My Ship Is Not The Hammer

Once again I find myself sitting in the Bosena system, absorbing the beauty. However, this time my interest is not directed towards the system itself. Instead, the lenses of the drone which acts as my eyes in space are focussed towards my new ship. She’s called the Broken Nose, a Maller class Cruiser, made by the Amarrian Empire. Honestly I wouldn’t care if she was made by Jamyl herself; the Broken Nose is mine now. I sit at the lagrange point, panning about and admiring the clean lines of the heaviest armour in the class, broken only by the jutting turrets of the five 200mm autocannons.

Moments later, my scanner pings, and I glance away to see the signature of a Minmatar Wolf assault frigate. I’ve flown those before, I know exactly how dangerous they are. I am, however, confident in my belief that I am more dangerous than this intruder, but still I broadcast orders to my crew to go to full combat readiness. I narrow him down to a belt, but since I’m supposed to be playing the part of a simple lower class pilot not prepared for duels against other immortal ship-gods, I decide to wait and let him come to me. I sit patiently, checking my scanner so that I’d know if he decided to leave, but he seems stationary. Alright, I think to myself, if you want to make me come, I’ll comply. I set in a course for the asteroid point he seems to be lurking at, and activate my warp drive. It is a sharp contrast to the drive of my ramshackle Rifters: instead of screams reverberating and shaking the entire ship, this brute simply purrs and rumbles, all the vibration of the massive drives absorbed by my still more massive armour plating.

However, just as my ship is about to pierce Einsteinian limits and hurl itself towards the point in space, I see on my displays the bracket and icon of a new ship flying into the point I’m sitting at. A Wolf class assault frigate. Damn, should’ve been patient. It’s too late to cancel warp, but in the brief second I see him, I notice that the white brackets around his ship in my HUD are filled with a blinking red overlay, symbolizing that Concord, in it’s infinite wisdom, has decided that this Capsuleer has done enough damage to peace and stability to warrant open season on the ships he flies. Not only will the sentry gunners at gates and turrets not engage me if I decide to attack him nearby, but Concord will not penalize me for destroying his ship around his pod.

The moment I arrive at the place I first saw the Wolf on my scanner, I snap out orders to reverse direction and spin up the warp drive as fast as my engineers humanly can, so that I can fly back to my origin. The Wolf is still there, fourteen klicks off my bow. I order my sensor tech to get a lock on his ship, while laying in a course to orbit him as close as I can, and send out a ping on my corporation comm channel. The instant the intermittent blips of the targeting software turn to the clear tone of a solid lock, I slam my fists on the activators for my guns and my propulsion jamming suite. As we both approach each other under one kilometre, struggling for a position of advantage on the other, his guns find their range, and my shields, which are only an afterthought on this ship, fade instantly to the barrages of nuclear fire spitting from his craft. Moments later, my own cannons, slightly at odds with the software of my craft which was not designed to compute firing solutions for such unwieldy weapons as projectiles, spew their solution into the turrets’ trackers. My own hail of ammunition, perhaps not as accurate but certainly greater in volume, slam into his ship, rocking it, melting his shield projectors to drifting vapour. He begins to dig into my armour, but my massive bulwarks of tungsten, layered with energized nanite webs, absorb it like so much space dust. The lines of my fire begin to trace back and forth across his now-unshielded craft, and I see that even as the stitching paths of hell run across his ship, green mist bubbles from the depths of his hull and reform the twisted scraps into clean and shining plates.

I engage my frigate-sized capacitor neutralizer, but even with it’s help, he’s holding up marvellously. Slowly but surely the monstrous output of his guns are chewing precise well grouped holes into my armour. To make matters worse, an opportunistic captain of an Angels faction cruiser has decided to add his pitiful firepower to the mix. Luckily, my comms ping from earlier has finally been answered, and the two new members of my organization exit warp and engage the Wolf. Under the firepower of myself, another Wolf, and a Rifter, my opponent quickly melts. I let his pod go while I chase down the impetuous Angels captain, and punish him for his impudence, permanently.

The fight over, I retire to a prepared safe spot, and check my comms for any chatter I need to respond to. I see that the pilot whose frigate I just tore apart around him has said “Good fight” in local. I respond in kind, and he mentions that he in fact suspected it was a trap, but engaged anyway. I laugh, but inside I’m smiling grimly. That’s exactly why I won.

Then I see the best news of all in a local pirate’s channel. Before I tell you, first, some back story. When I first came to be a black hat in the realm of New Eden, I met a great man by the name of Sard Caid. Not only did he teach me all I know about combat and hunting as a Capsuleer, he was also a good friend and a deadly wingman and commander. Of late, however, he has been inflicted with a strange glitch in his pod interface implants, meaning that occasionally without warning, while piloting his ship, he suddenly falls unconscious. This of course has meant that he has been able to in combat safely. However, with the help of a man in my corporation, who was a cybernetics expert before he became a killer, his problem has been fixed.