2634-09-27
New Holland Shipyard was an adventure. They had two other tugs on hand to help, but I ended up pulling most of the weight, the other two providing guidance. It paid really well too. So well in fact that I could take a small vacation. I won't, but I could. The money I'm now making is way too good, so good in-fact, retiring at 70 now is an option. I probably wont do that either (chuckle).
I am scheduled to come back here to pull another cargo ship out to the Io shipping lanes, a trip of about 3 days, to the tune of closer to 3.5 mill to me. That's good for 2 payments on my tug, and still have 500K left to get supplies.
Right now I'm headed to old Boston to pull a garbage scow into orbit around the moon. From there I'm told they mag thrust the scow into the sun. Pretty effective way of disposal in my book.
Of course there will always be some group that has only a vaguest grasp of science, protesting the practice. They claim that the sun will fill up with trash and burn out, refusing to believe that the sun is hot to the billions of degrees. These groups remind me of the Flat Earther's of old. I never understood how they could think the planet was flat. I suppose that if they got to see from the perspective I do, they would never have thought otherwise.
Tonight I think I'm going to dine on a good old fashioned steak, made in my own galley, baked potato with the works, side salad, and a beer. Picked them up from New Holland. A nice blend of hops, and barley, with a hit of citrus. Going to stock up next time I'm in New Holland.
With dinner, a movie of course, I'm thinking Hunt for Red October. Don't judge, I have a thing for old movies.
Logged off duty
Driver Hal Johnson out
2634-10-3
The operation in Old Boston was pretty easy, and good pay for what it was. A simple barge full of non-recyclable trash and garbage that weighed a whopping 750k metric tons. That barely made the generators bump. Could have done it in a few minutes with the power of my new beast, but you can't yank something up through the atmosphere of the old marble like that. People get kinda cranky about the shock-waves.
It took a couple hours to get it out of Earths gravity. Again, the local space regs mean you gotta keep things slow around the home world, but once I reached free space, it only took 6 hours to pull the barge to the station where it was then magnetically launched into the sun. I stuck around to see the process.
They warned me to stay at a minimum distance of 30,000 meters as the EM field could knock out my electrical systems. I doubled that, but it was quite a show. The imagers on this new rig more than made up for the distance.
The system consists of 3 concentric rings spaced at specific distances apart. When they power up the mag field, it creates a pretty blue glow between the rings and inside the ring space. They called it Cherenkov radiation. Same stuff you see around old fission reactors from the early nuclear age, just without the deadly side-effects. Then they tractor the barge into place, draw it inside the first ring, and with a pulse that you see ripple across that blew glow, that barge is on it's way.
Now you may say that you cant hear anything in space, but I swear on the maker that when that barge was launched i could hear the crack of the mag field. Call me crazy but i swear I did.
That's a job I wouldn't mind doing from time to time. Anyway been a long day, time for dinner and a movie. Perhaps Beetlejuice would be fun to watch. Dispatch said they'll have another job lined up for me by morning. Cool thing about that new comm unit. I ain't gotta wait hours and hours at light speed to know where I'm going.
Logging out off duty and logged into sleeper Driver Hal Johnson out
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