001.
What a welcome to Eden!
The system gives him the warmest hello he's had in a long time; a solar flare bursts out at him as he gets out of Hyperdrive, testing the Ceres' heat sinks. A red signal light indicating just that illuminates the left side of his face. He just manages to ignore it, trying to initialize the drive again right after it's just finished cooling.
His smile is all grit teeth as he has to manually push fuel to give it power. His leg jumps up and down as blue eyes look from the drive charge to the heat shields. In his head, he tries to do the calculations: The amount of hull damage he'll take, the vast, uncharted, empty space around him.
It could be ages until he finds a settlement. How many cycles would he last out here? He had made the choice to sacrifice fuel over hull, but now-- now that it wouldn't do any good-- he wondered if he had made the right one.
The light illuminates the cockpit, in his head Val can see it searing everything it touches as it comes over the console, closer and brighter every second.
The Ceres hums under him, the Hyperdrive initializing not a moment too soon.
A sigh echoes in the empty cockpit. There is space for two, were he to find a co-pilot. Might be worth looking into finding someone who actually knew how to fly instead of working off the auto-pilot and a few flight sims.
It's another thing to add to the list. It wasn't anywhere near the top. Repairs, upgrades, supplies all took priority. And now, of the uptmost importance, fuel.
He had only grabbed so much from The Convent: A few crates of contraband he'd managed to trade one of the few explorers who had the misfortune of stopping over on the depressing little moon, a can of Old World soda, some flash rounds. The only other thing he has to his name is his carbon dagger and laser blaster, a comfortable weight on his hip- a reminder of when he was young, pretending to be The Convent's lone protector, a pantomime few of the nuns had humored.
The engine room is warm as it always was. Comforting, in the hum of noise and the heat it let off, reminding him that the ship was doing its best to keep him alive. The checklist he had ripped out of the engine manual was taped to a piece of paneling next to the diagnostic interface. He went over it step-by-step. The Ceres was a Frankenstein's Monster of nearly every usable piece of hardware that he had managed to find in The Convent's scrapyard, he had built most of it by hand with help from some of the Nuns who knew a thing or two about ships from their past lives, before they had become Sisters.
The engine, however, was taken whole-cloth. He was lucky enough that the ship had a full manual on care and upkeep. Despite the fact that he'd done the checklist nearly every cycle since he got the ship running, he still referenced every step, ensuring he didn't miss one. His inexperience had always scared him.
The diagnostics printed off, long strips of continuous paper which he'd put into the pulping machine later. He takes it back into the Cockpit, relishing in the empty space and the lack of warning messages.
As the Ceres travels around the star, exploring and mapping as it goes- referencing the Cyberspace information against its coordinates were possible- Val keeps an eye on fuel, worrying the corner of his lip. Eventually, he falls asleep there, in his pilot's seat with the light of the sun, filtered through the safety screen of the cockpit, slowly moving across his face.
