Dumping the excess waste in deep space where they would never be found again, River and Mike's next destination was a major trade hub River had once visited a few years prior. To do that, Mike located a small free-flowing ball of metal inside the cockpit and tapped it.
"What was the system again?"
"DS-01 A91501-1, I'm pretty sure it was a yellow star, red dwarf binary."
Entering the system name in the console, the small floating sphere started rotating rapidly before it projected a star map inside the cockpit, with the sphere itself transforming into an indicator of River and Mike's current location before generating the fastest path to the searched system along with a bit of additional information.
"Let's see… A class G and class M binary system with 4 major satellites, 3 stations with one of them being marked as a large trade hub. Good job remembering that name River, we should be able to find a branch of the pilots guild and a nice ship there."
While speaking to River, Mike absent-mindedly manipulated the ship's console as he had done a million times before to enable the ship's FTL drive.
Of course, Mike had never actually done this before, in Interstellar online the entire process of entering faster than light travel was done with a single hotkey, but this unaware gesture served to seriously impress River. As the ship entered supercruise, Mike plotted the route to their destination and watched as the empty space outside transformed into a series of lights and lines.
"3 hours till arrival, okay then..."
Having entered faster than light travel, Mike took his hand off of the stick and throttle before starting to fiddle around with his wrist-mounted display. With nothing more than the silent hum of the engines and machinery, Mike continued tapping away on his wrist-mounted display and River quickly became bored.
"What are you doing?"
After staring at the different light streaks zipping past the ship for a little under two hours and nodding off for an unknown amount of time in the co-pilot seat boredom finally became too much for River to bear as she turned to her still masked business partner.
"Creating a worm that'll get rid of this ship when we reach the station, I don't want security forces to search the ship and find all these bloodstains."
"Get rid of the ship, how exactly?"
Not wanting to get caught out by any more of Mike's unexpected moves, River wanted to figure out exactly how Mike planned to get rid of their current ship.
Knowing his previous track record, River figured he might blow the reactor while the ship was docked.
"It'll suddenly detach without authentication and fly straight into the nearest star."
"... That'll work, but we'll get in trouble for it."
It didn't take an expert to realise that the local security forces wouldn't take kindly to an unmarked ship breaking out of the station's docking clamps and not even attempting to pay fees before flying straight into a star.
"Yeah, but without the ship's mainframe they won't be able to stick anything to us other than obstruction of justice if they're overly corrupt, don't worry about it."
Of course, Mike's information on how the pair of them would be treated came from Interstellar online, a game where a player could casually commit piracy and then sell looted goods back to the corp they had just robbed blind.
Needless to say, things didn't exactly work out as Mike had intended.
-
"So let's take this from the top again, you hired a type 96 transport to get to this station, and on the way, the pilot, which you never looked at with that fancy-ass vacuum suit of yours that stores facial id's, got off his shit high on chems and then after dropping you and your girlfriend off at this station, somehow managed to wrestle his shitty transport out of our docking clamps only to fly straight into a star?"
Fast forward about 50 something hours Mike found himself inside a dusty interrogation room with a pair of bright spotlights in his face as an officer that hadn't been home for about a month grilled his story for the nth time.
"Yeah, that's exactly what happened."
The look of frustration at Mike's answer was as clear on the officer's face as it had been the 10th time Mike repeated his blatant lie but after hearing it so many times it was now clear to the officer that Mike was never going to tell the truth and confess to whatever illegal activity had been going on. This was particularly annoying as the crime that had been committed wasn't severe enough to continue holding onto Mike without any evidence to support it, so no matter how much the officer's instincts screamed at him that Mike was a criminal the officer had no way of proving it.
"Can I go now?"
As Mike asked the same question had done the last 24 hours there had been a lapse in the conversation, the officer simply breathed a deep sigh and glanced over at the one-way glass where the other people who had tried to crack Mike were most likely standing.
"... Yeah, you're free to go. Get your shit and get out of here, I don't ever want to see your face again."
"Understandable, have a nice day officer."
As Mike got up and stretched before nonchalantly leaving the interrogation room, the interrogator couldn't help but curse under his breath.
"That little shit…"
Getting his gear back, Mike immediately drew his pistol, loaded a magazine and chambered a round right in front of the clerk before holstering it at his hip. Of course, such sight was hardly uncommon as handheld weapons had become common enough for 3d printed guns made out of plastic to be sold in vending machines. Of course, those kinds of weapons barely held a candle to the kind of gear Mike had been grinding for since the release of Interstellar online.
Stepping outside the security station Mike was briefly awestruck as he looked up and saw the cold and empty hard vacuum of outer space only separated by a few metres of reinforced glass. From his current position, Mike could see the central station where he had arrived a few days prior, the other side of the ring section which he currently found himself in, and the multiple towers connecting the two structures that spun around to give the ring section about 1G of simulated gravity.
"Are you done gawking at absolutely nothing anytime soon?"
"Yeah, sorry."
Hearing the not so pleased voice of River right behind him, Mike considered responding in kind with a snarky remark, but in the end, he made the decision that he still wanted to keep on living and just meekly apologised instead.
"Good, then let's go sign this contract before I change my mind."
Finding the nearest pilots guild proved easy as it was just down the road from the security station, as Mike entered the foyer he immediately drew the attention of the people inside, although that attention only lasted a few seconds as the people inside were quite busy. Queuing up at the reception desk, Mike turned to River who was clearly still peeved.
"I'll sign up as a pilot."
"Sure, I'll take the role of operator then. Although I really don't want to admit it, you're the far better pilot Mike."
Even though River didn't want to further inflate Mike's ego further than it already was, from the little she had seen of his piloting she had to admit that he was the better pilot. Mike wasn't about to counter River's point, partly because his ego got in the way, but also because he felt River could be a much better operator than what pathetic effort he could offer.
(Being an operator is all about tweaking the reactor output to thrusters and weapons, doing combat, coordinating with other ships and handling the various subsystems, I'm terrible at all of those things.)
Before long, River and Mike were finally at the end of the queue where they were greeted by a middle-aged woman in the pilot guild's uniform.
"What can I do for you two?"
"We would like to register, and enter into a binding contract."
Looking up from her screen, the clerk briefly looked at Mike's fancy vacuum suit, River's shabby one before quickly coming to a conclusion.
"Are you being blackmailed into this?"
"Nope, but you wouldn't do anything about it if I was, would you?"
Immediately answering the clerk's question in an extremely blunt fashion, Mike got a faint smile out of the clerk before she returned to her blank expression and continued her job.
"No I wouldn't, but it is policy to ask. Now fill out these forms and pay the registration fee and we'll get on with the assessments."
Clearly only interested in earning her pay and nothing else, the clerk manipulated the console in front of her as a pair of panels lit up on the reception desk and turned into monitors which displayed the pair of forms the two of them needed to fill out. Quickly looking over the forms and filling out the relevant parts before Mike paid for the registration.
"Okay then, the door to the right will lead you two to an evaluation area, enter the training pods and the automatic evaluation system will assign you a rank, ranks are non-negotiable and will decide the missions you're offered."
Following the clerks instructions, River and Mike soon arrived at a large room with a series of state of the art flight simulators stacked next to each other. The 6-metre tall behemoths cost the equivalent of a small battleship each and they were able to almost perfectly simulate a spaceship environment, save for eliminating the gravity present at the station.
"I'll see you on the other side."
"Please stop being so fucking dramatic."
With a not so pleased eye roll from River as his send-off, Mike entered his designated pod and strapped himself into the chair in the middle of it. As Mike sat down the outer door closed and a series of screens came down from the ceiling before moulding themselves into a cockpit window.
[Please specify test discipline.]
"Pilot."
The second Mike designated the test type, the interior of the simulator became much more detailed, quickly approximating a standard Yellowjacket light fighter.
[Please specify desired input type.]
"... One stick, split throttle and three pedals."
While Interstellar online was available on most platforms and Mike chose to play it on computer, the type of input one chose to control the game with was as much a personal choice as the path one would take in the game. Interstellar online supported almost every single choice of peripheral available on the market from standard HOTAS (hands-on throttle and stick), double stick and even translation control sticks while the slightly more masochistic part of the player base used mouse and keyboard or even a console controller to control their crafts. The configuration Mike chose was one which had been the same as he had used when playing Interstellar online, placing his right hand on a flight stick commonly used in flight simulators plastered with hat's (four-way switches), buttons and triggers which could be pressed while moving the stick to yaw, pitch and rotate the ship. In Mike's left hand was a throttle which split into two, the position of those throttles would control the ship's main thrusters while his fingers could easily reach yet more hat's, switches and buttons which controlled more miscellaneous functions and the ship's auxiliary thrusters placed all around the ship for translation and rapid reorientation. Finally, Mike's feet rested on two large pedals which served as auxiliary yaw control, while the central pedal did something far more unorthodox.
Configuring all these controls took Mike about 10 minutes, but considering that they gave him the ability to fully control every single aspect of the craft he was flying while still having the freedom to look not constantly have his eyes on the controls to make sure he didn't miss click anything it was time well spent.
[Control configuration confirmed, commencing test.]
With final preparations taken care of, the view inside the simulator suddenly changed to deep space. All around the vast backdrop of space were tiny dots of different colours, stars of all shapes and sizes which together blended into the surrounding galaxy.
[Eliminate all hostiles, additional waves will spawn after a set time or when all hostiles have been eliminated.]
(So a swarm PVE mode? And here I was wondering if I would be doing parking exercises for the next hour.)
Quickly confirming the status and weapons loadout of his ship, Mike found his Yellowjacket fighter outfitted with 4 weapons, two lasers specialised in breaking down enemies shields on hardpoints on either side of his cockpit and a pair of gimbaled gatling guns underneath the ship for ripping apart armour and cracking cockpits. Right in front of Mike was a sensor display nestled in between the stick and throttle, this display showed Mike's own ship as a stationary dot in the centre, while signals and contacts would move in 3 dimensions around the central dot in relation to both Mike's own and their movement. This sensor is what alerted Mike to hostiles as two ships appeared about 6 kilometres in front of him, having just exited from supercruise travelling multiple times the speed of light they lit up like a pair of christmas trees due to all the heat they were radiating.
(Time to work for a living…)
Although Mike tried very hard to keep calm, the urge to finally be in a 'real' dogfight won over as he lit up the main thrusters and deployed his weapons, rushing forward like an idiot. Lighting the afterburner from a complete standstill, Mike was pushed back in his seat as his Yellowjacket fighter accelerated as Mike finalised the targeting. Closing to within effective laser range, Mike melted the first opponent's shield before his sensors could cool down enough to spot Mike, then he immediately switched target and pointed the fixed beam lasers towards the second hostile while using the gatling guns to rip the shieldless craft apart at the same time.
The first two hostiles hardly stood a chance as Mike quickly saturated their shields before moving on to tearing their critical systems apart with cannon fire, this ruthless but effective tactic quickly got the administrator's attention, and he quickly contacted his boss and showed her the live footage of their newest recruit making a fool out of their evaluation software.
"Hoo~ That sure is some shooting."
Impressed with what she was seeing, the local pilot guild leader broke out into a mischievous smile.
"Up the difficulty by a factor of 10. Let's see if this dude really has what it takes."
"Right away ma'am."