Have to say, that’s the first time I’ve had that happen. Usually, I have to detail to the captain the pecking order. Especially if they’re former military officers and not used to having a civvie ether-jump nav on board.
No, not all ether-jump navs are as bitchy as I am, but I have the right to be, if you’ll look at my successful record. There’s areasonI’m the highest-paid ether-jump nav out there, in terms of base salary. There’s areasonthat, as a freelancer, every time I post I’m available, a bidding war kicks in with captains and corporations trying to seduce me to their vessels.
So far, I’ve stuck with Maxim Colonies ships, or ships contracted to them.
Yes, I’m a cocky prick. Because the only personnel scarcer than ether-jump engineers and techs are ether-jump navigators. Just because you can fix and operate an ether-jump engine doesn’t mean you’re qualified to plot a course with one.
Besides, my record speaks for itself. It’s not bragging if it’s true.
By coalition law, youmusthave an ether-jump-certified navigator on board to ether-jump. We not only run the jump, butapproveit, too. Captains can lose their licenses if they try to dodge that, and the ship’s owner can face massive fines and penalties, including having their entire fleet grounded, if they don’t adhere to the law.
Maxim Colonies is extremely strict about adhering to that particular law. To the point that any vessels contracted with them, like thePR, are required to have proprietary ether-jump nav lock-out systems in place. When I physically depart the ship, even just for shore leave, I set the system so it can only be overridden by another Maxim Colonies-certified and approved ether-jump nav.
That means the shipcan’tleave without me, or at least without another certified ether-jump nav aboard. I mean, theycan, but they can’t ether-jump if they do. They can travel to a jump portal and go through that way without me plotting the course, but if there isn’t one located close to their point of origin or their destination, it doesn’t help them very much. Large cargo freighters like this one tend to make lots of runs to places not yet served by jump portals, or they are larger than older jump portals can handle.
Meaning I have job security.
The ether-jump navigator law came about when one of the early ether-jump ships ended up emerging from their jump too close to a massive space station. The space station had over eighty thousand souls on board at the time, in addition to three hundred ships in berths and dry-docks. It was a literal near-miss that could’ve proven catastrophic.
The only thing that saved them was the nav making calculations and tweaking the emergence point, overriding the co-ordinates where the computer wanted to emerge. A minute gravity wobble, thanks to the planet’s sun impacting how its three moons orbited it, was the cause. The computer literally would have landed them practically on top of the space station, too close for the captain to make a course correction in time to avoid a collision.
It’s also why ether-jump nav techs in general command such a high salary. Maxim Colonies keeps me happy, and I stay with them. Besides, their ships have, overall, the best safety records, and the strictest safety regs of any other major fleet, including the military.
I won’t accept inherently dangerous runs. In my early career, I was sort of forced to accept whatever commission I was told to take. No shit, some of those missions were pretty damned hairy, and made me glad I hadn’t enlisted in the military.
I really didn’t have a choice then, because I was under contract. I still got paid damn well, both in salary and in bonuses, but I chafed under the restrictions and the moments of fear had me puking in terror more than once.
Part of being a freelancernowmeans I can turn up my nose at postings and routes that putmeat risk. It means I don’t make a fraction of the money that I could in bonuses, but considering I’m only thirty-three and I could now retire planetside somewhere and never lift a finger again in my life, andstillhave more money than I can count, I’m good with that trade-off.
I like to havefun. I like routes where I get to see new places, or at least revisit interesting places that are exciting, but in the good ways.
Not the dangerous ways. I’ve seen enough of danger in my life already, thank you very much.
I could even have my choice of instructor posts, if I wanted to go that route. Working for Maxim Colonies, obviously, since they’re the biggest, or as a civvie contractor for the coalition military.
But that would be booorrrring.
I’m enjoying life.
I mean, am I lonely?
Define lonely.
I don’t have to worry about a home, because I live light and can literally transport everything I own in a couple of rucksacks and small cargo totes on my personal porta-sled, which stays in my quarters with me.
Whatever ship I’m on is my home. Or, like I sometimes do—and maybe will this time—I move into a hotel on a station or planet while between runs, or when awaiting my next commission.
Once we’re docked, I’m literally not needed until forty-eight hours before departure. That will give me enough time to go through the nav systems and perform my calibrations. Well, this time, I’ll return a couple of days early because of the comms system overhaul. I want to make sure we’re thoroughly debugged before leaving the dock. I don’t understand why they’re overhauling the comms system when it’s fairly new to begin with and seems to be working just fine, but it’s not my ship or my money.
The ether-jump AI uses the comms system for location beacon pinging off hyper-com portal buoys. If there’s a snafu, I want to find that outbeforemy pucker tenses mid-jump and I’m sweating the accuracy of my jump-in point.
I’ve never been to the planet Pfahrn before. Our ship was transferred onto the Pfahrn run to take up the slack for another ship whose jump engine went down.
I might go planetside instead of staying on the station the entire time. I have a personal com, so the ship can reach me if I take shore leave down there and they need me back in orbit. I’ve got just under six months left in my current commission contract with this ship. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to renew my commission on this ship or take another posting. We’ll be making several runs back and forth from Pfahrn for the next six months.
If we end up taking over the other ship’s exact route permanently, the processor they were making regular delivery runs to is approximately four weeks away from Pfahrn, one way. I’ll plot multiple jumps to complete the trip, because I personally don’t like to make a jump longer than a week. Not for this particular vessel, jump engine, and route, if that’s where we’re assigned. That interval seems to be the sweet spot between too-short to make it worth a jump, and just long enough before the ether-jump system starts to get squirrelly and begins amplifying minute AI errors and compounding them, forcing me to have to get creative on the fly with my quantum math.
Doable, but, honestly? Not worth the stress for the risk-reward ratio. Especially when I am responsible for twenty-eight lives, including my own.
