Dean Dean finds himself adrift in deep space after an unfortunate collision on the fold space highway. A chance discovery of an unusual artifact brings him to the attention of the feared Dedan Empire.
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Dean Dean, the owner, Captain, and sole crewmember of the class 4 independent galactic freighter St. Jude should have been happy, or at least not sinking ever deeper into the depths of despair. But today nobody could accuse him of being cheerful. This depression had been going on for so long that, thanks to the collision in The Fold, the interstellar superhighway, he had no way of knowing how long he'd felt that way. Sanity was still there, but it was just clinging onto his mind with the ever-weakening fingers of a grip that would soon be gone. He had started talking to himself but so far the conversations had been one-sided. Still, he felt sure it was only a matter of time before he would begin to have long, loud and aggressive arguments with different voices in his head.
Not only had the impact with an unknown object taken out his timekeeping software it had also destroyed the hyperdrive controls and all his space charts that had been stored in the ship's computer. The combination of disasters had left him flying around an unidentified backwater of the galaxy at sub-light speed. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. This uncertainty had not totally sapped his optimism and he kept hope that some spaceship would happen to pass that particular sector of space and be able to pick up his weak distress signal.
At first, he'd tried to navigate by the stars but, as constellations changed when viewed from different angles, he found himself just as lost as he had been before he had looked. Then he had tried to star hop from one solar system to another in the hope that he'd find some inhabited planet but that had been a slow process and so far all he'd found were stars with mainly gas giants or lifeless balls of rock devoid of minerals that he could utilise or life forms to help him out.
As he had no idea of time, he slept when he was tired and then tried to keep his mind active when he was awake. Not an easy thing for someone who was on their own to do. Especially as the only on-board entertainment consisted of a draughts board with the red pieces missing, a pack of Astragorian playing cards with no Emperor or Double Diamond Lizard cards, and an instructional hologram demonstrating, to the viewer, how to build an emergency space shelter out of materials that he didn't have on his ship. Thanks to the lack of stimulation, he had found two new hobbies to fill his time – eating and drinking – but that too had temporarily come to a halt when he'd found he had become too fat to get through the doors leading to the kitchen. Then, after a brief diet and an exercise regime involving wobbling walks around the ship's corridors, he had found his normal food reserves had all gone.
Thankfully, he knew his cargo-hold had been full of food and mining supplies destined for a Dedanite colony on some remote outpost of their federation. In desperation, he had opened the first few containers and found only strange looking machinery until eventually he came across some sealed freezer units stuffed with bottles of some green slimy liquid and grey chunks of synthetic dietary supplements. The latter he had wanted to classify as food but after tasting it he decided that title would have been too generous. It might have been nutritious, but the chewy material had the texture of shoe leather that had been soaked in second-hand snot and tasted like an Elephinus XI boxer's jockstrap after a particularly long and sweaty fight. It managed to keep him alive, however, the subsequent uncontrollable and almost non-stop flatulence ensured he could no longer don his spacesuit and leave the ship. On the other hand, the green liquid tasted far better than it looked and one small glass of the stuff was enough to send him into unconscious alcoholic oblivion for several hours.
