Reflection
08 Feb 2016Korneph Speartail
Here again.It's 3am station time, slouched over a brandy - not Lavian mind - some cheap pish imported from the Alliance. The Docking Clamp, they call this dive. The names are always poor attemps at witty humour, one waterhole's way of distinguishing it from another the next system over: The Docking Clamp, The Mail Slot, The Snake Pit and The Long Haul, but the liquor is cheap and you're never short for company.
"Isn't it funny," slurs the man next to me as he lifts his head from the table, emerging from his drunken stupor, a bald patch between thinning white hair reflecting the sterile halogen lamps in the bar, "How Faulcon deLacy has a bird in its name but names all its ships after snakes".
Thud. His forehead hits the table again and he snores.
I never said the company was good.
I light another cigarette, inhale deeply and check my watch. Different station, different night, different drunk. Same wait. The insurance company will pay up, of course, so long as you foot your 5% premium they'll get you a brand new ship and send you on your way, but that doesn't mean they rush. It stings to lose days of work but it beats bankruptcy.
I'm sure I closed the throttle. I'm a veteran pilot, I wouldn't head off the bridge to make coffee leaving myself on a collision course with the station would I? Of course not, the accident report just says "mechanical failure" - just like the last one. It's a mechanical failure that the coffee machine is so far from the con.
Two hull losses in one week, Korneph? You're on a roll.
It was good coffee at least. Well, the one sip I managed to have before it found itself smeared across the side of Gentil Hub with the rest of my Anaconda.
Nothing to do but settle down and wait it out. The drink numbs the all too familiar sting of wasted work, wasted profit - we all know how that feels. But, I'll be back out in the black again before I know it. That thrill of not knowing what's after the next jump: adventure, conflict, riches, disaster? That's why none of us stick around one place for long.
Just another one of those lessons I still haven't learned: Kill your speed, not your credit balance.
See you, space cowboy...