Chapter 1

A blaring, ship-wide alarm woke me up at 02:43. I hastily ran to the bridge, rubbing sleep out of my eyes so I could see the monitors. The SuperLight drive was flashing an angry red MALFUNCTION status. I squelched the alarm, and tried to pull up detail for the problem. The system helpfully told me that there was a malfunction, and that the ship’s computer had rerouted me to the nearest habitable planet. A blue-green ball was on the main viewscreen, but I was focused on the engineering station. The most detail it would give me was that the drive had malfunctioned, but not why. I opened comms to send a distress signal. MALFUNCTION. Again, no detail as to what malfunctioned, or why. I initiated a full system reboot. With my luck, Martin had sabotaged my ship to get back at me once he’d secured his new berth on his cousin’s ship. Asshole. The reboot took what seemed like ages to complete. SuperLight drive and communications were both still malfunctioning, and the system wouldn’t say why. I ran a diagnostic, which isolated the problem to the SuperLight coils. The comms were down for the same reason – the SuperLight coils were malfunctioning. Martin had run a tune-up about a month ago. The diagnostics wouldn’t tell me why they were malfunctioning, let alone how to fix it.

FTL communication used the same coils as the drive to send and receive data. The SuperLight coils were big and power hungry. Fast freighters and courier ships didn’t have a separate coil assembly for communications, as there wasn’t enough room, and the coils were too much mass, which would draw too much power and require a larger reactor. I deployed an emergency beacon that would transmit a distress signal so long as it was in the sunlight. Too bad the signal crawled along at the speed of light. I couldn’t be too far from the transit corridor, since the computer had been able to reroute me fairly close to this planet. A check of the NaviComp said I was two and a half light years away from the main transit corridor. Thirty months for the distress beacon to reach the area where a passing ship could pick it up. I would make planetfall in about an hour. Survey data said that there were edible plants and animals on the planet, Teldar 2, but I sure as hell didn’t want to live out the rest of my days eating alien dogs and saving the food I had on board for special occasions. I mean, I had enough food to last me about a year, and I could stretch that almost indefinitely by adding local game to my meals. The emergency survival computer would show me how to kill, clean, and even butcher my kills. It could help me track down game by linking to the ship’s sensors or even the survival satellites I would deploy in low orbit just before I landed. I could survive, but Teldar 2 was uninhabited. I would be alone for at least those thirty months.

Once on the surface, I shut down the engines. The computer had picked a temperate location on the planet where game was plentiful in a clearing up on a hill surrounded by trees. It would be my home for the foreseeable future. Not having to run the gravity drive or SuperLight engines, the reactor had enough fuel to keep the ship running for millennia. The survival computer did warn me that the weather would start to turn cold in about eight months, and the game would likely migrate away. I could theoretically move the ship, but that seemed silly. The hill I was on seemed like a good spot, and there was a small lake nearby. The survival computer gave me instructions on how to construct a crossbow using parts found in the engineering bay, but I didn’t need to resort to anything so crude. I had a half dozen shipping containers in my hold that were loaded with all kinds of weapons and ammunition. I set to breaking open the customs seals and searching them for rifles and ammunition. The first container was tightly packed with crates of what the shipping manifest said were MANPADS, Man-portable Air Defense Systems. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to shoot surface to air missiles at my dinner, so I closed that one up. The second container had crates of 7.5mm precision rifles. I had to empty half the can to get to them, digging through crates of 5.5mm automatic rifles, squad automatic rifles in both 5.5mm and 7.5mm, and even a few M115 15mm heavy machineguns. I pulled a case out of one of the crates and opened it. There were two rifles inside, packed in protective foam. There were also a pair of cleaning kits, and optics. I took the case to my cabin.