Warp Drive Active....for five minutes.

Flashfresh woke up with a start and groaned in discomfort. The headache was back. Every fecking time he gets podded; the wake-up feels worse and worse. Flash feared that one too many pod-deaths and he will surely go insane. His cloned body ached and while it was grown from his own DNA, he felt strangely disconnected. After all, he hadn't lived in this body at all. It was a snap shot of his body from exactly nine days ago. He knew this from the ache in his right knee, having banged it on an equipment container. The memory of the pain still fresh.

Beaming brightly, an orderly wearing a medical smock had suddenly appeared next to Flash and offered him a towel and a clipboard with discharge papers.

"Captain, welcome to our facilities. I hope the awakening was not too troubling?"

Flashfresh took the offered pen and put his signature to it, grumbling about a headache.

"Thank you sir. May I kindly remind you to update your clone at any of our facilities, due to the need to increase the storage parameters, the cost of your next clone could well be higher. Am sure you understand."

As he spun off to attend to some other re-awakening pod pilot, he turned round. "May I also interest you in our new deal for high value capsuleers?" Flashfresh swung his legs over the table and stood up on unsteady legs.

"I feel terrible."

The medical orderly sympathised.

"The memory download was 99.97% successful. There was a slight loss in telemetry however. Must have been quite an explosion." He smiled brightly. Flash glowered. The medical orderly continued, "We can improve memory download with a new programme that will cost -"

"Bugger off."

The medical orderly's mouth snapped shut but kept his rictus grin before scuttling off somewhere.

Vaguely, Flash recalled picking up the scraps of a mixed fleet who had ran into trouble around Dal. Gorgoleon was lost early on. Some of the ships, Flash included, when warping towards their targets, found themselves in a seemingly never-ending warp tunnel. Flash only managed to break out of this anomaly by disconnecting his pod from the ship's interface and causing an emergency crash out of warp: a very dangerous manoeuvre. This happened to a few of the pilots on both sides and resulted in a very scrappy and uncoordinated fight. It resulted in a loss to the 'pirates'.

Then racing back home, Flash was caught on the exit side of gate by some anti-pirates who promptly scrambled him. Then without a 'by-your-leave' decided to open up on Flash's Lachesis. Feeling suitably aggrieved but without drawing any aggression, Flash limped back towards the gate he had just arrived and managed to activate the gate, his Lachesis in half-shield. With his aggressors all unable to jump due to the aggression timers; Flash thought that he would be safe once on the other side. Alas, hotly pursuing Flash was a G.I.S. fleet who had landed behind and were waiting for him. They got their man and credit to this mercenary alliance, they can scramble ships quickly and in numbers when required.

Yawning, Flash got dressed and made arrangement to get his sorry arse back home for a much needed drink.