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Burning for Safety - Wildkins - 01-11-2016
Burning for Safety
“I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.” -- John Green
“I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.” -- John Green
ITV Barrier Prowler, Low Houston Orbit
It took Graham six minutes to stop hyperventilating.
The Coral Sea incident had gone off without a hitch. It had taken him more than a month to cycle all of the less loyal members of his crew off to other stations in the squadron, leaving him with a set of capable sticks who'd follow him off a bridge. Which was good, considering he was metaphorically asking them to do so. When, not if, the Navy discovered that his death was nothing but a wives' tale, his crew would bear the brunt of the responsibility - Graham would be long gone. It had taken everything to keep the preparation up to this point secret: checking out ESRD prototypes of Nomad-based weaponry; setting up those prototypes to a pair of Guardians, slaved directly to Long Island; and most importantly, setting up his death in a manner that'd make it hard to verify. Busting the front of the Coral Sea with an old anti-ship mine worked well enough, it turned out.
He gazed at the small telescreen showing the exterior of the Barrier Prowler. The aging barge trawled its way through the mass of traffic outside the Houston drydocks, inching its way toward the stellar equivalent of a parking space. Five minutes, four hundred credits, and a hard seal on the docking clamp later, Graham found himself inside one of the Navy's temporary orbital storage facilities. Hundreds of aging warships sat in docking clamps, awaiting maintenance teams and repair orders that would never come. Cargo containers were hastily hooked onto the facility, serving as impound lots and scrap facilities. Graham was headed to the former; with any luck, his ident-codes would still be functional, and something resembling a spaceworthy vessel would still be present when he got there. The dead officer briskly stepped around junked Guardians and the command bridge of a pre-lane Mastodon, stepping through a crudely-connected airbridge and, finally, the impound lot itself.
The lot was a poor sight; Rogue 'junk' ships were haphazardly strewn about the dimly-lit lot, interspersed with docking cranes pushing out into open space, holding smuggling vessels like prizes in an arcade crane. None of them looked functional, much less safe - blast marks and plasma burns dotting each of the vessels told the stories of a dogged battle in the Badlands, or a bomber's embargo duty that went a bit sour. After a quick spot-check of the vessels, he swore the whole lot off, descending back into the storage facility prior. And right as he crossed through the airbridge, he caught sight of a mostly-intact Montante, sitting across from a pair of broken Liberators.
"That'll do."
RE: Burning for Safety - Wildkins - 01-12-2016
Vessel ID G33-120, Bering System
It had taken half a day at full burn to hit Bering's murky nebula. Graham was sure the authorities were already on his case, and had likely noticed the conspicuously empty impound clamp. And that's assuming he didn't flip any automated security systems on his way out; it's not every day that a dead man decides to check out a broken gunship for intel work. Regardless, given both the markings on this vessel and the fact that, according to Liberty and soon Sirius in general, the man named Johnathan Christopher Graham was very dead, he did not intend to stray anywhere near the trade lanes. One automated TLAGSNET ping off to Fort Bush and they'd have a lead on him - one more than they already had, anyway. He didn't intend to make it that easy.
The gunship coughed and sputtered its way through the asteroid belts surrounding Bering's orange star, fighting its way through a cloud of murk and twenty-year-old engine tech to inch toward Freeport 2. He didn't intend to make this a long stay - plenty of Liberty pilots have stopped for a drink here while doing deep recon, and the last thing he needed was his cover blown, so close to freedom. He fought the urge to flip the power to full and send out an active radar ping; he wanted to be sure he wasn't followed, but breaking silence that quick would only lead to trouble. Besides, no smuggler's gunship running the belts would dare send out a ping like that, and he wasn't intending on breaking that thin cover.
Slowly, but surely, the rock began to dissipate as the gunship crawled through the last of the asteroid belt. A couple of freelance ore trawlers, marked with some half-baked company name that'd probably outlive their pilots, sat near-motionless outside the Freeport. Graham steered plenty clear of them, giving them a wide berth as he called up the docking administrator.
He was greeted with the visage of a robotic assistant, common on these far-off worlds. It was hard enough to afford keeping the generators running, much less paying three shifts worth of traffic controllers. Robotic assistance was the typical norm, and he was glad that it was. One less person he had to talk to face-to-face was another small victory for him. Graham punched in the code for docking bay four, sent part of his dwindling credit reserve across, and set the aging gunboat down in the hangar.
It took two hours more than Graham had hoped to spend in the dead system to get the plates removed and replaced with a fresh set, as well as a quick once-over on the various aging systems. According to the heavily drunk manager, the newly-christened Veritas was, surprisingly, without major fault. It was, however, heavily outdated even by a smuggler's standards: the manager spit-balled the age of the vessel at over forty years, and it was seemingly only updated once. He dreaded to think what would happen if he had to push the vessel into combat. Graham shook his head, pushing the notion out of thought as he handed over a paltry payment to the man, and boarded his vessel once more.
Not long after, the Veritas set off from the Freeport and toward Rheinland proper, putting his career and that hellish House physically and metaphorically behind him.