Down in the dust of Daymar

Forty Five days since the last entry, and I’m still living out of Port Olisar. Odd jobs keep me afloat — security runs, courier hauls, the kind of work that barely pays but keeps an FS9 slung over my shoulder. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about going back to full-time mercenary work. Fighting comes easy after years of war, and the verse never runs out of people willing to pay for guns.

That’s when I got the call. Unexpected. A familiar voice I hadn’t heard since the service: Spectemus. An old comrade. He’d caught word I was in Stanton and needed help. These days, he runs combined security and mining operations — a tight crew, good gear, steady contracts. He wanted me to bring him equipment: a ROC, an ATLS Geo, and whatever materials I could scrounge.

So I went to work. Picked up what I could at Olisar, acquired a ROC off Yela after overhearing stories of a wrecked ship.  I bartered for an ATLS Geo from a contact on Cellin. I saw some pirates hassling a minor, sniped them from a distance with my AO3. The hauler was grateful with an aUEC transfer, and I was able to take the Maxlifts and multi-tools they were no longer using. I even stripped the piartes cutty black of its XL-1 and Avalanch coolers. I went ahead and installed those. Since insuring equipment is insanely cheap these days, I called in the new equipment with R.R.I to have piece of mind.  With everything loaded into my Freelancer MAX — rigged and patched more times than I care to admit — I headed out for Daymar to rendezvous with Spectemus and, to my surprise, our old LT.

That’s when everything went sideways.

Two klicks off the deck, full afterburners screaming, Daymar’s heavy pull biting into my ship — and then catastrophic systems failure. Probably those components the pirates had, that were now installed on my ship. No warning. No recovery. No time. The ship went dead in my hands. By the time I attempted to compensate, gravity had already claimed me. What followed was a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of my Freelancer MAX, scattering it across a fifty-meter debris field through the sands of Daymar before the wreck came to rest barely twenty meters from Spectemus’s Cutlass Black and his ops crew.

When the dust settled, all I had left was the wreck. The Max was gone. The ROC, gone. The Geo, gone. Boxes, tools, gear — all scattered, broken, lost in the crater and the debris field. Everything I brought with me was erased in a heartbeat.

I climbed out of the wreck, ears ringing, dust still falling around me. Spectemus just stood there, arms crossed, staring at me in disbelief — like he wasn’t sure if I’d just tried to kill him or save him. Beside him, the LT was doubled over, laughing her ass off, the kind of laugh only a soldier who’s seen too many close calls can manage.

I walked out alive, but lighter than I’d planned.

Sometimes, survival feels like the only thing the verse lets me keep.