2,568.66 light-years from home
31 Jul 2017Evgeniya Asimova
The silver fins on Evgeniya's hull glinted in the raw brilliance as the ship swivelled and drew away from the gravitational swell of the system's sun. Evgeniya was the first person ever to have seen that sun, the first to have ever felt its gravity. As she passed over the nearby asteroid belt, accelerating more swiftly now, she brought up a display of all the astronomical bodies in this previously uncharted area of space. Her blue eyes studied the map, fresh generated by her ship's computer, and - after a brief deliberation - she set a course for the nearest planet. The ship glided through the ink under her smooth piloting, barrel rolled several times, and swung right around the beautiful and austere white planet, across its darkside and back into the orange light of the sun, while her scanners unlocked the secrets held beneath the sparkling crust.There was nothing like being out there in the wilds, far beyond the reach of human civilisation.
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The life of a Commander was a lonely and often boring one, but it was also one that was filled with amazing moments of freedom, of expansion, and of feeling incredible power. The speed and capability of Evgeniya's craft was beyond our imaginations to grasp. We are limited by Einsteinian notions, but her ship was not. Where we struggle to get the bus to work, she could jump through tens of star systems in one Earth day, flying through them with ease to scan all the interesting and varied planets, moons, gas giants and suns she found along the way.
Exploring the galaxy was much easier and more rewarding than it had been in her father's day. Her father had been an amateur by comparison. His exploration missions had been funded by a whip-round of Imperial families interested in learning more of about local constellations and nebulas; he had done all the painstaking work by the sweat of his brow in a tiny and uncomfortable ship. But now the continuing expansion of human civilisation meant that exploration had become a big business. Data was everything. And people paid top whack for Evgeniya's data. They wanted to know what moons could be mined, what systems were like, which suns could be scooped, and – above all – what planets might make a reasonable place for humans to live. Miners, economists, politicians, world colonisers, religious sects, astronomists, physicist, and biologists all wanted to see her data. She would make millions from a journey like this.
Her ship was also superior in many ways to anything that was available to her father's generation. It was a Lakon Spaceways Asp class, upgraded with some of the best components. Many of those components she had over-clocked and enhanced herself, meaning that her craft was amongst the best. It was not the most stylish craft, to be sure, but it was an ideal one for her lone exploration missions. She had spent the last few years running missions in Imperial space and bounty hunting in Can Qing (not to mention studying advanced engineering) in order to have this formidable craft. With the Euphorbia crystal now installed in her drive, she could glide over 40 light-years in the lanes between the suns, glide more easily than a stream down a mountainside, meaning she could travel hundreds of lightyears in a day. A 40 light-year jump-range was a lot for that class of ship, especially considering that she kept her craft loaded with armaments, which was unusual for an explorer. But she had learned her craft as a Commander the hard way, running with smugglers and fighting off pirates, and she would have felt naked without guns, even in the middle of nowhere, even in places like this where there was no record of a human ever having been before. Space was vast, and you never knew what might turn up. Whatever turned up, she wanted to be prepared for it. It was worth carrying the extra weight of all those guns because they gave her peace of mind.
But, despite all these advantages, Evgeniya still had to be tenacious to get anywhere and make a profit, exploring the endless galaxy. She had to work hard constantly for days on end, stopping only for a few hours to nap, performing and re-performing repetitive task, pumping herself full of stimulating drugs, with little to break it all up. In her time, all the systems of the Milky Way had been named individually - but only a small fraction had ever been visited and mapped out in any detail. There was believed to be over 400 billion systems; less than a million had been explored, and only a few thousand had permanent inhabitants. There was years of profits ahead of her if she was willing to put the work in.
The system she was in was called simply, and – she thought – rather elegantly 'Slegao JP-G C27-4'. It was a fairly lucrative system for her. It was a binary system: it had two suns orbiting one another, and each sun had several small worlds held in tight orbits. The primary sun reduced to a pinprick of light behind her as she scanned all the planets in turn. Many of them contained rich sources of metals. And the first planet orbiting the smaller second sun had many of the properties required to support human life if efforts were made to terraform the place. It was a world covered in dark-grey water. In a few centuries' time, there might be people living there, adapted to the moderate gravity and the 37.4 day year. People were adaptable, even if old Earth always remained inside them, defining and limiting them. And no doubt they would christian the planet with a more interesting name than the one Evgeniya registered on the database when she completed her scan: 'B1'.
The craft was bearing up well, and so was she. This was almost the end of her voyage. She had seen varied and beautiful sights.
One more jump and she would make her way back to Can Qing.
