The Journal of Alan Ledford
by Roger Ostrander
Let me introduce myself.
Captain Alan Ledford, freelance starship pilot extraordinaire. You'll never find a pilot more daring and adventurous than I! You can pay me less, too, because as a good guy I always work for what's right and good!
Now that we've placated the people who expect such qualities from their pilots, let me actually introduce myself.
Captain Alan Ledford, freelance starship pilot ordinare. People say I'm 'daring' and 'adventurous' but really it's more along the lines of 'want to get paid' and 'willing to go into hostile areas because that's where the money is.' The last bit about being a good guy is, as much as I like to project an embittered-mercenary-captain image, mostly true. I stay on the right side of the law. I take on the 'good' jobs like mail delivery and moving food supplies to backwater colony planets. I don't pirate.
Let me elaborate on that point. When people hear the phrase 'freelance starship pilot', they think 'pirate'. This is because that's what the movies call pirates. In these movies, there are always two pirates - one, the one we call the 'freelance pilot', the bad-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold that we know will always do the right thing, and the other, the truly evil pirate who we see at the beginning of the movie hijacking a shipment of puppies and then setting fire to the ship. Never do you see the actual freelance pilots, the ones who are doing boring things like resupplying trade convoys or haggling for a slightly better deal on bulk quantities of poorly-manufactured rice. That's what an actual freelance pilot does.
Now, you're probably asking yourself, "If this guy's so boring, why am I rifling through his memoirs?" Well for one thing, if you're reading this then I'm dead. Or possibly I've been captured by one of the many factions who hates me specifically or my species in general and you're the person they've assigned to find evidence against me. There stands a chance that you're a prankster practicing his slicing skills and you've managed to break into the computer I'm keeping the notes on and go through them. If that's the case, I commend you, because I stole the security technology from back when I was military years ago and I've been improving it ever since. So no, I will not hold the hackery against you.
Back to the point about being boring. Just because I'm on the level and an upstanding citizen hardly means that... well, it hardly means that I'm on the level or an upstanding citizen. Laws vary wildly from place to place and there's no way to be able to follow them all at once. I inadvertently smuggled forbidden goods into a sector once; after I learned that they were prohibited - certain religious artifacts, in this case - I made it a point to continue smuggling them. They were harmless, they brought good money, and they tweaked the nose of the various authorities who didn't want them around. All good reasons in my book.
There are also pirates. The real sort of pirates, the puppy-looting sort. When you're around for a while you know where they'll strike (borders, areas with underfunded patrols) and where they won't (central planets, heavily escorted convoys, anywhere they stand the remotest chance of being caught). Regardless, I've been in a few firefights. My ship was once a factory-original Merchant Cruiser. MCs, as a rule, do not generally carry weaponry. This is not to say that they're forbidden to, but it is frowned upon and of course there are the sectors which outlaw the practice entirely. My ship is packed to the gills with weaponry. Standard and non-standard lasers, launchers for missiles of all sorts - including a number of nukes and nastier items, the typical package of EM warfare gear, and a few little toys I'd either whipped up myself or kludged together based on half-remembered military technology. The first few times I encountered pirates, they took me for an unarmed cruiser. To get into certain sectors, after all, I had to project an aura of helplessness. It was, fortunately for me and unfortunately for them, a completely false aura. Strangely enough, I had little trouble with pirates after the first year or so of my freelance career. Word gets around.
Enough with the small talk. Let's get started.