Fallout
19 Dec 2016Tisiphone Moreau
It turns out that when you manage to get yourself credited as the sole responsible party for the demise of an entire pirate clan, life can get real interesting real fast. This is probably one of those things that the Elite-rated pilots know all about, but for me it came as a bit of a revelation. Someone should really tell you about this stuff before letting you sign on to a massive system-wide bounty hunt.In hindsight, the Crimson Posse obviously weren't acting alone in Aeternitas. There was a coordinated effort on the part of several gangs and clans and that means there was someone powerful orchestrating the whole thing - and now that powerful someone has put the bounty right back on me.
Of course, I didn't know for a few days. After the big payoff in Houtman City had cleared, we were back out to our usual routine. I probably should have known that it wasn't going to settle down easily. It never settles easily.
We got a lucky break and that's likely the only reason I'm still alive out here. Someone started making a lot of noise and asking a lot of questions around the Sobek system and Tiler caught wind of it. Kristal was up in cockpit while I was getting Redemption ready for lift-off and caught his priority comms call. I thought she was going to pass out right there on the deck when she ran down to break the news. It's not as though she hasn't tangled with pirates on her own before, but something Tiler must have said had her rattled like I've never seen before.
Tiler's message boiled down to a pretty simple suggestion, however: "Run. Right now." If Tiler thought I was in danger right in the heart of the Alliance, I wasn't going to argue.
I told Kristal she didn't need to stick around - she wasn't even involved at Aeternitas - but she wasn't having any of it.
"And miss the chance to race the Taipan into canyons no one else has ever seen?" she'd scoffed. Fighter jocks are always the same, aren't they? Imperials like Kristal seem just as crazy as any the Federation ever groomed.
The trip out of the habitable worlds was a pell-mell of jumps we barely took the time to calculate and furtive hydrogen scooping. The only real pause - barely long enough to eat a halfway normal meal and to bathe - was at a settlement on the ragged edge of Federation where an old friend of Tiler's repaid a nearly as old debt by giving Redemption's frame shift drive an overhaul to squeeze out every last light second from the coils.
I'll have to remember to ask Tiler what he did for her back in the day. He'd mentioned that she'd been in my situation once, herself. He's got a real weakness for women who tend to get into trouble.
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Every time I come out here I end up feeling bad for the early generations of explorers. Men and women out here in the vast silence, crawling along from star to star with hyperdrives that wouldn't even be fit for trainer shuttles anymore. On the plus side, their surveys must have been exceptionally thorough since you'd basically be forced to visit every star on your route.
Us? We were in a hurry. It's amazing how quickly a thousand light years can pass when you're motivated. We really didn't stop to look around until we were that far out, but since then all we've done is a whole lot of looking.
This isn't my first trip out but it is Kristal's. Her constant nervous chattering is starting to wear on my patience, and every day Redemption feels smaller and smaller. Going out alone sure has its own set of challenges - like forgetting how to speak when you get back to civilized space - but going out with a partner?
We've settled into a sort of routine of studied avoidance. We meet up in the galley for breakfast and coffee and a little conversation and then part ways. I've been keeping busy on the flight deck scanning and catalouging the stars and planets in the systems we jump into. Kristal's mostly stayed down in the hangar, keeping up on her fitness regimen. We've set down on a number of worlds so far and I've been all too happy to let her launch and go have some fun with the Taipan. It's actually nice to have the ship to myself for a couple of hours.
I've never been out this way so I plotted a course into the North America and Pelican nebulae. Just a couple of regular space tourists, we are. We've got nothing but time to kill out here, so I'm trying to make the most of it.
We were camped out one night on the edge of a dizzyingly deep canyon system, some place with a spectacular view of the two nebulae rising up over a distant shield wall, when Kristal noticed an extremely bright patch of light up in the sky. At first we thought it was another ship but when it didn't move we worked on other theories. Let me tell you, space madness is a very real thing and if you'd heard some of what we'd drunkenly come up with that night you'd have no doubts.
In the end, the nav charts confirmed that it's the NGC 7822 nebula, a ribbon of white-hot stars blazing up there off the Pelican's shoulder. It's a long way off, but we decided to make it that far before turning back. Who knows what kind of trouble will be waiting for us by then.