Burning Down the Hive
Essense region – Peccanouette constellation
Arnon System – Planet IX – Moon 3
Sisters of EVE Bureau station
25 August YC 127
Three days after my wild chase through the space rifts, I got summons from Sister Alitura. The agent looked tired but excited.
“He tracked it!” she exclaimed as soon as I entered her office. “Wolf tracked the Mysterious Drone!”
“Where is it?” I asked eagerly.
“It’s here, in Arnon. But it’s not just that drone that he found — there is a whole swarm! Captain Korff, we need to destroy them before they build a hive and multiply.”
I grinned at the agent, “Vlad’s Pest Control is at your service, ma’am.”
Essense region – Peccanouette constellation
Arnon System – Mission location
I landed on the grid about 90 klicks away from an acceleration gate and a group of drones.
“There it is!” Aura cried out, highlighting a line with ‘Mysterious Drone’ label on the Overview.
Before I could do anything, the mysterious drone activated the acceleration gateway and warped into a deadspace pocket.
“Follow him!” Aura yelled, agitated.
I was about to will the destroyer towards the gate when I remembered the mission objective.
“Sorry, darling,” I said regretfully, “but we need to do a bit of a clean-up here first.”
“But it will escape!”
“Maybe, but for the good people of Arnon system it is more important that we destroy the swarm. Besides, where will that drone go? It has already escaped from us once and it came here, to its swarm. It will remain here, where it is protected by other drones.”
“You are too logical for a human,” Aura said grudgingly.
“And you are too emotional for an AI,” I stuck my tongue out at her.
The clean-up was routine — orbit and snipe at the drones at a max firing distance. I spread my rails across the four Alvis and the same number of Apises and spent a very satisfying minute popping the rust buckets with hybrid charges. Then I took the acceleration gate.
The second pocket was more populated — there were 14 frigate-size drones, all guarding the star of the show, the Mysterious Drone. As all my attention was focused on that elusive star, I failed to notice that the drones in that pocket were much closer to me — just 20-30 km away. Normally, I would turn back, activate the MWD and build a distance between the pesky robots and my ship as soon as possible. In my pursuit of the Mysterious Drone I neglected that precaution and paid for my negligence. As I lingered in place, trying to get a target lock on the object of my chase, it escaped again through another acceleration gate.
I cursed and willed Kaukokärki into a 85-km orbit around a nearby asteroid. After all, my primary objective was to destroy the swarm, and it was better done from a distance. Methodically, I acquired target locks on the closest seven drones, spread my railguns across them and started firing. The next thing I knew, I wasn’t going anywhere and my shield damage indicator flashed red.
“What’s going on?” I muttered in surprise. “I thought I turned on the microwarpdrive.”
“Uh-huh,” said Aura, “and that little fella with a warp scrambler just turned it off.”
“What?” I croaked in disbelief — a rogue drone with a scram was unheard of!
“And its comrade just webbed us,” Aura continued matter-of-factly.
My eyes raced across HUD and confirmed Aura’s words — two Strain Render Alvis tackled me and reduced my speed to mere 175 m/s. It was a nightmare scenario — I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t warp away and I couldn’t shoot the little bastards which were running in tight circles around me, outpacing my rails. And in the meantime, my shield damage was steadily growing as the drones pelleted my destroyer from their blasters. In panic, I willed Kaukokärki to fly away from the main group of drones which were still a fair distance away from me. That knee-jerk manoeuvre reduced the angular speed of those drones relative to me and increased my damage rate. Encouraged by the first explosion, I locked another drone from the remote group and allocated an idle railgun to it.
“Cap, what are you doing?” Aura asked in a horrified tone. “You need to target the scrambler!”
“What’s the point?” I asked in response. “It is under my guns and I can’t get it. This way, I can at least avoid being overrun by the remaining swarm.”
“You don’t need a swarm to be overrun — these two tacklers are already overrunning you. Look at your damage indicator — it’s just a matter of time.”
I glanced at the HUD and saw that a quarter of my shield was already gone!
“And now,” Aura continued, “look at the scrambler’s damage indicator!”
I lifted my eyes to the top of the HUD, and felt a warm flower of hope blossoming in my chest — the drone that scrambled me had a short red arc on the right side of its icon. It meant that the railgun that was shooting at it, occasionally managed to find its target despite the drone’s high angular speed.
“Now I understand the saying, that even a blind squirrel finds a nut,” I said gleefully.
“And you have seven of those squirrels,” chuckled Aura. “Let’s check how many nuts they can find together.”
Although it was tempting and, probably, prudent to reallocate all my railguns to the scrambler, I didn’t like leaving a job half-done. The farther drones that I was shooting at had their damage indicators in the armour or even hull. Stopping the fire meant that they would restore their shields and I would have to go through them again. Moreover, they could have closed the distance and added their fire to tacklers’. So instead of immediately pointing all my guns at the pernicious Strain Render Alvi, I waited for them to finish their current assignments. As I did so, the speed with which the red arc grew around the tackler’s icon steadily increased. Finally, when I had all seven rails trained at the madly orbiting drone, I achieved the same damage rate as I dealt to its trailing cousins with one gun.
When the scrambler was finally destroyed I breathed a sigh of relief (yes, one can do it even submerged in pod goo). Now, if my straits got any direr, I could warp away. But it was too early to flee, at least not into the warp tunnel. Nevertheless, flee I did as soon as my hitherto scrambled microwarpdrive spluttered into life and started carrying me away from the other tackler. Equipped with just the stasis webifier, the second Strain Render Alvi could not suppress my MWD and could not keep up with my increased velocity. Soon, it started falling back, and that’s when my rails punctured the drone with deadly precision.
It didn’t take me long to clean up the rest of the swarm. I waited a little bit until my shield was completely restored and jumped through the acceleration gate into the next deadspace pocket.
First thing I checked on arrival was the distance to the nearest rogue drone — it was 42 klicks. Second check — no Strain Render Alvis. Good. Third check — the Mysterious Drone — still on the grid, 61 km away. Excellent!
My elation was short-lived. As soon as I fired up the microwarpdrive, intending to close the distance to the fugitive drone, another “Mysterious” object popped up on my Overview window. That Mysterious Ship sent me a message “You’ll never get the secrets of the rogue drone!”, blew the aforementioned drone up and warped away! I stared at the HUD with my mouth agape — where just a second ago was a solid red icon, I saw a grey symbol representing a wreck, and an empty one at that.
“Cap,” Aura’s voice interrupted my stupor, “we still have a mission to complete.”
I was so distraught by the dismal ending of my chase that I nearly abandoned the mission. Then I remembered what brought me there in the first place — The Damsel incident — and felt ashamed. I could not undo what was done to that ship, but I had an opportunity to prevent such incidents by destroying the swarm of the pestilent machines. There weren’t many — only six — but one of them, Wrecker Alvum, was cruiser-sized, and I took extra care to keep my distance from it. As usual, no drones had sniper fits and I finished their extermination in relative peace, at least compared to my encounter in the previous pocket.
When the one-sided battle was over, I approach the wreck of the Mysterious Drone. It didn’t look special — just a jumble of metal scraps held together by coruscating cables. The Neocom didn’t show anything worth looting. I looked hopefully at Aura, but she shook her head.
“Nah, I already tried the high-resolution mode — it just showed smaller debris.”
“Damn,” I cursed, “I should have jumped after that bloody drone immediately. Then I would have got to it before that goddamn ship!”
Aura snorted, “And then what? Chances are that you would have to shoot at the drone leaving it more pulverised than it is now.”
“I would have been more careful than that butcher,” I grumbled defiantly, knowing full well that there was no way I could control railgun targeting with sufficient precision.
Aura shrugged cynically, “Well, it is what it is. If you’ve finished staring at this pile of rubbish, I suggest we return to the base and collect our time bonus before it expires.”
Essense region – Peccanouette constellation
Arnon System – Planet IX – Moon 3
Sisters of EVE Bureau station
“Dagan!” Sister Alitura cried out as soon as I entered her office. “He is alive! All this time he’s been alive!”
I blinked in confusion, “Who is Dagan?”