System: Arietes Sector GR-1 E1-111
In orbit: Colberand 5-E
Date: 08-15-5798 GS, 1865 PE (3889 AD)
"Beep-beep-beep"
.....
"Beep-beep-beep"
Dane Morlund surfaced from sleep feeling extremely odd. He didn't feel the thick mattress of his bed, though he did feel padding against his back and legs from time to time. He could hear himself breathing, and the flow of air around his ears and over his face. It wasn't the sound of his phone alarm that had started his bleary crawl out of unconsciousness though. It was a three pulse beep and then silence, a pattern that repeated enough to be annoying, and the worst thing was that it was in both of his ears. Very close to his ears in fact. He moved his right arm, searching around him for the source of the noise, and then slowly brought his hand up toward his ear to swat the source of the noise away from his ears, only to encounter a hard surface that contained his head. When his hand impacted his head, he heard a dull thump, from both sides of his head. It was similar to when he had hit his motorcycle helmet while adjusting it before a ride.
His brow furrowed in confusion as he wondered why he would be sleeping with his helmet on, and why he would still be hearing his phone alarm going off. Then the tone of the alarm changed, pulsing rapidly five times followed by a voice.
"Reserve oxygen is now in a critical stage. Reboot primary power core immediately."
Dane jerked awake, his eyes blinking in bleary confusion as he looked around. Around him, small lights blinked and pulsed at odd intervals. Some were yellow, others orange and a lot of them were red. The alarm pulse sounded again urgently as he turned his head, his breathing sharpening in confusion and fear at the unfamiliar surroundings and the feel of weightlessness. He reached out toward the pulsing lights, but they were just outside of the range of his fingers and that is when he noticed the gloves, and the material covering his arm. He would have brought his hand closer to his face, but the alarm pulsed again, louder this time. Five sharp beats, and then the voice repeated in his ear.
"Reserve oxygen is now in a critical stage. Reboot main power core immediately."
Dane looked around him, then down at himself and found that he was harnessed into a chair, straps attached to his clothing were connected to the chair behind him, and his legs were likewise connected to extensions of the chair, like some kind of medical chair.
His breathing sharpened as he looked around again, the helmet on his head following the movements of his head. He was looking through a visor that extended from just above his brow ridge to just over his cheeks. He could still see clearly from right to left as the visor gave him nearly 120 degrees of visibility. Something about his situation clicked, and he leaned forward slowly so that the belts connecting him to the curve of the chair wouldn't lock and prevent him from continuing. He moved his legs, spreading them and then reached down between them searching for a white circular protrusion and found it. It was nearly ten inches across and had a handle on the inside. He reached down, gripping it with his right hand and twisted to the right. It didn't move and he groaned as a panic started building inside of his chest. Then he twisted left and it spun, slowly. He tried turning it faster, but it would only turn at a slow steady rate. Finally it stopped with a clack, and popped up from its position about an eighth of an inch. He pulled on the handle and it slid up, revealing three glowing shapes inside of a clear tube that was latticed with metallic tracings. Then he turned the tube one half turn clockwise and pushed down on it as the alarm sounded again. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
"Reserve oxygen is now in a critical stage. Reboot main power core immediately." the mechanical voice sounded in his ears.
"I know godsdamnit! I'm working on it!" Dane growled in frustration millimeter by millimeter the clear cylinder slid back down as the glow became brighter and brighter until he had to close his eyes tight against the glare that started to hurt his eyes. Finally with a clunk that he felt in his hands and through the seat, but didn't actually hear in his ears, the cylinder slid home, and he started turning the handle clockwise.
He felt it lock in place with another silent clunk, and released the handle, leaning back and breathing hard. The air in his helmet was getting dense, and he made a conscious effort to slow his breathing. Breathing in for three seconds, holding it and then breathing out for three seconds. He looked around again at the blinking lights arrayed in an arch. A few of them had turned from red to yellow, but nothing else had changed. His left hand twitched and he reached down to his left side and groped around seeking.. something.. then his hand grasped a lever and he pushed on it, turning it forward until it stopped. Several blinking lights turned from yellow to green and a flickering image popped up on the inside of his visor. A countdown starting at four minutes and fifty eight seconds.
"Good. That should do it." he thought to himself. But then he wondered about that. "Do what?" For one thing, he didn't hear that incessant beeping anymore, and the voice had stopped nagging at him. But the air in his helmet was still hot and humid, and it was getting hard to breathe.
"Fuck, I'm running out of air.!" he realized. But he fought back the panic, and kept his breathing low and slow as he closed his eyes. He pushed back against the rising panic again, and just tried to remember what he was doing, where he was, and why he was here.
He could remember the ride out of San Francisco, An hour of nothing but himself, the sound of his Norton 750 commando and the wind roaring around his helmet as he traveled south on the coast highway. He occasionally glanced to his right, catching the white of the full moon lighting up the crest of the waves as they rose up and broke over the beaches. He remembered a conversation, no, an argument and the pain in his chest as he packed up the few things that he had always kept at her house.
Her house. Christina's house. The woman that he had been deeply involved with for the last four years. But then he found out that he was the only one who had been deeply involved, the only one who had been deeply invested and had been planning on taking things to a deeper level, a more permanent level. But she had not been planning on investing her time, or her life in someone who was almost thirty years older than herself. She was still young and pretty and she hadn't made enough mistakes in her life yet. So, he had admitted that she needed to make them on her own.
He had pulled off of the coast highway onto a pullout overlooking the Pacific Ocean, parked his bike and sat on the berm to just listen to the sound of the ocean as it roared below him.
He didn't notice the star that moved overhead. It didn't even register that there were no flight lamps blinking on the wing tips. It only occurred to him to look up when the roar of the ocean below him grew quiet. still. Like the waves had simply stopped moving and only the light summer breeze had ruffled his black hair, and swept it into his gray eyes.
When he did look up, all he saw was light.
The cool hiss of fresh air startled him awake for the second time and he looked around him, still inside of his helmet, but with more green lights in the semi-circle around him. He used his hands, padding around him until he touched a control and the arms of the chair that he was strapped into folded up toward him as he moved forward, closer to the array of lights. He was looking at a smooth, flat surface with lights under the surface. When the chair stopped moving forward, he reached out to his left, laying his thumb over two green indicators, and slowly pushing them away from himself toward the outer curve of the array. The green lights flashed yellow and he tapped them, not understanding why, but that it felt like it was the correct sequence. Suddenly more lights came on across the array beneath the surface of the smooth panel. It looked, and felt very familiar, but he was having a hard time placing it.
There was a new countdown happening on his right and he blinked, trying to remember what it meant. Then it occurred to him that he only had that much time to restart the main power core. He was running on auxiliary power fed by the core under his seat that he had just initialized. He looked around and reached out for two more controls, tapping them from red to orange ready-status and waited until they were green to tap them again.
All of the lights dimmed, and he had a moment of panic until he watched three bars on the right slowly lighting up, lengthening and then flashing. He tapped the panel under the bars and they turned solid yellow while everything around him lit up. He waited, breathing slowly still and checking on the HUD to confirm that his reserve oxygen was still doing good, then he turned his attention to the left side of the panel nearest him.
He slid two more yellow indicators away from him, then tapped them when they blinked green. This was all feeling far more familiar than any of it reasonably should, but then it came to him. Everything he was doing, he had done before in a futuristic simulation game that he had played for years. How many months, years had he spent toiling away at jobs that he hadn't cared for in the least, and come home to put on his Cyclops VR helmet, slipped on his Reactive 8R gloves and settled himself in front of his computer, gripping the HOTAS sticks just to let all of the tension slide away for hours. Just him, some friends that he only ever heard through the audio, and the sights and sounds of slipping through space. Dane looked up, past the array in front of him and his mind froze.
Stars. Hundreds of thousands of stars spread out before him in unbelievable clarity. The sight of it crashed into him and he almost wept at the immensity of it all. Living in California in the modern era, there was no way that people could ever see this kind of view. It was like looking at an enormous black sheet of velvet with diamonds strewn across it without any particular pattern. It was awesome, breathtaking, and incredibly humbling. To his left, a crescent of light preceded darkness where the stars were cut off from view and he realized that he was somewhere over a planet or a moon. A giddy feeling bubbled up inside of him and he started to laugh in incredulity. He looked down at his hands, and the material covering him, it was a suit, skin tight and stone gray with red trim. The gloves on his hands were of the same stretchy material, but there were circular contacts on the pads of his thumbs and fingers that were lit in yellow.
Just as he was feeling a kind of hysteria haunting the edge of his mind, a series of lights flashed on his left. He automatically reached out and tapped them and felt a low hum vibrate through him just before he started to settle into his seat and feel gravity again. Then something new happened, and he looked up at a flickering in the air over the controls.
It was an image of himself. Black hair with strands of gray shot through it. Angular gray eyes with a slight epicanthic fold inherited from his Finnish ancestors there were plenty of lines in the corners of those eyes telling of decades of life lived. Angular features and a wide jaw bearing a close cropped black and gray beard. High cheekbones and a straight nose.
Below all of that were broad shoulders and a fairly deep chest. He had spent plenty of time in front of a computer, certainly, but he had also spent a good amount of time working outdoors, chopping wood for a side business, fixing fences and doing landscaping for those who lived in the mountains. He wore a tired smile, but there was something else there, like a secret joke that he wasn't willing to share.
"Hello, Me." said the holographic image of himself, startling Dane.
" Congratulations on surviving the first test. Before you get your panties in a twist or start panicking, just listen to me for a second. This is a recording, this is all real and it is very important that you keep it together right now." said the holographic image through my helmet audio.
"There are a few things that need to be cleared up. The first is that, yes. You are exactly where you think you are. Somewhere out in the stars. But don't ask me where, The Hevali haven't told me, and I think there is a reason for that.
The second item is that.." the image tilted his head back and forth as he chose his words. "You are actually a clone.. of me. The reason that you think you are me..is that all of my memories, good, bad or otherwise, are in your head. Everything you.. I.. we have ever done, felt, seen.. all of it is there." he said while Dane listened to himself, leaning back into the command chair and laying his hands in his lap. He decided to relax and listen as he advised himself.
"It turns out that the Hevali need something, and I.. you.." the image shook his head as though trying to get used to something. "We.. happen to fit the bill in regards to who they need to do it. What is it? I don't know. They aren't telling me everything, but what they have told me is enough to get my cooperation in this." The image of Dane leaned forward, probably looking into the camera or recording device, to emphasize the point.
"I trust them, Dane. I think you should too." Then he leaned back into the chair he was seated in in the image. "Do you remember all of those dreams that we had about flying out in the stars, seeing planets, asteroid rings, alien jungles and deserts.. landing on planets and meeting sentient species, trading with them and getting to know them?"
The image of Dane smiled, and an almost giddy look was in his eyes.
"Well, there you are, m'boy. We are about to go out and do our own version of James T., but, and here is the part that I have to make real clear. If you get into any scraps, Don't fuck up and die. There won't be any reload screen." Dane, the image, winked.
"Oh, and if you are wondering about Earth? eh." he shook his head sadly. "Let's just say that humanity finally did get off the planet, but it got ugly first. Also.. it's been a while, so no one is going to remember anything about old earth. The human calendar goes by P. E. Post Exodus, just so you know, and there will be lots of documents for you to read and get familiar with that are loaded into the database of the ship, and what a ship it is. I made sure that we would have everything that we would want.. uhm, sorry. No porn. You will have to make your own, or see if you can trade for some. Ha! On the down side, I will not be around to see any of it." he said with a sad smile. "I think Christina was actually smart to not want to marry someone thirty years older than her. And I know that is no comfort to you, but.. having a heart condition would not have made for a future as long as we had wanted."
The holographic image of Dane paused in thought, then shook his head and looked into the recording device again.
"We.. or rather You, are about to have that big adventure we always dreamed of. But I am going to leave the rest of what you need to know to my friend, Laikarth." He raised his hand, waving at the recording device.
"Keep your ass out of trouble, Dane." The image of himself seemed to relax as he smirked and held his hand still now, splitting his fingers in a well known pop culture salute. "Live long and kick ass."
The air seemed to waver and the image of himself disappeared, replaced by the face of a creature with tan skin, long features and an elongated, hairless skull. The dark eyes blinked vertically, like a lizard, but were much more expressive and he saw a smile form on its thin lips.
"Greetings, Dane. This will be one of only a few recorded messages that will be encoded into the ships database. As your previously recorded self explained, we do have a purpose. However, informing you of it would likely cause certain undesirable variations in the timeline. So you will have to.. Wing it?.. I believe the Earth term is? You will learn, along the way, that there is much more to you, now, than you were before." The image of the tan skinned alien bowed its head.
"I do hope that you will forgive us for some of our meddling, as you will experience some things that seem strange. I can only recommend that you.. go with the flow.. as your self has often said. There is nothing harmful in our tampering, either to yourself or to others. It would have been counter to our desires in the end. What you choose to do with your abilities..is entirely up to your own ethical and moral code. We trust in you, and we hope that we merit your trust as we have managed with your previous self."
The alien tilted its head, glancing at something and then blinked in that disconcerting reptilian way, then looked into the recording device.
"By now, your ship's life support, artificial gravity and controls have been reinitialized. We have modeled the controls, navigation, communications,. Everything really, on the entertainment game that you desired, as well as many other features. However, I do implore you to read as much as possible regarding the capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of your ship. Learn it. It is yours. With that, I bid you good journey, Dane Morlund."
The holographic recording ended and Dane was left staring at the stars again while the room lit up around him. An icon lit up on the inside of his visor and he recognized it as a symbol representing breathable atmosphere, so he brought his hands up to his neck, and pulled on the taps at the bottom of his helmet below his ears. Air hissed in around the seal and it loosened, the padding on the inside becoming soft and allowing him to lift the face of the helmet up on a swivel, then he lifted the helmet up off of his head and set it down on the console, breathing in the air of the cockpit and looking around him.
The now lit up command deck was only one of five seats, each of them with control arrays and screens arching around them. Two seats on either side, and slightly behind his own central command chair. He reached down and tapped the retract button, and his chair slid back on a rail, allowing him to turn and look further back. A central aisle was lit softly from above by panels on the ceiling and walls, and by strip lights along the floor of the central walkway. He disconnected himself from the chair and pushed himself out of it to begin exploring the ship.
It took him three days to fully explore the Sunspear, which turned out to be the name of the ship he was on. His home, now, it seemed. He had wandered the length and width of the Sunspear discovering command quarters with soft beds, showers, and plenty of room for clothing and personal belongings. It was all empty at the moment of course, as he was the only person on board. He found a large communal gally where he could request food or drink of any kind that he could think of from Earth, either by touch screen menu, or verbally. Optionally, he could simply ask for ingredients and use the kitchen to cook for himself. He was surprised to find a gym that used gravity to adjust the weights, a hot tub, and sauna as well as a resistance running wheel and much to his delight a swim lane pool that cycled the water rapidly to make him work hard to keep up or else be pushed back against the intake wall.
There were passenger cabins, and an enormous cargo hold which had plenty of empty space to load with cargo. He didn't spend much time in either of those places, but resolved to review what cargo he had in more detail later. The engineering compartment that housed the power core, and primary controls for the engines that pushed the ship through space were located here. He found a machine shop, where he could build small devices that required circuitry or mechanical parts which were not listed in the fabrication profiles, and thought about seeing if he could build a guitar. His fingers itched for something to play while his brain worked out the massive change in his life.
One of those changes was his new body. He looked, from the outside, like he had when he was in his early twenties. There were no lines around his eyes, and his hair was entirely black without even one strand of gray in it. He was also far more fit, lean and muscled than he had ever been in his life. There were no scars around his knee from surgery that had been necessary after a felled tree had rolled and pinned him against another tree. In short, he had the mind of a man in his late fifties, and the body of an Olympian god, sex organs included. He had never been less than any woman needed, but now he would have been considered well hung without being a cause for fear of internal damage like most porn actors were.
He took residence in the captain's quarters, of course, and had a few back up outfits fabricated as well as loungewear made of soft fabrics and loose fit. Not that he needed to wear anything at the moment. He was the only person on the ship and he did end up walking around in the buff for a while. However, when he wasn't spending his time exploring and familiarizing himself with the layout of the ship and how to navigate from one place to another efficiently, he also spent evenings reading and memorizing the manuals and procedures from the ships database. One of those procedures, of course, was the strongly worded warning about what happens if the particle shields failed and there was a hull rupture. The body suit that he had woken up in also happened to be armor and environmental suit. It would protect his body from rapid decompression, and the absolute zero temperature of open space, but only if he was wearing it. So, back into the suit he went. It fit him perfectly, of course. It had been fabricated with his exact measurements in mind, and was made of a stretchy material similar to the old surfing wetsuits he had worn in his brief time learning how to surf while dating one woman, but it was a great deal more forgiving.
Eventually he admitted that he was delaying. You can only explore the interior, and navel gaze for so long before you have to start exploring what was outside. So he returned to the command deck and settled himself into the central command chair and started going through the holographic consoles. Navigation was practically blank, which was very upsetting. He had no idea where he was, much less where he should be going in order to make contact with other people. The galaxy was so vast that, if he just wandered aimlessly, it was highly unlikely he would ever meet up with anyone. He set the sensors on the task of absorbing information, meaning that it would scan the stars, logging, classifying and computing distances and star types as well as making calculated guesses regarding probable bodies in orbit around those stars.
The next task on his list was to scan the star system he was in. He opened up the communications array and programmed it to simply listen and record, to see if there were any communications bouncing around between the planets. That turned out not to be a complete disappointment. There was something transmitting in the area, but it was faint, and distant. He was going to have to get a better idea which way to go before he started up the engines and got the ship moving. He swept the current controls to one side and opened up the sensors, and began an in depth scan of the system in a slow rotation around his central point of view.
It took nearly three hours, and it required that he actually start up the engines and leave orbit of the moon he had been spinning around, but he finally located the signal. It was very faint, and out at the edge of the system, but he finally narrowed it down. From the command chair, he brought the ship around and pushed the throttle up until he had sufficient speed to break into FTL, passing through the orbital paths of several planets. Gas giants with huge rings of stone or ice flew by, and one large ice covered planet so far out in the system that no heat would ever melt it to liquid for any length of time.
Drawing back slowly on the throttle, he entered the orbit of a gas giant with dense rings surrounding it. It was a huge sphere of ammonia atmosphere, with multicolored bands and planet sized storms blotching the upper atmosphere. At least the scan didn't show the signal source being inside of any of those storms, because he had a serious doubt that the ship would be able to survive in even the mildest of them. Instead, he sent out a drone to scan the rings in a slow orbit of the gas giant, and then he waited.
Two hours later, as the probe rounded the planet and swung back around the far side, Dane started receiving the telemetry. The rings were dense, and heavy in metals and minerals. The signal was coming from the far side in the second ring, and was faint because of how the metals in the ring were refracting and countering the pulses. It was clearly an emergency beacon, but how long it had been there was beyond him. Dane fired up the drive again and left the probe to catch up to him on its current trajectory. He would pick it up and recharge it for another use before he dropped into the rings for a closer look.
Once he had the probe locked into its slot in the cargo bay, he slowed his momentum as he neared the source of the signal and slowly closed in on the second ring, skimming over the glittering asteroids. Rocks the size of mountain ranges, and smaller made up a roiling tide in eternal slow motion. Between these giants flowed an ever shifting flow of stone dust and boulders that could easily crush the Sunspear if not for the shields that surrounded the ship and kept it safe from high velocity particles and pebbles that traveled at speeds that were measured in AU. He tilted the control lever forward and slowed even deeper into the sub-light range, now traveling at kilometers per second, and then even slower as the signal grew stronger.
Dane kept his eyes on his surroundings, closely monitoring the movements of the mountain sized asteroids that threatened to crush him if he wasn't careful. He watched two huge Everest sized rocks impact in slow motion ahead of him and dove deeper into the ring to avoid the collision and the shrapnel that resulted from the impact, shivering as he watched the hundred tiny flares of energy on his shields as car sized rocks impacted with the shields, rapidly losing their inertia and becoming languidly drifting stone again. There, ahead of him he saw his goal. Another Everest sized asteroid, but one with a deep cleft on one side. A split that must have been formed when two rocks had impacted and remained attached. He slowed even further, using his docking thrusters to guide him along the canyon until he found the source. It was a ship, long and narrow, and mostly made of framework with only a few sections plated in metal and composites. Heavy cables, and a multitude of cargo containers surrounded its length creating an image of a metallic plant stem with bulbs at irregular intervals. The foremost section of the ship was missing, seemingly smashed to pieces and ending in a jagged break. Whoever had been on this ship was long dead, he knew, but there was still a pang of sympathy for those travelers.
He stalled the ship at a slight distance and began a signal ping of the ship on the same frequency as the emergency transmitter. This prompted the automated system of the dead craft to respond with a data burst that took several minutes to complete. The fact that he got a data burst at all told him a bit. He knew that the central computer core was still intact, and that being the case, he probably had a way to know where he was, and the ship's last port of call. Which, in turn, meant that he had a chance of finding civilization.
Ship Name: Anoko Koia.
Ship Class: Anshoi XII Harvester
Ship Registry: IM45019, Talusca 3.
Registered Owner/Captain: IM; Hanasia Ve'enn
Registration date: 10-23-5688 GS, Masaghyar Shipyards.
Next he conducted a general scan of the ship itself, looking for heat, radiation, structural stability and residual weapons discharge signatures. He wasn't entirely sure that he would get anything on the last scan, because of how pitted and exposed most of the hull plates were, but if he did find something, then he would know a bit more about how the ship came to be here. He started recording his findings and switched it to automatic as the date came in.
In the end, the ship looked solid enough, but there was no atmosphere in it. It looked like the air had blown out into space in the initial impact, and onboard containment had failed in a cascade from one end of the ship all the way to the engineering bay in the tail section. Right where he needed to go to retrieve the data core.
Dane's first space EVA was nearly a disaster because he almost lost the contents of his stomach into his helmet when the lock shifted over into zero gravity. But he managed to keep it all down, and make the seventy yard distance on jet drive, while holding onto the mag-line. He had reached the rear airlock on the engineering section, and powered it up long enough to feed it a false code, then opened the lock and transferred through, leaving the lock powered down and open to the stars. Inside, lit only by his helmet lamp, Dane moved with slow, deliberate movements. Just the slightest effort used to push himself from wall to wall, and climb through the blown bulkhead doors. What he saw of the inside of the ship didn't tell him much, but it didn't look very well maintained even to him.
The darkness of the engineering control room was predictable. There was no power except for the fading battery of the emergency transmitter, and even that was going to be lost to time eventually. Dane looked down at his wrist data pad, then up and around the dark chamber, orienting himself from the door before gently pushing himself toward a panel on the near left wall. Behind this wall, he found a pull out shelf stacked with color coded synthetic crystals with hair thin metallic lines of circuits tracing every one of them. He had forgotten which ones he specifically needed, so he reached back behind him and pulled the satchel he had carried at his belt and began filling it with every crystal on the shelf, top to bottom. Even if he was taking irrelevant and unusable materials, he could recycle or sell them elsewhere. He just needed the navigation data, and maybe anything related to the ship's logs.
With the first shelf emptied, he moved on to the second, and then the third, then he was done and he could return to the Sunspear.
He was halfway back to the rear airlock when an odd shape drifted across the passageway in slow motion and he tilted his head up, reaching for the side arm on his hip, but there was no other motion to the multi limbed, space-suited figure that drifted against the left hand wall of the passage. It hung there with its back turned toward him as he slowly drifted toward it on a collision course. He drew his weapon, clicking the safety off and keeping his elbow tucked in close as he reached his left hand out to intercept the object. The feel of the impact told him a few things; The first was that the suit was occupied, the second was that it was rigid, as there was no give in it, and that told him that who, or whatever it had been was very much dead. That knowledge still didn't remove the shock of seeing the desiccated and frozen alien face that greeted him when he turned it around. It is a natural reaction to death, after all. At least, that's what he told himself after nearly pissing himself. Whoever this was, they had family, friends, loved ones, or had at one time however long ago.
He searched the corpse in a perfunctory way, choosing to only search so much, but managed to find a kind of Identity slip, and stowed that into the satchel as well. He didn't want to go through the bother of toting along a corpse-cicle into his cargo hold, particularly if in doing so he was crossing some cultural boundary, or taboo. SO he left the alien where it was, and returned to the Sunspear. He had a long night ahead of him, scanning each crystal and determining which ones were valuable.
"I guess I had better put on some coffee, and play some EDM." he thought to himself.
Many hours later, Dane had a better idea of what he had found in the crevasse of the asteroid. A mining ship that had discovered a large cluster of asteroids with valuable metals. The fact that the asteroid was in a dangerous section of the ring was no deterrent to the captain and crew. If they could manage to fill their hold, then it would be worth the risks.
They hadn't, of course, and now they were just more motes of dust adding to the rings over the next billions of years to come. However, they had managed to mine and refine several tons of metals and minerals which were, even now, clamped to the side of the mining ship which was anchored to the asteroid.
Dane stared out through the forward view port of the command deck at the wealth that he could potentially take for himself, but ultimately decided not to. It would amount to theft, and he had no desire to start his new life as a criminal. He sighed and logged the information on his data pad, and drank more coffee, as tiny micro fragments pelted the shields of his ship. Even tucked into the crevasse as he was, there was only so much protection from ricocheting fragments. He was simply lucky that his shields were strong enough and stable enough to handle the constant bombardment.
Late in the evening, or early in the morning, he wasn't sure, he finally found what he was looking for, and the onboard computer began working at full speed to ingest the information that was crucial to his new life. An entire database of known inhabited systems, geopolitical spheres of influence, trade routes, mining concerns, and purchased prospects flooded his library. Communication codes, language libraries and cultural notations. The now deceased captain had even included a long list of contacts, favored and hated. Though, Dane honestly didn't think any of those mattered, if he was correct in his assumption that this ship was lost quite a while back.
All of those contacts were likely as dead as the captain and their crew. However, he hoped that at least some of the information was still good. Because the nearest outpost was at the edge of the Akharim Empire. It was a long lived merit based empire that spanned over two thousand star systems, and looked to be constantly expanding wherever they found no resistance. With that, he shouted in joy and searched through the remaining data crystals for the rest of the navigational information, feeding it into his computer two at a time until the last one was entered, ingested by the computer and stabilized within the core. He was ready to get out of the system, but he needed a shower, and a night's rest first.