Journey to Colonia - Day 3 - Amundsen Terminal
31 Oct 2019Smertkopf
Sixty-eight jumps.My eyes widened a bit after the galaxy map had plotted the route, but I grinned and said to Midnight, "One hundred percent."
"One hundred percent," Midnight echoed, and we cruised off to Lagoon Sector NI-S b4-10 on a trek of around two thousand light-years.
This is the routine:
1. Jump into system.
2. Honk. If there are enough bodies in the system, move on to step 3. (Enough bodies is generally more than 6)
3. Search for High Metals, Earth-likes, and Water-worlds. If none, move on to step 4.
4. Scoop if necessary and jump to next system.
In this manner I proceeded roughly 2% of the distance across the galaxy, the sixty eight systems mostly blurring together except for a couple of large blue stars and a binary pair orbiting in very close proximity, one of them orange and the other red. One of the blue stars gave off a beautiful violet light that made the cockpit of the Anaconda glow in a way I've never seen before.
I told Midnight a story I know about a smuggler out of Aldebaran who trafficked in occult contraband, amongst other things. You might wonder what could cause something occult to become contraband, and as always what things are banned and what things are not banned is often a matter of culture and taste. To give you an idea of the kind of things in which this smuggler trafficked, here is a sample of some items I know him to have sold around the Bubble:
- An ancient, massive book with covers of gold and pages of human skin scrawled with indecipherable symbols.
- A statue of oily black stone carved in the shape of an octopus-headed biped, ten meters tall.
- The personal holographic records and testimony of an obscure cult leader who led his ten thousand followers in a bizarre suicide ritual during which they piloted a fleet of ramshackle ships into Sirius.
I wouldn't call myself a superstitious man, but perhaps it should be no surprise that something bad happened to the smuggler after years of hauling such cargo. One day he picked up a weird coffin or sarcophagus off of a shady traveler who claimed to have discovered it somewhere outside of the Bubble. The coffin or whatever it was was described to me as "one of the unsightliest things I've ever laid eyes on" by a woman I know who is no wilting lily. Apparently the dimensions of the thing were off, far too narrow to accommodate a normally-shaped biped, some three meters tall but only half a meter wide. The carvings upon the narrow box depicted impossible geometries that my friend described as "somehow obscene". She was offered a mint to come along with the smuggler on his trip to sell the coffin to a buyer he had lined up in a system on the edge of the Bubble, but she wisely refused.
The smuggler departed, and nothing was heard from him for five years. Then, his ship, minus the coffin, reappeared in the system from which he had first departed, and when the interior was inspected, the smuggler's remains were found in a state of abominable mutation, with limbs grotesquely askew and new appendages and organs grown where none should be. It was clear that however the smuggler had finally passed, the ordeal had been extremely painful. My friend, who had skipped out on the promised payday, was one of those who discovered his wracked corpse, and she visibly shook when she told me of his fate.
Turned in about 4 million in cartographic data at Amundsen Terminal. Next stop is not far away, Attenborough's Watch in Lagoon Sector FW-W d1-122, another asteroid base. Will report in from there.
CMDR Smertkopf