Yesterday was a normal, ordinary day in the life of a mercenary like myself. Took some contacts, hunted a pirate and was getting ready to go home.
My new ship, the Origin 325a was a beauty and a very capable fighter. My drinking buddies thought I’d gone soft, some thought I’d won the lottery or that I was having a middle-age crisis.
The truth is, I got tired of the old, trusted Avenger! I love that ship to bits, but it had run its course for me. With the Origin, I could spend more days in space and hunt pirates as it allowed me a certain level of comfort, with a decent toilet, a bed and a small kitchen. Hell, if I wanted to, I could invite someone over to… look at the stars.
“Spooling”, the HUD showed me. I set the destination and hit the button to take me home. Quantum travel, this marvel of folding space to arrive faster to wherever you want to go is truly amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Little did I know this was not going to be an easy ride. I was out of my seat, reading a book, when I got forcefully pulled out of quantum by an interdiction ship. A bloody pirate was firing at me!
I jumped quickly into my seat and started evasive maneuvers. Got the bastard in my line of sight and managed to land a few good shots, but he had a head start and managed to do some damage by the time I had control of my ship again. The HUD was red with alerts and I had intermittent power to the shields and thrusters.
This was not a good time to dog-fight, maybe those outlaw bastards had a mark on my head for one too many arrests and kills. He was clearly out to get me, not capture my ship. Time to leg it then! I pushed the engines to the limits and got away from the attacker, who hadn’t followed me, strangely. I think I hit his engines, so he was swimming in hot waters too.
As I was worrying about pursuers, the over-burned thrusters gave my ship a spin and power failed. Juuuust great. My lunch was telling me things I didn’t want to know. After a couple of minutes of trying to power it back up and contemplating sending a distress signal, which may very well have attracted the pirate’s friends, I decided to take it one subsystem at a time and try to stabilize.
Restarted power with weapons down, no joy. Restarted power again with weapons and shields down, minor success. Thrusters started working which allowed my stomach to come back to its senses but it didn’t last long. Out of power again, but at least I wasn’t spinning anymore. I floated out of my seat towards the back to get the repair tool. Some good that will do, who the heck knows how to repair an Origin ship?! See this is why the Avenger was such a sturdy ship. Started to regret my choices.
Manually opened the door to EVA towards the components hatch outside with the manual on my helmet display. Found a few fried wires in there that I could replace and repatch but most of it was like alien technology . Origin was super high tech, luckily they used some standard common components. One solid hour later, almost on half a tank of oxygen, I was able to get enough juice from the power supply to the QT drive and a little bit to the engines. However, the engines were almost fried due to my desperate attempt to escape so I could not rely on them too much.
Back in the ship, powered on once more and… mild success. The ship was stable with only the QT drive powered on. I disabled all the other systems, including life support and gravity generator and strapped into the chair. One more time, pushed the coordinates to the nearest space station and said a silent prayer. Never been so happy to see the Quantum drive in operation and folding space. I had just enough oxygen to make it back to HUR L1 space station.
Now the end of the story is not a big spoiler as I’m still here to write my thoughts in this journal, from the comfy bed of the space station, drinking some hot chocolate. I made it back, left my ship in the repair bay and ordered my Avenger Titan to be brought over as soon as possible. I think my trusty old ship will get a new life and the new one needs some upgrades. May have to consider which missions to take one or the other, given the situation. Happy to be here still to tell the story!