Splintered Reality: Part One

More than anything else it resembled a giant metal dragonfly constructed of tubes and miscellaneous debris that had been found floating in space.   It was lightly armored, even among a line of ships known for being particularly brittle. But for all that it was even faster than nearly anything in the space lanes.  At speeds approaching 6,000 meters per second there was little that could catch this particular ship. She dropped out of hyperspace somewhere near the first asteroid field in the Bania system and accelerated toward the outer rim.  As she approached the field a line of poetry from her days in academy came to mind. This particular line was scrawled on the inside of a stall in the ladies room and said something about a ship so small that “there was room for her ass and a gallon of gas.”  The particular breed of pilots in question where interceptor pilots…and like most she had a brain full of implants and nerves wrapped so tight that her instructor said if anyone ever hit her in the stomach she would sound high G.

She had been hired on by Kaalakiota Corporation, or “KK” as it was commonly known, right out of the academy. In fact Commander Skidochi Huorola had asked for her by name.  It was not her scores as an interceptor pilot that had made her an attractive candidate to the head of KK Internal Security. Nor was it any potential use in the cold wars between the Caldari mega corporations that made her so useful.   Her high scores were a bonus, but what attracted the attention of Commander Huorola was the fact that Tajqa came to the Caldari war academy already knowing how to fly Minmatar interceptors, and fly them well.

Her mind sometimes wandered during what she thought was routine missions. Now it was pulled back to the present as a bright red cross suddenly popped into view, detected by her side scans.  There were some terms that capsuleers still clung to and use of the word view was one of them. In fact Tajqa was not viewing anything – she was actually floating in a pod of green primordial goo, with cables strung to the inner surface of the pod.  She was like a living computer, the ships sensors plugged into her mind, and her pod plugged into the interceptor.  Perhaps a more accurate term would have been that she felt the blood raider frigate just barely over 25,000 km ahead of her Stiletto class interceptor. The Cruor was designed specifically for draining energy; something that Taj’s interceptor didn’t need in abundance to be deadly…which was the entire reason Caldari Internal Security had sent her to hunt Blood Raider ships preying on Kaalakiota manufacturing interests in Bania.  Kaalakota didn’t really care whether Amarri citizens got blown up or not, even though its manufacturing operation in Bania was on the outskirts of the Amarr Empire.  But when those same pirates began to affect the KK Corp profit margin? Well that was another matter all together.

The Curor had the same range as Taj’s interceptor; both could blast away at each other from 25,000 km out.  Still, technical specifications where one thing; being able to lock on to an interceptor approaching you at 5,800 meters per second was another matter altogether.  Taj willed the ships guns to lock on to the Blood Raider, and at 24,999 km the Stiletto began hurling large chunks of radioactive metal into the hull of the frigate rapidly looming larger in her sensors.  Then it happened…

By the time the Blood Raider frigate was within 10,000 km there was a bright flash and shards of metal flew into space, in a pattern resembling some enormous space bound flower.

By the time her interceptor reached 9,000 km her side scanning sensors sounded an alarm, an Ashimmu Blood Raider cruiser shimmered into view – held stationary so it could use its prototype cloaking device.

By the time she reacted the cruiser had established lock, four beams of light lanced across the asteroid field from the turrets on the mottled bronze and red spear shaped cruiser.

By the time her own ship had flown apart into its own brilliant flower, scanners on the inside surface of the pod had already performed a deep scan of her brain and sent the data through a hyperspace stream to a medical facility more than 25 gate jumps away.

The blood raider cruiser had been waiting for her.