1 Orphaned by fate

I should have been with them but I stayed home to work on my project a rusted worn out Ra series protocol droid not much to look at it's photo sensors vaguely resembling an insects compound eyes. My parents had gone to contest the settlement fees that were being levied on all citizens of the planet regardless of how long they had been there and they never came back they had been shot repeatedly.

I sold my family's homestead and just about everything else they had aside from some things that I just couldn't part with and I headed to the space port there was no way I'd beat the empire on the ground so it was time to get creative. At the star port I was shown a lot of different ships within my price range and I found one a old gutted cloak class fighter shaped vaguely like a thick wing with two large engine nacelles protruding through it on either side of the cockpit. I had to rebuild the entire ships internal systems and rewire the entire thing needless to say I put weeks into my new work installing the best systems I could afford. By the end of my self isolation I had fully rebuilt my new ship and had installed a pair of decent weapons a pair of dual energy cannons and a torpedo launcher though I didn't have any torpedoes it could theoretically fit 7 in the magazine.

As an afterthought I installed two turbo laser cannons just above and behind the cockpit that would slowly charge and I'd get two shots every half hour or so not the most practical weapon system but they would still be useful if I needed a little extra firepower. My fighter was ready for testing so I took it out for a spin and found it exactly as I expected it to be definitely not the fastest fighter in the galaxy but strong enough to shrug off multiple hits and with enough redundancy that a single hit wouldn't put it out of the fight so now it was time to cobble together a couple torpedoes.

Creating a new torpedo was a challenge and I didn't have access to any military explosives so I had to come up with an alternative and luckily ion weapons were easy enough to develop but I'd need to scale up what I could get to do what I wanted. My torpedoes ended up being terrible but interesting at least they ended up being a oversized pulse style ion cannon that would get within a certain range and touch off a targeted three pulse burst of ion energy theoretically enough to disable a small ship in the light transport and yhat class but unless I wanted to go pirate I would have to avoid that.

Loaded with a couple torpedoes and ready as I could be I set out my new fighter shields charged armor painted in a midnight black and pale blue name stenciled on the side "Ghost". I'd heard about a small shipment of goods by a known imperial supplier in the Vider system just a short hyperdrive hop away and it was time to get my first strike in. Coming in system I tuned my sensors to their highest settings and started charging the weapons and I didn't have to wait long the scout ship sensor system I had splurged the majority of my funds on proved it's worth as just on the edge of its detection range a single large contact popped up my target was close.

I will admit that what happened next was rather anticlimactic at long range I opened up with a stream of energy cannon shots and the turbo lasers and by the time they hit the freighter was already surrendering my first shots had been targeted at their few weapons systems and the energy cannons had dealt with them quickly and the turbo lasers had stripped their shielding. I gave my demands and watched closely as they abandon ship and left the area then I swooped in and flew the freighter out of the system as quickly as I could just far enough that it would certainly take a while to find and then I looted it to my hearts content.

I ended up getting a nice crate full of old rifles and energy cells for them as well as a crate of grenades and a pair of energy cannons designed for use as heavy ground weapons. A good haul and I had more than my ship could fit but I stuffed everything that I could into my ships small cargo hold then raided the ships stores and filled my cockpit with food that could be stored for a while without any refrigeration mostly a small crate of survival rations which I basically dumped behind the pilot's seat and a handful of guja fruit think space apples.

Once I'd raided the ship to my heart's content I set a grenade to its longest delay and put it directly on the power reactor right next to the fuel lines and then booked it out of there. I got out just in time and watched as the entire aft of the small freighter went up in a blaze of expanding plasma and flying debris. I had raided every credit I could from the ship and even kept a holdout pistol I found in the captains quarters and every credit I could find it wasn't much but every credit I could get would be useful. My first raid was successful and now I had a cargo hold full of hot high quality laser rifles and a pair of laser cannons and a few more credits in my pocket so I decided to head to a well known outlaw planet to sell my goods.

After dodging a close call with a random street fight involving two groups in a rather nasty gunfight I managed to sell my goods for a decent profit and escape the insanity on planet. Once safely back in space I started looking for my next target which ended up being a fast hauler in the Corodite system a small mixed species colony with small imperial presence in the system they tended to export manufactured explosives for the empire and I wanted to hit them before the empire started upping system security. I came out of hyper as deep in system as I could and spotted my target easily I'd come down just on the edge of the gravity well maybe 400km away from the hauler practically spitting distance in space though the second they saw me they poured on the speed headed towards the safe jump distance.

I didn't have time to charge my turbo lasers before engaging so I decided it was time to test out my home made torpedoes and fired one while blasting away with my laser cannons. My torpedo hit but it didn't appear to do much so I launched the second one which did the job seemingly as all their systems seemed to short out and die and then they launched escape pods all of them in fact. Before I could start celebrating I spotted a imperial gunship with a fighter escort on their way out to intercept me so I returned the favor my turbo lasers were fully charged and the capacitors I'd installed after my first raid were charging by the time I was in range of the gunship I should be able to get off a double volley of turbo laser shots and it was time to get some direct vengeance.

I figured I could take out a couple of the imperial fighters on the first pass and so I went in full bore pushing my ship to the limits of its engines. Now I figured I had a 50/50 chance of winning but if I wanted to claim my spoils I had to take out these guys before more ships showed up and I was pushing my ship to the limits. The imperial fighters got into range quickly and I spray and prayed and managed to drop three of them before they passed me already spinning my ship around I checked my shields and they were down twelve percent not a bad start considering how many hits I'd taken the imperial fighters didn't seem to have any shields and a single hit was enough to put them out of the action. The last enemy fighter was not wasting time and was already trying to make a second pass but once I got the guns on target he quickly joined his fellows just as the gunship got into range and started pelting me with his few laser cannon turrets.

Shields dropping quickly under the barrage I spun my ship around and evaded as best I could until I was quite close and then I unloaded my turbo lasers and energy cannons on it and I wasn't expecting much but was pleasantly surprised when their shields seemed to drop and my last two energy cannon shots hit home on their hull. I spun back for another pass and they opened up with everything they had turbo lasers energy cannons and even a pair of missiles that were very poorly aimed. My energy cannons raked all down the side of the gunship and silencing several gun emplacements allowing me to pull back on dangerously low shields they were down to 12% but I was still in the fight so I made a third pass on the weakened side this time and must of hit something important because there was a couple decent explosions as I passed.

I made a fourth pass and targeted the area just ahead of the engines with everything I had and this time I bored through the armor and hit something important as moments after my pass escape pods were being launched. I made a final pass on the gunship and watched as some small explosions started tearing it apart so I turned to go collect my loot and get out of the system. The fast hauler was right where I left it floating dead in space and so I put on my survival suit and boarded it looting as quickly as possible and I filled my cargo hold with a entire crate of simdex a high power explosive and a handful of light personal weapons including a pair of laser pistols and a single grenade the other grenade I found I used to sabotage the reactor on the hauler before I got myself out of there.

I got into my ship and headed out at top speed and watched as an imperial star destroyer jumped in system and started launching fighters but I'd made it out just in time. The next few days I spent jumping systems in a random pattern to throw off pursuit and then headed for the outlaw world I'd made my first trip to and ended up selling my collection of loot for a decent price and picking up a trio of new torpedoes and the parts to build a couple of my own ion torpedoes. I ended up spending a week on tatooine and building three of my improvised torpedoes I was ready for another adventure I'd cost the empire a few credits and earned quite a few more as it was now I could almost afford a second fighter not that I could fly it by myself but if I wanted to I could and that was plenty.

Armed and ready I trolled through any information that I could get on imperial supply routes and freighters and I could already tell that they were starting to upgrade their cargo ship convoys and reducing the number of single ships. The weakest convoy I spotted was an industrial transport freighter with a gunship as escort and considering my prior experience fighting one I figured I had a good chance of pulling it off so I decided to check it out. Dropping into the system and turning my scanners to maximum I started searching for my target and spotted it refueling at a small station in system and then I spotted the defensive forces. Gunship was not what was what I'd call what they had it was a proper corvette with fighter escort and well I figured I'd wait until they were leaving the station as I certainly didn't have the weaponry to deal with a station and a corvette plus fighters. I shut down everything that I didn't need and left the sensors in passive mode and waited for hours as the freighter fueled up and the corvette did it's random patrol though I made sure that I was nowhere near it's patrol area.

As I waited for the freighter to depart I planned my attack I'd hit the enemy fighters in my first pass take them out of the equation then dump all of my torpedoes on the corvette and depending on what the situation was after the torpedoes I'd go after the freighter. The freighter fires up its drives and departed the station after refueling for six hours and once they were 20 kilometers away from the station I powered everything back up and pushed my fighter to the max. My plan worked out exactly how the gunship had my first 3 torpedoes were my custom ion torpedoes which didn't seem to do all that much but anything was better than nothing while the remaining four normal torpedoes dropped the shields and the last hit right on the bow of the corvette the fighters were easy enough to dispatch and I only lost 8% of my shields to them.

After bombarding the corvette with torpedoes I gave them four turbo laser hits right where I estimated the reactor was and watched as they lost power and stopped dead in space. The freighter was running full power away but there was no chance they could escape though by the time I caught up to them my turbo lasers had recharged and I shot them right in the drives and watched as their shields failed and then pumped in a number of energy cannon shots into their engines and then they abandoned ship. I decided to take the ship cargo and all and using the remaining engines to get it out of the system right now I had little use for a cargo of construction supplies but I figured I'd want them eventually.