I am aware of the reality hand-waving that goes on when distances of 100ls are crossed within minutes, and accelerations of 0.25c are done within minutes
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
Part I:
Strapped into my pilot’s shell, I checked the statuses of my systems again. Life Support, then Propulsion, Weaponry, and finally Armor and Shielding. Satisfied that my subsystems were all functioning at near optimal levels, I recharged my gel tanks from the ship’s holding tank and flooded the shell with acceleration gel.
Controlling the flow rate of He3 fuel into my engines, I powered up my reactor and charged up my matrix capacitors. These aftermarket additions were useful for providing a short burst of concentrated laser fire as a last-resort, chewing through armor and shields at two point seven times the normal fire rate.
I am an independent mercenary working for the Commonwealth as a agent of law and order. This means that I have undergone three years of compulsory military and legal training that tells me, simply, what I can and cannot shoot at with my dual lasers and assorted missiles. I operate on my own whim and fancy, clearing out systems with pirate activities at my own risk and reward, apart from a monthly stipend. Each confirmed kill by the mandatory telescopes installed on orbiting satellites and stations affiliated to the Commonwealth usually nets me enough for a round of drinks for everyone at the spacer bar, after maintenance and fuel costs. Bigger kills- I get more.
My objective today is to check out the few NavBeacons which have detected some hint of pirate activity near one of the larger asteroids in the system’s outer belt. It seems that pirates are starting to gather in numbers there- but this is outdated information as whatever activities I see now as a recording has happened more than 2 days ago in the past- 1 hour to reach the station’s military sensors by light, and another 40 hours to get through the bureaucratic red-tape to the system's military administrator, and another 3 hours for him to dally and flirt with the women of his station before handing it to me as a contractual hunt-and-kill-if-they-are-pirates-job.
Most of the time, they aren’t pirates. Just illegal miners boring for rocks- easy to scare away, and I earn the minimum kilocred or so for a negative report. Doing drudgery does get the bills paid and my ship purring at maximum efficiency though, which is why I do these menial tasks.
Traffic control gives me the all clear. I jet out of the docking bay with cold-gas thrusters. Anything more than a blowtorch flame in size and heat is absolutely banned near a station in civilian times. Loss of atmosphere and structural integrity to stations by careless captains is absolutely effortless when ships have engines that bring them up to 0.25c within minutes.
Once out of the clearing zone of 10 000 km, I angle my drive away from the station and activate my reactor to 56% operational efficiency. Target locks on me drop one after the other as am identified as non-hostile by my direction vector. Just by pointing their ship’s blunt nose in the wrong direction, ships have been blasted to bits by the standard centurion guarding every Commonwealth station. Stations are practically sitting ducks compared to the infinitely more mobile ships, and to protect these havens of air and warmth a little more than mere paranoia and itchy trigger fingers is required. Death comes swift if regulations aren’t obeyed. If you don’t die, you are automatically labelled a pirate, which nothing other than death or a lengthy court process in a heavily fortified military stronghold can clear. So I am very careful.
My passive velocity radar goes off the scale. Alarms sound and a moment later a sudden corona comes over my visual display. Have you ever seen starlight reflecting off gas in vacuum? That was what I saw when my sensors pivoted back. Tremendous outgassing produced billowing gas clouds which obscured my view of the station. A brilliant eruption of light shone through the wreckage another 20 seconds later.
Reflexes kicking in, I kicked the ship into a high-gee elliptical orbiting what was once the station. Radioing the general direction of the wreckage, I received no distress calls, and only the automated emergency transponders blared its grievous wail across the depths of empty space.
@#$!, this was bad. I had gotten to know some of these people relatively well over my past week of stopover at this residential station. And now they were nothing but a cloud of incandescent vapor. Even the heavily armored Centurion could not be reached on any frequency- it was probably obliterated by the debris from the explosion. This was really, really bad. An unprovoked attack on a civilian Commonwealth residential station? Much less was cause for systemic obliteration of pirate elements.
Keying the sequence for the transponder beacon, I ejected it into free space, calling for an immediate emergency to be responded only by armed military Commonwealth elements. Hell, St Katherine’s was only 3 systems behind- the audacity for such an open attack!
I sent out tight beamed, low dispersion data bursts to all friendly and neutral stations within the system detailing the events of the attack, careful to not reveal my spatial location to the hostile elements present. A few responded in the affirmative and there was a perceptible outflow of merchant and civilian vessels out of the system back towards St Kats. Abruptly the transponder beacon ended its transmission, barely an hour after I first deployed it.
Three Charon frigates were within 100ls within my location, sifting the area for my drive presence. Corsair patrols spread out in a spherical volume away from my former transponder beacon (now cloud of ionized metal and vapor).
This was combat, and I was scared shitless.