When Zoners get nasty...

[Sombs]

Four escorts. Designations Mercenary, Elena Voigt, Lunawolf and Heliaca, who later switched to Chrysaetos. With those four Freelancers escordting the Dreamweaver, Kyu had enough backup to face the Lane Hackers if they would get into his way. Following the hints Bishop and Mayer gave Kyu, the group moved to the Magellan system, to begin the search there.

Like a bad omen, they had been encountered by a Lane Hacker named Gustav Graves the very moment they entered the Magellan system. They first passed by him, yet he followed the group to Freeport 4, stopping them for an interrogation. They first tried to talk themselves out of it, but the situation heated up very quickly, escalating in a fight: Four Freelancers versus one Lane Hacker. And he used all the dirty tricks. Mercenary was put out of action, and it required Elena Voigt to use a very suicidal move to bring the Hacker down, dropping a mine onto his Vindicator close enough that the explosion ripped the engine of her fighter into pieces. The people on Freeport 4 luckily were able to replace it very quickly. Elena survived more or less unharmed - similar to Graves, who managed to escape with his pod.

Setting a search pattern in the Barrier Cloud of Magellan, they found all kinds of interesting stuff. A Gallic Battleship, a Jump Hole to Leeds, some wrecks. After a while they stumbled across what they were hoping to find: Deeply hidden in the Barrier, the Mactan base was welcoming them with long-range pulses, which prevented them from going in too close. Remaining in the distance, the Dreamweaver tried to scan the installation, only getting a few visuals from it. Zooming into the pictures, Kyu noticed a little thing close to the base. A node. It was sending out highly encrypted signals. Nothing Kyu was able to decrypt.

Having found what they were looking for, they moved back to Liberty, to follow the second hint Kyu received from the Navy: Galileo. It made sense, as the Dark Matter clouds were rendering the scanners nearly completely ineffective. Entering the first cloud, they stumbled across a Rogue asteroid base - it appeared that close infront of them that the Dreamweaver had to use evasive manouvers to not collide with it. Moving on, they found nothing else in the first cloud, but a little wreckage. Nothing interesting. Other than in the second cloud.

Leiden base. While the Freelancers had nothing better to do than making rheinlandian puns about that name, the Dreamweaver moved as close as possible to Leiden to get a good look on it. And on another node they found. So both hints were correct. Mactan, Leiden. Two Lane Hacker bases. Enough to work with, Kyu thought. Paying the Freelancers, they left the cloud, and the Dreamweaver moved back to Liberty, to make a short break there. Kyu was actually fascinated by what they found. He was right with his assumptions. Back when he tried to contact the Lane Hackers to find out about their current views on OSI, he did it to find out how they were able to sustain themselves. It was part of the idea to learn from them in order to make Nichols a self-sustaining space station. Looking at their bases, wich are rocks in very inhospitable places, they surely had the means to sustain them for long periods of time. It was a shame they weren't cooperative, Kyu thought. But that was in the past. For the future, he had other plans. And given that Voigt offered him to work for him again, chances were good she might end up in those future plans.