The ''Piloting a space craft for noobs'' book cost 3,000 drift points.

  I know this because I checked. I checked it on day one hundred and thirteen, sitting in my iron chair with my hands on my steering wheel and my propulsion system humming through the hull in a way I could feel in my back teeth, and I looked at the price and looked at my drift point balance — 5,647 after all the recent expenditures — and made a decision.

  I was not going to buy it.

  Not because I couldn't. I could. The system labelled it as a ''recommended'' text not compulsory. But 3,000 drift points was 3,000 drift points, and I had needs that were more pressing than a manual for something I was going to learn by doing anyway, and I had read twenty-five engineering and physics textbooks, and I understood the theory, and how hard could it actually be. It literally a space minivan and I know for a fact that I understood how to drive, I also built it myself soooo...

  I would like to revisit that question now, with the benefit of experience.

  The first few hours of flying was fine.

  This was the problem. The first few hours were fine in a way that gave me a completely inaccurate impression of what flying a metal box through space was going to be like on an ongoing basis. I eased the thrust up gradually — one percent, two, five — and the box responded cleanly, moving in the direction I pointed it with satisfying directness. The steering wheel translated to the thrust arrays with a lag I clocked at approximately half a second and accounted for. The radar showed me the space around me in its two-hundred kilometer bubble. Everything was clear. Everything was nominal.

  I pushed the thrust to fifteen percent and felt the acceleration press me back into my iron chair and watched the stars shift position in my window and thought: I can do this.

  I pushed it to thirty percent.

  The box, it turned out, had opinions about thirty percent.

  Not structural opinions — the hull held, the reinforcement did its job, the thrust arrays performed exactly as specified. The opinions were dynamic. At thirty percent thrust the half-second control lag became a conversation rather than a delay, a back-and-forth between input and response that required adjustment, and adjusting too sharply at thirty percent produced a correction that needed its own correction, which produced another, which produced the specific experience of a metal box executing a series of increasingly enthusiastic rotations through open space while I held the steering wheel and said words I'm choosing not to transcribe.

  I brought it back to ten percent. Stabilized. Breathed.

  "Okay," I said to the window, which was now showing me a view that was rotating slowly back toward where I'd intended to point. "Okay. That's useful information."

  I spent the next three hours learning the relationship between thrust percentage and control input the way you learned anything without a manual — by doing it wrong, noting what happened, adjusting, doing it slightly less wrong, noting that, adjusting again. I mapped the lag at different thrust levels. I learned that lateral corrections at above twenty percent required anticipating the correction before I needed it. I learned that the thrust arrays had slightly different output characteristics on the port versus starboard side, a minor manufacturing variance in my own fabrication that I logged and compensated for.

  By the end of the 8 hours I could hold a heading at twenty percent thrust with reasonable consistency.

  I was, I decided, ready to actually go somewhere. I decided to head toward the civilization signal in the distance.

  There was a teeny weeny problem. So see I remember the system telling me on day one that there was a nearby civilization. It was nearby by space standards but too far for my radar to detect it. I decided to think for a second on how the system was able to find the civilization and remembered flux perception. If I could focus and use flux perception to find an area with a high flux density I could find the civilization the system spoke about and maybe answers.

  This is going to sound worse than it was, but....

  I decided to turn off the radar. Now wait... No I'm not stupid. The radar consumes over 2 times more flux than everything else in the box combined. Let me explain how the radar works

  So the radar absorbs a massive quantity of flux from it flux battery(me) and converts it to multiple tiny particles and disperses it at high speed into the surrounding space. When it comes into contact with anything solid it bounces off it and it makes a the particle explodes and releases the compressed flux all over the object it hit. This object now has a unique flux signature that can be detected by the receiver of the radar.

  That process is repeated once every minute which eats away at my flux reserves. Now all that and I can't detect anything with the radar. Meanwhile I can do something similar with my flux perception with basically zero flux, just a little more focus.

  I pushed the thrust to twenty-five percent in the direction of the massive flux signature and held my heading. I closed my eyes to focus more as I didn't need the window. I was barely 4 seconds when I heard a loud sound.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The first rock hit the port side thrust array with a sound I had never heard the box make before. A sharp concussive impact, metal on something harder than metal, and the thrust array's output stuttered in a way I felt immediately through the controls, the port side suddenly pulling less than the starboard, the heading drifting without my input. I was sent flying of course at ridiculous speed. I mentally cursed and turned on the radar as quick as possible. It was red.

  The rocks stretched across my entire forward heading in a density that the radar rendered in red because it had apparently decided that the appropriate color for you are flying directly into this was red, which I thought was reasonable if somewhat belated information. I had been flying into it for forty minutes. I was now, according to the radar, approximately inside it.

  I cut thrust. Grabbed the wheel. Started correcting.

  The next twenty minutes were the most focused I had been since the anti-flux Igo, which had involved vacuum exposure and near-death and used every resource I had. This was different — no flux reserves needed, no skill application, just me and the wheel and the radar and the rocks coming from every angle because I was moving and they were moving and the vectors were not cooperating. A piece the size of a car scraped the hull and the integrity readout dropped two percent. Something smaller hit the window — I flinched, involuntarily, an absolutely useless response — and the window did what the window always did, which was nothing, because the window was indestructible and had no patience for rocks.

  I wove through it. Badly, at first. Better, as I found the rhythm of it. The radar told me where things were and I moved away from them and found new things and moved away from those too, the corrections getting faster and less overcorrected as the minutes passed. The thrust stayed low — eight percent, six, whatever gave me control without committing me to a vector I couldn't escape.

  I came out the other side breathing hard with my hands cramped around the wheel and the radar showing clear space ahead and the hull at ninety-one percent integrity.

  I looked out the window.

  There was a planet.

  I had not expected a planet.

  This was, in retrospect, the navigational error underlying the navigational error — I had not been using the radar, which meant I had not seen the asteroid field, which meant I had also not seen what the asteroid field was orbiting. Or rather, what it had been orbiting before whatever had happened to it, because the planet I was looking at through my window was not in the condition planets were generally supposed to be in.

  It was almost Mars-colored — red-brown, dry, the texture of a surface that had not had weather in a very long time. It was larger than Mars. The system, which had finally decided this was relevant information, told me it was approximately 1.3 times the size of Earth.

  A significant portion of it was missing.

  Not eroded. Not cratered. Missing, as in the geometry of the planet was wrong — there was a concave absence on one side that should have been more planet and was instead a curved scar, the edges of it smooth in a way that spoke of something enormous and deliberate rather than impact or geological catastrophe. The asteroid field I had just come through was, I understood now, the debris from whatever had been removed.

  The system provided a note in the same formal tone it used for everything:

  PLANETARY BODY DETECTED

  Classification: Barren — Former Habitable Zone

  Estimated cause of surface damage: Igo feeding event, Level 4 or above

  Current status: Uninhabited

  A level four Igo had eaten part of this planet.

  Then it hit me. Aside from anti flux Igo's regular Igos all have ridiculous flux signatures and the bigger they are the larger their flux. I must have sensed it from a distance with flux perception and because of its size presumed to be a planet or some space civilization. I almost screwed myself over by chasing a level 4 Igo.

  I was looking at a planet that had been partially eaten, and I was looking at it through my window because I was currently entering its gravitational pull, which I knew because the engineering textbooks had covered gravitational mechanics extensively and I recognized what was happening to my heading and my speed, and what was happening was that the planet was making a decision about me without consulting me.

  I grabbed the wheel. Pushed thrust to twenty percent. Tried to correct.

  The planet had significantly more gravitational influence than twenty percent thrust at this range.

  I pushed to forty. The control lag at forty percent was not something I had practiced with and the corrections I needed were not corrections I had learned yet and the planet was getting larger in my window very quickly and I was doing everything I knew how to do and the everything I knew how to do was not enough.

  "Okay," I said, with remarkable calm for someone whose window was now showing a single uninterrupted view of a rust-red planetary surface approaching at a speed the system was politely declining to display. "Okay. This is happening."

  I pulled the wheel back. Felt the acceleration hit me like a wall — the inertial forces the manual had warned about, the fatal ones, pressing me into the iron chair with a weight that had no respect for the fact that I was trying to do something about this. My vision grayed at the edges. I held the wheel.

  The box hit atmosphere.

  What followed was approximately ninety seconds that I am going to describe only partially because I was not fully conscious for all of it and because the parts I was conscious for were primarily the sensation of the box tumbling, the sound of the hull under atmospheric stress, the window cycling rapidly between views of sky and ground and sky and ground, Gerald — somehow, impossibly — still on and flickering, and my own hands locked on the wheel doing whatever they could with the information available.

  The box hit the ground.

  It hit it at an angle, which was probably the only reason I survived — a direct vertical impact at the speed I was going would have been a different kind of ending. Instead the box struck the surface and bounced, which was not a sensation I had any prior reference for, a full-body impact followed by a brief terrible weightlessness and then another impact, and then a long grinding scrape that went on for what felt like much longer than physics should have allowed, and then it stopped.

  Silence.

  Gerald was not on.

  The silence lasted for what might have been seconds or minutes. I was sitting in the iron chair with the wheel still in my hands and my head was ringing in a specific way that I understood, dimly, meant I had hit it on something during one of the impacts, and when I touched my temple my hand came away wet and everything went dark again.