Mysterious Stranger
18 Jan 2019User151063
Two days ago I needed to visit the market on Melvin Hub for a new pair of space gloves. As I disembarked from Pongo I couldn't shake the feeling of being followed. I made my way to the retail zone all the while trying to catch a glimpse of my follower without making myself look like a tourist. As I turned the corner towards the spacewear traders parade I heard a distinct 'psst psst'. A hooded figure stood in the shadow of a darkened doorway. " Don't look around fellow traveller, just brows the shop windows. A ship has crashed in strange circumstances on Olela 3, it would be worth your while to investigate it and upload the data file. Hurry though, the salvage teams will be there soon and it will all be cleaned up. The coordinates of the crash site and the encryption key for the data link has been uploaded to your comms" I looked over to the doorway but the stranger was gone and the doorway well illuminated. Had I just experienced a waking dream?After the customary haggling I bought a smart pair of black Cetisian leather space gloves, I'm not so rich that I can afford to buy cheap. I made my way back to Pongo mulling over the encounter with the mysterious stranger, was it just a waking dream? On firing up Pongo's systems there was a message from an anonymous source, how the hell do you send an anonymous message? The message contained the crash site coordinates and the data link encryption code. So much for the waking dream theory!
I had some business to take care of, some deliveries that needed to be completed so I got my head down and got back to the grind. All that Bertrandite and Polymers aren't going to deliver themselves. Plus I had a little job for the Federation Navy that I'd agreed to. All the while I couldn't get the encounter with the stranger out of my mind. I checked the galactic charts and found the location of the site was approx 200LY. I completed my outstanding contracts and transferred to crash site data to Tesiree. I got my vehicle hanger and planetary scanner out of storage and equipped them on my beloved Cobra. I figured a small landing pad ship would give me more options for stopovers on the journey so I plotted my route to Olela system.
It is a fifteen jump journey for Tesiree and she can't carry enough fuel to make it all that way. Fortunately, there were mostly scoopable stars en route so I was able to make the journey with no stops. I was four hops away from Olela when my comms panel lit up. " Now I have you rookie, you will regret poking your nose into business that does not concern you" The interdiction shock was nauseating, I fought with the controls to maintain the escape vector. Tesiree was magnificent and after a mighty struggle I evaded the interdiction. I was on my way to the next system, breathing a huge sigh of relief and thanked Randominius that I didn't need to put my combat skills to the test.
The last few hops were uneventful and on arrival at Olela system I stopped in at Wisniewski-Snerg Landing to refuel and repair Tesiree. On the system chart there was an unexplored world three planets out from the star so I guessed this must be Olela 3. After a brief supercruise to the planet I put Tesiree in orbit and launched a series of planetary probes to complete a full surface scan. The scan revealed the crash site location on the coordinates supplied by the mysterious stranger.
I made my way down to the planet, landed near to the crash site and disembarked Tesiree in my SRV. A short drive towards the site revealed the ship was a significant sized vessel of a type that was not known to me. Suddenly, I came under fire from sentinel skimmers . Why would anyone deploy sentinels to a crash site? My combat skills would be tested after all. Maneuvering the SRV around the hull of the crashed ship I was able to engage the skimmers one by one. After destroying all three of them I was free to explore the site. I eventually found the data core and downloaded the data files. I could find nothing else of interest so headed back to my ship and back to Wisniewski-Snerg Landing. On arrival at the station I took a look at the data files, it was the last log entry of the ship captain. He stated that they had encountered anomaly that had fried their systems. They had to bail in the ship escape pods. I hope they got picked up and are safe now.
All that remained to do was to head home and get back to the workaday life of space cargo delivery. The journey home was uneventful, Tesiree a joy to fly in comparison to the lumbering utilitarian Pongo. On arrival at Melvin Hub I handed in the data for a cool C1.5 Million and an additional C1 Million exploration data. Small beans in terms of credits but an adventure and a mystery that begs more questions than it answered. Who was the mysterious stranger? Why did he/she want me to explore the crash site? What was the anomaly that fried the crashed ships systems? Why was a killer sent to intercept me?
Cmdr Casa_Del_Seany signing out.
Fly safe commanders