Marc Miller's Traveller Character Sheet

Lucas Fuentes

(Melanie Drake)

Homeworld

Difficulty Codes

Skill Cap

Space and Related Skills

Other Vehicle Skills

Social Skills

Academic Skills

Miscellaneous Skills

Military Skills

Weapon and Fighting Skills

Psionics

Weapons and Armor

Possessions

Career(s)

History

Background Links

T4-Style Career

Common and Background Skills

Rogue : Pre-Term One

Rogue : Mustering Out

Juvenile Hall : Pre-Term Two

Academic Record

Scholar : Term One

Scholar : Mustering Out

Scouts : Term One

Scouts : Mustering Out

Rogue : Term Two

Scouts : Mustering Out

Background Notes

#########
BACKSTORY

I think I was in the Hall before I realized that not everyone sees the world like I do, as a collection of equations and probabilities.

I was just another kid in the barrio, just another kid in the family. I had seven brothers and sisters, but no father that I ever knew. Ma sometimes had some drunk and useless man living with her, sometimes not. It was better when she was alone.

8th street was in the Five Brothers territory, and if you knew what was good for you, you were in. I had a pistol by the time I was 9, and was stealing and driving getaway cars when I was 12. I was a small kid and it took that long before I could reach and work all the controls and see where I was going at the same time.

Small and brown: brown hair, brown skin, brown eyes. I looked like just about every other kid out there, at least the ones a couple years younger than me. I could be forgotten before I was even noticed.

This was a large advantage.

Until I was big enough to drive, I was usually just a lookout. Nobody ever saw me, or remembered me. Sometimes they used me as a distraction. That's riskier, but when you look like 90% of the other kids out there, your description doesn't get the cops very far.

And that's when your mark even makes the connection. I could easily sidle up to someone and look young and pathetic and needy. Hell, I was all three to start with. By the time the mark figured he'd been taken and his wallet and whatever else he had was gone, he'd long forgotten the beggar kid who'd distracted him for a crucial 30 seconds.

Not that I ever got anything out of it. Besides being allowed to live and not get beat up too often, that is. Believe me, it was enough. You never really had friends. Oh, they said they were, but only as long as everything went well. I was not really comforted knowing that if the Peacekeepers another two blocks off killed me, my "friends" would kill one of them.

And, of course, my first girl ditched me as soon as things went south.

Vera. I was all of fifteen, but I fell hard. She was just another street kid, nondescript as the rest of us. But she smiled at me that time me and Carlos dropped off the catch of the day: 5 guns we'd stolen. Not at Carlos, but me.

I started up a numbers racket, off the clock so to speak. It would have earned me a good beating if I got caught, but I was careful. Numbers were easy, and I looked small, pathetic, and reasonably honest. It's ridiculous what people will believe when they want something. Like anybody besides the house ever wins.

I ran a small game with small takes, but it was enough to give Vera enough trinkets to keep her attentions on me.

Until, like I said, things went south.

It was just another job. I was the driver. No robbery this time, but a hit. The Peacekeepers were getting bold and were hitting up some of our storekeepers for protection. So someone high up decided to take it to them and assigned Carlos and Manny. They were both "friends" and wanted me to drive them. Should have been simple, like so many other drive-by shootings.

I drove the car, one I stole on the way to pick up Carlos and Manny. They got in, both on the passenger side of the car, Carlos in front and Manny in back. I drove up Avenue K, they set themselves up and ready, and two buildings before the run-down house we knew Jacko'd be at, we were surrounded by lights and sirens.

Yeah, I know. It's obvious. I was fifteen, what can I say?

Carlos had been ratting on us to the cops for two years. They decided to make examples of us, I guess. Before another cycle of murder-revenge got started.

I was lucky, at that. Manny was 17. He was tried on a whole host of gun charges and attempted murder and who knows what else. Convicted and sent to "rehab". We're progressive and advanced here in the core of the Imperium: we rehabilitate criminals. Just another word for brainwashing, where they take all the "anti-social" bits out of your psyche and leave you all happy and shiny. If it works, you're free and docile and meat out on the streets. If it doesn't work, then you're shipped off to a convict mining colony or the like somewhere. That, too, kills you pretty quick. I heard Manny was "cured". And dead days after he returned home, a smiling idiot with no street smarts left to him.

Yeah, I know. Why are you tried as an adult at 16, but if you enter the juvenile system, you stay there until 18? That's just the way it is. I'm sure it makes sense to some faceless bureaucrat in a comfortable office with a comfortable home, a wife, a dog, and 2.3 kids somewhere.

But I was still 15. Another two months, and I'd've been given the same treatment as Manny probably. But at 15 I was still considered a kid. It was Juvenile Hall for me. If I could make it through that for the next couple of years, I'd be free and clear on my 18th birthday.

Free and clear to hit the streets again, most likely to be arrested again shortly and tried and punished as an adult.

It was the only world I knew, the only way things could be.

Except that there, in the unlikely hell of the Hall, everything changed.

###

Did I mention as soon as I was picked up that Vera forgot I ever existed? She never even answered any of the notes I sent her. No, after a couple of weeks I got a note from Benny: "Veras mine now leave her alone".

My older brother Tomas was still in the Hall by the time I got there. He was picked up for aggravated assault when he was fourteen, so he must have been stuck in the Hall for three years by then. He was in another facility, though. They'd put him in Wendwood. I was in Bond.

He got out about four months after I went in. He never even made it home. The girl he'd assaulted was the sister of a Peacekeeper, and he shot up Tomas about a block from home.

I'm not saying he didn't deserve it. He had a temper -- I still have a scar he gave me when I was 8. He left that girl in pretty rough shape. But he was my brother and it hit me kind of hard.

I made my plans: sit tight and be quiet. Don't get noticed. Just like life outside, really. Once they let me out, find a gun and kill the SOB who killed Tomas.

I was barely sixteen and planning on mayhem and murder.

It's easy to see where my life should have gone: dead before 20. Killed on the streets, either after the whole caught-tried-convicted-rehab thing, or before I even got that far.

Instead, as I said before, everything changed.

I wasn't too bad off in the pecking order at Bond. I wasn't on top, constantly having to defend my position. Nor was I at the bottom, constantly a target for everyone else. No, I'd been picked up for Accessory to Attempted Murder and Grand Theft. I had not actually killed anyone (threat to those already here), nor was I just a petty thief (meat). I was comfortably safe in the forgotten middle, just where I liked to be.

Besides the social order of the inmates, you have to negotiate the System. Some of them are honestly caring, and they're the hardest to deal with. They just don't leave you alone. The rest are there for reasons ranging from anything to just making a living at a j-o-b to genuine sadistic pleasure in roughing up kids. The last are the easiest to deal with, because you've got a leash on them. The middle group? Avoidance. They just don't care.

If you're not from somewhere all civilized like we are here, you might be wondering how there's anybody on the streets at all. If it's that likely that you die or get siphoned into the system before you're 21, how can you sustain so much crime?

Remember, I was nobody. Ma was nobody. Whoever my Da was, he was nobody, too, and my siblings' fathers and all the men Ma ever brought home with her were all nobodies. Cannon fodder is what all us nobodies are, and there's always plenty of nobodies. The guys at the top, now. They're the ones who run everything. They're somebodies. They got connections, they got cash, they got dirt on cops and lawyers. They don't go down, hardly ever. And there's plenty of cannon fodder between them and the somebodies at the top in the rival gangs. Nobodies shoot and kill each other; nobodies get picked up and dumped through the system. Somebodies have protection against all that. They're the ones running the show, and they don't go nowhere.

At Bond, I found tests. Batteries of tests. Day in and day out, tests.

They don't accept your school records, which are pretty much the same for all the kids. Let's face it, if you've ended up in the system, you've had problems for a while.

My school records were pretty empty: I rarely showed up.

So they test you. Knowledge, intelligence, aptitude. They wear you down, and eventually even the hardest case makes enough honest answers, even if by accident, that they figure out where you belong.

Mostly, that means they teach the teachable ones and hope for the best, and they warehouse the rest and expect the worst.

Once in a while, they find a talent. The talent has no hope: they latch onto him with unbreakable hooks.

This is where I discovered math, and how it wraps around and defines everything and everyone. And that most other people don't see any of it.

Sullen fool that I was, I wanted no part of the system. I had no interest. All I wanted by then was to kill the guy who killed Tomas, and maybe take out Benny and get back Vera, too.

But they have ways, oh yes they do. All the beds have restraints, you know. After all, a lot of us were pretty dangerous. And so I spent several weeks, 10 hours a day, hooked up against my will to those direct teaching tools that just pour crap into your brain.

I now know that this is considered a benefit of technology. Some high-level doofus can learn everything he needs on the way to a meeting while sleeping on the journey.

At the time, I considered it pure torture.

Up to the point something clicked.

I can't say what it was. But somewhere along the way, everything I knew shifted 90 degrees. I always had a way of seeing the world in probabilities. Now I could fit those vague numbers and intuitions into equations and it all made sense.

The world around me was defined and explained by those equations. The people I dealt with on a daily basis were governed by the immutable laws that math described. Knowing that plus adding in some of a given person's idiosyncrasies, I could make decent odds on his actions and reactions.

The illicit gambling at Bond with homemade (or smuggled or stolen) cards and dice was entirely transparent to me. Dice and cards are constants, and my fellow gamblers again each had their equations that defined the way they used those dice and cards, the way they reacted to their luck and to each other. If you saw everything just the right way, it was all so predictable. Feed what you know into the right equation, work the factors and responses just right, jiggle a little for the unknown, and you got a pretty good shot at reading and manipulating them.

I no longer needed to be strapped to the bed to passively learn math. I wanted it, worse than I ever wanted anything in my life.

Because it made the world make sense, and it gave me control. The one thing I never had.

Of course, math alone wasn't enough. Not for me. I had no easy way into University. I had to test well enough across the board that I could be accepted for a free ride. Otherwise, I'd just get dumped back home, and I suddenly wanted something better than that.

So for two years I worked harder than I ever imagined could be possible, just for that single chance at escape. I learned what I could and gambled my way into others covering what I couldn't get quick enough.

It worked. On my 18th birthday, I was released from Bond Juvenile Hall. But not back to 8th street. I was sent immediately to the University, where I was accepted as a freshman, majoring in Mathematics, on a free ride.

I never went back home. I escaped; why would I go back?

###

Funny, the more things change the more they stay the same.

That's just another way of saying that no matter where you go, people are the same. Not individuals, of course. Individuals are unpredictable. But as types, as groups, they're easily described by the usual equations.

I had no place at the University.

I was no longer a member in good standing of anything. On the streets, you don't try to force your way in. You lay low and hope no one notices you. Or if someone does, you hope they invite you in rather than use you as target practice because you're less than a nobody.

The University wasn't really any different.

Or rather, it was, but not enough, and I was definitely no different.

Unless you've been where I was, it's hard to explain. People who've always lived where negotiating your place in the social order doesn't involve beatings and death don't see things the same way I did.

So I approached University life the same way I approached everything: stay quiet and invisible.

All I was really interested in was studying anyway. You couldn't keep me away from math without extreme force. Other subjects ranged from key to interesting to dull but necessary. And I studied for the dull but necessary as hard as I had to. Then I discovered physics, and everything came together. Turned out math was only the beginning. Necessary, but by itself meaningless. Its true power lies in the ability if gives you to not just manipulate cards, dice, and people, but the universe around you. And the other universes we can't see directly, though we still interact with them, and they with us.

I had a lot of catching up to do, no matter all I accomplished in Bond.

And I was afraid.

I woke up every morning, wondering if this was the day some professor would call me out with a "You don't belong here!" and send me back to hell. I went to sleep every night, wondering if I would wake up in the morning and find myself wrapped up in a dirty sheet on the mat on the floor at home. Or still in Bond, one of the warehoused ones, scrabbling for position, planning to kill Tomas' killer. Or even worse, wake to a lucid moment in a white room while some soulless technician reformatted my brain.

I spent my days in class and studying, and my nights fleecing my fellow university students, mostly in poker. Everyone fancies himself gambler, and the deeper in they get, the more reckless they get and the more eager they are to prove their deep pockets. Just because my tuition, books, room, and board were covered didn't mean I didn't want a bit more. Besides, it's fun.

One turning point came in my next to last semester. Maeve. I'd lost a social bet at a track and field event (never bet sports) and had to take an art course. It was obvious in the first week that I was going to flunk it, and then I'd have to pay out. Maeve had been losing pretty regularly. She came to me ... I didn't blackmail her or anything. She owed me a lot and finally admitted that she couldn't either pay me or play her way out. Relatively smart, compared to most of my fellow students. She asked if she could work it off somehow, and I told her she could provide me with my art projects for the semester. She was an art student -- she talked about it when she played (always keep your mind on the game).

She was more than an art student, she was an artist. She played it good for my homework: good enough to pass, not good enough so I looked like an artist. "I" specialized in bad primitives. About halfway through the semester, I met her artwork in person, in her room.

Amazing. She couldn't add 2+2 and get the same answer twice in a row, but her paintings were brilliant. They were all bright, rich colors and energy. Not one painting was muddy or dull. They were all ordinary things; a vase, a flower, a dog. But they were so alive, and the colors reached right out of the canvas.

Maeve's a direct contrast to her paintings. She's quiet and dreamy and pale. Once you get to her know her well, she comes alive and you can see where the energy in her paintings comes from. I got to know her very well.

She came with a large social group, which welcomed me into their circle. Or least admitted me. But I was "in" for the first time since I was 15. And they didn't expect me to lie, cheat, steal, or kill for them.

###

Graduation.

The doubts left me that day.

I was the proud owner of a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a place as a master's degree candidate. I knew no one could ever send me back again. I was safe, and I was in control.

I don't actually remember much from that night. Maeve and her friends and I celebrated all night long.

The Master's degree segued smoothly into a PhD. Maeve stopped going to classes once she earned her arts degree. She had a successful one-man show and started selling her work at a small gallery. And she moved in with me, since she lost her dorm room.

By day, Maeve painted and I worked doggedly on my dissertation on multi-universe dimensionality. By night, we went out to dinner, we went to theatres, we watched movies. I still ran my poker game, but just once a week. I didn't need to cheat to beat optimistic college students, but I did a little anyway, just to keep in practice.

###

My PhD came with an offer from the University: Professor of Physics. It was hinted that I'd be on the fast-track to tenure. Four years, probably. I'd have to teach low-level courses, but there would be plenty of time for research, and once I had tenure, I'd get graduate classes to teach instead.

Maeve and I moved from student housing to adjunct professor housing. We had four rooms: a living room, a kitchen/dinette, a bathroom, and one whole room just to sleep in. I could eat at the University for free, and I had a salary. I was rich!

I'd already bought the ring. Maeve and I were walking back after a night at the theatre about a month before I was awarded the PhD. It was cold and clear, and our breaths steamed out with every word we spoke. We passed a jewelry shop, closed of course at that hour, and she ran to the window to look at the display.

She always does. She loves bright, beautiful things that sparkle. She chattered about this ring and that necklace, but stared with silent appreciation at one ring. The center stone matched the vivid blue in the first painting of hers that caught my eye. I bought the ring the next day.

I held onto it because, well, I don't really know why. For some reason, I wanted to wait until I had that Ph.D. Until I was a real professor. Until I was someone. I don't know why I thought that would matter to Maeve. No, to be honest, I knew it didn't matter to her. It mattered to me.

I took her out for dinner to an expensive, romantic restaurant. I played with the ring in my pocket the whole time, waiting for just the right time. Dessert came and went. I payed the bill. We went home and had some amazing sex. But I didn't offer her the ring.

I thought, I'd wait until I had tenure. Then I'd be secure. I was certain I'd have it after four years, and that's not really so long. We'd already been together almost that long.

But the next four years moved slowly. I could not believe how stupid the students in basic physics courses are. They couldn't follow a tenth of what I tried to teach them. I had no idea how they even got into the University.

My research stalled. It was all theory, of course, but I could only get so far mathematically. I was certain of the endpoint, but that wasn't enough. I needed some hard data. I needed to validate the theories I had already, and I needed to be able to test and extend the models.

One night, I fleeced the wrong person and had to take a week's leave to recover from the beating I got the next night. The whole thing took me back 12 or 13 years, right back into the hellhole I thought I'd escaped. After that, I took steps. Never again.

I carefully reached out and bought a gun. I realize that most civilized worlds ban civilian weapons, but there was a very long and well-established culture of duelling on mine. You couldn't find a rifle anywhere, but handguns were very popular.

I hadn't held a gun since I was 15. And I'd never really been taught how to shoot. Not beyond "hold it this way, point it, and pull the trigger". To my surprise, I enjoyed target shooting.

But that wasn't enough. I'm a small guy, and a small guy with a gun is still a small guy. So I joined a gym, too. And discovered I'll never be much more than a small guy with a gun.

I never did get called out to a duel.

At the end of the four-year slog, the tenure list was posted, and I wasn't on it. I demanded to know why from Dr. Ponuru, the department head, and he fobbed me off with something about budget cuts.

I knew the real reason, though.

He never liked me. He could follow neither my thesis nor my dissertation. He utterly disbelieved my multi-universe theories, and believed my models were all wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if the cretin doesn't even believe in more than our own universe.

I had some hard decisions to make.

If I stayed at the University, I would always be struggling with him, as long as he was department head. I didn't see him leaving anytime soon.

But, Maeve was here. And this was the best university to be at for multi-universe physics, and the engineering school was also top-notch.

I needed to be here.

I had to prove Dr. Ponuru wrong. Or rather, I had to prove myself right. Once I had been published and my theories were accepted, he would have to tenure me no matter how he felt personally about it.

I could only see one way to do it.

To stay here, I had to leave.

I wrote up a draft white paper on the irrelevance of intersticial dimensionality and a grant proposal. It was accepted, and I was given a post as an adjunct to the Scout service. Dr. Ponuru gladly gave me a leave of absence, and before long I was about to leave my home planet for the first time in my life.

I helped find Maeve a nice apartment. She was making pretty regular money on her paintings, but I left her a good chunk of my winnings, to see her through any rough patches she might have while I was gone.

Our last night, I finally got up the nerve to ask her to wait for me until I got back. She loved the ring, just like I knew she would.

###

The next four years passed by at an alarming rate. I had a small scout ship entirely at my disposal, crewed by a single scout. I followed my instincts and found at least a little data to support my theory. If I pushed it a little. I also learned how to pilot a ship.

It's like driving, but even better. I have to admit, piloting is like being the master of your own, personal universe. I am the ship, and the ship is all there is. Yet at the same time, my little ship-universe is merely a small island, one among many.

I wrote to Maeve regularly, and she wrote back. She missed me terribly, of course, but she waited.

The end of my four year grant was near, and I was so close. I thought the paper and the data I had so far was good enough to be published in the Imperial Journal of Dimensional Physics (or at least the Reviews of Modern Physics), and that would be enough to extend the grant until I could finish everything. I hated to make Maeve wait, but I was so close.

Both journals refused to print, as did the others I tried. The editor of the IJDP dismissed my premises as "foolish", and I wondered if he'd even been able to understand the first thing I wrote. Damned idiot. The rest didn't bother with more than a form rejection, as if I was just a student.

I still had a much-advanced white paper, though, and I used it to apply for a grant extension.

That, too, was denied. I was expected to return to the University, tail between my legs, and resume teaching morons.

And marry Maeve.

What did I want? I could return, teach, be a respected professor, and have Maeve. Eventually Ponuru would have to award me tenure, if not as fast as I wanted it. Everything I had dreamed of in the last few years, and nothing I could possibly have invented in my wildest dreams before that.

But my work on the interstice and universal dimensionality would remain unfinished. I needed just a little more work, I was certain. I was so close, I could see it. The Fuentes equation would explain it all. And me, the small kid from the streets, I'd be somebody. I could even see a Knighthood in it, maybe. I thought she'd like being Dame Maeve.

In the end, I had no real choice. Perhaps it was bred in me from the start, inevitably from the first time I stole a car.

At the first opportunity, I hit the scout on the head with a wrench and took off with the ship.

I'm sure I didn't kill him. Pretty sure. I didn't hit him that hard, really. Just enough to lay him out cold.

I'm sure he was still breathing when I left. He must've been. Just real slow probably.

###

I carefully moved away from the center of the universe, inching my way through the lowest-class ports I could, avoiding anything with any kind of base, staying away from newslines. I decided head towards the Spinward Marches.

That god-forsaken frontier is so far away from everything important, I'll be able to hide in plainer sight, and finish my project.

Once I was a few systems out, I sent a coded message to Maeve, explaining everything, and gave her the code for a drop-box so she could send me a reply. When I got there, there was no answer. I tried a few more times.

After a while, I did get an answer. Maeve wasn't any different that Vera, I guess. She found another man to take care of her, since I was gone and not coming back soon enough for her.

###

And here I am: ???. [wherever Martyn wants to put me]

It took me four years to get here. Dodging scouts and other trouble-makers. Stopping to "gather" cash to pay for the next leg. I've got a collection of Imperial IDs, some better than others. I've changed the ship's name a dozen times. I've tried to make some structural changes here and there so it doesn't look so much like a scout ship, but that didn't really work out very well. Now it looks like a slightly vandalized scout ship. Scouts being the way they are, it's not notable. But it still looks like a scout ship.

[plus whatever else I need to write to get Lucas where he is, into whatever current trouble he's in, with whoever his companion(s) might be, if any]



############
LUCAS' PAPER

The Irrelevance of Dimensionality Regarding the Interstice that Separates the Universes

Abstract:

Our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes. In the infancy of theoretical physics, it was claimed that our universe was defined by the 3+1 dimensions that we humans directly experience, plus a number of others (commonly 10 or 11) to reconcile varying string theories. This paper proves that only the 4 dimensions define our universe, and other dimensionality actually impinges on ours from other universes at the quantum level. In an earlier paper, I proved that amongst all the infinite universes, there are only 42 possible dimensions, and different combinations of the 42 dimensions define the different universes. Since that paper, it has been theorized that the interstice that separates the universes has either no dimensions or all 42 dimensions. This paper further proves that a discussion of intersticial dimensions is meaningless.

This is all I see missing:

Homeworld
University

Serpila in Quinoid subsector, Old Expanses sector.  It's the other side of Core, fairly near the Solomani Rim.  There would be some Terran influence on cultures there, although strongly Imperial.  The world is a blank slate, anything you choose to describe will become canon in this game.  Invent the University too. :)  These are the stats:

Serpila       A674A98-F  S Hi In              503 Im

Starport: Excellent (A)
Size: Medium (8800 - 10400 km)
    That's about halfway between Earth and Mars, gravity somewhere in the 0.85 range at a very rough guess.
Atmosphere: Standard, Tainted (obviously not tainted too badly)
Hydrographics: 40% water
Population : 50 billion
Government: Impersonal Bureaucracy
Law Level: High
Technology: High Stellar
Planetoid Belts: 0
Gas Giants: 3

Allegiance: Imperial
Bases: Scout Base
Trade codes: Hi In (High population, Industrial)
Travel zone: Green

That seems a good enough fit, and about the right place to have taken 4 years to get to the Spinward Marches with distractions along the way.

The attached image shows the relative locations of the Old Expanses (Red, with a green dot at approximately Serpila's location) and the Spinward Marches (Yellow).  Core is one sector to the left and two up from the Old Expanses.  (The blank areas are no data in my program, not no stars.)  The Solomani Rim sector, where Terra is located, is one to the left and one down from Old Expanses.

Current location

Dinom / Lanth.  Please get Kalida to use this as a waypoint between Victoria and Regina if you can.  It's jump-6 from Victoria, right on the way, and everyone accepts her routes so there doesn't need to be any odd justification I think.  If that fails, the cook you pick up on Regina will ask to go there for special food supplies, but I'd rather it appear a chance encounter than a GM directed destination. :)

If you're looking for an ultimate destination for Lucas, I'm guessing at this point he might have been headed for Attica / Querion.  It's just outside the Imperium and Zhodani areas, has a reputation for being kind of a pirate base and run by organized crime, who pretty much get to make the laws there too.  Information, technology, everything is available there for a price.  He could slip into the society there and set up a base to complete his research free from the slightest interest by any authorities.

Kind of ironic he should be hit by pirates, when he's on the way to a pirate base world... and almost at the Imperial border, too.

Anything important that might have happened between here and there
Is he alone on his ship?

Dinom is still kind of a dangerous place, 13 years after a workers' revolution, and not many people come here.  There's good resources here but no-one to enforce law off the planets.  He would have been transporting someone here from Dinomn, the next system over.  There's no regular trade route to Dinom from Dinomn, so passengers have to get on whatever free trader or other ship they can find.  He picked up a passenger who thought even a free trader was a little too much exposure, wanted something more discreet and would pay very well, ridiculously well in fact.  50k credits for just a little Jump-1, and an extra stopover for Lucas on the way to Extolay, and the promise of a lucrative cargo from Dinom to Extolay too if he proved himself on this run.

The passenger was an important agent of one of the factions on the mainworld of Dinom.  He didn't say that to Lucas, but the gossip Lucas had picked up on Dinomn made it very obvious to someone with his background.  The man was very worried about making it back to his base city -- and he didn't say which yet, he said he'd do that in orbit around the destination -- and nervous about the trip.  He did not tell Lucas his name and did not offer any ID.

Lucas's ship was attacked on the way in, maneuver and jump drives hit, and the passenger grabbed by pirates to sell to another faction.  They wouldn't care about Lucas or the ship, a scoutship isn't worth enough to salvage when it's shot up like that, and he wouldn't be worth anything himself.  Details of the attack I can leave up to you, but it would be clear the pirates had been tipped off the man was on board and when he was going to arrive.  Precision target on engineering and then a boarding party that told Lucas to lock himself on the bridge.  Once they had their prey on board, they jumped out of the system immediately.

Life support was still running, but there were no other ships insystem to rescue him.  Lucas could probably last a couple of weeks if careful, and how long he'll have been there when found I'll leave up to you.

The ship that attacked Lucas was the Raptor, a 300t Gunned Escort.  Their transponder said they were owned by the Associated Surplus Distribution Company of Dekalb / Querion.  Their captain even introduced himself as Ed Williams, and remained friendly through the entire encounter -- except for the shooting up the ship, kidnapping the passenger, and leaving Lucas in a disabled ship, of course.  The Raptor isn't really very big -- a little larger than a free trader -- but it's faster than a scoutship and much more heavily armed, and was waiting for Lucas when he came out of jump.

Plus any other niggling details that you might think of. Basically, though, the past is much less important than the future, until/unless pieces of his past turn up to h(a)unt him.

I'll need a ship's name for the transponder that Nightshade would pick up.  The transponder is still running and the comm gear and computer is intact too.  He wasn't really left for dead, but it'll be pure luck if someone arrives insystem in time to rescue him.