The Ransom

-3-

For someone who’s supposedly descended from a mining family, I sure give a lot of shit to miners.  I’m not quite sure why, since I’m friends with some miners, but… there you have it.  My CONCORD criminal record is filled with instances of my gleefully blowing up of mining barges in highsec, interspersed with actual ship kills and losses.  But that’s beside the point.  Maybe it’s because I’m kind of an asshole, and pick on people who can’t exactly properly fight back.
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Take this guy, for example.  Name of “Lord Hellsky”… a little ostentatious, but my friend Marra found him piddling about in a belt in Hadagaugo, mining in a Scythe-class cruiser and a standard mining drone.  She called me up and let me know that there was fun to be had, so I took my Rifter, Applejack, and flew over to Hadaugago to see what I could do.



At first, I thought not much.  I flipped his can, he warped out, and I only had his abandoned mining drone to show for it.  Shortly afterwards, he came back in a Hurricane-class Battlecruiser. I wasn’t going to tangle with that without knowing more, so I warped off before Miura let me know that, since the dude was a miner, his fittings weren’t exactly… standard.  No need to make me feel like a pussy, boss...

I do love a challenge, so I headed back to the can and waited around, hoping Mr. Hellsky would drop by and play.  And he did, except he came back in a Mammoth and tried to take his ore back.  Theft implies ownership, which means that ore was mine, so I did what any reasonably sane person would do, and shot his Mammoth to pieces.  Not much left over from the explosion, so I let the asteroids pound the wreck into unrecognizable bits.

Sitting there for a minute, pondering what to do, I was slightly surprised to see a Hurricane, red on my overview, decelerating from warp into the belt right on top of me.  Might as well go for it, I thought, so I programmed in an orbit at 500 meters and lit up the guns.  Adrenaline rushed as the autocannons lit up the blackness of space, pouring their deadly hail into the shields of the battlecruiser, and I began to laugh as return artillery fire missed my own ship.  His guns were too slow and my Rifter too small for there to even be a chance of me losing, and as his shields dissipated into nothingness, his guns shut off and a private comm channel opened between my capsule and his.

“Okay,” he began, “you have won.”  Well no shit.

“I do believe you seem to be in quite the bind right now,” I replied, adding “How much are you willing to pay to make this go away?”  You see, part of the club charter is that I get to ransom people, and I have to honor them.  Not a problem for me, since I like money just as much as I like explosions.

“10mil?” came the hesitant offer.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, I thought.  I sent a quick command to the weapon systems, putting a couple more dents into the armor of his Hurricane for good measure before responding.

“Unfortunately, your ship is worth quite a bit more than that.  I don’t know if I can do that.  Care to try again?”

“50 million isk?”

I grinned.  “That’s more like it,” I replied.  “Send it directly to me, once I get confirmation of the transfer you’re free to go.”  Just for fun, I put a couple more rounds into the hull of his ship right over where his pod would be.  The little things in life, right?  That was right about when the Neocom let me know that my account was 50mil richer, so I turned off my guns and warp scrambler, watching as his battered ship slid into warp towards the station.  “Fly safe,” I offered, more as a parting shot than anything else.

I might be an asshole, but at least I have fun.  And hey, 50mil isn't bad either.


-PG