Oolite Bulletins

You get used to spotting the signs of trouble early. If you have the IFF Police Band Scanner – and it's money well spent for the warning it gives you – you can see straight away if the bunch of ships loitering a few kilometres off the beeline from the Witchpoint beacon to the station are Clean or ha...

Escorts don't have to wait very long for a job to come along. Even though Tom and I had opted to be picky enough to wait until the nightcycle was officially over, we had no trouble finding someone who wanted our services. No-one knew what an “Ouroboros” was meant to be but we'd barely had time to ea...

A friend in need will help you hide the bodies. Agent Braden didn’t take much convincing that our ships didn’t ought to be registered as Claymores. As far as possible we’d been keeping our existence nothing more than a rumour, even in Santaari sector where we’d been carrying out most of our operatio...

You never get tired of seeing how different planets look from orbit. Onatbeza was pretty near as high-tech as they come – in the top thirty-odd for the whole Galaxy, and near top for its sector. When you look down at a planet like that, you notice a couple of things: The air’s real clear, and the ni...

You can spend as long as you like wishing you had thought a little longer before jumping into something you shouldn’t have jumped into. One thing that was bothering me was that it was going to be hard to get word back to Macrae – and while on the one hand I figured that even I wasn’t irreplaceable, ...

I'll cross that bridge when someone looks like wanting to pick this ball up and run with it. :lol: As long as you’re a whole galactic sector from home, you might as well try having not so much as a tenth-credit to see if life can possibly suck any harder. We got ourselves berthed and figured we mig...

I would be pleased and flattered if someone wanted to write an OXP based on the Claymores - either the ships or the organisation - but I don't have the necessary know-how to do either. If you have to go diving head-first into things, take someone to cover your back. Better, of course, if you can lo...

Trainees are never ready for their first fight. All right, “never say never” if you insist, but in practical terms it’s a darned good guideline. We’d not had any intention of getting into any rough stuff this run, which was just meant to be a way for the raw Scots to get their first look at Witchspa...

It was time for a little sight-seeing. By now I was getting the green Scots to mingle with the experienced escorts – whom we were still recruiting at a steady trickle, with what seemed like the leave and blessing of all officials concerned – and that was giving them a clearer idea of what to expect ...

There’s a thrill in watching your trainees develop. Long hours on the four-wheelers and in the simulator gave way eventually to some real flights in the Claymores. It wasn’t always that way, as I’ve learned. Back in the days when people were flying atmosphere craft, you had the really elementary tra...

(Which is not to say that you won't have plenty of opportunities to get some combat rep in the course of ferrying passengers and cargo across the chart) And cim , as he well knows, hasn't said the half of it. Throw in parcels as well and you have plenty of Assassin magnets aboard as well as pirates...

Breakfast with Macrae is almost as enjoyable as dinner with Macrae. Neither of us had been in any great hurry to get out of bed, but we did have more business to discuss and Macrae had his itinerary for the next twenty days already worked out, so there was only so long that we could spend procrastin...

I was enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of handing Macrae something he hadn’t been expecting. I was also enjoying another unfamiliar sensation – and one that not so many months ago I’d have been horrified to think that any but the nastiest of girls would have been interested in. Well, I guess we all...

You don’t realize how much you miss space until you’re up there again. Unfortunately once you get used to the reality of the universe, which isn’t at all how you would have imagined or liked it to be, you have to get used to the idea that there are people up there who will gladly wreck a vessel wort...

Before you start trying to fight in three dimensions, you’d better have some idea what you’re doing in two. Macrae based his early training for the groundsiders on the model that Agent Elus and the escort service had used, especially with the people from the backwater worlds who had more catching up...