“Bishop this is Ice Venture, come in, over.” Crackled the voice from the Hulk-class exhumer that had just jumped in low and away to their starboard.
“We see you Ice Venture, you are cleared for linked protocol, sending access codes now,” answered the young communication officer on duty.
“We? Fucking, “we”? When the hell you get all corporate-mouthed Bish?”
The comms officer swallowed and cleared his throat before selecting to transmit, “Captain Bishop is currently attending to the composition calibrations, sir, and has delegated wing adherence policy to crew. If you wish to send a message, I can surely insert it into his queue…”
“Naw, naw boy, that’s alright, as long as he gets me my 15% bonus to yield, he can be knee deep in pussy for all I care. Here’s my ID codes, link me up bitch.”
The comms officer cut the feed and furrowed his brow. Ship to ship comms in the academy fleets he’d been in had always been much more…succinct. He supposed it was yet another adjustment to be made when working with Capsuleers.
But this wasn’t just anybody; this was John Klark, THE John Klark. And if he was in system, they were all about to be either very rich or very dead. It was said he was wrapped in liquid luck, it just happened to be both kinds.
Hurriedly, the comm officer stabbed his fingers at his console, no need to drag this out any longer than it had to. He validated the transmission gate and launched the sync process. Above him, on the main holo, the four minuscule mining ships hovered at their current relative coordinates around the massive central Orca-class industrial ship. A blue aura overlay enveloped the Orca and the four other, already linked, ships.
Subsystem readouts on the newly arrived ship flickered from dull red to cool blue as the Orca's link module software agents took up advisory positions in the Hulk. As they locked into place, each of the subsystem technical commanders, began running their teams through the synch diagnostics routines. Calls when down through the chain of command and readiness signals were sent back up. As each completed their checks, flags were set to passed and the light blue glow enveloping the five other ships slowly extended towards the Ice Venture. When the sensor suite finally sync'd and the Hulk was completely surrounded by the blue aura, the senior gang link command engineer began receiving verbal confirmations from each of the technical commanders. When done, he stood and walked into the middle of the holo, thus accessing the command queue.
“Captain, this is gang link control, Ice Venture has sync'd and is ready to enter link mode, proceed?”
A moment passed and then in silver three-dimensional floaty-text, there appeared the words, “Yeah, let the bastard in.”