I christened my Zephyr prototype probe ship 'Spider' and took her for a workout the next day. Her special core probe launcher, the Iris system, could collect vastly more data with much sharper resolution.
No one else was up and about at that time and the station machinery ground away in solitude. I did a few loops around our base and kicked her into a solar warp. I scanned down the new exits to place as bookmarks in the corporation hangar. The highsec led to Pavoudis. This was unfortunate.
KAIRS had been growing lately with more and more active pilots. Doc P and two others had been waiting fir the wormhole to transfer onward so they could find the new access system and join us. Our new link was in a tight pocket of highsec systems in a sea of red, superhostile systems. We were an island, a 6-system buffer at minimum cut us off from civilized space. Our resupplies from the major resource centers of the galaxy would have to wait, or be blasted through several conceivable pirate blockades.
I headed back home and found the new C4. I popped through, put at ease by the fact that any sudden attack by the Sleepers, mysterious dark aliens that inhabitedmany wormholes, wolud be negated by the sensortag of my specialized ship. Spider was a dream to fly, responsive, smooth and with excellent inertia.
I sent out my probes then flitted in close to the pink sun to help hide my signature in case of pirates. The data was streaming in almost immediately. I was safe. No Sleepers detected, no players in-system. Just the wormhole to Veronica.
I cruised the system a bit more and scanned down a few plex sites for the corp. No mystery ships.
I made a mistake in my joyride. I didn't investigate the other hole first. C6, as big as it gets, infested with player pirates. In the time I had been scanning, they had spilled in; I assume the link has relatively fresh. They were my opposites, I was an early morning inquisitor, they were the vanguard of their invaders. Drakes, those flattened reptiles, had been nearing me. They found me at the third planet. Klaxons sounded as they began to lock. I knew I had maybe 5, 6 seconds. I didn't have time to align the Spider to warp out, I assume if I did that I would have been scrambled, locked in space as this fine ship was taken back by entropy. For all its sensor suite goodness it had bare minimal defenses. A single rocket would smash me.
I saw the first thing straight ahead: Planet 4 of the pink system. I set the computer in a rush to Warp to 0 meters and kicked the solar warp pedal. Not fast enough. The nearest Drake snatched a lock on my fragile vessel. Some sort of mortar-like sprays cascaded through the space between us. flashes of directed metal fragments shredded by port solar sails. Another lanced straight through my ship. On both sides of the spherical pilot section there was decompression. Small tools, wires, anything loose whipped about, some refuse briefly plugging each hole before tearing through. Each hole was widening by sucked-out micro fragments of my hull., A section of the staging harness for the starboard sails was blown off. I had a second to look through the porthole at them. All I saw was the blunt forward face of a massive torpedo. It felt unreal;death, reeling me in 100's of meters at a time. I closed my eyes as the fiery explosive reached the Spider.
The Spider bucked once hard, as I saw this, and then I was watching the torpedo explode in the space I had just filled. The whole scene whipped to a pinpoint behind meas I careened through warp. The symmetry loss of the sails, the fact that 65% of the solar intake was simply gone, meant that the solar warp was unstable andat an angle. I missed Planet 4 by several astral units. I could feel them transiting after me, so before I caught sight I nosed her to the warp exit, had the ship redistribute the remaining sail sections for proper alignment and launched at full warp velocity through the system, not stopping as she passed through the Veronica wormhole, not stopping until she came to a skipping halt at the Red Queen hangar. I broughtcast the emergency, we battened down the hatches. Our CEO, now online, brought our heaviest artillery online, all our secondary and tertiary shields crisply came into being.
They never came at us. Repairs are underway on the Spider. I'm alive.
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