November 4 3302
The hull creaked and groaned as the stresses of an interstellar jump made itself known. With a final crescendo of ethereal noise and spooky sounds, a star appeared smack in the middle of my cockpit.
Always gets me. There gotta be a better way to do that...
I gave a frustrated sigh and then turned my focus towards finding a docking station in this star system that was quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
Well, if 'nowhere' was the middle of inhabited space. Despite the fact that I was technically surrounded by hundreds of billions if not trillions of other life, I couldn't help but feel utterly alone. Without a second thought about that harsh reality, I adjusted course to the nearest station: Viete Colony, a mere 298,800 light seconds away from the central star.
Shifting the throttle to 100%, I slouched back in my chair and occasionally glanced towards the HUD showing distance and speed, which was at three hundred times the speed of light and climbing. The next few minutes, as per usual, were filled with my little spaceship hurtling through a vacuum and me being bored as hell. I would have some sort of music-playing device, but I was piloting one of the smallest ships on the market and I don't quite have the room for one.
Despite having a couple of minutes to adjust my speed for a safe re-entry into normal space, I decided to forget about that small aspect of disengaging from supercruise and overshot the station, all the while mumbling curses until I reached the appropriate distance to safely disengage of a thousand kilometers. With a bang and a flash of light, I returned to the normal part of space, and an oscillating starport dominated my field of vision.
I always hated these ports–– I could never find the 'toaster slot' as it was known to most pilots. Almost every time I would frantically fly around with my docking timer running down trying to find the opening, and finally succeeding with only a few minutes left on the countdown. However, once I was inside Viete Colony or whatever it was called, everything went swimmingly.
The twin cannons rattled my poor Eagle every time they took fire at the offending vessel, a Vulture which far outclassed my ship on a good day.
Today was not a good day: I'd already been snagged out of supercruise by a pair of gunships and then not even ten minutes later an Anaconda interdicted me and practically tore my ship in half. The stress of those two short-lived, one-sided fights was showing itself in the form of the hull creaking ominously and the targeting assist was completely bugging out. At least I had some practice with my plasma accelerator.
With one last shove at the Vulture's shields, I turn and got the hell out of Dodge, charging up the FSD as quick as I could. Once I was in the relative safety of supercruise, I had two options: one was to head back to Viete, and the other was to just ditch the Prism system altogether and try and find somewhere less dangerous. The answer to my question was shown to me in the form of my FSD malfunctioning mid-flight and dropping me a good...fifteen hundred and eighty-seven kilometers from Viete Colony. In other words, at my top speed of four hundred meters per second it would take an hour and six minutes to reach the orbital.
An hour and six minutes later, my Eagle running on fumes, and me at the edge of sanity, I docked with relative ease at a platform.
"Automated flight assistance disengaged, may your visit to the starport be a productive one Commander."
