Sector 8
Prelude: Today. I Shall Let You Live. Tomorrow, Who Knows
The last sector. This is it. The big one.
Of course, we have to deal with admin and a few small ones first. Starting with the admin, we can hand over the message and stop being glorified postmen.
Personally I think we could have rung the doorbell, left it on the doorstep and flown away. But sure, let’s give the message ourselves.
Our message is “the rebels have a really big ship. You should blow it up”? No wonder the rebellion is winning if we he have to tell our military leaders that, explains a lot.
Oh, right, we have to blow up the really big ship. With this extra fuel, awesome. Space Molotov cocktails all round then. Fine, where are these repair shops?
Nowhere terribly useful then. Marvellous. Let’s go on our date with destiny.
Ok, word of warning here, so you’re not shocked, but we accept all surrenders from here on in. There’s nothing much to be gained by fighting to the death and risking a lucky hit.
First rebel who gets to live.
We visit the one accessible junk shop and retrieve a pretty good haul. We’re happy about the missiles and drone parts.
Second rebel. They send in a boarding party, it’s so sweet.
We shoot them a bit and then accept their surrender.
Much to our bafflement, in the epicentre of the war zone we run into some expansionist gardeners with crappy equipment.
Yeah, they call themselves terraformers but that just means a centuries-long project to grow a lot of really nice lawns and herbaceous borders,
We help out and find out that they’re unprincipled gardeners. I had an aunt like that. I can’t believe this but we go into bat on behalf of the slime mould.
We take the bribe and slink away, feeling morally compromised. Not the first time this trip. Maybe they and the mould will get along. Anyway, sod simple organisms, we have a base to defend.
Time for a final upgrade. We max out the reactor and add a bar to the weapons.
A ping appears on the scanner. Incoming.
And there it is. Big, yellow, and horribly beweaponed.
Stations, guys.