Etharious gazed down at his terminal, cup in hand, as he worked through the day's reports. He was the commander for the scouts that traveled directly forward, a mid level position in the scout core. He had overall command of the directional sector he was assigned, overseeing hundreds of scouts, mapping their movements and ensuring no two scouts overlapped as they combed systems for ores and materials. In other words, he directed the tip of the spear that was their eternal flight.
He wasn’t perfect in his duties, but few would be with the sheer density of scouts and the complexity of the maps he had to make for each one. Some would make deep dives into unexplored space, enduring a couple weeks without work and pay so they could find themselves in an open sector that could be explored for months without a need to stop. Others would have to cover the closer systems being able to get to them, and thus get to work, sooner. This however came with the trade off of having shorter runs and confusing paths that had to be strictly adhered to.
It was a complex job but he’d made sure to train his subordinates well, often hand guiding them through the process he’d spent two centuries mastering. However, as a flashing notice started on his screen, prompting him to set his tea down, he was reminded of the least enjoyable part of his duties.
A missed check in was not often a thing to worry about, often times early check ins were more troublesome as it could mean forcing a scout to re-scan a system just to keep them on schedule, a thing they wouldn’t be paid for so were loath to do, or forcing a re-mapping of their paths so they wouldn’t inconvenience other scouts. Not every system was built equally so some would be little more than stars, while some would be enormous, having dozens of world size bodies that would need to be scanned, not to mention thousands of asteroids. So, late check-ins were often expected and scheduled for. If a scout needed an extra day to check on things in a system then so be it.
But to be three days late for a check in started to raise alarms. The first would be expected, the second would raise some hairs but not be too worrisome, but a third would force a reaction, something no scout would risk as there could be severe penalties for causing a rescue force to be alerted and dispatched. So, knowing that, he pulled up the elfs file and started to read into it, hoping to find an explanation for this missed check in before he had to sound the alarm.
“One Miss Yalena. Forty three years old, first deep run, no notable mishaps during her training runs.” He scanned over the notes, seeing she went to the public scouting schools and self trained for space flight along with self trained eva suit maintenance and use. She was a dedicated and hard worker from the slums, dragging her family out of poverty through sheer will. He then checked on her ship, including equipment and provisions.
“That thing is older than I am.” He frowned as he noted the salvage title that had been upgraded to operational status, having gone through a refit at some point in the last forty years to outfit it with a slip space bubble generator and driver, navigational hardware, and a sensor suite. It had apparently been used by another scout who sold it for the capital needed to buy another, more comfortable, vessel. It was originally a Seed shuttle. A sturdy little craft built to shuttle people from ships or stations, capable of atmospheric landings. Tough, reliable, and simple to repair, along with being cheap, most flight schools would have a number of them on hand for training flights as, even at full acceleration, you’d more likely kill everyone aboard than cripple the little vessel.
Without the modifications for ftl and deep flight necessities, such as a water recycler, the ship wouldn’t be much of a concern. As it stood, Yalena might just be floating out at her last jump with a busted drive, unable to communicate with her drive offline. He looked up the ship's complement and her location prior to lost contact. She’d made it to her destination, a system with a suspected ‘super planet’ that should be habitable, if requiring a powered suit to move on. She should have a weeks worth of oxygen, due to a manual recycler and heating element, aboard but he doubted a Seed ship would lose power so quickly so he didn’t worry that she would die from lack of oxygen or freezing to death. She also had the option to land on the planet for heat and air, with her suit capable of scrubbing the worst the planet had to offer.
He moved his hands and started looking through the maps, trying to pinpoint her exact location. It wasn’t too hard to find, deep exploration missions weren’t nearly as tangled as the short range missions. She’d made it two jumps off her deep launch. He traced along other jump routes of other deep ranging missions until he found the closest scout.
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Bringing up a message screen he started to type up the rescue mission. “Poor girl.” He found the correct form and started to write it out. “Compensating us is going to get expensive, I pray it was something well out of your control.” Her insurance should cover the lion's share of the cost, but she’d still be out thousands of credits and have a broken, or lost, ship.
‘Felts,’ he wrote ‘scout in need of rescue, coordinates to follow. Mission is to commence immediately, pay already routed to your account. Any delay will be considered a violation of your contract and will result in the termination of said contract.’ He thought about anything else that needed to be said, already having attached the coordinates to the end of the message along with an image of the ship and the frequencies it should be transmitting on. Ftl messages were difficult to send and had to be kept minimal to ensure the small slipspace bubble wouldn’t be expanded overly much. Most deep range messages were little more than confirmation of arrival and departure, with the scouts leaving behind probes that prospectors would collect on arriving in the system. Anything more complex was impossible for small ships using minimal drives.
He decided to add in ‘suspect drive disabled’, so Felts would scout the system for an adrift craft first before doing deeper scans on the surfaces of the planets and moons in the system. It should be a quick enough mission, the little craft was bright orange and had the sensor profile of a dwarven battle station. Unless it had been utterly annihilated then it should be found quickly enough, even on the surface of a planet. He marked the message to be sent but decided to dive into Felts profile beforehand, just to be sure he wasn’t giving an important mission to a layabout.
Felts had an acceptable record. Fifty years working for the scouting core, with only a few altercations per return to station, something hardly of note as any spacer gone for so long every mission was bound to be ‘energetic’ upon return. His record for scouting was clean enough, not as thorough as Etharious would like but hovering just between standard and sub standard. He’d apparently been better in his earlier decades but had trended downwards, making Etharious put a note in his file recommending Felts for a long vacation to bring his productivity back up. His ship was something to note though, an old ‘Mist’ freighter. A small ship for a freighter, they were better used for smuggling or transporting high value low volume cargo. A good choice for a scout, in his mind, as the small cargo bay could easily be repurposed for multiple things, a powerful sensor suite, food reconstructor, and quarters were what came to mind, though other things could be useful as well.
It seemed to him that Felts should do a good job, though he did mark Felts’s ship for inspection when they came in. He was already planning to send Felts on a vacation, might as well see what was under the hood of his ship, giving him a chance to offer some advice from a more senior scout on his vessel's loadout.
Message prepped to send he had other duties to attend to for the lost scout. First to contact the insurer and make sure she wouldn’t be overly nailed when she came back in. It wasn’t technically his duty but he had made himself a reputation as a thoughtful commander, more flexible than most and caring for those subordinates under his command. It wasn’t a reputation made for climbing the ranks but it did keep his people productive, and out of most trouble, so he maintained it.
He checked over the insurance contract and found it fairly agreeable, a surprise to him as Yalena was a young scout. He’d expected something much more predatory for the girl's first insurer, simply grabbing the cheapest option so she could get out and make money as quickly as possible. She’d have a pretty bad debt when she came back but nothing she’d fail to climb out of. Especially with a ship replacement policy, she’d likely be better off for it.
Having his curiosity itched he decided to dive deeper into Yalenas records, combing through them to better understand her. She didn’t get high marks in studies, but that was more the educator's fault. Few who endured free education would come out as extraordinary students. But she’d also acquired some tutors as well, paid for by her mother. While those didn’t provide any measurable education they did show a girl who’d plotted her path early and stuck to it diligently. Even her ship was becoming more of a surprise.
The shuttle had been owned by a dedicated short range scout, and heavily modified by him. Inspections reported a good sensor suite, fantastic water recycling, and little else. The ship was built with little comfort in mind only offering maximum profits. It also had been maintained by a ship yard rather than the pilot, another surprise. It wasn’t a cheap thing to have done but the short range pilot had made it work rather well. His down time was minimal allowing him to make the most out of his shorter time away from the station.
That raised an odd alarm bell in Etharious’s mind. A ship this well maintained, even if it was old and somewhat less fit for the job, should not have broken down so early in the girls career. A quick check of the drive manufacturer and he was sure of it. Something would have had to go badly wrong to put this ship out of action. Putting aside pilot error, something he didn’t expect out of someone so obviously devoted to her education, he had to plan for the worst. Before he composed another letter he made one last addition to The message to felts, deciding to remove all punctuation and spacing in the words, even though it made the elegant text into a horrible parody, so the data chunk would be as small, and fast, as possible. ‘Exercise caution, no pre-existing conditions found.’
Sending the emergency communication to felts he turned to his final duty here, with a heavy heart, this time sending a message to the scouts High commander. He couldn’t take this duty from him, nor did he want to. He wrote out a small message including his findings on Yalena and her ship, and recommended he be prepared to write a black letter to her mother. It was the worst part of the job for any of them, but he wouldn’t allow this to be shirked. He was part of the scout core, and the scouts always took care of each other. No one else could.