EVE Fiction

(There will likely be a sequel to this).

Sabriz Adoudel opened her mouth in revulsion at what her ships' sensors were showing her, then immediately regretted it as slimy, tasteless podgoo began to fill it. She checked the cloak on her ship was still active and looked outside again.

At least a dozen, perhaps as many as sixteen Mackinaw-class exhumers turned as one and moved from one ice deposit to the next, then all activated mining lasers simultaneously. Sabriz's computers all agreed that these were capsuleers - paragons of individuality, all people with the potential to reshape the galaxy. Something - some unfathomable intelligence - had control of them and had enslaved them all to mine as one.

She ran some quick background checks to determine the identity of the members of the mysterious mining fleet. All of them appeared to belong to the University of Calle, an organisation Sabriz respected from her early days after attaining capsuleer status, but immediately recognised was no place for starship pilots capable of flying such advanced military-grade mining hardware. Sabriz certainly had never sat the certification course for piloting such a starship, but knew that even with her medium-grade cerebral implants accelerating her learning, attaining that qualification would take her weeks of dedicated study. These pilots were not new.

Again the ice asteroid depleted, and again fifteen exhumers moved as one. Sabriz could only ask herself - what is going on here?

She looked further into the data provided on the mysterious ships. Upon certification as a capsuleer, pilots register a new name with the interstellar authorities - Sabriz herself had changed hers to escape ties to her pre-capsuleer past, walking away from a career as a starship pilot on the payroll of the EOM terrorist group, a career Sabriz was not proud of. Yet for some reason, these pilots had set their registered, unalterable names to Ice Destroyer followed by numbers from 001 to 015.

Who would allow such a name to be assigned to them in such an irrevocable manner? And who - or what - could enslave fifteen people and turn them into indentured capsuleers? What in the name of EVE was happening here? Could it be something inside the ships holding these miners captive?

Sabriz paused to reflect inside her Enyo-class assault frigate, and made a decision to unravel the mystery. She considered sending out a signal through the CONCORD-approved local frequency for the Ala star system, but decided to take a more direct approach, attempting to hail Ice Destroyer 011 in private conversation.

There was no response. Not an abrupt "who the hell are you", not a polite "hello", not even an expletive - but silence. Sabriz decided to escalate things with an extortion attempt. She contacted Ice Destroyer 009 with a ransom demand - hand over thirty million Interstellar Kredits, or she would attack.

Nothing. Silence. Surely if non-capsuleers had hijacked the ship, some response would have been forthcoming, even if it was to return the threat. Could something in the zombie capsuleers' escape capsules be controlling them?

Of course Sabriz couldn't make good on her extortion efforts in her present ship, as CONCORD would intervene and destroy her Enyo well before the Mackinaw was ever in serious danger, and this ship was too valuable to lose to the space police. However, as a capsuleer, she had access to many other resources - other ships, with more firepower and less of the Enyo's focus on speed and stealth. Sounding out market contacts across three star systems, she placed orders for a Catalyst-class destroyer, eight highly advanced tech 2 Light Neutron Blasters, and three tech 2 Magnetic Stabilizers. Upon brief consideration, she also decided that speed would be critical in this mission, and ordered unique modifications to increase the ship's firepower, and eschewed the traditional warp scrambler used in capsuleer engagements for two sensor boosting computers. Win or lose, this battle would be over in seconds, too quickly, Sabriz predicted, for the ponderous exhumer to escape.

Fifteen exhumers again moved as one, toward yet another asteroid in the ice belt.

Sabriz continued her research. None of the Mackinaw pilots had any registered combat experience other than losses. Studying battle reports from the safety of her cloaked ship, she noticed that several of the Ice Destroyer fleet had lost ships to pirate attacks, and not a single one of the battle reports indicated any defensive modules on the ships. Such a fitting on a high-value ship was incredibly reckless even by capsuleer standards. Upon receiving word that her market orders were ready, she began the jump into the quiet pirate hub of Fasse en route to collect her specially purposed Catalyst from nearby Stegette. Her new-fangled scanner indicated dangerous non-capsuleer pirate action in a hub in Fasse, which had been claimed by Serpentis pirates, but she ignored it, confident that her Enyo could outrun anything short of a capsuleer ambush employing remote sensor boosters. Nothing of the kind was to be seen, and she was soon docked and having her capsule transferred into the destroyer.

Xinhua, the Garoun Investment Bank starship engineer in charge of fitting her ship, asked Sabriz to sign a waiver indicating that the unconventional fitout met the type certification she had provided, which she promptly did. He further informed her that due to industrial action provoked by many starship technicians suffering accidents (something about biomass dissolution), the station would not preload her Void ammunition and she would need to do so herself in space. Sabriz quickly agreed and undocked, loading a lucky thirteen shots into each of her eight guns. Within minutes, she was back in warp, and making the stomach-churning jump into Fasse.

Sabriz was familiar with CONCORD's capacity for overwhelming force and reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. She knew there was no chance of her escaping with her ship, but also that CONCORD obeyed the Yulai Convention on capital punishment. Heat alarms sounded as a second and a third volley fired out of her light neutron blasters, but she paid them little regard - her attention was solely on the Mackinaw's trajectory, and its curious silence. No attempt from the pilot to bargain for the ship, nothing but this bizarre hive-mind mentality she had never seen before.

The third volley fully disabled the Mackinaw's shields, and the fourth penetrated deep into armor and caused a non-critical section of the hull to explode. Sabriz watched the ship start to collapse in slow motion and calculated that its critical propulsion systems and life support systems were still likely to function - until the fifth volley tore the entire ship into three pieces. As the expensive ship exploded, two things caught her eye - the pilot's escape capsule, which she immediately began to acquire a target lock on, and what appeared to be three logic circuits in excellent condition that, given the right tools and time she didn't have, she might be able to salvage and sell for more than the entire cost of her Catalyst.

In battles, time slows down, especially for capsuleers. Veterans of war call it the time dilation effect - your advanced capsuleer senses are capable of processing so much information so quickly that, when you really need those advanced cerebral functions, it seems you have longer to make decisions than you should. The six hundred milliseconds Sabriz's computers required to acquire a lock on the capsule gave her ample time to consider the situation she now faced. And had their situations been reversed, it would have given Sabriz ample opportunity to find a celestial - any celestial - to warp to in order to escape.

She could allow this pilot to escape, and never solve the mystery of who or what was controlling them. Or she could shoot the pod and have her charge of aggrevated property destruction upgraded to premeditated murder - but perhaps in doing so, she might find clues as to what was really happening. And if there was something in the pod granting the control, her actions might free a capsuleer like herself from slavery. She fired, and while one of her guns exploded from the heat stress she had subjected it to, the other seven fired true. A brief flash of green light, and the escape pod cracked open, both venting its contents to the heavens and transmitting the pilot's consciousness to a clone bay somewhere in the galaxy. Undoubtedly some would call this murder. Sabriz considered it mercy.

CONCORD Police District Commander Abdul Harrakh exited warp and, using top-secret technology that none of the empires and thankfully none of the capsuleers had yet managed to replicate, his ship electronically jammed and had shot at the red-carded Catalyst without even needing to acquire a target lock.

He quickly surveyed the scene. Another Catalyst attack on a miner. Immediately he thought of the Hulkageddon terrorists and the New Order extortionists, although something here didn't fit the pattern - the apparent perpetrator's criminal record was less extensive than in most Catalyst attacks, there was no visible accomplice 'scooping the loot' as the criminals would call it, and her long and distinguished service to the Gallente Federation against Serpentis criminals made him uncertain as to the motive.

However, Abdul was merely curious about the motive, not in any way concerned. He knew the proscribed sentence - something he liked to call "termination with extreme prejudice". Already reeling from the CONCORD battleship's first volley and what appeared to be a turret explosion caused by overheating, the Catalyst cracked in two as its Jovian-engineered turrets allowed it to fire antimatter charges that would normally be too large for anything short of a dreadnought.

Abdul sat in his battleship and started filling in the accursed paperwork, and signalled to the rest of his squad to do the same. Paperwork. Why must there be so much paperwork every time he was forced to euthanize one of these so-called 'ganking ships'? It was enough to drive a man mad.

Sabriz felt the unnerving sensation of her ship exploding around her. Whilst this was a terrifyingly unnerving experience the first time she had engaged in starship combat, the loss of a ship was nothing new to her now, and she immediately regained her bearings, and decided to do something reckless. Having discerned that the Mackinaw fleet had fled in the direction of the Ala system's primary star, she ordered her escape capsule to scout as close to the star as the capsule could handle. As she predicted, she could see the fourteen remaining Mackinaws , although they were already accelerating back into warp - directly back to where they had come from. No human could be that stupid, particularly not a capsuleer, and Sabriz surmized that some primitive artificial intelligence must be controlling them. She decided to use the next few minutes - while CONCORD still listed her as kill-on-sight - to think, and to attempt to contact Ice Destroyer 004 and see just what was going on. Had she succeeded in breaking the hold of whatever entity controlled him? After that, who knew what the future might hold?

She'd definiately return to see if anything could be salvaged from her Catalyst and to try to get those logic circuits, assuming no enterprizing capsuleer had beaten her do it, and to seize any mining equipment she could resell from the wreck. After that, the stars were the limit.

Reserved

Still intend to finish this, RL has just been hectic lately and will be for the short term future. Too tired to be creative.