Day One - Bug-cicle

Day One

So I guess I'm starting this journal in case I die in space horribly and someone happens upon the vented corpse filled hulk of my ship and is curious about the frozen corpses they find on it. I'm new to this journal thing, but I'll do my best.

Let's see… where am I going and why?

Where is the planet of Zeztin, across the damned universe - or so it seems. It's really far, let me put it like that.

Why…?

Well, that's a story.

It was early in the morning three weeks ago and I was sleeping in my quarters on the cargo ship I captioned previous to taking up the position of captain of the Winter Saber, my bastard father's ship. I was woken by the knock on my door. When I opened it, my engineer was standing there looking rather saddened. We've known each other for a while, Martin and I, and he's always been sort of like a little brother too me from the moment we met.

He was sad to be the messenger delivering bad news.

A childhood friend who worked in the spacedocks had been shot in a robbery. Stupid cracked egg son of a bitch had tried to take a friggin' laser to protect some lady in the store where he worked. I guess he forgot in the moment that piercing lasers exist, however rare they might be, because she went and died too.

"You gonna be okay, Captain?" he asked me as I just sort of stared at the screen displaying space out the front of the ship.

"I'm fine. Need to make some calls. Pack your things. We'll be on Eezo soon."

I ain't got no reason to lie here. As soon as he left, I cried my eyes out and then made some calls.

When we got to the Dimensional Fold Compression Generator Beacon and wormhole jumped to the Eezo beacon I already had an idea of what was coming. When we got to the docks, my friend Elliot was a corpse and I was listed as his next of kin.

He had a will. It all happened fast. A lawyer met me on my way to pick up the body.

That's when I learned that he had asked me, in his will, to take his body back to Zeztin. He wasn't a Salk, he was a Novarin - big insectoid things. Gorgeous shiny carapace, an egg layer just like a Salk, but with four legs and a sort of centaur like arrangement.

He was a sweetheart, and he was… he wanted me to take him back to his home planet. I guess childhood friend is a bad name for it. When my mom shuffled off the mortal coil, he kind of raised me. He was a teenager at the time. I learned about ships from him.

Marty was with me at the time.

I cried some more.

Then I made some calls.

Some asshole got a hell of a deal on my cargo ship and the guys working for me were out of a job. As I walked into the morgue, I was already making the call to purchase a freezer-coffin. Sure enough, it was Elliot. I made arrangements, blah blah blah.

Marty was surprised that I was… kind of rich, I guess. I'd kept my bastard father's inheritance hidden from everyone. No way I wanted folks knowing I was the kid of a space pirate, fuck that. I worked every day of my damned life from age fourteen on and I wasn't about to stop because I got some cash and a big ass ship with a mess of cannons on it. So the ship had sat in a long-term docking structure.

Well, that's that.

Elliot is a bug-cicle in the hold. Marty is in his quarters. I'm sitting on the bridge in the comfortable captain's chair that smells like dust and my dead father's apparently way too strong cologne which I found in the captain's quarters, and I'm… wondering if I'm an idiot.

But this… this is important to me, and I'm rich enough I don't need a job for a long time.

They're fuelling the ship now. Tomorrow, we go through the Dimensional Compression Fold Generator Beacon's wormhole all the way to Lozious, and from there… fuck knows.

That's all for now, Journal.

That's all I got 'cept some tears.