Long Distance

Upon choosing my bounty target, I registered with the station and downloaded the last know space coordinates to my Holo-watch.

'Neat piece of technology…' I thought to myself as I looked at the new data. Nearly 3 years ago I had bought it for its multiple functions, from the obvious telling of time, it popped up a holographic display that basically outclassed even the best computers of the 20th century. From a streamlined notepad to a music app, and even something old school called Shed Artist, an app used to make music on the go. If you could think of the app, it was on this thing. There was also a scanning feature to capture and recreate 3D images via hologram. Quite like cameras of old, but now 3D instead of bland 2D. '10,000 credits well spent…'

I sauntered back to the elevator and headed to my ship. The cold recycled stale air of the station melding into the background as I planned my attack.

Step one, go to the location.

Step two, locate the target.

Step three… capture…? Or kill… the bounty was alive or dead, but no one ever managed to take a bounty alive…

As I stepped out of the elevator I returned to the airlock, cycled it and returned to the hanger bay. Here there was a team of 5 loading the last of the ammunition on the ship, while the dock manager supervised them. I approached him casually as he looked at his own Holo-watch, taking down notes, submitting material requests for this bay, and doing many other side tasks as well.

He kept staring down at his Holo-watch as I neared.

"Your ships almost ready, another 5 minutes or so, how do you wish to pay, invoice or direct?"

"Direct." I replied simply. No need to invoice it, I had the creds and soon i would be rolling in even more.

He brought his Holo-watch next to mine while not stopping from casually tapping away, some of his taps furthering his normal productivity and a few sending the auto charge to my own Holo-watch. I tapped accept and sent the creds after verifying the amount and charges.

I waited patiently for the mechanics to finish arming my ship and once given the green light I boarded and began undocking procedures.

One by one, each of the ships systems came to life and soon I could hear radio side tone kick on before I adjusted the gain to remove the static.

Once I was ready to leave, I called into the station to request a flight path out.

"Jupiter Station, Rogue 6, requesting undocking flight path."

"Rogue 6, Jupiter Station, flight path sent, undock when ready, nearby space is clear, out."

With that I took off and slowly navigated my ship along the designated path, showing up not unlike that of some old video games. The path appeared as multiple blue arrows directing me away, displayed on the cockpits glass.

Once I was clear of the stations no warp zone I entered the coords to my nav computer.

'Hmmm…. Interesting… Proxima Centauri. Never been there before but it made sense. 2356 the first colonists spread out from earth, 3 terrestrial bodies in the sol system were colonized officially. Sure, mars had a few outposts previously, and same for the moon, but these were large scale operations. Billions of people on these ships, and mars' still developing ecosystem started to rapidly change, plants finally getting way more CO2 than they were used to behaved completely unexpectedly. At first it appeared they would die out, but instead mars started to become a lush jungle world. The moon was still the moon, and that would never change as the colony there was more of a massive moon city, comprised of many HAB modules linked together by airlock hallways, electronically set to automatically close should there be a breech anywhere, stopping the entire city from losing pressure. The last of the colonies landed on Titan, similar to the moon, but rather than one large city it was multiple cities, though the planet resembled mars in the fact there was plant life… well… not normal plants given the fact titan had a nitrogen and methane atmosphere, and humanity decided not to terraform the moon. The remaining ships went out to other star systems with planets that were expected to have capacity to support colony development. No one expected Proxima Centauri to have one of the best colonies candidates ever. A Gaia world as it was called. It orbited the star perfectly in line with its equator, directly in the middle of the habitable zone of the star. Maybe a couple hundred miles from the poles to the equator was nothing but lush environments, a whole perfect ecosystem. Plants and animals thrived here, not just the native flora and fauna, but when humanity introduced farm animals and the like they seemed to naturally integrate with the ecosystem and maintain an unprecedented balance.

However, no one could expect the planet also had an unforeseen circumstance. 90% of the native flora had narcotic like effects, and shortly after founding the entire colony very quickly became a refuge for pirates, criminals, druggies, and smugglers. The colony also declared independence and with the numerous other colonies and lack of control, the main body of humanity left the planet to its own devices seeing the lack of minerals and other useful materials to the expansion clause. Soon the laws and regulations on trade there were lifted, and the world became a truly free zone. The whole environment reminded me of a character from a movie that at the time took the world by storm and was going well till the main character was charged with false allegations and lies or something. The pirate character who always said his name was captain something would be proud of the planet, because all though there were no laws, it was truly free, like what he always said ships were. Freedom.

The coords lead to the asteroid field just past the planets orbit, between it and the gas giants. Of course. How corny. Of course, the pirate would be hanging out in an asteroid field. It's like pirates took every piece of science fiction media and said 'yeah! Every pirate does it so it must be a good idea, even though they got caught and taken down i wont!'

Ironic though, my target could hide and scurry like a rat, and while he could run, it was very unlikely he would be faster than me. I could be there in 6 hours without a Grav drive, or warp drive. But given that they both would get me there roughly in the same time frame of 1 hour there was no point to caring. Thankfully though I installed a warp drive and not a Grav drive.

Grav drives had their perks sure, such as less fuel usage overall, less power consumption when activating, as well as the fact it was a near instantaneous start, its cons fell to the fact you needed a gravitational source, the larger the better and faster. A Grav jump from Jupiter would take an hour, though from something like mercury would take maybe 3-4 hours. Plus, there was the fact you had to orbit the gravity source multiple times to build up speed and power to jump.

Warp drives however could be used anywhere, though depending on how far you were going they had increased fuel consumption the father the distance and there was a maximum distance you could travel, varied by charge capacity of the drive itself, the smallest and fastest charging ones could only warp you about 25 light years, where the capital class drives could warp upwards of 300 light years max, Grav drives had no maximum distance. You just had to be prepared for slight errors in accuracy as quite literally, Grav drives were like aiming a rail gun and firing your ship out of it, the farther the distance the more likely you might not be aimed precisely where you needed to be, although most ship computers could accurately calculate precision for anything less than 600 light years on most models, warp drives were just… never imprecise…

Slowly i powered on the warp drive. My target the local space of Paradee Sae, then i would manually fly to the asteroids.

I watch in awe, arcs of energy expelling from my ship to the front of my ship, slowly but surely the empty space in front of my idle ship saw a pinpoint of blue light appear. Then it grew. And soon a 30-foot-wide wormhole entrance appeared. Through the winding path that twisted and turned through space directly to my destination I saw the planet. Stange… with all the twists and turns I would expect to see walls… or something that indicated the twists and turns but no. I saw the planet before me. I engaged my thrusters and flew into the wormhole. It felt… like nothing different… it was as if I was flying normally… as if I was just in normal space and not warp space…

It also seemed that no matter how fast or slow I set the thrusters I wouldn't reach my destination faster, I guess that's why warp drives were not always the better option. The planet slowly grew before my eyes during the hour-long trip.

Once i popped out the other end I let the ship drift as I turned around to watch to wormhole close, seeing Jupiter Station in the background shrink and disappear.

I turned the ship back around and observed the vibrant planet before me. God was it beautiful. To think that earth or mars was green… crazy… even the most vibrant earth or mars had ever been, which they were both very close to each other, could not compare to the vibrance of this planet. Sure, the pollution was low seeing as how most planetary structures and machines used green energy, but still… wow… astonishing… maybe… maybe on the way back i might check out the surface… it would be the first time I stepped foot on a planet other than mars or the couple times I went to earth to work…