14MAR3025
You ever wake up with the sinking feeling that something is deeply wrong? Yeah. That was me this morning.
I say morning, but time’s a joke out here in deep space. No sunrises, no sunsets—just the cold, indifferent glow of my busted control panel flickering at me like a dying firefly. The ship was quiet. Too quiet.
Now, I’d like to tell you I handled this situation with calm professionalism. That I systematically diagnosed my ship’s problems with the steady hand of an experienced engineer.
Instead, I woke up, realized I couldn’t hear the hum of my reactor, and immediately started screaming.
Turns out, the scavenger shots from last week did more than just mess up my sensors. They nicked a coolant line, which—shockingly—turns out to be pretty important for keeping the reactor from shutting itself down to avoid, you know, exploding.
So there I was, floating in the middle of nowhere, reactor offline, one thruster functioning at approximately the power output of a sneeze, and life support running on backup batteries.
I had two options:
Accept my fate, draft up a dramatic final message, and spend my last moments in quiet contemplation.
Rip open the maintenance panel and slap parts together until something stopped trying to kill me.
I chose option two.
The fix was... not ideal. Ever used duct tape on a high-pressure coolant line? Because I have now. Don’t recommend it. But against all odds, it held. The reactor rebooted with all the grace of a drunk trying to stand up after a bar fight, and I only had to kick it twice to stop the warning alarms.
Crisis averted. For now.
New problems:
The "agricultural supplies" I was hauling? Turns out half of it was contraband. The moment I get back to a populated system, I might get flagged for smuggling.
I still have no working external sensors, meaning I could be flying straight into a sun and not know it.
The coolant leak might be getting worse. The duct tape is looking... uh, sweaty.
Lesson learned: When a job pays too well for the risk level, it’s not a good deal. It’s a setup.
Until next time.
Quote of the Day:
"Duct tape can fix a lot of things. But probably not this."
