Month: January 2019

49.22 light years Djabara from Paresa where loyalists to Hadrian Duval are marshaling their forces. Too damned close.

I watched as the technicians replaced a cargo bay with the necessary SRV hangar for surface operations. Almost as an after thought I had them pull out another cargo bay for bulkhead reinforcement. Better to go heavy and prepared I thought.

Refitting the ‘Augur took longer than I expected and in those very short hours war erupted in Paresa.  Whatever window I had was gone.  Now I was going to have to dodge imperial patrols looking to catch fleeing stragglers.  What worried me more that if this was a trap I’d be facing twitchy Imperial Security Forces and whatever surprise was waiting for me.

353 light-years later I was descending onto the dark side of Djabara 2’s 4th moon.  The rocky surface pushed up at me as I dropped down closer to the planet, the Relentless Augur groaned unnaturally as I descended.  The Python wasn’t ever intended for extensive operation in a gravity well.  It handles better than some ships, sure but it’s no ballerina .  I wasn’t far from my noted coordinates and within a few minutes I found the site in question.

A quick flyby of a mysterious structure showed me a number of docked ships and an excessive amount of defensive positions for anything I wanted to get mixed up in.  My first guess said this was a pirate operation but some of the structures looked too robust for a fly-by-night smuggler’s den.  No, this had secret government facility written all over it.  I didn’t know what I would find here but I landed with the intent to find out.

Almost like it was laying there for me a fragment of message buoy lay on the ground.  Waiting.

I pulled down what data I could and killed the lights.  I wanted to keep as low a profile as possible.  Not that it mattered.  As soon as I approached what seemed to be a quiet vector, sentries lit up and started swarming my direction almost immediately.

I bugged out.  This was beyond just me and I made a note to ask around before I came back.  It was lucky I left when I did, my SRV shield buckled quickly and armor started flaking away as the sentries chased me beyond any typical patrol distance.  Someone clearly wanted visitors kept at bay.

Djabara had been on my mind for days. I was out of the ‘bubble for almost a week, outside radio contact and isolated from anyone or anything familiar. I was hardly in the bubble for a day when the message came through encrypted channels without sender or subject. Djabara 2, it said, was important. And a series of coordinates that would guide me to a surface location.

This smelled like a trap. I jumped three systems just to distance myself from the point of reception before I stopped to consider the mission. Alix scanned the file seven times that I know of and probably a dozen more I didn’t. It wasn’t a honeypot. It wasn’t a trojan. The file was safe.

So that meant the coordinates were likely a trap. So I sat on the data while I considered what to do.

Meanwhile reports of Duval and Patreus posturing in the Empire started sounding more and more like civil war. Djabara was smack in the middle of Empire space. If I was going to go I had to go soon, before the shooting started.