"A Rough Day at the Office"
22 May 2018CelticSpartan01
I’m finally getting a chance to write this because, well, I’m finally back in my ship and in my home system.. well.. a ship almost exactly like mine, but not my original ship.. THAT ship is currently making it’s way through a system in several.. dozen.. or hundred pieces, now the proud new resident of space junk around a small planet.I’m going to write this log as a type of deposition, in case the people I.. killed.. have family and they try to sue or their friends come after me for blood.. It won’t matter, they know who I am and so I might have to deactivate some of my helpful trader apps and go dark for a while, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
It all started two days ago, nearly two days ago, late at night on the 19th, early 20th, after I wrote my last log.
I decided to take a mission which sounded like an exploration mission, (guess that’s my inexperience showing.) turned out to be scanning a data node.
Well I show up and there is a Fer-de-lance sitting on the planet, near the base (Which I had to look for by the way.) and he’s wanted. There are also turrets! What the hell kinda scan job did they send me on?!
So I got the hell outta there, went back to home base and decked out my Asp Explorer for combat and also added an SRV. I figured “Okay, I took the contract, if this is the kind of shit they send me on, I don’t wanna back out of the contract.. Just land, scan the data node and get out.”
Now while that sounds simple, and it is, for anyone who has any experience in an SRV, I had none, didn’t even remember to program the controls.
Well, I got there, landed safely (After taking out those turrets with my ship. A couple missiles and or rail gun shots a piece and they were done for.)
I drive my SRV out and this damn thing handles like a dream on one hand and too good on another, I can barely control it and had to end up breaking out the operators manual to figure out everything, mainly how to scan the damn data point.
Before I figured out how to scan that data point though, in the process of messing with the controls and configurations, I apparently launched my ship into orbit, okay, no biggie, right?
Wrong, at some point, unbeknownst to me, it was destroyed, so there I am, on what is now a hostile planet, just me an a structure which I have no idea how to get into, an SRV which has limited power to produce those nice things like oxygen and I’m sure there are people coming to get me.
So I thought for a moment, then went to send Coolj a message for him to get an SRV hanger but no SRV, land and give me a ride in his ship and I’d pay him back as soon as we reached station side. Before I even could hit the comm request button, the SRV shook so hard I think I nearly broke my neck. Turns out it was the apparent owners of the facility.
Being faced with what seemed to be overwhelming fire power (What looked like a mix between a hovercraft and a tank and that fer-de-lance that was nowhere to be found when I got back, about 100 meters above me, nose and all hard points tracking my SRV, I saw no choice but to power down my SRV and put my hands up and hope they didn’t shoot anyway.
When I got out, helmet on, I almost tumbled into what had made the SRV shake so violently, it was a warning shot I guessed, from that tank and it’d left a massive crater.
The half dozen men picked me up and violently threw me into the back of a rover truck. Or, as violently as one can be thrown in .22 gravity.
Four men piled in the back with me, told me to take my helmet off, they did so to show they weren’t just wanting to laugh at me dying horribly.
So I take my helmet off and THAT is when I find out what the close up view of a pulser rifle stock looks like, because that was the last thing I saw until about, near as I can figure, 4 hours, when I woke up in a horrible smelling cell like room, which being able to smell anything was a surprise as bad as that stock face smash had broken my nose.
Upon further inspection, it looked as though it were once living quarters but had since been converted into a place to hold prisoners. I soon found out that I wasn’t alone.
Long story short, or, shorter. My roommate ended up being the sole survivor of a pirate clan which had tried to attack a convoy headed for this planet, needless to say, “it didn’t go well” would be an understatement.
As far as who our captors were, the best he could tell me was that they were like a corporate mob faction, which, doesn’t narrow it down at all.
He had been in this place for about 3 months, unsure of why he was being kept alive and, no matter if he admitted it or not, he was afraid, afraid they were getting ready to start torturing him to loosen his lips about known pirate bases, or, maybe just for fun, they did seem like the type that would get off on torture just because.
No need to go into detail about the conversation me and this pirate had over the next 12 hours or so, I’ll just say that it was.. disparaging to say the least.
He was surprised I was a pilot, I’m not huge, but at about 6 foot and 240, I’m bigger than the average pilot. The pirate seemed absolutely ecstatic and said that was all he needed for his plan to be a success, a pilot.
Anyway, let me try to keep this under 4 pages.
So in stories, the prisoners always have a “plan” a lot like this guy and they always work, but this isn’t the “stories” and I told him I had a better idea than us playing sick to get guard in there then overpower them. Besides, the cameras would put the whole base on alert anyway, if we were going to escape, we would need to risk our lives and likely die, better than whatever was to come.
So I started to call the guards outside our cell door “Hey!” no answer “Hey dick heads!” finally a “What the f*ck do you want” came back.
“I knew you’d answer to your birth name!”
“F*ck you! “ he responded as I heard the other guard chuckling.
Then he opened the door and walked in, chest and head forwards, shoulders looking ready for a fight and pulser rifle coming up slowly “What the f*ck do you want ya smart ass?! “
“Oh! Just wanted to tell ya that if you let me go then I can get my friend here to give ya a reach around, on the house!”
Now, let me tell ya, a knee to the stomach HURTS! The 14 or so kicks, punches and rifle stocks to the stomach and head hurt even worse.
I guess that’s about when Mikael (The pirate roommate) took the guards by the surprise. He got lucky, took ones gun and shot them both. Sure enough, before the first body even hit the ground, the alarm started to sound, the guys in the surveillance room had been watching everything.
So I pick up the pulser rifle and stuff one of the guards pulser pistols in my belt, the whole while feeling like I’d been hit by a train, twice.
I tell Mikael “Hey, you could have jumped in sooner!” to which he just responded with a shrug and “had to make sure they were ‘emotionally committed’ to beating you to death before I could take the chance in attacking them.”
Now I wanted to try to get out without killing anyone, not Mikael, he was gunning down everyone in sight, regardless of who they were or what they were doing, cries of pain and surprise were cut off violently and with sickening suddenness as he worked his way through the guards.
I admit, I had to kill a few people, I didn’t want to, I don’t even like thinking about the fact I’m killing people when I bounty hunt, even if in order to get a bounty over 100,000 credits you’ve got to be one of the worst human beings in existence (I know this because I heard of a pirate that would rape the women of a ship, make the men watch, then jettison the men, women and children into space and laugh as he watched them die and his bounty was only around 50,000 credits, so, I try not to feel too bad about bounty hunting kills.)
So we fight our way to the hangers, now I’m already hurt from the beating I took and I’m not stupid, I know there was more than one reason Mikael let me get beat that much before jumping in, he wants me beaten up so it’ll be easier to take me out when or if he decides to, so, maybe I was acting like I was hurt a lot worse than I actually was.
I spent 6 years, from 8 years old to 14 years old, in the mines as an imperial slave under a slave driver who cared nothing for honor or pity, that mine was worse than any labor camp or any prison, now I can fly the shit out of a ship and I’m not horrible with firearms, but when it comes to hand to hand combat, dirty fighting, do whatever it takes fighting? After 6 years in those mines, it’s basically a damn specialization of mine.
We get to the hanger, what’s left of the guards (Probably 30 or so, after we had killed about 11 by my count. One in particular was a guy that Mikael hit right in the ear with a bolt from the pulser rifle, guy’s head went like a watermelon hit by a type 7, freaked me out, Mikael just laughed and yelled over the fire “I love it when that happens! AAAAHAHAHAH!” I almost slipped in the f*cking brain matter and cerebellum juice while running around the corner, guards hot on our trail. I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone more than I hated Mikael at that moment, but, he needed a pilot and he was helping me escape, so..
When we got to the hanger the only thing sitting there was a Type 9 freighter which looked as though it was currently being repaired, which, of course, was just fan-f*cking-tastic.
But aboard we went, with.. Mikael shooting a couple of engineering techs.. unarmed.. techs, “just for fun” as he said..
This was when I decided that somehow, I would get him into the hands of the authorities.
Take off was a bit sketchy considering that I’d never flown anything this massive and slow, as I told Mikael when he yelled “I thought you were a pilot!”
Bumping the floor and walls twice, okay, 3 or 4 times on the way out, I pointed the nose straight at the sky, pushed the throttle all the way forward and felt the ship lurch into motion at its best speed.
Turrets started to open up on us, the same ones I’d destroyed earlier that day, they had rebuilt them fast, or perhaps, just replaced them, this giving me an idea of what kind of operation we were dealing with, a well-funded one to say the least.
I yelled for Mikael to transfer power to the rear shields before they took out our thrusters and he did, we had almost made it out of mass lock range when two eagles popped up on my radar from behind and one in front.
With no real weapons to speak of (Yea, it was unarmed, except for mining lasers and point defense.), I decided to show Mikael he wasn’t the only crazy one in this party of two. Hitting boost, I managed to take the eagle ahead by surprise, as I could see in the pilots face as the much more massive craft smashed into his eagle, crumbling, crushing and splattering it like so much goo filed ice against a brick wall, the last thing I saw was an “O” shape on the pilots mouth before he was turned into J-E-LL-O all over the bottom part of my pilots canopy, the blood began to bubble from the radiation emanating from the nearby star, forcing me to swallow bile as my brain automatically attempted to render what that must have smelt like.
I then lowered the cargo hatch and the landing gear, smashing my fist down on the emergency full stop button and switching controls to “alternate flight controls” and turned flight assist off, I pulled back on the stick, out of the corner of my eye I could see Mikael’s eyes going wider and wider before he sputtered obscenities, frantically trying to buckle himself in as he should have done already.
The two eagles which had been in hot pursuit, had no chance to slow down, let alone stop (Especially considering they’d fired missiles, which had been intercepted by the point defense and screened my maneuvers with the resulting explosions just in time and at the right moment.) and the vessels went slamming into the top of the Type 9, rocking the ship as it continued to turn over, and began to drift down to the planet, slowly, beautifully, horribly, falling through the massive fireballs created by missiles and fuel exploding from the much smaller craft.
While what I’d done worked, it also seemed to cause a power surge in the already damaged ship which tripped the breakers and shut down the power plant.
I yelled at Mikael to get back there and manually reboot it, funny enough, he did, without even a moment of rebellion.
Needless to say, we came within about 60 meters of crashing into the surface before Mikael was able to restart the power plant and manually cycle the hyper drive, which gave us enough thruster power back, engines screaming wildly to pull the ship out of it’s dive, finally succeeding before taking us out of mass lock range and into super cruise.
I went to choose a destination when I felt the cold metal of a pulser barrel against the back of my head and heard Mikaels Russian accented voice say “We will not be going to that system, it is.. high security, I prefer, anarchy systems, much easier for someone like me to find ‘work’ and for you to also find work, maybe as some well off hairy pirates parlor girl!”
At this point he was making himself laugh way too much at his own jokes and to me, whatever was serious and whatever was not didn’t matter, I would-NOT go back into slavery of ANY kind.
In the middle of his full throated belly laugh, I pulled us out of super cruise, slammed the ship into a starboard yaw and roll, simultaneously turning off flight assist, hitting boost, while turning off the inertial dampeners, this sent the ship into vomit inducing spin, as the engines continued to burn, created g forces up to 20.
Mikael went flying into the port bulkhead but instinctively fired off a shot from the pulser which all but destroyed the pilot console, sending sparks and slivers of sharp, white hot metal into my face.
I returned all ship systems to full stop and normal with the auxiliary controls before jumping on the Russian, hoping he hadn’t recovered more than I had from that insane spinning which made one feel like their chest was being crushed and eyes would pop, ending up as bowls of soup in ones sinus cavity.
At least, I hit full stop, but with the ships damage before boarded, having been exasperated by the eagles slamming into her hull and now the interface hub at the pilots seat being blasted, the ship was anything but in “nominal condition” Suddenly as myself and Mikael struggled in a life and death fight for the pistol, the vessel lurched and went into super cruise on its last known heading, which just so happened to be straight for a neutron star. Thank God the inertial dampeners had been brought back online at least, or else, well, red paste doesn’t write log entries..
At this point, after seeing him do what I’d seen and then trying to put me into slavery, I had no pity left. I Grabbed his hand, pinky and ring finger in one hand, bird and pointer in the other and tore opposite directions, splitting his hand to the wrist and spraying globules of blood, floating in the ship, all over. A scream like nothing I’d ever heard from any living thing, echoed and rang off the walls, I took the sadistic Russian by the wrist and shoulder and threw him over my shoulder, slamming him down on the metal deck much like one would swing a sledge hammer, mixed with tossing a heavy sack of grain off their back, he landed on his face and chest, so hard from the centrifugal force of my throw that I heard his rib cage collapse a bit, broken ribs puncturing his lungs which sounded like a thick bubble being pierced and ripped, air escaping to ever so slightly inflate his body and a hidden, trapped scream of unimaginable pain, tried to leave his lips.
I kicked him in the head, hard, I heard his skull crack against the deck and it warped some bit and that was the last sound I heard from Mikael, other than the mumbled slobbering, sobbing pleas from his broken jaw and body as I left him, now a broke and I’m pretty sure mentally disabled, man.
I went to the hanger bay and jumped in one of the fighters, taking it, I made my way to a nearby station while watching the Type-9 disintegrate into the star until a surprisingly and unbelievably massive explosion took the place of the now evaporated vessel.
What the hell was on that ship?!
From there I just told the authorities “some” of the truth.. they confirmed my identity and my insurance paid for me a knew Asp Explorer, just like the one I’d lost.
They wanted me to stay there in the infirmary, but I refused, fearing for my safety and instead, headed back to my home system and station and here I sit, typing this, the longest log entry I’ve ever done.
I spent a couple hours in the infirmary here at my home station, the list of injuries as follows: 4 broken ribs, 2 fractures in my leg, 3 in my arm, 4 concussions, a broken nose, hairline fracture and lacerations in my cheek bone (That’ll l be a scar.), a ruptured kidney, torn tendons and muscles in both legs, torn ACL and the list goes on and on, the doctors guessed adrenaline got me to the fighter bay and to the station.
Modern medical science is amazing, but, my body remembers all the injuries and it hurts like a #$(*%$*#(#$($$%*#$*(#$.
I’m not sure if what I’ve written here will end up getting me in trouble, I’m not sure if I regret anything I had to do or anything I chose to do, or both.. maybe neither..
All I know is that I’ll be a lot more careful out there now and I’ve got a lot to think about and one thing is for sure, it’s back to relatively safe and relaxing trading, for the immediate future, it’s gonna be me, a pillow, covers, a bottle of good whiskey and some sleep.