The Red Racoon Dog

[Tain]

"Devestator, you may kill him if you wish."
"... He does."


Location: Vicinity of Omicron Delta Jumphole
Grid: ??
System: Omicron Minor


"F-ck."
"F-ck?"
"I'm starving."
"As you should be, Captain."

Tain looked incredibly annoyed and dissatisfied as he rudely brushed past one of his droids working on the bridge. He wished he had never opted to get them the "Satire Matrix" upgrade that some craterfaced programmer probably developed overnight. He also rather wanted to find the man that had convinced him to purchase such a thing and find a nice cargo cell to shove him in for the rest of his life. With the droids to keep him company of course. It was far from the worst that he had conjured up in his spare time. A hungry belly and sarcastic droids that commonly failed to perform their tasks without locking up at random was excellent fuel for sadism.

He had been working to maintain a low profile lately, an effort which was ruined in full when he had randomly encountered a group he had never dealt with before... "Ghosts" they were called. Controlled by the great alien race K'chm. No. That couldn't be right. He was pretty sure it was some other form of the word "Ghost" and that there was an actual name for their alien race, rather than a sneezing sound effect. Ah well. It didn't matter too much anyway, he was sure that it was pretty close to a sneeze.

As a matter of fact, he hadn't just simply "ran into them". He had ran into their leader, and one of their battleships to boot. A long discussion ensued when Tain had unwittingly commented on how the leader (who he didn't know was the leader at the time) was "harsh". Tain thought it interesting that there was actually an army out there that wanted to completely obliterate the entire human race, and he hadn't heard much about their philosophy before conversing with their leader. He didn't express his feelings vocally, but at the end of the conversation he was left with the notion that the entire group of "Ghosties" was completely bat**** crazy.

He had undocked from Freeport 11 to continue his trade runs shortly after their conversation ended. The other battleship accompanying the Ghosty leader had been lurking just within his sensor reach through the whole of the conversation. The proximity had Tain's interest piqued. Upon leaving Freeport 11 to traverse the system to Yaren, he had paid note to the battleship exiting cruise behind him. It had followed him to the Corsair hideout.

Long story short, before leaving the system he had doubled back to express his feelings in a different way and had done a highspeed flyby of the Ghosty battleship, screaming, "BAAAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK!" and sending a cascade of pulse fire from his port batteries crashing into the other ship. Shortly after, he ran like hell. He didn't know whether or not he had made an enemy that day... but he did like the laugh he got out of taunting something four times larger than the Dog.

Other than that, things had been pretty quiet. He was awaiting a designation change from the Galactic Ship Registry, and had recently recruited a new pilot into the GCB to be his money cow. The pilot was surly, rude, and refused to give his name, preferring to be referred to by his designation of "Black Freight" instead. But, he was loyal as far as Tain could tell. The Dog wouldn't have to run any more trade routes unless he felt like it.

Things were smoothing over nicely. Now if he just knew where the hell his partner had gone...

---

Penguin.