Tom rolled his Thunderbolt over to port, shaking his head as the sluggishness he'd been trying to fix with Cantieri was very obviously still present and may even have gotten worse.
This, apparently, was not unnoticed by his wingman, "Still sticky huh?" Lis asked over the comm, her voice slightly muffled and distorted by the speed they were travelling and the military encryption protocols.
"Yeah," He replied, wiggling the stick to try and loosen it, "I'm officially out of ideas."
He smacked his orientation indicator like he'd flick away a speck of dirt.
"What was that?"
"I lied; now I'm out of ideas."
She laughed as he brought his fighter back up into formation slightly ahead and above her, then rolled over 180 degrees so he could look up at the drydocks. "City in the stars." he whispered, and could swear he heard Lis smile.
The two fighters opened up into cruising speed and quickly streaked away from the Monolith, whose distinctive double-hull design glittered in the dark; flat white windows gradually becoming indistinguishable from the innumerable stars. When the ship was only visible to Tom as a blue outline in his vision when he looked over his shoulder right at her, he stopped turning back and focused on the trip to the shuttle.
Proxima was an unexciting system, its natural features ignored by relocation agencies. Instead the bustling city of its only habited planet, Prospero, was the main attraction for offduty servicers and tourists from the central planets. Prospero was the biggest extra-solar city despite having no political importance. Proxima was, however, a major naval repair yard and the only system through which ships could travel to the eastern systems. This high traffic made it especially colourful, though the number of ships were closely regulated by requiring all shipping be conducted along established and clearly marked Confederation lanes that pierced the system on Tom's onboard map.
The shuttle they were to escort was travelling along a sparse trade lane that ran from the Prospero naval officers academy to Prospero Junction. As military fighters Tom and Lis were not required or expected to follow the lane and so instead of cruising to the Junction and then up the lane to the academy they had triangulated an intercept point through darkspace; the regions of all Confederate-settled systems that lay between the trade lanes and local bases' spheres of influence. This path would alos carry them over a major tradelane leading from Junction to the jumppoint to Lalande 21185; the colonial captial system of France. As the mission timer clicked down its first hour the chevrons representing civilian shipping vessels began to give way to hull-specific outlines. Tom and Lis blasted unnoticed over the lane, their latent military sensor camouflage darkening their fighters to the lowgrade civilan scanners, and made the final course adjustment to meet up with the officers shuttle. Tom, in the lead and serving as mission commander, was monitoring local radios and picking up an anomaly. He was about to ask Lis about it when she jumped onto the comm ahead of him.
"Lead," his interest in the anomaly dropped as soon as he heard his formal title for the mission, "I've got something off the lane about two klicks at our depression."
Tom recalibrated his scanners to where Lis had them set, as mission secondary she was monitoring the actual contacts, and immediately picked up the rough outline of a wrecked freighter in gray, his helmet interface allowing him to see it through the instruments in his cockpit.
"Looks like a Huxley-class freight," He rolled a 180 again to see if he could make a visual check, "Appears she's been split down the middle Ten." He used her squadron call number.
"I'm picking up a few scattered crates, appears they've been spread less than a quarter klick from the wreck; suggests recent raid."
"Means whoever took this thing down might still be local." Tom slowed from cruise and flipped his fighter into combat ready. "Call it in, I'll do a scoot n' snoop."