7 - Hunting

Having bought River a vac suit and some basic supplies Mike strapped into the pilot seat of his brand new ship as the pilot guild's display hanger was slowly depressurized pending his and River's departure.

"You good over there?"

Glancing to his side, Mike's vision would normally have been blocked by the Scorpion's main armament which took up about half of the craft's total mass, but due to the display screens and cameras plastered everywhere inside the cockpit of co-pilot cockpit, Mike could easily see River strapping in as well before giving a thumbs up. Although cramped, everything inside the cockpit and co-pilot cockpit was intuitively laid out with Mike's seat able to fold down to access a small crawlway that looped around the railgun and granted access to the co-pilot seat on the other side of the railgun.

Although said crawlway was now stuffed with various supplies and foodstuff, making it even more cramped than it had been before.

"Ready for departure, buzz the tower River."

Having confirmed fuel levels and brought the reactor online and to a standby output level, Mike passed the ball to River who contacted flight control and requested permission for takeoff.

"Flight control, this is the operator of GCV-43, requesting takeoff from hangar number 15 bravo."

[Good afternoon operator of GCV-43, this is tower control. Takeoff request granted, use taxiway 3 on your exit from the station.]

With the station's traffic control giving the okay Mike felt a shake as the platform beneath his Scorpion fighter started moving via a rail system. With the platform moving to the hangar exit two massive blast doors opened up to let the vacuum of space into the now depressurized hangar and lead to an elevator that carried the platform to the surface of the station's 'barrel'.

"This never gets old…"

The barrel, as players of interstellar online had nicknamed it, was the main hangar of stations positioned in the centre of rotating stations where the rotation induced gravity was lowest with an opening to space on one end, and the central control tower (or noob spire, named for some player's poor depth perception and grasp of deceleration) on the other.

Looking directly upwards Mike could see a dock crew unloading a large cargo freighter, manhandling the 1-ton containers in the low gravity while the pad next to it was occupied by a medium fighter getting a new coat of paint while the crew was busy reloading its armament.

[GCV-43, clamps released. Please limit your speed inside the hangar to 5 m/s and use taxiway 3 on your way out of the station.]

"GCV-43 confirms clamps released, using taxiway 3 on our way out."

Mike briefly considered exiting stations like he normally did in Interstellar online, but as the flight controller had not only mentioned a flight speed restriction but also his exit vector there would definitely be fines if he lit the afterburners inside the hangar.

(Slow is smooth and smooth is fast I guess… But that doesn't mean I'm going to just behave either.)

With a quick burst from the attitude control thrusters to lift off Mike once again resisted the urge to light the afterburners and just sucked up the landing gear before following the directives… Except for the fact that he was reversing the entire way and basically blind to oncoming traffic.

[GCV-43, everything okay down there?]

"Yeah, I'm good."

"Mike what the fuck are you doing?"

"Testing the thrusters."

"Could you-"

"Calm down River I can navigate this kind of traffic in my sleep."

"...I swear to god…"

"Enough about my driving, you can complain if I actually hit something. What are we hunting?"

Getting away from River's bickering by changing topics, Mike finally flipped the ship around so River would stop staring a hole in the side of his head.

"... According to the information from the guild our target is a group of 3-5 pirates recently seen operating in resource extraction sector 6 shaking down miners for their goods and leaving them for dead if they refuse."

Pulling up the mission data himself while still taxing out of the station Mike looked at the data the guild had collected on a few of the pirate vessels and while it was lacking it was enough for him to get a pretty good idea of their modus operandum.

"Let's see… Two Yellowjackets, a Vulture and a dropship along with unconfirmed reports of more small / medium fighters. The dropship is their carrier, if we can disable that it'll keep them from running away."

The way Mike figured they worked was using the dropship to carry their stolen loot, if he could poke a few holes in its drives the other pirates would stand their ground and defend it instead of scattering like newborn spiders and making it harder for him to wipe them all out.

"Agreed, but there's a good chance they've camouflaged the dropship to make it look like a mining vessel so getting a positive ID on it will be hard… Anyhow, this job stinks."

Exiting the outer airlock, Mike brought the speed up to 220 m/s to put some distance from the station so he could engage the FTL drive.

"How so?"

"Because this small a pirate operation should have been squished by the local security forces already, given that their transport has already been ID'ed, furthermore the fact that they haven't switched hunting grounds yet is strange."

Having made her living as a pirate herself, River had learned the hard way that the only way to survive was not drawing attention to oneself or being large enough for the local security forces to deal with, given that this group they were hunting was doing neither of those things and still somehow alive despite keeping to the same prowling ground was highly suspect.

(So either that dropship is packing way more heat than scans from surviving victims indicated, they're paying off security forces or they have a much larger force than the report from the guild said… Or just all 3 at once.)

Having completed thousands of pirate hunting quests in Interstellar online, Mike was quite familiar with the modifications the quest generation system liked to throw at players, but he wasn't sure if these still applied in this world. Given the ship modifications in this world that weren't even slightly balanced, Mike had no idea what kind of heat the pirates could be packing, furthermore corrupt security forces might have been fairly easy to deal with in Interstellar online, but in this world, Mike had a feeling it would be a considerably larger pain to deal with.

[Tower to GCV-43, you're clear of the station and free to engage FTL drive, tower signing off.]

Doing his best to sound normal after Mike had reversed out of the station, the station's flight control signed off as Mike and River reached the arbitrary 5 kilometre distance from the station that was needed to enable their FTL drive.

"Yeah, the guild definitely doesn't have all the information, but most requests are like that so we just need to adapt on the fly and deal with it. That, or we just run when the going gets rough."

"... I'm not even sure you can call that a plan, but let's just go with that for now."

With an eye roll and River's tacit approval of Mike's 'plan', Mike quickly punched in the coordinates for resource extraction sector 6 which was an area of about 50 cubic kilometres inside an ice ring of a nearby gas giant. Having engaged supercruise and corrected the trajectory, silence filled the cabin as Mike watched the radar to look out of other ships lining up behind him to jank him out of supercruise and rob him blind.

"So how much are we down to after everything?"

Bored of staring out into deep space, River struck up a conversation even though she could have just looked at their joint account to read the balance.

"About 200K after buying supplies, your new vac suit and the surprisingly pricy ammunition for the railgun. But this mission and bounties should net us about 300K and be well and truly enough to put in a solid 50 light years of distance from this system."

"50 light years huh, I don't think I've ever been that far in any direction… But couldn't we go much further than that?"

Slightly excited by the opportunity to see more of the galaxy than she ever had in her entire life, River suggested going much further than just 50 light years as fuel cost less than human waste per ton.

"Yeah we could, but I want to buy map and route data from the cartographers guild to make sure there's a fertile hunting ground on the other end of that journey in addition to information on the major powers near that destination."

Running away from the criminal organization he had pissed off might be all well and good, but if that meant ending up in an area without any easy work available might end up even more dangerous than staying put. As such, data on the destination was not only useful but outright essential.

"Ah, yeah. That makes sense, such information isn't cheap."

Not having worked with the - guild before, River had no idea of the price of such data, but she still reasoned that such a large amount of data wouldn't come cheap.

"Furthermore I think it's best if we buy information on 8 or 9 total sets of routes in different directions through a few anonymous intermediaries."

"... Now you're just being paranoid, even if you were part of some massive cyndacide-"

"I'm not worried about that, if anything they're long dead after failing to deliver what they promised, I'm worried about whatever corporation wanted to buy you from them. If they're willing to partake in human trafficking then there's no way they'll just let you get away after my old associates failed to deliver."

"Right, I almost forgot you tried to sell me to some corp."

Immediately the line to River's cockpit went cold, but luckily enough for Mike he wasn't stupid enough to try and strike up another conversation, or worse yet, try to make excuses.

-

"Approach vector good, speed good, punching out in 5… 3… 1…"

Disengaging the faster than light drive, most of Mike's vision was filled with the icy ring that encompassed resource extraction sector 6 which was his current hunting ground. Lighting the afterburner to close in on the ring, Mike and River's ship was hit by multiple ship scans as the waste heat their ship radiated right after exiting supercruise was plenty for even the most anaemic sensors to pick them up without issue.

"We're getting pinged by about 50 vessels."

Being the ship's operator, River quickly logged the scan's by their intensity and frequency to get an idea of what kind of sensors were sending those pings before clustering them in groups based on energy and direction.

"Yeah, those pirates made everyone nervous. Try to find out where those scans are coming from and map them in clusters, mines work in groups of at least 8 with a lot of specialist crafts while security forces usually work in pairs. We're looking for clusters of ships between those two groups."

"Got it."

While instructing River on what they were looking for, Mike trotted down the reactor and deployed radiator fins to quickly dissipate the build up waste heat while still outside the ring, as deploying radiator fins in a dense belt would just be asking for them to be ripped off. Closing in on the belt, it quickly became clear just how large some of the chunks of ice were, ranging from the size of a football to a three story building the average size was about that of a small house.

Needless to say, in a head to head collision Mike's medium fighter wouldn't even dent some of those rocks, and if he wasn't careful Mike could get caught between two rocks and get squished like a bug.

(Realistic or not, nothing gets my blood pumping more than a race through a dense belt like this…)

"I've checked out all the ping's, there's nothing suspect in terms of clusters. They're all either duos or larger groups, but I can't be entirely sure with all this ice deflecting and bouncing signals around like this."

"I figured, let's run over all the larger clusters and do a visual confirmation, if that does not yield anything then we find a nice rock to tether to and wait for new arrivals."

Sucking in the radiator fins, Mike opted to go through the belt instead of skirting the edge and scanning the mines inside, partly because he found it more fun to navigate a belt like that, but also partly because it would make him harder to spot for someone on the lookout for mercs or local security forces.

---

"Okay, let's take it from the top again."

While River and Mike were just starting their first hunt, another one was slowly winding down to an end a few systems over. Chained to a metal chair, Mike's former associate Adam was quite familiar with what normally went on inside the room he found himself in, only this time instead of torturing poor lowlives for information he was the lowlife getting tortured.

Although his torturer would definitely prefer the therm 'enhanced intarigation' instead of torture.

"This kid you have no idea where is from just wanders into your shop one day and offers to work for you?"

Wearing a black suit way too fancy for the environment he was in under a bloodstained clear plastic apron, Adam's interrogator had black sunglasses which completely blocked out his eyes while his perfectly maintained short beard and hair along with a fancy silver watch told Adam that he worked for a corp.

"T-thats the truth, I swear!"

Having trouble speaking with half his teeth ripped out and dizzy from all the drugs he had been pumped full of, Adam was way past the stage of begging for his life. All Adam wanted was an end to his suffering, the pain from his flayed fingers and crushed toes to end.

And for his suffering to end, Adam had to tell the truth, the past 13 hours had told him that much.

After offering a small smirk in response to Adam's cries of pain, the interrogator turned to one of his cohorts. This guy didn't speak much, but the short sentences that did leave his mouth determined whether Adams' suffering would end or be extended further.

"Algorithm says he's telling the truth."

Wearing some sort of facemask filled with cameras and other sensors, no lie or half-truth seemed to get past him, Adam had learned so the hard way early on in their 'talks'.

"Okay then, so over the next week or so this kid helps you wipe out all other competition before disappearing with your other associate? Do you really think I'm that stupid Adam?"

Getting up from his seat, the apron-wearing interrogator pulled out a knife and started playing around with it.

"I s-swear thats w-what happened!"

The interrogators had long since gotten the full story from Adam and figured that Mike was the real prize to go after, but being pro's they wanted to make sure they had it correct and therefore pressed Adam to repeat his story over and over again.

"I told you before Adam, when you lie, I hurt you! When you tell some bullshit story like this: I. HURT. YOU!"

Right as the apron-wearing interrogator was about to plunge his knife into Adam's knee, yet another suit-wearing person stepped into the torture room.

"Sir."

"What?"

Answering without looking away from Adam's tear-stained face, the apron-wearing interrogator kept his knife hovering just above Adam's knee, occasionally digging it a few millimetres into his skin with a smile when Adam stopped sobbing.

"We cracked the station's security system, logs and surveillance footage shows the package and the person of interest getting on a shuttle off station 3 days ago. Said shuttle was tagged when it broke out of a docking clamp on a station a few systems over and flew straight into a star."

Getting up on his feet after hearing his subordinate's report, the apron-wearing interrogator clapped Adam a few times on his cheek before plunging his knife straight into his eye socket and twisting.

"Finally some good news, pack up here, we're done."

Ripping off his plastic apron and using it to wipe the blood off his knife, the interrogator dropped the stained apron and left the room as his subordinates started pouring highly flammable chemicals over Adam's corpse.