Tejori Lotor
Only the bright future lays ahead...
She began the laborious process of disconnecting the converter from its junction. It took patience and care, because Tejori was, in essence, trying to remove a component of the hyperdrive system that had never been designed to be interchangeable. In any other circumstance, it would've been considered safer and much more efficient simply to pull the entire hyperdrive array, right down to the engines, and reinstall a new one. For all the obvious reasons, that wasn't an option. Tejori knew she could've managed the physical separation of the chamber from the rest of the engine by herself, but once she'd done so she just as quickly realised she would never have been able to remove it from the ship alone. She simply wasn't strong enough.
#
The ship was exactly as Tejori had left it, undisturbed and silent. She slid her speeder into cover at the aft end of the ship, then stopped and listened to the silence of the desert. There was no wind. There was no sound but her own breathing. She shivered, rubbed her aching, cold hands together, heard the sand whispering beneath her feet as she walked to the loading ramp and keyed the passcode. The ramp lowered on its hydraulics, the noise of it sudden and all the louder in the stillness of the night.
Night. The most dangerous time to be out in the Graveyard. The night belonged to the predators. More than once she’d nearly died here. And the same potential killer was behind every near miss.
Greed.
Greed took more lives in the desert than any other factor. Technically people were eaten, or starved, or smashed their brains all over a deck after falling a hundred metres. But greed made them do it. It made them push themselves beyond what was safe.
She climbed aboard, then shut and locked the ramp behind her. It was dark in the main compartment, lit by only the faint glow of starlight creeping in from the cockpit corridor. She followed the light into the cockpit and lowered herself into the pilot's seat. She pulled her goggles down so they hung at her neck and laid her night-stick across her thighs.
She felt foolish. She'd been so certain that she would arrive to find the ship already gone or, if she was lucky, find someone in the process of trying to steal it. She had ridden through the Graveyard and across the Crackle and risked gnaw-jaws and frostbite and crashing all because she couldn't bring herself to trust anyone.
She was so tired. She’d worked two days around the clock to fit the converter. On paper, the ship could fly. So she’d gone back to her home to gather the belongings she needed and get off this rock.
She shut her eyes. She felt sleep tugging at her, pulling her down. She half-dreamt of being warm, of being small, lost memories trying to swim their way to the surface. She opened her eyes, and it was still night. The stars shimmered, limitless in the sky. She closed her eyes again, then opened them. At the lip of the dune ahead of her, she saw shadows moving.
She started awake, one hand tightening around her night-stick. She wasn't entirely certain she hadn't been dreaming. She slid forward in the pilot's seat, almost onto her knees on the cockpit floor, using the flight console to conceal herself.
The shadows moved again. Two figures were descending the dune toward the ship. She couldn't quite make them out, and then she saw two more shapes cresting the dune, leading luggabeasts.
Four Teedos coming toward her.
As they drew closer, Tejori could make out details. All the Teedos were armed, most of them with staves but one had a rifle. She couldn't see their markings in the darkness, but she didn't need to. They had come either to take the ship or to destroy it. It didn't matter. Either way, Tejori wouldn't let them.
There was a difference between being able to fly a ship , Tejori had flown a VCX-100 light freighter for almost a year now. At least virtually. Since she found the spaceship she had spent the better part of a year reassembling, she’d loaded this ship onto her flight-sim and performed each and every variation of manoeuvre the computer could throw at her.
It was a good program, or at least she imagined it was. She could select any number of ships to fly, from small repulsor-driven atmospheric craft to a wide variety of fighters, all the way up to an array of stock freighters. She could set destinations, worlds she'd never visited and never imagined she would, and scenarios, from speed runs to obstacle courses to system failures.
At first, she'd been truly horrible at it, quite literally crashing a few seconds after takeoff every time. But she learned. She learned so much that there was little the program could throw her way that would challenge her now. She'd gotten to the point where she would, quite deliberately, do everything she could think of to make things hard on herself, just to see if she could get out of it. Full-throttle atmospheric reentry with repulsor-engine failure? No sweat. Multiple hull breach deep-space engine flameout? A walk in the park.
But despite knowing the hyperdrive was functional and communicating cheerfully with the navicomputer. Despite understanding that, at the flick of a switch, the repulsor engines would be humming along at optimal efficiency. Even though she knew the pressure seals on all the external access ways were tight, and the atmosphere was stable, steady, and comfortable, she was nervous. Because this wasn’t a sim and one mistake didn’t mean you got to run the programme again.
She flicked a switch from her crouching position. There were two familiar warning lights flashing on the console, and each was nonessential; one told Tejori that the water tanks were empty, and the other told her that the ship was overdue for its scheduled twenty thousand light-year maintenance.
#
As she exited the atmosphere, she felt alive in a way she’d never felt before. She’d run away from Maggot when she was fourteen. That felt good. She’d made it to the age of eighteen. That was almost a miracle, but felt nothing like this.
She hollered as loudly as she could, making so much noise, she didn’t hear the warning sounds as one by one, warning lights started to blink on. But she saw them.
Outside of the cockpit was endless space. Beautiful. But then so was the sand of the desert. And like that natural phenomena, it was the endless nature of it that would kill you.
At a loss for what to do, she did the only thing that made any sense. She hit the emergency distress beacon and went to find her tool-kit.
[member="Kurt Meyer"]
