Quoted By:
Although the prize ship isn’t in any shape for combat, you decide to bring it along anyway, feeling that it’s better to keep it close to your chest instead of leaving it floating around with a token crew. Shis’so makes no comment as you give the order to resume the navigation slave system, and order helm to set a course for Burn Caladh. Common sense dictates that you take a roundabout path to the system, which the pilot obediently sets, and you begun traveling to the minimum distance from the Point.
“This is not our usual mission profile,” your XO says. You steeple your fingers and regard the Tri-D tank contemplatively.
“Let’s just say that my interest was piqued.”
Owing to his incessant buzzing, you made sure that Fraus was kept in his quarters for the duration of the trip; you didn’t need him on the bridge to make a simple trip to an uncolonized backwater. The <span class="mu-i">Flow My Tears</span> navigates through the stellar matter surrounding the Point and soon clears the jump boundary. Helm’s fingers fly over his board: equations to calculate the most efficient combination of travel time, fuel cost of Insystem drive, probability flux of FTL, and finally, the transform equations that set up the FTL path. High flux could spread a ship across half of a solar system, turning it into a smear on radar and a burst of noise on the radio. A good pilot was one of the first things you had found as captain. “Entering FTL state on a .035 flux path,” helm announces, and soon the orange settings of realspace are replaced on the monitor by the computer’s technicolor approximation of the unimaginable flux state.
You’ve got plenty of time, so you start flipping through the available data from your bootlegged Looking-G.L.A.S.S. database. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly up to date, but Burn Caladh was quarantined so long ago that the information is there anyway. Like you remembered, there wasn’t much: only the barest of facts that there had once been an EEC mission there, but it had left under some mysterious circumstances. Certainly it wasn’t the first time that the FSP had made a mistake and quietly covered it up. In fact, there are probably a dozen potential colonies that get abandoned or delayed every year for undisclosed reasons. Burn Caladh was only different because it experienced some brief fame as an upcoming vacation site for several galactic travel companies; apparently it had remarkable natural beauty. You find some amusement in being able to see the same vistas soon at no extra cost.
