mikeazariah

Finally he got into his ship and got it clear of the station before the local agents could realize he was ‘free’ again. He set for a semi quiet spot to drop the first ‘check probe’ which he used to see if an in-depth search was going to be worth it.

This time the scanning base would be an asteroid belt, that way his drones could get the dust blown out of them if any rats were in the area. Mike smiled as he set a single drone out to meet the rats and then in the same motion brushed his hand across the probe launch display and set the probe for a very wide scan. “What the hell is an AU anyhow?” he mused as the probe started its first pass.

The ping of the results on a secondary display brought him back the the present. There were a few anomolies of note in the system so he dropped three more probes and set them to overlap on the first anomoly that caught his eye. While they were warping into position he smiled as the drone returned into his bay and he set the small tractor to tug in the wreckage of the rats who were no longer bothering anyone on this plane of existence. As the wreckage came near he set the sal;vager on it and returned to the probe report.

Closer but very very far from the 100% lock he would need to be able to warp to the site. So it became the routine of fine tune the range of the probe set, move them into planar overlap position, scan. Rinse, repeat. Eventually he got a 100% lock on a wormhole. Setting a bookmark of the site he recalled his drones and warped to see this rare opportunity. It pulsed slowly in the distance and he set course to approach it as he ran a basic id scan on it. It looked fairly fresh and its gravitational fluxes were slow and steady meaning it had not, yet, been overused. He figured it had to be good for a few hours before it might close so he double checked all systems and activated the jump while set firmly in the grasp of the wormhole.

Dirointation. Him, the ship, the shield reinforcement was down . . . he looked to the channels and they all were black, he was in an unknown system. Anything that happened here would never ever get back to concord. Flicking the shielding back up online he bookmarked the location of the exit and then warped to a distant planet. Then he took a deep breath and gathered his wits. He turned on a rleatively new program that he had installed and fed it the system information and waited for a full analysis.

*ping* “Hmm, class 3 . . . damn, it is chopping my shield regeneration . . . oh well, let us see what is out there . . .” Another brush of the hand sent a probe out and it gave the initial ‘bother report’

*ping* “Holy Cruddles!” The display was alive with 100% locks with only a single probe out there. Soilar cells, frontier outposts, sleeper sites, the lot of them. He picke done at randeom and set the waro to take him way waaaayy out on the edge of the site so he could give it a look-see. “Hmm, a couple of towers at 88 km, not too bad . . . wait what the heck are those?” . . . New targets appeared even further out as he was examining the info on the tower . . .

}thooooom{

“What the?” The towers were targetting and hitting him from 90 km out and hitting hard.

“Dammit, shields not coming back fast enough” The status on the outer shields was dropping like Amarri clerics at an all-you-can drink event.

He set course swiftly and warped out and rested as his shields slowly (oh so very slowly) returned to full status.

“Maybe a Solar Cell is better?” Again the approach from a distance, no towers but a fair spread of targets. He locked on the first and fired the heavy missiles.

“That got their attention.” Every ship on the overview was on the move and after him.

“Steady, steady” With a critical eye he watched the armor of the sleeper ship rise as his own shields slowly degrade. Then a dis-harmonic hum reverberated through the ship. “Funny, that sounds just like . . . warp scrambled?” A closer look at the overview showed that sure enough he was scrambled and who the culprit was. Muttering a curse he shifted targets and focussed fire on the ship that might be the death of him.

The ship rocked with a steady barrage, outgoing AND incoming. The scrambler exploded and he licked his lips thinking of how good the salvage might be when a second ship hit him with a web. And there were still the rest of the pack, moving up fast. If they had another scrambler . . . “Dammit”

The ship reentered known space a few minutes later, no richer in materials . . . but wiser.

“Every time I lose, I learn. At this rate I will be a freaking genius, soon.” Mike docked and headed straight for the bar on the station.