Running on minimal systems, the heat she gives off looks like background stellar radiation at any measurable distance. Of course it means going with the shields disabled, but when I do it right you'd not even know the Proportion was there until you saw it outside your canopy.
Most pirates - hell, most pilots - fly cheap, lightweight sensors. Hanging 11 kilometers out from the outpost they'd led me to - amusingly named Shepherd Enterprise - and they had no idea I was even there.
The outpost was exactly what I expected it to be. Run down, cobbled together, barely spaceworthy; little more than a place for the Crimson Posse to dock, repair, refuel and offload whatever cargo they'd managed to scoop up. Combat ships came and went in twos and threes, each and every one of them wanted for some crime or another against the Federation.
I spent about an hour, maybe a little more, gazing down at that outpost. Every ship, every scan, every bounty warrant. I was looking at a really big payout for this.
But first I'd have to collect.
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One of the quirks of hyperspace travel is that you always end up in the same place. Jumping back from Mulachi to Aeternitas put me right where any pirates would end up after making the same trip. All I had to do was wait for them to start jumping in, with my hardpoints open and shields hardened.
It didn't take long. One of the first ships to show up was the same Eagle I'd followed out to their base! That 25,000 credits was enough to cover the cost of the missiles I spent through the rest of the battle.
Yeah, I put out a distress call. I'm not here for the glory of taking them all on by myself. Never say no to having a couple of System Authority Anacondas backing you up - that's my advice to you. The Crimson Posse ships came into the system as a trickle at first and then a flood when they realized they were under attack. Both sides escalated their response. A dozen other bounty hunters showed up, and then someone must have tipped off the Navy because an hour into the fray, a Farragut-class battlecruiser ripped itself out of witchspace and opened fire.
My stomach goes cold every time I see one of those monstrosities. Dozens of pulse laser turrets started perforating the Crimson Posse fighters faster than I could even lock my sensors on. My missile magazine ran empty long before the battle was over. It was a slaughter.
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Back at Houtman City they were all grins and applause and claps on the back. Apparently the Crimson Posse had been a thorn in Aeternitas Industries' side for quite a while and no one was sad to see their ships turned into wreckage.
Between the bounties put out by Houtman City and other, existing claims from the Federation, the kills recorded in my ship's computer totaled out to upwards of four million credits. Not bad for a day's work. They tell me there's a bonus coming when this whole affair settles down.
We'll see.
Things don't tend to stay settled for long out here.