Gotta start living

Retired soldier, new system, no pension worth a damn — so how do you make money?

In Stanton, the answer is: however you can. This place is definitely a system for the Entrepreneurial type. If you're a go getter or a hustler, you can make aUEC in no time.

I started with odd jobs. Simple things like taking boxes from different sections of Olisar to another section.  Talking to an old salty dog who was on his way out and didnt' have a regen I picked up a very used Freelancer Max. This thing was held together by hope, dreams and duct tape.   I started picking up boxes from outpost and dropping them off at Olisar for the local shops. Running onboard security for haulers who didn’t trust Olisar’s guards, cleaning up messes in outposts, and escorting fragile cargo across jump lanes. Nothing glamorous, but enough to keep my bunk rented and food in my gut.

Then came the bunkers. Officially, they’re active security posts — staffed, armed, and maintained. But every few days, comms go dead. I get called in, storm the halls, and it’s the same scene every time: hostile forces dug in, guards wiped out, alarms silent. No breaches. No blown doors. It’s almost like the incursion starts inside the bunker itself instead of coming from outside. Nobody explains it, nobody asks. We just clear it, secure it, pickup a few guns and some random armor (good for selling back at Olisar) and wait until it happens again.

Not every job was dirty work. Sometimes it was satellites — finding them when they drifted, patching them back into alignment, or hauling busted ones back for scrap. Easy credits if you don’t mind chasing blinking lights through the dark.

And then there was the asteroid. I’ll never forget it. Out in a forgotten belt around Yela, we found a rock covered in old noodle machines. Dozens of them. Rusted, broken, some still humming if you kicked them right. Nobody knows who put them there or why. Just another Stanton mystery, but I’ll admit — I laughed harder than I had in years.

The strangest job came from a widow. Her husband had been stationed on the local Covalex shipping hub, back before it blew. She wanted his belongings — data drives, personal effects, anything I could salvage. I went EVA through the drifting corridors, shards of station hull still spinning like knives. The logs told the story, a corporate screw-up wrapped in silence. I gathered what I could, even managed to pull his old ID tags from a locker.  I picked up a few office chairs for my Corsair and that’s where I found it.   Another noodle machine, just floating in the passageway. Not in any manifest, not worth a single credit to Covalex. So I brought it back. I called it salvage cargo, call it theft, call it a soldier’s souvenir — doesn’t matter.

Now it sits back in my quarters, humming to life when I want it, spitting out noodles like it remembers a different world. It’s a small thing, but after decades of war, I’ve learned to hold onto small things.

Maybe that’s what survival looks like now. Odd jobs, strange finds, and one battered noodle machine to remind me that the ‘verse is still capable of surprising me.