Gazing Into The Maw Of Hell...And Then Home
07 Oct 2021Scubadog
Damn, that took awhile. After I arrived at Explorer's Anchorage I handed the keys to The Ceti Azeria over to the techs to start rebuilding all the interior portions of the ship that the damned Guardian relic toward had pierced. Then I contacted the station quartermaster to see if there were any rooms to rent for the time being. It hadn't escaped me that there were surprisingly few ships in the system, so I figured on a pretty good chance of getting a nice room. I wasn't disappointed. Of course, I really wasn't all that concerned if they didn't have a decent room. I mean, seriously, I could have just locked myself in my stateroom on the ship, but I knew I'd hear every hammer, every drill, every rivot as the workers repaired my ship.
You know, I can visit Sagittarius-A many times and that black hole will still make my butt pucker. It feels like I shouldn't be able to drop in on the marker beacon without getting sucked into an infinitely stretched out mass of cells. But it's captivating, that's for sure.
Two days later I got the buzz from the station that the ship was repaired. I spent an hour inspecting the work. Trust, but verify, as the saying goes. I packed up my personals, dumped them off in my stateroom and headed up to the bridge to do all the pre-launch prep. No issues popped up, so off I went. This was going to be the relatively short leg of my journey, and I wasn't planning on being nearly as attentive to gathering cartographic data along the way. About halfway back to the Colonia bubble I decided to put down on one of the planets just to get one last evening listening to nothing but the faint howling of the thin atmosphere against the hull of the ship. I routinely shut down everything--including shields--when I land on planets like this so as to minimize the common background noise that all ships make. A final strange sunset before making it back to Bisley Landing in the Benzaiten system.
The final push home went without a hitch, and it was equal part satisfying and disappointing as I manually drove my behemoth through the mail slot (I hate autodocks!), but I was indeed home.
