Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who knows how to jailbreak a battlecruiser
The Carolina Sigma comms relay went dark six months ago.
Obviously, without galactic comms, it's real hard to ask why your galactic comms are out. Maybe something broke. Maybe the Great Filter silently took out everyone else. Maybe the comms corp sunsetted some branch of the network as unprofitable. (Maybe Caro Sigma III's parent corp sunsetted them.)
Management have retreated to their fortified aerostat, correctly figuring they'll be first against the wall if unrest kicks off, to while away the days with drugs and VR and...whatever the hell management do. Meetings. Orgies. Most Dangerous Game Nights with clones of the office juniors. But, you know, what unrest? Sigma III is a boneyard with a skeleton staff; a starship graveyard the size of a bone-dry planet, a planetary population in the low hundreds, and hundreds of thousands of marvellous, luxurious, self-repairing, palatial self-contained environments, packed off here because they're in last product cycle's colour, or whatever.
In theory, there's reclamation; recycling, refurb, post-sales remarket. In practice, Carolina Sigma III is one boneyard of thousands, and none of them are empty, and none of them are getting emptier.
"If they didn't want us to hotwire these suckers," Piper says, "then maybe they shouldn't have cut us off. I wasn't planning to be here for ever."
Chen nods obligingly at the rote rant. For someone not planning to be here, Piper never had much in the way of a plan to do much else, her perpetual threat to buy a ticket out of here and just go never more than a pressure-relief valve. But the writing on the wall is large and looming: if comms are gone, what's next? Will the next supply ship arrive? What happens if it doesn't?
"There we go," Piper says triumphantly, as the backlight of the main bridge display flicks on, followed by a boot animation. "She's on. You're up."
It could take up to an hour for the ship to fully start, actually — they're really not designed to be switched on and off casually. But the next part will be Chen's turn; they slide into the captain's chair, watch the bootloader progress bar.
Jumpstarting the hardware is — with no disrespect to Piper's hardware skills — not the hard part. The ship's Mind knows it's been mothballed, or at worst decommissioned; Chen's going to have to talk it through the combination robopsych-and-software-exploit hoops to get it to unlock the drive, because nobody has the skills to crack open a black box synthetic gravity hazard and hack that hardware before it spaghettifies everything in range.
They crack their knuckles, knowing Piper hates it, but needing it as part of their mind-clearing routine. Breathe. Ignore the failure of the last two attempts, week-long ship-cracking jaunts petering out in the ships' Minds seeing their attempts for what they were and stonewalling them.
"You want anything from the galley?" Piper says, openly bored now, the second she's not poking around with a hardware probe and soldering iron.
"Tea?" Chen says, as much to get her out from underfoot as anything.
Minds are as unique as people. They can't all be winners, and there are a lot of ships at Caro Sigma.
They could be at this for a while.