The Privateer/Chapter 1
Satisfied that I wasn't being tailed, I finally let my white-knuckled thumb off the afterburner switch. In the old days, I'd flick that thing on whenever I was feeling too impatient to cover the distance to my next starport landing on impulse engines. Lately, though, my only thoughts were on how much the burner fuel would cost me every time I'd put my thumb anywhere near it. Life, death, or otherwise; that last skirmish just cost me another 136 credits, to say nothing of the cost of repairs once I landed.
I turned my chair to check the rear view, only to remember that I hadn't had a ship with a rear viewport since I left Coalition service. My only comfort was my slightly shorted-out radar, and the debug output from my aging targeting system - so old, it had reverted to its text-only failsafe mode, incapable of displaying the graphical radar. I didn't have the money or expertise to get it fixed, so I just spent time learning to read the raw data values on the amber-scale monitor. Speaking of which, said monitor hadn't been displaying anything out of the ordinary for the last two minutes.
I kicked back in the chair, propping my feet up on the side viewport (the only place on my dash on which it was safe to do so, without accidentally kicking the keyboard). The nav computer said it was about 200 kilometers until I'd be at the last jump back to the Loye system. At my current velocity, a whopping 45 meters per second, it'd be a frustratingly slow journey indeed.
A glint out the side port caught my eye for but a split second, until I glimpsed the designation and license number. It was a Talon, the preferred light fighter of the Church of Man, but I needed only look at the first two letters of his license to see it was a Militia craft. I kicked my feet back up with a sigh, fingering the vidcomm button with my left hand in case I needed to do any talking. I wouldn't be kept wondering for long. My debug screen flashed a few messages as the speakers behind me popped and clicked.
>stdout|open sound device /dev/vidcomm1 >stdout|open video capture device /dev/vidcomm1 >/dev/vidcomm1 ==> COMMTAG ID: MTA5783; execute function A_InitComm(); >/dev/vidcomm1|/dev/tscript ==> INITIATE COMMUNIQUE TRANSCRIPT >MTA5783 "Unidentified vessel, this is Loye Militia 5783. Your left wing appears to be damaged and your registration number is unreadable. Please indentify yourself." >F_G5_1 "This is freelancer gamma five-dash-one. How goes the patrol?" >MTA5783 "You haven't been cleared for small talk, civilian. We need to scan your cargo bay for contraband." >MTA5783 "Cut your engines to zero and prepare for boarding." >F_G5_1 "[illegible, word not in transcript bank] Negative, Loye Militia, my docking clamps are damaged. Cannot support a boarding attempt." >MTA5783 "Cut your engines to zero and prepare for boarding. This is your last warning, or we will fire on you." >F_G5_1 "Are you listening to a [illegible; distorted] thing I'm saying? My ship is badly damaged, docking clamps are damaged or missing. Cannot support boarding attempt, repeat, docking clamps are damaged, cannot support boarding attempt." >MTA5783 "Acknowledged, freelancer gamma five-dash-one. Jettison your cargo bay and we'll let you off this time." >F_G5_1 "You gotta be kidding." >MTA5783 "Second warning, jettison your cargo bay." >F_G5_1 "Go to hell, jacker." >/dev/tscript ==> COMMUNIQUE TRANSCRIPT: UNEXPECTED END OF FILE >stderr|IMPROPER SHUTDOWN: FORCE QUIT SENT TO /dev/vidcomm1
It certainly wasn't the first time I'd seen pirates hijack a militia vessel, but it didn't happen often enough for me to consider the possibility until now. The tip-off was when the guy didn't run a scan. Militia don't board vessels - they've got all the tools they need in those fancy helmets of theirs. This guy was a fine actor, but the procedure was all wrong. But even if I did figure out he was a pirate, there wasn't much I could do about it; my afterburners were running out of fuel, I only had one gun left, and like he'd said earlier, my wing and maneuvering jets were damaged badly enough that high-speed maneuvers were out of the question.
So I pulled the only trick I had left. I slapped the throttle as high as I could and flicked the afterburners with my thumb. I still wasn't going very fast, certainly not fast enough to outrun a pirate, but it was better than drifting by at roughly the speed of a golf cart. The pirate obviously hadn't expected this, and his initial meson burst went wide of the mark. The next wasn't so lucky for me, as one bolt struck my tailpipe, crippling the engines more than they already had been.
I thought I was done for. Even with afterburners (which were running on fumes at this point), I was still only clocking 75 meters a second, which was slow enough to be the equivalent of doing the MC Hammer slide in a pressurized EVA suit. Two more lucky hits struck my one remaining wing, and I saw what was left of my laser cannon float past.
A nearby explosion rocked the entire ship, or what remained of it. I thought for sure I'd taken a missile hit, and frantically checked the damage report on my MFD. No changes to speak of...but then the vidcomm channel opened again.
>stdout|open sound device /dev/vidcomm1 >stdout|open video capture device /dev/vidcomm1 >/dev/vidcomm1 ==> COMMTAG ID: SLC1174; execute function A_InitComm(); >/dev/vidcomm1|/dev/tscript ==> INITIATE COMMUNIQUE TRANSCRIPT >SLC1174 "Target down. You alright?" >F_G5_1 "Could be much better. Thanks for the save." >SLC1174 "This is Solar Liberty Coalition 1174. If you could state your registration number for the record, I'll call a tow vessel to pick you up and take you to Loye." >F_G5_1 "Freelancer gamma five dash one. To what do I owe the pleasure?" >SLC1174 "Just passing through on regular patrol." >F_G5_1 "[muffled] Sure took you long enough." >SLC1174 "Uh, freelancer gamma five dash one, say again?" >F_G5_1 "Never mind." >SLC1174 "A tow vessel is on its way. It should reach your current position in an hour. Keep your engines at zero and your blinkers off. When it shows up, give it my designation number, one one seven four." >F_G5_1 "Acknowledged." >SLC1174 "Watch your back, freelancer." >F_G5_1 "Thanks." >stdout|close device /dev/vidcomm1 >stdout|close device /dev/tscript >stdout ==> Communication successfully shut down. >stdout|EOF
The towboat finally showed up and tractor-beamed me into its massive cargo hold. It drove me nuts back there, since the cargo hold is never pressurized, and my navigational equipment didn't work in enclosed spaces. I could only pass the time playing card games on my PDA (which, like all the other things I owned, was older than I was) until we eventually pulled into Loye Naval Station, where the Solar Liberty Coalition's flagship was moored.
I hopped off my broken husk of a trade ship and heard that familiar beep from my PDA that told me I'd received mail. I sighed, knowing it wouldn't be good. It ended up being an invoice from the towboat, to the tune of 1566 credits, to compensate for lost cargo space. I didn't see that he was carrying anything else back there, so I had no idea where he got off charging me the equivalent of a trunk full of exotics. Thankfully, there wasn't a due date attached, so it was pretty much a "pay at my leisure" sort of thing. That only slightly softened the blow for what came next.
When the nanobots finished looking over my wreckage (I could scarcely call it a ship anymore), my PDA once again showed me the bill for repair and refitting costs. 6,000 credits to replace the lost missile launcher and laser cannon, 750 to load the missile launcher with ammo, 30,000 to replace the burned out shield generator, 20,000 to replace the targeting computer's dead GPU (I deemed this a low priority), and 3,500 to replace the alloy hull plating that used to be attached to the side panels. Strange world we're living in, I mused to myself, when personal protection is cheaper than the stuff it's protecting. The alloy manufacturers must have been making a mint off of me, regardless.
The bill wasn't getting any smaller (or bigger, I reassured myself), so I went for a stroll through the base. There wasn't much to be done without military clearance, since all but the lowest three decks were locked off to civilians, and the local bar, The Exhaust Port, was probably only considered a bar for 20% of its floor space, with the remaining 80% being a mysterious VIP section that nobody seemed to really know anything about. Despite reasoning with myself that I couldn't even afford the tow fee, I still insisted on buying a drink. It'd take the edge off, I'd been told, but all I'd gotten out of the glass of New Milton-Keynes lager was a headache. Or maybe it was the sound system, which was loud enough that I could barely hear the barkeep, and was likely on fire, judging by the stench of burned speaker foam I smelled every time the music flared up.
I took my egress from the tavern before it erupted in an aural inferno and decided there wasn't much I could do without taking on more missions. And to take on missions, I needed something to fly. I no longer considered my beaten-up taxi, which I'd christened the "USS Please-Don't-Shoot-Me," worthy of any space flight whatsoever. The name didn't end up doing me any good - you might have noticed before, but the pirate earlier hadn't been able to read it.
A quick trip to "Debatably Honest Bob's Ship-porium!" later, I learned that my ship was worth more as scrap metal than as a trade-in for another vessel. I'd thrown the dealer for a loop when I immediately asked him my ship's value in scrap iron. First, he laughed in my face. Then, he looked at my ship and laughed again. Finally, as if my heart hadn't sank enough, the dealer looked at me, opened his mouth several times as if to speak, and didn't end up saying anything at all. With a grim expression, he pulled me into his office without much of a word.
The dealer made me an offer that he claimed he'd never had to make before. He told me that most privateers never last long enough to finish making payments on their ships, so he'd never given much thought to financing or credit lines for his customers - cash up front only. In my case, though, I was so badly in the hole for repair costs, and my ship worth so little, that he was willing to let me "start fresh," so to speak. He'd take my ship, eat the repair costs himself, sell the fixed equipment to make up the costs, then keep me on retainer to do some odd jobs if he needed them until he figured I'd worked off the part of the bill that he couldn't cover by selling my stuff. I figured he wasn't trying to lead me down a slippery slope, so what the hell, I shook his hand and sealed it. Within three hours, my ship - lacking its name, since the left wing had to be replaced - was once again ready for business.
I examined the ship's exterior. Wingspan was exactly to specifications, armor plating was currently comprised of melted-down beer cans (what the dealer called "green armor"), and the weaponry consisted of a single laser cannon that might as well have just shot little flags that said "BANG!" With a glimmer of hope, I asked the dealer about the targeting and radar systems - he said it was the only thing he could "save" from the ship before replacing most of it. Nobody would buy back a targeting computer that was permanently stuck in debug mode, after all. That was okay with me, though. I'd gotten so used to reading the amberscale text output that I almost thought a graphical radar system was cheating.
The inside of the ship was nearly as impressive(ly low-budget) as the outside. The cockpit was unchanged, aside from a few burned-out access panels being covered over with what looked like cardboard, and the cargo hold now reinforced with one column comprised of a stack of crushed beer cans. I was starting to wonder if the beer cans were some kind of theme or practical joke. The dealer insisted that it was the best value for his money, which told me he hadn't spent anything at all on the makeshift hullstrut. The beer cans probably came from his personal collection, for all I could tell.
I settled in to the familiar pilot's chair on the right side of the cockpit. There was another chair and another station on the left side, that I'd never used, but it contained almost identical controls to my own, excepting the monitor screens. I never understood the point of having a co-pilot station with no screens.
The USS Leave-Me-Alone was sealed off and almost through starting procedures before I received a vidcomm call.
>stdout|open sound device /dev/vidcomm1 >stdout|open video capture device /dev/vidcomm1 >/dev/vidcomm1 ==> COMMTAG ID: BOBS_SHIPS; execute function A_InitComm(); >/dev/vidcomm1|/dev/tscript ==> INITIATE COMMUNIQUE TRANSCRIPT >BOBS_SHIPS "Hey, pal, one more thing before you go." >F_G5_1 "What?" >BOBS_SHIPS "Got a favor for you. Gal pal of mine is looking for a decoy to keep the heat off her for a trip through a Coalition check point. Says she's got an op-for pilot on ice in her cargo bay, wants to bring 'em in for a bounty but the Coalition doesn't like enemy pilots in cargo bays, regardless of what you're doing with 'em." >F_G5_1 "What do I do about it?" >BOBS_SHIPS "Meet her at this waypoint in the HG-101 system. Neutral territory, Coalition can't touch it, but pirates won't go anywhere near it." >/dev/zrouter ==> COORDINATES RECEIVED FROM COMMTAG ID: BOBS_SHIPS >/dev/zrouter|/dev/navsys1 ==> DESTINATION: nav://HG-101/nav2/x107/y99/z-1 >F_G5_1 "Compensation?" >BOBS_SHIPS "Adequate." >F_G5_1 "That's it?" >BOBS_SHIPS "Wouldn't do to get rid of an asset so soon, would it? You proved your ability to not die, now show me what you're really made of. Could be some extras in it for you, heh heh..." >F_G5_1 "Fine." >stdout|close device /dev/vidcomm1 >stdout|close device /dev/tscript >stdout ==> Communication successfully shut down. >stdout|EOF
