Breaking the Spirit

[Heresy]

Cambridge was a far cry from Leeds. Clean, bright and well protected, it didn’t strike Tim as a place where there would be much work.

“Oh well, better follow the old man’s directions…” Tim spoke to himself.

After landing, Tim followed the directions to the letter. Sure enough, he came up on a small ship dealing lot. Most ships were second hand; Startrackers, Cavaliers, Clydesdales, a CSV or two. Didn’t look like the place that would have the ship he was looking for.

Undeterred, Tim asked the dealer about his ships. At first, the dealer simply shrugged him off as an upstart teenager looking for a joyride, but this soon changed. Tim displayed his resume, his old ship and mentioned Tobias. All these things together and the dealer took him into a backroom.

The lights flickered on to reveal two ships in mint condition; a Ravens Talon and an Eagle. The price tags certainly reflected the condition too, placed at 2,799,900 and 1,899,000 respectively. The trade-in value of his hawk a mere 200,000 credits, Tim didn’t have much of a choice. After a little haggling for extra equipment, as is usual in backroom deals, Tim took off with his shiny Eagle. Uninterested in sightseeing the beautiful plains of Cambridge, he made straight for the gravity elevator.

Almost as soon as he was dragged past the clouds by the docking ring, he picked up some Corsair identified targets on his scanners. He engaged them and expected an easy fight. He got the opposite.

The movements of the Corsairs were insane. They danced in all sorts of weird directions and had the firepower to boot. The Legionnaires manoeuvring thrusters were going crazy, and one wondered how the pilots inside handled such stress. The Corsairs managed to beat down the police resistance before military help arrived, and retreated when the gunboats and their templar escort came through the trade lanes.

Tim had managed to hold his own, but they certainly weren’t molly’s by any standard. A quick check of the job list revealed high payment rates for the clearance of Corsair forces in areas around the Cambridge system; excellent hunting grounds indeed for a budding Freelancer such as Tim.

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