On The Run

On The Run

You would think that with less then two hundred thousand humans left we would be united. We were not. Drifting in space, fractionalized we continued to exploit each other not learning from our mistakes.

The asteroids were our home now and, also our enemies home.
I had been captured by a small band of space pirates and set to work on a small mining operation overseen by no more then twelve of them.
There were thirty of us. We toiled on the machines, charged our life support as required.
Space pirates, the name seemed comical in a distant history, not here, these people would kill you if you were no use, it was survival out here, no use, into the recycler.

It was the chance we had been waiting for, it happened quickly and we seized the opportunity.  A meteor shower had us bunkered in the main cave complex.
The shower seemed like a small one, but life threatening nonetheless.
It was then that we all viewed a com, a small freighter, no escort, six clicks and closing through the HUDS in our space helmets.
They elected to take it, they sent six of their people and left the others to watch us.

Hell broke loose as a very large meteor crashed into the main complex.
It instantly killed one of them and four of us.
We were scattered, floating, some flung onto the nearby rocks and others into the void above.  I clicked my inertial dampeners and looked twenty meters back to see my drilling partner do the same.
It was then we made for the hoppers.
They were already on us as we powered the engines up, vertical lift, forward thrust, away.

Hand gun fire vibrated the hopper as we leveled off.
We arced about to look back and see we were being pursued.
The meteors buffeted my space buddy behind me as four hoppers pursued.
My hopper had a rocket launcher but no rockets I was hoping it was the same for our chasers.

We were throttling up to almost full speed one hundred meters a second.
Unless you are close to something you don’t notice speed in space.
Nothing is much close to anything.

I headed toward a pack of bigger asteroids for cover, our pursuers still behind one breaking away anticipating our maneuver into cover.
There was a flash as a rocket released and bore down upon us.
It hit the asteroid shattering debris as we moved behind it.
The maneuvering was allowing them to catch us as we had to slow a little to swerve about the asteroids.
We were not great pilots by any measure but we were determined to survive.
It was a combination of luck, and skill when as we came over the top and cornered to the right, a glint on the roid below, a base.

My buddy hit his dampeners  as the pirates bared down.
Perhaps they caught the glint of the sun reflecting off the solar panels and were startle for a split second.
They flew by my partner and he let fly a rocket into the nearest hopper as it flew by.
The explosion impelled it into it nearest companion and in the excitement the other two hoppers careened into the asteroid base.
Crash, Crunch.

That had been two days ago.
We were at least thirty clicks from the pirate base.
There may be only seven of them but they had friends, they would be coming and we knew not where we were.
The problem with broadcasting your antenna for a distress pickup out here in nowhere land is that you risk inviting the wrong kind of friends for collection.
The problem with not broadcasting is that you just don’t ever get found.
You could be right next to your savior and neither of you would know it, it all looks the same, grey, grey, grey…ooohhh gold, and then more grey.
Grey madness, that’s what kills the ill-equipped.
That and getting lost in a mining tunnel maze, that will kill you as well.

We were recycling the destroyed hoppers to get the abandoned base operating.
It had a good cave system for cover and the meteor showers were fairly light when they came, so far.
There was a good supply of uranium and other essential elements.

It was the end of the third day when we spotted a mining transport about 9 clicks out.
My buddy chose to try and make contact in hope that it was manned and not automated whilst I continued recycling what was left of the pirate hoppers.

He embarked in the smaller of the hoppers we had salvaged and I got back to the task at hand.
Breaking down a thruster module with my grinder, my coms lit up with my buddy’s message.
“You believe this!, I’m 2 clicks out and I missed the transport, it veered off.”
“And?”, I said.
“And”, he continued, “ We have a bigger established base over here, defenses are down or depleted.  I’m checking it out now.”

When I zeroed in on him he had located a vast underground system laden with large cargo holds, assemblers and refineries. On the surface was what appeared to be a massive recycler system for breaking down mid sized ships.
We found three bodies in the cave system but couldn’t figure if they were scavengers, pirates or the builders of the base.  There was a half reclyed or crashed ship floating above the recycler system, hard to tell what happened here.

We over looked the recycler system.
It was hap hazard , it looked like it would work but the craftsmanship was more your tinkering type.  Out here you were a miner, a scavenger, a pirate, a tinkerer or a space engineer.
Miners got by, they could fix what they had to but would always be miners.
Scavengers were much the same but normally ended up selling out there own kind out of necessity and became pirates.  The tinkerers kind of held it together and fared ok, some of them had become mercs for the outpost stations.  And then, there were the space engineers, they excelled, they made it all happen, they were humanities future.
And for all we knew they were all out in the freaking Ort Cloud somewhere because they were few and far between.

The pistons on this thing looked dodgy. Had it ever been used?
It could break up with the slowest momentum.
My buddy decided to get things going here and I headed back in the other hopper to secure more uranium.
We would split our chances on both bases, get the defenses up and build something to get us to back to Outpost LX or even Delta Base where ever that was.
We were space engineers, we’d make it happen.
If the pirates didn’t get here first.
We were on the run from them, from time and a hostile environment.

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