[font=Lucida Sans Unicode]The silver nose of an armored transport edged into the asteroid field gingerly. Smokey brown Leeds fog swirled like living tendrils around her. Carefully, she picked her way through the morass of floating rocks. One smaller pebble skipped across her port bow, sparking a blue current from her shield. It skidded off into the fog and disappeared. The pilot was wise to go slowly. Her shield was strong but this was unknown sky and caution was always the best default setting under such circumstances.
Rage had heard rumors of niobium deposits here and that meant a nice little payday. Absently his hand went down to the medallion that Cei Lea had given him for luck. He smiled, remembering their last night together. Ah, nice playtime... but now was time for work. He punched up the weps selection console, choosing a single forward cannon. Best not to use too powerful a salvo, he might just destroy what he came for.
Spotting a likely rock, he swept the cross-hairs over it and hit the trigger. Fire erupted from the Buckshot, followed by the bark of a chemical explosion. Instantaneously, a brilliant lance of energy reached out and pierced the rock, transforming it into a puff of dusty rubble. Tuning his scanner to pick up floating debris, he waited for the sensors to register. Nope nothing there of interest. Undeterred, he swung the targeting reticule over another rock and repeated the sequence: fire, explosion, rubble. After the fifth attempt his scanners picked up something. He called up the composition analyzer and ... bingo! Niobium!
"ALRIGHT!" he shouted to the empty bridge, "PAYDIRT!" And he busied the tractor with filling the hold with this precious cargo -- back on The Ring in New Berlin a ship load of niobium would fetch a pretty price!
Suddenly, his sensors began to glow red! A flight of ships -- hostile by the look of them -- were closing fast on his posit. Judging by their speed of ingress, it was a wing of fighters. He flipped the cruise on and put the ship into manual control, pushing the steering toggle forward sharply. The responsive little transport did a vertical dive out of the system plane and her pilot dumped several counter-measures in her wake. Now he leveled her out and waited. Digits ticked off across the bottom of his bridge HUD... an excruciatingly slow dance to ignition.
"Come-on baby... come-on..." he sweet-talked her, an attempt to romance the burners into lighting off before... PHEW-EUUUH. The engines shut down. They had been sabotaged by a cruise disruptor missile. "Cuh-RAP," he screamed angrily as he activated the hologram-targeting system. He was going to have to fight!
The bridge dissolved and his command chair suddenly appeared to be mounted on the top of his ship. It was a little unnerving at first but it was the way the system was designed to work... to give the gunner the clearest possible situational awareness. He spun around, seeking the first hostile with his targeting reticule... The gun computer flashed an ID under the locked hostile. 'Hessians?!' He squeezed the trigger on the gun-stick. Nothing happened. "What the..." then he slapped himself in the forehead, "You idiot, you only have a single forward gun selected..." ZAP ZAP SIZZLE ZAP, he was taking hits now from the two lead fighters, their energy cannons working on his shield.
Quickly amending his weps selection, Rage began squeezing off salvos at the closest pirate vessel. The blue bar indicating the target's shield strength was diminishing rapidly, being eaten away by the seven turrets of the armored transport. As the first fighter blossomed into fiery debris, he spun onto the next and started scoring immediate hits there, too. Then... 'GODDA-MIGHTY!' ... he spotted something in his peripheral vision. Turning quickly to check his sensors he saw another flight of reds coming in hot from the opposite direction! ... and 'for crying out loud' another flight coming in from a third direction. What was that: twelve? What in blue blazes was going on? Well, his little transport was tough but a gunboat she ain't... He sighed and shut down his main engines. Almost casually he opened up comms. It was time to have a chat with these guys... seek terms...