Rocketbilly - serial space opera - Episode 1

           "Rocketbilly"

A Serial Saga Of Those Maverick Spacers Known As Rocketbillies And Their Moonshine-Powered Rockets

Author's Note: This space opera is inspired by a dream I had where I was blasting into space on a moonshine powered rocket. Going planet to planet, living free - - as a moonshine powered Rocketbilly. Cause when you're a Rocketbilly, whether you're drinking up or blasting off, you're always powered by that same ole moonshine.
As traders, explorers, and prospectors, the Rocketbilly exists within a highly decentralized star-spanning economy where the primary consumable - moonshine - can be produced almost anywhere that you can grow fruit or sugarcane to ferment. Where there is life, there is moonshine, as the Rocketbillies say.
I am proud to debut this serial space opera, as it is written, here on our own decentralized frontier - that "space" we call Steemit! I hope you enjoy.

• • Bill

Episode 1

The trick isn't producing enough moonshine to get yourself (and your ship) back off a primitive planet. The trick, as a true Rocketbilly, is wanting to get back off a primitive planet once you have produced the tens of thousands of gallons of high octane moonshine that your ship would require to make it off said rock. Sitting on a resource like that on a primitive world makes you a virtual king, and the temptation is to live like one. The backwater worlds of the vast stellar cosmos in all their glory are littered with the bones of Rocketbillies who didn't know their place. I almost became one of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I guess it started when I saw on the net that ole Samos Kraw and his gang were among the assorted patrons at Waigon Station. I knew they wouldn't be happy to see me. A dispute over holo-cards had turned ugly on another world a long way away, not far before. Them firing tracers and incendiary rounds at me from autocannon rifles was the last thing I saw in my rear view mirror, so to speak.

I cursed the latest expansion of the ban on overcomputing devices. Cause while the Feds reimbursed me 3x what I'd paid for that nav unit, now I had to fly this semi-complex beast of a mutirocket nearly by pure feel. I glanced instinctively at the gaping hole in the looted instrument panel as if it might still offer me as "pilot" the choice of several evasion and escape scenarios which it would then dutifully implement. No such luck! Federal clamp-down on artificial intelligence devices in the wake of yet another robot uprising had reduced me to an astro stick and rudder man. It was adapt to the new way, drop out of the game, or die. My option to drop out of the game had evaporated.

So I coasted quietly as I could past Waigon Station. I needed fuel, but not that bad. Lights out, no transmissions, I just kept going. Forlornly eyeing the fuel gauges. Even my radio receivers were switched off to minimize stray electromagnetic signatures. I hoped I wasn't noticed.

I knew where there was an automatic fuel depot and going off literal star charts and my remaining instruments I executed a couple of course correction burns and reached the point in space where I knew there was a fuel depot. Or had been.

I get that it was automated, but those simple machines shouldn't have been pulled due to these new AI restrictions. Did it just go out of business? I saw the remnants of machinery, geospheres and habitubes but everything with much value had been stripped.

So I drifted. Minimized my vitals using sleeptabs and pondered the star charts. Found a system with a bunch of low-resource habitable worlds and rolled the dice on one. Burned my last moonshine vapor bringing the ship close as I could to a stop at the edge of the planet's atmosphere and let gravity bring me down unpowered. The Schwartz gravity shield plates ran off their own chargers with years of charge remaining, so no worries there. I settled gentle as a leaf to the surface of Ophelia 27 and used differential shielding to steer onto a grassy clearing at the edge of a volcanic island.

I popped the hatch open and smelled salt spray, heard waves breaking on the beach below. Thinking of the 20+ surfboards in my cargo hold, I smiled for the first time in weeks. There were worse places for a surfer to be stranded...