Just posting here to let you know I've compiled Mossfoot's Tales of Woe into a single book (It came out to over 50,000 words, so I guess it counts as a short novel )
While the formatting here is good, I could take it a bit further. If anyone would like to create a cover image for it, I'd see if I could format it as an ebook next
In another time, in another life, I was somebody. Truth be told it feels like a dream, or a lie I told myself so often I wanted to believe it, but every so often bits and pieces come up reminding me at least some of it has to be true.
Once, I was the son of a Navy Captain…or did he become Admiral? I’m a bit hazy on the details. I do know that I used to live the good life. Even from a young age I was flying his fancy ship collection, with or without his permission. I had all kinds of friends willing to do anything for me just to be in my inner circle. Women threw themselves at me…
…no, really, I swear. I didn’t always have this horrible scarred face. I used to be quite the looker.
I had money, fast rides, faster women, and a first-class pass out of any trouble I found myself in thanks to my dad’s connections. I had it all.
Then it all went to hell.
I’ll spare you the details. My understanding is the recordings were saved by a bunch of people and kept alive on the bootleg circuit until recently, when it suddenly became a hit. Not that I’ll see a penny. Identity issues aside, it’s considered public domain now.
You see, I’ve been away for a long time now.
The short version is like this. My dad’s XO tried to murder me because I’d inadvertently stolen a piece of kit from him that proved he had a secret black-ops going on in the Navy. My luxury yacht was blown out of the sky and I was left for dead. More to the point, I was.
Fortunately my corpse was recovered and I didn’t stay dead long. Hiding with a new identity and a crap-ass ship, I had no choice but to survive without the support system I’d been so accustomed to.
I did okay for myself. Not great. I got by, I guess. But I couldn’t escape my past, and when it caught up with me, I uncovered a dark conspiracy.
In the end I saved the day, sorta, with the help of a woman who also blew me out of the sky once… That seemed to happen to me a few times it seems… Anyway, we got away on board one of my dad’s antique ships and were ready to start a new life.
Then it all went to hell again.
Things get especially hazy at this point. We had just docked and gotten my Cobra MKII repainted, ready to start cruising the space lanes as a team, and the next thing I know I’ve been found in my derelict ship in interstellar space, somewhere near a place called LHS 3447.
Over a hundred years later. Way over.
And this is where I have to call my past into question because the universe is different now. Way different. Different in ways that made me wonder if I was just living an even more insulated life than I realized. If we all were.
It seems that what I thought of as my galaxy was just one isolated part of a much larger one, artificially cut off from the rest by an imposed 7 light-year restriction on hyperdrive jump technology. Or Frame Shift as they call it now.
I’m not going to go into details. Trust me, it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I remember when I came from there were different alien species being around, and access to different galaxies, but when I talk about it now people stare at me like I’m a bloody lunatic.
Nope, as far as the galaxy is concerned humans are the only space-faring creatures around—aside from the Thargoids. At least they still exist, but nobody’s seen them in decades, it seems. There are two galactic powers, the Federation and the Empire, and if you ask me they’re both full of crazy people. Lave and the worlds I once knew are still around, over a hundred light years from where I am now, part of an Alliance of independent worlds. How I got here from there I have no idea.
All I know is I was found in my ship. Dead. Again. Seriously, it’s becoming a bad habit with me. What brought me back this time is so much techo-magic-mumbo-jumbo involving nanobots and progenitor cells and stuff. And the only reason they bothered to do all THAT to me is because the antique Cobra MKII I was found in could pay for it. Barely. They didn't bother to heal the scars on my face, though. Said that was "elective" or something. I look like someone dropped a frickin hot pizza on my face.
They also wanted answers. I got your standard polite military debriefing, where my story was repeated time and again from every angle—but if I’d been gone for over a hundred years, what good would that info do anyone?
I dunno. When they were done I was allowed to go on my merry way. My pilot’s licence was renewed and with what little was left over from the “finders fee” from the Cobra I was able to afford a small ship. A next generation Sidewinder.
Great. I used to pop those tin cans for fun in another life. Now I’m stuck flying one? Why does the universe hate me so much that it’s not content with just killing me, but is trying to do it as often as possible? The little buggers haven’t changed much in three hundred years, other than being jump capable now.
And so it begins. Starting over with a hole in my memory like a black hole in a much larger universe than I ever expected to see. Everyone I know is long dead…
But on the bright side, everyone I know is long dead!
Last edited by mossfoot on Mon Jan 19, 2015 3:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome back Cmdr Mossfoot, nice re-introduction. Looking forward to hearing how you cope with the future
Bit of luck your transmissions being relayed back to the Ooniverse by retro time-vortex handwavium field generator thingy that seems to have been sewn into your flight suit collar
The way I see it, I can always write directly in the Ooniverse again via Violet's POV But since it's all Elite at the core, I didn't see a problem with continuing with any fun adventures I might have in ED
have downloaded your doc to read on the way to work. did you get a cover image? what sort of thing were you thinking of?
ebook sounds good.
keep up the good work mossfoot
Arthur: OK. Leave this to me. I'm British. I know how to queue.
OR i could go with
Arthur Dent: I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
or simply
42
I remember someone did a cover for me (and I'm sorry I forgot who!), but for the LIFE of me I can't find it. I had even formatted an epub for it. Weird that I can't find it anywhere now...
Oh, this gets even better. Turns out I had even less left over from the antique sale. Technically I don’t even own my ship. It belongs to the Pilot’s Federation. No wonder I got such a good deal on it. So I can’t just sell it and settle down on a nice planet with a bunch of pool bunnies.
That used to be the dream… though it was a space yacht with a pool that ran the length of the ship and cheerleaders acting as lifeguards. But for some reason that doesn’t hold the appeal it once did to me. I’m not sure why.
Maybe it’s because I became a thrill junkie, and the old easy life just doesn’t cut it anymore. That seems to ring true. That’s the problem with having a black hole for a memory, I can never be sure what’s true and what’s misremembered.
So, I’ve got a grand total of a thousand credits to my name and a ship I don’t even really own. Though apparently any upgrades I buy for it I do own. Yippee.
Once my licence got cleared and I checked out on my piloting and medical exams, I checked out the cockpit. A Sidewinder. It looks like a baby Cobra in some ways. Kinda cramped.
Living in this is like living in a floating bachelor apartment. Not so much a pilots cabin behind the cockpit, more like one of those capsule hotels you find on back-end space stations. Though I have to admit, it’s kitted well enough for entertainment. Vid screen over the bed and descent sound system.
The cockpit’s also impressive. The multi-function-displays are a serious upgrade in terms of functionality. Funny to think such a basic ship has such a bad ass display. Not to mention voice commands and head tracking targeting.
I could get used to this.
---
The bulletin board was a bit light on missions. I got stuck carting fruit from one system to another for a third party. Decent money to be made working like that, more than enough to live on. Live well, even. But my ambitions are a bit higher than that. Bigger ship. Faster ship. Something with a billion megawatts of shields and a neutron star’s worth of armor to keep me nice and safe.
On my second run some joker tried to interdict me. That’s a new trick. It used to be that your in-system jump drive (or supercruise) would kick out any time you came close to a large enough mass. That’s still the case, but it’s more of an emergency brake on really big things like planets or stars. So you can zip past ships and stations at close to the speed of light far faster than you ever could before.
But with the right equipment you can kick someone out of supercruise and engage them while their frame shift drive is forced to reboot. It’s ostensibly meant for police and licenced bounty hunters, but let’s face it, it’s the first thing a pirate is going to buy.
Fortunately, evading an interdiction isn’t too hard if you’re a decent pilot, and let’s face it, I am. If I’m facing pirates, I’m doing it on my own terms.
Speaking of which…funny thing happened on the way to the trading post. My HUD picked up an unrecognized signal source. Now this is often because of something bad that’s happened, such as a ship forced out of supercruise. Also ship wreckage. And wreckage means drifting cargo and that’s free money.
But when I dropped out to see what it was, it turned out there were three pirates lying in wait, giving off a distress signal.
Well I’m no sucker. I turned around and got ready to get the hell out of there when I noticed something strange on the readout. I hailed the lead pilot.
“Um… guys? You’re here to take my cargo, right?”
“That’s right. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll dump your cargo and bail, punk.”
“You must have been expecting a bigger ship, huh? Something with more than a few lousy tons of cargo?”
“We’ll take what we can get. Dump it, or we open fire.”
“Sure, sure. Just answer me one question first. You were expecting a bigger ship, right?”
“Anything is bigger than a Sidewinder.”
“True, but that’s not how I knew. You know how I can tell?”
There was no response, but I could picture their puzzled expressions.
“Because you all ditched your shields for extra cargo room.”
I learned later that inexperienced pirates gain a certain amount of street cred for running without shields. Now, I’m not one to go out looking for trouble, but there’s only so much stupidity I can take before I take it upon myself to teach valuable life lessons to those in need.
“Today’s your lucky day, guys. If there’s one thing I know about Sidewinders, it’s that they come with ejection pods standard, and you can’t swap them out for an extra beer cooler. Ship. Deploy weapons.”
Heheheh.. the problem with life lessons is, you have to remain alive to profit from them.. something I suspect those three didn't manage to do.
Most games have some sort of paddling-pool-and-water-wings beginning to ease you in: Oolite takes the rather more Darwinian approach of heaving you straight into the ocean, often with a brick or two in your pockets for luck. ~ Disembodied
Well, if you buy into the Elite: Dangerous system, those ejection systems are automatic and practically foolproof.
Here's what I don't understand, though - if your ejection pod is supposedly almost indestructible and you always get retrieved... why should hits to life support matter?
Some kind of stasis field? Something that preserves the body and sends out a distress signal, but you're out cold the whole time. Shame we can't capture pilots in-game Actually that's the subject of my next bit....
Life is cheap... well, to everybody but me it seems. I've technically died enough times that I've become extremely adverse to the experience--not that I was ever looking for it in the first place.
But 3300 is a very strange time indeed, and the reason for it all boils down to the fact that death ain't what it used to be.
Back in my time... ghah, I can't believe I just said that like some old fogey. Though technically I am something like a hundred and seventy-seven now. Anyway, back in my time if you got shot down you were dead. Your only hope was to activate the escape pod in time and hope to hell that whoever did it wasn't looking for some extra income selling you on the slave market. But now...? Well, I've gotten ahead of myself. Where I should really start is how great a pilot I turned out not to be...
"Docking approved. Proceed to Bay 14."
Up till now I'd been docking at the local outposts, which look like oil rigs in space. I have to admit I always found those a bit tricky, because there's no real sense of up or down on them, landing pads are scattered about like acne on a teen's face. Ugh. I really shouldn't be making fun of them right now, given my own condition. It reminds me of the time I asked a woman out shortly after I was shot down and scrambling to make a new life for myself, not realizing half my charm came from my family name and pocketbook. I got a martini tossed in my face for the trouble.
Now replace the martini with acid and imagine she smashed the glass in my face as well for good measure.
Anyway, I'd had to do low-grav dockings on outposts before, usually convenience stores and the like. But now I was approaching my first big-ass station. My god was it beautiful. Not one of those ugly dodecs that look like giant dice for someone's intergalactic session of Dungeons and Dragons, this was meant for comfort. The habitation ring on the outside with clear panels allowing light down on the endless loop of parkland. Honestly, that sight alone made space feel a bit less cold and lonely. You spend too much time out in the deep black and you start to think the universe is nothing but metal panels and electronics. Seeing those forests in space is like a breath of fresh air through the vacuum of space.
The center of the station is the docking, trading and administration area, with the familiar mail slot docking port. Hell, it seemed even bigger than the ones I was used to, which was fine by me. So with docking granted I slipped inside, leaned back, and waited for the station's auto-dockers to do the rest...
"Warning: Loitering violation. Please clear the entry bay."
Huh? Oh, I guess I hadn't nudged myself in enough. I pushed the thrusters forward a bit more, only to get another warning.
Wait... they weren't expecting me to land my ship inside this station by myself, were they? No major station anywhere did that - it was a recipe for disaster to let pilots deal with traffic control on their own. Another warning, and the countdown timer was ticking down. Oh crap.
Okay, not a problem, I could do this. Gravity here is 0.1 standard, pretty much like at the outposts... piece of cake. I can do this. I can totally do this.
---
"I have no idea how you did this."
The dockworker was one part annoyed and three parts amused, looking at how I'd managed to wedge my Sidewinder on the docking pad... sideways, upside down, and on an angle.
"You do have a pilot's licence, right?" he asked, then scratched his head as if wondering what equipment he'd need to untangle this Gordian Knot.
It had started out easily enough, but then I'd overshot the pad a bit, ran into the guard panels, panicked, overcompensated, and... well, this.
"I've never had to dock inside a hub before," I said.
"Well, you're lucky I was on hand to lock you in manually. The pad's docking system isn't supposed to lock down and let you disengage unless you're within a ten degree range of tolerance. Figured you for a scrap, though." Scrap seemed to be the local term for what in other times was called a noob or greenhorn. In this case it's because many starting pilots earn their early paychecks hauling scrap from one station to another.
"I swear I'm a better pilot than this. I just panicked is all."
"Well, panicking can cost you more than just a fine, kid...er...sir...um...ma'am? Sorry, it's the face."
"Sir is fine." At this point I was considering wearing a helmet 24/7, and was I really thin enough to be mistaken for a woman? I guess I could stand to put on a few pounds. The regen process had taken its toll in muscle as well as fat.
"Well, as I was saying, you can... oh crap, there's another one." The sealed docking hanger I'd been lowered into had its own air supply, and as a result I could hear through the walls the faint sound of high energy weapons fire.
"What's happening? Is the station being attacked?"
The worker checked a monitor by the far wall. "Nope. Some dumbass is stuck under a bridge."
I came over and looked at his monitor. Sure enough, a hauler was wedged under a bridge with cargo trucks driving around the station's circumference, and it was getting mercilessly pounded with laser fire. The pilot was clearly trying to get away, but kept making the same mistakes over and over again.
My jaw dropped. "Wha... why? Why don't they just shut off the engines and get a team out to set it straight? Haul it back to a pad?"
The worker shrugged. "Station control can't be bothered. They figure the pilots will never learn that way, this way is easier."
The hauler blew up in a brief ball of flame, and scrap littered the ground like gently falling snow in the reduced gravity.
"Plus we get to keep the scrap and cargo."
I was still flabbergasted. "But he can't exactly learn anything NOW! What's the punishment for loitering?"
"Pretty much the same thing."
What callous dictatorial dystopian hell had I been dropped into?
The worker looked confused. "What? It's not like he's dead or anything. He's got his pod."
I hadn't seen an escape pod. Come to think of it, even though my Sidewinder came with one standard, I didn't really know where it was.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and how it had changed the universe, possibly for the worse.
As I started off explaining, death use to be a big deal. If you didn't activate the escape pod in time - assuming you had one - you were dead meat, and nothing short of a me-shaped miracle would change that. As much as I complain about the universe using me as its personal urinal, the fact I've survived death three times now does not go unappreciated. In fact my bad luck is no doubt just its way of balancing the scales of luck.
Turns out, one of the big advances in the last hundred and fifty-odd years was in the realm of pilot safety.
Any history buffs out there? Remember the early forms of powered locomotion, like cars? Well, those things started off with squat in terms of driver safety for a while, then they developed the seatbelt, and later on the air-bag to cushion the blow of an impact. Crash survival went up immensely. What we got now is like the air-bag times a billion. Though the term "escape pod" is still used, there is no pod, per se. It's your seat. Your seat has its own little power source, thrusters, and stasis field generator. When your ship blows, it kicks you free of the debris with the thrusters and you're more or less out dead once the stasis field kicks in. But it's the easy kind of dead that just takes a defib and adrenaline to reboot. The stasis field keeps your body in a recoverable state and the seat sends out a distress signal for retrieval teams to come pick it up.
The net result of this is that pilot recovery and survival is at an astounding 99% in standard accident and combat scenarios. Not so high as to be guaranteed, so people still do their damndest to not get shot down, but high enough that those DOING the shooting down can sleep easy, knowing they're not a mass murderer (other than that 1% "oops" factor).
So as I staid before, life is cheap. For a given value of life.
It all reminds me of one of those old science fiction shows from a millennia ago. Some starship crew comes across a planet where wars are all fought in simulation rather than using actual guns and bombs. Only in that case the casualties politely queued up for disintegration like they were British Lemmings or something.
Only here you don't even have the consequences of that, and it has taken its toll on society. The galactic economy is propped up in part by the constant manufacturing of replacement ships, driving ship costs down. Insurance agencies thrive on the constant trickle of revenue made by replacing ships, and offer easy loans to those who can't afford to replace outright, the cost of which is gradually taken out of the pilot's income. Pilot retrieval is a lucrative and full time business at most stations, with little ships that barely show up on any radar darting in and out for quick pick ups and returns in exchange for a slice of that sweet insurance pie. Piracy now is viewed largely as an inconvenience and bounty hunting has become a part time sport miners do on weekends. And this is why it's become easier for a station to not bother with traffic control and docking ships, letting the pilots handle it themselves, then blow up the loiterers or someone stuck under a bridge, rather than to actually get off their butts and do something about it.
The way I see it, stupid pirates with no shields = easy money. And half the time when they take out a cargo ship they have to leave half the crap behind because even without shields their tiny cargo bays are filled.
And so, much like the first time I had to start over in life by collecting empties (blasting asteroids) for spare change, I've taken on the role of Mossfoot - Galactic Garbage Man, cleaning up other people's messes and punishing potential litterers with semi-deadly force.
I wouldn't be so flippant about taking out other pilots, even if they are pirates, if it wasn't for the epic survival gear everyone has now. That 1% risk? Well, they are pirates, and for all I know they finish off ejected pilots before the vultures arrive (what I call the pilot retrieval shuttles).
Who knew being a garbage man could be so profitable? I stumbled across trade data, military plans, silver, all kinds of great stuff that was worth a small fortune compared to the piddly cargo runs being offered that I could actually handle in my Sidewinder. The one problem is selling it. That's another change from the old days. Used to be there was a galactic sense of "finders keepers" which of course kept the pirates happy.
Merchants, however, got sick of that crap and created a foolproof means of identifying cargo containers. Before departure, each cargo container is encoded with an ID that is tied in with the unique engine signature of the ship carrying it, while the ability to disable the ID is tied directly with the biorhythmic signature of the pilot. So only the pilot can disable the ID, and if any other ship carries the cargo it's registered as stolen - no exceptions.
This means pirates with stolen booty will be easily identified on a casual cargo scan, and fined or blowed up accordingly. But it also means there's a monopoly on licensed salvagers, and those are locked down by the same station-run gangs as the pilot retrieval vultures.
Did I happen to mention the sweet economic situation these nearly-death proof escape pods have provided some people, and how it's made them rather unscrupulous in the process?
But not all stations play that game. You look hard enough and you'll find yourself a black market or two, with the means of deactivating the cargo ID and buying goods off you no questions asked.
I've been making a list of local black markets, particularly those on oil-rig type platforms. They've got very little security and you're unlikely to be scanned by a passing Federal ship. So that's where I take my shopping cart full of empties these days. And thanks to a few lucky scores, I quickly had enough to buy a ship that was truly my own and not on permanent loan from the Pilot's Federation.
Okay, somebody answer me this – how the hell can we go two hundred years and still be flying the same frickin ships? Take the Cobra MKIII, for example. You’d THINK there’d be a Mark IV by now. It’s only been literally two hundred and one years since it was released. And other ships flying around are way older designs than that!
Granted, in many ways they aren’t the same ships at all. That forced hyperdrive cap of seven light years was something only imposed in the independent worlds around Lave and GalCop and all that. Seriously, if I thought the conspiracy I uncovered within the Navy was bad, it was a schoolyard prank compared to the lie everyone lived through.
Had I not been pop-frozen and lost in space, I probably would have lived to see the end of all that. While most people still act like I’m nuts when I talk about the inter-galactic wormhole and aliens so numerous it was like you just randomly picked out nouns and verbs from a hat, I do find vague references to it now and then. Seems to be a sore spot people are trying to forget.
From what I can gather the seven light-year limit was a means of isolating a section of our galaxy where the wormhole route was before it collapsed, to both allow intergalactic trade but keep it from spreading onto the rest of our turf. A galactic quarantine. Each of the galaxies had one, presumably. The concern being those other galaxies might have slightly different laws of physics, and that could destabilize things if too much interaction was allowed to take place. Seems like a weak sauce of an excuse, but it would explain how one race had edible poets, I guess. Or how juice could embody an abstract concept such as evil, and not just be a metaphor. Only Navy ships with ultra-top-secret clearance were allowed to break the limit, or even know about it.
And that might very well explain the mystery of where they all went after 4004… well, 3150 by our reckoning. You might remember the universe was plagued by pirates and rogue factions when a special pilot assistance and coordination software was developed that make coordinated tactics a breeze and our ships became easy pickings. And the Navy sat back and did nothing, presumably addressing a Thargoid threat on the frontier. But what if….?
Never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore. Ancient history, literally. The wormhole collapsed, and most of the aliens went back before it did. Nobody talks about it anymore. Back to ships.
Some ships like the Cobra MKIII look mostly the same as they did before, just a bit more flourishing and detail on the outside. But on the inside? Completely different, from the engines to the entertainment centre.
Then you have other ships like the Adder I just bought. About the only thing they kept the same was the name. No longer the stepped-on tissue box of old, this looks more like an old-school shuttle with a bit more attitude. The atmospheric wings are no longer retractable, but fixed, and it mounts three weapons instead of just one.
In fact EVERYTHING outside of a basic hauler mounts more than one weapon.
The Adder is a completely different ship on the inside, too. It’s also far more customizable and modular in nature, and it seems the concept of cargo compression has been given up as a bad idea. However, the feng-shui masters have managed to make the most of the internal compartments and cargo storage is far more efficient. I was able to fit about twelve tons of cargo into it, and still keep the important stuff I wanted like shields intact.
It’s actually a pretty decent ship, all told, and can be upgraded to something a lot better. But I don’t plan to hang on to it long. I miss the comfort afforded by my old MKII, and even though it’s probably in a space museum around Sol somewhere, I can at least get my hands on the enduring legacy it created.
Good to see you back again, and congratulations on passing 10,000 thread views (more than my various efforts put together, I see, although Sidewinder Precision Pro managed half what you've had at least). I look forward to seeing more!
"Sidewinder Precision Pro" and other Oolite fiction is now available for Amazon Kindle at a bargain price.
It is my role in the universe to have moments such as this. Same station. Same dock worker. Different ship.
"I still have no idea how you did this."
This time I'd managed to wedge my Adder on the docking pad... sideways, upside down, and on an angle.
What could I do but shrug and slip him a Ten-C for activating the manual clamps again before station control decided it would be easier to just blow my ship up for scrap? I'd made a dozen perfect landings before this, but the one time I overcompensate avoiding an Orca on takeoff from the pad ahead of me and this happens. Because God's a wanker and I'm his favorite piece of tissue.
It hasn't taken me long, but I've almost got enough for my Cobra. I haven't had time to get attached to the Adder, really. Some of its features do remind me a bit of the nice Neolite custom hull I had back in the day, but to me it's a means to an end.
And what the hell is that end? I'm adjusting to this time, but the fact is I'm alone. This dockworker is the closest thing I have to a friend and I don't even know his name. I've had longer conversations with pirates trying to get me to drop my cargo.
I have a sneaking feeling I'm running away from something I don't want to think about. That if I look too hard in the mirror I'll see past the scarred, melted face and see something inside that's really troubling.
Well, you know what that means... time to get a custom made tea maker! The kind with the special "optional extra flavors" nozzle at 80 to 90 proof.
) 
