Monday, October 13, 2008

Loss #8: The Myrmidon

An icon flashed on my HUD, indicating a change in my financial accounts. Looks like Guillome had finally sold some of my loot and paid me. It was about time. In the mean time, I had bought another Rifter, the Restock Four, and gone out hunting with it. By the time he had made the deposit, I was jumping into the Intaki system.

There were two targets on the system scanner in Intaki. A Hulk-class Exhumer mining barge, and a Myrmidon-class Battlecruiser. Looking up the records on the pilots in local, I found the Myrmidon pilot to be 3 months out of the academy, and the other to be much older. But being in a frigate, there was no way I was going to take on a drone-carrying battlecruiser. I have this thing about drones. I don’t like them when they’re pointed at me.

I followed the Hulk pilot around for a while. He was strangely moving frequently from belt to belt, instead of mining in one spot. Then something caught my eye on the scanner.. he had high-tech drones with him. There’s that thing about drones again. I sat in planetary orbit, pondering my next move, when the Myrmidon warped into the same asteroid belt where I had scanned down the Hulk, and they began communicating over the local comms channel. The Myrmidon pilot mentioned that he was hunting Serpentis and salvaging their wrecks. It was just the intel I needed – he wouldn’t be outfitted for fighting capsuleers. But would it be possible to solo a battlecruiser in a frigate? I had serious doubts. It’s times like these that I envy other pirates, who can call for backup from their corpmates.

After some encouragement from Hallan Turrek over the Hellcats public comms channel, I launched my Rifter into warp towards the belt. I managed to just catch the Myrmidon after he had dispatched the local Serpentis fighters. I had him targeted and scrambled almost instantly, and began to orbit the battlecruiser at the extent of my range with my microwarp drive in an attempt to avoid whatever drones he might launch. My gut knotted as I saw five high-tech Hammerhead II medium drones spew from his drone bay. Despite his young age, he was able to field very powerful drones. I almost managed to destroy one of them before they tore my Rifter to shreds.

I escaped with my capsule intact, and exchanged friendly words with the pilot. He offered to leave my wreck for me to salvage, but I was already on my way to Oursulaert to spend those new-found credits on another Vengeance…

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Really enjoying these, do keep them coming!