Getting the gang together
18 Nov 2020Valanga
Today was an interesting day. It was also a day I had to fly my Type-9 Heavy, so everything balances out. God, do I hate flinging that tub of bricks around.I was really quite delighted to see a familiar name appear on my comms panel, cutting through the tedium of today's work. "CMDR Sirokos"... a name I was well-acquainted with but haven't heard in a good while. An old buddy of mine I met forever ago. He was one of the first friends I had outside of the Federal Navy after I got out. We've flown together as wingmen more times than I can count, and been on all sorts of adventures - some of which led us to new discoveries or wealth, and others having totally blown up in our faces.
Sadly he's an Imperial, which is something I have had to just rationalize away because, dammit, he's too good of a friend and pilot to drop over that... but dammit, is he ever stubborn and unyielding. I'd rather he be a Fed, even, but I digress.
Me, him, and the co-leader of my squadron got together and mined like our lives depended on it, our lasers eating into the endless asteroid field and all the spoils being swept into the Type-9's gaping maw. We were able to bring home almost 500 tonnes in the course of an hour or two, and while we were out we even encountered a rock with a solid painite core!
Granted, we sat irresponsibly close to the detonation that cracked that core. In our unshielded ships. That got peppered with asteroid shrapnel. AND we had managed to screw up the explosive yield and blew up half the damn core. But I didn't care. I didn't care that our adventure kept sliding into being a misadventure. I was having a fantastic time. It felt almost like it did all those years ago.
Almost.
But of course, time changes all of us. I'm no exception. The constant flux that has flavored my past few years ensures that the feeling will never quite be the same, but I don't regret any of it one bit. If there's even the slightest regret, what then was the point of-
Wow, I'm getting off track. It really has been a long day, hasn't it.
Why does Kappa Fornacis have to be so out-of-the-way?