Naturally, I turned off the power first. I've heard too many stories about pilots doing their own weapons maintenance who didn't. I wasn't actually surprised when I found out that my turret was jammed. All of my weapons have had quite a workout over the last couple days. Let's see, I thought as as I slid on my back under the hull of the Aedos, what all was there?. There were all of those Mollys who weren't happy with me mining the Dublin gold fields. They chased me all the way to Cambridge. I'd never seen them quite that determined. I wonder what they were so upset about? I thought as I shined my flashlight up at the underslung chaingun. Maybe it had something to do with that gunboat I took out the other day.
What else... There were the Hessians in Omega-5 that ambushed me at the jumphole. Luckily for me, they were distracted by a wing of Corsair ships long enough for me to get away. I took a gamble that the Corsairs would tolerate my presence slightly more than the Hessians and headed for their territory... as it happened, right through a minefield. That didn't help either. Come to think of it, I thought, that was the most likely place for the gun to take damage... aha!
There it was. I could tell immediately what had happened: a bit of shrapnel had pierced one of the barrels and lodged in it like a hatchet deep in a log. When that barrel had tried to fire, it had melted the shrapnel into an imperfect plug. The gun's internal diagnostics had eventually detected that there was a problem and shut down the barrel, but frankly I was lucky the whole gun assembly hadn't exploded.
The bad news, of course, was that I couldn't repair it. Blast, I thought as I slid out from under the ship, I'll have to get a specialist for this. The turret was too expensive to simply replace.
Well, it wouldn't have been, if it hadn't been for that malfunction... I was bitter about that too. After spending a very long time carefully mining chunks of rock containing alien organisms, I was halfway back to Cambridge to sell them when my cargo hold's radiation containment field collapsed. By the time I got it back up, it was too late: everything in my hold had been sterilized. More than three hundred thousand credits worth of organisms, gone just like that. And that's a lot of money to an independent trader like me.
Yes, my luck has been a bit rocky of late.
I climbed into my ship and hit the button to activate the information console. Nothing happened. I tried again...still nothing. Oh...right. I stepped around the corner, flipped a switch, and watched the ship's power grid come back online. Grinning sheepishly to myself, I returned to the console and fired it up. Time to start looking for a weapons repairman, I thought. The console loaded, and then informed me that I had a new message waiting for me.
Tannik,
We could use your help.
Head to the provided coordinates. I think you'll be very interested in what you see.
-Leroy Fenning
Attached to the message were some coordinates... quite a trip, way out in the Omicron systems. Well, this is interesting, I thought. I'd met Fenning once before, the first time I wandered deep into Omega space. I hadn't planned to keep in touch, but apparently he had. As it happened, he was one of the few people in Sirius that I felt like I could wholly trust.
Why wait? I thought. If the Zoners wanted my help, they would have it, and as soon as I could get there.
"Los Angeles Traffic Control, this is the Aedos, requesting permission to launch."
The ship roared as the engines spooled up for launch, vibrating every bone in my body. I grinned again. Space, I love this ship!
![[Image: aedos_mini.jpg]](http://students.cs.byu.edu/~sushi/aedos_mini.jpg)