Colonia in a Clipper Part 2
30 Mar 2024Cetacean1
"Some think space madness just happens, but it is a process. If you don’t want to work on it don’t worry…. it will work on you."As the fuel reserves ran low crossing the gap from the Orion arm towards Colonia I turned the shields off as a farther measure to conserve fuel. We even stopped mapping systems, and did not dare land to collect samples in the gap.
Perhaps it was the fear of a meteorite cracking the unshielded hull, the thought of dying in space as fuel ran out, or the realization that the pretty pink flower like clusters co-pilot Martina had collected were likely the great ancestor of foot fungus…. But we had it. Space madness found a way.
We did things to remain sane, like taking space walks to carve a new notch in the paint outside the hull for each new system we visited, but the repeated landings on newly discovered planets to search for new life eventually wore them off, along with the surrounding paint.
Eventually we made a very rare discovery- a new Earth like planet in the Flyiedgiae EK-S C6 system. That brought us back to the moment... for a while, it was still over 12000 LY to Colonia.
We started to see the stars as a dense cluster of bright white stars and wondered if we were seeing a different view of the central galaxy. As we got closer it seemed to tower over us reaching up from the galaxy, then over us.
It was just a massive cluster of stars almost 10000 LY from Colonia. Systems in the cluster were only about 1 LY from each other, leading to fast jumps between them. However only finding ice balls and a few stay gas giants, we continued the journey forward.
Starting to focus more on the systems with potential earth-like worlds (most the scanner picked up ended up just being balls of ice and rock) started to restore some sanity as the rest of the jumps blended together. By the time we were only 3000 LY from Colonia 5 earth-likes had been found, most new discoveries.
The specimen rooms were also full of samples, and worlds with only bacterial life were skipped.
The race to turn them in for first discovery before someone else could beat us too it began, and drove us to reach Colonia faster.