by Sunforge

I can remember the first time I stopped just looking at the stars and started thinking about travelling to them. I was in my back yard and can't have been more than seven years old when I saw something bright streak across the sky above me. I ran inside, full of childish excitement about my latest observation to ask my dad what could have caused such a phenomenon:

"Dunno" He grunted, without looking up from whatever journal he was reading. Now I don't know about you but whenever my father didn't answer a question it was normally because he felt it was something I shouldn't know about (beer, girls, pulling the legs off spiders, the usual stuff), so I filed his answer away in my child's mind for further enquiry. During my teenage years I enthusiastically investigated all the topics that my dear father wasn't forthcoming about. I discovered pretty quickly that, in the main, girls didn't like being investigated too much but space flight and beer made very good companions. So that, as they say was that, it was going to be a pilots life for me. I did of course harbour the secret plan that pilot plus spaceship equals babe magnet but I've yet to find a girl who was magnetically attracted to any ship that I fly. You live and learn I guess.

My father used to despair about my obsession with space travel and my frequent "junkie" visits to local scrap yards just in case there was something I could salvage from a genuine space craft. If I did find something that looked like it came from the skies above, I'd spend the whole day hacking it into small pieces to bring it home. As a result my folks became bemused hosts to a menagerie of ship parts, dead electronics and other paraphernalia that I'd drag back to their humble home.

As I grew up and my teenage years left me I took a bunch of random jobs and saved as much cash as I could so I could buy a ticket off the gravity bound lump of boredom that I called home so that I could do something better with my life. At one point I got so desperate to get a ship that I did, briefly, contemplate stealing one and lighting out for parts unknown to live the life of an outlaw. I was swiftly put off when I realised pretty much every ship had a transponder fitted that enabled Concord to work out where you were: or at least that's what I was told by an off duty security guard one day over a beer. Scratch that I thought to myself: back to the two jobs and night school.

In the spare time I had left between all the work and evening classes I hung around the space port talking to freighter crews asking, and in some cases begging them, to take me up for a ride. Sometimes a kindly skipper would let me hitch with them, which was always a highlight of my month and other times I'd sit there staring at the ships as they passed through on their business. I began to wonder if I was going to be one of those sad, middle aged guys, you see sitting on the 'mac outside the space port wondering where their best years went. I know, at the time, it wasn't the easiest thing for me to accept but I had no flight experience and whilst I thought I was a good mechanic I couldn't prove it to anyone else. That's when I realised one very important thing about getting your first crew slot: you had to look like crew and most importantly talk like crew.

I'll let you into a secret here: freighter captains inhabit the lowest rung of the space ladder. Everyone else looks down on them because they fly the unglamorous slots at a space port: midnight to 6 am. They also survive on very low margins and have to cut their costs to the bone, in harder times, just to keep flying. I noted after a while that these guys were also a breed apart; they didn't wear fancy uniforms, nor did they care for manners or what school you went to. No: these guys cared about the next trip off planet and whether they had enough cash to keep their crates going. After spending a lot of time hanging around with crews and bugging them for scraps of information I learned to ape their mannerisms and even began to dress like them. If you want to know how an average freighter crewman dresses, just empty out your wardrobe and pick the worst stuff you've got then put it on, then go outside and roll in the dirt for a while, you'd be a shoo in for crew. So in possession of the secret code of dress like crew, act like crew and talk like crew I began my quest for a ride.

You know what? One day my little act worked and a freighter skipper hired me on the spot as second engineer to fill in for one of his guys, who'd gone down with food poisoning, or avoidance of the law, I was never quite sure which. This was going to be my first trip and like all first trips it was a memorable one. During my tenure as official second engineer, which lasted all of one flight, I learned an awful lot of lessons. I'll give you a few examples: a dead guidance system isn't helped by one of the crew being too tightly wound for the confines of the ship. Lesson two: a crowbar makes for an excellent improvised tranquiliser. Lesson three: when swinging a crowbar don't get it caught in any overhead control cables, the pilot tends to panic if all his instruments go offline at the same time. Fortunately I was saved by my savant ability to work small wonders with duct tape although I'm not entirely sure I patched every cable back the right way round.

So the excitement kind of turned me round a little by the time we docked up. I needed a drink to settle the nerves and stop my hands shaking. I parted with a few isk and slapped a stiff scotch down the hatch. Did I tell you that the guidance system cut out during docking? Probably not, but the sound of a ship colliding with station shields is as impressive as the sound of a pilot swearing he's going to kill you if he ever sees you again. The scotch dealt with the shaking hands and did wonders for my confidence, which in hindsight wasn't so great, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and I was too young to know any better. Now all I had to do, I said to myself, is find a ship yard, buy a ship and ride off into the sunset, right? Yeah, right, you'd better read on hadn't you.

After a couple of wrong turns I made it to the biggest shipyard in station and there, amongst the piles of scrap and bits of partly disassembled ship, I found the owner: Mondo Thursday. Over the years I've got to know Mondo pretty well but I've never been brave enough to ask him what kind of parent calls you Mondo Thursday. Mondo's a cash only guy with a preference for avoiding the words tax, guarantee and working order but apart from those omissions in his character he's pretty honest. On that first day I spent quite a while walking round his yard staring at the ships, some of them big, glamorous things that looked like they were meant for deep space exploration, others more prosaic industrial types. After about an hour of wandering round, mouth agape at the prices, I struck up a conversation with Mondo. It was a short conversation which ended when he sent me away for wasting his time because I was a kid. I felt like I'd been caught in the adult store and shooed out by the staff: nothing to see here kid, get back to where you belong.

The way I looked at it if I could survive being second engineer on a garbage flight I could get Mondo to sell me a ship, so I begged a place to crash that night and headed back the next morning.
"Howya doin' kid?" It was Mondo's standard greeting.
The kid bit grated with me, but I learned later on that he dropped the kid when you'd made your first flight and came back in one piece. It was his way of putting the universe to rights I guess.
"I'm not gonna give up Mr Mondo, I want a ship." I said with grim determination in my voice.
Mondo looked me up and down as if assessing my credit worthiness.
"Cheap ship huh? Been saving your cash?" He said philosophically.
"Mr Mondo as long as I can afford it and the thing flies in a straight line, I'll be happy."
Mondo smiled at me, then he turned round to look at the long lines of ships in his yard.
"Well if you're just starting out, why not try that little ship" he pointed to a battered looking orphan in the far corner of his yard and then carried on "Three previous owners, none of 'em too careless, flies pretty well and you know what? I've had a good day so I'll throw in a laser or two."
I thought he'd stopped but it was one of his pregnant pauses, which you quickly learn not to interrupt. Mondo's a man that likes to have some space around him so he can think.
"You'll be paying cash" He said after his pause. I nodded "And you ain't moving anything from my yard until ever last isk clears with the bank" He continued.
At least Mondo was being honest with me, so after a little haggling and some careful counting of my cash I ended up buying that battered little orphan in the corner. To seal the deal he poured me a scotch which went a small way to easing the pain of parting with my life's savings. When we were done, he offered me some final words of wisdom:
"That ship'll treat you well if you fix it up some" He said in a fatherly kind of way "And don't get too ambitious the first few times out: that's a great way to get a pilot's funeral".
I didn't know what a pilots funeral was but I learned a little later that it meant dying in the cold vacuum of space. A pilot's funeral indeed.

There I stood, the proud owner of a new ship, a variant of the Impairor class if you want to know, called "Old Mary". I didn't like the name it had, but I knew from traditions going back thousands of years that you never changed the name of a ship. I also knew that shooting Albatrosses wasn't such a good idea either, which was more problematic, since I'd never seen an Albatross and was hoping they weren't some kind of weird space creature. Traditions aside, I was one proud happy kid when I clambered on board and sat in the pilot's chair on the control deck. I'd brought myself up on a solid diet of space fantasies with my buddies but I was the only one that'd got this far. Now I was a pilot sitting in my first ship with a thousand dreams all clamouring to be fulfilled and out there, in the limitless expanse of space, was where I could make it happen or die trying. I can't tell you if I got misty eyed or wiped a tear from my eye but I do remember a swelling pride that came from knowing that I'd finally made it: I was, for better or worse, a pilot. My dreams of adventure were interrupted by Mondo poking his head round the bulkhead door to the control deck.
"So when's your crew arriving kid?"
"My, uh, I need…" Something wasn't right, I'm sure I'd read that the Impairor was a one man ship. "I don't need a crew" I blurted out.
Mondo laughed.
"You don't need a crew if you're a pod pilot, that's true. But you're no pod pilot, so you'd better round up an engineer and a gunner if you're going to get this thing out of here".
Ah a crew: I'd spent everything I had on the ship and had nothing left to pay a crew with, except vague promises. I felt deflated and sheepish as I sat there with my hands on the control column.
Mondo was, I guess, bright enough to spot a man who had lost his way.
"Ah, you hadn't figured this out had you? Well you're not the first and you certainly won't be the last." He stopped for a second and pulled a data pad out from his pocket, passing it to me "Take this, it's on the house, it's got the recruitment pages".

I took the data pad from him and began searching through the pages. It was disheartening reading: a lot of the crews were hardened veterans and they wanted more cash than I could have saved in a lifetime. It dawned on me that I had to make a hard choice: pick a veteran who'd fallen on hard times or take a chance with a few rookies, like me, who were looking to catch their first ride. To be honest it terrified me as I realised that I might not have what it takes to lead a crew and fly a ship at the same time. I also knew that I couldn't go back: I'd bought this ship and I wasn't going to give up my dream for the lack of a crew.