EVE Fiction

"Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap" said Adreena as she bolted through the corridors.
"Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap", she continued in the Qui Es In Caelis.
Her litany changed to a breathless "frackity frack frack" when she arrived near her pod, undressed herself and climbed into it. While the goo started filling the egg, she touched the talisman hanging there and whispered a quick prayer. She realised she was more upset by the drones interrupting them right before they started digging into Arakata's datapad, than by the actual and tangible threat they posed. "Heh -way to sort your priorities, girl..."

"Ok, guys, there are a dozen baddies closing up to us, probably rogue drones. You can start screaming and running around."
"Permission to flail arms ?"
"Sure."


"Captain Sepherim, you're my anchor, right ?"

T. Sam turned the Jaguar around and brought it to 10km behind the Sin. If they were going to take a static defense, he didn't want the Jag in front just yet, where it could be sniped at long range by the drone battleship. The drones' AI might make the same decision they had-- take out the small ships first. He'd wait to until the ships closed range, so that he could use the Jaguar's speed for tracking-avoidance, and its short-range autocannons to maximum effect.

[OOC- Having to post quickly using a borrowed PC. I didn't have a chance to read the most recent posts, so sorry if this one doesn't sync with them. Basically, T. Sam's actions will follow the flow of what the fleet pilots decide].

[OOC- dang, I got some crap roles...can I apply my +1 to drone related actions? :3]

Edit: Thank you! \o/

You swing you gaze towards the sun. Its bright blue light flares from your perspective. After a few moments a contact enters the grid and your short range sensors clearly identify it as a one of the rogue drone frigates. A few moments later another frigate comes into view, then two more, then a group of 8.

Obviously equipped with micro warp drives they seem to be moving at about 2000 m/s. Despite the speed with which they close into range, the seconds slipping by seem to stretch on an on. Astra launches a set of sentry drones and they all swivel around to begin tracking the incoming frigates. Moments later they let loose a volley of blasts out toward the lead frigate. At this range and without transversal, the blaster shots hit home and the drone explodes. Pouring through the expanding cloud of shrapnel and radiation, the next three drones close to within range. Another volley from the sentry drones dispatches one of the three but obviously your shots aren’t coming fast enough.

The bank of blasters on “Brown Bagin’ it” charge to full, and fire on the next drone. Once again the lack of transversal means the shot tears through the flimsy frigate hull and a third drone is destroyed. At the same moment the bright red hued laser beams of the Wraith focus on the last of the 4 lead drones and leave horrible trenches of boiling metal across its dingy armor. The sentry drone flight lets lose a third shot targeting the lead frigate. Before the blasts of charged particles impact the drone the Wraith slices through it with another beam from its lasers.

The group of 8 frigate drones close to within 50 KM. Astra, her sentries and Sephrerim coordinate their shots and another 4 fall before they reach 30KM. Unfortunately the drones seem to have realized the danger posed by your large guns and they begin to spread out. Your shots begin to miss. The sentries take one more out before Astra calls them back in and your own swarm of Hobgoblin scout drones flies out toward the enemy. The laser beams from the wraith change to a serene looking yellow. The beams connect with a drone, and it trails a cloud of radiation leaking from its damaged reactor. The next shot from the Brown Baggin’ it grazes the damaged drone but even an indirect hit is enough to cause secondary explosions and completely disable it. The remaining two drones have veered around and have charged in towards the Wraith. The Hobs have connected with the one on the left and are steadily tearing through it’s armor. The Qui Es In Caelis lets out a volley of hot metal that tears through the drone causing a reactor breach and subsequent explosion.

The last drone closes to 10KM and lets off shots of its own but even the un-bonused shields of the Wraith absorb the violent energy. Without delay it is torn apart by green laser beams and artillery rounds from the Tanto and the Qui Es In Caelis. The hobs arrive late and are left idling in the cloud of dust and debris. A few seconds pass, you look around, the adrenaline still coursing through your veins.

Before you have a chance to decide if it’s over, a fleet of drones warp onto grid. Their warp bubbles collapse and the assortment of destroyers, cruisers and the battleship come to a stop 10km away. Immediately they begin spreading out and targeting your group.

The shield bar started to reload, as did the capacitator. The cannons started to cool down and the armor repairers to cover the holes in the armor unopposed. It had been a real close call. Too close. And we didn't know if there were more in the seed ship, and if there were how many. It didn't look good. We needed time to recover.

At least, all the systems in mind reported green. No crewmembers had suffered significant injuries. Nothing irreplaceable was lost. I ordered the ship to turn and to fly away at full speed. The frigates would be better scouts to search for a new safespot for us to hide in for a while, but for now taking distance could keep any more incoming drones from jumping too near to us.

-Captains, all report status on your ships. The INS Wraith will be ready in 1:23 minutes for combat again, with full capacitator restored and all damaged restored. Captain Sam, you've proven quite good in navigating around, we'll need a new safespot for the whole fleet to recover in case more enemies shall come. Captain Madeveda, your mechanic skills should come in handy now, so proceed to scan all around us searching for more incoming enemies while we wait for the new coordinates to arrive. Captain Pardus, deactivate all unneeded systems in your ship so your capacitator recovers quicker, we'll need all that firepower again soon enough.-

As I said those words, I could feel my body "going to sleep". It's the only analogy I can find to expressing how it feels to deactivate the different modules of a ship. They just slept, and with them went some of my inhuman senses, the steel prolongations of my expanded consciousness.

-Oh, to all, you've done a great job here. Thanks to it, we're all alive now, it's been a honor to fight by your side.-

Together we had avoided death. For now.

After the last round was shot, after the last drone exploded, Adreena felt, hidden behind layers of metal, circuits and various non-human datas, her heart pounding. Violent, regular beats against her ribs, each one an affirmation that she was still alive. She was glad, in that moment, not to be her flesh body alone -adrenaline comedowns were the worst. While she was, for all intends and purposes, a ship, she didn't have to deal with hands shaking uncontrollably.

"Grettir, is everyone down there all right ?"
"We're fine, miss."
"Good job, everyone."
"Thanks, miss."



"All right, Sepherim, starting scanning right now !"

"Miss... Are we following an Amarrian's orders ?"
"For now, we're following Captain Sepherim's order, Grettir. It's entirely different. Set the scanners to detect combat probes, too -I'm not sure the buggers can use those but I don't want any surprises."

From the new safe spot, Sam transmitted to the other three pilots:
"Message for your review when time permits. The seed ship is still in its last position, but the drone ships are gone. So those were probably the ones we killed."

"To return to what we were doing: I'm going to start reviewing the info from Aratakar's datapad. Here's a wild idea. We have a seed ship with with a jump gate attached. Arataka indicated that he'd seen seed ships before. And he has knowledge of how jump physics work. If we can deploy the gate into a grav well in this system, it should point sync with and point back to the gate the seed ship started from. In other words, it could allow a connection to another system closer to Gallente space. That could be our way back to known space. A lot of ifs, but the good news is we've killed the escort drones. And we have Arataka, who could provide the math and physics on all this. Good job on not punching him out or spacing him, pilots."

"I've sent the coordinates for this safe spot, now warping back to loot the drone wrecks. We might need components in order to rig something later, or we might get some cyber components with useful maps of their AI. Please don't damage the wrecks or our buddy Arataka," he said with a grin in his voice.

He opened comms to the two Jaguar crewpeople. "OK, good fight there, we did well. Standing instructions: In the event of Jaguar destruction, hail any of the three other ships and ask for retrieval of your escape pods. I think any of pilots provide rescue if they can. If you have a choice, go with Adreena or AstraPardus over Sepherim's Amarr ship. I doubt he's a slaver, but... preference is for Adreena or Pardus."

The Jaguar warped back to the combat site and began extracting components from the wrecks.

"Capacitor fully charged." I said over the comms. Good thing I was trave fit, cap goes up as quickly as it can.

As the armor nanites had finished their job of smoothing over and filling in any damage that remained from the Rogue Drones, I hit the subspace engines and made my way towards the shredded hull of the drone battleship. It looked like there was something left over, perhaps some of those parts that Nas uses to enhance my drones would be in there.

I position myself to examine the wreck and release my little salvager drone, once more...

"Er, if I may... If we make this jumpgate work, we'll arrive in Gallente space from a rather unexpected way -if it's been 20 years since the seed ship arrived here, everyone probably assumed it was lost. Oh, and we'll be coming from the drones' regions, too. Without FTL comms. That is, without the means to tell everyone that we're, the, er almost-good-guys. So, maybe we should find a way to repair our FTL comms before jumping ?"

You inspect the contents of the BS drone wreck and find what it contains. Your cargo drones pull apart the wreck to find some self contained device evidently still intact. It must have been protected deep within the ships converted cargo hold. The circuitry seems to be viable and it came apart from the wreck without any trouble but without access to the database you have no way of easily naming the thing.After running some scans, you share them with each other.

(Some quick Knowledge rolls...

Sepherim Know 2 (1, 1, 1, 0) 5
Telegram Know 3 (1, 1, 1, -1) 5
Astra Know 2 (-1, 0, -1, 0) 0
Adreena Know 3 (1, 0, 1, 1) 6*

Therefore...)

Astra doesn't understand the thing at all.

Sam and Sepherim guess that this device is what the drones used to communicate.

Adreena you actually recognized the device. The last one you saw was called a Hive Link or something like that. Given your ability to jury rig systems together you think that if you wanted to, you could probably access it. Whether or not connecting your ships computer to the Rogue drone network is a good idea, is up to you.