Mossfoot's Continuing Tales of Woe...

[mossfoot]

So a bit of background. Before ED came along, I was big into the open fan based project Oolite, which is meant to be in the same universe as the original Elite (but before Frontier and First Encounters), just expanded upon. Being a writer and editor by trade, it wasn't long before I had to start jotting down my adventures in suitably fictionalized way.

Now that I've joined ED I have that urge again, but rather than start over, I thought I'd bring my hapless wanderer over and have him adjust to life in a much larger universe.

Instead of reprinting his past adventures (which if you're curious start here: Mossfoot's Tales of Woe: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l86aerg2q4rircn/Mossfoots-Tales-of-Woe.doc?dl=0 ) I'll just work in a minor (vague) recap into his introduction to 3301.

Update: This stage of the story is complete and compiled into an easy-to-read .doc file you can get here:
Mossfoot's Continuing Tales of Woe: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0avbs5d8p2slt8g/Mossfoots-Continuing-Tales-of-Woe.doc?dl=0


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In another time, in another life, I was somebody. Truth be told it feels like a dream, or a lie I told myself so often I wanted to believe it, but every so often bits and pieces come up reminding me at least some of it has to be true.

Once, I was the son of a Navy Captain…or did he become Admiral? I’m a bit hazy on the details. I do know that I used to live the good life. Even from a young age I was flying his fancy ship collection, with or without his permission. I had all kinds of friends willing to do anything for me just to be in my inner circle. Women threw themselves at me…

…no, really, I swear. I didn’t always have this horrible scarred face. I used to be quite the looker.

I had money, fast rides, faster women, and a first-class pass out of any trouble I found myself in thanks to my dad’s connections. I had it all.

Then it all went to hell.

I’ll spare you the details. My understanding is the recordings were saved by a bunch of people and kept alive on the bootleg circuit until recently, when it suddenly became a hit. Not that I’ll see a penny. Identity issues aside, it’s considered public domain now.

You see, I’ve been away for a long time.

The short version is like this. My dad’s XO tried to murder me because I’d inadvertently stolen a piece of kit from him that proved he had a secret black-ops going on in the Navy. My luxury yacht was blown out of the sky and I was left for dead. More to the point, I was.

Fortunately my corpse was recovered and I didn’t stay dead long. Hiding with a new identity and a crap-ass ship, I had no choice but to survive without the support system I’d been so accustomed to.

I did okay for myself. Not great. I got by, I guess. But I couldn’t escape my past, and when it caught up with me, I uncovered a dark conspiracy.

In the end I saved the day, sorta, with the help of a woman who also blew me out of the sky once… That seemed to happen to me a few times it seems… Anyway, we got away on board one of my dad’s antique ships and were ready to start a new life.

Then it all went to hell again.

Things get especially hazy at this point. We had just docked and gotten my Cobra MKII repainted, ready to start cruising the space lanes as a team, and the next thing I know I’ve been found in my derelict ship in interstellar space, somewhere near a place called LHS 3447.

Over a hundred years later. Way over.

And this is where I have to call my past into question because the universe is different now. Way different. Different in ways that made me wonder if I was just living an even more insulated life than I realized. If we all were.

It seems that what I thought of as my galaxy was just one isolated part of a much larger one, artificially cut off from the rest by an imposed 7 light-year restriction on hyperdrive jump technology. Or Frame Shift as they call it now.

I’m not going to go into details. Trust me, it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I remember when I came from there were different alien species being around, and access to different galaxies, but when I talk about it now people stare at me like I’m a bloody lunatic.

Nope, as far as the galaxy is concerned humans are the only space-faring creatures around—aside from the Thargoids. At least they still exist, but nobody’s seen them in decades, it seems. There are two galactic powers, the Federation and the Empire, and if you ask me they’re both full of crazy people. Lave and the worlds I once knew are still around, over a hundred light years from where I am now, part of an Alliance of independent worlds. How I got here from there I have no idea.

All I know is I was found in my ship. Dead. Again. Seriously, it’s becoming a bad habit with me. What brought me back this time is so much techo-magic-mumbo-jumbo involving nanobots and progenitor cells and stuff. And the only reason they bothered to do all THAT to me is because the antique Cobra MKII I was found in could pay for it. Barely. They didn't bother to heal the scars on my face, though. Said that was "elective" or something. I look like someone dropped a frickin hot pizza on my face.

They also wanted answers. I got your standard polite military debriefing, where my story was repeated time and again from every angle—but if I’d been gone for over a hundred years, what good would that info do anyone?

I dunno. When they were done I was allowed to go on my merry way. My pilot’s licence was renewed and with what little was left over from the “finders fee” from the Cobra I was able to afford a small ship. A next generation Sidewinder.

Great. I used to pop those tin cans for fun in another life. Now I’m stuck flying one? Why does the universe hate me so much that it’s not content with just killing me, but is trying to do it as often as possible? The little buggers haven’t changed much in three hundred years, other than being jump capable now.

And so it begins. Starting over with a hole in my memory like a black hole in a much larger universe than I ever expected to see. Everyone I know is long dead…

But on the bright side, everyone I know is long dead!

 

[mossfoot]

Oh, this gets even better. Turns out I had even less left over from the antique sale. Technically I don’t even own my ship. It belongs to the Pilot’s Federation. No wonder I got such a good deal on it. So I can’t just sell it and settle down on a nice planet with a bunch of pool bunnies.

That used to be the dream… though it was a space yacht with a pool that ran the length of the ship and cheerleaders acting as lifeguards. But for some reason that doesn’t hold the appeal it once did to me. I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s because I became a thrill junkie, and the old easy life just doesn’t cut it anymore. That seems to ring true. That’s the problem with having a black hole for a memory, I can never be sure what’s true and what’s misremembered.

So, I’ve got a grand total of a thousand credits to my name and a ship I don’t even really own. Though apparently any upgrades I buy for it I do own. Yippee.

Once my licence got cleared and I checked out on my piloting and medical exams, I checked out the cockpit. A Sidewinder. It looks like a baby Cobra in some ways. Kinda cramped.

Living in this is like living in a floating bachelor apartment. Not so much a pilots cabin behind the cockpit, more like one of those capsule hotels you find on back-end space stations. Though I have to admit, it’s kitted well enough for entertainment. Vid screen over the bed and descent sound system.

The cockpit’s also impressive. The multi-function-displays are a serious upgrade in terms of functionality. Funny to think such a basic ship has such a bad ass display. Not to mention voice commands and head tracking targeting.

I could get used to this.

---

The bulletin board was a bit light on missions. I got stuck carting fruit from one system to another for a third party. Decent money to be made working like that, more than enough to live on. Live well, even. But my ambitions are a bit higher than that. Bigger ship. Faster ship. Something with a billion megawatts of shields and a neutron star’s worth of armor to keep me nice and safe.

On my second run some joker tried to interdict me. That’s a new trick. It used to be that your in-system jump drive (or supercruise) would kick out any time you came close to a large enough mass. That’s still the case, but it’s more of an emergency brake on really big things like planets or stars. So you can zip past ships and stations at close to the speed of light far faster than you ever could before.

But with the right equipment you can kick someone out of supercruise and engage them while their frame shift drive is forced to reboot. It’s ostensibly meant for police and licenced bounty hunters, but let’s face it, it’s the first thing a pirate is going to buy.

Fortunately, evading an interdiction isn’t too hard if you’re a decent pilot, and let’s face it, I am. If I’m facing pirates, I’m doing it on my own terms.

Speaking of which…funny thing happened on the way to the trading post. My HUD picked up an unrecognized signal source. Now this is often because of something bad that’s happened, such as a ship forced out of supercruise. Also ship wreckage. And wreckage means drifting cargo and that’s free money.

But when I dropped out to see what it was, it turned out there were three pirates lying in wait, giving off a distress signal.

Well I’m no sucker. I turned around and got ready to get the hell out of there when I noticed something strange on the readout. I hailed the lead pilot.

“Um… guys? You’re here to take my cargo, right?”

“That’s right. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll dump your cargo and bail, punk.”

“You must have been expecting a bigger ship, huh? Something with more than a few lousy tons of cargo?”

“We’ll take what we can get. Dump it, or we open fire.”

“Sure, sure. Just answer me one question first. You were expecting a bigger ship, right?”

“Anything is bigger than a Sidewinder.”

“True, but that’s not how I knew. You know how I can tell?”

There was no response, but I could picture their puzzled expressions.

“Because you all ditched your shields for extra cargo room.”

I learned later that inexperienced pirates gain a certain amount of street cred for running without shields. Now, I’m not one to go out looking for trouble, but there’s only so much stupidity I can take before I take it upon myself to teach valuable life lessons to those in need.

“Today’s your lucky day, guys. If there’s one thing I know about Sidewinders, it’s that they come with ejection pods standard, and you can’t swap them out for an extra beer cooler. Ship. Deploy weapons.”

 

[mossfoot]

Life is cheap... well, to everybody but me it seems. I've technically died enough times that I've become extremely adverse to the experience--not that I was ever looking for it in the first place.

But 3300 is a very strange time indeed, and the reason for it all boils down to the fact that death ain't what it used to be.

Back in my time... ghah, I can't believe I just said that like some old fogey. Though technically I am something like a hundred and seventy-seven now. Anyway, back in my time if you got shot down you were dead. Your only hope was to activate the escape pod in time and hope to hell that whoever did it wasn't looking for some extra income selling you on the slave market. But now...? Well, I've gotten ahead of myself. Where I should really start is how great a pilot I turned out not to be...

"Docking approved. Proceed to Bay 14."

Up till now I'd been docking at the local outposts, which look like oil rigs in space. I have to admit I always found those a bit tricky, because there's no real sense of up or down on them, landing pads are scattered about like acne on a teen's face. Ugh. I really shouldn't be making fun of them right now, given my own condition. It reminds me of the time I asked a woman out shortly after I was shot down and scrambling to make a new life for myself, not realizing half my charm came from my family name and pocketbook. I got a martini tossed in my face for the trouble.

Now replace the martini with acid and imagine she smashed the glass in my face as well for good measure.

Anyway, I'd had to do low-grav dockings on outposts before, usually convenience stores and the like. But now I was approaching my first big-ass station. My god was it beautiful. Not one of those ugly dodecs that look like giant dice for someone's intergalactic session of Dungeons and Dragons, this was meant for comfort. The habitation ring on the outside with clear panels allowing light down on the endless loop of parkland. Honestly, that sight alone made space feel a bit less cold and lonely. You spend too much time out in the deep black and you start to think the universe is nothing but metal panels and electronics. Seeing those forests in space is like a breath of fresh air through the vacuum of space.

The center of the station is the docking, trading and administration area, with the familiar mail slot docking port. Hell, it seemed even bigger than the ones I was used to, which was fine by me. So with docking granted I slipped inside, leaned back, and waited for the station's auto-dockers to do the rest...

"Warning: Loitering violation. Please clear the entry bay."

Huh? Oh, I guess I hadn't nudged myself in enough. I pushed the thrusters forward a bit more, only to get another warning.

Wait... they weren't expecting me to land my ship inside this station by myself, were they? No major station anywhere did that - it was a recipe for disaster to let pilots deal with traffic control on their own. Another warning, and the countdown timer was ticking down. Oh crap.

Okay, not a problem, I could do this. Gravity here is 0.1 standard, pretty much like at the outposts... piece of cake. I can do this. I can totally do this.

---

"I have no idea how you did this."

The dockworker was one part annoyed and three parts amused, looking at how I'd managed to wedge my Sidewinder on the docking pad... sideways, upside down, and on an angle.

"You do have a pilot's licence, right?" he asked, then scratched his head as if wondering what equipment he'd need to untangle this Gordian Knot.

It had started out easily enough, but then I'd overshot the pad a bit, ran into the guard panels, panicked, overcompensated, and... well, this.

"I've never had to dock inside a hub before," I said.

"Well, you're lucky I was on hand to lock you in manually. The pad's docking system isn't supposed to lock down and let you disengage unless you're within a ten degree range of tolerance. Figured you for a scrap, though." Scrap seemed to be the local term for what in other times was called a noob or greenhorn. In this case it's because many starting pilots earn their early paychecks hauling scrap from one station to another.

"I swear I'm a better pilot than this. I just panicked is all."

"Well, panicking can cost you more than just a fine, kid...er...sir...um...ma'am? Sorry, it's the face."

"Sir is fine." At this point I was considering wearing a helmet 24/7, and was I really thin enough to be mistaken for a woman? I guess I could stand to put on a few pounds. The regen process had taken its toll in muscle as well as fat.

"Well, as I was saying, you can... oh crap, there's another one." The sealed docking hanger I'd been lowered into had its own air supply, and as a result I could hear through the walls the faint sound of high energy weapons fire.

"What's happening? Is the station being attacked?"

The worker checked a monitor by the far wall. "Nope. Some dumbass is stuck under a bridge."

I came over and looked at his monitor. Sure enough, a hauler was wedged under a bridge with cargo trucks driving around the station's circumference, and it was getting mercilessly pounded with laser fire. The pilot was clearly trying to get away, but kept making the same mistakes over and over again.

My jaw dropped. "Wha... why? Why don't they just shut off the engines and get a team out to set it straight? Haul it back to a pad?"

The worker shrugged. "Station control can't be bothered. They figure the pilots will never learn that way, this way is easier."

The hauler blew up in a brief ball of flame, and scrap littered the ground like gently falling snow in the reduced gravity.

"Plus we get to keep the scrap and cargo."

I was still flabbergasted. "But he can't exactly learn anything NOW! What's the punishment for loitering?"

"Pretty much the same thing."

What callous dictatorial dystopian hell had I been dropped into?

The worker looked confused. "What? It's not like he's dead or anything. He's got his pod."

I hadn't seen an escape pod. Come to think of it, even though my Sidewinder came with one standard, I didn't really know where it was.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and how it had changed the universe, possibly for the worse.

As I started off explaining, death use to be a big deal. If you didn't activate the escape pod in time - assuming you had one - you were dead meat, and nothing short of a me-shaped miracle would change that. As much as I complain about the universe using me as its personal urinal, the fact I've survived death three times now does not go unappreciated. In fact my bad luck is no doubt just its way of balancing the scales of luck.

Turns out, one of the big advances in the last hundred and fifty-odd years was in the realm of pilot safety.

Any history buffs out there? Remember the early forms of powered locomotion, like cars? Well, those things started off with squat in terms of driver safety for a while, then they developed the seatbelt, and later on the air-bag to cushion the blow of an impact. Crash survival went up immensely. What we got now is like the air-bag times a billion. Though the term "escape pod" is still used, there is no pod, per se. It's your seat. Your seat has its own little power source, thrusters, and stasis field generator. When your ship blows, it kicks you free of the debris with the thrusters and you're more or less out dead once the stasis field kicks in. But it's the easy kind of dead that just takes a defib and adrenaline to reboot. The stasis field keeps your body in a recoverable state and the seat sends out a distress signal for retrieval teams to come pick it up.

The net result of this is that pilot recovery and survival is at an astounding 99% in standard accident and combat scenarios. Not so high as to be guaranteed, so people still do their damndest to not get shot down, but high enough that those DOING the shooting down can sleep easy, knowing they're not a mass murderer (other than that 1% "oops" factor).

So as I staid before, life is cheap. For a given value of life.

It all reminds me of one of those old science fiction shows from a millennia ago. Some starship crew comes across a planet where wars are all fought in simulation rather than using actual guns and bombs. Only in that case the casualties politely queued up for disintegration like they were British Lemmings or something.

Only here you don't even have the consequences of that, and it has taken its toll on society. The galactic economy is propped up in part by the constant manufacturing of replacement ships, driving ship costs down. Insurance agencies thrive on the constant trickle of revenue made by replacing ships, and offer easy loans to those who can't afford to replace outright, the cost of which is gradually taken out of the pilot's income. Pilot retrieval is a lucrative and full time business at most stations, with little ships that barely show up on any radar darting in and out for quick pick ups and returns in exchange for a slice of that sweet insurance pie. Piracy now is viewed largely as an inconvenience and bounty hunting has become a part time sport miners do on weekends. And this is why it's become easier for a station to not bother with traffic control and docking ships, letting the pilots handle it themselves, then blow up the loiterers or someone stuck under a bridge, rather than to actually get off their butts and do something about it.

In short, it's INSANE.

 

[mossfoot]

Then again, whoever said I was sane?

The way I see it, stupid pirates with no shields = easy money. And half the time when they take out a cargo ship they have to leave half the crap behind because even without shields their tiny cargo bays are filled.

And so, much like the first time I had to start over in life by collecting empties (blasting asteroids) for spare change, I've taken on the role of Mossfoot - Galactic Garbage Man, cleaning up other people's messes and punishing potential litterers with semi-deadly force.

I wouldn't be so flippant about taking out other pilots, even if they are pirates, if it wasn't for the epic survival gear everyone has now. That 1% risk? Well, they are pirates, and for all I know they finish off ejected pilots before the vultures arrive (what I call the pilot retrieval shuttles).

Who knew being a garbage man could be so profitable? I stumbled across trade data, military plans, silver, all kinds of great stuff that was worth a small fortune compared to the piddly cargo runs being offered that I could actually handle in my Sidewinder. The one problem is selling it. That's another change from the old days. Used to be there was a galactic sense of "finders keepers" which of course kept the pirates happy.

Merchants, however, got sick of that crap and created a foolproof means of identifying cargo containers. Before departure, each cargo container is encoded with an ID that is tied in with the unique engine signature of the ship carrying it, while the ability to disable the ID is tied directly with the biorhythmic signature of the pilot. So only the pilot can disable the ID, and if any other ship carries the cargo it's registered as stolen - no exceptions.

This means pirates with stolen booty will be easily identified on a casual cargo scan, and fined or blowed up accordingly. But it also means there's a monopoly on licensed salvagers, and those are locked down by the same station-run gangs as the pilot retrieval vultures.

Did I happen to mention the sweet economic situation these nearly-death proof escape pods have provided some people, and how it's made them rather unscrupulous in the process?

But not all stations play that game. You look hard enough and you'll find yourself a black market or two, with the means of deactivating the cargo ID and buying goods off you no questions asked.

I've been making a list of local black markets, particularly those on oil-rig type platforms. They've got very little security and you're unlikely to be scanned by a passing Federal ship. So that's where I take my shopping cart full of empties these days. And thanks to a few lucky scores, I quickly had enough to buy a ship that was truly my own and not on permanent loan from the Pilot's Federation.

An Adder.


Sigh... some things never change.

 

[mossfoot]

Okay, somebody answer me this – how the hell can we go two hundred years and still be flying the same frickin ships? Take the Cobra MKIII, for example. You’d THINK there’d be a Mark IV by now. It’s only been literally two hundred and one years since it was released. And other ships flying around are way older designs than that!

Granted, in many ways they aren’t the same ships at all. That forced hyperdrive cap of seven light years was something only imposed in the independent worlds around Lave and GalCop and all that. Seriously, if I thought the conspiracy I uncovered within the Navy was bad, it was a schoolyard prank compared to the lie everyone lived through.

Had I not been pop-frozen and lost in space, I probably would have lived to see the end of all that. While most people still act like I’m nuts when I talk about the inter-galactic wormhole and aliens so numerous it was like you just randomly picked out nouns and verbs from a hat, I do find vague references to it now and then. Seems to be a sore spot people are trying to forget.

From what I can gather the seven light-year limit was a means of isolating a section of our galaxy where the wormhole route was before it collapsed, to both allow intergalactic trade but keep it from spreading onto the rest of our turf. A galactic quarantine. Each of the galaxies had one, presumably. The concern being those other galaxies might have slightly different laws of physics, and that could destabilize things if too much interaction was allowed to take place. Seems like a weak sauce of an excuse, but it would explain how one race had edible poets, I guess. Or how juice could embody an abstract concept such as evil, and not just be a metaphor. Only Navy ships with ultra-top-secret clearance were allowed to break the limit, or even know about it.

And that might very well explain the mystery of where they all went after 4004… well, 3150 by our reckoning. You might remember the universe was plagued by pirates and rogue factions when a special pilot assistance and coordination software was developed that make coordinated tactics a breeze and our ships became easy pickings. And the Navy sat back and did nothing, presumably addressing a Thargoid threat on the frontier. But what if….?

Never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore. Ancient history, literally. The wormhole collapsed, and most of the aliens went back before it did. Nobody talks about it anymore. Back to ships.

Some ships like the Cobra MKIII look mostly the same as they did before, just a bit more flourishing and detail on the outside. But on the inside? Completely different, from the engines to the entertainment centre.

Then you have other ships like the Adder I just bought. About the only thing they kept the same was the name. No longer the stepped-on tissue box of old, this looks more like an old-school shuttle with a bit more attitude. The atmospheric wings are no longer retractable, but fixed, and it mounts three weapons instead of just one.

In fact EVERYTHING outside of a basic hauler mounts more than one weapon.

The Adder is a completely different ship on the inside, too. It’s also far more customizable and modular in nature, and it seems the concept of cargo compression has been given up as a bad idea. However, the feng-shui masters have managed to make the most of the internal compartments and cargo storage is far more efficient. I was able to fit about twelve tons of cargo into it, and still keep the important stuff I wanted like shields intact.

It’s actually a pretty decent ship, all told, and can be upgraded to something a lot better. But I don’t plan to hang on to it long. I miss the comfort afforded by my old MKII, and even though it’s probably in a space museum around Sol somewhere, I can at least get my hands on the enduring legacy it created.

Time to save up for a MKIII. Time to have a home.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Okay, somebody answer me this – how the hell can we go two hundred years and still be flying the same frickin ships?

I drive a Lada, its got a new number than the older version, but its body and interior hasn't changed in style in god knows how many years.

If something works, then it works.

 

[mossfoot]

It is my role in the universe to have moments such as this. Same station. Same dock worker. Different ship.

"I still have no idea how you did this."

This time I'd managed to wedge my Adder on the docking pad... sideways, upside down, and on an angle.

What could I do but shrug and slip him a Ten-C for activating the manual clamps again before station control decided it would be easier to just blow my ship up for scrap? I'd made a dozen perfect landings before this, but the one time I overcompensate avoiding an Orca on takeoff from the pad ahead of me and this happens. Because God's a w*nker and I'm his favorite piece of tissue.

It hasn't taken me long, but I've almost got enough for my Cobra. I haven't had time to get attached to the Adder, really. Some of its features do remind me a bit of the nice Neolite custom hull I had back in the day, but to me it's a means to an end.

And what the hell is that end? I'm adjusting to this time, but the fact is I'm alone. This dockworker is the closest thing I have to a friend and I don't even know his name. I've had longer conversations with pirates trying to get me to drop my cargo.

I have a sneaking feeling I'm running away from something I don't want to think about. That if I look too hard in the mirror I'll see past the scarred, melted face and see something inside that's really troubling.

Well, you know what that means... time to get a custom made tea maker! The kind with the special "optional extra flavors" nozzle at 80 to 90 proof.

 

[mossfoot]

So you see the thing about your basic Cobra is it was originally designed for certain deep space military purposes. Trust me, I know these things. *hic* Don’t ask me how I know. It wasn’t until the company tanked after the MKII fiasco and taken over by what-his-nuts that it was repurposed as a multi-role civilian trader. But they didn’t really change anything, see? *hic* Yeah, they added a couple of guns, sure, and make a chassis that could take the strain, but other than that, it’s a MKII through and through.

And I used to have one. THE one. That was my baby. Well, my dad’s baby. But I took it, and possession is nine tenths of the law, am I right? Especially nowadays. *hic* I tell you, I thought the law was weird and lenient in my time? The kind of crap I’ve seen stations turn a blind eye to? Or what I’ve heard about from other pilots? Sheesh. And yet they’ll blow up your ship for loitering, too. Hell, some jerks even let themselves get blown up if it means they can take somebody out with them for crits and giggles. Or just so they can get a fresh paint job.

Well that ain’t my bag. *hic* Someday those morons are going to fit into the “oops” factor and evolution will attend to the rest. I’ll keep myself alive and in one piece and go spread my seed across a thousand worlds like Captain Kirk.

For some reason that last bit wasn’t funny. I wonder why it wasn’t funny? I’m always funny. I’m a funny guy. Funny, that.


*hic*

 

[mossfoot]

Ghah… my head. Geeze, your body goes a lousy hundred and fifty years without any booze just because you’ve been deep frozen like some woolly mammoth and suddenly your body forgets how to process alcohol.

I got a sinking feeling it had more to do with the progenitor cells and nanotech that brought me back, though. Sure, you guys can give me the liver of an eight year old, but you can’t make my face not look like it was dragged through a mile long cheese grater.

I’ve taken to wearing a helmet whenever I leave the ship now, which for some weird reason has caused some people to high-five me and call me “Stig”. Not sure what kind of complement that’s supposed to be. You can’t go past the pilots bay with a helmet on, though (security reasons, you might as well be wearing a ski mask in a bank), but I can get to the local bar at least, which is all the human contact I need for now. They look at me strange when I use a straw for my beer (about the most I can handle right now) under my visor. Well, screw ’em.

My god, do I really feel that alone in the universe right now? Maybe I’m not just wearing a helmet to hide my cat vomit face.

Wait, why does that ring a bell? Didn’t I own a cat once?

---

Helmet off, inside the Orbis station’s habitation ring. Wow. These really are like cities in space, with a surprising amount of greenery everywhere. If it wasn’t for the obvious curve in the distance on either direction, you’d think you were planetside.

I felt ridiculous being inside a pet store. Might as well have been a bloody nail salon. But I realized if I didn’t do something about my attitude I was going to end up going space-happy and fly my ship into a sun.

The animals here were perfect. Unbelievably so. Genetically engineered to be exactly what you wanted. There were dogs that had vocabularies of a hundred words, thanks to enhanced intelligence and a translating collar they wore. They had elephants that were one-tenth normal size and fully domesticated, hamsters the size of footballs, and cats…

…actually, cats hadn’t changed much. I suspect something in their DNA stubbornly refuses to have anything to do with bowing to our will, even on a genetic level.

But a cat was what I needed right now. Dogs are too needy. With a hundred words, the only ones I’d ever hear would be “Come back!” every time I left the ship. And one-tenth size or not, an elephant would be a pain to clean up after. No, I needed a companion that could take care of herself…

…um… sorry. Kind of spaced out for a moment there. Anyway, it didn’t seem right to just pick one at random, so I was waiting for inspiration to hit. In the meantime I picked up what I knew I’d need to go with it. Food, litter box, automated micebot to chase (“Now with twelve different activities and four AI levels of difficulty!”)

That was when a guy came in to complain to the manager.

“Yes, I’d like to return this cat, please.” He had the annoyed voice of a father who was also a businessman and who didn’t have time for fathering but did so out of obligation.

“I’m sorry, what seems to be the problem?”

“I bought him for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow.” Ha. Nailed it.

"It's a she, sir."

“Whatever. The stupid thing managed to get out of its carrying case and into my son’s workshop and burned its face on a laser welder. Look.”

I turned just enough so I could see the cat out of the corner of my eye, being held up at arm’s length like a baby that had just crapped its diaper. It was still a kitten, but not at that defenceless stage. It had long hair of a grey/black/white patter that kind of reminded me of a raccoon (yeah, we have raccoons on Lave, they manage to get everywhere, it seems). It also had one side of its face burned in a straight line, right over its left eye.

“I can’t give my daughter this! It’s wrecked.”

“Have you tried taking it to a vet? Maybe they—”

“Yes, yes, they said the scar will heal and they can replace the eye and fur, but not for another week. My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow! I’d like a replacement, please.”

“It’s not our policy to return an animal just because—”

The man rolled his eyes. “Fine. I’m in a hurry here. Just take it and dump it back in the vat or wherever you grow them. It’s completely useless now anyway.”

It would just so happen that this hairy little kitten turned and looked at me with its good eye at that point. Of course it did.

“If you won’t help me I’ll take my business elsewhere. But first I’m demanding a full refund!”

With one hand I scooped the cat up from the man’s grasp. The man turned to yell at me, saw my face, and then saw my fist.

“Keep the change.”

The store manager didn’t say a word as I laid out the supplies I had collected in the cart. “All this.” I paid and walked out with the kitten draped on my shoulder.

That’s one nice thing about this face. People assume you’re a thousand times tougher than you really are. He gave me a half nod as I left, and I knew I wouldn’t have the cops harassing me on the way back to my ship.

Sometimes inspiration hits. But when it comes in this form, it’s nice to hit back.

 

[mossfoot]

Having acquired a travelling companion, it was time to check my bank account, and see if all my garbage collecting had paid off. Along the way, I tried to think of a name for my new companion, which I had been told was an offshoot of the old Maine Coon breed, which was why they were being sold at Maine Hub. This would have meant more hair than I cared to deal with, but one of the genetic tweaks that took with this breed had to do with allergies and managing shedding.

I was teetering between Lucky due to her circumstance of coming into my possession or Scratchy based on what she was doing to my back, when I saw my numbers. They were good, but not enough for a Cobra, even if I traded the Adder in and everything with it.

I must have muttered my disappointment aloud because the guy waiting for the terminal said, “Didn’t you hear about the sale?”

“What sale?”

“Ships and gear are ten percent off in LHS 3447, including this station.”

Ten percent? I did the math in my head and it came up thumbs up.

“Looks like we’re both getting a new home, kitty. Ow!”

---

The Cobra MKIII. What can I say about it I haven’t said before? It’s a classic design and all around good general purpose ship. A home away from home for pilots for over two hundred years. There are more expensive, more powerful, and more luxurious ships, but they aren’t without their trade-offs in terms of upkeep, combat, or generally larger combat profile. Some have fancy nacelles to give them more speed and manoeuvrability, but a fully shielded Cobra could cut through those like butter if it ever got rammed.

And it was close enough to my MKII that I could pretend everything hadn’t changed. Hell, maybe it would help me remember some things.

So now I had to determine a name for my ship as well. But first thing was first, take this ship out and shake it down, make sure it works the way I think it should.

After running through the pre-flight check, and making sure the kitten was secured in her box for the time being, I took off and spun the ship around to look at the station.

What a beautiful sight. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing the habitation ring on these things. I decided to go in for a closer look, buzz the parkland.

That was when an unidentified fluffy object floated into my view.

For a moment I thought I had bought a lemon and this ship had a bad case of Trumbles, but it was in fact my cat, who had somehow gotten out of her carrier and was floating in the cabin. I hadn’t fitted her with GeckoPads™ yet, I was so eager to get this ship going I had forgotten, which meant she was bouncing off the walls as I manoeuvred into position and was not spinning around like a whirling dervish. Thank goodness I hadn’t hit the afterburners.

I instinctively reached out to grab her, and once she got my arm everything went to hell.

“Ow-ow-ow-OW-NO KITTY!”

I had to hit the thrusters to keep myself from ramming into the habitation ring’s support pylon as it swung by.

Instead I accidentally hit the afterburners.

“NononoNONONONO!”

If you go to Maine Hub in LHS 3447 and look really close at the habitation ring near the main baseball field, you might see a glint of light reflect from the scratch my Cobra left behind.

My ship did not fair nearly as well.

“Eject. Eject. Eject.” The computer trilled the words as I gripped my cat and hoped to hell the stasis field worked as advertised. This was not the way I wanted to end up part of the “oops” statistic.

I don’t remember much after that. I hit space, my lungs burned, and I was out cold. When I woke up, I was back in the station, my cat in a wire cage with a thick padlock on it—I can only assume I told them what happened in some delirious state of semi-recovery—and I was being shown the terms and conditions of my insurance agreement, and how much I was going to have to pay back in order to cover the loss of the tragically nameless Cobra. It was a lot.

I would get a replacement ship, but I was back to collecting garbage for a while until I built up some capital to trade with.

I looked over to the wire cage, where the kitten was licking its paw like nothing had happened all day long. On the upside, I did get a name for my cat out of it.

“Dumbass.”

 

[mossfoot]

It turns out Maine Coon cats are infamous for getting into trouble. I fitted the GeckoPads™ on Dumbass and it took her only a few hours to get used to life in low to no-G situations. Her sleeping tank is a closed off centrifuge to simulate half earth gravity, but just like pilots we need to get some real gravity once in a while. Medical technology can only put off the effects of lack of gravity for so long.

You’d think this would be the start of a series of heart-warming stories or amusing anecdotes about the trouble Dumbass got into. And maybe under other situations that would have been the case.

Unfortunately, just as space and time are curved, so is life, and it threw me another one.

“Commander Mossfoot.” The man waiting for me by my ship was clearly part of the Federation’s Navy. Why he was here was anyone’s guess. Aside from some teaching the occasional pirate the need for good manners, I wasn’t exactly making a name for myself. And sure, I’d done some favors for the Navy now and then, but that was just so I could get access to the Sol system and general networking. Good for business and all.

“That’s my name. Well, sort of.” I saw no need to use my real name at all anymore. That life was over.

“We know. I’ve been briefed about your work in the Alliance systems a hundred and fifty years ago.”

Uh oh...I didn’t like the sound of this. Also, I couldn’t be sure what he meant exactly. My assumed name was, after all, assumed. The person I assumed it from having been a pilot working for a secret wetworks unit under the command of my father’s XO.

Long story.

“That life is long gone,” I said, figuring I’d keep my story applicable to either identity just to be safe. “I’m strictly freelance now.”

“I understand. But we know you are a skilled pilot and have certain skills, and your position puts you in place of deniability for my superiors. It’s clear that you haven’t given up fighting altogether, even if you have cut back. We were wondering if you would be interested in putting your abilities to more productive use than picking up space junk and slapping around teenagers with more money than sense?”

“Not particularly,” I said. “I don’t mind spacing idiots who think property damage is fun. Well, it is, obviously, but people might get hurt. I don’t care for that. They get picked up by the Vultures quickly enough, and they have to deal with insurance for the next month. Works for me.”


“Strange. We saw nothing about those kind of... ethics in you psych records.”


Ah. That answered which identity they thought I was. Oh, wait, maybe it didn’t. Not if they were using my pre-death psych eval. I’m pretty sure I was rubbish at that. Pretty sure the term ‘self-centered narcissist with sociopathic tendencies’ had been written down on it somewhere. But that was a lifetime ago. Well, a few if you’re keeping score.

“You seemed quite eager to participate in various black ops before. We had you down as a man who understood the long view when it came to galactic security.”

Okay, NOW it cleared up who he thought he was talking to. The other guy. Great, even now I couldn’t escape that mistaken identity problem. I considered clearing it up once and for all, but the man spoke first.

“If it’s a question of payment, I assure you the pay is quite generous.”

I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. “Define generous.”

“One hundred and seventy thousand credits.”

“Holy crap, who do you want me to kill?”

“Exactly.”

---

The man’s name was Tiberius Miller. Head of a terrorist organization operating within the regions nearest to Sol. His real name was Joe, but he changed it to Tiberius to sound more threatening. Nobody would follow Joe Miller.

The officer made the briefing exceedingly simple. Scout out the areas around Sol and track this man down. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Get paid.

A hundred and seventy thousand credits was enough to buy a small squad of Sidewinders or a few Adders to give you an idea of what this was worth. Hell, I could retire if I really wanted to with that kind of money.

And the guy was an honest to goodness a-hole. When it came to galactic politics there are always two sides to every conflict, often a lot of grey thrown around, but anyone who takes on passenger transports to make a point deserves whatever he gets.

Still, was I really up for this? It was one thing to defend myself in combat. Heck, I even went so far as to go “Oh deary me, here I am lost in space with a cargo hold full of silver, whatever will I do” over comm channels to lure suckers out once in a while, but this was different. This was hired murder. No pod was going to be recovered.

For the life of me I don’t know why I signed up, or why I did it so quickly. Something had changed inside me. No, that’s not right. Something was missing. I didn’t know what at the time.

“Excellent. Now, once you relocate to Sol you can begin. But before you take him on, we have a general “seek and destroy” quota to fill in the same region for his followers. I recommend you take them on to learn the kind of tactics Miller is teaching them.”

“What will I get paid for that?”

“A proper promotion within the Federation Navy. We can’t reinstate your rank of Captain, as you aren’t formally enlisted. But promotions within the civilian arm of the Navy will have its own rewards, as you are no doubt aware.”

“Plus the uniform is a chick magnet,” I said. Mr. Buzz Cut was not one for sarcastic humour, it seemed. “Fine. Go to Sol, get set up, search the systems, take on some renegades, and kill their leader. That about it?”

“Yes. Congratulations, Commander Mossfoot. You’ve made the right choice, and are helping make the Federation a safer place.” He shook my hand, but I didn’t care about the Federation. To be honest, galactic politics had been the last thing on my mind.

The two superpowers were the Empire and the Federation. My old home at Lave was part of a group caught in the middle called the Alliance, which primarily tried to take care of themselves when the giants got all sabre rattling. Then there were independent stations and systems not affiliated with anyone in particular. That’s about all I knew. Recent events? Something about the Emperor being sick and some wedding postponed in the Empire, and the VP dying in the Federation… just whatever I hear in passing on Galnet.

So it wasn’t any sense of loyalty that was making me do this. If I had any of that left it would probably go to the Alliance anyway. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the underdog these days. So, again, I couldn’t figure out why I so quickly agreed to risk my life like this, other than the prospect that this could open up business opportunities and of course a huge pay day.

---

It took me a day to reach Sol system, jump after jump, picking up some extra credits scanning planets and systems with outdated cartographical data. When I finally got there with Dumbass sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, I was less than impressed. Sol was the home of humanity, but it wasn’t my home. This was more of a curiosity than anything.

I rented a room on Galileo, the station orbiting Earth’s moon, where Dumbass could be safe while I went and did the most reckless thing in my life to date. I had enough pin money for a good room, and to hire someone to check in and feed the cat every day. I’d also found out that Galileo was weighed down with silver and needed shuttle pilots to ferry it to Earth in a timely manner, so I was able to build up more capital in the meantime while I got ready to hunt.

The pirates were easy. I barely gave them a second thought. Some random interceptions around Wolf 359, pretending to limp around in a ship full of liquor, it wasn’t long before I either found or was interdicted by the local renegades. They didn’t last long.

Then I got word from a Federation contact that Miller was at Barnard’s Star. And with that the game, as they say, was afoot.

 

[mossfoot]

I drifted through the expanse of space between Barnard’s Star and the nearest station for hours, checking every passing ship and every strange signal.

I’d like to say I had some niggling worries about this, or that I stared in the mirror one day and didn’t like what I saw, but the fact is none of that was on my mind whatsoever. Just finding this guy, spacing him, and cashing a paycheck.

It wasn’t like he didn’t deserve it. I ran across the work of Miller’s followers everywhere. Wrecks of trading ships drifting, their cargo spread about and not even collected. It wasn’t even stuff worth collecting – grain or toxic waste or basic chemicals. They were trying to scare traders off from the area, and probably doing a good job of it.

But like I said, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. No sense of outrage or vengeance or duty or justice. Nothing.

I saw another anomaly show up on my HUD and checked it out expecting more rubbish.

Instead I found Tiberius Miller, already powering up and preparing to fire in a frickin Anaconda. The biggest and most lethal craft available on the civilian market.

“You think I don’t know why you’re here?” He shouted over the comm. My shields took a battering as I tried to thrust myself into a firing position, but it was no use. Beams stroked against my hull like I was getting lashed with a laser cat-o-nine-tails.

“You can suck space like the rest of them, Federation goon!”

A bright purple orb struck, and my ship was thrown off course. Shields were down. I hit the afterburners, hoping to get some distance.

“Incoming missile,” the computer trilled.

I jinked to the left and right, using lateral and vertical thrusters to try and get a bit more manoeuvrability, but my hull kept on taking a beating. Where were my shields? Why weren’t they recharging?

“Taking damage,” the computer said.

“You think I don’t know that?” I yelled. Miller had made a chump out of me, and I’d be lucky if I got out of this alive. The shields still weren’t recharging, but I had made enough distance that I could check the systems panel to find out why.

He’d blown them out. That purple orb that hit me had wreaked all kinds of havoc on my ship and fried the shield generator completely.

I was out of this fight. I managed to clear enough distance to engage the frame shift and get the hell out of there, with less than half my hull integrity remaining.

Now, you would think this would have taught me a lesson. That I’d remember that it was my cowardly sense of self-preservation that had kept me alive (more or less) for so long. That I’d go back to Sol with my heart racing, my tail happily between my legs, ready to pick up Dumbass and just go off trading metals and luxury items again.

Instead I looked at my credit balance, intended to rebuy my ship in case of accidents, and asked myself if I had enough for bigger guns.

---

The outfitter wasn’t the sort to ask questions. Whether people came in to expand their cargo capacity or turn their ship into a death machine didn’t matter to her, so she didn’t bat an eye when I asked what the most powerful weapons a Cobra could hold were.

“Well, you’ve got four weapons mounts, the top are class two, bottom are class one. What are you outfitting for. Defence?”

“Offense.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, the Cobra can pack some decent power, depending on what you want to trade off on. Fixed mounts are slightly more powerful than gimbled or turreted mounts—fixed mounts don’t have to worry about diverting energy to servos and whatnot. But of course a gimbled mount is going to do half the work for you. You just need to keep the target in general line of sight.”

I was a good enough shot that I didn’t need gimbled mounts when it came to energy weapons, but projectiles had lead time to worry about.

In the end I outfitted her with what I thought was the best I could get. A rail gun on one side, burst laser on the other, with twin multi-canons gimbled underneath.

“I need to test her out. Any combat going on in the area?”

Maybe it was the way I said it, or the fact I clearly didn’t care who was fighting. “Uh… there’s actually a bit of a civil war going on in the system. You’ll find some combat zones marked on your HUD if you’re Navy affiliated… I assume you are?”

I nodded. “That’ll do. Thanks.”

----

I have no idea who was fighting or why. It didn’t matter. I just found the combat zone, near a planet with a mining facility, chose a side for my IFF to register with, and opened fire on the first red dot to pass my radar.

The whole time I wasn’t really thinking about fighting, I was looking at damage inflicted. Sure, I could look at stats about power consumption and damage per second all I wanted, but that wasn’t a substitute to seeing how it played out in the field.

And so Eagles and Cobras went down with relative ease under my new rail gun. Ammo consumption might be a problem, but this was about taking out Miller. I could stand to have that eat into the profits a bit.

An Anaconda entered the fray and I tested my kit out on it. Dang those things had powerful shields. I’d have to remember that.

Along with my team mates who I could have just as easily been fighting instead under the metaphorical coin flip, we took down the shields and battered the hull. The rail gun worked well enough against its reinforced hull, but by the time it was taken out I was out of ammo.

Still, should be good enough for a one-on-one fight. The important thing would be to stay behind it, where its more powerful weapons couldn’t hit me.

Without a word to anyone, I left the combat zone, returned to the station, cashed in my service bond to pay for rearming the rail gun, and headed back to Barnard’s Star.

---

This time I located myself near the only viable outpost, hunting for signals. If Miller was operating out of this area, he had to use this station to re-arm and repair, possibly using forged idents to avoid attracting attention, but then again on outposts like this more blind eyes were turned than anyone liked to admit.

This time Tiberius was good enough to announce himself, and offer me a chance to leave. I took this to mean that he was scared of what I was packing, and figured he should be. I powered up and tried to flank him, but by the time I got around he was already facing me again. We traded volleys of fire like two warriors charging each other with swords for a running swing.

Sparks flew off my console, my shields were gone—again. Hull integrity was down to 32%. Then I heard a distressing crackling noise.

“Warning. Cockpit compromised.”

The cracks along the canopy continued to spread as the Anaconda swung about to try and hit my rear. I hit the thrusters as the cracks webbed across my view.

“Oh hell.”

The good thing about explosive decompression is that it blows everything outward, otherwise I’d have had giant shards of canopy stuck in my chest. The emergency life support kicked in as the air pressure left, but I wasn’t dead. For now. Miller was still behind me firing missiles.

I put all power to engines and what was left over into shields. I had fifteen minutes to get to the station, listening to the muffled warnings of my computer, the sound of my own laboured breathing, and the steady ticking down of my oxygen reserve as the nearby oil-rig in space came mercifully into view.

Again you’d think I’d have taken this moment of terror as a chance for reflection on my life choices. And again, you’d be wrong.

---

“Back again?” Despite the repairs made, the outfitter could tell my ship had been through hell, largely because I’d left the paint job as it was.

“Your weapon suggestions sucked,” I said to her.

“They weren’t my suggestions,” she said. “You wanted the most powerful gun I had. I told you what that was. But power isn’t everything.” She showed me her inventory. “If you actually want a suggestion, I’d go with two of these.” She pointed to hefty-looking fixed beam lasers that were on display. “Two of these can peel off the shields off just about anything.”

“Even an Anaconda?”

She shrugged. “Given enough time. You’re hunting a ‘conda? Geeze, you really are as stupid as you are ugly.”

“And there goes your tip.”

“Look, even if you take the shields down you need to get through its armor. Those multicannons won’t do the trick. I suggest using more dedicated canons instead. Hits harder, but slower. It needs to be used at closer range, or at least if he’s coming at you head on—which presumably you don’t want to do. If you got the shields down and you’re close, you strafe him with this and he’ll feel it. Better yet, get the gimbled type and target his subsystems. You might get lucky and crit out his reactor.”

It sounded like good advice. There was just one problem. I didn’t have enough money for the full set.

“Sell the discovery scanner. And the fuel scoop.”

She did the math and shook her head. “Sorry, you’re still sixty grand short.”

“Sell the cargo bays.”

“Okay…how many?”

“All of them.”

For the first time the outfitter looked concerned. “You sure about that?”

“Cargo bays aren’t going to help me win a fight.”

“Sure, but, it’s the way you’re saying it. You know you seem a bit…obsessed, right?”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind. Do it.”

 

[mossfoot]

Flying alone in my Cobra, waiting for Miller to show his face again. The outfitter had called me obsessed. But I wasn’t. Not the way she meant it, anyway. Keeping at 30km/s, searching for stray signals that might give away Tiberius’s position, I realized what the problem really was.

I just didn’t care anymore.

All I had was this—a ship, and a mission. So I was focused, yes, but not obsessed. I didn’t feel enough of anything right now to be considered obsessed.

This time around I didn’t find Miller. He found me. I was interdicted, and rather than fight it, once I saw it was an Ananconda on my tail, I killed the engines and let him take me.

“You again?” he said, opening gun ports. I did the same. But rather than gunning my engines forward I turned and hit the afterburners.

“That’s right, you better run!” he yelled after me.

But I wasn’t running. Once I was up to a good speed I turned off flight assistance and let momentum carry me away from him while I brought my ship and guns around to bear. Once in position, I put flight assistance on again and slammed the engines in full reverse.

It had the desired effect. I was just barely in range of his lasers, but that was it. And with my more precise sense of aim, I drilled on his shields at the edge of effective range, diverting power to weapons while keeping enough in engines and shields and keep me away from him.

“You’re not getting away from me that easily,” said Miller. “You’re a punk, just like the rest of those Federation goons. And I will boil up your ship and watch the void take you.”

I said nothing. I didn’t care enough about him to banter. I only cared about removing him.

He must not have rearmed his missiles since our last encounter, because I wasn’t hearing any impact warnings. My shields were still in good shape and his were going steadily down.

“Stop running like a coward and fight me!” Miller yelled. It seemed my tactic was ing him off. His lasers were sputtering as they struggled to get enough power from the generator, which seemed to be dedicated to engines now. But still I kept focused, steadily burning his shields like he was an ant and I was a magnifying glass.

At last the shields were down and I lobbed cannon shells at him from a distance. It took a few seconds for them to reach him, but after the first hit he jinked and avoided the others. I could keep burning him, but his shields were starting to recharge. I decided to engage, get to his rear if possible, and do as much damage as possible before the shields went up.

“That’s more like it,” Miller said as I reversed the engines once again. I used my vertical thrusters in addition to my usual pitch and thrust to arc around him in a wide circle, but one that kept him in my sights more often. I also got strafed for my trouble, but I thought my shields could take it. I was wrong. By the time I was on his six, my hull was down to two thirds integrity. But this time I wasn’t running. Nothing critical had been hit, and my shields were already recharging.

The dogfight that ensued lasted for what felt like a lifetime. Each of us burning at one another’s shields and doing minor hull damage, ticking away at one another’s life with a thousand paper cuts.

It was a testament to my skill, I suppose. This guy was certified Elite and an Anaconda outclasses every other ship in terms of shield strength, firepower, and hull plating. Your only hope against one is to get hit as little as possible. So I figured I had to be delivering a ten-to-one damage exchange ratio this whole time.

And it was starting to get to Tiberius. “Butcher! Murderer! You can’t kill my people with your ships so you starve and strangle them with taxes, sanctions, embargos until they are meek and beaten and willing to be ruled by you. You think you are better than me? That you are upholding what is right? Your cause and your government are a fraud.”

I said nothing, trying to knock out his reactor before the shields went back online, but he was starting to get to me as well.

“I am fighting for something better. I fight for the freedom of my people, and you only fight for credits. What does that make you? They call me a terrorist, but at least a terrorist believes in something. What does a mercenary believe in besides money?”

This guy was just about on my last nerve. He’d hit my shields and both of my cannons were knocked offline. Damn. This was bad. His ship was holding together by a thread, but so was mine. And so was my patience.

“You are a pointless fool fighting for no one but yourself, for no reason but you can.”

Then the jerkwad had the balls to start quoting literature.

“You will die and be still, never shall be memory left of you
after this, nor regret when you are gone…”

That was all he said, but I knew the rest by heart. He was quoting the poet Sappho.

You will die and be still, never shall be memory left of you
after this, nor regret when you are gone. You have not touched the flowers
of the Muses, and thus, shadowy still in the domain of Death,
you must drift with a ghost’s fluttering wings, one of the darkened dead.

Something snapped.

I honestly can’t tell you what it was, but those words meant more than Miller realized. It was as if he’d slapped my soul. As if he’d known how empty my life was in a way I had only been vaguely aware of before. I had nothing to care about other than a kitten back on Galileo station. I had no family, no friends, no life to speak of. I had nothing. I was nothing. I would leave nothing behind.

“Shields online,” the computer calmly said. But I was anything but calm. For the first time since I took this assignment, I was mad. No, furious.

“Burn in hell!” They were the only words I ever said to the man. I held down on the fire button and cut straight into his hull, hitting the afterburners, by accident or on purpose, I have no way of knowing. My ship wedged right in behind his engines, causing a caststrophic meltdown, blowing my ship back, and tearing what was left of it to shreds.

My ship spun out of control. The controls fried and my HUD went on the blink. The canopy cracked and blew out. Number one engine had broken off and exploded a safe distance from me, but number two was intact and going critical. Thrusters offline. Life support offline. Tea maker still functional.

“Eject. Eject. Eject.”

Everything got real quiet, and not just because of the sudden vacuum in the cockpit. The computer’s voice telling me to eject didn’t sound right. It sounded like someone else. I looked over to the empty co-pilot’s seat, only to see it wasn’t empty after all.

A woman sat there. Tall, dark hair, wearing an outdated pilot’s uniform from the Lave systems. She looked at me with a sarcastic half-grin on her face, shaking her head slowly as the ship disintegrated all around me. Despite the fact there was no air and she had no helmet on, I heard her clear as day before everything went black.

“Dumbass.”

 

[mossfoot]

“Okay. Tell me a story,” the woman said. She was sitting next to me on a grassy hill overlooking the spaceport on some planet. I wasn’t sure which.

I should have recognized her, but I didn’t. I wanted to ask who she was, but the words wouldn't come out. I just looked at her, trying to place the dark hair and eyes, and that sarcastic smile of hers.

Eventually she got tired of waiting. “Fine. I’ll tell you one. It’s a story from Earth over a thousand years ago. It seems like a simple police story at first – a retired cop needs to stop a bunch of fugitives who are on the run for being different. But by the end you realize it’s about something else entirely. It’s a story about life, finding meaning in it, and trying to figure out what it’s all about. About regret and coming to terms with how things must come to an end.”

I looked at her, puzzled, wondering what this story was.

“It’s called Blade Runner.”

---

I woke up. The bright lights designed to make microbes and bacteria run for the hills had a similar effect on my eyes. I looked around. I was in a hospital room. Again.

“We’ve really got to stop meeting like this,” I said to the walls.

I guess the monitors told people I was awake, because it wasn’t long before a nurse came in to check on me, followed by the Federation officer who had assigned me to track down Miller. The officer waited patiently as the man asked me some inane questions about how I felt and left. I wished the uniform had followed him out, but he didn’t.

“Feeling better?” the officer asked, even though the nurse had just asked me the same question. I nodded. “You should know that Miller’s escape pod was found not far from yours. He’s in Federation custody.”

“Swell,” I said. “I still get paid, right?” To be honest I didn’t actually care about the money. I just hated the idea of going through all that for nothing.

“We would have preferred dead. Cleaner. Now we have to deal with certain inconvenient civilian legalities. But yes, we consider the contract fulfilled, Lieutenant.”

My brow furrowed. Had I just enlisted?

“You’ve been rather busy. We noticed. The pirates around Barnard’s Star, joining our forces in an engagement around Wolf 359. Passing communications and supplies in-between. It didn’t go unnoticed, or unappreciated. We tend to show that appreciation in the form of rank. Honorary, but it does entitle you to certain privileges and entrusts you with more difficult assignments.”

“Swell,” I said again, knowing this wasn’t the only reason he was here.

“We’ve arranged for your ship to be replaced and returned to the combat specs you had upgraded it to, and took care of the insurance for you through your account.”

“Thanks.” Wait, they could access my account?

“We take care of our own,” the man said, trying to be as straight and true as his crew cut. “When you’re feeling up for it, we’d like to discuss the possibility of further assignments.”

I began to chuckle. Here I was in a hospital bed, having just faced the realization that I had nothing in my life. That existence was an empty and meaningless void. That nothing I did was going to be remembered or cared about… And here this guy was asking me to go out and keep at it.

“I think I’m out for a while,” I said. “But I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

“Very well. I can imagine that took a lot out of you. My comm channel will be open if you change your mind.” He nodded and left without another word.

---

It turned out I had been transferred back to Galileo, since that was considered my “official” residence. Dumbass was in good shape at my lodgings and hadn’t grown too much. She even recognized me…or just assumed I was bringing food.

I got her in the carrying case, packed up her stuff and gave the keys back to the front desk. I’d considered dealing with this existential crisis here or on Earth, but it just didn’t feel right. My new and still nameless Cobra was as close to a home as I had. But honestly, I wasn’t going to sort things out.

She was waiting for me at the outfitters as I’d requested. The chief mechanic there was a lot less attractive than the one who’d kitted her out during the hunt for Tiberius Miller.

“You the owner of a Lonely Heart?” he asked.

“What?” I’m pretty sure that was the name of a classical song from way back.

“That Cobra. Lonely Heart. Is it yours?”

Great. The Federation takes care of its own, my butt. They didn’t get me a new ship, they got me a used one. With my luck it would need an overhaul of everything from the engines to the life support system.

I looked over her. She was definitely a used ship. But then again, I was pretty used myself. I smirked. “Guess I am.”

“Right. Well, we got those mil-spec beam lasers your officer buddy asked for, but I gotta say, that’s a lot of firepower for your power plant to handle. You sure you want two?”

I looked back to the ship and thought about what I intended to do with her.

“No. Sell one of the beam lasers and put in a mining laser instead. Get some cargo bays put back in, and add a small refinery.”

The man checked out the specs on his datapad. “Yeah, she can handle that just fine. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Replace anything that looks like it’s ready to wear out and give her a new paint job.” Just because I couldn’t get a decent makeover didn’t mean the Lonely Heart couldn’t.

I needed some time to think. Alone…more or less. This was as good a way to get that as any.

 

[mossfoot]

I’d never grown a beard before, and, thanks to my lovely combination of burns and scars, I never would. But if I could I was easily out there long enough to be a mountain man.

Ever play an old Earth game called golf? At first is starts off being an excuse to have a really long angry walk. Then you get okay at it and start taking pride in your general improvement. Then you get good enough that any slight mess up frustrates the hell out of you and you’re back to having a really long angry walk again.

Mining is kind of like that, but in reverse, since you’re trying to get the hole in one by having the ball land inside your ship.

It’s bad enough having to scoop up fragments like they’re discarded cargo, but then you gotta process them, and rarely do you ever find anything with a decent amount of pure metal in it. Highest I found was in the fifty percent range.

But it wasn’t about the metals and minerals, it was about the peace and quiet. Aside from a single Sidewinder who (briefly) tried to mug me, I turned the experience into something more Zen-like.

So I mined, I pet my cat, I checked my cargo holds to see how much good stuff I’d collected, I got my cat out of the refinery bin before it went back online, I ate, I got my cat out of the air recycling system, I read, I got my cat out of the airlock (which I’m certain I had locked and encrypted) before it blew open.

But most of all I sat in my chair, looking at the gently tumbling rocks, lit by the nearby sun, and wondered what it was all about.

Maybe this was all that was left in my life. Scraping by a living until the day one vital organ or another gives out and I’m found as salvage a week later. Well, what's left of me after Dumbass realizes there isn't any other source of food she can open.

I kind of envied the pilots out there with a sense of duty, either fighting for one of the big three factions, or simply acting as their own little guardians of the galaxy as freelance policemen. Heck, I almost envied the pirates. Sure, they had no morals but at least they felt like they had purpose. It’s just that their purpose came at the expense of yours.

I looked over at the co-pilot’s chair, and sure enough there was Dumbass, even though I always keep the cockpit door locked. How does she do that? She was there sitting and watching the purple mining laser as if she was going to jump through the viewscreen any moment to grab it. And I wouldn’t put it past her to try.

I even envied Dumbass. At least she had it all figured out. With her there was never a why, only a try.

---

“It’s called Blade Runner.”

I was back on the hill listening to the woman tell me a story about a retired cop hunting down and killing artificial humans. I’d actually seen the movie before as a kid, but the way she told the story it was like she was talking about something else entirely. She focused on the subtext of what the story meant, how unfair the replicants situation was, how brutal Deckard’s job was, and ultimately, the importance of grace and forgiveness, and the importance of life itself.

When she got to the point where Roy Batty saves Deckard’s life, she had a distant look in her eyes, looking off into the growing night sky as she repeated his final speech. “I have seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

She then turned and looked at me. “Time to die…”

----

I woke up with a start. It was the third night in a row I’d dreamed about her, and I knew darn well who it was now… I just didn’t want to admit it.

I mentioned before the black hole of memory I have in places, but also that my journals were in the public domain (and bizarrely popular among a small subset of pilots). The thing is, I’ve never bothered listening to them after the first eight or so. The gaps it filled did me no good now, and only gave me a building sense of dread, like I didn’t want to know.

But I knew. I knew enough, anyway.

I’d lived my early life getting through life on wit, charm, money, and my father’s influence. When I lost the latter two, I found out how much I’d actually relied on them, because the former two didn’t get me as far as they used to.

But in all my time I’d only come across a few people who’d cared absolutely nothing about my wit or charm, and only one who’d agreed to work with me in the close confines of a ship for more than 24 hours.

Hell, she even killed me once. It’s how we met.

I got up, ate, got the cat out of the zero-g toilet she’d somehow gotten into, and went back to work. Drill, scan, drill, scan, drill, scan, scoop, scoop, scoop.

My eyes drifted back to the empty co-pilot seat. We’d busted out of my father’s carrier in his prized antique MKII prototype together, then laid low as the fallout from those events blew over. She’d reluctantly agreed to work with me, at least until I could afford to replace the ship she’d lost.

And then…? It was still all hazy, except for the dreams.

“Whatever happened to you, Violet?”

 

[mossfoot]

I suppose I should set the record straight before someone fan-fictions the crap out of what I’ve been saying. Violet and I never did the Cobra with two backs. Not that I didn’t suggest it once or twice on long trips between systems. Thing is, I was never her type—her type lacked a Y chromosome.

But really that was just another way for her to call me on my . Of course I was going to try and seduce her. That’s how I’d always handled relationships with women. It would have made things easier for me—let me trivialize our partnership, or treat her like I would any other woman. She wasn’t having any of it.

With sex off the table, or anywhere else, I had to treat her like an actual human being. I remember wondering when my life had become a bloody after-school special, but the fact is we worked well together. I provided the schmooze at stations, bargaining for better prices and feeling out slightly shady deals, she provided cover fire when said shady dealings when out the airlock, and I had to run with a briefcase full of credits. She always had a plan ready for escape, and a head for tactics. Bounty hunting had been her bag long before we ever met, running away from trouble had been mine.

We’d been doing that for at least a year, I think. And then? Not a clue. Only the dreams, which were giving me a really bad vibe to be honest.

It was a month now that I’d been scouting asteroid belts and planetary rings. Every couple of days I’d stop back in at McKee Ring to offload and get some grav-time in.

Only this time I realized that my self-imposed exile therapy wasn’t working. I might have had all the time in the world to think, but what I was thinking about wasn’t helpful.

I was wallowing.

I had the whole universe out there, and here I was hiding in rocks. Okay, so maybe I didn’t want to go back to my social butterfly ways just yet. Maybe I was sick of people, or maybe I was afraid of making new ties after having lost all of my old ones. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t stuff to do out there. What was that line from the story she told me?

“I have seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…”

A bit poetically violent, sure, but the meaning was still there. Roy had seen some crazy stuff in his time. And what makes up who we are more than the sum of our experiences? What defines us?

Did I want my experiences to comprise of drilling rock all day? Or did I want to see some crazy stuff?

That day I sold my mining drill and refinery, and fitted my ship with an advanced discovery scanner and detailed surface scanner.

The mechanic at McKee Ring didn’t seem too surprised by the change, but he did ask, “Which way ya heading?”

I looked around the station as if I could somehow see through its walls.

“Which way is Orion?”

 

[mossfoot]

It took me some time to reach the edge of inhabited space. There are WAY more inhabited systems out there than I was used to a hundred and fifty years ago. It can be pretty overwhelming looking at them all on the star chart, to be honest.

The star I had in mind was just off the shoulder of Orion, but not actually part of the Orion constellation. Most of those stars were way too far away for my liking. I was used to at least having a station to send an SOS out to if I got into trouble, and back in my time, that was every station. Not so anymore.

I wandered from system to system, only stopping at stations to do repairs and check on the value of a hold of Indi Bourbon I was carrying. That stuff’s in demand, and the further you go from Epsilon Indi, the more it’s worth.

Eventually I reached Empire territory. Now, I can’t say I know much about the Empire in terms of policy. Most of what I hear on GalNet has to do with the soap opera going on in the palace, with the Emperor on death’s door and a royal wedding being called off.

I do know they allow slavery, which I’ve never been cool with. They dress up the language and try to make it like a legit kind of debt repayment, but it still grinds my gears. I've almost been sold off myself on more than one occasion. They also seem to have a smug sense of meritocracy to them to justify just about anything. Sure it’s not a democracy, but it’s a place where you can get ahead if you prove your worth.

Contrast that with the Federation, which is a democracy that’s rife with corruption from what I hear, and everything gets bogged down with special interests and whatnot.

To be honest, if I had to choose sides I might very well go with the third option—the Alliance. That makes up much of the area of space I used to know, including my home world of Lave. I say “if I had to” because from what I hear a lot of the better known Alliance worlds are full of douchebags gaming the system to make the lives of pilots like me hell. They say you can’t go home again, but in my case it’s more like I don’t really want to. Not yet anyway.

The Imperial stations I came across seemed much the same as those in the Federation—modular designs that work, keep a familiar baseline so that pilots travelling long distances don’t get confused and make costly mistakes, that sort of reasoning.

The folks there didn’t say much. I didn’t hear any docking announcements, and the repair people just seemed kind of grim and duty bound. Maybe these guys were banished to the outer planets and just stopped giving a flying fig anymore.

The last inhabited station I was in was Vinge Hub in Lovaroju, where I sold of the bourbon for a cool quarter mill. The system I wanted to go to was maybe 200 light years away, but my stupid navigation computer could only calculate 100 light years, so I had to find a mid-point destination to program in. One that would take me through Hades Sector MH-V, Col 285 Sector OR-V, Synuefe XV-S and all the rest of the alphabet soup.

Hey, there are 400 BILLION stars in our galaxy, you can’t give them all cool sounding names. And if you just let any old bloke name them, half of them would end up being profanity. So I can’t say I really cared about the names, but they did help emphasize the fact that from this point on, I was going out alone.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again.

I felt excited.

 

[mossfoot]

Well, if I thought leaving inhabited space would mean never running into another human being, I was sadly mistaken. Not in every system, mind you, but every so often I’d have a blip on my radar, a passing Asp, Adder, or Cobra like mine. We’d more or less grunt greetings over the comm, then ignore each other and go our merry ways.

Even if a system has been scanned, Universal Carteographics pays top credit for fresh and updated data. They sell that information to miners looking for metal-rich worlds to exploit or would-be colonists looking to set up their own hippy-dippy Eden off somewhere… no doubt dying because the local vegetation is all poisonous.

The further I went out, the fewer these people were. Just as I thought I’d seen the last of them, though, an Adder showed up on my radar somewhere in Synuefe VP-U B36, and as I ignored him and scouted the numerous planets of the system, the moron suddenly interdicted me!

“MINE!” he yelled as we hit normal space.

He started shooting at me with a rather pathetic pair of multi-cannons.

“What the **** is wrong with you?!” I said over the comm.

“MINE! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!” Can’t have what? I didn’t have a clue, but he wasn’t giving me a choice but to fight.

I hadn’t really had the Cobra equipped for combat, though, so the fight was… well I can’t say exciting. More like long. You know how two kids who don’t know how to fight spend half an hour slapping at each other and actually getting hit maybe one in then times, making pathetic whining noises?

Yeah, this was that kind of fight. I kept hoping the fool would just go away, but he fought to the bitter end, burning up in a bright ball of flame, no ejection seat to be seen.

Dang. What was his problem? The only thing I could imagine is that he’d gone space crazy and was jealously defending this “find.” The system had numerous metal-rich worlds and even one suitable for terraforming. It would have brought in a pretty penny back home, and with a 50% bonus if I was the first to visit it.

Well, it’s mine now. Hope that was worth dying for, crazy man. How long was he out here for to get like that? Maybe I shouldn’t stray too far from home. If I start talking to my cat, or worse, myself, I’ll be in deep trouble.

 

[mossfoot]

Quick update: The original "Mossfoot's Tales of Woe" have been collected as an eBook and is available here: http://www.noahjdchinnbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Mossfoots-Tales-of-Woe.doc

It takes place around 3150 (150 years before Elite: Dangerous) more or less in the same world as the original Elite game (which as you might have guessed by some of my comments in this story, means there are some rather amusing explanations for how things work in that world as compared to this one). The original post has been updated to add this link as well.

 

[mossfoot]

I’d been out here for a while now. Once in a while I’d pass by another explorer and we’d link our ships and share a drink—I’d show them the marvels of my “special” tea-maker, while they would crack open a bottle of whatever hooch they had on hand.

It seems to always be called “Indi Bourbon” by explorers, even if it was made in the cistern of a toilet. In fact, they tend to have their own short hand when talking about their travels, which I had my most recent companion explain to me in detail. You stay alone out here for too long and you soon start to crave human contact.

Apparently, in explorer speak, I’m a Bowman (explorer), and since I still have my guns on my Cobra, I’m a ‘Battle Bowman’. Since I have a set destination in mind, I’m ‘locked on’, while my companion was just on ‘walkabout’. He captains a ‘flying brick’, or Lakon Type 6, which seems to be an apt description given how it looks. He noticed my ship wasn’t equipped with a ‘La-Z-Boy’ (advanced discovery scanner) so he figured I spent a lot of time ‘hunting shift’ (looking for the parallax of stars and planets out of my intermediate scanner’s range). And so on, and so on.

Seems like everyone out there has their own lingo. Traders, bounty hunters, miners, explorers, even pirates. I’d never really thought about it much before now, but then, I never had as much time to think as I do now.

---

As time went on, Bowman encounters became few and far between and then stopped altogether. I didn’t mind. Right now I was more interested in the different systems I would find.

Before I was pop frozen, it seemed like every system was the same. There was only ever one planet you bothered heading to, and one station you were usually interested in. Lately I’ve become keenly aware of the multitude of other stations a system might have, and other planets besides the main inhabited one. Then again, in those days I thought all ships had a seven light-year limit on their hyperdrives. Most people in the area now known as the Alliance did. We thought only bigass Navy ships could break the 7LY barrier.

But the fact is a Cobra can actually hit over twenty light-years a jump if properly outfitted, which makes most of the galaxy accessible. If only I had known…

During this trip I saw a lot of amazing things – a star system orbited not by planets, but by a dozen smaller stars, gas giants orbiting dwarf stars so close to one another you wondered how they didn’t crash into one another, of if someday they would. I even tracked down my first black hole—no easy feat without a La-Z-Boy scanner. I had to climb out of the system for tens of thousands of light-seconds, just so I could see the orbital paths of the planets that were orbiting it. From that I was able to guestimate its location and dive straight towards it.

In hindsight, not the smartest thing I ever did. But I eventually found it, bending light around it like an invisible ring. That would get me a shiny credit or two back Solward.

Each new system had the possibility of new surprises, and if it didn’t have any it was easy enough to move on to the next system. I was…content. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time.

So naturally it wasn’t going to last. You should know me by now.

I reached a system that, if viewed from Earth, was just off the shoulder of Orion. An uninteresting place, to be sure. Big yellow sun, but only one metallic rich planet orbiting it.

And an unidentified signal source orbiting the planet.

I blinked when I saw this on my HUD. The last USS I’d seen was four hundred light years back. Only a few possibilities came to mind as to what it could be, none of them good. The most likely was a fellow Bowman whose ship was destroyed but still putting out a distress beacon.

I came in close and pulled out of Frame Shift, finger ready on the trigger, just in case it was another crazy hermit type.

It was a ship, but it wasn’t destroyed. In fact it was in perfect condition, silently orbiting the metallic rock below.

And something about it seemed familiar.

I got closer. Whatever it was, it had been here a long time. The paint was bleached white, so it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. Er… unless it was always white, that is.

The profile of the ship made me think it was an Asp at first, but no, it was more like a Cobra, except…I actually gasped at this point. It was a Cobra, but a model I hadn’t seen in a long time.

A hundred and fifty years, to be exact.

It was a Cobra MKI, the first of the series. They stopped making them ages ago and the only place you could see one now would be in a museum, probably next to the MKII prototype I was found in.

I inched my ship closer, to try and get a look inside the cockpit. There was, indeed, someone there and they were, indeed, long dead. The pilot didn’t have a helmet on, so once I got close enough I could see the telltale signs of mummification. But at first, just for a moment, I thought…

I shook it off, and circled around the ship, looking for a serial number or something so I could report the find back home. An ancestor somewhere would no doubt appreciate having the mystery of this person’s disappearance solved.

Nothing.

Well, I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I decided to pop out the airlock and get inside. I brought a power cell with me so I could power up the ship’s computer and download its logs. Least I could do, since I couldn’t exactly bring the ship back with me.

Walking inside the old Cobra MKI was like entering a tomb. No lights, dust particles everywhere, no sound. I wasn’t going to bother turning on life support, for all I knew it could break down at the worst possible time. And I couldn’t shake the strangest feeling that I’d been here before.

I reached the cockpit, where the pilot sat waiting for me. No, seriously, it felt like the pilot was waiting. I half expected the seat to turn around and face me when I got close enough. But it didn’t.

I plugged in the power cell and the cockpit lights flickered to life. It was funny to see the old radar and multi-function displays come to life. I’d gotten so used to the holographic projections this felt like a serious nostalgia kick. So far, so good. I accessed the main computer, brought up the log…

…and promptly lost my mind.

The ship’s name was Lady Luck. That didn’t ring a bell, but what did ring a bell was the name of the pilot.

I looked over at the mummified pilot in the captain’s chair, eyes sunken, teeth grinning at me, and then at the name tag on her antiquated flight suit—Violet.

And then I looked behind her, where another Violet stood, leaning on the top of the seat staring at me. In the same flight suit, without a helmet on, far from dead, and also grinning at me.

“Took you long enough, flyboy.”