Beluga Liner From Hell
The passengers waited in a long queue but they were in good mood.
They were refugees looking for their chance of a second life on LTT 9360, the elusive planet that spaceships never reached.
For most of them the flight was the only option. Tickets were not cheap - from 500,000 to 1,5 million credits - but they were all glad they got one.
From the terminal everything had looked all right. The ship was a brand new Beluga liner. If the line could operate such modern ships the service could not be so bad, could it?
Inside, all looked very dark and a lot of stuff was missing. The passengers looked a bit surprised when they saw that all escape pods had been removed. They were told there was only one for the captain and the crew, but they were not needed anyway because this journey would be a piece of cake.
The truth is that the line had taken a huge financial gamble. The new Beluga Liner cost over 150 million credits that had been a reinvestment of the previous profits.
The already totally inadequate class 6 shield has been removed, sold and replaced with 32 extra seats for a total of 174. Which was pushing the absolute theoretical limit for this class.
Only a little bit had been done to reinforce the hull, but it was clear that any major collision or attack would result in a major desaster.
They had gambled that a liner would finance itself after 2 journeys and if it completed just 1 they could afford a total loss.
The passengers passed through the cramped, dark tunnel into the cargo hold, and some caught a glimpse through the cockpit door. They could see a bald and very unfriendly man, obviously the commander. He was eating some kind of sandwich and drinking from a whisky bottle. His boots were on the instrument panel, crumbs and mayonaise dripped on the cockpit.
When some woman with their children wanted to look inside, he raised his scarred, ugly face and made a quick, condescending gesture towards the exit.
The steward, a girlish looking transvestite with makeup grabbed the woman by the arm, pulled her back in line and said
"Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm... no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...
I mean .. dont you dare talk to him! He's having pretty bad mood swings already, he's having them all the time.
One time I was disturbing him in the cockpit when he was sobbing over a dead fly and he said he is gonna kill me the next time.
Now go to your seat and don't move until the light goes on again."
Well, at least the pilot knew how to fly. And fly he did!
Immediately on exiting the station he slammed the throttle open, all engines came on like hell breaking loose and for the first time the passengers felt the crushing g-forces.
A moan went through the cargo hold as if hundreds of tightly pressed lips were crying in agony at the same time.
Then the heating switched off because the engines needed all available power. The steward slammed shut the cockpit door, locked it from inside, and switched off the lighting as well.
It was quiet, the people were alone with their fear and the silence of space. Only from the cockpit you sometimes heard laughter, and sometimes yelling followed by the sound of someone getting bitch slapped.
Endless hours elapsed, interrupted by landings on other stations to pick up more passengers that never seemed to end.
What came now - the 45 minute acceleration through the LTT 9360 system - was the worst. The passengers huddled on the floor, some prayed, others just stared in hopeless resignation.
Only after an eternity, when the ship started decelerating, they knew their orderal would finally be over.
The pilot siwtched on the docking computer and the ship took some more hull damage. It settled down violently and the journey was over.
When the captain opened the cockpit there was steam coming out like from a sauna. When he walked through the rows of passengers who looked up like they had just seen death, he said "You have 10 minutes to get out of my ship" and "God is it cold in here" and shook his head in disgust.
A young man came forward and asked "did you have to go 1300 times speed of light the whole time, only to arrive a few minutes earlier, was this worth it? look at my knees they are bleeding."
The commander seemed very irritated: "Do you know how many offers I turned down to sell you into slavery? But they never offered enough so I had a good heart. Now GTFO off my ship you maggot."
The young man leaped forward and smashed him in the face. The pilot started screaming like a girl, "police! police! I'm being assaulted!! help me" Cops came and dragged the man away, and lead the remaining people out of their prison.
When the conditions became known the authorities at Smeaton Orbital wanted to seize the ship, but the Beluga Profit Liner had already left and dumped 1000 canisters of biowaste inside the station.
It later became known that funds in the range of 350 million credits had been transferred to the account of the ship owner within the last 48 hours.
, so yes. You have to keep your keyboard at hand anyway to map some of the functions. But controlling the ship with an analog input is so much better.
