The stars slowly streamed past the flight deck.
Blaze paced the cramped alcove, right in front of the door leading to the locker room. The engines propelling the ship across space sent a gentle thrumming through the deck and into his ears. As he strode from one side to the other, he tried to match the rapid rhythm. To get in sync with the steel steed carrying him into the cosmos. For each set of four cycles, he took a single pace. When he hit one side of the fuselage, he gave himself an extra four cycles to dig his heel into the deck and spin in place, and then he started back the other way. Since the alcove was about ten feet wide, he turned around pretty often.
As he paced, he kept his body wired up with tension. Although he moved his legs slow and easy, stepping across the deck in a casual saunter, he put a little muscle power into every stride. Lifted a leg, kicked it forward, planted it firmly on the deck. He announced his presence by putting his foot down — literally. With that dynamic strut, he imagined he was swaggering into the roughest, nastiest saloon on the frontier.
The blaster pistol tucked into the gun belt slung around his waist slapped his hip with every step. Reminding him it existed. That a space cowboy's life was full of danger, and he had to sharpen his wits, because trouble might come knocking at any moment—
Mid-stride, in the middle of the alcove, he spun around and yanked his pistol out of its holster.
"Reach for the stars—!"
But as his hand whipped the pistol up, the tip of its barrel snagged on the holster's edge. The gun spun around in his palm, slipped out of his grasp, and twirled high into the air. The battered black matte finish on its beveled, boxy frame caught the light.
Immediately, his badass posture collapsed. He bent his knees and got ready to lunge and catch the wayward pistol. His back curved and his arms snapped up and hovered at his sides.
The pistol reached its apex and then started to fall.
He lashed his arms out in wide, sweeping arms to snatch it out of the air, first his left and then his right. He missed both times. His sudden, agitated lurch screwed with his balance. Before he knew what was happening, he pitched head-first towards the fuselage.
"Hah!" he yelped.
As he fell forward, his eyes spotted the pistol clatter to the deck at his feet. Then a terrible thump smacked his forehead and knocked him senseless. A throbbing void consumed the front of his skull like a black hole. Dazed, the starship fading in and out of view, he slid down the fuselage and landed in a painful heap.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Ow," he groaned.
The dust settled, and aside from the engines, silence filled the flight deck. His squished face was wedged into the corner of the deck and the fuselage. A pulsing pain seeped through his brainpan. The gun's sharply-beveled frame dug into his chest.
Not … not as smooth as Blastburn does it …
Then, a chime came from the main console.
Am I hearing things …?
He grabbed the console's bucket seat, dragged himself to his knees, and peered at the monitor. He struggled to read the text through the enormous blob eating away at his forehead.
Does that say …?
He hauled himself up into the chair and leaned forward to squint at the display screen. The program showed him the feed from one of the starboard cameras. Vector lines bracketed a single distant star. An infobox flashed on the screen. As his vision cleared up, he read it eagerly.
> MICROLENSING EVENT DETECTED
His heart beat quicker, and he started to shake.
We got one, he thought.
He selected the 'Calculate' button and hit the enter key.
The program started to churn out calculations, trying to pinpoint the rogue planet's location in spacetime. Light moved at 186,000 miles per second, and the rogue planet was drifting across the starfield, so they'd need to do some serious number-crunching to locate where it would be 'now' — relatively-speaking.
Assuming it wasn't a false positive.
Just gotta keep your chin up, Blaze, he thought. Ride tall in the saddle, and never say die.
The program finished crunching numbers.
> COULD NOT RESOLVE POSITION
> SEARCH PLANE CALCULATED
He slouched down in the seat, staring at the screen. A slice spread out across the galactic map. The program hadn't captured enough data to locate the rogue planet exactly, but they had a general idea where it could be. They'd need to head out again, move along the search plane, and narrow down its position.
He swapped the astronomy program for the comms subsystem and opened a voice channel to the common room.
"Hey, Rsh," he said. "Get up here."
"What?"
"Might've found something."
"Do you mean …?"
Blaze smirked. "Kestrel Mining might just be in business."