The surface of The Black Crow failed to reflect any sunlight as its enormous hull drifted out of the moon's cover against the sun. It was the result of coating the exposed metal bits with stealth plating alloy. Captain Maria Valmont always had a mind for pirates and liked the idea that they couldn't see her with the naked eye. That said, the ship still had a capital drive unit on par with a small lunar colony powering its movement and onboard system, making it very possible to see her on sensors if she powered up. Nervously she powered up the ship and prepared for the worst.

Nothing.

There were reports of pirates in the area but her sensors didn't pick up any signatures in her immediate vicinity. A breath she had been holding was let go as she hailed the nearest gate and requested a fold. Officials at the gate didn't mess around and gave her telemetry which she inserted and used. A howling groan erupted throughout the ship as the powerplant began to accelerated the oversized mass of metal and composite materials. It was perfectly normal and just the result of materials compressing to absorb the new forces. An emergency transition signal cracked to life.

"Black Crow. Black Crow. Come in black crow. New energy signatures approaching your position. Please confirm."

Maria almost choked on air as the relief she had just moments ago, allowing it to become fear. Because of the ship's sensors being weak, it had not picked them up. The jump gate control was a marvel of engineering and capable of quantum level calculations, oh how she wished her flying rock of a freighter was even half as capable right now. Sure enough, the ship started blaring red lights as it used the new data to narrow its own search and get its own result.

The ship groaned even more.

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"This is Black Crow. Thanks for the heads up, my sensors are now registering the threat. I am confirming fold. Repeat. Confirming fold."

Maria's heart pounded at her words while her hands flew over the controls to bypass safety measures to really move this bird. The number on her display slowly fell from 10, to 9, then all the way down to 3. Anything below a 2 and its was a 50-50 chance the ship simply ripped itself apart during the maneuvers. Anything below a 1 and the ship would snap like a twig. It was the best she could do.

"Understood Black Crow. Were accelerating the timeline of the fold. God's speed out there." The communications went dead, intentionally so she could focus.

The gate controllers weren't idiots. They knew it was bad and were doing everything they could to keep her safe. With the fold opening early, she just needed to get to it before something really bad happened. Pirate ships were engineered with barely any safety in mind and surviving the forces applied in a fold was out of the question. Everything hinged on her getting to it before them.

A suite of old electronic warfare installed on the freighter burst to life, filling the immediate spectrums with white noise. At this range they would be launching torpedoes and kinetic missiles. They were nasty things to deal with. Torpedoes with their high yield payloads would buckle the hull if they hit while the kinetics would punch right through, usually taking out connections between systems and forcing the ship to rely on redundant systems and rerouting.

Red blips on her monitor rapidly closed on her larger green dot in addition to a much larger purple dot that was the fold. It needed to be larger for her to fit through and she prayed it would be as her ship moved towards it. The race out of danger had begun.

Tiny yellow dots showed up. The pirates were firing range finders, a method of giving their weapon systems a greater chance of connected by triangulating. It was a simple, but effect method with the additional equipment being very difficult to detect and hit with its limited size and purpose. The yellow blips were had very little to lock on to regarding sensory data. It was why the ship listed them as yellow, detecting them as threatening but non-lethal as a result.