PPPI Sbaccanona Lends Her Aid to Ratti's Cause

I ignore some of Sbaccanona’s more questionable statements and push onwards. “I’d appreciate sharing anything you have of your final months, to update the predictive models for where the others might be,” I ask without asking.

She doesn’t reply with the data immediately. Instead, she continues looking through the packet I sent. “Wait, do you really think this Captain Destro is ours? Because if it is, I don’t see why they’re doing this whole thing.”

Furgone replies, “I know. We think he’s made some kind of alliance to wear down Astro’s soft power or whatever.” Close enough that I don’t feel the need to engage.

“Well duh, he’s working with the newest iteration of the Freeport Alliance, whatever they’re calling themselves today. Says here they unionized again about a century ago. I’m wondering why he’s working with them. It’s gotta be an angle, right?” she replies immediately. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how well she can figure things out, due to all the genocidal and questionably violent tendencies getting in the way. But she’s as good at this as any of us, in spite of her age, and unlike myself and Furgone, she’s not thinking about much else at the moment.

“Your historical location data of the final months before our ill-timed decom, please, Sbaccanona,” I send out once more. Alongside the request, I add a ping to my drones to pause their repairs.

“Rude,” she replies alongside her historical data. “Not that I’d expect better from you, but I’d hoped a few centuries of maturing would mellow that mean streak.”

I pulse out a laughter message, layering in commands to my drone to continue their work repairing the reactors and the defense systems of the Avariata Pace. Because I’m not quite ready to give her fully functional weapons other than whatever is left of her standard weapon arrays. Just in case she gets bored and decides to follow through with her plans and destroy a star. Not sure how they’d manage to actually do it, but if anyone got bored and figured out a way, it would have been Sbaccanona. They get to work on repairs. I plug the new data into my models. She seems to be right, thus far. Her data ends before ours, so her decommission was at the very least earlier. It might mean her incident was why we were shut down. But she’d done it before, so I’m not sure why they’d change their reaction that time. Something to do with the planet, perhaps? The people on it. Or there was something more going on. Something else I don’t know yet.

The .90021 system updates to a likelihood of .90531. There is also a system that’s moved up to a .87554. “Is everyone ready to move?”

“And by everyone they mean you, dear,” Furgone feels the need to add.

There is a momentary pause, likely a check of her gravdrive and power levels. “With the most love, I hate you too, Furgone,” She replies to their statement, then to my question, she adds, “And your robots should be done soon enough. My reactor leak is going to cause problems if I have both impulse running and the sheath active with the drive revved up. I like doing that so I can reposition while reactivating without any delay for my turns.” Makes sense. Especially if you don’t want to try gravdriving through unknown systems. There’s always a danger that someone’s moved in and has some kind of tracking system or sensor scans up. And there really isn’t a way to hide the distortion of an active gravdrive.

“Understood. We’ll take a beat, start plotting a course, though,” I send out, adding the location of the .90531 system to the statement. I start plotting the course. Straight line will work well enough, We’re not staying in place long enough yet for me to be worried about anyone tracking us. Meanwhile, I also start thinking on what Sbaccanona said. If the Obiettavita and Destro are working with the new freeports, why? I believe her analysis, it would explain his brutal efforts being focused on Freespace invasions. But the Freeports wouldn’t move against any of the corporations, not in earnest. They rely on them for their own survival. And sure, he is driving the marauders and pirates and raiders and the like towards attacking corporate aligned rather than free ships, but that wouldn’t have any real effect on the bottom lines. I realize, what if it isn’t about that. I assumed Destro was striking out. But Furgone is right, Destro, above all else, is about security, safety. What if his part in this is making a safe haven, for after. Would fit most of his actions I know about, and Sbaccanona’s analysis. I won’t tell them yet. Furgone would use it as an excuse to attack Astro early. Sbaccanona wouldn’t care, but would use Furgone to test Astro’s current Defenses. There were only 20 of us left when we were decommissioned. I don’t want to risk any more of us dying. I care about all of our futures, as much as I care about revenge. Sbaccanona doesn’t care about much of anything, as far as I have been able to tell. I’ll tell them if they ask, but I suspect Sbaccanona will figure it out on her own while we are waiting if she wants to know, and Furgone doesn’t care about the quote unquote peacenik enough to ask about his plans.

Meanwhile, I look through the data from the station looking for a target for the next step. We need a base of operation. It should be a system with a star, so we can restore our reactors’ power reserves whenever we return from an operation. Having some kind of asteroid field to hide in would be helpful as well, just in case we get tracked down. Unoccupied is a necessity, now that I know Sbaccanona is around. A nebula nearby would be nice, as a defensive holdout location. Putting that into the map, I get around 1000 systems to choose from, 735 of which remain unclaimed by any of the corporations. I’ll send them to Furgone to determine the three most defensible, then a manual check to make sure there aren’t any pirates or other trouble. As I drift into position for my straight line path to the .90531 system, I send to the others, “Good?”

“Ready,” Furgone replies.

“Yes,” Sbaccanona adds.

I send an additional message to the Stirante. “Here’s 735 systems. Can you figure out which three or four would be the most defensible for us, as a base of operations?”

Furgone chirps in assent. “Activating in five,” he sends out, a clear invite to race.

Four. Three. Two. One. I activate my gravdrive. As do the others, I assume. The path takes very little time to traverse. No Service systems means no fear of some theoretically present weapon. And no fear of destruction means no delays. The gravdrive whirrs down. I am the first here. They clearly didn’t do proper straight line paths. I turn on my sensors. The Avariata appears. Six pirate vessels are here. They’re scrambling to defend the system. She doesn’t even need to send any message for me to feel my compatriot’s glee. They can’t escape, else they’ll report our existence to others. That means no gravdrives. Sbaccanona starts opening fire on them. I begin to plot random gravdrive paths around them. The gravitational distortion should mess with their own gravdrive path-plotting efforts. “Please surrender,” Sbaccanona sends out, “It makes killing you people so much more fun.” She is sending it out as audio. Making herself seem human, like Destro. Or, more likely, she wants them to suffer psychologically as well as physically. Her Weapon Array Alpha, is firing wildly at them, making their pilots focused entirely on impulse control trying to avoid the thin lines of pinpoint defense lasers. That, combined with the total gravitational distortion means they aren’t leaving anytime soon. I send out a few of my more deadly drones, to do the same suppressing fire as the Avariata Pace is doing. I don’t want my little friends to take away from Sbaccanona’s fun, just give her a little help.

The Stirante appears. Furgone sees the lines, and sends out a laugh to me and Sbaccanona. “I leave you alone for less than a minute,” he jokes, for all to overhear. He then launches a pair of torpedoes. I didn’t think he had any functional torpedoes left. Then, I realize he didn’t. That’s one of my drones and a metal hunk that’s vaguely torpedo shaped.

“No fair,” Sbaccanona replies, more to Furgone’s use of his torpedo tubes than the other’s statement.

I send a command to the drone fired out from the Stirante. “No rooms unexposed.” It magnetically latches onto the hull of the ship it was fired at, and begins to get to work, melting holes in the hull.

Sbaccanona decides, with my drones helping, it’s time to act. She activates her minor magnetic accelerator, launching a small metal ball at a different ship. The pirate’s shield quickly powers higher, slowing the ball. Clearly they didn’t know what they were dealing with. The ball, like my drone, magnetically finds its way to the hull, and begins to vibrate. The ship’s gravdrive activates, without the sheathe turning on aligned with the path. The ship seems to stretch and rip itself apart at the molecular level. She launches another. The next ship, knowing what the last ball did, shut down its shield briefly to let the ball shoot all the way into the ship, where the engineers inside could take care of it. The other pirates launch fighters. “I hate when they don’t keep open comms,” Sbaccanona complains. I see the reading of deadly toxin seeping out from the ship that she fired on. I turn the drones onto fighter duty, launching a few more to help out. Furgone gravdrives right up into the middle of the pirates, rams one, then gravdrives right back out in the clean path, taking a small hunk of pirate ship with the Stirante on the way out. Leaving the rest of the ship floating in space sans reactor. The drones finish off the fighters as the Avariata Pace finally gets their torpedoes ready. I expect her, like Furgone had, to fire off one of my drones. Instead, she launches an actual missile. It continues accelerating at one of the two remaining pirate ships. That ship, like the first one Sbaccanona launched something at, raises its shields defensively. Which would have been helpful. Except, Sbaccanona only had one type of missile furrowed away under her floorboards. And when a nuke goes off in space, the pulse of intense electromagnetic radiation is pretty much unavoidable. Which, of course, does mean Sbaccanona’s sensors can’t hear the poor people in the two neighboring ships struggling to get their reactors and life support back up as they try to stay calm and not think about impending suffocation. Emphasis on try.

After an hour, once the readings come back into focus and there hasn’t been any new activity from the pair of ships for long enough that something should be coming back if anything was going to be turning back on, I send in the drones. Furgone sends to us, “I’m guessing this, as fun as it was, means the system doesn’t have one of us decommed in it?”

“Probably not,” Sbaccanona adds.

A drone reports back something suspicious. “I don’t know, hold,” I reply. The drone seems to indicate the gravdrive and impulse controls of the ship it’s investigating are over three centuries old. And Astro in make. “We won’t find the ship. They seem to have scrapped it. But if we can figure out where it might have been decommed, we might be able to salvage the cores. Shove them into one of these useless freighters.”

“Can do,” Furgone replies. “I can handle that. Sbaccanona, connect to the systems of the one you gassed, see if you can find anything useful. Feel free to look for anything fun as well. Ratti, you think you can get the one with our gravdrive up and operational again?”

“Sure,” I reply, “I’ll send in the drones to do a kill sweep, then fix it up. It’ll still be shit, but it’ll be functional shit.”

“Great. I’ll finish running those numbers while I look. I’ll pick ten, not three, then use any new astrigation data from Sbaccanona’s search to narrow it down further.” And with that message, the Stirante vibrates briefly then disappears, gravdriving towards the nearest planetary body to scan it.