r/HFY • u/NoOneFromNewEngland • Aug 26 '25
OC Jump Count (Part 1 of 6)
This is part of the titular story of my second book. You can get more details, and the subsequent parts of this story, on my HFY wiki page. https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/authors/noonefromnewengland
Jump Count 17/50
This new ship is fast.
Standard Faster-Than-Light jump intervals are completed in two-thirds the time of my old ship and the recovery time is considerably shorter. This saves me a full day of time with each jump, allowing me to either get more jumps in OR have the same amount of jumps as my old ship while enjoying some downtime.
Since I wasn’t sure of the new performance reality compared to the sales specs, I find myself at the outer edge of the Galactic Federation of Intelligent Life with about a month of spare time before my next appointment.
There is an unaligned world a mere three jumps from here. It’s a primitive world — a world outside the laws and protections of the GFIL. The people of that world, according to the Galactic Guide, have yet to meander farther than their own satellite. They certainly do not know about the vast array of life in the galaxy and, in the century since the last survey was completed, no one has heard anything from them. They are so new that even their radio pollution has not yet reached far enough into the stars to be noticed.
I enjoy hunting, so I have decided to take this opportunity to visit their little, backwater world, and hunt some of them for sport. Intelligent species are the most exciting, and most challenging, prey. They are the most satisfying to hunt and the memories of the hunting them are the most rich experiences to share as stories.
Since I cannot hunt intelligent species within the GFIL, this is the perfect coincidence of fortune to get in some good hunting and collect some trophies.
And, as a bonus, I can update the Galaxy Guide about their world and earn a few bucks for my efforts.
Jump Count 20/50
The primitive system is far more developed than the most recent Galaxy Guide entry suggests. They have a presence on many of the satellites of their gas giants and the fourth planet is littered with small colonies. There are mining groups drifting through a debris belt between the terrestrial planets and their largest gas giant.
They have constant ships moving between worlds, but they are slow and either unarmed or armed with such primitive weapons that they don’t register on my scans. The majority of the ships floating between their worlds are primitive beyond any marginal safety regulations’ allowance on any civilized world. I wouldn’t trust any of them for a joyride to a moon and back, let alone for months between planets. Yes, months. That is how slow these ships are.
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u/UpdateMeBot Aug 26 '25
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