“Alright ladies, all pilots to your jumpgate around Kourmonen. We’ll show those Amarr pigs what being a Minmatar is all about.” There is a chorus of agreement over the comm channel as our fleet begins jumping into Kourmonen from its surrounding systems. 

The Amarr have been stepping up the fight recently. Now it was time to push them back.

We gathered in an unrestricted military complex, sent our technicians to work, and waited. They wouldn’t take long, and we knew they would come in force.

The pilots were well trained. They were Tribal Liberation Force militia after all. Everyone took their designated positions. Morale was high. I was pleased to be commanding them.

That is when the sensory overload occured. I was hit with a massive headache. My vision went dark, then bright blue. I could feel my Vagabond, a ship I hadn’t pulled out of the dock in a long while, slip into warp, destination unknown.

“Aura, what is going on?” I thought, evoking the command to stop the ship. I was deaf. I was blind. Aura didn’t respond. “Aura, status.” I pushed my will against the machine. No response. 

I reached for manual override to my pod. Something was drastically wrong. My mind was reeling at the thoughts of sabotage. The rear of my pod hissed open. I started screaming for assistance.

My crew helped untether me from the network of cables that kept me in touch with the ship. “Status report!” I bellowed across the deck. “All systems unresponsive Colonel! The computers are locked up! We have no control.”

I stormed over to one of the nearby terminals, and smashed it with the meat of my closed fist. “Dammit!” A blue screen was on each and every monitor. “Reboot the system! We need to regain control, and I mean NOW!”

The computer techs quickly initiated a manual override. Everything went blank. The ship eased out of warp. We had no control. We were sitting ducks. We were dead if anyone found us.

“Get me that system back online now!” I could see them scrambling frantically, each of us knowing the perilous situation we had suddenly found ourselves in.

1 minute, nothing.

“Sir, we can’t reboot the system! Diagnostics are showing corruption in the base Aura system!” What was going on, I could not tell you. It is not my area of expertise. All I knew is that I had a fleet depending on me. Sure, my second in command would step up, and Neu Bastian was more than capable, but dammit, it was my fight, and I wanted to be there. 

“And there’s nothing you can do? Is that what you’re really telling me?” I threw a menacing glare at my technicians. “Well, we could do a manual reinstall, wipe the system clean. We would lose everything custom you’ve done, but might be able to get the ship running again.”

Without hesitation, I knew the command as it was coming out of my mouth. “Do it.”

90 minutes later, we were operational. Granted it was a base model, out of the box Vagabond now, but that’s ok. I could work with that.

We quickly opened our intel channel, only to find the battle was over. We had secured a victory against the Amarr, who arrived with a heavy battleship fleet. And we missed it all.

I was going to have to get to the bottom of this. And fast.