Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kashyyk]

Captain Carlin started back into full consciousness. She was phasing out and on the first official board meeting too. Not a good start, although this was much more tedious than the mission briefings she had to deal with before the squadron had joined Onslaught. After spotting the holo display however, she silently thanked the admiral for his forethought.

"Whilst my ships aren't exactly designed for mining missions, they do have a reasonable amount of space remaining so they could be pressed into service. I do not care for it, but I can appreciate that it would be of use. I will officially abstain for now.

Regarding the Takeover, I believe finance is a later agenda, but I do not believe we have the funds to spare for logistics and repairs in case the entire thing goes tits up. As such, I vote against.

Honour: This is something I feel we can do well with. We should easily be able to negotiate partial payment up front to cover any expenses, and dealing with any orbital defences should be simple. My only real concern is ground invasion, but I suspect a planetary blockade and threatening invasion from Kai Warrior Drones should be a pretty good bargaining chip to get his surrender. I vote for this mission.

Finally, this Alliance Station. I have no love for the Alliance, so I am immediately tempted by the chance to flip them off. Seizing it in the name of the League will give us that base of operations I have mentions of, and one that is slightly more reliable than a CEO. I vote Aye for the league side of this mission, and Nay for the Alliance side."

[Ross Vernal]

The Admiral  waited for the others to finish, and then offered up his opinion on the particular Rifter in question.

"I'll say this - my friend is an amoral sumbitch with the charisma of a brick who errs on the side of good publicity. The other person attempting to collect has four priorities. In order: himself, himself, money, his people."

He ticked off fingers for each one, and then updated the display.

Formal Vote Takeover: 44.4% in favor, 19.3% opposed, 36.3% undecided Honor: 41.6% in favor, 8.7% opposed, 49.7% undecided Mining: 20.3% in favor, 19.4% opposed, 60.3% undecided/abstaining Station: 10.5% for League, 89.5% undecided

"I'd normally put those of you from the Alliance against, but... you're here, and can speak for yourselves."

[Rolepgeek]

With the addition of a new mission, Markus speaks up again, now fully seated.

"I must oppose the Station mission, either way. I would prefer we not pick sides, or, rather, not make enemies, so early in our career. Leads to sticky situations and lost opportunities. I'll abstain officially on the matter of mining. I believe that it would make an excellent second mission set should we decide to help out the Admirals friend."

[Ross Vernal]

After a while of reasoned debate aided by the alcohol, nearest approximation to fermented synthetic Flower nectar, and basic greed, the company finally reached the conclusion that it would proceed to the Rifter CEO and make a show - or practical application  - of force to warm up, then to go whip a defense force for some real work, possibly followed by mining and honest work until the next big contract came up. With it being reluctantly settled to everyone's lack of serious dissatisfaction, the shuttles returned to the ships, and after a few hours of stealth running towards a safe hyper translation point, assembled into a generic formation designed to provide maximum protection for the weakest ships.

The second day out, the Fleet would detect a convoy in nearby hyperspace. Closer sensor inspection proved them to be a small, unknown fleet consisting of what would appear to be a pair of Frigates and four Corvettes, slightly over-massed. The contact approached closely enough to noticed the serious differential in tonnage on their sensors and the offensive formation, and immediately* dropped down several bands in hyper, if not exiting hyper entirely.

The trip through hyperspace would continue until the seventh day; the fleet would exit hyperspace, get a fix on galactic coordinates, and re-calculate. During the few hours it would take to orientate and calculate, the patrolling small craft would pick up faint readings of what would appear to be at least three ships with a combined mass/size of roughly 14,000, drifting through space at a slow ballistic crawl, approximately 5 light-hours away in distance from the Fleet. With the information being relayed into the captains, with the Admiral's courier pilot as a quiet observer, it was generally agreed that someone should decide just what to do with this information, and from their ships, the Captains would tune to the same encrypted chat frequency and appear digitally to decide what to do about the ghost.

[* About seven minutes, for the sake of not bouncing off the border with catastrophic results.

OOC chat will do for this, although you can certainly post a reaction and whatnot. ]

[Ross Vernal]

After a brief meeting in which strategy was discussed, the captains adjourned and set out on ordering additional micro-jump coordinates. After a slight delay in astrogation, the Vanguard, the Corvettes, the Cossack, and six fighters jumped.

***

After a few test signals to establish the FTL relay, the Vanguard and its companions (save for the Cossack) exited hyper nearby the contacts, sensors ready.

It was revealed the three ships were, in fact, oversized and partially loaded, twenty-five years obsolete League Megafreighters, with visible hull breaches from missiles and extremely thin-aperture energy weapons, with visual evidence of blown nodes and ejected power plants.  Clearly, they'd been hit by pirates, looted, abandoned, and scavenged upon by other small-time scavengers and parasites.

The most expensive of the cargo (and the crew) had long since been taken, but entire compartments seemed entirely intact from the outside. Although two of the ships had clearly suffered from drive node blowouts, and had jettisoned their power plants, the third, aside from some minor secondary blowouts and fried circuitry, could possibly be finagled into bringing up an understrength drive and navigated to the yards in a few months by a skeleton crew. It'd require an investigation to see if this was the case and if it was even worth the salvage, but at the very least, it was raw materials.

This information would flow back in dribbles until the picture had been established to the rest of the company's satisfaction.

[Ozarck]

Captain Ozarckus' expression is somber on the vidscreens of his fellow captains. "A damn shame. Pirates are a real pox on civilization. And whatever small time looters got here before us ... scavengers. Not worth the anger." He shakes is head sadly. "Well, let's get news to the government, and to the families of the crew, if we can. I wish I could say I thought some scavenger had already done so, but -" Ozarckus sighs. "

"Well, no use leaving them as they are either. Let's see if we can get the one functional, and transfer what we can from the others to it. I'll leave the Poison Fang and Adder's Bite as escort, with their fighters. But, if you think that's too risky, on their end or ours, well, we have a contract, and I mean to fulfill it. These hulks are low priority."

((do you all find my text readable enough? I can try other color combos.))

[Rolepgeek]

Markus' laugh is a grim one. "Are we any better than the scavengers, Oz? But you're right. Leaving them here would be no help to anyone, either living or dead. If you think you and your men can break them down quickly enough to be useful, Knavikov, then we'll leave them to you, I think. Other than that, there's not much to do here, besides see if we can get one of the hulks working. Maybe it'll be a Rifter ship, keep up half-decently with us in hyper, even."

[Ozarck]

Ozarckus leans back thoughtfully, scratching his chin with a slight frown on his face. ARE we any better than scavengers? We should be. He muses.

"Tell you what. Let's set aside the proceedings from this endeavor for a while. Set up a fund, maybe donate half of our proceeds, less expenses for the retrieval, to the families of the victims. Maybe we can retain a little humanity, ... errr, retain some standard of ethics here."

[Rolepgeek]

Markus sighs behind the locked barriers of his mind. He and Oz had similar views on a lot of things, and some fair bit in common. But they'd had discussions over things like this before... "A noble sentiment, Captain, but I doubt we would have very much luck. Discovering the identity of all the crew on board three heavily damaged megafreighters, finding their families, if they weren't on board the ships themselves, and then setting up fund deliveries to them? As much as I would like to in other circumstances...we are a company. Bad things happen to good people, and we can only right so many of them. We can try to find what we can, but..."

His hands make a slight upward motion, non-committal. Having one's queen slain and her throne usurped woke one up to necessities of life in a harsh galaxy rather quickly. And apparently, sometimes it meant even Ex-Coalition could end up more financially minded than an Ex-Rifter...

[Ozarck]

Ozarckus nods slowly, listening to the familiar argument again. Not all scavengers are scum. he thought. Sometimes they, as we are, simply are doing what they need to to survive. And often their resources for helping are slim to non-existant.

He makes a throw away gesture, and smiles, for the first time since news of the find reached him. "You know me well, Captain. I'll likely try a little too hard to find someone to apologize to. But I won't ask it of the fleet. Galactic law entitles us to the spoils here, and as we all know, what's done is done, what's lost is lost. Besides" he rests his elbows on the table, fingers interlocked before him, "That Megafreighter could make a nice addition to our fleet. With a ship like that, if we can get her spaceworthy, I'd be less disinclined to those cargo runs and mining jobs."

[Romans]

Taking it all in, tapping his fingers as he does James Barron responds diplomatically, "I'm all for helping the families but how about we do it smart, we scrap the two ships for what they have of worth. The money from that can go to the families, and the third ship can be our prize from this whole situation, my men can get started working on that".Pausing for a second realizing something "and as for ownership we can figure that out for a later time, lets do this and get out of here".

[10ebbor10]

"The ships here are legal salvage, and thus ours by Trade Regulations. I see no need to inform anyone of their existence, beyond the strictly required legal needs. The crew's families would have been informed when the ships didn't arrive, many years ago. The nessecairy benefits would also have been paid out by responsible agencies."

"While I'm not opposed to Corporate Philantropy on principal grounds, I must object this time for several reasons. Finding the families would be an unnessecairy diversion of our resources. In addition, I'm not certain there are much profits to be made. These vessels have been discovered before, but no one bothered to come and salvage them."

[~Neri]

A series of clicking noises can be heard over the comms, an annoyed noise can be heard, followed by what sounds like a metallic clang.

"Aquire."