22
Feb
2019

you are not in kansas anymore

By Admin
4701 views

After the meeting in Pennsylvania, I was dispatched to explore a connecting system that we have no information about. One jump hole registers as a stable one and I actually had it locked in my system a couple days ago while training and testing my new ship’s ability to sustain proximity to sun coronas.

It is a small ship by any standards, but I can’t not be continuously impressed by it.

The smallest jurk on the joystick is throwing this glorified escape pod into fast tumbles. It looks like I am piloting a mad rabbit in a race with ten hound dogs without the feeling of fear associated with that. It has enough power to sustain a good amount of fire released from the guns I’ve scavenged last week.

I named it Diurpaneus in the honor of a dacian king from my ancestry on Earth. It will serve well as one of my Assistants. There is the issue of the long-term docking that I have to resolve. A new contract and a strategic place requires some thought and planning.

This comes back to the need of exploration.

These nearby systems from Pennsylvania seem like a good prospect and I could use this to support my returned friends in the days that come or even maybe new explorers that like our goals…

All said and done, I am flying in a straight line to merge within space I’ve never seen and traveled through.

The atmosphere after the jump is serene. This place has an unnerving tranquility about it that is contrasting severely with the visuals I have from my cockpit.

I see planets clearly and a medium bright sun that seems to have cleared a good area in its vicinity leaving a spotless field of view to the center of the system.

A couple of asteroid fields caught my eyes and I am plotting a course to explore these first.

I am fresh here and I better stay out of sight and not in open space where I can be a most rewarding target for what might lurk in this part of the Universe.

The basic reports I am getting is that this is a Liberty controlled space but the activity of listed Liberty rogue elements is high. I would not want to find myself conversing with one of the latter’s faction Destroyer’s captains… Not alone at least.

chapter 1: just get yourself somewhere

Getting through the densely packed small water-ice rich asteroids seems like a game designed for this ship. This is a gold-mine in the eyes of visionaries. A lot of the planetforming companies could see this as a strong backbone for local enterprises.

Water all around, and it’s because of the characteristic light-wave variations that I saw a future target in exploration. An intensely purple nebula. It looked like a humongous cotton-candy was floating in space low bellow the Sun’s equatorial plane. I was so intensely satisfied by that image that I could only see in the records, hidden in my peripheral view a familiar man-made shape. A target for next enterprises.

- This could be a sweet ride. I say to myself very proud of my pun.

When alone in space, humor could take shapes and forms you never associated with it before because of societal taboos. Well… Here you are free to release yourself from those boundaries and imagine your values to a scale closer to your own. So, I laughed!

The waypoint was indicating a different course and abatement from it would cost me more days then i supplied the ship for and this is another no-no in space exploration or any enterprise for that matter.

The ship makes a small cracking noise when thrusters are reversed. A water-ice crystal made its way into the engine and the heat took care of it in the most violent way. No sensors are reporting damage, but it would not take a second happening like this one to worry a veteran.

I am jumping out in clear space hurtling towards what could be a habitable planet.

My hopes are brought up by zooming past a fight between what looked like Liberty Rogues and Bounty Hunters. Where there are people, there is a base, so I step on the throttle ignoring the commotion around me.

chapter 2: in life there is always room for one more disappointment

Closing in, it looked clearer and clearer that this planet would not be inhabited. What looked like a former branch of the asteroid field I left behind broke loose from the orbit was following, attracted by the gravitational pull of the planet and now it surrounds it like a pack of hyenas stacking a sick elephant. It id left to the imagination what ordeal could potential inhabitants go through at the level of the constantly bombarded surface of this planet. What a waste.

I can’t give up yet, so I decide to move in larger and larger circles around the planet to look for a smot, or maybe something indicating some sort of a presence.

This is how I stumbled upon the wreck of Demeter. A border world construction vessel that could very well have some compatible equipment with my rust-bucket. Proximity was tolerable and a stationary position wa achievable for me to work at retrieving some pieces over the next day hidden in this place, in the shadow of the biggest, saddest beautiful planet I’ve seen lately.

chapter 3: visible death

Small, big, opaque or quite rare, colorful and plain, gaseous or rocky, the loose formations in particular have a lot more attraction for me in my endeavours than jumping from planet to planet with nothing to do in between but ponder to the might of the infinity surrounding you.

One by one, I combed every patch of this space only to find more wrecks.

More space…

And more wrecks.

This dance of agony and enthusiasm followed for 5 days. It seemed like at every dark or obscure place, death had sprung a trap.

The antithesis of the clear, everlasting space, devoid of any matter and spreading seemingly to infinity, with the busy quality of the locations where unfortunate pilots had to accept the unavoidable, is startling in contrast and quality.

I am in a place of absolutes and there is no denying.

Such thoughts were going through my mind when I realized that I reached a point marked as desirable from my very first entrance in this system.

I made my way in the cotton-candy, only that now, it does not seem like the sweet time I was foreseeing before. In this cloud's purple haze I find myself constantly avoiding pockets or indiscernible origin radiations and clouds of burned rocky material.

At first disregarded, blaming this sight on the hypnotic appearance of this environment, I faint blip on the radar, just like it would have hit another shell of another wreck started to be confirmed by a shadowy presence behind thick glasses.

This could not be here! It all started to rewind in my head.

Freeport 7.

The Donau.

The Order.

The Nomads.

The pesky, soules, inconsistent, betraying Nomads.

It is a Nomad gate.

chapter 4: a way in does not mean a way out

The jump was made successful. I made this out of pure ambition more than curiosity.

It turns out that every act of reckless stupidity end up costing more every time.

I am on the other side of this gate now, looking towards what looks like the guts of a zollofian spiral fish, complete with the repugnant smell of acid burn that often comes from deep beneath any of the Omicron’s clouds.

The radar keeps flashing annoyingly:

“UNKNOWN LOCATION - UNKNOWN SYSTEM”

It takes me a while to get that from the background and pay attention to the notifications. I keep seeing some lights in the distance, but I also know that 40% of nanobots in a radiation rich area spells “deep sleep in a pod”.

I like to sleep. When I get the chance I am stick myself to any soft surface like a kid to his mother’s hand. I miss a good sleep, but not nearly as much as dedicating myself to a long period of cryo. Back-up thrusters and input the master gate activation key.

The gate has another suggestion, somewhere on the lines of a firm “Hell NO!”.

It looks like it offers me volunteer to that long sleep.

No efforts, no codes, nothing makes it budge.

From my vantage point, a dark and frowned gate speaks to me:

- Well...suck it up my friend and go in. That way!

“That way” I go.

Wherever “that way is”.

As I was thinking that, I remembered the flicker in the asteroid field in front of me.

Wait a minute! Where are these rocky thing are coming from? This is surreal. The color would suggest I am in a bubble of a nebula of epic proportions, surrounded by a star nursery. Maybe this is just a bubble from many that could be around, but where is this? Where am I?

As I approach, what looks like a creature emerges in lieu of the flickering lights. It’s shape is reminiscent of Nomad ship designs.

There is something much more... human-like, about this design though…

It dawned on me that the asteroid field I am going through right now could actually be a debris field from a destroyed planet. I see bases torn to pieces every now and then, but planets? You need a planet to destroy another, a star even, or an oversaturated black hole that spews back the remains of the rocky world.

Everything looks calm. Everything looks by design. Everything is a mix and not match on a gargantuan scale. A system made for the fun of a superior entity.

Suppositions.

It is all so heterogeneous, that any hypothesis is plausible. A logical, physical explanation must be hidden here. And if I am right, then what caused a planet to be scattered like this, would be a good thing to know or recognize when time comes.

It’s definitely humanoid accessible, which means the occupants and builders are in tune with our existence. Thy even build docking points on the bulkheads that are compatible with my ship’s design. They are Sirius knowledgeable and they hide in plain sight in direct access next to the core of our inhabited territory.

No patrols. At least, not that my equipment can pick up.

As I was testing the fit on the docking arrays on what I associated earlier with bulkheads, I spotted an unusual alignment of objects next to a planet. They stand out form this position in the sea of random and irregular boulders.

I need a way out and the base could be my way to stay here for longer then expected.

Symmetry, repetition, sequence and similar geometry to known objects are a sign of planning. I know only one species capable of that in a mathematical fashion. It’s us. These Nomads are impulsive, instinctual and organic. Humans collaborating with them, controlled by them or even Nomads mimicking human intelligent thought?

Matters not. If there is such a sign, there must be a way out there.

chapter 5: met expectations

A trade lane design...

A trade lane!

This could be it.

No reason not to push forward.

Beautiful repetition! This looks even more like a test site. From the design of the entire space, now to these objects, it all looks like a big playground for trials and research.

A bit stretched for a conventional trade lane spacing, this denotes experimentation with alternative energy sources to fuel these machines. Mechanical machines. No organic or nomad energy variations are picked up in my data. They are not powered on at this point, but they seem like they were active at one time.

I could play the scientist for a short while. I know what I know from experience and not at all from books. My father encouraged me to perfect labor skills and to be able to survive. My mother would have liked me to be a scholar, but she never had anything to say at the end of it.

My trusted notebook keeps a record of all this now.

My radar still insists on letting me know:

“UNKNOWN LOCATION - UNKNOWN SYSTEM”

Let all this data in the hands of the trusted led pencil. Another win for the old-school.

I am writing like a madman everything I see, everything I suspect and everything I can think of to make me not only recognize this place next time, but also help me navigate it at least on the path I have taken until now.

I had to stop writing when I saw it. At first it looked like the background was warping from some unknown factor, but no, it was there as clear as I see this pad I am writing on.

A jump hole.

Not a single move. Not a single hair moved until I saw the tube accelerating me through space. I did not know where or when, or even if it will spew me out, but I know that I had to take the chance.

"Thuringia System"