Assassination Gatecrashed
26 May 2016TheDarkLord
Leopold Heckmann Ring, Malaikudi. Fer-de-Lance “TDL PhotonFlinger”.May 3302
<Incoming Message from The 9th Legion>
CMDR TheDarkLord,
The Pirate Lord P Travis is making a nuisance of himself and disturbing the legal operations of our allies in the Rusasaei system. None of the local bounty hunters are brave enough to face him. We need an Enforcer with your capabilities to put an end to his disturbance. We do, of course, have budget for your time and expenses.
Research suggests that this is less than 6 light years from your last known location.
<Message Ends>
[Accept] [Decline]
“Budget indeed,” I thought. It was a healthy wedge on offer to end this dude’s reign of annoyance. “Back to work.”
I took my feet off the desk so that I could lean far enough forward to tap [Accept]. Then I sent a message to Anders down at the shipyard, asking him to prep TDL PhotonFlinger for launch.
I booked a taxi to take me down to the shipyard, then read the latest Galnet News while I finished the sandwich I’d made myself for lunch. I’d thought of having the afternoon off, and just going for a wander. When I had reached into the fridge for a drink with lunch, something stopped me from grabbing a beer. Instead, I’d taken a lurid-coloured caffeinated sparkling soft drink. A wise decision, it had turned out.
I arrived at the shipyard to find Anders stressed.
“Sorry sir, your ship’s not quite ready yet. We need to refuel it and load it with ammunition, and the power plant isn’t yet ready to run the drives.”
“It’s no problem Anders. I need to change into my flight suit and do some prep anyway. Will you be ready in 15 minutes?” He looked visibly relieved. He must have been expecting me to shout at him for a delay to PhotonFlinger’s operational readiness. It wasn’t really my style to do that, but I guess some pilots were impatient and would take this out on the yard hands.
“Thank you sir," he said. "The ship will be ready to lift off in 15. I shall see to it personally.”
“It's fine Anders, thanks for your help,” I replied, but I don’t think he heard. He was busy barking expletive-laden orders to the fuellers and munitions teams. I smiled and walked up the rear boarding ramp into my ship.
I was relaxed, and I wondered if I should be. I’d been running assassination missions for a while, and I was pretty good at it. Find the target, pull it out of supercruise, and destroy it while its wingmen organised themselves. Photonflinger was an exceptionally good assassination boat as well. Even in the cases where the target’s wingmen were in decent ships, and knew what they were doing, PhotonFlinger’s shields were strong enough to take the wingmates’ battering whilst its armaments dealt with the target. Clippers, Pythons, Fer-de-Lances, even Anacondas had fallen to her, to the point where I no longer worried about success in these missions.
I mused over this as I changed into my flight suit. I wondered what Ashley would think of it. The auburn beauty from my past who would have preferred me to have been a simple trader, running the shipping lanes in a nice friendly Type-6. I’m sure she would have liked this ship as a place to hang out though, if only she could put its five hardpoints out of her head. She had liked being in opulent surroundings, and this converted executive jet would have appealed to her greatly. But this Fer-de-Lance had a declared value of 150m credits, and that was a lot of trading in a borderline defenceless cargo boat. No, I was content with what I was doing, and how I was going about it.
Game face on, I strode aft to the bridge. I took the right seat, and hailed Anders.
“Everything is ready for you sir. Thank you so much for your patience.”
“No problem Anders. Can you please ensure that the launch bay is clear?”
“Yessir,” he replied, and as he keyed off the microphone I could already hear him shouting at his minions.
Once the pre-flight checks were complete, I programmed Rusasei into the navigation computer, and initiated launch. Traffic was light, so I had free reign to choose my own launch path. The Fer-de-Lance’s wings waggled as I lined up with the exit slot, and out into space. Once I cleared Mass Lock, I initiated the hyperspace jump.
Rusasaei is a pretty unremarkable system. No scoopable star, no ringed planets, and a single station a few thousand light seconds from the jump exit point. And yet I’ve been here a lot recently. Many persons of interest to The 9th Legion pass through, and my bosses like to arrange little welcoming parties, like this one.
I mooched about in supercruise for a few minutes. Someone called Paul showed up in a Fer-de-Lance. It seemed odd though, because although he was shown as a mission target, he was both Clean and a Novice. Didn’t really strike me as Pirate Lord material. I attempted to interdict him anyway, but he evaded. As my Frame Shift Drive cooled in normal space, I plotted my next move.
I returned to supercruise several minutes later. I aimed just to the side of the cooling brown dwarf star and focused on my Contacts panel. Each time my scanners detected a candidate ship, I scanned it. Finally, a Fer-de-Lance with P Travis at the helm. My target. Rated Dangerous, and Wanted in this system, he looked much more like my actual target. I interdicted him, and he submitted. We dropped into normal space together. I cycled firegroups, pushed power to weapons, and deployed hardpoints.
A second ship appeared, and immediately started firing upon my target. I ran a jousting pass on Travis, my two medium and one large pulse lasers stripping his shields. I flicked Flight Assist off, and spun around to go again. Three and a half kilometres from Travis, I had time to find the gatecrasher. A Fer-de-Lance also, my scanner told me that this was that Paul cove from earlier. He was attacking Travis too.
A regular bounty hunter?
He was still showing as “mission target.” It didn’t make much sense. I turned my attention back to Travis. Now with his shields offline, I targeted his power plant, and used multicannons as well as the pulse lasers. The three Fer-de-Lances furballed briefly, but Travis did not last long. His bounty was credited to my tally, and my mission was marked as Updated.
And now this Paul was firing on me.
Normally, in assassination missions, as soon as the prime target was down, I retracted hardpoints and bugged out. But this Paul was piquing my interest. He was still showing as a mission target on my display. I returned fire, and his Novice status was quite evident as he lacked the skill to counter my tactics. With Paul destroyed too, I set course for home and high-waked.