The screen blinked to life in front of her as figures began flickering across the surface. A low hum started from within the large piloting console as various lights and buttons came to life, bathing the dark alcove with a dull neon light. She glanced at the panel in front of her, her eyes darting between the various readings on display. These were just the automatic updates, which came to life every hour or so, the ship detailing the outside conditions and any anomalies that may have arisen.
They were now traveling through the Medulla Nebula, a small quadrant on the outskirts of the L-472 Sector, itself considered a backwater by galactic standards. A few centuries back it was a bustling thoroughfare, as trading ships passed through on their way to the Gemini Cluster, but with the discovery, and later colonization of the Rode System, a more direct and sustainable system, with its twin suns providing over one hundred times more energy than Medullas lone star, now in the last few centuries of its life.
Many of the trading stations and settlements stood empty, with only a fraction left for small time traders that made their way through the system. Only one of the five planets in the Nebula was habitable, and only just. Centuri Alpha Seven was a dwarf planet made up of desert and windswept wasteland, with weak, 64-hour long day cycles and freezing, 16h night cycles. The primary settlement on the planet was, in its heyday, a bustling metropolis, where traders, industrialists, mercenaries and an assortment of gamblers and criminals worked together to create a thriving economy. Nowadays the city lay in disrepair and ruin, with entire sections abandoned as corporations withdrew to set up shop in more profitable sectors of the galaxy, and only those too poor or too old remained, eking out a living from the few ships that still passed through every now and then.
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