New Beginnings - did I really hear an angel call?
05 Sep 2023Deckard Jansen
I don’t know why I decided to visit the shipyard after docking at Linnaeus Enterprise [BD+48 738] and up until that point, I had no intention of buying a new ship. The Aiken Drum, my faithful ASPX had served me well. We’d done a few tours around the bubble and I had re-engineered the old FSD as best I could. Sure, it didn’t have the long distance legs of some of the craft we encountered but it was a fast ship. This old man was happy with it anyway, but there was this nagging doubt… was it cut out for a long flight into the black? That’s the only thing that I can put my finger on as to why I found myself looking up at a slightly tarnished and beat up Krait. Sure the paint job on it made it look shiny from across the dock, but closer inspection revealed any number of nicks, dinks, and repair scars that suggested this same ship had seen some significant action. Further enquiries about the Krait’s previous owner provided little detail but a lot of rumour. It either belonged to a now retired space pirate, or had been a squadron ship put into defend systems over near Barnard’s Loop. One of the sales jockeys said that it had been dropped off by a raven-haired ice queen who had done three tours along the outer rim and decided to hang her suit up and head back to Altair with her final payout.
Whatever its past truly was I guessed I would never find out, but here I stood with a cool
250,000,000 credits burning a hole in my zero G account thanks to the gold broker at Kummer Acropolis. That was maybe my last stab at some easy money, but now I felt this pull towards the black. I had to get out there discover something new for myself and get away from all this mundane. Maybe I’d find out something new about myself too. Sure there would be risks but the rewards would be so much greater.
I looked over the ship a couple of times. It needed work. I could swapped out my Asp’s FSD easy enough and it would definitely need a new seat in the cockpit, but it would do.
As I walked around the ship musing about whether I would buy it or not, I noticed something odd. The new paint was already flaking off where the nameplate would have been… would have been? It was still there, you could just make out the rectangular rise in the surface through the layers of resprayed red paint. Some paint job this was. I picked out one of the thermal drivers that I kept in my boot pouch and began to scrap along the rectangular lines where the paint was flaking. The paint job was worse than I thought and the layers of paint lifted off easily with only the lightest of heat settings. The paint wasn’t bonded to the surface at all. Who the hell did this work I asked myself as doubt started to creep in. It was then that I noticed the first couple of letters A…N… G…. I carried on the clean up job and revealed a poly-chromide tungsten alloy name plate that was as hard as diamond but only a couple of millimetres in thickness. This was a permaplate, impervious to fire, impacts, blasts and anything else you cared to throw at it. It could be shaped, moulded, engraved, stamped or cast but only once and then just after it had been fired. People would use this for Crypto passcodes and deposit them in deep vaults in far flung reaches of the old Sol System where they lay forgotten for centuries and had lost all meaning to anyone.
Not this one though, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to engrave this. The script looked like a hand-writing expert had applied some of that ancient ink to one of those dusty books you see in that museum of antiquities back on Altair, except they’d cut into this alloy instead. Angel of the Abyss
Was that a reference to that raven haired explorer, or was it a reference to the shop itself? Had it been the rescuer to many a lost soul out in deep space? Or was it a reference to the Guardian Angel that legend had would sit on our shoulders? I didn’t know either way, but I liked it. The plate seemed to cold to touch, a different temperature to the hill around it. It would need a proper clean up but it seemed appropriate for what I was looking for and it felt like something I was destined to find.
I bought the ship for the name in the end when I was about to walk away. There was only one path I would be taking now.