Helicity groaned and threw the ringing alarm clock against the wall of her spartan appartment, the cunning caldari timepiece was fortunately constructed with this use in mind, and deployed a tiny shield just prior to striking the wall. It gently floated to the ground on a grav-chute.
Helicity sneered at it, wisely, the alarm clock’s AI had taken the point and the irritating ringing had ceased.
Business kept her on Amarr time, which meant the other Pythons were typically at their most active when she was asleep, but tonight she was going to join them, no matter what.
A brisk cold shower and some semi-legal stimulants later she was floating comfortably in her pod and being loaded into her beloved Arbitrator cruiser.
“Nalvula?” Spec’s ever enthausiatic and sarcastic voice came over the comms, grinding on her still-awakening nerves.
“Sure” She replied while adjusting the sights on her beam lasers and assault launcher.
Nalvula, a peculiar system, in a tiny chunk of low security space surrounded by very high security space. The problem was getting there. The only way to get to Nalvula from Aurohunen led through the high security system of Vaajaaita (a name which never stops to elicit laughter from the less mature amongst the Pythons).
Glancing at her overview, running the gate should not be a problem for their makeshift flotilla, no one was flying anything too slow to elude the dull witted Navy officials that would doubtlessly give a half-hearted attempt at stopping them. Again.
As they crossed the threshold of the gate the comms flared into life with garbled messages from Skye and Golden Helmet, their ships were not materializing properly on the other side of the gate and their systems were going offline. This stargate error has been more and more common of late.
Several tense moments later, it appeared that the emergency warp systems on both their ships had saved them from being sitting ducks for the hotheads in the caldari navy that would have gladly blown their ships to smithereens.
Spectre and Skye set about scanning Nalvula and it’s surrounding systems for prey, these systems were often home to hopeful young capsuleers, eager to prove their mettle against the non-capsuleer flown ramshackle ships of such organisations as the Guristas and Serpentis, they were easy pickings for a small fleet of capsuleers with real combat experience.
Sadly, after what seemed like hours, it appeared there would be no sport to be had… until Spectre encountered a fellow pirate in Megathron battleship sitting idly near a jumpgate.
We set about our trap, spectre’s lachesis would be the bait, while we waited on our side of the gate, lightyears away in real spacial terms. The Megathron would have no way of knowing we were there.
The trap was sprung and Spectre and the Hurricane engaged eachother, our fleet jumped through, and soon Drones, lasers, missiles and hyper-velocity shells streaked through space, the mighty battleship was quickly losing it’s defenses, but the gatecrew appeared to take pity on him (or were bribed) and decided to let him use the jumpgate despite his recent acts of aggression, while denying us the use of the jumpgate.
Helicity stifled a cry of frustration and recalled her drones. Pouting in the pod-goop she was beginning to wonder if she should have stayed in bed.
Disheartened the gang returned home, switched some ships and relaunched to check out the local hotbeds of violence and death, Dantumi, Mara and Passari, home of the monkeys from DFP and CBS.
After some fruitless chasing of a former associate in an Onyx (who was far, far too clever to be caught with his pants down) Golden Helmet piped up in his boyish voice:
“I have a caldari navy raven and a megathron on scan, they appear to be in a safespot between two belts, I’m going to probe them out”
Helicity’s bloodpressure spiked and adrenaline began to seep into her tissues.
Finally, prey.
Helmet had succeeded in locating the two battleships and was creeping closer to them in his stealthy helios ship, unnoticed by the two behemoths.
“Point! but hurry up, this ship can’t take much”
Helicity slammed her arbitrator into warp, the megathron battleship that Helmet was currently holding in place would make short work of his small ship, but she had just the thing for such an occasion…
“CNR is primary, someone point the Mega” Spectre chimed over the comms.
“I’ll deal with the megathron” Helicity replied, a vicious grin creeping onto her features.
As the warp bubble collapsed and real space returned, everything slowed down in her mind. The Raven was already being attacked by her corpmates, drones buzzing around it like flies, The megathron loomed right before her, a mighty Gallente battleship with very, very large particle blaster turrets.
She engaged her warp scrambling module, to make sure the battleship went nowhere. With a simple thought impulse she willed her Drones to attack the Raven, while firing her laser and missile batteries at the quickly diminishing shield of the Caldari battleship.
And then the masterstroke, sifting quickly through the code projected into her mind’s eye she selected a segment of viral code, loaded it into her two tracking disruptor modules and in a single stroke virtually disabled the Megathron’s guns entirely, their tracking and range being utterly debilitated by her electronic warfare modules. As the Megathron’s pilot tried in vain to get his weapon systems back in working order, Helmet made good his escape.
The Raven exploded with a pitiful, inaudible, pop. The megathron followed soon after, having been completely unable to bring it’s guns to bear during the entire swift encounter due to the arbitrator’s formidable ewar abilities.
The chatter on the comms went on for hours, but Helicity was not listening, her skeleton crew diligently guiding her vessel home as she slept in the warm and gentle embrace of her capsule, dreaming of battles and explosions to come.
