Okay, so a few days ago, myself and hermana Daniela Ferucci were doing a standard patrol of Omicron Gamma. Nothing extroadinary about that, right? Anyway, we picked up a nomad roughly 12 kilometers -directly above- planet Crete.
Now, I'm not one for chasing the blue folks around the place, but Crete? That's asking for a beating. Besides that, I was actually looking to analyse the performance of the Mamoru in real "edge-world" (as they call our region of space) combat.
Giving chase to the blue sword cutting its way through to Omicron Kappa, it tried in vain to ward me off. Firstly, it decided it would be a good idea to invade my mind with a warning. When that didn't work, it sent me some sort of vision of a glowing box in a storehouse on planet Crete. Thanking the nomad for that piece of valuable information, I continued the chase, with Daniela closing in behind me thanks to her formation boosters.
Eventually, we ended up in Omicron Delta. Not being stupid, and more importantly having uploaded all of the navigational data from my old Praetorian, Sunslayer, in to the comparatively new Mamoru, we set course for the Omicron Iota jump hole. Even though the nomad broke off infront of us, there wasn't any other origin point that I was aware of, and sure enough, it trundled into scanner range after a small wait.
However, it was no longer alone.
Several new targets, two extra light fighters and one bomber, apparently phasing around the place, appeared. The effectiveness of the rare "design" as it can be described, of the bomber was not high, suggesting that its phasing was not voluntary and may have more been a malfunction of that evolution. Importantly here, I would like to stress that I've not seen a nomad ship of this type before, and I could not gauge its effectiveness in combat due to its phasing. Be careful around the nomads, hermanos...
As the nomads finished gathering their forces, so to did our tentative allies, the Order. Sending a small task force to assist, the Order did so in good fashion. Despite the fact that over the course of the battle, my ship was being worn down by the Nomads, the Order kept up the pressure. Curiously, after the first nomad light fighter imploded in a blue flash, their organisation broke down horrendously. This is even more surprising when you consider that at this point, my regen bays were completely empty.
Daniela was suffering from flight control latency problems at the time, but tried her best to assist after managing to perform some in-flight maintenance. Her help, when it came, was invaluable.
Before the fight concluded however, a nomad heavy fighter appeared from the jump hole. Wierdly, an image of a woman wearing a red dress flicked across, I gather, all of our viewscreens. I didn't know they could control our systems as well... you would've thought we'd have already lost if they could. Anyway, the assassin, its name designated by the Order, was brought down given some time. The remaining forces, two light fighters and the aforementioned bomber, retreated to Omicron Iota, where we didn't follow.
However, a Zoner Juggernaught did... though, it wasn't firing during the course of the battle. I have no idea what happened to that Captain and his crew, but its his own stupid fault if his ship ends up glowing blue too.
That was not the most interesting part of the encounter, however. Not for me, anyway.
During a battle, we all know that its standard procedure to activate the tractor beam sweep when an enemy is downed. You can pick up useful things, such as ammunition, for your own ship. Foolishly, as it is instinctive for me to do now, I did so... and got lucky, if you count your ship being modified beyond your control as lucky.
My internal scanners indicated that I had picked up a "Nomad Thruster II" whatever that means. I mean, obviously, its nomad material, its a thruster, and its the number II version. But, well, its being a bit invasive now, and its not something that weedkiller can get rid of. Time will tell if something can be done about it, but count yourself lucky that this isn't a video feed.
One thing I wont settle for is my Mamoru turning into a damn flying glowstick, so if a chainsaw goes missing from the stores, know that I'm just borrowing it.
Oh, and I checked out the store house on Crete which was, according to the nomad, glowing. It turned out not to be a lie, there was an active artifact in the box, which had apparently become active shortly after the inspection by both our scientific minds and those of the Order planetside. They were packaged for delivery on one of our transports, and were due to be loaded roughly two hours after I got there. Luckily, that never happened. After a short examination, the active artifact was deemed to be highly unstable. Consequently, it was repackaged into the core of a nuclear warhead, and fired into our red dwarf star via the main planetary gauss cannon. Problem solved.
