Hunting the slavers

The unpleasant sound of the alarm rang, Roxor woke up and went to the cockpit. They were arriving at the coordinates encrypted into the computer system of the slavers. It was bordering an asteroid field. No planet signaled on charts there, only an abandoned mining facility.

Roxor ordered a rapid scan of the area. No ship, only the abandoned space mining facility, leftover since the Clone War, according to the Guild's archives. Not even close to main hyperspace roads, it could only be used as a hideout base for smugglers. But the fact that it was present inside the database took out the secret aspect of it as a suitable smuggler base.

The old Platinium Beetle came closer to the abandoned mining installation and run its scanner over it. No life form was detected, even after an extensive scanning. No active system, no energy detected. Roxor decided to go down and check, as it was his only trail to the slavers. He put his armor on and ordered his droid to land the ship close to the installation.

The gravity was so low on the asteroid that he had to use the gravboots to walk to the station door. One at the airlock's door closed obviously, he searched for a terminal where he can ask B2 to work to open this door... but no terminal was there... It was a manual opening, with no visible opening... It had to be wireless, or magnetic of some kind. But for now, Roxor was clueless on how to open this door...

A plasma torch would do the trick, but it would take tens of hours... So Roxor just had a more brutal idea: Use the canons of the Platinium Beetle to blast the airlock door! Roxor wasn't generally a big fan of this kind of stuff, but this will make an exception. He returned inside the shuttle and ordered the droid to lock on the door and blast it. An easy and fast job... The targeting computer barely acquired its target, and ready to shoot, but something unexpected happened inside the abandoned base. An energetic signature showed on. It wasn't there before... The base began to activate. An old single laser turret was receiving energy from god knows where, and that wasn't good at all, as the Platinium Beetle was landed there like a sitting duck. Roxor ordered to fire on the old turret without having a lock on and to take off immediately. The Beetle's canons immediately fired upon the ground turret. it wasn't a very hard target to hit, but Roxor's joy was very short-lived. The small weapons of the Beetle scarcely scratched the Turret old triterium armor. Now the turret's canon was turned facing the beetle and fired. No time to dodge, the beetle took the hit directly. Its shields suffered greatly. A couple more of these and Roxor would be turned into little pieces of meats like his ship...

He ordered FA-4 to dive below the asteroid, to use it as a cover. They took another shot. The ship shivered strongly. Shields were at 10%. It wasn't made for space combat, even less suffering point blank shoots from ground artillery. Roxor never understood the pleasure that some people felt in space combat. The perspective on being blasted by a powerful canon inside a tin can was not attractive at all. Indeed, Roxor never enjoyed fighting, the best fight is the one you don't have to fight, but when it was necessary, he was damn good at it... Or at least he used to be one of the best hunters in the profession and still has some good leftovers.

The ship dived as quickly as possible to hide at the other side of the asteroid. It took another hit and a little part of the ship's shell was blown away. The ship instantaneously lost atmosphere. Some little stuff escaped by the open space hole before a crate flew through the air by aspiration and blocked the hole. Only the air was sucked out. Hopefully, Roxor was still in full body armor, and the droids didn't need oxygen. The ship landed again at the other side of the asteroid, apparently safe this time. They would have to make some repairs.

Roxor programmed his Mark VII inquisitor droid to go lurk around the supposedly abandoned station. After that, he'll investigate that facility by himself once the ship will be fixed...