Once Upon a Time In Ardar

Wasn't long before the story was relayed to Texas Red

But the outlaw didn't worry men that tried before were dead.
Marty Robbins - Big Iron

Spectre hadn't been to happy when he saw my latest post, but I didn't care. I dialed him up and offered a duel to settle our differences. Rifters at Dawn. He accepted and we both made our way to Ardar for the final showdown.

As I passed through the gate I warped to the rendezvous point. Spectre was waiting for me thirty kilometers away. His Rifter looked fairly customized, but in the darkness of space I found it impossible to make out any details.


We began to close the gap almost immediately. His targeting system went active before mine, but none of our modules reached out that far, so it didn't matter. Mine locked onto him shortly after that and both our webifiers activated at the same time. His ship tried to pull into a close orbit, but I outran him and held distance. I knew he was less skilled and hoped he was using EMP ammo instead of Barrage.

The decision to take a far orbit instead of a close one is almost risk free. If he's loading EMP I'll win by keeping range, if he's loading Barrage, we'll be even and I can make more decisions from there.

In this case he was obviously packing Barrage, so I went ahead and pulled into a closer orbit to break his tank. It was a good call, but his guns were cutting pretty hard into my own armor. My guns began to hum as I set them to overload. I watched huge chunks of his armor fly off as the hypervelocity rounds chipped his ship. Our armor repairers were doing nothing to stop the onslaught, and suddenly we were both in structure. This was going to be a close one.

I saw I had the capacitor for another armor rep, and activated the module. Almost as quickly as my readout showed more armor, it disappeared again as a Phalanx rocket exploded against my hull. His armor growed just a bit but then was shattered again by my own autocannons. As the last of my armor flew into space I overloaded my afterburner. There was no turning back now.

The guns on my ship were starting to show the strain and I stopped overloading them, losing them would be foolish at this point.

His autocannons were making short work of my hull, punching holes through the fuselage and through the crew compartments. Luckily for them I had left the crew in Hek. They'd complained then but I was glad of my choice now. My own guns were punching through his hull just as quickly. We both reached half hull at the same time and then I was surprised to see one of his guns explode, taking his other autocannons as well.

And then his ship became a bloom of rapidly expanding plasma.

It was a good fight, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course Spectre has a different view on how things took place. He is of course a liar and a rogue. He says he had Republic Fleet EMP loaded, but the killmail clearly shows he had Barrage loaded into his guns when he died. My honor is proved, his reign of terror is over. I am content.

Good Day.