Sixty three hours later, aboard the ‘Long Winded’.
Felts sat at the control center of his ship, reading through the sensor reports of the previous day. He’d been unlucky so far on his mission, finding only basic ores with only trace amounts of exotic, profitable, materials interspersed throughout the crusts of the dead worlds he’d been searching. It wasn’t all bad, he had months yet to search around for more profitable systems and fill the small cargo space he’d reserved for a self appointed bonus.
It wasn’t against the rules for scouts to do a little mining here and there, but it was a little looked down on as mining could easily distract a scout from their normal duties and ruin their schedule. He’d managed to strike a fine balance between sloppy scouting and self enrichment, so long as he did his job well enough he wouldn’t be getting any nagging from the higher ups. And he’d be able to put more and more away to buy a better vessel, perhaps something big enough for a dedicated small craft that would allow him to mine while he scanned the system.
That was the dream for most scouts, a big ship, a small crew, and high profit margins, unless you were determined to go into command, which would require far too much effort for him. Learning each scouting position, going to a command school, decades or centuries of experience, all to land somewhere squarely mediocre doing an unforgiving job that would eat every spare minute of your day and ask for more.
No, command was for the high born, not for a low class elf like himself. He’d content himself with an achievable goal, like gaining a large ship and renting it out so he could sit at home just letting funds flow back to him. He’d never be a fleet master like some, leasing out ships to desperate pilots, but having a ship or two was plenty within reason.
Just as he was spending imaginary credits on future dreams he was interrupted. A message from scout command blinked onto his display, wiping away the disappointing survey and filling it with a full message. Accidentally getting an affirmative, or negative, message wasn’t unheard of, shooting messages through slipspace wasn’t always accurate with so many scouts and messages, so the command message didn’t bother him. He was already sitting up, ready to send a ‘confirm command’ message back, so the poor sap waiting for his message might be able to move some time in the next week, when he noticed the size of the command message.
Any deep range scout could tell you what a message contained just by reading the size of the data, as each message was usually kept minimal, each bit of data enlarging the bubble and slowing the speed of transmission. A message this size was clearly more than a yes or no response.
Curious, and still figuring he wasn’t meant to be the recipient, he opened it and sighed as he read his name at the start of the message. His run just died in its infancy, barely being a couple weeks out. He was already thinking some relative had passed and he’d be expected to return and spend a week or two grieving but the next words put a pause on that. It was annoying to make out the sloppy structure, taking time to parse as someone had to be saving energy by cutting down on grammar. “Scout in need of rescue?” He sat up straighter, his earlier thoughts vanishing as he took to reading the message with more seriousness. Despite the time it took to make out, he read the message with all the seriousness it deserved.
He punched in the coordinates as soon as he finished the message, then started to bring his ship about to make for the outer reaches of the system. He could start his jump there but the bubble would need to be enlarged this deep in the star's gravity well. A day spent burning now would save him another three in slip space.
He initialized a ship wide systems check, watching the reports come in and noting them down. His survey gear had been hiccupping recently and he marked it for repair while in slipspace, the report showing a destabilization in the energy input. He’d been running the survey equipment hard and had probably damaged the fuse array again. He’d kept telling himself he'd upgrade the survey gear, and fuse array, but other things always cropped up and the small array had always been reliable, even if it ate fuses like candy. Fuses were cheap enough and the gear was good, if lacking in reach and power. Now that it presented an actual problem he would dedicate some of his savings to putting a proper system in rather than using his last ship's survey gear.
He could feel the ship as it started its maneuver, turning and burning for an escape vector. His inertial dampeners were in effect but the Long Winded was a lean ship, built for stealth and escape over passenger comfort. It was something he enjoyed about the ship as she was quick for her size, built to outpace pirates or customs. Not that he’d ever needed her to do that, but being able to get around a system in a hurry helped him with his small mining operations. She even had defensive lasers dotting the hull, multi directional beam weapons designed to intercept missiles or torpedoes. He’d considered selling them but found they worked well enough as drills without adding much weight.
All systems cleared, and the maneuvering burn mostly finished, he stood up and slowly made his way out of the command center. “Use caution.” He thought as he made his way into the crew quarters. They had mentioned a suspected drive failure then added use caution. That probably meant they suspected something other than pilot error or a manufacturing defect. He had to guess that it meant something in the system could be a threat.
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He hauled out the spare e.v.a. Suit from the ‘guest’ quarters and started to lug it towards the airlock in the cargo compartment. “Gotta be some kind of stellar hazard, something they didn’t pick up in their observations of the system.” He grunted as he hefted the suit across the deck. The cargo bay might not have been big but even a short distance dragging the suit was a difficult task. Finally he set the suit beside the inner door of the airlock and began using magnetic mounts to secure the suit in place. If he dropped out of slipspace and had to maneuver hard he didn’t want the suit bouncing around the bay and ruining the crush layer.
Standing back and giving the suit a solid kick he was sure it wouldn’t shift any time soon. The suit had a small med pack on it so he wouldn’t need to bring anything else, and if the elf needing rescue needed more than the small med pack could provide then they wouldn’t likely be able to get in the suit anyways. He’d have to think up another solution on the spot. Hopefully the ships battery held out long enough for him to arrive so he could query the elf on their status, possibly prepping more supplies before he made an attempt at rescue.
He mentally ran down a check list of everything he’d need for this. He had the spare suit, in case theirs was damaged, he had the med pack, his systems would be good to go on arrival, and he’d be prepared for a rough flight if he had to do some maneuvering. His final check was to go over possible threats on arrival. Least likely was a hostile presence. Pirates wouldn’t venture so far out, and few would bother scouts as there wouldn’t be any profit in it. Let alone most scouts had plenty of evasion skills and would be difficult to pin down and destroy, let alone capture. Even if there were pirates, scout ships had excellent sensors so it would be hard to imagine a pirate getting the jump on any of them. Let alone getting the jump on them and disabling, or destroying, them before they could enter slip space or fire off a distress message.
Hostile natives were out for practically all the same reasons, and more. Natives capable of in-system flight would simply be too far behind in technology to out pace or out maneuver a scout ship. Hell, even blind drunk he couldn’t imagine losing a race against a low tech species. Beyond that, there hadn’t been an addition to the higher races in centuries, this scout would have to have god like luck to stumble onto one while on a deep range mission.
That left a hostile environment. As he’d thought earlier, long range observers were just that, observers. No one had the tech to do deep range scans at faster than light speeds so all they had was what they could observe, usually making educated guesses on what a system might contain based on observed rotational anomalies and images. Most guesses were pretty accurate, as if they said a system had gas giants you’d likely find gas giants, same for planets or empty systems. The inaccuracies mostly came in the form of number, size, or density of planets, or other bodies, in the system. So jumping into a dangerous system wasn’t unheard of.
The most likely explanation, in his mind, was that the elf had jumped in a little too close and found themselves in a younger system, a place with more debris floating about that would make navigation impossible. Probably jumped right into a field of debris that slammed the ship like railgun darts before they could get out of there. So he had to hope they’d had the time to burn out of danger and settle somewhere on the outskirts of the system where he could find them. Otherwise he’d be scanning for ship confetti in a newborn system full of interfering debris. He hoped that wouldn’t be the case but he wouldn’t bet on hope.
His mind made up he moved to the command center and adjusted his jump coordinates, shifting the exit point to one further from the system. He should come out in line with the other elfs travel path so he’d just have to burn towards the star and possibly find the elfs exit point. If everything went well he’d find a half broken ship in high orbit just outside of the Oort cloud. If they went poorly he’d find a cloud of refined metals that he could mark as the missing ship. Then all he’d have to do is transmit a ‘failed’ message to indicate the elf as unrecoverable or dead.
He’d had to send that message before, he’d been scouting long enough to have been called up for rescue ops, three times to be exact. The second time had been an unfortunate maintenance error in that elfs drive system. The bubble it produced was unstable and failed on exit. All he’d found was a field of needle-like particles. It was an ever present fear for anyone using old ships, or suspect drives. To have the bubble fail and collapse, crushing down at faster than light speeds and pushing the contents out of pin sized holes at the front of the bubble as it slammed into real space.
At his controls he had little to do, not caring to bring back up the survey reports, so he tried to recall the meeting before the deep range launch. It was more of a tradition than a necessity, pulling all the deep range pilots into a meeting to give them their orders. It did give everyone the chance to meet each other, but that didn’t often prove useful. This time it might.
He looked at the coordinates and thought about the elf that was assigned the systems ‘forward’ of him. It was a young elf, he thought her name started with a ‘y’ but wasn’t sure. Recalling the meeting he tried to focus on what her ship was. Small, pear shaped. “Oh.” Now he’d remembered, it was an odd enough choice for any deep range pilot as its size would have been painfully cramped for such a long mission. It was an old seed shuttle, something he was familiar with as he’d tormented his instructors by bouncing the one he was assigned off of every surface available, or that was how they told it.
The seed shuttles were tough little things and damn hard to put down. Even the old rust bucket he’d flown had taken the collisions he’d had like it was used to it. As beaten up as that ship was he hadn’t managed to cripple it. With that in mind he let a little hope creep into his mind. He’d bet on a seed shuttle living through a battleship's broadside, let alone a cloud of rocks.
With a little more determination than before he leaned forward and started to slow charge his slip bubble generator, getting the drive ready to send a message. It would be small, barely more than a single bit. He didn’t want to waste time charging the drive up for a proper confirmation, and didn’t want the message to be slowed by bloat. Command wouldn’t have time to doubt him. A single ping would be confirmation enough that he’d received his orders and would be en-route.
With that, all he could do was sit back and go back over his checks, nerves making him worried that something might go wrong with his ship before he could help. His ship didn’t have a drive strong enough to pass on a rescue message and it could be days before command could get another message to the next closest scout.
He hadn’t felt his nerves spike like this since the last rescue op he’d done, the third. He’d come into the system expecting the worst, just like the second time. He certainly hadn’t expected to find a greenhorn who’d managed to crash into an asteroid with a rented junker, though he was relieved. Hopefully this time would be the same and he’d just find the elf with her ship ass end up on a moon because she hadn’t accounted for gravity when she started her burn.