You ever give your heart and soul to something, only to find out that that something is being used in a way that corrupts both it and you through and through? I have. Ageira took my work, and poked so many holes in it until even a seven year old could abuse it. Then they gave it to their special clients, top-tier customers willing to pay billions for backdoor access into the tradelane software. Backdoor access that wasn't there before. Once I found out, naive as I was, I took it to my supervisor, they reported it to their supervisor. Then suddenly, I'm being moved to a different department for work-related issues and my supervisor disappears.
I realize I'm done for, so I keep the proverbial head down. I start to notice things; objects not where I left them, doors suddenly unlocked even though I am 100% positive I locked them. I begin to prepare for an exit plan. Before I can, I receive a cryptic message on my personal device, amazing work as my security is top-notch, detailing instructions on how to evade my, apparently closing in, capturers. I have no idea how, but those instructions were accurate down to the second.
The station turrets were a joke. I am not the best pilot, but any idiot can recognize that fractal ellipse pattern. Ageira uses it for most things, from generating security codes to encrypting their own files, makes an odd sort of sense they used it to program those turrets. One of their shots did graze my external camera mount, so I lost any footage from the scape. Luckily it realigned itself a few minutes later.
Next issue were the Ageira patrols (can you say 'fractal ellipse search pattern'?) which weren't much of an issue, but the Xenos, those were unexpected. Luckily they were a bunch of rookies and were taken out easily enough. By a strange twist of fate, a familiar voice came from my speakers. I will only refer to him by his new alias '[REDACTED]', but there's no words for the feeling of not being utterly alone.
Together we shot through the openings of the patrols in the field. [REDACTED] told me that instead of going through the gate and risk getting tagged (at this point, a near certainty), we should use a jump hole. He knew of one, appeared stable so we transversed the event horizon and ended up in New York. Not knowing where to head next aside from risking the trip into the badlands, we turned to Rochester base. Here we were able to find various contracts, so we could impress our soon-to-be saviors, the Liberty Rogues. Good thing too, it set us up with some much needed cash. Even though we weren't that well known yet, we decided to chance the trip into the badlands. With some luck and a trick I picked up at Rochester from a friendly Junker, we would be able to get through to the Rogues.
Turns out, luck isn't all you need. What you need is a reputation. At first the Rogues wouldn't even talk to us, so I deployed my trick. I hacked my way into one of their older ships and changed our IFF from there. This seemed to work, they guided us to a hidden base in the Badlands, I think they call it Buffalo. However, once aboard they quickly discovered my 'trick', and we were refused any supplies, access to ships other then our own, and left to our own devices. Luckily for us, our private devices chimed with a new message which in turn provided a new direction. Niverton, in Pennsylvania.
We quickly made our way there and found what we were looking for. A pair of Bactrians with not too many scrapes. A quick transfer of the funds we gained from our earlier contract work and we were good to go. Next stop was Texas. There were rumors about special weapons, something that would surely impress our Rogue overlords. So we set out to find some. After a few misses and some tense time in one of Texas' radiation fields, we found the remains of the Dallas Research Complex.
We made our way back, but were forced to divert to Beaumont Base. LPI as well as other lawful personnel were scouting out the gates and the nearby fields of debris. We decided to lay low for a while. Afterwards we would take some more missions for our Junker hosts, and we'd be able to show our faces on Buffalo again.
Once we proved ourselves yet again, we received word Buffalo had forgiven my previous missteps. Making our way back, we felt like gods. Here we were, escaped from corporate clutches and doing pretty well all things considered. Sure we were on the run, but we also managed to take out hosts of enemy fighters, a few bases, and had survived incredibly dangerous parts of space.
That all changed when we reached Buffalo for the second time. Turns out that although forgiven and we could now conduct business on the base, nobody actually wanted to, being an unknown quantity. So we resorted to more grunt work, mostly against bounty hunter patrols. For the last stretch we decided to simply bribe one of the station officials and once word spread of our new standing, we could now dedicate ourselves to the last leg of our mandatory journey.
The messages were fairly specific, smuggle Cardamine to Montezuma in Cortez. Tried and bribed as we did, raw Cardamine was off-limits to outsiders. Instead we were offered to smuggle the Cardamine Cartridges. Hoping this would appease our would-be benefactors, both [REDACTED] and I loaded our holds to the brim and took off. Our journey was immediately hindered by the presence of a Liberty Navy and 46th Fleet check point on the California gate. Deciding to use guile rather than brute force, we broke into the security layer of the California-West Point lane and faked an outage to its sensor network. This caused the checkpoint to break up and check out the disturbance allowing us to quickly slip into California.
Opting for speed over safety, we raced through the lane network, hoping we could outrun those who would be no doubt chasing us. Several minutes later we entered Cortez and disappeared into the icefields, looking for Montezuma base. The rest of the journey uneventful, the dodging of giant ice chunks notwithstanding, we arrived at Montezuma and sold our precious cargo.
As I type this, the wait begins for a message from our rescuers. Hopefully this was not all for naught.
Graphical proof of the exploits reported above is contained in the encrypted storage bucket attached below.
PS: There appears to be a potential flaw in the coding of the final message. It contains remnant code of the supposed message formatting, which I was able to reconstruct but it did not implement this into destination as it should.
PERMANENT AFFILIATION POLICY CONSENT: I hereby agree that my character will be permanently affiliated with The Lane Hackers. In case of leaving the official faction I am allowed to continue playing my character only under independent Lane Hacker affiliation in accordance to generally accepted Lane Hacker lore.
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