Today is the day. You have been checking your email every few minutes to see if the message from the Vega Trading Corporation has arrived yet. Competition for places on their agent training programme is intense, but you know you have something special to offer. Whether this is your natural troubleshooting talents, your material resources, or simply the return of certain pictures of the head of Human Resources in an ... interesting situation, you know it's what they're looking for. A life of galactic travel, adventure, and excellent pay awaits you. You'd settle for a lot less to get away from your home planet of Dziban.
So space travel is dangerous, but you don't really know anyone who's actually been involved in a teleporter accident or lost in hyperspace. The Vega Corporation is one of the galactic banks that control pretty much all interplanetary trade, and working for them is about the only way off planet unless you own a ship. In fact even if you own a ship, you still need a crew, and the banks have a near-monopoly on the type of training a spaceship crew needs. Plus there's the problem that most planetary governments won't let a ship connect to their teleport station for planetary transfer unless the crew are vouched for by someone they trust ... and everyone trusts and loves the galactic banks.
If you get this job you will be able to get access to most civilised planets with your bank credentials. Uncivilised planets too, because they ask no questions if the price is right. Communications between systems travel at the speed of hyperspace transports so there's plenty of scope for courier and diplomatic jobs with interesting destinations, not to mention the more undercover kind of work if that's where your talents lie. Perhaps you'll get to see the ruins which are all that remain of the known alien civilisations. Or maybe you'll be involved in the search for new habitable planets to settle. The next generation of hyperdrives are supposed to extend the practical range of travel enormously; or they will when they've ironed out the bugs. Rumour has it that some of these drives can take you to some very strange places indeed. It's amazing what the hyperdrive engineers can do, but you wouldn't want to be one. Hyperspace is too dangerous even for you to mess with.
Whatever job they put you on it's got to be better than staying on Dziban. Hyperdrives weren't so advanced when your home planet was settled about a thousand years ago, and so colonists were prepared to put up with less than suitable planets. Even a thousand years of terraforming hasn't made Dziban completely comfortable; it's always either too hot or too cold, and the native wildlife isn't friendly. Or maybe it's not the weather but the politics that make you want to leave; though at least Dziban is one state, unlike many planets whose colonies have fragmented into separate nations. Or you could have personal reasons for leaving. VTC don't really care about your past, after all. Once you're in orbit you're outside the jurisdiction of the Dziban legal system, a fact which may well have influenced VTC's decision to build three large space stations there.
Your computer beeps. The message has arrived. You notice it's a long one, which can surely only be a good sign. You open it. You have been accepted! You are instructed to report to the Cephlon Teleport Station in two days, from where you will travel into orbit. You hope you won't be coming back for a long while.
The system will be based on Over The Edge (though I think the combat rules are ambiguous, so be prepared for the fact that I may be interpreting them differently from others. I don't think this will produce any very nasty surprises though!) I'm aiming for six-eight weeks of plot.
Catherine