Refugee to General: Part 3 – Trader
26 Oct 2024Constance Flux
My name is Constance and I’m a Trader. Me and Radish had been making a small but tidy profit and being frugal, so we had a nice nest egg hidden away, but nowhere near enough to buy our own ship until a lucky break presented a once in a lifetime opportunity for the likes of a couple of nobody’s. Biowaste was the key. No one wants to shift it but everyone wants it shifting. Our Boss (Schev) had a been running a contract with Kumo Crew to dispose of their piratey poop from Crimson Exchange in the HIP 10792 system to Attenborough Terminal in the Almagest system. It was a long slow haul in the oldest company T9 Heavy, barely modified above stock outfitting. Schev didn’t like doing the journey himself, he had other more profitable routes to run in far nicer ships. We had built up enough competency with the heavy freighter that he entrusted us to crew the run ourselves, with the agreed payment , after 10 round trips, being a rundown old Adder that we could call our own. All was going great but for a fuel scoop malfunction on the very last run. Like the mythical Icarus, we flew to close to the Star and overheated while scooping, damaging several modules and we were forced to drop out of Super Cruise to affect repairs. Well this was all fairly straight forward for a whizz mechanic like Radish but it did take some time . Unfortunately the star we had been trying to scoop from was O class , that burns hottest of all star types, and the cargo bay full of biowaste started to get dangerously hot. So much so the decomposition and fermentation process was accelerated exponentially. As we engaged the engines to jump to the next system , my beloved ships cat, Belle, jumped down from the bridge conduits above the navigation controls. As ever she landed with precision on her soft padded paws, directly on to the big red button marked BOOST.
The already straining engines produced even more heat and before the helmsman could activate the emergency heat sinks it was too late. The already bubbling biowaste boiled and then bust forth from every single one of the 752 Cargo canisters. By the time we arrived at Attenborough Terminal all the crew had been forced to don their helmets due to the toxic fumes now pervading every micro-parsec of the ship. We were not popular and the end client was furious , not only at the loss of trade but at the detox team required to clean both the ship and the docking bay.
On arrival back at Crimson Exchange , Schev was incandescent and as we stepped out of the now pine scented T9 he kicked Belle so hard she shrieked. He then proceeded to beat Radish with a huge Hyperspanner. I hate bullies and my life of manual labour and naturally statuesque build meant I was pretty handy in a fight. I stepped in and exploited the weakness of every man. I kicked him in the space balls and then I kicked again. Then I grabbed his precious jewels and twisted until he fainted. When he came to , I twisted some more and told him we would be taking our payment and leaving. As the grubby Adder passed through the toast rack of the station I could still hear him crying out. Our days under the thumb of the Kumo Crew were served and as we engaged the Hyperdrive and jumped to the Robigo system, we did so as Flux and Radish, Independent Traders.
