Hey people!
The last entry is long, long ago. Feels like an eternity for me, which really stressed me out at some point. Unfortunately I'm rather busy at the moment. I couldn't take the time to get back into my cockpit for the last to and a half weeks and I guess this won't change until August. But I made some time to go on writing anyway (actually the logs were supposed to be close to ingame encouters, but since there is no time to play...). I wanted to try something different therefore, somthing more, and just made up a story without the ingame input, but with inspiration from the great tales of the forum here. I hope I will have time soon, to show my respect to those people in an adequate way. Until then my work is also my thanks to them!
Here is the (long, long) result of the last few weeks, which might have turned out to be an overkill. I hope you can enjoy it, although it is very long! (I also grew a little impatient to finally get it out, so forgive me the mistakes I overlooked while correcting it)
Obsidian Orbital. Still.
My brother couldn't stand it any longer. He took off yesterday night.
„If I have the possibility to park my ship next to star of a class of my choice for the night, why should I spent one more night here?“
„Never could sleep without the corridor lights turned on and your door halfway open, could you?“ I was teasing him.
I am fine with it. Repairs are almost done. Another two or three days and the actual journey can finally begin.
After bringing my brother to his ship, I went to the viewing platform and watched him take off. Whether it's the tea or something else, I'm not sure, but melancholy was creeping up on me, the whole day. I stood there for quite a while after my brother had left the station.
The last time I can remember doing this, was shortly before beginning to work in Petrov's refinery. I was twelve then. It's a strange feeling to look back and see how far you have come, when you are a nobody coming from the ass of the world. Finally setting foot on another station outside of your home system, owning a ship, plotting each course you can imagine, setting your travel route for uncharted places. I can't help the feeling to be in the wrong place. Of course I'm not. But I'm a tunnel rat, used to narrow maintenance shafts and service tunnels of a godforsaken refinery outpost on a moon that even the apocalypse would forget, if it was cleaning up the rest of the galaxy (In one of the books Petrov gave me before my departure, I took with me, I found a picture of four horsemen symbolizing the apocalypse, I think that's great picture). Until three weeks ago my life was taking place within solid steel structures dug into rocky ground and stretched not more than a few dozen meters towards stars, which I often couldn't see, since the orbit of our moon didn't allow for more than one hour of real night time.
Petrov's necklace with the cross hanging from it, sparkling from under his all time favorite red short sleeve chemise, never made much sense to me. Maybe it means something in the end?
It certainly means that Petrov has a bad sense for fashion, of course. But Petrov is convinced that it means something. He always stressed the word 'something' without ever being specific about it. Yet he never failed to mention, that he was convinced – a believer – whenever he had the opportunity. God! I miss that son of a b*tch. I mean Petrov! Not god. He might be the only thing on that station that might not have been forsaken by the Almighty (Petrov never said „god“). If it hadn't been for him....I mean Petrov. Not the Almighty.....
What ever! There were things to do, ships don't get repaired by praying. I was in need of some spare parts. There were some damaged hydraulic conduits and high voltage adapters. The old ones got bent on the impact. What I also needed was someone who could check the communication between my nav computer and my FSD. On my way back to Maia after the crash, I noticed that my destination coordinates were slightly off from what was calculated. And I myself wouldn't lay hands on this for sure; don't want to jump out in the middle of a sun or in the middle of deep space without a reference point (I wouldn't even know, which of this would be worse).
I might have not come far in the universe yet, but I was confident of recognizing a cutthroat when I saw one. One of the few things my home station could teach you.
I had naively hoped that this far out people might be different and I wouldn't have to barter, since I really hate it and I always had to remind myself that I wouldn't hurt anybody's feelings by calling a reasonable price. Well, people are different on Obsidian, but not when I comes to money, I thought, when I first entered the local spare parts service.
„How can I help you, my friend?“, it sounded loud and suspiciously enthusiastic from the other side of the room.
The man behind the counter threw a broad smile out of his strongly tanned face at me the moment I set foot into his shop, reaching out with his hand over the counter and grabbing mine in the blink of an eye as soon as I was in range. His teeth shined like a class A star, dark black curls, with the occasional gray, were hanging from either side of his leathery, sun scorched face – everybody else around here seemed rather pale.
„What is it you need?“, he said still smiling as if I was his son visiting for a Sunday morning family breakfast come together. His tone was so friendly, almost caring, that it actually made me pause for a second before I pulled out a list of the things I needed and handed it over the counter. Without a word of course. His strategy shouldn't work with me, I thought.
„Ah...yes...of course...I see...“, he said with occasional murmur in between while going diligently through my list, eagerly nodding at everything he had in storage. „This should all be no problem. I will put together a box and bring it to your ship in about an hour.“
„And someone needs to have a look at my navigation system and recalibrate it.“, I said. His smile brightened (which I wouldn't have thought possible), as if, what I just said, made him happy in some way.
„Yes, yes of course“, his eyes where glowing with joy. He went to open the door behind the counter. „Tavia!“, he shouted. “She will be there in a minute.“, he said to me and was about to disappear in the back of his shop.
“Hey! Don't you need my bay number?!“
„Oh, I know it. B 36. A rather cobbled looking ASP Explorer, right?“
„Ehm...yes...how...“
„Not many come here, even less stay as long as you do.” I felt a little spied on. “And most pilots take better care of their ships. No offense”, he added with a wagging finger and a smile. “I wondered when you'd show up. I'm glad you are here now. I even thought about coming to you myself. I'm happy to help you!“ Before I could make up a story of fierce pirate attack or a least a spectacular hit and run accident in the docking area, since I didn't want him to think I am a crappy pilot (which I am not!), he gave me another bright smile and disappeared again.
„Happy to help me“, I said to myself, wondering how nice people can be, when it is about money. His was the first smile I got since my arrival on this glorious Utopian Station (which I wasn't to surprised at. Petrov called me a skeptic, because I “don't believe in big things” - or did he call it naive?). If he wouldn't be a cutthroat, he would be a really nice guy, I thought, or at least a charming salesman.
Since he left me alone, I looked around for a bit. This kind of shop reminded me of home. With all the self made looking stuff on and around the counter and salvage ,for the most part, piled on the ground, hanging on the wall or down from the ceiling, using up every tiny piece of space the small shop had to offer. In some places in this small shop – it didn't even made up 20m² and there was a big steel pillar in the middle – you would have to bow down to get through. There was only a small corridor which led from the entrance of the shop to the counter. To get anywhere else in this cave like room, you would either have to shuffle around everything to create a new path between the dangerously overhanging and swaying piles; or you had to climb over them, what would rather be suicidal, because all that stuff that was standing, lying or hanging around and leaning against each other formed a sensitive but yet stable system, with the single parts supporting each other, keeping the neighboring parts from falling over and under each other; where on little imbalance would lead to chain reaction, to an, in the true sense of the word, avalanche like creation process of an even bigger chaos than there already was, which would surly overshadow the Big Bang itself. Everything here was piled up with an unbelievable craftsmanship. It was clear, from the moment he left me alone: for a thief, this room would be a death trap, delivering a metal avalanche death.
Which was exactly the thing, which reminded me of home. It looked very much like the places where I got spare parts, if something at home had been broken again; mostly mum's kitchen stuff, which was the most boring things to repair I could imagine as a kid. But I have to admit that is was time and nerves well spent. You can't imagine what a simple hyperwave toaster from Samsony can teach you about wave processors and plasma conductors, especially if you have to keep it alive for 18 years. When I began to tinker around with my ASP Explorer there were a lot of things I didn't need a book for.
But there was one big difference between the junk dealer here and those at home. The stuff here looked more sophisticated, there were things I haven't seen before. Some things, like an Isidoric hydraulic ion pump, which are often used for those movable landing pads – we actually had one pump in our cargo/passenger elevator to our housing unit – I could recognize after a while, but clearly there were some crazy modifications made, of which I couldn't make any sense. Other things I couldn't identify even on closer inspection. Some of them at first seemed to resemble some of the prosthesis or limbs, I saw on everybody here. A thought, which shortly gave me quite the chills, which I but quickly discarded. Coming from an insignificant refinery outpost, it did not seem far fetched to say that technologically speaking we lived in a different decade back home...or maybe even a different century. These things
„Are you standing around there all day or shall we go have a look at your nav-computer?“, said a youth- and forceful female voice behind me.
I didn't notice someone entering. „Come on, I don't have all day“, the voice snapped at me. I only saw her back, because she hurriedly left the shop striding with big steps considering her height. The short glimpse I caught of her though, was enough to stop my head from telling my feed to follow her. This was until another thought hit me.
There was a girl, or rather a woman back home, named Rebecca, which once said the exact same words, in the exact same manner. She said this after my 16 year old me pulled out 150 credits, an amount of money the esteemed lady of sub level 69, would never have expected from a newbie dump worker like me.
But this woman here obviously wouldn't provide me with the same service Rebecca did.
She was supposed to repair my nav computer. Now, if she was as good in her field of expertise as Rebecca was in hers, then I wouldn't have any doubts about her. But the young lady, I was now following down the corridors - not in order to get into a private room with dimmed red light and the smell of sweat and other substances, but to get to my ship – which at this point didn't smell that much better – this young lady was about 30 years younger than Rebecca, who back then, was about 50, if I had to guess (she kept her age a good secret). And I know that the communication between a nav-computer and an FSD is a delicate matter, which normally requires years of experience. It turned out that Rebecca wouldn't need all day for me. It only took about 2 minutes. Undressing and dressing included. The young lady named Tavia would need years to do the job right, if she could do it at all!
Before even going near a control panel of a nav computer, you'd start to recalculate low wakes by the tens of thousands until you could determine a ships position within the stat system accurate to a millimeter. Then you'd undergo the same procedure with high wakes. And only then you might be allowed to tinker just a little bit with some drone's nav computer settings (if the last few thousand calculations you did, had been flawless, of course). I heard people say, it's rather a form of art than handcraft, meaning it's not only about maths but instincts. You had to feel the invisible strings combining the masses of each piece of rock, metal or ice of every size out there, from a small 1 meter asteroid up to Westerlund 1-26 itself. You had to play them like a harp.
'Experienced' is a word I wouldn't have used to describe Tavia. Her way of walking revealed a certain confidence considering the task lying ahead of her, I had trouble at first to keep pace with her and still look like the master of the situation, since she overwhelmed me with her sudden appearance at her father's shop. The client is king, right?
„You are Tavia?“
„Yes.“
„We are going to my ship?“
„No, I will lure you into a dark corner, then I will stab you with this screwdriver“, she held up a screwdriver over her shoulder, „take all your money, salvage your ship. What we can't need, including the biomass of your corpse, will be sent on collision course with the nearest star.“
„...“, was all I managed to say. After that, there was a moment of silence. „Okay...“, I finally said, trying to laugh it all up a bit. As an answer I got a sigh of resignation. „Seriously, you want to calibrate my....?“
„No, I don't want to. I have to, because my father told me so. And don't you dare think for a moment, I'd be too young!“ she sharply turned around pointing her index finger right on the tip of my nose. Her eyes pierced directly into my eyes. At least think so. Her eyes were hidden behind a visor, which I only saw now. A slim steel band with a flat gold inlay stretched from one temple to the other. But she was supposedly looking at me. I mean, where else? Her dark hair falling left and right of her face, matched that golden stripe on her visor. But I almost ted my pants.
She lowered here finger but still looked at me sharply (I guess). „Let's go.“ She commanded, I followed. Although her voice was suddenly softer. Yet her walk was the same as before, big determined, slightly aggressive steps.
Five minutes later we came around the corner to the hanger deck.
„It's the one on the left.“
„I know.“, she said impatiently.
„Sorry.“, I said. She seemed a little off. Nervous. Driven.
She went ahead, climbing up the ramp at the back of my ship, with no sign of slowing down. She knew exactly where she had to go, to get access to the mainframe. I let her go, since I didn't want to disturb her or say something wrong again.
When I reached the mainframe access in the lower section of my Explorer, she was already kneeling in front of it, typing on a small omnitool display.
“Password and FSD Type, Class and Rating”, she gave the pad to me looking in the opposite direction. I typed in my password and handed it back to her.
“Mercedes 5A.”, I said.
“Yeah...calculations are slightly off...”, she expertly said, more to herself than to me. She made on deep breath, then she would tilt her head.
This was when she started, without any hesitation or consideration. Out of nothing her fingers began to rush over the tiny board of numbers and letters of her wrist display, so incredibly fast that they seemed to blur. She was sitting there on her keens with her body sinking more and more into itself and over the display into an almost embryonic posture. Her concentration and focus seemed to manifest and form a bubble around her. Her lips were puckered. The only other light except for her omitool came through hatchway behind me up the ladder from the corridor leading from the air lock in the back of the ship straight to the upper cockpit. The light from her omnitool covered her torso in a warm orange blanket of light, as if she was holding a candle. She mumbled something into the complete silence of the compartment, soundproof encased by the ship's hull. In this light you could think she was praying. As she went on with her work, it seemed like her concentration gave way to some kind of trance and her body seemed to slightly move back and forth together with the rhythm of her breath.
Although she was whispering, just letting the words drip out, I could understand some of what she said. I could understand that it was numbers. Spoken in a much slower rhythm than her fingers were moving in. She mostly mumbled. But some numbers she spoke in a very clear way, pronouncing every syllable carefully as if she wanted to remember all these numbers or physically put them into the midst of the air in front of her, invoking them to wait for them to be needed again, to be put in the right place. She sometimes used her fingers to pick some of them out of their levitating stance, but not without touching her fingertips with the tip of her tongue first. I was standing a few meters away right at the foot of the ladder just watching and listening. Mesmerized.
Then she let her head fall down and stayed like that for a moment before throwing it back groaning with relief. “Uff!”
“Hey, it's dark in here.”, she said turning to me again. I thought she would have totally forgotten about me by now, having been in that almost trance like stance. In this darkness you would hardly notice that she had no eyes if it wasn't for a stripe of reflected light cutting through the dark spot before me, where her head was.
“Ehmm...hello, Mister?”
I was still on another planet from looking and listening to her.
“Ah! Yes...dark.”
“I'm finished, everything's back in order.”
“Great”, I said, senselessly clapping and rubbing my hands, totally not knowing what to say, until: “What? Wait. You just started 5 minutes ago!”
“No. It took exactly 65 standard minutes and 45 seconds.”, she stated.
“You're joking.”
She repeated her former statement. I had a look at my watch, which had no use, since I didn't know what time it had been, when we came here.
“Indeed, you're right”, I said anyway. “You're sure everything is fine?”
“No, not sure, I believe so.”, she said with conviction.
“So if I should jump and find myself on the inside of a star...”
“Then it's not my problem, since you're dead then and couldn't come back anymore to complain. If your baby does what it's supposed to do, which it should, because I just told it to, there is no problem either, since I did the job right. By the way, what's the name of your ship?”
I looked at her not really knowing, what to say. She wasn't joking. She actually meant it. What she said was logical in the end. It wasn't even sarcasm.
Since she had done what ever sorcery she was doing on my nav computer, she seemed eased and less on edge. By now we were standing in the airlock, she was already on her way back to the shop. Or maybe she were going to see a doctor, I thought, to check if her brain was still right. Because what she just claimed to have done, calibrating a nav computer, without any reference data or flight records or any look at my FSD, is impossible. I've heard about VI drones, that are able to do the same work in about 3 to 4 hours. If it's a high end model hooked up to station main processor system.
But all I could say, was: “It's name is Kangaroo. How much is it?”
“700 Credits, the parts you ordered including.”, I looked a her, narrowing my eyes. I didn't know, if I was supposed to laugh. It's hard to find out, if someone is joking, when you can't see his or her eyes. She just stood there framed by the outer doorway of the airlock, not moving, looking straight at me.
“Cash.”, she said in a demanding tone, leaning forward while holding on to the top edge of the door. I guess she tried to intimidate me in some way. “I'd ask for more, of course, if it would be up to me...”, she added, shrugging, when she noticed, I didn't even blink.
How much more, I thought. Five or ten times the price? Even that would be a joke. Her father seemed to set the prices. Why he would give away his services for almost nothing I didn't know. His daughter obviously wasn't content with it, but it didn't look like, she was too bothered by it either. It seemed like she thought, they could do just that few little extra credits to make life a little more comfortable out here in the beerless nowhere. It didn't seem like she thought the existence of her family would be in peril, which I thought it was, because of the Samaritan price policy of her father (Petrov told me this word. Samaritan. It means 'to good to be true').
I reached into the breast pocket and pulled out a transfer chip and uploaded 800 credits.
“Thank you”, she turned around. “Fly save, Commander.”
“Hey! Fancy visor you have there.”, I stopped her.
“Oh thanks, my father made it.”
“Quite impressive work! And who did the surgery? I didn't see a hospital here yet.”
“My father did.”
I knew by now, that she wasn't making a joke. She could be sarcastic, if she was in a bad mood, but she wouldn't make a joke, if she was in a good mood. Like she could never intimidate someone, if she wasn't really . Since she came back from her calibrating number trip thing she did back in the ship, she seemed eased and less on edge.
I remembered the limb like looking objects back in the shop hanging from the ceiling and off the wall in between all the other stuff, you would use for repairing machines but not humans.
“So, he actually is a doctor?”
“He's a priest.”
“Now, wait. I thought he's a salesman.”
“He's a priest.”
“But what did he learn or study? What's his education?”
“What do you mean?”, she said confused.
“Does he have a degree? Like in theololology, or so? Is he some kind of surgeon? Or a engineer? Or is he some kind of technician?”, or a crazy fu*king cyborg builder? I didn't want to say this out loud.
“What's the difference?”, she said confused.
I thought about Petrov again. He was the closest thing to a priest I know, I guess. He would sometimes tell us stories about the books, he used to read. I remember two of them. One with a crescent, I think. Another with a cross, similar to what he was wearing around his neck. He never read to us, but sometimes he would tell us during lunch brake, what he was reading the evening before. I always thought that's a priestly thing to do, from what little I know about priests. But he was also a cutthroat. He definitely was a cutthroat. Not to us workers boys and girls, but sometimes he talked about business to us. Nasty things. He wanted to show of, which I think is not very priestly. I'm sure he never did a surgery or build a cyborg. He was not so much a technician and totally not a surgeon. He always said that he had two left hands.... And the father of the woman in front of me? She, whom I only could get a good look on for the first time now– with her bob haircut of a rather boring brown blondish color, freckle sprayed cheeks and her small but well defined physique – looked very attractive. Attractive enough to silence some obscure thoughts about backyard surgeries.
“Why did you call it 'Kangaroo'?”
“It jumps a lot...”
“I think, you are more creative, when it comes to modifying your ship.”
“I love it.”, I said. “This ship is my baby.”
“Kangaroo baby.”, she said and wasn't sure if she was picturing the right animal. “You know, that kangaroo baby has a funny smell?” Stupid toilet, stupid crash, I thought.
Her father came by bringing ordered parts. As she walked past him she said: “I took care of the money, 600 Credits.”
“You are already finished?”, his smile vanished. But she didn't bother to answer and went straight for the hangar exit, happy about her own 200 credits, I guessed.
Her father came up the ramp and gave me the box he carried with him. He held on to the box for a second as I wanted to take it.
“Please, don't tell anybody.”, now he looked as pale as the rest of Obsidian's citizens.
“Tell what?”
“Never mind.” He quickly turned around and followed his daughter.
It was not until then, when I noticed that daughter and father didn't look alike.
I wasn't sure, what I witnessed that day in the mainframe compartment of my ship. But by now I may have an assumption.
