“... SEE: Spontaneous Evacuation Event. SEE occurs when an evacuation even takes place and communication delay leads to no rescue or a severely late rescue operation being dispatched to the delivery location's crew. While the pilot should prepare for a potentially gruesome scene, most locations will be just the abandoned location structure. The pilot is encouraged to log a SEE code in their manifest and proceed to their next route. While rescue operations are not legally required in SEE scenarios, pilots may perform scans to see if there are any signs of life from the crew or habitants.....”
- Excerpt from the Sol Independent Trade Contractor Standard Procedure Checklist
Part 1. Isolated Arrival
Approaching Nemo Point Research Station
Jabari leaned back in his pilot couch and took a long drag of an electronic hookah. He absentmindedly checked the sensors and navigation displays. Nothing has changed, another three days till landing. These long routes are such a grind, especially solo he thought to himself while trying to stretch his neck. With no relief pilot onboard he has been stuck in his couch for the past eighteen hours and was beginning to feel it. Nemo Point Research Station was a partially brutal route, with only six of the ninety hour flight time being in stable space. The rest of the time a pilot needed to be at the controls to monitor the scanners. Spontaneous crashes are rare but were still frequent enough that most pilots followed the guidelines, Jabari included. Nemo Point. Resupply Frequency: 3 YR. And I’ve been lucky enough to fly two of those. He chuckled to himself I shouldn’t be mad. Dr. Jones is nice enough and someone needs to bring em food. He took another deep drag of the hookah, contemplated the device, then slammed it down in sudden disgust. I can always hear my fathers voice in my head when I smoke that stupid thing. “I undertake the training-precept to abstain from alcoholic drink or drugs that are an opportunity for heedlessness’'. He would repeat that over and over again. I’m not even Buddhist anymore, but deep down.. I guess I feel like he’s right. He rested his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. For a second everything was quiet and he felt like he was floating. The navigation system alarm pulled him out of his trance. A small asteroid was crossing his flight path. He made a slight course adjustment, logged the maneuver in the flight controller software and took another pull of the hookah. Only two more hours till I can rest. Two more hours....
“You should be grateful, most kids your age never even get the opportunity to go on the biggest ride in the Sol System!'' Jabari looked up at the track in front of him, stretching up higher than he could see. He grabbed his fathers arm and begged him to get him off. His father shook his head and walked away, motioning at the ride operator. The operator hesitated for a second before starting the ride. A weightless sensation filled Jabari’s stomach and he closed his eyes. He felt himself being thrown left, then right, then left again. On each turn he slipped further out of his harness, further away from his father until....
Jabari woke with a yelp. He looked around, taking a second to remember where he was. The features of the dimly lit cockpit of the hauler slowly filled his vision. The navigation system was flashing a reminder to start the deceleration burn. He cleared the notification, he had plenty of time before he needed to start the burn. He unstrapped himself from his crash couch and stumbled back to the coffee maker. As he watched coffee drip from the machine into his cup he absentmindedly smoked the hookah, trying not to picture his fathers face. While they had a cordial relationship, Jabari always felt guilty for not being closer to his family, particularly his father. He knew his father loved him and always did everything he could to provide for their family, but all Jabari could remember of his childhood was his fathers absence. When he was young and his father was climbing the ladder at work, they ended up moving from shipyard to shipyard for several years. His mother was very extroverted and tried her hardest to connect with Jabari but she couldn’t understand why or how he could be so laid back. As a result, Jabari has been alone for most of his life. It bothered him at first but now he prefers it. It makes me stronger, more focused and analytical. It’s who I am He thought to himself. It’s why he got picked for the long-duration flights. His mind was sharper and more rugged than the other pilots. They couldn’t handle loneliness but he could. He puffed his chest out a little and grabbed his coffee. He dropped heavily back into his crash couch and started preparing for the deceleration burn. More paperwork than flying He lamented to himself, as he started the checklist.
“One of the most important pieces of equipment every starship is equipped with is the flight computer. This computer uses specialized software that informs pilots of their legal and safety obligations when performing flight duties. During each flight stage, pilots will enter a specific stage code. This code will populate the flight checklist. The data entered during the flight stage will be used to calculate the flight path, unlock software as needed, and inform pilots of situational and legal obligations. All data that is entered, stored, erased, or displayed on the flight computer is stored on the ship's blackbox, which is bespoke to the ship. Failure to maintain or comply with the flight computer may result in disciplinary action up to and including arrest....
- Excerpt from the Sol Independent Trade Contractor Standard Procedure Checklist
Decelerating into non-celestial bodies is dreaded by all pilots. Since there is no gravity to assist with deceleration the engines have to do all the work. Pilots must instead endure a high-g burn which is taxing on the body. The constant physical pain made Jabari uncomfortable. The pain itself didn’t bother him, he was used to it at this point. The pain and immobilization reminded him of just how trapped and alone he was. Most pilots daydream about rotating out for leave but even on leaves Jabari really didn’t have anyone to spend time with. He avoided flying home most of the time, his parents talking to him mostly on work felt like updating the ship log. Hana was on a long-haul flight to Pluto, not that she’d want to see him anyways. Their last meeting hadn’t gone well, he didn't handle the news of her boyfriend well. Not that she gave me a choice, he thought bitterly to himself, Trying to force me back into a relationship with her. He knew in his heart that they would never resolve their issues, but he couldn’t bring himself to let her go. It was selfish, but losing her would be losing the only person he felt cared about him. He needed her. He sighed and tried to stretch his neck, fighting the g-forces succeeding only in making himself more uncomfortable. He looked at the flight computer expecting the hand-shake request from the station's docking computer. Once the handshake was initialized the docking computer would guide his ship through the last stages of the landing. This accounted for local debris, traffic, really anything smaller than a school bus sized asteroid that his ships sensors wouldn’t pick up. The handshake request wasn’t there, so he tried again. He sat back in his crash couch and waited, it would take about 6 minutes to receive a reply at this distance.
“MUD-12. ER-3.4D”. Jabari stared at the computer, hoping more would follow. When it didn’t, he took a long draw on the hookah and stared off into space. Nemo Point hadn’t responded to any of his three handshake requests. After confirming his and the station's equipment were online and functioning properly, he panicked a little and logged the event. While communication blackouts were not unusual, missing multiple handshake requests was cause for alarm. These requests needed to be approved by a human suggesting either an abandoned point, or worse, an accident on the station. The computer's return was less than helpful, the code only confirming the message uploaded to the deep space relay network and letting him know to expect a reply in 3.4 days. Jabari took another look at the computer before deciding to accelerate a bit more. He turned on the cockpit's viewscreen and directed the sensors toward the station. Located deep in the Arach system, Nemo Point Research Station was a Sol-EoA Joint Project studying antimatter officially for application as a fuel source although everyone knew what that really meant. The station had around 500 people on board at a time, 350 scientists and the rest assorted crew. The station itself was composed of two mega-structures: the top, a donut shaped cylinder with a docking structure in the middle, spun around its axis to produce gravity. This structure was the living and storage areas and made up less than 50% of the total structure. The second superstructure was attached via a complicated lattice structure to the bottom of the ship dock and extended downwards for about a mile. This structure contained the labs, and could use either the artificial gravity generators or zero-g to customize the environment. This station was unique and extremely expensive. Antimatter is extremely reactive, being best studied and stored in low gravity environments. This drew Jabari to the contract, having the opportunity to visit a station very few people in the universe had access to excited him. Dr. Jones showed him around the first time he visited, the station was the cleanest station he had ever been on. The crew quarters were standard, what you’d expect to see on a midline cruiser. The labs however, had impressed even his untrained eye. One lab was filled entirely with absurdly shaped accelerators, another had several colored electromagnetic fields visible through the windows, and another yet was filled with floating black orbs. Jabari spent so much time watching the experiments. Dr. Jones ended up practically dragging him out of the research section. They snuck back down later to conduct their own experiments, before getting chased out by security. The reprimand was worth it. He kept in touch with the doctor for a while after their first encounter, he liked listening to her talk about her research and she admired his disregard for the rules. They’ve been speaking less recently though as she got involved with someone on the station. Jabari was used to this, nobody wanted to sit around waiting for a spacetrader to come home. The scopes focused on the crew section of the station. He was approaching from the top of the station and could only see the top section. He noted the exterior lights were still powered on, but no external windows were open. He changed to radio frequency and his stomach twisted in anxiety when he saw none of the usual signals bouncing around the station. Normally there would be millions of individual radio signals traveling to and from the station but he only saw signals going to. With his new speed, he would be arriving within the next hour.