Lonetrek region – Okela constellation
Ekura system – Mission location
15 December YC 126

The Guristas patrol was hiding in an old dirty shipyard tucked away in a deadspace pocket. The shipyard emitted a lot of waste gases which hung around it as a smoke screen. Three haulers berthed at the yard were shut down and I could not determine their registration. What I could see clearly, though, was a group of 10 Guristas ships scattered around the shipyard. They felt pretty safe and relaxed as none of them reacted to my arrival. After facing off 35 aggressive frigates at once, I was rather laid-back too. Without bothering to move from my warp-in spot I targeted the closest two hostiles and started shooting at them from all my guns. While the hybrid charges worked through their defences, I targeted five more. As the first targets exploded I moved fire to the next pair and so on, all the time staying put. The pirates died before they were able to get to me close enough to land a hit on Merimetso.
“Look,” I told Aura pointing at the overview, “Pithi Destructor. I haven’t seen such model before.”
I focused my camera drones on the Destructor and discovered that it was a Guristas’ adaptation of a Kestrel frigate.

“Hey, did you see the destroyer?” said Aura, “It’s called Pithior Renegade!”
“Where?”
I frantically searched the overview. To be honest, when I arrived I didn’t pay much attention to the shape of the icons, just to their colour. I simply targeted everything red and started shooting.
“There,” Aura pointed at an underlined triangle.
I redirected my cameras toward the Renegade, but at that moment it exploded spectacularly.
“Oops,” I said, “Now we can only reconstruct its appearance from the wreck, as they do planet-side with kyonen-beast bones, but I guess the end result will not be as exciting. It’s probably some variant of Cormorant or Corax. They are designed by The Rabbit, after all.”
When the Guristas patrol was destroyed, I wanted to continue the good work by demolishing the shipyard, but then remembered Purkkoken’s warning – if a structure was not labeled ‘Guristas’, leave it alone. All the shipyard constructions had neutral names, so I followed the agent’s advice and simply warped back to the station.

The agent did not have any other missions for me for the time being. After the disastrous The Seven investigation all his contracts were inspected under a microscope, and he was not able to issue a new mission until the last one was reviewed. I slapped Purkkoken sympathetically on the shoulder, and signed off for the day.