The Ferryman
01 Feb 2022Will Magpie
Space does things to a man.I don't mean normal space madness, the hypnotic effect of jump after jump after jump after jump. I mean the sheer scale of it all. There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you're thousands of light-years from the nearest human being and the entire Milky Way galaxy is in your field of view. It occurs that you could spend the rest of your life mapping star systems and never make even the smallest dent in the number of uncharted stars in the Milky Way, let alone the countless other galaxies out there. To say one feels small and insignificant in the face of it is an understatement. Getting that feeling is when the real space madness kicks in, and how to deal with it is the trillion-credit question.
Recently, in the time between contracts, I've been reading stories of the ancient explorers on Old Earth, from when humanity was confined to a single planet. They all kept records of their thoughts and journeys, so I figure as an aspiring explorer myself, I ought to do the same. It certainly can't hurt, and maybe it'll even help manage the space madness. Who knows, perhaps in the distant future someone will stumble across a long-dead starship above a planet somewhere and find these logs. I could take that for a legacy.
...I suppose if I'm trying to make a somewhat permanent record of myself, I should probably start with explaining who I actually am.
So, a brief overview.
I am William Magpie, an Elite-ranked Commander of the Pilot's Federation, member of the Stellar Cartographers' Guild, and accidental Duke of Velnambe. Well, really I'm the Duke of Tello Martius, a small province on the planet Velnambe, but it sounds better and opens more doors to say I'm a Duke of Velnambe. It's not lying, per se, just... omitting details. Anyway, I was born on the Airy Ring station in Pictavul, on the edge of Imperial space. At age 22 I earned my pilot's licence, and in the nine-or-so months since, I've been to the northern and southern extremes of the galaxy, and several places in between. If you couldn't guess from the first sentences I said, exploration is my calling in life. Distant stars urge me towards them, and there are few greater joys than finding unvisited stars, unusual planets, and strange forms of life.
At the moment, however, I am doing none of that. Instead I'm stuck in the bubble doing grunt work for ungrateful employers. Because, despite being genuine, bona-fide Imperial nobility, I am very much 'new money'. Or more accurately, 'not much money'. So here I sit in a Python, doing contracting work for a taxi company. Feels wrong, somehow, for a duke to be chauffeuring tourists and businessmen. Back-to-front, really. Nevertheless, I've heard the passenger industry is one of the best ways for someone with limited resources like me to make oodles of credits, and these guys are certainly paying a good commission despite being a tenth the size of Apex at best. So I'll put up with the boredom and indignity for a while.
As for why I'm trying to find a get-rich-quick scheme? Well I have ambitions, and for what I'm planning, I'll need credits. An 'enough to buy a starport' amount of credits.
So for now, call me Charon. I'm the ferryman.