There and Back Again - Part I
19 Mar 2019Rikki Sixx
I awoke this morning with a start. Soon after arriving in Hyades Sector PT-V a17-3 I'd throttled down and fallen asleep, head still spinning from another brush with a pirate. I'd been dreaming again, the same dream I'd been having for days, in which my ship was destroyed on this lonely journey. The cold sweat under my flight suit made my skin crawl. The start of this trip felt so long ago, and the decision to set out in the first place had been gnawing at me. If something happened to me out here my logs might be the only thing that let people know what happened. I better get something recorded...
This all started when I wasn overheard grumbling in a bar at Thome Gateaway at HIP 16607 about some of my longer journeys taking too long. The solo flights were boring, and the increased time spent travelling meant more chance of being held up by miscreants. Another expensive insurance pay-out could be the end of me, which put me off hauling anything expensive. I was treading water, and the cargo space in The Story's Open my Cobra Mk. IV was only carrying dust.
Some of the old hands in the bar suggested heading out to Deciat. "Try meet the Engineer Felicity Farseer" they said, "Get her to increase the jump range on that piece of shit Frame Shift Drive." I'd heard about Farseer in systems across the galaxy, but now I knew where to find her. I bought a cheap round of drinks, filled my cargo hold with whatever looked valuable though my beer-googles, got some shut-eye and set out first thing in the morning.
Flying out to Deciat was uneventful. It was further than I thought so I stopped off a few times, bought and sold some junk and kept going. Arriving at Farseer Inc. though, I hit a dead-end. Knowing where to find the Engineer wasn't enough, it seems; I needed to buy my way in. Source some meta-alloy and come back. No problem.
Back out in orbit I did some research. It turns out you can't just fly to any old platform and buy meta-alloy. Mining them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. It turned out that in the Maia system you can buy meta-alloy openly, so I started making my way out there - without any planning.
The journey took time, but I saw some amazing things. I explored quiet systems, stumbled across screaming neutron stars and landed on rocky, barren worlds to sleep. I was most amazing by the silence; I could do over a dozen jumps without seeing a station, platform or even the dissipating remnants of a ship's wake.
Finally I reached the Pleiades cluster, and shortly afterward found myself at Maia. I visited some tourist hotspots just to be around people again, and bought my meta-alloy. In fact I bought two units - one for Farseer's organisation and one to sell. I hadn't met a single pirate on my journey so far, and I may as well profit off all this after all...