These people were going to be my financial ruin.
First of all, the technology I was so keen on trafficking in was a bust. It turned out that all their neat tricks were gravitic. They'd mastered control over gravity - many species do at some point - and if their progress continued along these lines they'd discover in about a hundred years why species tend to not go any farther. Planetary-bound redirection of gravity tended to have destabilizing effects on said planet's orbit. Less fortunate civilizations have had their planets spin off into their suns or out beyond the bounds of their solar system. I could warn the Poln to these problems, but there's really no point. Gravitic defenses are all that's keeping them from being overwhelmed by the Anor, and that was unlikely to be a permanent situation - especially once they figured out how to use such technology offensively. The Poln did not want their planet doomed to the fiery guts of a star, but they held their enemy's planet in about the same regard as their enemy did theirs. It would be an interesting war and I personally was glad that, very soon, I was going to be nowhere near it.
The second reason why this is costing me is that the contract did specify that I had to bring all three pilots to the planet in good condition. Curly wasn't dead - thankfully - but by the time he had finished the heavy regimen of therapy and micro-reconstructive surgery on his brain that would be required for him to be able to function again, years would have passed. I was only getting paid for the other two.
I could have made up this cash - and then some - by letting the Polnian research crew have my hyperdrive. They were the first people to greet me upon my arrival in the city, before even the ambulance for Curly. Our driver had radioed back his best guess at what we had said - my translator felt like it was nearly overheating with effort - and apparently the story of the Anor drive had spread. They seemed to think we had stolen one of their enemy's rigs. Had that actually been the case I wouldn't have minded parting with it, but my rig was centuries more advanced. I figured the war was bloody enough as it was without me giving them more weaponry. Besides. non-interference laws are entirely too strict (and nearly universal) on the matter of selling advanced technology to comparatively primitive cultures. A pilot who violates them tends to make a number of enemies both in law enforcement and - more worrying - in the underground criminal syndicates whose toes I would be stepping on. Besides, it's my policy to only smuggle harmless things.
I spent the next few days informing the research crew what parts of my ship they could take with them for profit (none of it), checking up on Curly, and haggling over my contract with the Borderlands Construction rep. In other words, it was a rather bitter parting. Larry and Moe still blamed me, of course, and now that they were out of immediate danger and therefore no longer really needed my help in order to survive, they had decided that they weren't speaking to me anymore. At the beginning of the journey this would of course not have bothered me in the least, but right now it was just reminding me at the damage I'd done. There's usually a subtle feeling of accomplishment at the end of any contract - even milk runs like the postal service tend to leave me with a 'good job' feeling. This one was just leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth and a pressing need to go somewhere else and put all of this behind me.
My ship was returned to me on this last day; it turns out that flying it to the city would have been a perfectly safe undertaking so long as I'd been broadcasting who I was and hadn't flown above a few miles or so. Apparently the Poln had managed a gravitic planetary shield which was in place at some non-specific altitude. Anything passing through it would be violently hurled to the ground. Even if I'd managed to run the blockade, it seemed, I would have had to use the hyperdrive. This information did nothing for me now, of course, and in no way lessoned the crushing responsibility I felt and would feel for a good long week or so before I forgot. Before uploading the part of this record I'd been keeping on the panel I gave one last goodbye to Larry and Moe, even though I knew they wouldn't return it, and I left an account on Curly's ship computer of my side of the story so at least he'd know what I'd been trying to do (i.e. not get him killed)
--
Writing from the ship now. I'm in orbit, the Anor ships are converging on me with vengeance on their minds, and I'm sick of this place and never want to come back.
I'm hitting the Random button.
<!--Here's the point at which Ledford's various paranoias start to become justified. Though we aren't watching him just yet, we were on his trail. As neither the Poln nor Anor had formally petitioned us to help mediate their dispute, there was no action we could take besides our usual discouraging of mercenaries jumping to one cause or the other. We hadn't even had to take this measure, as the Anor blockade was very effective in this. Until, of course, the captain had somehow succeeded where all others failed. As you know, the trail grew cold here, but it was the first real lead we'd had for a while. The various postal services were too low profile for him to appear on the radar, though if we'd known we'd likely have tried anyway.
The Random button goes a long way toward explaining why the trail continued to go cold.
-->Ah, the Random button. This particular invention is mine alone; I don't think I've heard of another ship with one. A few other pilots I've talked to have simulated the experience in software, but it's nowhere near the lengths I've gone through with this button.
I hacked up the random button in software at first, too. Like many a pilot, I eventually come to a point where I'm leaving one contract without picking up another one. Traveling with an empty cargo bay, with nothing to escort, and with no prospects is disheartening, so I need something to entertain me while I'm en route to a trade hub. For that matter, I need to pick a trade hub. While going to the nearest one sounds like a reasonable idea, you tend to get stuck in a rut that way. After all, it was likely that one which sent you out on the job that ended with nothing else for you to do in the first place. So, for the first iteration, I created a program for the navigational computer that would choose a random hub from the list of hubs in my maps and then take me there.
That didn't work well at all, as I'd hit the button, see where the navigational computer was heading us, decide I didn't like it, and hit the button again until I got someplace I liked. This defeated the purpose as, being impatient, I tended to pick nearby hubs and this again got me stuck in a rut. The second iteration was designed to hide the destination from me, but it was the work of five minutes to slice into the program and figure out where we were headed. The third iteration I implemented completely in hardware. I re-wired the navigational computer so that it'd never tell me where I was going when Random mode was engaged. This, it turns out, was the work of about ten minutes to undo and decipher our destination.
The fourth iteration remains today. In one of these hubs, I took out the navigational computer entirely and swapped it with some nonessential system, thus making the nav computer completely inaccessible from within the ship. I dismantled the computer and re-built it, using tools that were only available within the hub. There was no way it was telling me my destination.
Only once did I completely stop the ship en route, power it entirely down, suit up, go outside, construct in the vacuum of space the tools which I would need, dismantle the navigational computer and then force it to tell me where it was headed. It took longer to do that than it would have taken for me to simply wait until I got there.
It's good enough.