The following story was written by Stay Frosty pilot Yoanna McQueen.
Yoanna was hesitant.
The recent loss of her Svipul stung a bit and she felt like her mind was elsewhere tonight. The Pirate Lord wanted to take out a fleet of destroyers and she was unsure if she was up to the task of joining the pack.
Checking her hangar, her gaze fell upon one of her trusted Wolves. Yoanna’s consciousness resided in one of her turret focused pods and she really enoyed flying the Minmatar Assault Frigate. The pirate fleet she had noticed while warping back to the Federation Navy station in Ouelletta had no designated scout ship. So she boarded her Wolf and was in space just a few moments later. Catching up to the fleet was easy. After a few stargate jumps, Yoanna noticed the IFF transmitters of at least five navy destroyers on her directional scanner. She ran through her mental checklist to make sure she was combat capable: ammunitions, nanite paste, MWD idling, navigational charts loaded; the Wolf was ready. Just in time, as one of the pilots called out a Rupture in one of the battlegrounds around the system and Javix initiated a fleet warp command.
Her Wolf, being the fastest ship in the pack, landed first, spotting the Rupture about 150 kilometers away from her landing spot. Too far away to engage with weapons, and way too far for her warp disruptor to prevent the escape of the Minmatar combat cruiser. Calculations ran through her head. Her Wolf was springing forward and opening a gap to the pirate destroyers landing behind her, but that Rupture was fast. Going almost 4000 meters a second she barely managed to close the distance and was still about 150 kilometers away from her prey. Glancing at the tactical display, an idea formed in her head. She was barely done formulating her plan, when her Wolf entered warp already and hurled itself away from the chasing pack at speeds almost unimaginable to the human mind.
In warp, her synapses were firing frantically to complete the necessary course calculations for her return jump. Once the well known feeling of her ship dropping out of the warp tunnel settled in, Yoanna pulled the Wolf in a tight turn and almost immediately dropped back into warp - back to where she came from, back to her fleet. But this time her Wolf terminated its warp 100 kilometers short of its destination - a mere 60 kilometers from her prey.
With the mental equivalent of a slap of a button, the 5 mega-newton MWD unleashed its brutal thrust and she was thankful for the capsule fluid preventing her body from being crushed into mush. Rerouting energy to the MWD alarms kept screaming in her head warning her of potential damage to the module running too hot. She made a mental note to talk to one of her engineers about ripping these silly systems out of the main processing core altogether.
With the extra speed of the overheated MWD she was closing on the Rupture fast. It seemed like the enemy pilot had also used his thermodynamics knowledge to eek that little extra bit of power from the engines of his cruiser, but it seemed like his engines were near failure and his speed was dropping again. Keeping part of her mind on the sensors to check her range to the Rupture, the Wolf's energy grid reacted to her thoughts and increased the power to the warp disruption module to increase the range at which she was able to disrupt the enemy’s nav computer.
“Yoanna is going to tackle him!” a pilot from the destroyer pack yelled on the com channel. “Really?!” She could hear the Pirate Lords astonishment in his voice clearly and a slight smile crept over her face. Two seconds later, her warp disruptor acquired a target lock and the cruiser was trapped. And then Rixx’ voice in her head again and a slight shiver ran down her back, as he ordered the gang forward with a sinister grin in his voice: “Get him, boys.”
Her pulse was racing. The adrenaline kept her mind sharp and she felt nothing left of the doubts she had when she boarded her Wolf prior that day. Juggling sensor inputs, drone trajectories, reload times and heat levels of her modules, she kept her range to the cruiser constant. Her warp disruptor was keeping her target from warping off and the rest of the gang was closing in. Her 280s would have thundered, instead she merely noticed a slight flash of the muzzles and fractions of a second later a Warrior II exploded in a giant ball of energy.
Shifting her mental focus, she noticed her armor repair module running low on charges. But she wasn’t the inexperienced pilot she had been even a year ago. She knew full well what her Wolf could take and with the the enemies Warriors being decimated by her artillery guns, she was very confident she could hold the cruiser until her gang arrived.
Then she felt a sudden shift in the inertia of her ship. Going over the sensor data, she noticed that an unexpected energy spike had fried the circuits of her MWD, shutting down the module before catastrophic failure would rip her ship to pieces. Only a few months ago, that would have sent her into panic mode. Now she assessed her situation calmly: the cruiser was gaining ground but one of the gangs’ destroyers was closing the gap. She readjusted the energy grid of her ship as fast as her synapses would let her, increasing the power of the focused beams disrupting the navigation computer of the enemy Rupture.
Slowly the distance to the target increased. 25 kilometers, then 26. She registered the impacts of the Wolf’s Howitzers on the Rupture’s shields knowing full well the small guns of her ship wouldn't be able to break the enemy before the cruiser would leave the disruptor’s range. 27 kilometers. Alarms screamed in her head, warning of immediate shutdown of the module because of heat damage. And then, Rixx’ voice sounded once more in her ears: “Rixx has point.”
Relief flooded her nerves. The Wolf pulled out and lined up the remaining Warrior drones to blow them to pieces. She didn’t even register the hits to her armor and shut off her armor repairer. Because she knew that she had done it again - secured a kill for the band of bloodthirsty pirates pouncing on the now helpless Rupture, for the band that had become something more than just pirates to her. For the band, that had become - home.