Romikivh Tamir

2300 hours. The Freedom’s Forge outpost in V2-VC2. I woke up in a bit of a daze. I’d barely been sleeping twenty minutes, and emergency CTA alarms were blaring throughout my room. I never did well waking up so soon after I fell asleep. I never did well with alarm clocks, either.

It was the sound of the Emergency CTA alarm. This meant that, as a capsuleer on-base, I was expected to drag my ass out of bed and get into a combat boat.

I got up to the hangar and decided to board my Vagabond. A typical boat for an Ushra’Khan pilot with an equally typical fit, it had stood the test of time.

The capsule’s jack slipped into the back of my neck and I became aware of a whole new dimension—the sound of the alliance’s channels and the interface of the Neocomm on the periphery of my vision. The voices in my head, as she would always call them. An almost imperceptible sting as the capsule assessed my physical state and injected enough caffeine and adrenaline into me to jumpstart my body.

I undocked and raced to meet the fleet in GE-8JV. From there we departed through HED-GP and moved into Paxton Federation space.

Our first kill was an Armageddon in D-GTMI. I targeted and pointed the ship, but just as my Vulcan 220 Autocannons fired up, the ship exploded. My first rounds exploded in the midst of the wreckage. It was only then that I bothered to check the pilot’s name—it was Poslen, a man who I did not expect to find out in the bowels of Catch.

Half a year ago my sister Vala had joined Raddick Explorations, then a member of Intrepid Crossing, with Poslen’s help. She had a chip on her soldier because of some bad history with Red Alliance and wanted to help blow up some of their ships. I hadn’t heard from her since Intrepid evacuated Etherium Reach, but I knew Poslen was an honorable man. I had met him myself when I helped Vala move out of Molden Heath.

It was just a pity that his new corporation had joined in the company of slavers. There was no getting around the fact that we were enemies now.

We had another kill or two and moved on. Just as the fleet was getting close to our destination, the connection between my brain and my ship was severed. Since the last time I was podded, my capsule jack hadn’t felt right—like something had gone wrong in the clone manufacturing process. I became aware of how alone I was as my connection to the Neocomm and the fleet disappeared; as an old, anonymous quote went, “In space, no-one can hear you scream.”

When I was able to get it working again, the fleet had moved on. There was no questioning that decision; Dirka, our fleet commander, needed to get the large and slow fleet to a target fairly far away—Providence freighters moving new sovereignty modules into their space.

By this stage the fleet was too far ahead. I moved carefully back to our own space, doing my best to avoid any Paxton camps set up to catch stragglers, thankful that my ship hadn’t been attacked while I was out of the loop.