Just Business

Author: Jaenen

Original post: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/eve-vgo-do-you-remember-isk.630800/page-29#post-16044699

Author’s Note: As many have probably noticed, I have a habit of bantering between my alts when I have more than one toon logged on. This thing is an extension of that, spiked by a conversation between me and Suz a couple days back. Jae calling her alts a harem is an idea I’ve had for ages; an outgrowth of how I envisioned the relationship between her namesake - a WOW Assassination Rogue - and and the other WOW character (a Draenei paladin named Ivonova) who semi-regularly traded mental places as my Main Toon. Back then, I let my inner dirty bastard out more than I do now when gaming (it helped that most of the time I was just playing with random strangers on the internets, not people whose opinion of me I valued) and so Jae-the-first and Ivon’s relationship was... well, I’m sure you can guess.
Anyway. Suz told me I really had to write a fic about Jae and co after I (being tired is my only defense and I freely admit it is inadequate) actually called them (Sedil and Cassie, really) Jae’s Harem. Er. Understudies. Still. I’d been meaning to do something, and I could do a quick little ficlet of them fairly easily. It felt nice to get the creative juices flowing a bit, I have to say.
The plot, such as it is, is adapted from one of the mad schemes I pondered a while back but strangled in the cradle as unworkable. To whit: 4 toons; 2 in Absolutions (Jae and Casseri) one in a salvagecane (as yet unnamed and at the time nonexistent Minnie alt) and one in a cloaky hauler (as yet unnamed and still to this day nonexistent Gallente alt), all working together to blitz C2 and C3 anoms as quickly as possible, looting and salvaging until they fill the cloaky hauler, then back to highsec. I conceived the plan before I had any real idea of just how amazingly useful an Orca is; and back in the day when my hatred of the Tengu spilled over onto the other T3s.
At the time, I had neither the ability to multitask nor a beefy enough computer for the idea to be even remotely workable. Changing up the ships to more capable and useful ones would help but... even now, I’d be hard-pressed to make it work, skill wise, and I am, to be honest, too risk-averse to sink the requisite ISK into the attempt. But oh, if it could work...
Anyway. The story, such as it is. Probably a bit too exposition heavy, though perhaps that can be justified as Sedil being deeply introspective. Also convenient, establishing what bits of background I’ve thought up for these characters over time.
Oh, and I’m not sure how 3 bombers vrs 3 Ravens would ACTUALLY go, but, well, for the sake of argument let’s assume that the Raven pilots are idiots and weren’t spidertanking.

Entry for the YC114 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest but not elegible for prizes.

Sedil Okab wanted to rub at her forehead and will her growing headache away, but at the moment that wasn’t an option. When one was in one’s pod, hooked directly into the ship’s computer core, there wasn’t much one could do with one’s physical body.

Under normal circumstances, she preferred to command her ship from the bridge, rather than her pod - though she’d be quick to dive in if things started going badly wrong. The wireless linkups in the bridge gave a Capsuleer nearly as strong a link to the ship as the hard links built into their pod itself, and the eased interaction with one’s crew made up most of the difference. Sedil vastly preferred to command from the helm, because that extra touch of human interaction helped keep her sane in an increasingly insane world.

She was in her pod at the moment not because she feared for her safety in the fight that brewed before her - she didn’t, not more than before any other battle - but because she didn’t have much experience running covert ops cloaks, and the bitchy things required a finer touch than she could handle over the wireless. So she sat in the goo, her first mate’s voice oddly tinny and unreal-sounding over the remotes; less real than the dispassionate timber of the little bomber’s computer as she got into position and pondered the sequence of events that had brought her here.

She’d never really intended to go into the Capsuleer life; she’d been a scholar back home. Only a chance result from an otherwise utterly routine medical had changed the course of her life; the Republic needed all the pod pilots it could find; force multipliers badly needed to keep the Amarrian Kullwolf from the door. She’d been lost in a strange sea in more ways than one. Suddenly able to hear radio; feel solar winds; taste strange radiations while tied into the sensors of whatever ship she linked to. Suddenly feared by those who’d known her; who knew she was now one of the deathless Juggernauts that plied the spacelanes, devastating entire armadas singlehandedly.

Jaenen - if the Caldari woman had a last name, she’d never shared it - had offered a safe harbor of sorts. She made a habit of taking younger, fledgling capsuleers under her proverbial wings, answering questions and showering them with ISK and assistance, helping them get their feet under them and introducing them to important and influential people across much of Minmattar space, and even beyond. Sedil, feeling lost and alone, had welcomed the help and seized it.

The old saw about reading every contact at least twice before signing came readily to mind.

Not that Jae had tried to enslave or indenture her; nor any kind of literal or figurative bondage. She just... burned with a compelling, mad energy that swept lesser beings up in her wake as she charged forward, refusing to let her momentum be broken for any reason. Sedil had found herself unable to break out of that wake. Jaenen bound her, and others, to herself insidiously. Gifts freely given along with the advice and support - asking only that someday, when they were more established, they help out other newcomers to the Capsuleering life, find other lost souls in need of a little nudge and assistance.

While such groups were hardly common, they were hardly unheard of, either. Even just counting Capsuleers she knew herself, the Laurentson brothers worked similarly.

She was by no means the first Capsuleer Jaenen had so helped. Some of the others, more willful, perhaps, than Sedil herself, had broken out of that comfortable wake, but a few had not. Casseri Lirel, an expatriate Amarrian, Tamman Lys, a Gallente, and herself being the ones Jaenen called on when she needed help herself. She called the three of them her harem, tongue somewhat in cheek as she did. Sedil wasn’t much sure how she felt about that idea - not from any homophobia, but because her parents romantic advice had been heavy on ‘don’t get in the sack with the crazy.’ Casseri - who had not been a good and pious little Amarrian girl even before falling into Jaenen’s orbit - seemed to take it in stride, always responding to the label with a wry grin and sardonic quip. Tamman, perhaps naturally enough given her Gallentean heritage, embraced the idea wholeheartedly. She, like Jaenen, had an almost boundless enthusiasm for anything she set her mind on doing, if not the maniac, cackling glee that Jae showed when it came to turning her guns on some theoretically deserving target.

They worked together, flew together - though not always. She did her own mining, and dabbled in manufacturing; Casseri would often leave for weeks or even months at a time to do her own thing; but if one of the group needed help, or they just wanted to get together, she’d return. Tamman bought low and sold high, a guru of the markets across half of New Eden. The get togethers helped meld them into a group more than anything else; as they learned about each other. She’d learned enough about ultra-traditional Amarrian households and Caldari government creches to be eternally grateful for her own upbringing as daughter of two loving if distant parents.

A few weeks ago, Jaenen had called up her harem and announced she had a Cunning Plan, and needed some extra hands, and would they be interested? Sedil, grateful for the help she’d received and, at the time, bored enough of (admittedly peaceful and profitable) mining to be up for a change, had agreed to the latest mad scheme sight unseen, and cursed herself again for not checking first.

And thus she found herself in a Stealth Bomber deep in W-space, stalking a trio of Raven-class battleships that had made their way into the selfsame hole. Somewhere to her port, Jae and Cassie were also skulking up in Stealth Bombers, getting ready to make their attack run on the people who had so ungraciously interrupted their own attempt to make money.

Tamman was outsystem in the Orca they were using as mobile base and support, hiding under cloak. Said Orca’s holds held a few billion ISK worth of destroyed Sleeper ships collected over the week or so, and was in its own way more important than the rest of their task force put together. It helped that, other than the bombers the three of them were flying, it also held the rest of the task force at the moment; two Legions and a Noctis.

The plan had been deceptively simple. Jae and Cassie in the Legions, destroying Sleeper drones in job lots. Herself in the Noctis, looting and salvaging anything they found. Tamman in the Orca, carrying the pile of loot and some spare equipment. The emphasis was entirely on speed; clean out one hole, find a route deeper into W-space, and move on. She was good at keeping moving, even while salvaging, and Tam had a positive gift for finding secure, hard-to-scan safespots, a benefit of her normal K-space sideline of running munitions into hot zones. They were standing to make an excellent profit from this venture; not merely the Sleeper salvage but some datacores yielded to Jaenen from an ancient database and the results of the only bit of slowdown they’d indulged so far: a few systems back, they’d found an asteroid field with some truly awe-inspiring deposits of Arkonor and Mercoxit, which found its way into the Orca’s ore hold fairly quickly. It would, after all, have been a terrible shame to have gone so far and come home without totally filling the Orca.

The Ravens they stalked hadn’t challenged them; nor had they spotted them. But they were in a system that the girls wanted to plunder themselves, and they were taking the choicest bits.

And, well, after a few days of hunting Sleeper drones, Jaenen and Cassie were bored and in the mood for more interesting game. Were she not immersed in podgoo, Sedil would sigh at this thought. Their recklessness is going to get us killed again. And getting killed hurts.

Sedil mentally checked the clock. Just about time, now... Again she checked over her ship and its systems. It was a Hound class Stealth Bomber; Jaenen’s, loaned to Sedil as Sedil didn’t own a bomber of her own. Nor was she capable of flying any of the other bombers. She was just barely capable of flying the Hound. Jaenen had bought the ship years ago, during one of her little manias when she’d decided to name all her Minmattar-designed ships in Old Mattari. Sadly, done by use of automatic translation software and not the slightest actual fluency. Technically, its name did indeed mean ‘bloody hand killer girl’ but no native speaker would have assembled the phrase so... crudely.

Bomb launcher - online and ready to fire. EMP bomb loaded, another in the magazine. Three torpedo launchers, their magazines filled with Nova torpedoes. The bombs would carve through the Caldari ship’s shields like they were so much air, and the torpedoes would wreak havok on their hulls and the cursory armor Caldari ships sported. Target painter - PWNAGE online and ready. Microwarp drive ready as well. Once they sprung their ambush, they would be well equipped to survive it and fairly likely to bring it off in their favor.

Jae and Cassie were both piloting Manticores. Cassie, Sedil knew, had a fairly diverse stable of ships at her disposal; mostly Amarrian but with a smattering of Gallente and Caldari hulls. She could likely keep the bomber’s cloak working from the helm, and without too much effort. Jaenen... well, if there was a sub-capital ship the Caldari woman couldn’t fly, Sedil wasn’t aware of it. It had certainly never come up.

Jaenen’s voice came over an encrypted channel. “Cassie, Sedil, you two in position?”

For a moment, Sedil watched their targets - even encrypted, such a transmission could give away their presence if they were unlucky, or their targets had a better hand at delicate scanning than they’d guessed. But there was no reaction; they continued to slam cruise missiles into the rapidly thinning ranks of Sleeper drones. Casseri, it seemed, had similar concerns, as she’d also paused before replying, but both responded in the affirmative.

“Awesome,” said Jaenen, and Sedil could hear her manic grin as the prospect of violence against claim jumpers filled her. “Okay, standard bomb run. Cassie, damp the spinward-most Raven. I’ll damp the anti-spinward one. Point ‘em. We all pound the last one with torps and firewall the throttles. Once Middle is down, open up on anti-spinward, then spinward. Good?”

Sedil murmured her agreement. She tensed, readying herself for the imminent violence. She was barely aware of Jaenen’s three-count over their private comm. Then two Manticores dropped cloak in almost perfect synchronicity and let their bombs fly. Sedil trailed them by less than a tenth of a second, then kicked in the drives as she locked up the first target. Speed was a Hound’s armor and shield; the actual armor and shielding being little better than tissue paper.

The three bombs bracketed the Ravens almost perfectly - Cassie had been a kilometer or so out of position, but more than close enough for the weapons in question - and their combined explosion blotted out the cold light of the system’s primary for long seconds as they locked up their targets. It also tore apart the last of the Sleeper drones attacking the ships; a pair of frigate-sized drones who’d been harrying the battleship’s flanks.

Predictably, Jaenen was the first to get a lock, her lead volley of torpedoes screaming from their launchers and streaking in half a second ahead of Casseri’s own; which in turn lead Sedil’s. Their primary target - shields already stripped away by the bombs - looked almost like a spider in a candle’s flame amid the exploding torpedoes as they slammed home. It vectored; trying to start a run-up to warp, but to no avail: Sedil’s warp disruptor stripped that option from him.

Cries of outrage mixed with cries for mercy in the system comms. Sedil ignored them as her launchers cycled, another volley of torpedoes flying into the Raven that was her chosen victim. Her sensors pinged that the Raven had a lock on her. She wasn’t too concerned; cruise missiles were a laughable weapon against a frigate as fast and small as her bomber. Still, she pushed her attention a little more than usual into evasive maneuvers.

As she did, she spared a scanner-glance at the others. As she did any time she was flying a non-Minmattar hull, Jaenen seemed to be almost overflying the capabilities of her Manticore; pushing it hard as she kept her targets locked down and simultaneously made herself a difficult missile target. The bomber seemed to skid and slide as she vectored. By contrast, Cassie’s flying looked almost tentative; not quite pushing the limit of the spaceframe. Too used to strapping a dozen armor plates to everything; she expects any ship she flies to be sluggish. Herself, having done the vast majority of her flying in Minmattar hulls, Sedil knew precisely what one could get out of the Hound, and flew to that.

The ship bounced around her; the impacts of kinetic missile blasts rocking it even with the very fringes of their effect - she was far too fast for them to hit clean. But her shields held, and a third volley of torpedoes screamed out, and the Raven exploded under the three ship’s assault. The three bombers turned their attention to their next target. Absently, Sedil got a point on the first Capsuleer’s pod. She wasn’t much interested in podding people - nor was Jaenen herself, or Cassie(much) but the now-battleshipless pilot on the other side didn’t need to know that. A ransom at this point would basically be free money.

The last pilot started screaming over local comms. “Disengage, disengage! - I’ll pay to save the ship if you disengage!”

Jaenen and Cassie both answered with mocking laughter. The Amarrian’s laugh had a hard, almost aristocratic edge. The Caldari’s was simply bright and sharp with madness.

The Capsuleer seemed nonplussed by this. One of the now-in-a-pod pilots, a woman whose accent marked her as a sister Mattari, demanded, “What the frell did we ever do to you?”

Sedil headed off more disturbing laughter. “You were taking something we wanted. Nothing personal; it’s just business.” As she spoke, another volley of kinetic torpedoes out of Jae’s bomber took out the last Raven; the sledgehammer blasts breaking its keel. Jae herself swooped in to point his pod. “Of course, at this point, things could go very well or very, very badly for you. You might want to listen to the boss.”

“...Which one of you’s the boss?”

“Crazy laugh.”

The reply was too faint to hear, but Sedil would bet cash money it was profane.

Jaenen spoke up now. “Here’s how it goes from here, gentlemen and lady. A hundred mil, or you three take the Dead Pod Express back to K-space. If you pay, and the hole you came in by is gone, we’ll probe you another. But we keep the loot.” Sedil could hear her grin now; could imagine it twisting her visage into a semblance of the legendary Terran shark. “Make up your minds quick. Patience is not a virtue with which I am well endowed.”

This time, the profane reply was quite audible. “You win, lady. I hope the Sleepers get you.”

Jaenen gave a high sign, and we let the pods warp off. Shortly thereafter, they dropped off of scans, no longer in system, and I warped off too. I had a battlesite to clean up, and a Noctis to grab for the job. The Ravens gave up their broken treasures; some of them quite valuable.

Cassie and Jae switched back to their Legions, and went back to work, killing sleepers. I continued to clean up, Tam continued to keep our hoarded valuables safe. No-one else had the misfortune of crossing our path over the next day as we finished building that horde.

Back in K-space, I considered what had happened, and my roll in those events. What sort of Capsuleer I was becoming. What sort I associated with. I spent a night sleepless, finally deciding to cut my ties with the madwoman and flee; save myself.

It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last, either. I knew full well as soon as my cut of the loot arrived, I’d be up for Jaenen’s next mad scheme. The money was just too good; compared to what I could make on my own. I had, perhaps, no truly great need for it, but it was ever useful, and most of the time hard to come by. So I would swallow my indignation at so casually crushing others for no reason, and stick with the madwoman.