Neverborn
From DaveSpace
A Tale of Woe : Neverborn
Having spent most of the evening mining with his friend Watashi, it was with a certain horror that Hygelac realized that he had drawn the short straw and was to sell off all of the minerals which he had so laboriously pulled out of the rocks.
It was at the end of this 3 hour hauling marathon that his sluggish little Hoarder Class Freighter was ambling its way across the Avenod system. Virtually asleep at the controls of his ship Hygelac was keeping half an eye on his piloting and half on the corporation channels. Just 5,000 more units of Mexallon to sell and he would be getting some well deserved sack time.
As our bleary eyed hero approached the Stargate out of the system, he received an invitation to 'gang' with Neverborn. Must be a corporation member he hadn't met yet, being new to Dreamscape and its varied employees. So unwittingly Hygelac hits the accept button on his comms panel!
Before Hygelac had realized what was happening, his Freighter was happily warping towards his new found gang leader, Neverborn. Once the warp vapour had cleared, our slack-jawed pilot found himself in deep space, sitting in front of a ship which could have given an asteroid a lesson in looking large! Bristling with weaponry and armed with the latest in warp prevention technology it was only a matter of seconds before Hygelac was spat out of the resultant wreckage in his escape pod. But the chase was not over yet ...
The warning panel was blinking again as the massive guns slowly swung to match the trajectory of the pod. Our fallen hero, down but not out, wasn't about to roll over just yet. Franticly targeting the first navigable object in front of his pod. A smart move saving valuable seconds of warp alignment time, he entered warp just as the shots started flying. The lusty howls of pirate chagrin echoed through his coms-net, and he took a moment to taunt his hunter before warping to the nearest Space station.
Alas, the pirate was no rube and had warped to the station already! What followed was a flight for life of a kind that no vids could match for pure adrenaline. the next few minutes would stretch into a seeming eternity as warp after warp Neverborn chased Hygelac's fragile pod through a seemingly shrinking solar system. Even that stalwart legend, Captain Saltyballs would have been proud of the evasive action as Hygelac managed to lose his hunter in the rocks of an asteroid field, and dock in the waiting arms of a Mining Outpost and safety!
There are many lessons to this tale, but the most essential is probably this: "Of the thirty-six strategems, running away is the best."
You have been warned!