Into the Black IV
02 Jan 2022SirPuma
Personal Log, Galactic date 1.1.3308Happy New Year, self. I sit here, staring off into the depths of deep space, some twelve thousand light years from home, and I have to ponder what drives a man into this life. Fifty some years of life and thirty five of it dedicated to the Navy and ships; theirs, mine, any ship that will cart my aging butt across the stars. I've always thought I wanted a family, but my family always seems to be me, my ship and my cat. Why?
It's not that I love the solitary life of jumping from system to system, delving into the dark to find strange new worlds or forgotten relics. Much of that seems tedious. It's not that I hate people. Well, I actually don't like most people and don't like being around most people, but that's not really it either. It's not that I don't want intimacy, I really do enjoy the company of a good woman. So what is it? For some reason, I just get pulled back into the black, time and again, to seek the unknown and the forgotten.
So, now I sit in space, looking at the derelict mega ship Zurara. I've looked at each of the settlement sites (ie ghost towns) and read their logs. Then I finally found this ship, deep in the black and listened to the sad story of one of the crew. Someone should really pay for the crime of leaving all these people to die.
As a side note, mind the gravity at the Delta site. I managed to forget myself and jumped off one of the hab platforms. Spent an afternoon nursing an ankle in the med unit on my ship. So note to self, pay more attention to planet details after your scan.
Anyway, having reviewed this sad story of ships and crews sent out on promises of riches, just to kill them after the mission is completed, really gets to me. And I sit here, staring at far off galaxies and not many stars in our own; so far out our own galaxy looks foreign, and I wonder what it's all for. Why do I do this?
This second leg was a challenge. I couldn't rely on the nav computer. Every time I tried to get it to plot a course to this gods forsaken system, it wouldn't do it. Thankfully one of the mapping programs enabled me to set a number of way points to cross the void out here. I could try going further out, push my ship to it's limits. But should I wind up jumping to a system, low on fuel only to find the data on the destination wrong and I end up at some Tauri star, or a brown dwarf, then I'm screwed, dead in the water, to borrow a Navy term.
Maybe it's the risk, the challenge of the galaxy trying to kill me and me giving it the finger. Either way, time to start the third leg. Time to start trekking around the "east" side of the galactic disk and out to Beagle Point. This will undoubtedly be the longest leg of my journey.
Angela sent me another photo through the Galnet of my cat. The fat furball is laying belly up in her easy chair staring at her vid screen. Yep, she's spoiling him.
Marcus Apollo St Martin-Sepert AKA Sir Puma