Lost and found, a.k.a. "free stuff"
30 Mar 2016PoeTheWonderCat
It's been over a month since my round trip voyage to Barnard's Loop. I barely remember it. Something about hanging up the pulse lasers and searching for a better way. Go out, see the sights, bring back the juicy system intel to the land grabbers for a bit of coin and get to write my name in piss on the history books. "Kilroy Was Here" was a joke once. Maybe it was Chad, or Foo. Anyway, only clear memory of the whole damn thing was getting back to good ol' Fed space to cash in my chips. And faster then an Anaconda cuts through an FDL's hull my scan logs were pinged by every looky-loo with a hard on for stealing my records. By the time I docked at the nearest painite baron repository half my ship was missing and I was breathing through a tube. So much for the milk of human kindness.
So I take my earnings, lick my wounds and head for my favorite hole in the wall. Now nobody's getting rich counting the twinkles on a star but you'd think pointing out a few Edens and more palladium then old Zack Hudson's got senators in his pocket would keep you in whiskey and "friendship" for more then a month. But here I am again. Call o' the wild or some such. But it beats spacing belt rats for 30 pieces of silver a pop, and I like the solitude.
There is, of course, something to be said about the majesty of the galactic expanse. Nebula and neutron stars aside; a simple sunrise over the horizon of a deep blue gas giant gives me shivers every time. And I'd be a bold face liar if I didn't say I get a kid at christmas kind of excitement being the first person to scan something older then humanity. It doesn't change the fact that I AM a liar, but I don't need that kind of definitive proof bumping about.
So why am I going back home? I had some cockamamie idea I'd go spit in Sag. A for fun, but two things stopped me. One, I flew for two days and didn't even get an eighth of the way there, which is a read morale cock punch. And two... I met a black hole.
It was a little guy, nothing much to look at. Nothing to look at at all in fact. But the way it warped the stars and the milky way behind it... I was transfixed. I just parked myself in supercruise and stared at it, as close as I dared. Something about it made me feel more alive and more insignificant then anything else. And as I gaped at the mouth of nothing, it made me want to be part of something for once. I've always been a loner, and I've never been one for group think or mouth frothing zealotry. But at that moment, I wanted to make a difference to someone besides myself. I felt a paw pulling at me. Maybe this is a sign, I thought. I rifled through the stack of tourist brochures I'd accumulated from spaceport hotel lobbies and found the one I was looking for. The Church of the Space Cat. A cosmic meow seemed to reverberate through me. Maybe I'd give it a shot.
I glanced at the distance gauge to the black hole. I was getting closer. Of course I was, I was in supercruise and you can't go slower then 30km/sec. But the way the number dropped did not jibe with my "speed".
It was sucking me in.
Sign or no sign, I can tell when the universe is done with your bullsh*t. I turned as fast as my thrusters would go and jumped to anywhere but there. And now I'm on my way back. No way to tell if this Space Cat will curl up on my lap or puke in my slipper, but the big black will always be there no matter what. It can wait.