Homecoming
13 Mar 2017Per-Ja Ferra
Far Reach docked in Pribylov last night. For me it was a bitter sweat arrival. After completing our scans of the Great Annihilator We turned our nose home and drove hard and burned long. We were just about to cross the gap, that place between the bars of the barred spiral, when we spotted a lovely earth like planet. I asked the clients if they were up for a detour. They agreed, we were weeks ahead of their timeline, and I set course for the world. We took all the normal precautions and made a soft landing in a lovely field of red grass. We enjoyed the day took the rovers out and just relaxed.When we were headed back up the well I noticed a glitch in the avionics. Once in orbit I deiced to run a complete diagnostic. For some reason the shielding system had developed a cascade fault that was dangerous. Taking the shields offline I sicked the ARS on it and waited. ARS did a great job but just as the shields were coming up a micro meteor hit the ship. It ruptured the external hull and caused a short in the EPS conduits. All easily patched, except that the EPS short fired the main and backup storage on for the passenger cabin data systems and all of the recent flight data on the Far Reach as well. The practical upshot of which was that we lost all scan data and exploration data from the last thirty-six hours. This included the contract data.
While the client understood that this was something beyond my control they also had a contract to fulfill of their own. Since they were not going to get paid for the trip they could not pay me. Since they could not pay me then I took a hit on reputation as a failed contract. At least I had the can data from the gap back to upload. I gained a little rep toward my exploration status, not as much as I had hoped but some and my clients were so far ahead of schedule that they were able to book another pilot to take them back to finish their contract.
Already have another client who wants me to take them to a few spots in the area and they are willing to pay pretty high creds for it. Little suspicions that he may not be above board but after a week in the black and nothing to show but 200K in scan data I need to make some bank.