Cabbages and an Underground Railroad :)
19 Nov 2020LongDistanceClara
//My propensity for dumb titles continues!
Without going full cheese, thanks for some lovely msgs this past week - plus having been away from Elite a while (this may sound overly drama llama!) it's genuinely nice that however bananas the rl world gets, the Inara community logs are as awesome as ever, have been trying to catch up reading them!
I snuck in a few non-elite pics (heresy!) on this occassion simply because it was so relevant to the story, so apologies for that - Odyssey can't come soon enough! They're from Coffee Stain's 'Satisfactory' which I've spent far too much time in, hope they're not too jarring!
Cue waffle!
Cabbages and an Underground Railroad...
I am very much a space monkey. But planetside has its attractions too.
We're on Marimba right now, the perfect little earth-like world that Hal, Coral and I discovered ages ago and became our retreat from the rest of the universe. Usually when we visit, we'll head to an idyllic little island chain on the equator and set down in a nice little jungle glade not far from the beach; but this time we're here in the Clair de Lune. As gorgeous as the conda is, she's also a big beautiful beastie and there's simply no way she'd fit down there - nor would a peaty jungle floor support her immense bulk!
So we're perched up here on a promontory of honeycombed rock overlooking the beautiful sheltered bay that (until now) had only ever seen my crew lazily sunbathing and swimming in it - but is now being avidly explored by a swarm of kids shrieking in excitement.
While they play in the warm tropical waters, I can see the adults setting up the shelters for the night, a bit further up the beach where the jungle canopy fringes the sands. We'll be staying a few more nights to make sure they're settled in comfortably before heading back to the bubble but from personal experience I know - they're going to be very happy here.SOOO - how did this happen? Bit of a weird one this...
Sunset on Marimba
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After getting Coral's patented kick-in-the-mental-butt in my last log, I was all ready for a completely random jaunt off into the wild blue/black yonder.
So the next morning, the two of us piled into the Ylva, our somewhat unique explorey Beluga (complete with bar and luxury cabins because who says sploring can't be decadent!) which still looked a bit the worse for wear after our expedition earlier in the year. Coral did the honours, picked a random direction and we scuttled off out into the galaxy. It's a testament to how nosey the human race is that, after a day or so of just aimlessly bouncing around from star to star and finding ourselves out on the southern Rim, we picked up a familiar comm signal even way out here, just a few systems over. It's honestly amazing how just over the space of several years how "small" the galaxy has become. I often feel as though I'm never more than an hour or two away from some other nosey biped like me, poking around our galaxy.
That was quite literally true in this case, as we were just a couple of hours beeline-zoom from the bubble - which turned out to pretty fortunate. As we were catching up with our fellow deep-spacer's shenanigans, I was interrupted by a message with an Imperial Navy identifier on it, demanding I return to the bubble ASAP.Well, bugger.
I'd joined up with the Navy ages ago because a) it had been one way of getting my butt into space in the first place and b) generally speaking, ex-navy pilots had a pretty easy time getting jobs after their service. So I had done my time, mostly shuttling bigwigs around as a glorified taxi and left as soon as I could; BUT technically, that meant I ended up on the naval reserve in perpetuity. Given that the bubble had been a bit of a squabblefest recently (this is why I'm not a diplomat - I'm reasonably sure they don't refer to faction-wide skirmishes and open conflict as "squabblefests"), I kinda expected that this communiqué was something along the lines of "oi, we need cannon fodder, come back and get plastered all over a feddie's canopy please".
But newp - it was directly from an Admiral. To me. Which given my former standing in the Navy as glorified bus driver made zero sense.
All it said was to show up at a starport in Facece and report to his office directly - all in all, pretty weird. Still, ours not to reason why etc! So after bidding a slightly-deflated farewell to our deep space friend, we reluctantly swung the Beluga around and scuttled back to the bubble far sooner than intended.
Brief meetup on the Rim!
Literally the whole way back, Coral was driving me nuts with a non-stop litany of "What does he want? What if you're recalled to service? What should I do then?" which was making my already spooked head even more frazzled - largely as I was thinking exactly the same things. I was on total autopilot as I brought the Ylva back into the docks at Jameson, hurriedly grabbed some gear, jumped into a shuttle and zoomed off to Facece, leaving Coral looking a bit bewildered, poor thing!
Arriving into Facece with my brain going a mile-a-minute, I dropped into the shipping lanes and in a bit of a daze scooted over to Peter's Base, the Coriolis I'd been directed to in the communiqué. My mental state wasn't really helped when, having barely landed and debussed, some naval lackey shoved a bag in my arms, pointed at a nearby Eagle and told me to find the Admiral at the military installtion in high orbit around Topaz, the earth-like world that we were currently hanging over.
I'm not going to get all poetic about this, largely because I don't have a poetic bone in my body! But I genuinely can't think of a better analogy than being a twig floating down a stream - I'd kinda embraced the "eh what?" bewliderment of it all and just floated along for the ride. I shimmied up into the awaiting Eagle, found the bag that had been thrust in my arms contained a generic Imp flight suit, quickly changed into it and a few minutes later, I took the Eagle out of the dock and made the short scoot around the planet to the installation.
And yikes.
Big boats in Facece
I've never served on one of these things; in fact, I've only ever been near one once, an ambassadorial drop-off/pick-up type dealy. And despite sounding pretentious as all hell, the "Majestic-class Interdictors" are pretty awesome things.
They are huge beasties and yet - well in my eyes at least! - quite pretty, at least insofar as a huge chunk of metal that's two kilometers long can be! To see two of them up close was pretty dang imposing, but I didn't really have much opportunity to ogle them; the sheer volume of traffic and security patrols buzzing around the area kept my head very much on a swivel!I began to see why I'd been given the flight suit and Eagle; I'd barely dropped out of FTL before being electronically poked and prodded over the Eagle's identifier beacon to see who and what I was; a flight of vultures was parked squarely up my bum within seconds and I had the distinct impression if I sneezed out of turn, I'd be turned into metallic confetti in a hearbeat! Everyone seemed kinda twitchy, which I guess makes sense given the aforementioned squabblefest with the feds - and showing up in an Imperial Eagle was probably a bit safer than some unknown cobra dropping in on two capital-class ships unannounced!
Even so, the escort flying behind me had clearly never heard of personal space and even after they'd authenticated me and handed me off to the installation's flight control for docking on one of the carriers, I still had the feeling that every ship in the vicinity was just barely restraining themselves from blowing me to pieces; so I was pretty relieved to make my way into the cavernous docking bay of the carrier and set down.
Belly of the beast!
The adventures of Floaty Twig continued; I barely had my feet on the deck before Lackey no. 2 was hustling me off down the maze of corridors, hatchways and gantries to a non-descript room deep in the bowels of this leviathan - somewhere in engineering would have been my best guess based off the smell of burning dust on metal and the uncomfortably loud thrummmmm of one of the ship's reactors. At which point, I was told to "stay", the guide scuttered off and I was left feeling fairly dazed! I don't think I'd been there more than a few minutes when the door opened and in came a very austere looking Admiral, followed by none other than Kei!
//Reference; A Brief History of Kei
Excerpt from prior log:
"Before becoming a space bum, I'd gotten my wings as an Imp in the Navy (although I spent most of my time ferrying bigwigs around, thrilling stuff!). During basic flight, I'd met this really cool customer, Kei - amazing pilot, just cool as a cucumber however crappy things got, definitely someone I'd want when things went sideways (as they have a bizarre tendency to do when I'm at the wheel!). I managed to track him down to a smart little tour operator running out of Achenar and he didn't take much convincing to hand in his notice and hop a shuttle with me - awesome!"
I managed to stop myself from launching into a Kei-hug and remembered that as a general rule of thumb, you were supposed to salute people a thousand ranks above you, and so I saluted the Admiral (or at least a fair approximation of a salute). What followed next was more than a bit weird and FAR too political for my liking!
So as it turns out, all this squabbling going on in the bubble at the moment owes its origins (in part at least!) to a bunch of people who aren't overly happy about the leadership of the Empire being hereditary. I'm not touching THAT one with a bargepole - I have my own beliefs but have learnt over the years that often very little good comes of discussing them with the vast majority of people who generally end up being "somewhat blinkered" in their views!
Suffice to say, this friction kicked off all kinds of nastiness. And one element of that is the inevitable bickering leading to killing, people screaming "J'accuse!" left right and centre and, as ALWAYS happens in this kind of crap, some poor innocent people getting caught in the middle. The Admiral (a really nice grandfatherly type who I'm always a sucker for!) in a nutshell was as a loyal servant of the Empire as there ever was but hated that, as always, some people were using the conflict to advance their agendas. He had discovered that a small settlement on the outskirts of imperial space had unwittingly offered lodging to a secessionist radical who was hiding out having bombed a nearby administration facility; as an example, the entire settlement was to be taken into custody and more than likely never to be heard from again.
I was kinda wondering how this had anything to do with the Admiral until the other shoe dropped - specifically that his estranged son was one of those being taken into custody. They'd had some falling out and hadn't spoken in forever, but the long and short of it was the Admiral had kept tabs on him and knew all about this settlement - and it was about as radical and subversive as you'd expect a bunch of peaceful farmers and their families to be! They'd had no idea who the terrorist had been at the time, had taken him in as a stranger purely out of the goodness of their hearts and were now about to get squished under the boot of some scheming little regional administrator just to score some cheap local political capital.
HIGHLY seditious cabbages...
At this point I'm starting to feel preeetty uncomfortable because why-the-hell-is-he-telling-me-this! Cue Kei, who then explains he'd told the Admiral he knew someone who might be able to help (aka yours truly) by "disappearing them to a safe little hideaway, a tropical planet tens of thousands of light years away where no-one would be able to find them....".
THANKS BUDDY.
I mean I get why he got me involved, he knows I absolutely rage at injustice and am a sucker for a good sob story. And sure, Marimba is pretty much perfect - no-one would ever find them there in a million years, I've been there enough over the years to know that the local weather, fauna and flora have no surprises and there's no indigenous pathogens to make your brains into milkshake and squirt out of your ears but goddammit Kei, that was MY hideaway!BUT - these people obviously needed it WAY more than I needed a whole ELW as a tanning salon.
FINE - we'll take them there. The Admiral was obviously very grateful and I suspect, providing there's no fallout from all this, I may have just made a buddy in a VERY high place, which never hurts! Next came the big faff though - we first had to smuggle the fugitives out of Empire space. The Admiral had arranged for Kei to sneak them out right under the local magistrate's nose and they were currently hiding out on an outpost in the Achenar system of all places - hide in plain sight and all that! All I had to do was go and pick them up, then it was up to me how to get them out of the bubble!I promised I'd get them out safely and see them securely settled on Marimba. The Admiral was obviously very relieved and I couldn't help myself, giving the stoic old man a hug.
Protocol be damned, we were both breaking the law for god's sake! He gave a bit of a gruff laugh, hugged me back with thanks and then quickly left with Kei in tow.At which point I had a mild panic attack and freaked out a bit.
OK! So all I need to do is smuggle a bunch of people who (albeit unjustly!) were being hunted as fugitives from the very heart of the Empire and if I'm caught, we're all well and truly screwed. THEN I'm basically responsible for them - ok well technically no, I'm not, but Marimba was MY world and I'll be damned if anyone comes to harm there! Fine. One step at a time. I somehow managed to get back up to the carrier's dock, hop in the Eagle and zip back to Peter's base and from there back to Shinrarta, where I updated a very relieved Coral on what we had to do.
I may have mentioned this before but Coral is just awesome.
No huge existential or moral debates, no devil's advocating or doomsaying, just "Cool. So what are we gonna need?". Seriously, one in a million. I decided the best bet would be to take my cutter the Cassandra, since no-one would bat an eye at it flying around in Empire space - plus we had to evacuate about fifty people so we'd need the room! Nothing fancy - just dock with the station, grab the fugitives and scuttle back to the relative safety of Jameson.We boarded the Cassie, waited until around midday when traffic in and around Shinrarta was peaking and casually scooched on out of dock and quickly jumped over to Achenar. The fugitives were hiding out on the Misty Pines Homestead - a slightly misleading name, since although it sounded really cosy, it was in reality a bunch of biodomes strapped to a station. Still, it looked pretty enough on the way in!
Misty Pines Homestead, Achenar.
The actual "heist" was spectacularly uneventful and a bit of an anticlimax; Kei had sorted things out and basically Coral and I docked up with the station, skipped out to grab some lunch, came back on board and took off, completely ignoring the fifty or so people secreted away in the capacious cargo bay down below! The Cassie could easily outrun anything that was sent after us - those engines are basically directed supernovae!
- with a stupid amount of shielding to boot, but the whole point was to do it without raising any alarms that would result in investigation. The last thing we wanted was to be fugitives ourselves!OK, out of the frying pan, let's make sure Jameson wasn't the fire! I will freely admit, fine, I CAN be a bit cavalier with approach speeds into dock because come on, it's a big old dock, I've not rammed anyone yet! And even if I do speed, I'm pretty friendly with most of the flight controllers in the spacedock. HOWEVER - Joselyn Marks, the head honcho for Jameson's dock operations is well known for having a stick up her officious butt and any infractions would get investigated six ways from sunday SO - you've never seen me dock so meekly at that station as I did that day.
Followed by some very casual driving of the cargo containers over to my Anaconda, the Clair de Lune - and by casual, I mean ridiculously carefully and looking about as nonchalant as something out of a cartoon; seriously, if we hadn't been so terrified of somehow being caught, we'd have been laughing at each other at how obviously fake our forced not-so-poker-faces were! Still - no drama whatsoever. The fugitives were on board the Clair and we were almost ready to go.
I'd already got a whole bunch of evacuation shelters, medicines, water purification modules - basically I'd gone out and got pretty much everything you could think of and then some for a prolonged stay on a hostile planet, which Marimba was decidedly not! The plan was to get them out there, get them settled with everything they'd need to survive for a good long while, then scoot back to the bubble and grab anything else we might need. As it turns out - they don't seem to need anything; they're a ridiculously placid but tough bunch! I guess you have to be to eke out a living as a farmer on the edge of the bubble, but even so, they're just so resourceful that half of the supplies I bought them are things they've never seen and have no use for! Still - better to have it and not need it etc.
All packed up and ready to go! We waited for traffic to get especially busy and then snuck out of Jameson between a rattly old T9 and an impatient Beluga before starting our jumps. We'd decided to head a few k towards Colonia, just in case we bumped into anyone and fool any possible tails; then once outside the bubble, we swung around up north and began our run up to Marimba. Coral had nipped down to the cargo bay to make sure everyone was doing ok - with varying degrees of yes, no and zero-g motion sickness! It was the first time a lot of them had been in space, let alone having to endure witchspace jumps and for the uninitiated, it can be pretty stomach churning at best!
They all seemed remarkably sanguine about what they'd been through and the life they were headed to. I for one would definitely not be as calm as they were, uprooting from everything I'd ever known, running from an unjust accusation and zooming halfway across the galaxy to an uninhabited world with no way of reaching out or contacting the rest of humanity! Coral and I were doing our best during a break from the jumps to reassure them that we'd come back to check in on them regularly, make sure they had what they needed, that all this would blow over and they'd be able to return soon...
And yet they just smiled, thanked us profusely and told us not to worry, that they'd be fine! It was so inspirational yet at the same time made my blood boil! I absolutely loathe injustice - it's the one thing that can make my usually fairly happy-go-lucky demeanour turn into full blown psycho bitch and just rage at bullies and cowards hurting people I care about! The fact that these poor people were so philosophical about it all and were just getting on with things in such a matter-of-fact peaceful way was both wonderful and heart-breaking! I'm not going to get up on my soapbox (too late) but I really hope there's a very special place in hell reserved for the asshats who impose their petty little wills on others. Imp, Fed, Ally, Sasquatch, it doesn't matter what "tribe" you're part of - people are people and things like this happen a thousand times a day in a thousand places wherever you are in the galaxy.
All we can do I guess is live our lives with a little compassion and learn to live with different ideologies, rather than try and force others to change to our ways. Fat chance, I know, but you gotta try!
ANYWAY - we got out to Marimba fairly uneventfully;
Hello hideaway! Coming in to land...
...and I really don't care how cheesy this sounds, I was pretty shiny-eyed and grinny as I listened to the children shriek with excitement as they ran around on the beaches after we landed - none of them had ever seen a sea for starters! I couldn't help thinking how excited they'll be tonight when the sun sets and the stars come out. We're much, much closer to the galactic core out here and the night skies over Marimba are breath-taking - with such high stellar density, the starfield is like an ocean of little blazing diamonds cast across the sky.
And I know I sound like a travel agent or something but seriously, it took me years to find this place precisely because it is just so perfect; it's always been my little sanctuary amongst the stars. And yes, I was a little possessive about it and a tiny bit grumpy that Kei was precocious enough to suggest it to his Admiral friend - but looking at these wonderful people settling in as the last rays of the evening sun pull back over the horizon, it's a total no-brainer; I couldn't be happier that they'd found a home where they could live in peace. And for each person I see down there by the campfires, theres millions more back in the bubble, the so-called cradle of "civilization" who face persecution and intolerance every single day, who deserve a place like this to live. I know I can't do anything about that, but at least Coral and I were able to help these people and that's something I guess.
Yep. I think they'll be pretty happy here.
Time for me to turn in too! Goodnight, wherever you are. 
Moonrise over Marimba.