The Iron Claw
05 Apr 2018Pavel Mirsky
Not again...Detention
The light weight hull of my Lakon groaned as the mag-locks released the Astro-Van from bondage, an familiar blood-red sun looming over a coarse and ugly mega-hull. The stark white letters "ENTION CE" were all I could read, thanks to Remlok's patented emergency stasis protocols which dutifully kept my voluntary muscles from firing. Locked in, about to be locked UP. I didnt need to see the identifier of the filthy ship to know that the Iron Claw had me. Again.
The shiny reflective coating I had paid so much for, was ground against the receiving magneto-grappler with a raspy whine, and with a brief honk of klaxons, began descending into the maw of the intake platform of the center. My suit began relaxing it's subroutines and I found myself grateful for a real breath of my own recycled air as my diaphragm was released. A robotic claw attached to the multi-refueling port ungracefully, scratching my expensive mirrored paint yet again. The fresh air was pumped into my ship and I already could see the bill ( 500cr/day - Life Support, Waste Removal ) that would be levied against me, as well as the rest of my fines.
As my ship descended I wondered about my databanks and how they would betray me this time as the wardens of this hateful Claw tore through every giga-quad of information stored in my computers, leaving me with a clean slate of zeros as their secure-wipe algorithms wrote and re-wrote random patterns of ones and zeros to my receptive crystal matrix. No compensation, but I'll be damned if I cant go and PAY United Cartographics for my own damn data once I get out of this Claw's handshake.
I mentally replayed the last few minutes before I had been impounded. Caelano system, an evil looking inferno planet/blue star combo with a suspicious ring of debris far outside the exclusion zone. Inside the ring were many contacts; Listening Posts, Relays and a Aegis Coriolis station. I had been following some listening posts for a while, coming across a damaged mega-ship, the Artemis. It had been covered with the same slime the Barnacles surrounded themselves with, and had taken severe damage across its starboard nacell/hull. Seems the Artemis was designed by a catamaran enthusiast, but that strange double-hull redundancy had helped it survive, this time. All the Listening Posts pointed to Caelano, so after a few scans and surveys, I locked onto the Relay station, hoping to share my data.
Unfortunately I was too close to the Relay, and was immediately nullified and captured. Those fuckin' scientists wouldn't hear an iota about my data, guess everyone's too hyped up about the Goid sympathizers to even think that someone would want to contribute. Fair, I suppose, but I was an open book, and unarmed too. Didnt even have a limpet in my hold, had used em all collecting some escape pods from the Artemis. Did not matter, the frequencies were cold that I yelled on, never even got a response.
My ship booted into limited mode, and I immediately hit the heater as my helmet retracted. She runs cold, and on purpose too. I can scoop for days between the low-power powerplant, and my mirrored hull. Comms panel snapped up with the familiar face of the Iron Claw's legal rep. She either didn't recognize me, or didn't care, and I'd bet my discovery scanner it was the latter. I'll admit, getting picked up for the crime of photography by my own damn faction was a lot more embarassing than this.
I barely listened to her court-ordered blathering. "Ship will be impounded for minimum... Crimes of trespassing against Aegis... Additional sentence already approved... Galactic Security Lockdown Protocol... blah blah. Some new word salad about how much intruding on the Relay would cost me. Price multiplier due to the Lockdown... At least they gave me an itemized bill so I could laugh about the insane cost of synthesized food cubes would cost me later.
'It was not even about the price', I thought, as I tried to open Galnet for some reading material [SYSTEM IN LOCKDOWN MODE], 'it was about the time.'
This damnned place again