Evangeline Anastasia McDowell

[Bazza]

Entry#: 056
Date: 01 - 01 - 818 AS @ 08:37 SUT
Title: Oh boy...

A terribly intricate and cunning plan, which could have been executed with absolutely no-one knowing that anything had ever occurred. But of course that simply isn't how I do things.

The first step involved Perque contacting his wife, through proxy of his best mate and neighbour, to get her to round up everything of value and get out of the house. DSE has had rent-a-cops watching the house and no doubt the phone lines, for months, trying to catch Kendrick, who, according to them, eloped with billions of credits. Of course these billions of credits reside in the pockets of the man who now captains Kendrick's old Mammoth - but that's a story for another day. I planned this stage out and I must say I'm quite proud of it - the neighbour popping over and asking for some milk, whilst exchanging a letter containing all the relevant information. Dumbarse doughnut-punchers would never figure it out.

Stage two was the most entertaining. I brought the Alsatia down through the orbital docking rings to the planet's surface. We waited for night to fall before heading out.

The Alsatia, in all her ungainly exuberance, came thundering through the sky with the grace of passing flatulence. Atmospheric flight isn't really her thing. All engines at WOT on a 45 angle isn't subtle, for sure. I can only imagine what it would have sounded like from the outside. Flying at almost ground level surely didn't help keeping our profile low. But whatever.

I flew to the prefecture which Mrs. Perque calls home, and at the time set forth in the notice delivered earlier I crash-landed into the baseball pitch at the end of the block. I managed to burn the grass to a crisp. Oops.

My prize ran out from the safety of the trees and within seconds we had the wife and son on board. The rent-a-cops had, of course, followed Mrs. Perque to the pitch, but what were they gonna do? I had a spaceship and they had a car.

The lardball duds came chasing after her across the pitch. Bad idea. I moved the turrets around and got them trained onto the cops. One round, fired into the ground right in front of them. They both froze solid as they realised their position. Time for fun. One more round fired - one cop car nuked and two men in need of new undies.

I really wanted to stay a bit longer and have my way with these bastards, but sadly my fun time was stopped short when some real problems showed up - Air Force fighters, no doubt searching for the massive radar blip the Alsatia presents, flying unannounced over civilian air space. I hit WOT and with a bone-jarring jolt the ship was again airborne. We got some speed up and aimed for space. I, however, was no match for the fighter planes which caught up in minutes.

The leader of the couple did try to force me to surrender, "stop you ship and return to the surface, blah blah blah." Wasn't having a word of it. I just kept getting higher.

I had the rest of the crew on board take over the gunner positions and give the planes something to worry about. As they approached the ship I ordered my crew to open fire. Of course I had little chance of hitting highly trained specialists like these guys, but it would create enough of a distraction to buy enough time to get out of the atmosphere. I could do that - they couldn't - and that was how I would make my escape.

The fighter pilots had to think real quick as a barrage of pulse-laser fire rained down on them from the hindquarters of the Alsatia. With all engines at full power I was steadily getting higher and higher.

The leader gave me one more chance to surrender over the radio.

"Nah. I think I'll just keep getting higher and higher. How high can you go? Eighty thousand? A hundred thousand? Mate, I can go to infinity.".

Everything paid off once I climbed to about 30km. The fighters had reached their operational ceiling and were unable to follow me any further. With my tail defeated and the ship breaking free of Manhattan's gravity well I was able to back off the engines a bit, which was a good thing because I found myself with less than 15% of my fuel supply left.

Where could I go with that much fuel? The only place close enough is Ouray Base inside the Copperton asteroid field. I'm sure the lads there will appreciate sweet little me just showing up out of the blue.

I had to get out of Manhattan orbit before the real Navy sent ships after me. It was a bit hairy flying through open space between Manhattan and the edge of the Jersey debris cloud, but luck was on my side and nothing came after me; once I slipped beyond the edges of the field I was home free.

I set the navmap to the location of the Colorado Jumphole and sat back. I had some time to regroup and reorganise. Kendrick and his family were getting all mushy down in the cargo bay while Misaka was once again furious at my penchant for putting us in danger, but no doubt hot for my studly awesomeness.

Kana floated over from the gunners' bay and showed me something quite interesting - she had managed to snap a picture from the rear camera during our escape. Quite proud of her, actually.

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