Chapter 12: How To Solo Clear A Pirate Base

I brought my ship past the hangar doors and landed it in one of the empty spaces.

After going through the landing process, I did a final check on my equipment before descending the ramp to leave my ship, my rifle held at the ready.

I advanced cautiously, my eyes sweeping the seemingly empty hangar bay for any signs of movement.

Seeing none, I continued forward and stalked through the hangar, letting my ship lock itself up behind me.

Ok, first things first, I need to find a map of this ship or at least a way to get to the generator room.

Unfortunately I do not have a quest marker or even some kind of guidance line that could show me the way to my objective so I guess I'll need to do this the hard way.

Well… I guess I should first find a way out of here to start with.

Remembering how the ship looked from the outside, the only parts of the ship that still had power were concentrated around the hangar area.

It's still quite a sizable area to cover by myself so I tried to look for the pathways that seemed to be most used.

I realised that one particular door had deep grooves carved along the ground and what looked like tracks leading towards it. I'm pretty sure this meant that the pirates were pretty much only using that particular door to get out of the hangar.

Just to be sure, I went around to check the other doors and sure enough, all of them were either broken, locked or welded shut.

Well… I suppose this makes my choice of where to go next easier…

I moved to the side of the door, hiding around the corner with my rifle held at the ready while I pushed the button that would activate the doors to slide open.

Even as the door opened, I remained hiding behind the corner, waiting to see if there were any sounds coming from behind the door.

Seeing that nothing happened even after a while, I peeked around the corner to check if the coast was clear.

What greeted me was an empty corridor with lights that flickered on and off at specific intervals.

Hmm… Is there really no other pirate here? Did I really kill everyone already? I'm feeling a little bit stupid being so cautious right now but I guess some of my game instincts are at work here.

Especially in the multiplayer version of the game, other players would always love to set up ambushes and wait for other players to fall into them.

You could have just finished clearing a pirate base and might even be in the midst of collecting the loot when a player would drop down from the ceiling and eviscerate you from behind, causing you to lose all your loot and equipment to that bastard.

Yes, I speak from experience. And yes, I hunted down that bastard and made him pay for it, even made him lose his ship in the process.

Fuck that guy.

I decided to just assume that there might still be pirates in the station and continued forward carefully, making sure to check my corners and even the ceiling as I moved down the corridor.

Luck seemed to be on my side because I managed to find a map printed on the wall of the corridor midway.

According to the map, this corridor led towards the barracks and mess hall, which I suppose suited the pirates' needs just fine which was what led them to set up base here.

I tried to look for the generator room but I realised that it was located all the way at the aft of the battleship, the part that was completely destroyed and floating in space as debris.

This means that there must be an auxiliary generator somewhere here that wasn't located in the generator room and isn't reflected on this map… Or that the pirates managed to bring in a generator of their own to power this section of the ship…

Ugh… This complicates things…

I don't know if the auxiliary generator would be enough to blow this place up even if I were to overload it and if the pirates brought in their own generator, depending on the size, this plan might even be impossible to execute…

But I suppose even if I can't blow the place up, rendering whatever is powering this place unable to function would also be a win for me.

Without power, there would also be no life support systems online and anyone who is left on the ship would also eventually die anyway.

Alright, new objective! Find out what exactly was powering this place!

First stop would be the barracks I guess. If there were any more pirates around here, they should be there.

I committed the path there to memory and began my trek there, which I realised was quite easy to reach considering the fact that every other pathway was also either blocked, destroyed or locked.

And… It was also one of the only rooms that was still lit.

It seems like my caution was not unfounded in the end because I heard voices coming from the room even before I neared it.

There seemed to be at least three different voices coming from inside.

"Hey, don't you think they've been gone for a while already?"

"Who knows, maybe they're toying with the idiot who came all the way here."

"Why would a miner come all the way out here though?"

"I dunno, if you're that curious, why don't you go out there and ask?"

"Nah, fuck that. I'd rather just stay here and do nothing."

"Careful, don't let the boss hear that or she'll gut you."

"Fuck her, she's been gone the last few days and we've yet to hear from her group either. If you ask me, she probably got herself done in by a Merc."

"All the way out here in the outskirts of known space? I doubt there would be a Merc operating out here."

"Then she got eaten by a Leviathan or something, I dunno. Even those guys who went to the mining station aren't back yet. Bet they're all stuffing themselves with the supplies on that station while we're here just eating scraps. Fuuuuuck! I didn't become a pirate for this!"

"Shut up, no one did. But we're just having a bad haul now. I'm sure once boss comes back, we'll have a better place to target soon enough."

"Yeah… I'm just going to say it, setting up here was a bad idea. We should have just stayed in the same system as Theeve… At least we had a better time there."

"Did you forget? We had to leave there because our base was discovered."

"Yeah, yeah. And I wonder whose fault it was that we got discovered in the first place?"

"You want to start something?"

"Oh please, I'll finish it."

"Both of you--"

I reached the door to the barracks and leapt in, the barrel of my rifle already trained on the location of those three before I had entered.

With a quick burst from my rifle, I had shot all three of them in the head, not even giving them time to realise they were being attacked before they were shot dead.

I then scanned the room, looking for any more potential threats but found none.

I slowly advanced into the barracks and checked each of the cots to make sure they were empty.

But at that moment, I heard a door slide open and a man came out wrapped only in a towel with a toothbrush hanging in his mouth.

"Hey, are you bastards fighting agai-- What the fuck?"

I twisted around and double tapped him in the chest, the pirate letting out a gasp of pain before toppling backwards on the ground, joining his companions in death.

I pulled out my rifle's magazine and checked the remaining bullets inside it.

Seeing that I still had plenty, I slammed it back in and went to the door that I assumed was the bathroom that the last pirate had come out of.

I peeked into the bathroom and found no one else inside, effectively clearing this entire area of any enemies.

I finally allowed myself to relax a little as I inspected the four pirates I had just killed.

The three I first shot were playing cards and there were some Credit Chips scattered on the table. Of course, I went ahead to acquire those Credits for myself by plugging them into my Codex.

Now I'm four thousand Credits richer, yay~

The rest of the barracks was empty aside from a few more guns and personal effects that I assume belong to those pirates, those I ignored.

I moved quickly to the mess hall and the place was also devoid of any life.

There was, however, one thing that stood out in the middle of the mess hall.

It was a big generator sitting in the centre of the mess hall.

Holy shit… Did the pirates strip this out from the destroyed part of the battleship and bring it here somehow?

One of them must have been a heck of an engineer to be able to do that.

Oh well, this makes my job a lot easier now. Time to blow this place up!

That was when I heard a voice come from the speakers overhead, "Hey! We're back boys!! Better not have drunk all our booze you hear?!"

… Ah fuck, there's more of them…