Crayter Military Reporting Facility

[Panzer]

Three encounters of note to report.

It would appear, that the Maltese continue their traditional practices when it comes to trade. At about three PM, we received a notice from the listening posts across the barrier approach, that something sizeable was moving all the way from Liberty and across Erisian space, towards the Taus. Since were already in the region, having annoyed the increasingly active royal miners some already - we assumed position at the hole from t29 and soon enough, the expected ship appeared. It turned out to be an Maltese-flagged freighter, full of live cargo. We stopped them, politely asked that they relinquished all the slaves, but after a few attempts at bribery, the enemy merchant just started running and barely made it to Cali, despite being under fire the whole way.

The next encounter proved far more rewarding in just about any imaginable aspect. About five hours after the previous encounter, the listening posts in the lower hemisphere of T-23 registered signals typical for a Royal mining ship. Knowing that even under the best of circumstances, a mining ship has excellent odds of simply lasting long enough to reach the captured BMM base's safety with a corvette in pursuit and under constant fire - I decided to wait at least for a minimum of back up, in this instance to be rendered by an imperial exile fighter and one of the newly-arrived Fleet pilots, Taiki. We typically approached from the base and surely enough, our query was obliviously chewing at the beryllium asteroids. We typically asked him to stop, his reaction was flight, our counter-reaction was fire. And for once it seemed to work - About three kilometers from the base, the miner finally stopped, seemingly to surrender, which we would have accepted, but instead, after a few seconds, it started fleeing again. It was too damaged to last another shot and all the ore he had on board spilled out. Lucklily the Copernicus was nearby, after a MOX delivery, so not a droplet of the captured ore was wasted. All sold in Liberty and the proceeds split three-ways between the action's participants.

After that, we went to rearm, but as Captain Skalski mentioned, shortly after the convoy left, the Royal garrison dispatched two planes in pursuit - a fighter and bomber. Courtesy of the captain himself and the Imperial exile mentioned earlie, the enemy pursuit was defeated - the fighter destroyed, the bomber chased to the Guillestre. Unfortunately, moments after the battle was won, Skalski's plane was hit by Guillestre's flak and needed to be towed. The captain was not injured. Other than that, no damage or casualties sustained.

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