The cheek!
The bloody cheek!
He's only been with me two months, and he wants a new ship...
He's got a good point though, as per flippin' usual. Always bleeding right he is...
Anyway, we've got the old Train from some guy on Waterloo, it's called the Kernowek, which I believe is Cornish for Cornish. Cornish is an ancient Earth language, spoken by the people of Cornwall, a British county. They stopped speaking that language in the 1500's I think, which was centuries before the exodus, but still, it's a catchy name. [Said Ker-no-ik]
Anyway, we got our tag-along accountant guy, who's not such a bad guy. He's called Oliver Strick, and he's quite a good mechanic as well as an accountant. They're two skills I wouldn't normally associate with each other, but hey. Seeing as he's free for us to have along, though he does stop up skipping anything on our Interspace profit declarations, we may as well keep him.
Charles fell in love with our kitchen the second he saw it. Within an hour, it was sparkling. We've worked out a new rota on this ship, I fly most of the time, Charles just potters about, deals with the turrets, communications, sensors and such, and Oliver does, well, god knows. We've got rid of our old tea maker, for a shiny new machine in the kitchen, with which Charles will serve the pilot (me) tea throughout our trips. Talking of which, *peers into mug* oh, still got some, *slurp* Anyway, we've got standard quarters, small and pathetic, but there's three, not the two Charles though there'd be. They're pokey, but enough to sleep in, and the bridge, as I'm calling it, is big enough for us to sit around, drink, play card and act as general living space. Oliver's got the largest quarters, just to stop him moaning, because he needs space for a desk for his paperwork.
Well, Oliver's just finished checking the last of the paperwork, Charles has got the food and topped the water tank up, and I've finished the pre-flight checks. Let's do this. Wait... *slurp* ... *glug glug* Ahh... Now we're ready!
Oh my god, those Neanderthals. Since when has the only diplomacy for pirates been: give them what they want and run. James should learn diplomacy. Try to haggle. Nah, he'd wouldn't understand that...
Well, it was nice of Charles to get another two in/output terminals for the log, now there's one on the bridge and one in each of the quarters. I never fly this ship, spend most of my time trying to make sure Interspace don't reposes this ship for these two's idiocy. All they do is flippin' yell at me all day. Will admit, it's funny sometime though.
Well, we were just landing on Nuremburg one time, and Charles came into my quarters saying we've got a new route. We'd hooked up with another trader, known as Mephta, I believe, who could improve our profits with only a minor detour. We would still take the Military Vehicles to the Macduff (Or a Kusarian battleship if some KNF guys caught us supplying Bretonia right through their territory) and then Mephta had found a jump hole to Edinburgh. Now I wasn't overly happy with the jump hole idea, but we were promised it was safe. When in Edinburgh, we would pick up VIPs from the Luxury Liner. Now this I really wasn't happy with. A Train isn't a passenger vehicle. But Mephta had said that if we bought some special cargo pods for our train, the passengers would be quite comfortable, and a lot of the VIPs didn't want to show up on shuttle logs for whatever reason. Plus non-passenger ships aren't an obvious target if someone's trying to get a bunch of VIPs to take hostage. We would then take the VIPs to Augsburg Orbital Colony in Munich. From there they could take inter-connecting flight to other parts of Rheinland. After that we went came back to Nuremburg and picked up Some more Military Vehicles and went again.
Now I really wasn't overly happy about this at all, but James had made up his mind, so we got some passenger-suitable cargo pods (They could hold normal cargo as well, thankfully) and off we went.
That trip was quiet, with the only trouble being a pirate at the Leeds jump gate, who we would have bumped into even on our old route, he asked for 1 million credits from Mephta and us, which Mephta paid promptly while James was panicking. James wired Mephta 500,000 to cover our side of the pirate tax, and we carried on to the Macduff. Going through to Edinburgh was uneventful, unless you count our autopilot trying to ram that Planet Gaia. The return trip was just as uneventful, and I agreed we could stick with it. After all, Interspace may frown on shipping passengers, but money's money, and more money's even better, so they won't mind too much.
A dark haired man approached the seated officer. He had in his hands a 'black-box' from a destroyed ship. The howling Harris winds from outside the facility rattled the windows, and the young man shivered as he walked. He coughed lightly to get the officers attention.
"Sir, we found a flight recorder in the ice field, urm, it's, urm."
The officer stood up and walked round to the front of her desk, scowling at the young man. She was an imposing person, seemingly mad about everything, and she snatched the box off the man and turned back to her desk without uttering a word.
"I'll... uh, show myself out, ma'am"
The young man left, and the officer wired the flight recorder into her computer, sighing at the prospect of having to read and report all of the data within.
This was her report:
Flight recorder collected.
Ship destroyed approx. 1 year ago, location unknown, but flight recorder drifted to A5, Tau 31.
Ship name: Unknown
Ship class: Transport
Ship ID: Interspace Commerce
Casualties: 3 - James Miller, Charles Breen & Oliver Strick
Cause of destruction: KNF attack, likely due to cargo of Military Vehicles bound for Battleship Macduff.