Rules: some you observe and others you break. Some rules are sensible and some are there because the lawyers got involved. There is also a minor but very irritating set of rules which are there just to wreck your day. Our next flight was an object lesson in the application of these rules. Now if you ask me, I think that the gods of the space lanes are a cruel and unusual bunch who, over a period of millennia, made sure that everyone was going to fall foul of these rules one way or another. I bet they sit back in whatever qualifies for their heaven, watching us mortals screw up, whilst recording the best bits to show their friends at the weekend. Am I being bitter? Of course I am.

Those of you who were paying attention know that we'd added some secret sauce to our Mark 3 Imparior and were hoping that this new innovation would allow us to listen in to Concord broadcasts. Of course the only way to test that this mod was going to work, was to undock and take a flight. We were all geared up and ready to go. We decided against taking Einstein with us because he told us he got space sickness and I didn't fancy clearing up my flight deck after him. In hindsight I think he may have had other reasons for not coming with us.

We got a tow to the launching bay and double checked our systems before they were off-lined by the launch control tower. On older stations (like this one) they used a magnetic acceleration rail to ping you out of the station. To ensure that no accidents happened, they took control of your ship during launch. The overall effect of a mag-launch is best described as being pinned to your seat by a three hundred pound gorilla, whilst you're wearing a black out band over your eyes. After the launch there's a desperate scramble to check that everything's back on line and to ensure that the launch tower hadn't shot you towards an inbound ship. We all frantically checked our instruments (all clear), I checked for neighbouring ships (none). We heaved a collective sigh of relief and then before anything got pinged into us, I punched in a course for orbit around one of the nearer planets in our system, so we could test the Concord rig. The Flight plan kicked in and we warp-jumped to a small planet that doubled as an orbital junkyard. Kzen and Podie were itching to get started with the Concord gizmo, and I knew that I couldn't let hold them back much longer, so to give the illusion that I was in charge I gave them the nod. They immediately set to work. Buttons were pressed, switches were flicked, relays were relayed and manuals consulted. Actually none of that happened, this is the twenty something century, so Kzen pushed a virtual button on his control surface and smiled at me. So much for putting on a show I thought. There was a pause, whilst Kzen switched the comms subsystem onto "roaming mode". We caught snatches of conversation on various channels; local is always filled by someone swearing at someone else, travel information is always full of adverts and then suddenly we struck gold.
"Concord 17 this is control, notify infraction at Avada Stargate, code 6 in progress."
"Roger control, code 6 in progress, notify infraction."
"Control, this is Concord 22, reporting backups at Haimeh, suspect interference in Jasson."
"Roger Concord 22, added to info view."
Oh yes, we were receiving Concord loud and clear.
Kzen and Podie gave loud whoops and punched the air. I allowed myself a quiet smile: the guys had done well. This was indeed something that could save our butts if we paid attention.

I could only keep half an ear on Concord transmissions, as the planet we were orbiting had, as I mentioned before, become a junkyard. Even with collision avoidance on, it was a reasonably taxing job to keep the little Imparior clear of the biggest bits of junk. I had to rely on the shields to deflect the smaller stuff.

Things were going quite well. Kzen and Podie started channel hopping, to collect and programme all available Concorde and local police channels, so that we could access them on demand rather than search for them each time we needed to listen in. We noted from time to time the odd burst of prolonged white noise which hit the Concord channels. The bursts were intense and random in duration. The comms panel got upset with one of the bursts and Kzen had to re-start the sub system to free it up.
"What the frak was that?" Said Kzen.
Podie and I were non plussed, although Podie volunteered a less than useful idea:
"You sure you put everything back together right?" He said innocently.
Now the only way to resolve disputes like this is to refer to the manual. It is at this point I ought to provide you a quote from Sunforge's Space lane Rules (learned from bitter experience).

Rule 1: All manuals are actually written in Jovian then translated on a computer maintained by a drunken chimpanzee.

Kzen and Podie both reached for the big manual at the same time. After a brief struggle and a bit of swearing, from both parties, they got down to the interesting bit; understanding the manual.

In my experience, manuals only serve to confuse those of us devoid of a god-like understanding of modern electronics, so Podie's response was pretty predictable.
"This looks like it was translated on a computer maintained by a drunken chimpanzee"
Well Duh, it's a manual, what do you expect? No I didn't say that, I just thought it; I had no intention of making this a three way fight.
"Podie, you're holding the manual upside down".
The argument could have run and run but the ship decided to butt in with a few ideas of its own. It all started with a spectacularly long and ear splitting burst of white noise, then all our control surfaces blinked and died.
"So Kzen, does the manual cover this?" I said sarcastically.
Kzen had a look of wild panic on this face; I didn't share that look until I stared out of the bridge and realised that a very large pointy piece of debris was coming right at us.
" Shzpaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak!" I said hauling on the controls, then realised that I had to switch to manual over-ride to make them respond. Kzen and Podie joined the chorus a split second later as our shields suddenly made contact with the debris and we rebounded off it like a ping-pong ball. Great, we were now heading sideways at speed. I looked down at my situational controls only to realise that they'd gone out too. There was one small problem with this; there was no side view window, you only got a front view on this little crate. To compensate for that small problem, I jerked the ship round on its bow thrusters and then promptly wished that I hadn't. Smack in front of us was another large pointy piece of junk. Ker-boink, went our ship, Ka-ping went the shields, "Oh Frak", went the crew and off we cannoned, backwards.
It's times like these that a ship's captain has to give succinct orders, that describe the situation as it stands, that motivates the crew to get things back on track but leaves them room to exercise initiative.
"Sort this problem the Frak out: I'm not gonna get killed by flying junk".
I think that summed it up nicely. I gave myself a mental pat on the back and then returned to the frantic business of keeping us alive. Kzen and Podie exercised their initiative by descending into an argument about the manual, whilst disassembling some of the comms controls. It was at this point that Sunforge's Space lane Rules struck again:

Rule 2: Thou shalt not expect two or more technicians to agree. On. Anything. Ever. Especially if it involves a manual translated from the original Jovian.
Did you see that one coming? Sadly I didn't. Anyway I would have banged their heads together to make them see sense, but that would have meant that no-one was flying the ship, which was a bad idea right now.
"Sun, can you not bounce us round so much?" Complained Podie.
"Oh I'd love to do that Podes, but it's this space junk and the fact that my entire frakking PANEL's gone dead"
"We're frakking workin on', OWWWWW, that right, FRAK THIS, now!" Added Kzen.
Within the space of a few seconds events had descended into farce. If they weren't arguing with each other about who had done what to which component, they were complaining about my piloting abilities. I discovered that piloting a ship by hand was much harder work than it looked, especially when I realised that some of the space junk was composed of old, decaying ordnance which went BANG when your shields hit it. Fortunately the stuff abandoned out here had decayed enough to be sub-lethal, but the first collision inspired explosion nearly killed us all by heart attack. We must have spent about half an hour cannoning round the junk yard, shouting friendly words of encouragement at each other, often ending with a pleasant "Frak you and your mother" for the sake of emphasis. Eventually I threaded the ship though the worst of the debris to a clear spot and managed to hold us in a quasi geo-stationary orbit, whilst they guys set about jury rigging some controls. This brings me to Sunforge's Space lane Rule number3:

Rule 3: Technicians can eventually fix anything, however thou willest pay a high price for the fix bud and it won't look pretty when they've finished. Okay enough with the thou's already.

So thee and thou have been warned. We sat, or rather orbited in place, whilst Kzen and Podie found their way round the knocked out comms sub system. After a few trials and a lot of errors, we got enough control surfaces back online to attempt a jump back to the station. Now jumps are a matter of careful plotting by the computer, rather than us humans, and you just have to trust that they'll spit you out of the warp tunnel where they say they're going to. Mis-jumps aren't that common but they can happen, especially when Rule 3 is invoked and your gunner has accidentally wired the pseudo-random prime boot scrambler directly to the navigation unit's second input. Now call me old fashioned but feeding random numbers into a nav computer might do something weird to your flight path and verily it did.

We jumped sideways and arrived backwards. In completely the wrong place, with no idea where we were and just in case the ship thought we weren't paying attention, everything went offline again. Nice. I opened my mouth to make my feelings known to Podie and Kzen but they beat me to it, as they fell to arguing with each other about who was the biggest Pod Pucker. I ended up reversing my original aggressive stance and had to play peacemaker, which wasn't something I was expecting; I always thought that the captain was the one to dish out the dirt.
"Can you two stop yelling at each other? You're both pod pucking idiots and you're both going to get us all killed if you carry on like this."
That got their attention, now for the tricky bit:
"Okay how do we get this thing online and back to the station without another jump like that?"
They thought for a moment and were, I could tell, about to indulge in another spectacular disagreement when I held up my hand to stop them.
"Guys we're all in this together, it doesn't matter who's wrong and who's right in this; when we get back home you two can argue all you like over a beer"
My little speech calmed them down a little (not a lot, they still grumbled under their breaths at each other) and we all knuckled down to business. Ah that brings me to Sunforge's final rule of the space lanes.

Rule 4: Go Team.
Okay I'll admit it; rule four isn't exactly a rule, more a statement of relief. I tore up the manual and we three worked out how to get ourselves back home. So what (you're asking yourself) did we three plot? It was relatively simple really. We'd rip out the stuff that Einstein had put in, put back what he'd ripped out and concentrate on essential systems only, cannibalising parts if we had to. It took us a few hours to get the basic systems back online. A tense half hour followed as we checked and fretted over the next jump. When Kzen and Podie were happy, I pressed the big red button. Okay it's not really a big, red button but you get what I mean.

We jumped. We arrived in the right place. Then we crashed into the station shields, rebounded and landed in a heap a few hundred metres from a freighter, whose captain let us know exactly what he thought of my piloting skills on the local channel. Some you win, some you lose. I settled for getting home and called it a draw. Docking was exciting as our systems were flickering on and off every time someone hit the local comms channel. Mercifully the station tractor beams latched on to us and towed us in after a brief interlude of blind panic on my part. We'd arrived back home, our experiment of listening in to Concord channels an unmitigated disaster. Something told me we'd need to have a little talk with Einstein. I fished my personal communicator out of my pocket and gave him a call. We agreed to meet up on the ship to work out what went wrong and to see if we could put the electronics back together into a meaningful whole. Whilst I was pondering what could be done, my eyes alighted on the manual's title: Impairor Mark 3b. Okay, "3b" I thought to myself, is that different from the original 3 and what about the 3a? How could you tell? When Einstein turned up he had the answer. It was the wrong answer.
"Oh frongsticks had you told me it was a 3b I'd never have made the mods in the first place" Einstein said when he got on board. "Only a raving idiot makes changes to the 3b".
Now I don't know how it happened, but for one reason or another, I found that I had a wrench in my hand. Since my hand had nothing better to do and since my brain decided to occupy itself with other things my hand took the initiative and clocked Einstein with the wrench.
"Nice shot" Said Podie.
"Hmmm still breathing," Said Kzen
"Dumpster?" I added.
We all nodded our agreement and hauled him off to the dumpster so he could sleep it off in peace.

It's a funny thing but taking my frustrations out on Einstein drew us all closer together. Kzen and Podie stopped arguing and before we knew it we'd got most of the systems back online. We did have to go cap in hand to Mondo for some parts, but once we'd told him the story (and he'd stopped laughing) he gave us most of what we wanted for free after reminding us of Mondo's general law:
Never trust a genius, especially the last genius that repaired your ship.

I never did find out what happened to Einstein after our last, brief, conversation but I'm told he skipped the station after failing to pay a few bills. Word soon got out that I'd been the man who'd laid him out with a wrench not once, but twice, and I was quite surprised to realise how much good will that got me round the station. I guess every cloud (and some geniuses) has a silver lining after all.