006

Game Date: August 14th, EY217

Location: Labrys City (planet: Kali, system: Vishnu)

Events: military meetings and a curious lack of damage to the Steel Hummingbird

It's time to leave Labrys City and ideally not get shot out of the sky. Jillian plots a course working in the positions of the rings and the missile launchers. Hopefully, she's worked it out well enough that they'll slip past anyone armed and hostile. They take off, JIllian continually scanning the sensors and Malcolm keeping a finger near the afterburner switch. It seems to work; if they're noticed, no one makes the effort to pursue them.

Flying to Shiva, Homeworld's base in this system, takes a day, during which no one shoots at or crashes into the Steel Hummingbird. The crew opt to land at Bhopuhr Spaceport instead of The Ashram, as the Homeworld military's base is on the surface. There is the usual grumbling about landing fees, but less so about the cost to repair the plating on the Hummingbird's cargo hold. After all, without a cargo hold she's not much of a courier ship. Jillian and Malcolm head off to the military offices that are very near the spaceport while Volkova stays on the ship to oversee the repairs and Bishop heads off to Bhopuhr's city centre on his own mysterious business.

Jillian and Malcolm are allowed into the outer section of the base and the receptionist notes down their names and the events they describe. He also takes the gunsight photos of Volkova's. He leaves for a bit and the crew have to stew in a waiting room full of dreadfully out-of-date magazines like "Gunsight Review" and "Officers' Quarterly". Their information does seem to get some attention, and they are eventually ushered into Major Shiv Sekhon's office. He's generally uninterested and pudgy, but does listen to them. What they say seems important enough that he'll have the destroyer Nehru sent to Kali to check things out. Since they were both in the military, do they have any interest in going along on the Nehru? No, no, they don't, and they also need to get going. A last-minute burst of inspiration has them fill out a claims form to cover the damage incurred during the attacks on Kali, and they are on their way as quickly as possible. They left the military out of dislike, and have no desire to linger on a base any longer than they absolutely need to.

Back on the ship, the repairs are done, despite Volkova's complaints at the shoddiness of the work. With a useable cargo hold and no jobs, it's time to see what work is available. There is always the possibility of getting fresh produce from Labrys City and selling it to hungry miners farther out in the system, but no one wants to risk another flight to Kali until the military has cleared things up there. The Steel Hummingbird's finally in decent shape, after all. Bhopuhr Spaceport has a jobs board, as do most spaceports, and there are two possibilities that lie in the Hummingbird's capacity and the crew's interest. The first is a passenger run to the Walküren system to see Fafner's rings. The rings are spectacular enough that even out here on the frontier there are tourists. It's a gang of six tourists of the backpacking variety; not a lot of money in this job, but enough to pay their way and it should be a safe run: Walküren is more densely populated than Shiva. The second job is a run of some mining equipment to the Green Star mining colony on Lakshmi, one if Indra's moons. Some of the equipment has unexpectedly broken, and the regular supply ship Heldram won't be making its run for another three weeks. It will be cheaper for Green Star to get someone to courier the equipment than to get the full-sized transport ship out early for such a minimal delivery. Given the small size of Vishnu's system the second job will be quick and it's obviously legitimate. They head off to the Green Star offices, papers are signed, and the job is on. The cargo is in a warehouse in the spaceport, so once Bishop returns from his jaunt with some new clothes the cargo is quickly loaded and the Hummingbird, with lots of unpainted exterior panels due to the recent spate of repairs, takes off for the outer system.

Indra is distant for Vishnu: past Kali, past the Alice jump gate, past Ganga (where the Resplendent Dragon was attacked). It's currently directly out from Vishnu, so the 3AU distance takes half a week of largely uneventful flying. Two and a half days into the flight, as Indra fills the windows, Jillian notices something on sensors. It's a very subtle reading, but she's skilled enough and the Hummingbird has good sensors and an advanced sensor suite to boot. They're being scanned.

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Bishop's Bedpost Notch Count: Zero. (running total: 4)

Volkova's Bedpost Notch Count: Zero (running total: 1)