I briefly met with the pilots of the tugs that would be dragging the multiple millions of tons of raw materials and equipment. Not a Tenellian among them, thankfully, as my head already ached from the conversation earlier that day. Half of them I couldn't even identify the species of, though a little time at the computer would remedy that. One thing I could tell, however, was that they were all native to the Borderlands.
The Borderlands - at least, these particular borderlands, there are about 1200 different areas by that name - were an area on the edge of the Anashi Conglomerate, a loose grouping of star systems and species that's about as organized as the name implies. They're the border between the conglomerate and the vast Unsettled Areas. In actuality, the aforementioned areas call themselves the Torkund Collective and refer to the Conglomerate as unsettled. There's a long and tedious story behind why the two refuse to acknowledge each other, and while I won't bother putting it all here I will likely get bored enough during the trip to read the whole thing.
Yes, bored. I signed on for this venture in the hopes that I'd get to see a little bit of excitement out here. Instead, it turns out that there's no offensives planned against either the station or the people building it, my employers knew this fact all along, and it was in fact their policy to have an experienced combat pilot along for insurance purposes and to teach the new kids a thing or two.
Yeah, new kids. While the tug captains were all old hands at their job, the other three escorts were not. The company was looking for someone experienced because nobody else given the job of protecting the cargo was.
In other words, I was flying with rookies.
Now, there are certain advantages to flying alongside newbies. For one thing, anything I say to them becomes gospel. This isn't because I'm famous, or even because they know who I am, but just because of the fact that I'm old and have been doing this a while, and must therefore have some sort of idea what's going on. This means that, any time I talk to them, they are impressed. The topic doesn't matter - I shared my stories about the postal service deliveries with them, and they were gaping in awe of my prowess. I didn't exaggerate, either. I told them what I'd written down here. And I'm not exaggerating here, as it happens, because why would I bother keeping a journal if I'm not going to keep an accurate one?
There are certain disadvantages to flying with rookies as well, I've discovered. For one, they never have anything interesting to say. If I'm lucky, this means that they'll realize this fact and keep quiet. If I'm not, they will think that I want to hear every event in their life, perhaps as a way of re-living my earlier days. I don't need them for that, that's part of the reason I'm keeping the journal. The journal's quieter and shuts up when I want it to, too.
Other disadvantages include the fact that they've got questions. These questions are either going to be extremely basic - ones they should already know the answers to before they even step into a cockpit - or so bizarre as to make no sense whatsoever. As an example of the first, one pilot asked me earlier for the best mixture of air for a combat situation. Forgetting the fact that his atmosphere and biology are entirely different from mine and therefore I'd have no idea, there's also the little tidbit that his on-board computer has this information. An example of the second would be the poor misguided pilot who asked me if the dirt tasted different on different worlds. At first I took it for a translator mistake, but no, that's actually what he asked.
The point is, as soon as the novelty of being able to have people pay attention to my stories wears off - from experience, this will not take long - I'm going to start getting really annoyed at my charges.
The communicator is blinking while I'm entering this. I'm informed that it's the dirt-tasting pilot, the one I've named Moe. My translator is top-of-the-line, but all translators have a soft spot when it comes to names. They either translate to some sort of gibberish phrase which is hardly useful as a name or they give up completely. Mine is the former, but I've hacked it around enough so that it lets me give names to individuals and then sticks by them. My three cohorts are Larry, the obvious-answer asking one, Curly, the quiet one who's bugged me the least of the three and therefore in my opinion has the greatest potential, and Moe, the dirt-eater.
"Captain Ledford," Moe asked, "What if - what if one of us turned out to be an Anor spy!? Wouldn't that be cool? The rest of us would have to hunt him down!"
No, we wouldn't. I didn't care if one of the pilots were a spy from the other side. I was reasonably sure that this was not the case, as none of them were even familiar with either Poln or Anor and, like me, couldn't care less about whatever dispute they had. Even if one had been a spy, however, my job was to escort the cargo and protect it, and since the job of the spy in this situation would just be to gather information, I likely wouldn't care.
I only said a little bit of that, and I coached it in kinder terms, but Moe got the hint and stopped bugging me. The communicator light remained off for an entirety of thirty seconds before I got a call from Larry.
"Captain Ledford, sir," Larry was trying to look very professional and it was all I could do to stifle laughter. "I've been looking at our course along lane 971 here, and I've found it brings us very close to the Yotian Anomaly. Do you want me to figure out an alternate course?"
Larry was obviously very proud at having found a flaw in my course, but there were two problems with his reasoning. The first being that it wasn't my course at all, but rather the Borderlands Construction Corporation's course that they'd handed down from on high. The second problem was that he had succumbed to the public's view of the Anomaly, which was that it was a horrible scar in space from which nobody returned alive. This was only half true - it was indeed a horrible scar in space, but they wouldn't be able to place a lane anywhere near it if it had even a tenth of the horrible power it's reputed to have. I gently broke the news to Larry and he not-so-gently terminated the communication.
Ah yes, here comes the second part of Fun With Rookies, wherein they decide that you're just an old man who rambles too much and is out to quash their fun. At least it's quieter.