- Part I -

The sleek flying wing of the Raven light fighter cut through space, green drive flares blazing out into space and leaving a trail of ionized gasses in itīs wake. The pilot inside checked his radar for what seemed like the fiftieth time and, having assured himself that there was still no-one in range, he turned back and carried on with his previous task...

Sighing, he picked up a spanner, and started removing the bolts from the outer casing. He had managed to take almost all of them off when he noticed the small puddle of liquid glass that had seeped out from a hole near the bottom of the unit. Oh well, he thought, thatīs shot then, need another fiber optic bundle for the main power router. He looked again at the bits of plastic dotted around the cockpit: the remains of the insulating on the cabling leading to the generator, he looked at the still-red blob of molten iron stuck to the back of his pilotīs seat, and he looked at the crater where a high-velocity lump of metal had smashed into the inner hull. No, he decided, it was going to take more than a new fiber optic bundle.

A beep from the nav computer pulled him out of his contemplation of his expensive and now useless ex-shield generator and back into reality. The ship was nearing a īroid field. Hauling himself back into the cockpit as the asteroid field neared, he grabbed the joystick and started to carefully curve the ship around the lethal lumps of rock. At this velocity an impact on any of them would mean that he would be breathing vacuum very quickly. And he had no particular need of that... not today... or any other day for that matter.

As the Raven banked and turned around the grey-brown asteroids, the pilotīs eyes swept over them, watching for any tell-tale light, sign of movement. Anything that might be someone else, looking for him, waiting for him. Checking the radar again he still saw nothing. Not that that means anything, he pondered, they might be using ECM and his radar was pretty short range anyway; he had had to grab whatever was on the market and pretty quickly when he had last launched. How long ago was that? he thought, glancing at the on-board clock. Fifteen hours... oh well.. another few and he would be there...

As the ship left the asteroid field, Arouin Simell sat back in his pilotīs seat and set the clock to wake him in 2 hours.. 2 hours should be enough sleep... hopefully...

After a couple of hours of fitful sleep, Arouin awoke, fumbled for the alarm shut-off button on the clock, and then settled with hitting it with his beer tankard until it stopped. The lite-glo panel which provided the clock display fell off, he cursed, tried to get up to look for it, then broke it in two when he swung his legs off of the control board. Things were not going well.

As he neared his destination he got more nervous, starting to fidget occasionally with his goatee beard and idly tapping his fingers on the controls. He stopped with the idle tapping when he accidentally hit the emergency fuel jettison button and almost lost what remained of his afterburner fuel. He resorted to futilely trying to clean his radar display instead, and only seemed to succeed in moving around the grease over itīs pitted and scratched plexiglas surface. After a few minutes of this Arouin noticed an asteroid appear on his radar. The asteroid. He swung his ship around to head more directly towards it, and stared expectantly at the radar display. As he neared the asteroid, more appeared on his radar, and as he came even closer he began to pick them out of the star-studded blackness of space. As he moved between them, ship twisting this way and that to avoid a fatal collision, he noticed the object that his searching eyes had been looking for. An old piece of a pre-collapse space station, scarred, twisted beyond all recognition, bearing the flaking remains of an unfamiliar emblem painted upon one of its less damaged faces. He brought his Raven around to face it, and then fired his retros to bring his ship to a complete stop. After a few moments, several nearby asteroids opened hatches from which sprung lethal looking turreted missile launchers, from which launched lethal looking missiles.

....and after a few more moments Arouin didnīt get the inevitable; he got what he expected.

The missiles slammed into his ship unarmed, the fried shield generator letting them smash into the delicate paintwork on the outside of his Raven. He winced slightly as one of the Lanceīs slammed home with a mettallic crash, leaving a ringing in his ears as the ship reverberated. His tankard fell to the floor with a clatter, and as he leant over the edge of his seat to retrieve it from where it had fallen, the overhead compartment snapped open as a Kataka smashed into the side of the ship. Fending off falling boxes of rations he groped for the comms key, grasped it, then hammered at it yelling into his helmet pickup.

"Cut out the god damn missiles Voris itīs me you bloody idiot! My shield genīs toasty and youīve just demolished a rather nice paint job on my bird!"

There was a crackle from the comm unit and then a rasping cough.

"Heh, sorry old friend, you canīt be too sure these days, can you?"

Arouin sighed and slumped back into the chair, wiping off the remains of a packet of spicy sauce that had exploded over his tunic.

"No, I guess you canīt... well, Iīm waiting, gimme some rings"

"Okay... (Jurhern, turn on the rings, tightband to our guy in the Raven... oh you bloody idiot.. give that here... there...) Okay, done, see ya in a few minutes buddy"

The navi-puter recieved the docking ring holographic information from the unseen speaker, and then a large asteroid a few kilometers had a series of docking rings flicker into view leading into a crater on itīs massive pockmarked surface. Arouin grabbed the joystick and pulled the fighter around, flicking the throttle up, then span it around as the little ship entered the docking rings, fired the retros, then slid sliently towards the crater on the surface.

If, of course, he had tried to get away from the missiles, the only īlogicalī thing to do in the situation, they would have armed themselves and he would have been left floating as pieces of a lifeless corpse in a fused, twisted piece of metal. These safeguards were needed; the TRI was getting more thourough with itīs investigations into the activities of Arouin and otherīs of his ilk. When his ship was a scant hundred meters from the craterīs floor, the sides snapped apart revealing a more-or-less standard docking tube, then snapped close again behind him, wreathing the ship in a grimy blackness.

As the bay lift brought the Raven Light Fighter into the hangar bay, the fluro-strip lights flickered on uncertainly, strobing momentarily before stabilising at a slightly-too-harsh brightness. Arouin hit the cockpit release button, then stood up, pushing the canopy open. He had discarded the automatic opening and closing of the canopy since he had see his old, and now dead, friend Granneth Haars dock at a TRI station, only to have some lousy technician monitoring the docking tubes notice his ship registration and open the canopy remotely while the old guyīs Typhoon was still in hard vacuum. Some lessons came hard, and you either learn from them, or something terminal happened to you. As he got his first breath of the stationīs air he noticed how stuffy it had been in the cockpit and decided to get the oxygen reclaimers looked at. By someone reliable.

Arouin clambered out, shook his legs to try and work the stiffness out of them, then looked up towards the far wall of the hangar bay as a door opened and Voris Kolther walked out. A little too fat, thought Arouin, he hasnīt been exercising for a while. Getting rusty... not very good for a pirate to get rusty.

Voris held his arms apart expressively as he walked towards the newly landed pilot. A tatty green cloak trailed behind him, flapping as he moved, covered with a few decadeīs worth of grime and dust. Not as grimy as his face, however. Looked like he had been skipping on sleep, no matter how well fed he was. Arouin embraced him as the other man clapped arms around his shoulders,

"Looks like you made it in one piece!"

"Yeah, no thanks to you, you bastard... have you got any idea how much itīs gonna cost to get the whole ship resprayed?"