New in "Lost and found": an Imperial Cutter. Including pilot and rare commodities...
20 Dec 2021Anantyanta
This story took its beginning when our comrade Jaz came up with the fantastic idea of spending the Old Earth celebration of "Xmas" at and around Rackham's Peak, the highest point from the Galactic plane reachable by current ships.Woohoo, carrier-trip!
We decided to travel using Jaz' fleet carrier, the Alethkar, and prepared by loading liquor, wine, food, snacks and other... necessary and therapeutic commodities.
Especially the latter ones do seem to mix badly with flying in the void, at least in certain combinations, as the we found out when during the carrier cool-down after the 3rd witchspace jump, Jaz urged us to quickly launch and take in the view. Nobody really was too keen because we already had a lot of fun with the party going on and stuff, but when he got sad, we decided to humour him.
We had a bit of fun outside until... yeah, until I decided to try and see what happens when you crash a Trident into a carrier at full boost. Well, not really a lot more than could be expected (the Trident said "boom" and the carrier said "...", because he simply did not feel it).
Except, the combination of the therateupic effects of Helix in combination with Eranin Pearl Whisky and just maybe a homebrew moonshine processed by a Jaques Quinentian still seemed to make my head a bit more susceptible to the feedback loop when the virtual presence session was terminated rather abruptly. Whatever the reason, I was knocked out cold for quite some time.
When I came to, I saw that I had received panicky hails from Jaz (I remember one screamed message "ANA YOU HAVE LESS THAN 60 SECONDS, THE DESTINATION IS LOCKED WE CAN'T STOP THE JUMP", checked where I was and where the Alethkar was, and they were scudding 1.5k LY away. Not one jump (as the one ongoing could not be stopped in time), but two more. Seemed Jaz had tried to turn around but messed up, so instead of back, the Alethkar jumped another 500ly away from me. At that point, Jaz decided fetching me was too much trouble - when we talked, he tried to convince me to go into the escape pod and trigger the self-destruct of my 600-mio-credits-Cutter, including a lot of rare commodities plus usual party stuff like wine, beer, meat and fish. His trust in the S&R services is absolute, even 1300 lightyears from the next civilisation (I checked if I could fly back on my own, but my bubble-trade Cutter does not carry a fuel scoop).
Luckily, Foxi and Lupo helped me convince him (I think they were more interested in the meat for the grill than in me, but I took what I could get), so for the next hours, we had to deal with a grumpy captain whose carrier flight schedule got a tiny bit disrupted... but we got that meat onto the grill!