(With thanks to the folks over at the Wayback Machine)
Source: Alioth
Timestamp: 3303/02/04
While I was at one of the Engineers, a fellow named Bill Turner, some message traffic caught up to me. Along with the various routine notices, there was a priority message from IGER Central.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, while we were out doing our thing, IGER had caught the attention of people with less ethics and more money. We had been the victims of a hostile take over, and the entire Expedition branch was being disbanded. I had just become the owner of a, "Regret to inform you", letter.
Reading between the lines told me that they didn't trust the people that were out and about because we were too independent. I snorted in bitter amusement because the people that thought IGER was going to make them credits were firing all of the people that actually provided updated data.
GalNet, being the invasive piece of software that it is, had seen that I had IGER as a key word in my traffic and popped up a banner ad. I noticed that it talked about buying cartography data from IGER and how reliable it was because of the huge number of contributors cross verifying it. The irony was harsh, but I laughed anyway.
Shaking off the moment of melancholy, I raised my glass and toasted to myself.
Not all that wander are lost!
I looked at the data file, found on a flash drive I had thought lost. It was kind of unhappy making that there were only a handful of the Journal entries that I had made, but some are better than none.
Snorting, I thought back to the disbandment of the First Great Expedition, elements gone to other interests in Colonia and, possibly, still wandering who knew where. The group had always been loose knit (a momentary pause as I pondered the phrase, then a shrug), and I'd had no traffic from any of them in long enough to get them declared, Lost to Causes Unknown, if I'd had legal relations to them.
These days, I find myself still wandering, but mostly back in the Bubble. I brought the
FGES Wild Goose home from exploring Rimward, Trailing and Low of the Bubble, but it wasn't the same as those days back with Distant Worlds 3302, or even as late as the discovery of Perseus Deep. I hadn't even realized it was possible while deployed, but systems changes mandated by the Pilot's Federation had installed themselves over the sub-space net, effectively killing my AI. My cat had abandoned me with the closest thing I ever had to a daughter when I was in Colonia a couple of years ago, and, completely by myself for the first time in several years, I found that space madness was no longer something to be laughed at. That being the case, I had more or less Buckeyballed my way back to "civilization", only making a couple of stops to look at systems.
I've been debating selling off most of my ships, since the "fleet" has been sitting in stow for years. I'd probably keep
FGES Sleipnir, being that it was really my first significant ship. All of the ships that led up to her are really just that, stepping stones to the AspX. Most of the other ships littered around the Bubble were purpose built for one function or another that I no longer remember or care about.
They say that you can take the man out of the Navy, but you cannot take the Navy out of the man. I am finding that to be somewhat true, and have started working up a Clipper, christened
FGES Bellerophon, to take up Bounty Hunting. My old Vulture,
FGES Mantis, is still in stow, but I wanted to see what the newish Phased Long Range Burst Lasers could do, and, if I get the Engineering right, I should have 4 mounts with a 6 km range and some decent penetration.
