Chapter 1 page 2
12 Aug 2020Spud_
Our first ship, how can I forget it, I was the FNG, (freaking new guy), and our engineer, a 2nd class pilot an aspiring master himself was wealth of information and hard knocks for me. Mickey loved to share all his brilliance and knowledge with me, and also loved to share every navigation mistake I made or cargo loading mistake I made, and was not ashamed at all to make me feel as tall as an ant. Our ships Master, Commander Holly McSween seemed aloof to all of this and would just smile and tell me to keep it up and one day the shoe will be on the other foot and you will be the one breaking in the FNG. We hauled a lot of freight all over empire space. We had at our last port of call received a startling fleet wide message that possible hostilities with the Federation may be in the future. Along with that news, came my promotion to Astrogator 1st Class and Pilot 4th Class, I had put in enough time to take the pilots exam the next time we returned to the HUB. I am not sure what scared me more, war or that test.We left the HIP spur systems with a final load of old FSD drives to take back to the HUB as new FSD's were coming out and it was a nice thing, we could now travel 16LY at a shot, and there was talk of some thing called a scoop so you could collect fuel from nearby suns. We were about 26LY's out of the HIP systems and getting ready to set the last course for the HUB when we were attacked. A single ship with no transponder code that we could recognize came in hot on us as we were charging our drive. Holly started shouting orders at Mickey to cut this system, up that one, and she shoved every ounce of power to the engine mods. Trash Haulers had only one weapon, and it was junk, not even good enough to take out the shields on a target bot without a lot of work. They did however have a very powerful tractor beam. "Sweeney" as we had come to know her, told me to jettison all the freight and tie it behind us with the tractor and stand by to let it go when she said. She then shoved all the power to the FSD and when it charged she yelled for me to let it go, and the unknown fighter behind us got a face full of 162 junk frame ship drives and we vanished into glorious Hyperspace.
That was close, but we made it back to the hub with no more issues, and the excitement was high! Everyone in the Imperial Navy wanted to talk to us, ran our data banks, and we all had at least five interviews. Thankfully we were forgiven for the loss of the FSD's that would have taken me two years to pay for. The best part was, we were getting a new ship, ours had made its last flight. It was still in the yards, not ready for trials yet, but excitement was high and I had two full months in doc to study for my test....