Sunday 30 November 2014

[FICTION] The long kiss goodnight

Anabaric looked up from the console he was working on taking in the view from his small office which now looked out over the space dock. The Moros classed dreadnought filled most of the vista, Nashh's insignia was clearly painted on the sides, but something felt wrong. Nashh had a certain style about him and it was evident even when undocking Nashh's usual flying style was missing.

This pilot was observing the undock speed limit, rather than engaging the thrusters at maximum the moment he'd cleared his personal hanger. In fact this pilot was being extra careful, almost as if he didn't want to be noticed, he'd even turned the engines off as he passed a freighter so as not to cause turbulence...

This wasn't Nashh.

There was only one person that would even consider this today, Dame!
He pulled the comm unit out of his pocket, pressing the speed dial.

Over in Nashh's office the alliance meeting was in progress.

"What is it!" Nashh growled.
"Told you so." Anabaric's voice echoed out over the speaker phone.
"Fuck you"
Turning back to his console Anabaric entered a single line of code into the terminal screen.
"Don't worry, I've fixed it for you, he's having navigational issues..."
He could Lazy laughing in the background over the tinny speaker.

The jump drives of the Moros had spooled up and blue lines of electricity pulsed along it's hull, as the field lines converged a small explosion blew out several decks near the aft of the ship. The field lines stuttered twice then converged as the drives overloaded, purple sparks jumped over the hull, the ship vanished.

On board the Moros, Dame smiled as he made the jump, he was away, his cargo hold full of Nashh's rum and the Dreadnought fully fueled and ready. Then warning lights started to flash on the console, the jump was taking ages, something was wrong.

Reality shifted again and the ship dropped back into normal space, he started to take stock of the situation, the ship was in one piece, but why did his head hurt so much?  where was his cyno ship? In fact where the hell was he? Damage control was reporting minor damage to most systems, the jump drive was offline, fuel was showing depleted, navigation was showing errors, he couldn't possible be there... and why did his head hurt so much.

Checking his jump timer, Dame started to realize what had happened. An overload had caused the ship to use all the fuel in one single jump, he was lucky to still be alive, the moros was stranded with no fuel, and blown drives. Damage control teams were already working on the drives, 6 hours for the repair. Not really an issue, his head was killing him and he had 14 hours of jump fatigue anyway.

"So how did you know he was going to take that ship"
"I didn't."
"Then how did you do that?"
"I put a bomb on your ship"
"Just that one?"
"Maybe..."