The Last Flight of the Sunset Chaser

I woke up at Grim HEX. Bad lighting, worse smells. It’s been a long week.

Spectemus picked me up in his Carrack, The Exodus, pulling me out of the shadows and into a proper crew again. He’d been contracted by the UEE to run a patrol through Stanton — eyes on a sector around Yela. Simple on paper. Never simple in practice.

We crewed up and pushed out. It didn’t take long. Near Yela’s orbit, not far from Grim HEX itself, we ran into trouble. A group of would-be pirates trying to pull apart a Constellation-class ship called the Good Time Sunset Chaser. Desperation, arrogance, maybe both.

Three Cutlass Blacks broke off and came straight at us. They hit fast and sloppy. We answered with a fully crewed Carrack, shields up and guns hot. It wasn’t a fight — it was a slaughter. We cut through them like a hot knife through butter.

But in the chaos, tragedy struck. One of the Cutlasses clipped the Good Time Sunset Chaser during the exchange. Damaged and panicked, the Connie tried to break away — instead it dipped into Yela’s gravity well. We watched helpless as it spiraled down as we were enaged with the pirates. The Sunset Chaser went down with a fire trailing behind it, until it slammed into the frozen surface of Yela. No survivors.

We did what we could for them. Retrieved the flight recorder. Collected dog tags, crew manifests, and whatever personal effects we could from the debris field. We relayed it all back to the UEE. Another job complete, but it didn’t feel like a victory.

Then we turned to the pirates.

Every pirate body we found, we collected. Every usable component from their ships, stripped out and loaded onto Exodus. Just out of spite. They wanted to play at piracy — we made sure nothing of theirs was left behind but shame.

On the return to Olisar, we made one last stop. We stacked the pirate bodies in the airlock, set our trajectory, and cycled it open as we passed Grim HEX. The vacuum of space pulled the bodies out of the airlock, and they drifted forward, a silent mass of frozen corpses, timed just right to slam into the lobby windows. A message written in flesh and ice: Grim HEX doesn’t own the lanes, not while Path Finders exist.

A Professional report went to the UEE. The rest? That stays between us.