Well, you can check the enemy base position with the B key, that'll tell you where you need to go. Space will tell you your position, D, your current direction. As to not being shot down, there are two main points. Firstly, make heavy use of the N,S,E,W, keys to scan ahead ten cells in each direction. on the easy difficulty, guns will appear on scans (on normal and hard you have to just turn around when you here them), the guns are in east/west lines across the board with a gap in betwene, so when you find a gun on the scan, keep flying north or south and pressing the E key to scan east to find your way through.

Have you read the documentation? I'd deffinately recommend you read at least the "rules of the game" and "Episode 1" secctions, everything you need to know is there.

Oh, Btw, I'm afraid that in the demo version the game will cut out after a few minutes, so unless you buy the game, you probably won't be able to reach the enimy base.

Personally though, while I did find the demo of the game slightly mean, I stil ended up buying it, sinse even though episode 1 can be slightly slow at times, two and three more than make up for that (check the episode descriptions in the documentation and you'll see what I mean).