chapter 45
It has been a quick nearly three months. The roundabout seemed to have enough traffic that whenever we needed to refuel, there was a refuelling station that was big enough and busy enough that if pirates had attacked it, everyone would know almost immediately. That helped save some time, but that easy refuelling time was now over.
We had entered a new current that we will be travelling for quite a while. It was called The Line. When looking at the map, it was easy to think of the galaxy as a 2D surface—mainly because it was so much wider in the horizontal axis than in the vertical one. But there was still around 1,000 light years of thickness on average in the galaxy. Most current often didn't go straight even if the map showed that they did.
The Line was a curious current because it literally did go straight and nearly to the end of the galaxy for thousands and thousands of light years.
Originally, we were supposed to turn off The Line earlier than we will now because of the war, and hopefully the war doesn’t reach The Line itself. Otherwise, we would need to make an even larger detour, even if going through space without currents would be faster.
The reason why most didn’t fly through space without currents was of course because it was slower, but also because there weren’t the convenient refuelling stations, and even fewer trade stations and above.
You would basically need to visit solar systems. Either risk flying into unclaimed systems that usually had some type of presence, either miners or pirates, or try to deal with nations which arguably could be worse.
Currently, there weren’t any famous refuelling stations in range, and there weren’t even any trade hubs, so for the first time we needed to stop at a trade station.
They were the smallest of their kind but still quite a lot bigger than refuelling stations. And of course, every trade station was in a solar system, but luckily those governments had good policies. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have something that people called a trade station.
As we dropped out of FTL, we found ourselves in a quite normal solar system, with the trade station being between the 5th and 6th planet of this system. There were runways, but there were basically only two: the fast acceleration one and the regular acceleration one.
This time we took the faster one, as we pushed the acceleration to 20G, and I allowed the ship’s support system to help me handle the increased gravity. With it helping, the increased gravity was almost a non-issue, although I still could not move around. So instead of it taking three days to decelerate, it took only a day and a half.
The Trade Centre itself was small, only four kilometres in diameter and only 500 metres in height. Still, there were plenty of ships flying about, and once again, we simply docked and I purchased myself a one-day stay permit.
After I paid up for my stay, it was a short walk to the town that was inside the station. This was a lot smaller of a place, but here I got a good feeling.
Things seemed lively here. The native species of this solar system looked kinda like humans in their body proportions, but they were actually more like snails. They were really friendly, but the extending eyes and an almost empty face except for a mouth was a bit off-putting.
It didn't take me long to find a junkyard shop. They basically bought broken stuff, sometimes fixed it up, sometimes broke it down for parts. It was my kind of shop.
Most of the stuff I wasn’t that interested in, as it was more things for regular people, but there was definitely some stuff I would need to buy to make my stay in the Mark 2 a lot more pleasant.
There were only a few guns here, but they seemed modern enough.
“Hello, I would like a closer look at some of these weapons,” I asked the shop owner, who had been working on cleaning some kind of soot-covered parts.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but I didn’t need to wait long for him to make his way over.
“So what was it that you wanted to see?”
“This laser rifle and this coil gun.”
“You seem to have a good eye, but I’m going to admit to you that these are fixed guns. They came to me broken, so while I have tested them and they seemed to work well enough, you might want to give them a more thorough testing before trusting your life to them.”
“Thank you for the warning. How much is it going to cost me?”
“The coil gun I can let go for 12k. The laser rifle I can’t do less than 18.6k, so all together 30.6k.”
“I’d be willing to do that if you added another battery for the coil gun.”
“Hmm... yeah, I can do that.”
I watched as he started to pack everything up. The main reason I bought these was not to use them as my own guns, but so I could learn from them and how they function, so that I could make my own versions. That way, I could have my own standardized equipment that my defense forces could use.
As we went to exchange currency—as I didn’t have the exact amount of gold, so we needed to cut it into smaller pieces—I noticed on the lower shelf behind the counter a different kind of laser gun.
“Hey, what’s that?” I said while pointing at the laser gun, which made the shop owner look backwards.
“Oh, that? That’s kind of a special laser gun,” he said while picking it up and showing it to me.
You could use this with one hand, but it was quite big, like a sawed-off shotgun. There seemed to be three detachable somethings that resembled magazines. Two of them went near the back top of the barrel, the other one at the bottom front. The design looked like it was modified from a different kind of weapon or something else.
“This looks quite complicated. How does it work?”
“This one used to be a mining laser used in asteroids. Before the modifications that made it into this gun, it was a really strong mining laser that could work continuously for quite a while, but it used gas to generate the laser beam. This requires less energy than the crystal variant and is a lot more robust. The changes were made so it would be fully portable.”
He then started to take out the three different magazine-looking components.
“Here. The right one contains the gas. The left one is for the power. The one at the bottom of the barrel is the cooling solution. This thing will cut through basically every barrier, but you only get about five shots before you need to change the gas and the coolant. The power lasts for about 20 shots.”
"That doesn't seem that good. Why would anyone modify their mining laser for something like this?"
"That's an easy answer—freedom. A few hundred years ago, these things started to show up. Basically, they were constructed by slaves forced to work on mining asteroids. They didn't have any other choices for weapons, so this thing was their only solution."
"Does that happen often—these kinds of rebellions?"
"Not too often in these parts, only about one every 10 or 20 years. But there aren’t large slave nations around here, so it's quite quiet."
"How much is it?"
"I don’t have any extra gas containers or anything else for this gun. It's also seen better days, as it's quite old. But still, it's a piece of history. And while every so often more come to the market, usually people aren’t stupid enough to convert perfectly good mining equipment into a barely functioning gun. This is more of a showpiece, so I guess, 9000?"
"Yeah, I’ll take it. Also, do you perhaps know any drinking establishments that would be frequented by space adventurers?"
"Let me think about it. There's one three streets over. A place called The Beginning Line. Pretty sure there are the kind of people you're looking for over there."
We talked a bit more after that, but then I left and took all the stuff I purchased back to the ship, intent on finding this place named The Beginning Line.
As I entered, it looked like a restaurant-bar that served working people, but instead of there being the normal kind of workers, here everyone was wearing some sort of armour and carrying weapons.
Seems like I have come to the correct place to hopefully hear some rumours.
I sat behind the bar and ordered myself what seemed to be some type of beer and the house special for food, as I didn’t recognize any of the other meals, so I guess it was a surprise whether I liked it or not.
In one corner of the place, there were some more important-looking people that seemed to be having interviews.
As I finished eating and ordered myself something that seemed to be whiskey, I sat back a bit, then started to pay even more attention to my surroundings.
The most interesting thing was happening with the group of people conducting interviews. There was a person sitting two chairs away from me that was obviously an adventurer.
“Do you know what’s happening there?” I asked him in Standard, and he, after thinking a bit, seemed to decide to answer.
“Yeah, not too far away from here a space portal opened up. They purchased the right to clear it and are looking for other ships to join.”
“Then why are they seemingly turning away so many people? There shouldn't be that many space adventurers around here.”
“There is more than you think, but the problem is all of them have a tiny category ship, at least from what I understand.”
“What’s the problem with that?”
He gave me a look like I was stupid.
“There isn’t actually anything wrong with that—some of those ships could be really good—but if you don't have a good record, then no one wants you to join unless you have a bigger category ship, which would make up at least a little bit for the lack of combat experience.”
“Thanks for the explanation. Let me buy you a drink.”
“Now this is how an adventurer should act. I can’t tell you how many times green adventurers ask for advice and offer nothing in return, even if it’s just this small of a courtesy. My name’s Vertolit. Nice to meet you.”
“Remi,” I said while extending my hand. He grabbed it with his hairy and clawed hand around my wrist, and I did the same.
Unfortunately, we didn’t talk too much longer as he needed to go. Apparently, his captain wanted to leave as soon as possible. That was unfortunate, and the next few hours I spent here, no one else was quite so open.
That was unfortunately some bad news he gave me. Perhaps I needed to make the ship a bit bigger than originally planned. Fortunately, this stage was literally meant for making changes. Although this one might be a bigger change than I planned for.