Steerage-Class Passenger
23 Jan 2021Elkyri
Bolden's Enterprise, Tir3307.01.18
I started out as a tourist after all. After debarking from Boundless I first headed towards the experimental habitats recently constructed in laGrange clouds by Holloway Bioscience Institute. Dropping into laGrange clouds can be disconcerting to first-timers. Your first impression is that you are about to plow nose-first into something solid so you slam aft thrust to bring the ship to a halt. Then you recognize it's just a cloud and hit forward thrust. Then you realize the cloud is opaque, sometimes completely blocking all light and pitch black inside, and that you might slam into something you can't see so you hit aft thrust again to slow the ship. Then you hit the night-vision sensors so you can see and, lo, there they are.
Typically you find metallic crystals in those clouds -- huge things reminiscent of a child's jacks -- but there are often biologics mixed in with them. In this case the biologics -- peduncle pods -- have been artificially introduced. So while it was interesting to see the pods up close and personal there really wasn't much value in it. As I said, just playing tourist.
From there I plotted a course towards one of the nearby nebulae. At first it was just as I expected; every system I jumped into was already in the data base. That changed about three hundred light-years out when I dropped into a system that not only wasn't in the data base but which contained several planets of both economic and scientific interest. It's one thing to discover a barren icy body no one has ever seen before -- what is anyone going to do with it? But a newly discovered planet capable of sustaining terrestrial life is an important find so at that point things got a little more interesting.
I abandoned my straight-line course and started jumping into adjacent systems. Stars are very close together in this region so we're talking jumps of as little as three or four light-years at a shot. I guess you could call them hops rather than jumps. Within only a couple of hours I had surveyed at least two-dozen previously unreported systems, several of which contained terrestrial and terraformable planets. I also found a few laGrange clouds, these containing huge umbrella molluscs in addition to the crystals. It certainly felt more rewarding to have found xeno-life in the wild rather than in an artificial habitat.
I made a day of it before setting a course back to Tir, first hopping to adjacent stars then stretching out to max range once I started encountering previously charted systems. About fifty light-years out of Tir Yalena's scanners picked up an anomalous signal originating on a small planet just outside the system's asteroid belt. Launching mapping probes to pinpoint the location revealed the source to be a crashed ship on the dark side of the planet.
I came in low and slow with the night vision sensors on max range, carefully checking for any movement. I could make out what looked like an inverted T7 with only its aft end above ground. Nearby there was something else -- it looked like it might have once been a ship but was now just a pile of twisted metal. Seeing no other ships within sensor range and nothing moving on the ground I put Yalena down near the wreckage and dismounted to investigate.
At first I found only scattered cargo containers but there was an escape pod on the ground near the T7. The external panel was lit showing the pod was still active and occupied. I cleaned off the display and checked the biometrics -- alive but in stasis. Nearby was a cannister containing personal effects I assumed were those of the pod's occupant. Clear thinking on his part. He must have seen the ship's life support wasn't going to last and he wanted that pod found, so he ejected it and the things important to him outside where they would be seen.
I got him and his personal effects aboard but with no serious medical facilities on Yalena I did not dare to open the pod. He made the jump to Tir in a cargo rack.
