T
Trent
Guest
Greetings, and welcome to " The first page".
TFP is a thread with a simple mission: To get people to write the first page of a Traveller scenario, plotline, story or, best of all, a combination of all 3.
You can of course comment on other people's efforts, make suggestions, etc, but please try to do at least one first page of your own on occasion.![Wink ;) ;)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
To seperate any comments you might make from your TFP submission, please type a "+++" at the beginning and end of your TFP submissions if the post contains other comments.
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The artifical gravity field was drawing more power than it normally did, by a long shot. Then again, so were the thrusters, Captain Tanhauser noted with a weary concern.
Of course given that the Amanojaku was climbing out of a gravity well with a full load of cargo and topped off fuel jump fuel tanks, it was only logical that the AG fields would have to work harder to keep all the extra mass oriented along the ship's relative frame of reference, and that the thrusters would have to work harder to lift all that mass against the natural gravity the ship was overcoming.
Still, it was putting a prolonged high demand on the old free trader's even older fusion plant. While it was still in the green it was closer to the yellow then anyone onboard was comfortable with.
That was the problem with frontier worlds that had no highport facilities at all, you had to put the ship through an entry and landing, then liftoff at max mass. One such operation put more wear on a ship's hull, frame and, obviously, landing gear than a score of highport to highport jumps.
Still, independents took what runs were available.
The radio chirped. Captain Tanhauser's concerned stare shifted to it, and intensified. There was no good reason for the people running what passed for a groundport on Rynn to be contacting them.
"Free trader manojacky, this is Rynn flight control, please respond this channel. Priority message." The "staff" of Rynn's "traffic control" had proven utterly unwilling to properly pronounce the ship's name. Or perhaps they were literally unable to.
"Vacc..." Tanhauser cursed under his breath, vacc being a far worse word than "shit" to anyone who worked in space.
"Rynn TC, this is free trader Amanojaku, responding." The captain resisted adding "What, did we forget to bribe one of the facility whores for liftoff clearance like we had to bribe you and everyone else down there?"
"Manojacky, we have a...situation down here. Seems like a week ago some folks went to check out something on an island in the south hemisphere. There'd been some sort of quake there a few weeks ago and some people'd reported seeing something weird, something like part of a mountainside had collapsed and there was some sort of metal underneath it.
A whole family went to look it over, and we lost contact with them yesterday. Today we lost contact with the relay satt that had LoS to the island."
Knowing what was coming next, the captain listened with half his mind, and gave the other half a few seconds to think over a reply to the inevitable question.
"As you're leaving, could you swing over the area and see if you can establish radio contact with those folks? We'll send you the coordinates to the island and the freqs they were using. Also, see if you can see what happened to the relay satt if you wouldn't mind."
The tone was very much faux mild, the cretin at the port wanted the situation looked into badly, but was afraid the crew of the Amamojaku would exploit him if they knew he was desperate. Years of deals on both sides of the law made it easy for Captain Tanhauser to spot a crooked hick trying to come off as cool and unconcerned.
Hitting the deaf button on the comm panel, Tanhauser asked JC, his pilot "How hard would it be to swing over that area low enough to take a look and try to hail anyone down there?"
After a moment of thought, the pilot replied in his usual laconic tones "It'd add about 90 minutes to us reaching jump range, not hard at all, it'd just take a little time."
The engineer growled from his alcove "After the way they sodded us down there, they've got some real balls asking us for anythi-" The speaker cut off Britt's justified grumble.
"Manojacky, the...missing people are a woman, her husband and their two kids, ages 12 and 15. No one's heard a word from them in nearly 30 hours, and there aren't many vehicles in town that could reach reach the island very well. In fact they took the best ones when they went to check out what we'd heard about it."
"Meaning that if someone down there owns a decent air vehicle he'd ask for money to borrow it, you tightassed, thieving bastard." All three of the Amanojaku's crew had the exact same thought at the exact same second, given their experiences on Rynn in the last 2 days.
Hitting the deaf button again to deactivate it, Tanhauser spoke "The is the free trader Amanojaku. We'll overfly the area and try hailing anyone on the island. If we get a distress call we may land to render aid. Send us the location and comm freqs.Out."
"Lex," Britt began "odds are they want us to land there so they can kill us and take the ship, or at least our cargo."
"Not likely." JC replied matter of factly "Rynn has a rep for overcharging and hidden charging, but nothing like piracy or murder. They don't get enough traffic for that sort of fece to go unnoticed. Also, our current cargo's not that valuable"
"One pass over the island, Britt. If there's a snowball's chance that a couple kids are in danger, I won't pass on helping them. And the kids didn't gouge us, you know."
"Yeah, yeah." Britt conceded reluctantly. One reson he stayed with the Amanojaku was that her captain wasn't a hardass or a prick, and would, on occasion, stick out his hand or even his neck to help someone who needed it, and he'd rather work for a guy like that than a lot of captains. Still, having to pay a slack jawed yokel who wouldn't have known his ass from a lanthanum grid to look at his engines and then pronounce them safe as part of a "legally mandatory" pre-liftoff inspection had raised the engineer's blood temperature to fusion level.
"'I'll take the comm and scope, and look over the island. JC, get us over it ASAP." Tanhauser began readying the ship's main imaging systems for an orbital surface visual recon.
Veering sharply from her previous straight ascension vector, the free trader Amanojaku began a precise arc across the planet's girth, swinging towards it's southern hemisphere.
+++
TFP is a thread with a simple mission: To get people to write the first page of a Traveller scenario, plotline, story or, best of all, a combination of all 3.
You can of course comment on other people's efforts, make suggestions, etc, but please try to do at least one first page of your own on occasion.
To seperate any comments you might make from your TFP submission, please type a "+++" at the beginning and end of your TFP submissions if the post contains other comments.
+++
The artifical gravity field was drawing more power than it normally did, by a long shot. Then again, so were the thrusters, Captain Tanhauser noted with a weary concern.
Of course given that the Amanojaku was climbing out of a gravity well with a full load of cargo and topped off fuel jump fuel tanks, it was only logical that the AG fields would have to work harder to keep all the extra mass oriented along the ship's relative frame of reference, and that the thrusters would have to work harder to lift all that mass against the natural gravity the ship was overcoming.
Still, it was putting a prolonged high demand on the old free trader's even older fusion plant. While it was still in the green it was closer to the yellow then anyone onboard was comfortable with.
That was the problem with frontier worlds that had no highport facilities at all, you had to put the ship through an entry and landing, then liftoff at max mass. One such operation put more wear on a ship's hull, frame and, obviously, landing gear than a score of highport to highport jumps.
Still, independents took what runs were available.
The radio chirped. Captain Tanhauser's concerned stare shifted to it, and intensified. There was no good reason for the people running what passed for a groundport on Rynn to be contacting them.
"Free trader manojacky, this is Rynn flight control, please respond this channel. Priority message." The "staff" of Rynn's "traffic control" had proven utterly unwilling to properly pronounce the ship's name. Or perhaps they were literally unable to.
"Vacc..." Tanhauser cursed under his breath, vacc being a far worse word than "shit" to anyone who worked in space.
"Rynn TC, this is free trader Amanojaku, responding." The captain resisted adding "What, did we forget to bribe one of the facility whores for liftoff clearance like we had to bribe you and everyone else down there?"
"Manojacky, we have a...situation down here. Seems like a week ago some folks went to check out something on an island in the south hemisphere. There'd been some sort of quake there a few weeks ago and some people'd reported seeing something weird, something like part of a mountainside had collapsed and there was some sort of metal underneath it.
A whole family went to look it over, and we lost contact with them yesterday. Today we lost contact with the relay satt that had LoS to the island."
Knowing what was coming next, the captain listened with half his mind, and gave the other half a few seconds to think over a reply to the inevitable question.
"As you're leaving, could you swing over the area and see if you can establish radio contact with those folks? We'll send you the coordinates to the island and the freqs they were using. Also, see if you can see what happened to the relay satt if you wouldn't mind."
The tone was very much faux mild, the cretin at the port wanted the situation looked into badly, but was afraid the crew of the Amamojaku would exploit him if they knew he was desperate. Years of deals on both sides of the law made it easy for Captain Tanhauser to spot a crooked hick trying to come off as cool and unconcerned.
Hitting the deaf button on the comm panel, Tanhauser asked JC, his pilot "How hard would it be to swing over that area low enough to take a look and try to hail anyone down there?"
After a moment of thought, the pilot replied in his usual laconic tones "It'd add about 90 minutes to us reaching jump range, not hard at all, it'd just take a little time."
The engineer growled from his alcove "After the way they sodded us down there, they've got some real balls asking us for anythi-" The speaker cut off Britt's justified grumble.
"Manojacky, the...missing people are a woman, her husband and their two kids, ages 12 and 15. No one's heard a word from them in nearly 30 hours, and there aren't many vehicles in town that could reach reach the island very well. In fact they took the best ones when they went to check out what we'd heard about it."
"Meaning that if someone down there owns a decent air vehicle he'd ask for money to borrow it, you tightassed, thieving bastard." All three of the Amanojaku's crew had the exact same thought at the exact same second, given their experiences on Rynn in the last 2 days.
Hitting the deaf button again to deactivate it, Tanhauser spoke "The is the free trader Amanojaku. We'll overfly the area and try hailing anyone on the island. If we get a distress call we may land to render aid. Send us the location and comm freqs.Out."
"Lex," Britt began "odds are they want us to land there so they can kill us and take the ship, or at least our cargo."
"Not likely." JC replied matter of factly "Rynn has a rep for overcharging and hidden charging, but nothing like piracy or murder. They don't get enough traffic for that sort of fece to go unnoticed. Also, our current cargo's not that valuable"
"One pass over the island, Britt. If there's a snowball's chance that a couple kids are in danger, I won't pass on helping them. And the kids didn't gouge us, you know."
"Yeah, yeah." Britt conceded reluctantly. One reson he stayed with the Amanojaku was that her captain wasn't a hardass or a prick, and would, on occasion, stick out his hand or even his neck to help someone who needed it, and he'd rather work for a guy like that than a lot of captains. Still, having to pay a slack jawed yokel who wouldn't have known his ass from a lanthanum grid to look at his engines and then pronounce them safe as part of a "legally mandatory" pre-liftoff inspection had raised the engineer's blood temperature to fusion level.
"'I'll take the comm and scope, and look over the island. JC, get us over it ASAP." Tanhauser began readying the ship's main imaging systems for an orbital surface visual recon.
Veering sharply from her previous straight ascension vector, the free trader Amanojaku began a precise arc across the planet's girth, swinging towards it's southern hemisphere.
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