Captain Oliver of the space fighter Dragon was wishing he'd never left Earth. The loot had been good so far on his interstellar journey but now the pursuing Wraiths had caught up with him and their unworldly technology left him with no chance of escape. A spider craft scraped perilously close to his ship and bombarded the Dragon with another hail of burning, red bolts. A stray shot ricochetted into the Mnemonic sequencer, which had been ineffectually coordinating return fire, and it hissed and crackled before going offline. As the reboot system tried in vain to resurrect it, snatches of his log were played out in a crackling voice that echoed through his disintegrating ship. He tried to zone it out as he struggled into a primitive space suit and made for the escape pod at the rear of the ship.
Year 1 - Reached our first planet today and it looked pleasant and unthreatening. Acadia orbits the hot, orange sun of Merz. I shuttled down to the lushly vegetated planet and was received by a small group of three headed humanoids who called themselves the Threep. In exchange for some unimportant trade goods I'd stashed for just such an occasion one agreed to return to Earth with me as an indentured servant. Made him up a bedding space in the hull.
Year 2 - Cautiously approached a cold, blue sun named Viveka. One minute my scanners were empty but the next there was a crackle of electricity that registered as brief blips on all my sensors and a large ship blurred into the visible universe. I recognised it instantly as a Wraith phantom, notoriously hostile and unpredictable. It opened up with its weapons and ship alarms sounded angrily, reporting I had lost all connections to the chain gun mounted on the front of my fighter. Luckily I managed to outrun the interloper but as I outpaced it I saw tiny and fast Wraith spider craft deploy from its dock tubes to take up the chase. I resolved to lie low from here on.
Year 3 - Shaken by this experience I took refuge on the forest world of Bask. My spirits rose as I discovered some alien ruins that looked as if they had not yet been explored. After returning to my ship for a miniature digger I tunnelled into the nearest submerged chamber and recovered an exotic looking engine that seems to run on Nebular gases. I also removed a Mnemonic sequencer weapons computer that should come in useful. I'm uploading my logs to it now.
That was the last planet Oliver was ever likely to see. Four Wraith spiders had descended on him near the binary suns of Helios and Selene. While they were only weakly armed he lacked the armament to destroy all four ships before they could use their advanced circuitry to regenerate from solar energy. He had desperately turned his ship to flee but the deadly Wraith craft were too swift. Now his only hope lay in the camouflaged emergency pod, to which the servant Threep had already fled in fear, and the tender mercies of the next travellers to enter this isolated patch of space.
(This is a game report taking a certain level of artistic license from the free game 'Strange Adventures in Infinite Space', to which I have added the mod 'Even Stranger Adventures in Infinite Space'. Great game if you like space combat and complexity and don't mind basic graphics. Embarrassingly I was on the easiest settings for this mission. In my defence the mod enemies are tougher than those in the original and I was very unlucky to meet the Wraiths twice before I'd had time to upgrade my ship.)
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