Galactic Wanderers Day 2
03 Jun 2021Osiris.
Writing this after the fact in my guest room on the Gargantua because...wow. Hell of a day.Let's step back 24 hours and set the stage.
I opted to head out in the morning of day two to pick up some more rare metals on nearby planetoids since I had done so well the previous night. I visited several nearby moons and did both general moon surface mining as well as a couple of volcanic hotspots. Then I saw a strange signal on my scanner, unlike any other. Naturally curiosity dragged me to that signal and lo...
There were six occupied escape pods...in a debris field on a moon 50 light years away from the nearest outpost of humanity...2500 light years from the bubble or more.
Needless to say, these folks probably died in their pods. How long has it been since there was a rover on that moon, much less in their crash site vicinity? Gotta be a few hundred years.
The pods were "occupied" but I didn't have the heart to check the status of their occupants. I think I already know the answer.
Dutifully storing the pods in my ship cargo, I returned to my mining and after some time I glanced at the clock in my SRV. 21:41 it said. Wasn't there something important happening at 20:00? I checked my calendar. Nope not that. I checked the expedition comms channels. Yep.
The fleet carriers left without me nearly 2 hours ago.
....
Cue panic.
My first action was to consume all the oxygen in my SRV by hyperventilating madly. My second was to plot a jump back to Mammon station to lighten my exploration ship as much as possible. Those limpets were only going to slow me down at this point. I started to consider whether I would have to make the trip all the way to Sag A alone. I asked the expedition how far ahead they were. Oh, *only 2,500 light years*. Additional panic.
It could have been farther but one of the carriers was willing to consider waiting for me halfway. I dumped everything I could lightening the ship at Mammon (Everything except those escape pods because ...I'm not a *monster* who leaves desiccated corpses on the landing pad just because I'm about to be abandoned in deep space. )
Thankfully Mammon station is gorgeous so that helped calm me down a bit as I plotted in the longest single journey my nav computer had ever seen.
Ultimately it took me about an hour of nonstop jumping to reach the waiting carrier, who then proceeded another few thousand light years. I tried jumping a neutron star to cut some time off the trip but it both didn't work and didn't kill me...so that was O.K. I did make it and so I should count my blessings. Thanks to CMDR Arrivinghook piloting the fleet carrier Soylent Green, or I would have been on a very lonely solo trip to Colonia. Instead I had a temporary berth on the *Soylent* in which to think about my mistakes. Phew.
My tagline for the day: "Let's not do that again."