[b]RIFT TUNNEL EN ROUTE TO UEG COLONY WORLD HIEMAL
FEBRUARY 4, 2841
1300 HOURS (SYSTEM CLOCK)[/b]

Lance Carter sat in the cockpit of his personal ship, his feet resting on the console as he relaxed in his command chair. He was in his set of powered armour, and he didn't really want to get out of it because he simply really, [i]really[/i] liked wearing it. Sure, it was old and outdated compared to what was standard-issue for Marines, but it provided enough protection to easily shrug off small arms fire, and its powered exoskeleton meant it boosted the wearer's strength by three times. It essentially turned anyone who wore the armour into a superhuman killing machine. Other than that, it also came with inbuilt systems such as temperature regulators, night vision, scanners, and a set of helmet-mounted flashlights. The armour itself bore many scars from Lance's years as a mercenary, most of them served as memoirs from those engagements, although they could be easily repaired and polished. And so Lance sat, idly watching as several streaks of light passed by outside the ship, in the RIFT tunnel.

The Relative Interdimensional Field Transit, or simply RIFT, is humanity's answer to the limitation of sublight travel. Up until the late twenty-third century, humanity had been limited to the confines of the Sol System, living on Earth, Luna, and a terraformed Mars and Saturn's moons. Earth was overpopulated and polluted by that time, and only the rich and powerful lived on the terraformed moons and Mars, while Luna's population comprised of a handful of colonists, functioning as workers in Luna's many spaceports. With the technology of that time, before the introduction of Quantum Repulsion Engines, or simply repulsors, primitive rocket boosters or Hall effect thrusters were the norm for spacecraft. Journeys normally took months to travel from Earth to one of the colonies, and passengers were normally cryogenically frozen.

It wasn't until the year 2238 that a breakthrough was made. Scientists stationed on Mars succesfully opened a tear in reality when testing out a prototype warp drives. This tear proved to be one of the greatest scientific acheivements, as the scientists learned that the tear more or less tunneled through time and space, making it so that the speed of light was much faster in this alternate dimension. Of course, humanity quickly went interstellar and spread to the stars, colonising planet after planet and becoming a thriving interstellar empire.

Now, more than six centuries after this discovery, faster-than-light travel has become so common that any ship big enough are equipped with RIFT drives. Travelling to neighbouring star systems has become as easy as taking a walk to your neighbourhood supermarket, which is what quite a few people do in fact. Travelling to another planet to pick up groceries that colony specialises in. FTL-capable ships are similiarly commonplace, easy to find and easy to get, though they cost quite a bit and were guaranteed to leave a hole in your pocket. Lance's ship, for example, was a retrofitted and upgraded ageing [url=http://img01.deviantart.net/d276/i/2013/115/c/a/20130425_by_zhangx-d62y6jw.jpg][i]Moray[/i]-class[/url] patrol craft. The mercenary had since modified it to fit his needs, replacing its old Chevron CK 451 RIFT Drive into something much faster, and stripping several rooms for additional storage space and comfort. He had also replaced many outdated weapon systems, and even added more guns. The ship wasn't exactly very big, being only thirty-eight metres in length and five metres tall, much smaller than the kilometre-long warships the UEGNC fielded. It was a second-hand, however, and Lance had bought it only after careful bargaining.

Now, Lance sat in the cockpit of the [i]Renegade[/i], travelling to the UEG colony world of Hiemal. Sure, it was a frozen ice cube, but he had heard that the drinks there were pretty good. Great for celebrating his most recently finished contract of raiding a pirate den with several colonial militia. "Heard they serve drinks in glasses made of ice on Heimal. That true?" He asked what seemed to be thin air. 

But less than a second later, a tiny holographic figure of a man in powered armour appeared, lacking a helmet that showed his grizzled face. "Pretty sure. I've gone through several tourist reports and planetary customs. You gonna get a beer or something?" The figure said. Cutter was Lance's A.I. assistant. He handled ship navigation, maintenance, and other things. Human-built artificial intelligence constructs were divided into three categories: basic, standard, and advanced.

Basic A.I.s were stupid, to say the least. These were meant to perform simple tasks such as guiding an unmanned spacecraft or controlling a continental computer network. They were unable to learn and were often seen as simple machines.

Standard A.I.s, on the other hand, had the processing power of a thousand basic A.I.s or more, and were the norm for everything that required computerised aid as they could easily fulfil the problems basic A.I.s could not. These could also freely learn and perfectly communicate with humans, using whatever avatar they chose, although they were still rather limited in terms of thinking capacity.

Then you had advanced A.I.s, which were exactly what it said on the tin. These constructs were the most advanced and sophisticated of any human-built intelligence programs, capable of effortlessly controlling and overseeing the networks of entire human worlds, and performing quintillions of calculations per second, and could basically learn anything. These were mainly used in government agencies to watch over human colonies, and the most important scientific research. They were, however, incredibly expensive and rare.

All in all, these constructs were still common and a part of daily life for UEG citizens.

Lance shrugged. "Dunno. Maybe whiskey or some-" He was cut off by a multitude of alarms going off all around the ship. Startled, he shifted into a more natural position, sitting correctly as he tapped his holographic console. "What the hell is going on?"

"RIFT drive malfunction!" Cutter informed with similar panic in his voice. "Something's gone wrong with the thing damn thing!" 

"How? I just bought that thing two months ago!"

"You bought it from a shabby backstreet dealer on Sanction! What did you expect?"

"Uh..."

Cutter groaned. "I'm performing an emergency RIFT dropout. We're coming out of hyperspace in three... two... one."

The area in front of the ship opened up to reveal the inky blackness of space as the [i]Renegade[/i] shook from its sudden transition back to realspace. There were hundreds of millions of twinkling stars all around the vessel. That, and a planet right in front of the ship. "Uh... where are we?" Lance asked. 

"Don't know." Cutter replied, tapping away at a set of holographic interfaces. "But according to the position of the stars, we're twenty-three lightyears from the nearest colony. That planet's uncharted, but capable of supporting life."

Lance's heart sank at that. "So... what? We're stranded?"

The A.I. shrugged. "Pretty much."

The two sat there for a full minute before Lance finally spoke. "Fuck." He muttered, staring at the blue and green marble beneath him. "At least we'll be the first ones of explore a new habitable planet."