Natalia felt the ship drop out of FTL with a lurch and the sound of creaking metal.  It was one thing jumping from one system to another in a Navy vessel.  It was another entirely to do it in a merchant ship.  It wasn't unlikely that the FTL drive had largely been left unmaintained, especially during the war.  These ships were mostly used by volunteers to take people and supplies from one system to another, since the Navy could barely spare their own assets.  It wasn't unlikely that this ship had been constantly running for over a year at some point during the war.  Who knew how hard the last two and a half decades were on it?

"Alright Lynx, this is your stop," came a voice over the shipboard radio.

"I told you not to call me that," she replied, flicking a few switches in her own interceptor, preparing to undock from the shuttle bay.

"Well you [i]are[/i] a war hero, after all."

"Yeah, and I have a name.  It's Natalia."  She turned on the reactor of her ship, hearing it spool up and seeing the fighter's systems come online one by one.  The communications system came online after a short moment, and she was able to connect to her bank account and transfer her payment to the owner of the freighter.  "I've wired you your payment for the transport.  I'll be undocking shortly."

"Yeah, yeah, let me just confirm the transaction real quick..."  Natalia couldn't help but feel that this man was going to try something.  He had seemed seedy when she first contacted him, but his was the first transport to the Pollux system, and the last one for at least a week.  She needed work and had heard that it was in need of some extra hands.  On top of wanting to help with that, she had heard that one of her former squadmates was already there.

"You know, I don't think this is enough."

Natalia got a really bad feeling about the way he said that.  "Well, I'm looking at the contract right now, and it says 'in consideration of 1000 credits' and that is what I sent you."  She began to manually divert power to more critical systems; some of which were still coming online.  In the process of doing so, she saw a small ship pass in front of the bay.  She had a hard time telling at a glance what, exactly, it was, but it looked like a fighter.

"Yeah... well... you see, I'm a businessman, and an opportunist.  I found a much better deal from someone with a lot more money than you."

The fighter appeared again, this time stopping near the opening to the shuttle bay, along with two more, each one a different type.  And they were all pointing their weapons at Natalia's.  Motherfucker.

"Listen up you son of a bitch, you obviously know a thing or two about me, so I want you to think long and hard about what you're about to do."

"I know exactly who you are, and I know the risks.  I also know that you'd make a great prize for a crime lord.  Anyways, unless the next thing you're going to do is show me your tits or something, I-"

Natalia cut her comms at that and immediately got to work.  She diverted all power to her forward shields and thrusters and prepared to make a hard burn out of the freighter.  It would hurt, but her ship could pull free of the docking clamp.

"Now now now, Lynx.  I don't think you're in any position to-"

"I am Lieutenant Natalia Aprilia of the New Odessa Knights, and you clearly don't know who you're messing with, but I am more than willing to show you if you don't disengage and break off immediately!" she ordered, preemptively targeting the biggest of the fighters.  At that, the pirates began to open fire.  She knew they weren't going to try to kill her unless it came to self defense, but she couldn't afford to have her shields drop.  She threw her thrusters to max power and began to pull on the docking clamps.  It didn't take long for them to give, launching her ship out of the shuttle bay and almost into one of the pirates.  She turned around and diverted more power to her weapons.  "You asked for it," she said, launching a volley of missiles and blaster bolts at her target.  Every single shot hit it's mark, inflicting massive damage.

"You've barely touched me with your shitty lasers.  I would have thought an outfit like you lot would be more prepared," she mocked, delivering a final blow with her particle cannons.  The ship exploded, causing the other two to split up and try to attack her from two angles.  Natalia shifted her shields for all-around defense, but realized they were already down to 40%, and with them not being as focused it wasn't unlikely they were going to fail at some point soon.  Her ship took a couple of hits as she turned to one of the other aggressors.  "God dammit," she muttered.  She targeted the light fighter as it was closing in on her and fired a shot from her Gauss cannon, punching a hole right through the cockpit and killing the pilot.

The final offender was still feeling like he could take her, and actually managed to get her shields down and start inflicting hull damage.  Systems began showing status warnings as she turned to him and let loose a string of shots from her blasters, bringing his shields almost completely down.  Her missiles were locked, but still reloading, so she tried to maneuver around behind the ship, but found that this pilot may have actually know what he was doing.  She got hit a couple more times, damaging one of her thrusters and rupturing a power conduit leading to her port side blaster, leaving it without power.  "Fucker,"  she turned and regained missile lock, just as her missile rack was fully reloaded.  She fired more missiles and laid into the ship with her remaining blaster until it finally exploded.

"Fucking pieces of shit," she muttered.  She was about to turn her attention back to the freighter and attempt to disable it.  Unfortunately for her, it had already aligned and accelerated away, leaving her ship and the husks of the other three fighters sitting there.  Natalia took a long, deep breath and brought her hand to her face.  "It's been 8 days, and we're already back to our old ways, huh?"

[hr]

The full diagnostic of Natalia's ship revealed moderate damage to most of the ship.  Few of the major systems were badly damaged, with the exception of one thruster, and the aft-side power conduit, which also lowered the ship's overall shield capacity to 83%.  She had almost forgotten about the damage done by burning out of the docking clamps, and it had caused the thrusters to overheat, resulting in all of her thrusters operating at 78% efficiency, and the top of the ship's hull received some damage from physically tearing away from the clamp, resulting in her comms and sensors being damaged, leaving her unable to make any long-range broadcasts or to make any long-range scans of the surrounding area.

"Fucking pieces of shit; I can't believe I trusted that little rat," she muttered, pulling up navigation to find out where exactly she was.  Thankfully it wasn't interstellar space, or she would pretty much be dead.  She was within warp distance of a planet, but with her ship in the shape it was in, the computer couldn't tell what system it was.  There was a planet not too far away, and she figured that was the best place to start.  Worst case scenario, she was trapped in an uninhabited system with no life-bearing planets and doomed to starve.

This did not turn out to be the case as her ship dropped out of warp near the planet.  Her navigational computer was finally able to recognize the system as Molyneux and the planet as Ha'Mdama.  What was left of it, anyhow.  It was, of course, scorched by the Nomad and completely devoid of life, but her comms managed to pick up some garbled radio traffic not far away.  She switched to directional comms to help pinpoint the source, which turned out to be a moon, as yet unnamed, evidently.  RX3248.  She began to accelerate towards the moon and continued listening to her comms until things became clearer.  It took nearly an hour to close the distance, and only a couple of other transmissions were made in that time.  But finally, one came through clear enough to be understood.

[b][i]"...this is UWS Scythian, come in, over,"

"Scythian, this is RX3248 Flight Tower, we read you, over,"

"We are requesting permission to dock and unload, over,”

"Uh, wait one, over."[/i][/b]

Well then, this was interesting.  A Navy ship, out here?  How convenient for Natalia; possibly she could hitch a ride with them, and potentially even get some repairs.

[b]"pan-pan, pan-pan, RX3248 tower, this is independent interceptor Northwind Tempest, please respond."[/b]  She waited a moment, but received no response.  Perhaps they were ignoring her.  Though, in all fairness, it was more likely that her transmitter may not have been working properly.

[b]"pan-pan, pan-pan, RX3248 tower, I repeat, this is independent interceptor Northwind Tempest, please respond."[/b]  Another moment passed with no response.  She let out an exasperated sigh and ran a diagnostic of her communications system.  She was still able to receive without a problem, but it turned out that her transmitter had lost power, and no auxiliary power relays existed.  She still had an emergency transmitter, but it had a very limited range.  She switched to it and tried to divert extra power to it to see if that would work.

[b]"pan-pan, pan-pan, RX3248 tower, this is the interceptor Northwind Tempest, please respond."[/b]  She hoped this time the message would get through.  It was probably still not too clear, but she needed to establish radio contact.