Steky grudgingly woke from a deep sleep and tried to open her eyes. Instead of data from her retina, data streaming from her implants took its place. Planets and moons streamed by external cams as her ship warped. Not remembering why this was so alarming, she wrenched herself the rest of the way awake and pinged her sensor arrays. Where hostile ships in the local system? How long would the warp last? Where would she land? Was the cloaking module ready? How much capacitor? Was the jump drive online? As her ship dropped out of warp she scanned the vicinity. Her ship was at a moon, and she remembered it as the location of an alliance station. As she realized the friendly station was gone, she immediately searched for hostile ones. The closest was at another moon. With no immediate hostile engagement, Steky activated the cloaking device and exhaled as her ship phased out of visibility to local probes.
Her communication systems pinged with a fleet invitation from Grievance. "Wakey, wakey Steky! Fleet up and I will get you up to speed. I've got eyes and this system for the last week and its currently empty of capsuleers except you and I. No telling how long that will last though, so we have to get you out of here."
Steky's training kicked in and she held all her questions for later. The ship's systems indicated a date that she couldn't actually accept, but if she had really been in cryo for a decade it would explain why so many systems flashing red. "Jump drive is online," she replied. There was a slight pause and Grievance shouted, "Jump!" Steky arched her back and opened her mouth with the silent scream as she and the supercarrier that her mind commanded suddenly generated a boson sphere and tore through the folds of spacetime to a solar system many light-years away.
As soon as the star-field shimmered back into existence, her navigation system received a warp command and alarms blared. The ship had been targeted and webbing fields formed around it. Steky silenced the alarm as the seeming attack was coming from the fleet commander, a technique to help her mammoth ship to align for warp a bit faster. A few very long seconds later as she watched for hostiles, her ship entered warp and landed at a safe spot away from the jump beacon. She activated the cloak once more and sighed with relief.
The fleet commander was silent on comms and she knew he was occupied with the potential destruction of his ship if a hostile entered the star system while his jump beacon was lit. Tired from the strain of the FTL jump, she disconnected from her pod and crawled out onto the deck of the bridge to awaken the crew.
Steky approached each cryopod with trepidation. As with the other systems, some of them flashed red, containing only the remaining biomass of the former crew member it once held. As she awakened each squad commander, she merely shook her head at their questions that poured out after the retching that accompanied waking from extended cryosleep. "We will have a crew meeting once I get answers."
Shocku watched as each ship pilot come online in the virtual command bridge he had setup for their meeting. Grievance waved cheerily. Rask grumbled that he had forgotten to turn autocycle off his jump beacon, doubling the length of time he had been vulnerable. "Well, your clone lived to tell the tale, didn't it," Grievance said laughing. "What the fuck!" an angry Steky shouted as she came online. Shocku looked at her with empathy, "I get it Steky, I'm sorry." "A fucking decade on ice?!" she cursed. Shocku's tone turned firm, "We all agreed ten years ago that it was time to go on ice. Its all in the logs. But things have changed.
The horn of Goondor sounded, and I felt it necessary to wake the rest of you so we could come to our descendants' aid." Shocku explained that Goonswarm was under attack from the rest of New Eden and had called out for retired pilots to come to assist the alliance in its struggle for survival in the Delve region. "Delve? We were in Deklein!" Steky exclaimed. "Were." Shocku replied. "Things have changed... alot." Steky shook her head, "What can we possibly do to help?" Shocku laughed, "Well, you can bring your Hel!"
