Quoted By:
You have several options for getting off the station, but ultimately it comes down to a single consideration: you'd rather be the one in control of where you're headed.
So you're going to steal a voidship. Which is both easier and harder than it sounds.
The first thing you do is make your way to the shopping concourses, mingle with the crowd, order one last greasy sandwich for nostalgia's sake. Then you visit an electronics booth, a warehouse supply store and a chart vendor, picking up, respectively, a clean PCU to replace the one you lost with your tool bag, a bundle of cable ties and the latest local star charts - including coordinates for the more obscure and often less than legal stations and outposts.
While you're busy with all that, a station-wide announcement lets it be known that access to the Rings is temporarily restricted due to a "security incident". Which evokes collective groans from among the crowd, followed by immediate speculation about if this has to do anything with the Dragonblood or the alleged shootout in Halcyon Hill.
Which, yes, absolutely, but you're almost certain it has even more to do with you specifically.
Keeping well out of the way of ProfSec patrols, you head back into the maintenance shafts and cross over into the Rings that way instead. But instead of heading for the ring dedicated to passenger craft, you make your way to the first cargo ring. Specifically: Small Bulk Section.
The reasons for this are several. First, it's been actual decades since you sat in the cockpit of a voidship and you'll be rusty enough even without trying to figure out how to fly something new and unfamiliar. Second, you want something small and robust - something that can be crewed by a single person while retaining interstellar flight capability. And third, you anticipate having to flee far, far away, meaning you'll need some way to make money along the way, to pay for fuel and maintenance. And fourth, you want something that simply won't stand out.
Which means what you want is a cargo-runner. Of which there is always a small swarm surrounding or docking with Barter while it's in orbit - and this far out on the peripheries, the median age of a private cargo ship is somewhere north of three decades.
So you get out of a duct in an empty bay, step out onto the ringway and simply start walking forward with a purpose, cargo trains and maintenance vehicles rushing past while you keep an eye out for promising prospects.
It doesn't even take you that long to find one.
(cont)
