Ethanol in Your Engines

The glorious drink, the hooch, the sauce, a pirate's best friend. There when you need it like so many wenches weren't; on the other hand, it lingers unwantedly the next morning, suspiciously akin to said wenches in the end. Needless to say, I was drunk again, stumbling down the hangar gangway for another night of hazy debauchery and uninhibited, overconfident piracy, literally falling headlong into the cockpit of the Rifter like so much dead weight off the plank of olde. Slosh into the pod, plug in (that tickles) and boot up. Hello there, ship o' mine!

I manage to undock, avoiding any would-be catastrophes - that passing Thorax's pilot probably didn't even notice me clip him, it'll paint right over. At last, space, the final frontier; stars as far as the eye can see, in a system so sleazy not even CONCORD's finest would venture forth to dish me out a D.U.I.. Even in my lovely cloud of inebriation, I know there's a miner out there somewhere, unprotected and naive in his belief that such an ass-end-of-nowhere hole like this couldn't possibly draw the attentions of any more dangerous than a few prostitutes or antisocial wreck scavengers. Mentally fumbling for the proper system protocol, I finally engage the drive and lurch into warp, out of range of the station sentries, a frog's leap across the system to a moon-laden planet the name of which I'm damned if I know.

We'll call this an ellipsis. Skipping the details, I make at least two impromptu CSPA calls to my estranged ex-girlfriend while trying to drunkenly operate the scanner before I realize I have my Contacts list loaded on the HUD, though after opening the proper utility my efforts ultimately prove fruitful, if only by luck: a lone Iteron spotted off the port bow, luck be a carebear tonight. With a hardly graceful jerk to the left, I punch back into warp, speeding towards the nearby asteroid belt, spirits high on bourbon and Quafe.

Falling out of warp and struggling sloppily to keep the Rifter properly aligned, I spot my target at twenty-some-odd kilometers, scraping out a few jet' cans of hedbergite. Popping my afterburners, I head in with a close orbit in mind... He hasn't seen me! I'm practically shaking his hand by the time he realizes I'm there, warp-scrambling from a wavering orbit, autocannons blazing away with drunken abandon. Several stray shots puncture the Iteron's cargo bay and I get a mouthful of pod goop as I go to curse aloud, completely forgetting I'm in an entirely liquid environment. Knowing I probably Swiss-cheesed whatever goodies he might've had in there, I can only hope for a meager ransom. The target ship spouts jets of flame as I reach structure, and I kill my turrets.

...Well, so I thought. My camera drones all relay the blast as the Iteron first crumples in a half-hearted implosion, then bursts outward, spraying debris every which way in a fireworks show I hadn't intended to see. By the time I realize what's happened I already have the channel open with my victim, and he likely heard my slurred string of expletives, followed by somewhat embarrassed silence. At long last I reclaim enough seeming sobriety to mutter: "W-...uhh..ten million and I'll let'cha go!" Oh wait. There's no one here. I didn't even scramble his pod, which is probably docked and safe by now. Rindis, you are a genius from every visible facet of your personage. You are the pride of criminal entrepreneurs everywhere. You are a complete moron.

Collecting what measly loot there was left after the explosion, I head back to my temporary base of operations after my 'dangerous criminal' area warning has worn off, docking clumsily to ponder the depth of my stupidity. A long while passes and I decide I'm sober enough to return to the hunt. I undock. A volley of large projectile slugs punch melon-sized holes in the hull of my Rifter. There is a bang, there is fire, there is a bright light and there is the sound of metal torn from metal. I'm egg-bound. The Iteron pilot got his friends. I need a drink.