With a jerk I woke up. My Hound shifted as my brain struggled to make sense of my surroundings, then my view cleared. Outside, the system’s star’s light glanced off the hull of my stealth bomber as it floated in the protective bubble of the POS I was spending the night in. Fluid router downtime was looming, and I wondered what had woken me.
[ Druur, are you there? ] , asked a voice on our Alliance comm channel. Greygal, our intrepid leader.
Subvocalized or not, my first words were just a croak. I swallowed and tried again: “Am now.”
[ Do you have time to scout me to UQY, taking the back way? I figured I’d stage a TCU there while it’s quiet, in case tomorrow’s fight goes south. ]
“Sure thing. Give me a sec - I just woke up.”
[ You definitely sound like you only just woke up, even more than usual! ]
I smiled weakly in my pod while the systems of my ship went back to full power. My warp drive sputtered to life and the POS became a rapidly shrinking point of light behind me. In 60M, Greygal was already waiting in her transport. Our trip would take us through just two systems of ours, but since the TCU was of strategic importance... I took the lead and warped to the 9-H gate, activating the sequence right when I landed.“9-H is… friendly.”
[ Good, I’m coming in. Hey, how is your POCO project coming? ]
“It’s coming. There is only one left, and it will come out of reinforce in a few hours.” I answered while my warp drive did its duty again. The next gate loomed large, then the warp tunnel distorted my vision. “In fact … UQY is empty … we had it out of reinforce Saturday morning already, but Exiled was simply too active for us to do anything about it.” I grimaced in memory - Exiled was quite good at insta-locking camps and skirmishing, and especially our large ships would have just died needlessly.
[ Ok, hopping into UQY. You know, you could put these timers onto the calendar, so that people could see them, and, like, join your fleets. ] She coughed. [ Hint hint. ]
I felt chagrin as our ships crossed the space towards our staging POS. Our project certainly had turned out more complicated and lossy than expected, and the strain of alarm-clocking the timers was wearing on my team. Asking for Alliance backup would have made some things easier, but yet …
It wasn’t that we rejected backup when people offered, but somehow it mattered that we didn’t plan on it, even if we couldn’t put the exact reasons into words.
Greygal understood even so. [ You crazy lone wolves with your squirreling… ] she commented with amusement while the crews unloaded the TCU from her ship’s cargo hold, and I laughed.
“Yup.”
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