EVE Fiction

Immmmmm BACK! if you were a fan of my old story then... this one is almost completely unrelated. Feel free to look it up for some background, but for the most part this is unrelated.

So everyone knows, my willingness and ability to write more chapters is directly related to my ego. If you want more story, then please fan it :P

This chapter is a bit short, mainly to drum up some support and test the waters n stuff.

Without further delay, here's the story!

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The war had not gone well for his old corp. After the Sansha had gotten involved with a plethora of sleeper technology augmented ships it hadn’t lasted long. By the time Arceroth escaped from wormhole space it was over, though with the state in which his ship had limped back to port it could be argued he was in the worst of it. The alliance owning that station had no cares about Arc and his worn out crew, aboard a totaled ship, with a hold full of ex-prisoners. The wormholes had led him to a distant part of the galaxy; finally chasing the Sansha off, the forces which had managed to follow him weren’t enough to risk an assault on a defended station.

That was three Caldari Prime years ago, an eternity as far as the null sec politics were concerned. Empires had risen, prying systems from the hands of older alliances, fortunes were made, and life times of war came and went in the blink of an eye as far as those living in citadel space were concerned. Arceroth and Jenith had retreated back to the safety of Concord to escape the wrath of the Sansha for uncovering the technology they thought they had a monopoly on. After a year tensions had disappeared into the murky past, replaced with new, more pressing, concerns. Not that Arceroth had forgotten.

The decrepit Moa had been sold for scrap and, with the combined funds of Both Arc and Jenith, along with both crews still willing to work for them, a new Naga battlecruiser had become their ship of choice. Fitted with massive rail cannons, normally only found on Caldari Battleships, they quickly earned a name for themselves in the Caldari Volunteer Navy fighting the Gallente.

Arceroth strode along the clean decks of his battlecruiser, still shaking off the effects of the neural uplink to the ship. Thankfully he had gotten the Caldari Naval specifications for his Naga, meaning faster shield charging, quicker reloading arms for the railguns, and multiple uplink pods to allow for shift changes. The navy regularly took on very long patrols, weeks or even months away from port, so much so that even with the help of the pod exhaustion eventually took its toll on the pilot. Arc had been flying the ship for the past day, and was glad to be out of the pod, and able to move his own arms and legs for a change. He could take a shower and get some sleep in, something the pod made impossible, or unneeded as some would argue, but, whatever the pod did to keep his body going his mind could only take so much.

It also gave him a chance to check his mail, even deep into low security space, the haven of pirates not strong enough to carve out a chunk of null space for themselves, the ship wasn’t isolated. While he could technically check his mail while in the pod, he preferred not to, gave him something to look forward to besides a hot meal and eight hours in bed.

Finally reaching his quarters, just below the observation deck which stuck out above the ship, he put on a pot of coffee and sat down at his terminal. Most of the messages were pretty standard, supposedly great deals to be found in Jita, pre-approved applications to Goonfleet, and other such spam. One messages stood out, however. Occasionally his agents would send him messages about jobs or missions, and even less commonly they would refer someone who needed a ship to him. One of his contacts in the Caldari Navy had forwarded a message to him from one ‘Alki’ requesting a warship. High pay, would take him out to null sec, and…

“Jen?” he asked, keying the com system on his terminal.

“Yes Arc?” her soft voice emanated from the walls. She had taken over piloting for him, and was currently sitting in her own pod, deep in the heart of the ship.

“Got an interesting message here from Jason, back in the Navy, take a look.”

“Very interesting,” she said seconds later. Being hooked up to a pod did wonders for one’s ability to absorb information quickly. It also enhanced reaction time, spatial perception and a dozen other things that Arc only had the loosest of grasps on. Needless to say it made talking with someone in a pod very… odd.

“Thought you might say that,” Arc responded, getting up to check on the coffee, “what do you think?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Are you just saying that because of the pay?”

“I might have… other motivations,” the amusement was obvious in her voice, even though it was only a replicated copy of it, her being unable to speak in a pod.

“I’ll tell Jason we accept, and will report as soon as we get back from this patrol.”

“Good,” Jen responded quickly, “It will be nice to get back at those Sansha bastards.”

Chapter two

“Shuttle on scope, it’s our contact.” Jenith said from within the pod, “Vectoring to forward transfer dock.”

“Care to join me?” Arc asked before he set off on the long walk down the length of the ship. While a lot of the design choices who ever had made the Naga, putting the transfer dock at the far front of the ship, where most of the life support sections were in the rear, was not one of them. The half kilometer walk down the flanks of the ship was not helped by the cramped walk way. Both arms which made up the majority of the ship was taken up mostly with automated ammo loading systems, damage control walk ways, power distribution for the main guns, and the like.

Fitting the massive, 425mm rail guns required a lot of considerations, and finding room for those systems in a ship no larger than a Ferox was not easy. They had managed it, but there were some draw backs, placing the transfer dock at the front was but one, the walkway to the bow being so cramped as to make old fashioned naval submarines look roomy.

“Pass,” Jen responded, “Wilson is asleep right now, and he’s next up for piloting. I’d rather not wake him.”

“You just don’t want to squeeze down these corridors,” he responded with a smirk.

“Believe what you will,” her voice overly innocent. Arceroth simply chucked and started down the walkways.

---

“You must be Arceroth,” The woman stepping off the shuttle said, holding out her hand and giving Arceroth a weak shake.

“Yes, and welcome to the-”

“No time for small talk,” she interrupted, “I have hired you for a job, can you do it or not?”

“Ummm,” Arc stuttered for a moment, “We more than meet the requirements you put in the job listing, both myself and Jenith are skilled pilots, and we’ve both been outside of citadel space a number of times. Not to mention we have something of a beef with the Sansha.”

“Good,” she said, pushing past Arc in the small corridor and walking towards the main hull of the ship, “you may leave my shuttle in space here, plot a course for the Deklein region, best speed. I’ll give you more information once we leave Concord space.”

“Very well….” The Caldari captain said, following behind the strange, Amarrian woman. “You get that Jen?”

“Of course,” she responded, “Casting off your shuttle now, way points laid in, aligning for jump to stargate.”

“Perfection,” she said, not pausing in her gait, somehow managing to look dignified and clumsy as she stumbled through another of the evenly spaced emergency bulkheads.

“I didn’t catch your name by the way,” Arceroth asked, following with the grace only someone who was used to military spec battle cruisers could match.

“Alora.”

---

“Region jump completed, Welcome to null-sec.”

“Alright Ms. Alora,” Arceroth said, looking across the table at the contact. It had only been a day since they brought her onboard, and, dispite his attempts, he had been unable to get any more information about their job, other than it was in the Deklein region, and involved the Sansha.

“Yes, I shall now answer your questions.”

“Ok then, I thought the Sansha were based down near Stain, not Deklein. How does this involve them?”

“I have good reason to believe that the Gurista’s and the Sansha have signed a treaty, and are in the process of charting and maintaining a permanent wormhole route from Stain to Venal. Should they complete this, there is a very good chance that they will forge an alliance that will encourage other renegade factions to join. If they get enough groups together, even the citadel nations might not be able to stop them.”

“A wormhole bridge?” Arceroth asked, leaning back in his chair, “that’s just a temporary occurrence, when you manage to find a path through wormhole space which leads back to your space. A permanent one isn’t possible.”

“Maybe I misspoke,” Alora said, clearing her throat, “they are constructing a series of jump bridges into, through and then out of wormhole space. This bridge chain will lead from Venal to Stain, and take only a fraction of the time it would to use gates. And a damned sight safer too.”

“That would be incredibly expensive, and I don’t even know if you can form a jump bridge from wormhole space to null sec,” Arc scratched his head as he thought it over. “If they found a way, however, then moving fleets from one end of the cluster to the other would be incredibly easy. They could add more regions to this bridge network without too much trouble… Basically what you are saying is they are attempting to build a secondary gate network which Concord has no control over.”

“In effect yes, it would be much more limited in scope than the current gate network, but the potential uses of such a network represent too much of a danger. Especially if the Gurista’s and Sansha manage to monopolize wormhole space for this purpose.”

“Well,” Arceroth leaned forward again, “we aren’t exactly equipped to take on a jump bridge station. Much less the battle fleet that goes with it.”

“And that’s why we are going to Deklein, not Venal,” The Amarrian woman pulled a data pad out of her bag, keyed in a couple commands and slid it across the table to Arc. “I’ve tried speaking with Concord and the other Citadel space nations to get funding but they don’t believe such a bridge system is possible. Without proof I can’t get them to back me. Not that expect much out of them even with proof, but I might be able to attract some attention and maybe a couple corporate alliances outside of concord space will listen to me.”

good read. can't wait for the next chapter.

Arceroth had originally wanted a shield booster on the ship, his old Moa had one and he wanted the battle cruiser to have the same ability to dump power into the shields when needed. However, Jenith had talked him out of it, partly because she claimed that a passive, slower regenerating shield was more effective, and partly because of how long the capacitor would last in full combat conditions. Between the oversized guns and microwarp drive the generators had a hard time keeping up as it was; they would not be able to manage a booster as well. Arc still had managed to talk her into routing a large portion of the generator output directly into the shield emitters, allowing for faster built in regeneration.

The Naga slid neatly through the wormhole, scanners reach out for anything resembling a Sansha ship. It didn’t take long for the reports to start coming in.

“Targets located, one battlecruiser, two cruisers, and a frigate. Baring 40 degrees right, 20 degrees high, distance… 32 kilomters.”

“Calibrate guns for 30 klicks,” Arceroth’s calm voice flowed out of the speakers, “Priority target frigate, targeting… locked, starboard guns firing.”

The ship shuddered as the rail-guns spoke. Despite all the design that went into incorporating the battleship sized guns into a battlecruiser hull, there was only so much that they could do. With every shot the ship bucked and twisted like an angry horse. Anti-matter charges left the railguns at a significant portion of the speed of light, crossing the gulf too quickly for even a pod pilot to react. Against a stationary frigate, unprepared for combat, the massive slugs, each carrying a fleck of anti-matter the size of a fingertip, blew it to pieces.

“Secondary target is battle-cruiser, seeking lock,” Arceroth gave a running dialog over the ship’s intercoms, “Target spiked, firing.”

While the frigate had been caught unprepared, the battlecruiser was a different story. They had gotten their own defenses up and were already closing, the volley of anti-matter impacted their shields, exploding against whatever matter the shell’s payloads could find. But the Battlecruiser plowed through the explosions, and returned fire. Pulses of light intersected with the Caldari ship, to be turned aside and absorbed by the shields.

“Shields 90%” the damage control engineer on the command deck said, “emitters regenerating at expected rate.”

“Recalibrate guns for 20 klicks,” Arceroth said, “Target closing at 400 meters per second.”

“Recalibrated,” Jenith spoke, her fingers flying across the console in front of her.

“Firing.”

The smaller weapons on the Sansha battlecruiser simply couldn’t match the guns of a Naga, and the second volley tore through the remaining shields on the Sansha ship. Still unable to more than scratch the shields of the Caldari ship, all three remaining ships turned to warp out. The cruisers would get away, but another volley of oversized railgun shells brought ruin to the battlecruiser. Secondary explosions wracked its hull, generators going critical and engines overheating, the ship slowly tore what remained of its structure apart.

“Two kills confirmed, cruisers have entered warp we’re tracking them.” The sensor operator said, “But chances are they will leave our scan range before they turn to head towards the bridge station.”

“Find us a safe spot then,” Arceroth said, powering up his own warp drive, “I’d rather not be sitting here waiting for them to come to us.”

Chapter 4

“We have the station on the scanner, but haven’t been able to pin it down,” the scanner operator reported. It had been several hours running around the system to various planets and attempting to find the jump bridge station. Arceroth was still in the pod, being the best combat pilot, but the ship had stood down to half crew, to let at least some of the crew get some food and a quick nap. “We have it localized to the third planet out from the star, but this system has a lot of strange interference making it difficult to get a solid reading.”

“Any idea what defenses we’re looking at?” Arceroth asked from within his pod.

“Probably, we have identified the two cruisers we met with at the wormhole, but there are also a handful of frigates, a few more cruisers and a battleship with the station. But that’s not the worst part.”

“Is the station active?”

“No… well, probably not,” the operator amended, “we aren’t reading any energy transfers or large shields indicative of an active station. What we are detecting, is a capital class ship of some kind.”

“Any idea what we are looking at?”

“It’s most likely an industrial ship,” Alora broke in before the sensor operator could respond, “it takes a lot to put up a station in wormhole space, a capitol industrial ship would make it much easier.”

“That is one possibility,” the sensor tech said, “But without getting much closer I can’t be positive. There is simply too much interference to make a better guess.”

“How much closer?” Arc asked.

“Several thousand Kilometers, minimum.”

“Great, so we won’t know what we’re up against till we actually get there.”

“Pretty much but-“ the console the sensor tech was sitting at made a soft ringing sound, cutting off his train of thought. He scowled at the screen for a moment before starting again. “Yes, but we just got a location target for the station and… you aren’t going to like this.”

“Just tell me already,” Arceroth’s replicated voice somehow managed to sound exhausted and annoyed at the same time.

“The station is only a couple hundred kilometers from the upper atmosphere of the gas giant it orbits around. The gravity and magnetics off the planet combined with the interference from the star will make getting an accurate scan of the station difficult at the best of time. In combat… it will take several minutes.”

There was a long pause on the command deck, even with the capitol ship being an industrial one, and not having any weapons holding out against a battleship and a handful of cruisers for long enough to get good scans would be difficult, if not impossible. Throw in the frigates and anything else which may be hiding and it did not look good. A single battlecruiser, no matter how good, could only take on so much at one time. Even with all the hardeners and extenders on the shields they couldn’t hold out indefinitely.

“Alright Arc,” Jenith said, looking at the pod, “I know you have a plan, let’s hear it.”

“Well… I think it’s time to break out the Spike ammo…”

In reality he was warping into the gas giant the station orbited. While in warp a ship is out of phase with reality, preventing any collisions with particles, other ships or planets while at ftl velocities. This is a very good thing. On coming out from warp, however, the bubble separating the ship from reality collapses and it can be effected once again. Because of this effect the Caldari ship warped directly into the gas giant, starting to collapse the warp bubble just before hitting the upper atmosphere. By the time it was down the ship was a couple dozen kilometers below the surface. A battle cruiser isn’t exactly small, and one that, for all intents and purposes, just appeared within the atmosphere of a gas giant displaced a lot of gas. However, unless someone was watching the planet closely, they wouldn’t notice the slight movement of the clouds caused by this. And why would anyone watch a gas giant closely, it’s insane to warp into one. And it’s considered this for good reason.

“Shields are holding back the atmosphere for now but we can’t stay here long!” Someone yelled as the ship bucked and shook under the extreme air currents present beneath the surface of a gas giant. The planet fought back against the sudden intruder, attempting to crush it. But the Naga was a hard nut to crack, and the shields held the crushing pressure of the atmosphere back, for the moment.

“Active sensors offline, passive sensors to full, micro warp drive offline, targeting computer offline,” Arceroth listed as he ran down the modules he was shutting off. With no shield booster the extra power wouldn’t help him survive longer, but that wasn’t the point. “Ion engines minimal power, take us to the surface.”

Painfully slowly the naga rose through the gasses, pushing its way to the surface. The ship continued to thrash from the punishment it was taking, but the shields held. Inertial dampeners took the brunt of the forces off the crew and machinery, but it was still hard to presses buttons when the entire ship was moving like an angry horse.

A battle cruiser hitting the atmosphere of a gas giant at several thousand kilometers per second would cause a massive event in the cloud layer; however one simply rising to the surface was much smaller. Between the lack of anyone paying attention to the gas giant, the interference from the planet as well as the star, and having effectively no signature with all the ship’s active systems turned off, it might as well be cloaked. It took several minutes, some of the longest minutes in Arceroth’s life, but eventually the ship reached the surface, where the forces calmed down and the ship floated like a cork in an ocean. Hardeners were turned off, but the shields were still strong, strong enough to handle the level of turbulence in the upper atmosphere in any case.

“So, what now Arc?” Jenith asked.

“I don’t know, this was as far as I’ve gotten,” he responded, “Alora, please tell me visual and passive scans will be enough.”

“No, active scans are required, and we can’t make them from this distance anyways,” she said.

“Figured… well, I’m going to need a minute on this one. Busy yourself with the visual and passive scans till then.”

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Hope everyone enjoys! If you do, let me know via posts, messages, evemails, or monetary donations!

It had taken an hour for the Naga battlecruiser to reach an orbit that would pass within 40km of the Sansha station. Another day later the orbit of the Caldari ship finally coincided with the orbit of the station, bringing them steadily closer together. All of the ship’s stations were at standby, and Arceroth was back in the pod after a long down period and a couple hot meals. Jenith had taken over for him incase anything happened, but while Jenith was technically skilled, she didn’t have the pilot’s instinct of Arc.

“Range 400km,” a sensor operator reported, “closing speed 48 m/s.”

At that rate it would take two hours for the Naga to reach 0 range on the station, but that wouldn’t happen. Even with systems down, the Naga wasn’t exactly stealthy. Alora seemed to think they would manage to get right on top of the Sansha before they were spotted, Arc would settle for 200km.

He would probably open fire at that range anyways. Passive sensors had been watching the station ever since it came over the horizon, and it didn’t look good. At least two frigates had been recovered and repaired by the Rorqual, though one was inactive, probably because the pod pilot was killed and the fleet didn’t have another one to spare for a frigate. With any luck the combat pilots of the ships would be resting, as Arc had, and the ships would be slow to respond. However, that was still a chance that Arceroth didn’t want to take. If a frigate got close enough to disrupt his warp drive he would never escape. With the shield transfers from the Rorqual he would never break the cruisers, much less the battle ship. Without drones, another thing he and Jenith argued about at length when choosing a new ship, the large guns simply couldn’t track fast enough to catch the frigates should they get in close. Hopefully the remaining cruisers and battleship would be slow enough to respond that Arc could get the scans and get out.

That was the plan anyways.

“Range 200km.”

“All stations ready for combat,” Arceroth announced over the ship wide intercom.

The passives were finally getting a good look at the Sansha positions, and it seemed that they thought he had gone home. Only two cruisers and the inactive frigate remained along with the battleship and industrial. And they were mostly powered down.

“Approaching max weapon range, Spike ammo loaded,” Arceroth spoke more to calm his nerves then to let everyone know what was going on.

“Range 150.”

“All systems active,” Arc said as the ship shuttered to life. Power flowed into the various systems, hardeners, weapon systems, the microwarp drive, sensors, all of it came to life in a couple seconds. Just as Arc thought the Sansha must have swapped out their combat pilots as he was locking up the frigate and cruisers even before they started to react.

“Frigate marked priority, target locked, firing.”

The time spent in the gas giant had messed with the calibration of the guns, with anyone else at the station every shot would have missed, even with a stationary target and spike ammo loaded. But Jenith was good, very good in point of fact, and nearly half the rounds found a target. The second volley hit with seven out of eight rounds, reducing the still inactive frigate to so much slag.

“Aligning to safe spot, warp drive active…. Entering warp,” Arceroth announced, with the shields low and the capacitor all but empty the ship shuttered as it established a warp bubble. “Five minutes to safe spot, damage reports.”

“We sustained some minor structural damage from the gas giant,” Jenith said, scrolling down a list on her console, “heat damage to all port shield emitters… one is completely melted but shouldn’t be any loss to the port shields. A couple techs suffered burns, one pretty severe, but she’ll recover.”

“Take the melted emitter offline,” Arceroth said, then switched to ship wide, “all crew, there will be a two hour down-time before we return to null-sec space. Be back at battle stations at time 1500.”

“Battle stations?” Alora asked, “The hard part is over, all we have to do now is travel back to empire space.”

“The Goonfleet aren’t known for helping out,” Arceroth responded.

“Tell me Alora,” Jenith asked, standing up from her console, wiping some sweat off her brow and walking over to the Amarrian woman, “What was the exact deal you made with them?”

“I gave them a half billion isk,” the, now somewhat confused Alora said, “And they said they would allow us transit through their space to the wormhole.”

“To and from?”

“What?”

“That’s what I thought; they are probably waiting for us on the other side of that wormhole.”

“Why would they do such a thing? What could they possibly gain?”

“The Sansha and Guristas aren’t the only people interested in creating a jump bridge network in wormhole space,” Jenith explained, “With the resources the Goons have at their disposal they could build that network within a month.”

“Then why not come in here and get the scans themselves?”

“Why do themselves what they can get paid to let someone else do?”

“Gah!” Alora threw her hands in the air, turning to look away from Jenith, “Damnit… so what are we going to do?”

“Go through the wormhole, fight our way out and head back to empire space,” Arceroth said, stepping out of his pod, moments later it vanished into the floor. With the ship just holding position no pod pilot was required. And, even though he had only been in the pod for a few hours, he looked tired. Jenith nodded at a pot of coffee, still hot, waiting for him.

“Thanks dear,” he said, pouring himself a cup, Jenith simply smiled. After taking a long drink of what had to be the strongest coffee ever made, judging by how dark it was, he continued, “Any other wormholes out of this system will most likely lead to Sansha space. Given a choice between having to fight through Goon space or be lost in Sansha space… I’ll pick the Goons.”

“Why?” Alora asked.

“The Goons will only kill us,” Jenith said, sitting back down at her console, but with the chair turned around to face the deck.

“Also we have… friends in the area,” Arceroth continued, “we figured this would happen so we sent them-“

“We?” Jenith said, raising an eyebrow, “I’m the one who remembered they had moved out here.”

“Fine,” Arc smirked, “Jen here sent them a message to expect us. Didn’t tell them what we were doing out here, but… they should be ready.”