Antares: The Giant's Red Glare
21 Nov 2020OmegaPaladin
As I pulled my Asp Explorer into a tight orbit of Barnard's Star to let my fuel scoop snag some protons, I considered where my next trip should lead. I had just finished a run out to the Pleiades to the Maia system. While I had come there for business (I needed meta-alloys for a new associate), but the scenery was gorgeous. It was like flying into a painting. This only intensified as I approached the black hole. Maia B was surreal, distorting space like a bent mirror. Fortunately, it is not actively accreting mass, or the are would have been flooded with radiation. I could see why it was a tourist destination. After the trip back, and a stop at a planetside workshop for some fine tuning, I was pulling even more out of my frame shift drives. While my ship was being worked on, I downloaded all the free exploration pubs I could get - this engineer had some exclusives. One of them was an autobiography of one Captain Amelie Morello. This book was old when CMDR Jameson was flying around the Cooperative of Worlds - hell, it was older than Lave. Back when the frameshift drive was a wonder, not the commonplace feature of daily live it is now. Captain Morello ran a ship that was bigger than a 'Conda, with a full crew and a drive about the speed of low wake. Much like modern explorers, she flew for profit, glory, and wonder. She lived an adventurous life, that much was certain.
As I completed the circuit of Barnard's Star, I recalled how one of her longest trips began there. Each segment was in 50 light year or less legs, as her system's cooldown and refueling were much more involved. 50 LY was what colony and cargo ships could handle. Her first section of the trip went out to Nunki, aka Sigma Sagittarii. It was quite a valuable system, but it's still not been exploited. Her real challenge would be the trip to Antares. She would be the first to map a route to the system. While this was not a pressing area of current interest, Universal Cartographics would still pay up I figured I could not go wrong by replicating her route
As I followed her footsteps, I could see how the systems mostly remained the same, with a few changes. Many of the most interesting changes were found in the surface maps I put together. Finally, after a detour to Zeta Ophiuchi, aka Khagan, I finally arrived at Antares B, and found the system was inhabited.
Close in to the primary was a Fleet Carrier turned exploration hub. The owner was nowhere to be found, but the staff of the carrier were helpful enough. After some scanning, I parked there to refuel, and take in the immensity of the star. Even the carrier felt like a toy compared to the huge, slowly dying star, whose red-orange light bathed everything. I could understand why Captain Morello had come this far.