7 Friends In Space

Author: Kagaku Kei

Original post: https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/3856652#post3856652

Entry for the YC115 Pod and Planet Contest in the A Day in the Life category.

Imagine this. Just you and your 6 best friends, out in your spaceship on the frontiers of empire space. You’re on your way to a job you picked up at a market hub. Should be smooth sailing until you hit low sec.
Your ship isn’t the newest, it’s not the best, but she’s fast and there aint anywhere else in the verse you’d rather call home. Everyone’s lounging common quarter, telling jokes, cleaning guns, sharpening knives. Life is good, you all just got paid for that last job you did. Engines purring like a dream cos you even managed to pick up some strawberries to make your engineer happy.
Smooth sailing.
Alarm klaxons blare, you’ve dropped out of warp too early, something’s disabled the warp drives.
Sunnovabitch it a trawler bubble.
Pirates.

Well ****, they just bit off a little more than they could chew. You aint a nice little carebear that’ll just roll over with a please and thank you. Sisters fitted this ship up real nice for a little bit of combat.

Its time to take battle stations. You strap in and take the helm, its time to make evasive maneuvers. Your crew take their positions with practiced ease. Gunnery begins spooling up the lasers, heavy pulse lasers straight from Imperial Armaments on Amarr prime. The other five jack into their drone control modules.
By now the pirates have chosen to take you. They close into you. Short range scanners show frigates closing far faster than they should. The realization makes your stomach contract: capsuleers.

No going back now. Transferring all power to shields, you and your crew brace for impact. Gunnery has acquired his first target and begins trying to track it. Frigates are hard enough to hit as it is, egger ones are nigh impossible. But he keeps trying anyway. Gotta love the determination.
The blinking on the console tells you the pre-launch checks for the drones are completed. No matter how long you fly you never quite get over how weird the GUI for the drones is. Dragging all five drones into space opens the hanger door and energizes the magnetic launchers. From your starboard window you see the five egg-cracker drones race into space, the glow from their ion engines washes over you as they race around your ship to engage.

Suddenly an asteroid looms. Watching the drone launch almost made you plow into some billion year old space rock. Focus, man, focus.

You hear gunnery mutter unpleasant things about the eggers mothers as he struggles to hit them. He swivels his head as he tries to track the orbiting frigates.
The rest of your crew is doing about as well. None of them have fought eggers before. The crew are used to shooting things that are much slower and are having a hard time maintaining range.
By now the pirates have realized that they aren’t breaking your shields and your drones are doing a number on them.
One of them decides to flee.
Big mistake.
Gunnery finally is able to keep something in his sights for longer than a second and scores a hit, vaporizing that dirty pirate. His shout of triumph is lost in the blare of the short range scanner. More contacts. Bigger contacts.
More pirates.
Too many pirates.
Theres no way you can tank all of them. Its hurts to even think it but its time to abandon ship.
You tell your crew to pack into the escape rocket. Whoever designed the thing was macabre enough to put windows on the thing. You struggle to turn your head from the inertia of the initial rocket burn. But you see enough. You see home begin to break up under the combined fire of the eggers.
Its back to the bad old days of grubbing around and getting your arses shot off.
But you swear, one day you’ll take those damn dirty eggers. One day you’ll take them for all they’re worth. But that needs a plan, the long ride back to Jita seems like just the place to do it.