I'm not much of a novel writer so the "story" herein may very well be incoherent and rushed as I kept making stuff up as I went. It may also be complete horse manure. But I did my best to edit it into a readeble form.
Would of course be fun if someone actually took the time to read it
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I never knew my real parents. I was raised in an orphanage at Ackermann Market in Eravate system, left there at the desk by a woman whose identity remains unknown. Could've been my mother or someone she asked to bring me there. My birth certificate says I was born June 26th, 3065 but that is what the people at the orphanage guesstimated at that time. I could be younger or I could be older. Give or take a year or two. Nobody knows. I wouldn't say I had a troubled childhood or particularly hard times growing up, but I was bit of a loner and bit of a drifter with the constant feeling of not belonging there echoing in the back of my mind. All that eventually lead me to the shadier side of life. Doing petty crimes and what not just to escape the realities and make the ends meet. Authorities labeled me as a no good troublemaker who would never amount to nothing. But I wasn’t bad by nature. Simply trying to find my place in this cold, harsh world, which turned out to be harder than I thought.
At some point I ended up in this little liquor ring with couple of my friends. There was this old smuggler called One-eyed Frank who we ran errands for, piloting an old Cobra that was so beat up and rusty it was a miracle it even held together. Story is he lost his eye fighting a gang of pirates but for all we knew it might as well have been him just stumbling drunk in his ship and smacking it on a cabinet door or whatever. And boy, was he drunk. I don't recall a single time he would've been even remotely sober. To this day it puzzles me how he managed to actually fly the damn thing. And the stench inside his Cobra. Holy hell! Took a stomach of steel not to vomit when you stepped in. But he paid relatively well so we kept delivering his stuff despite his stinking ship and the heat we got from the Station Police. It was a non-stop cat ‘n’ mouse game yet somehow we always managed to outsmart them. Then after couple of years or so old Frank suddenly stopped coming to Ackermann Market. We later heard he had been killed in an ambush. In a lack of steady income I was forced to look for a "real" job. I wasn't a business man and knew absolutely jack about farming so I ended up working for the station maintenance with one of my buddies from the liquor ring.
It was a shitty job. Most of the time we were outside replacing panels on the hull or fixing something on the solar panels. Ungrateful and dangerous as hell. But at least you learned to respect the unforgiving environment that is Space. One false move and you're dead. I once witnessed a guy drift off because he had failed to secure his "life line" aka the safety cable. They sent a rescue drone after him but the poor guy was hit by the rotating solar panel array that sent him hurdling through the space right in front of an approaching Lakon 9 and that was pretty much it. Only redeeming thing about the job was the "office shift" meaning we'd be working inside, at the docking bay to be exact. Not exactly a safe place to be either, with ships coming and going all around but with magnetic boots we were at least fixed to the ground. Mostly it was just repairing things and cleaning up debris and whatever trash pilots and folks at the traffic control left behind. We also signaled and ushered pilots to get going if they were about to receive a loitering warning. Wouldn't want to be standing there when a ship gets blown up. Not that the station security gave a hoot if there were some maintenance nobodies strolling about when they opened fire. We actually had to sign this liability waiver that we were operating inside the bay more or less at our own risk. Sure we were informed beforehand if they were about to shoot as required by the safety protocols for us to have time to get inside shelters but still, we rather waved the ships off ourselves.
Between smuggling, petty crimes and shitty jobs I dated girls as well. But those were nothing to write home about. Even if I've had one. This one girl seemed nice but turned out to be a bit too ideological for my taste, constantly raving about the Federation, enlisting and all that jazz. After a year it was just too much. And this other girl, I think her name was Ciandra, she was really nice and we hit it off pretty well but then one day she decides she wants to be a guy too, so obviously that didn’t work out either. In the end I simply drifted from one relationship to another, most of them ending as quickly as they begun. At our spare time there wasn't much to do for bottom feeders like us. If we weren't at bars and nightclubs getting drunk and hitting on chicks we were either hanging around in the malls or doing small time crimes. But then when I was alone I usually wandered off to the Big Ring gardens. The gargantuan glass roof gave an impressive view into the space. I used to just gaze at the stars wondering what would wait for me there if I could just get off this stupid station. That was pretty much the life cycle for me year after year. A life changing moment came a few years ago, while I was again hanging in the gardens, in the form of an exploration Asp that pulled a stunt move and actually flew through the ring as it made it's approach towards the airlock. It passed the ring so close it looked like it was going to crash. But it was awesome sight to behold. I can't really describe it but there was something truly majestic about that moment as I watched the massive ship glide by, softly maneuvering in silence, it's hull gleaming in the sunlight even though being dirty beyond words and all banged up. But it all added to the epicness of it as I imagined what the crew had experienced, where they'd been and what strange and wondrous things they'd seen. It was so mesmerizing and something just went ‘click’ in my head. That's it! That is what I want to do.
Of course it wasn’t simple as that. Ships cost money. A whole lots of it and I was barely making a living and whatever was left I blew into alcohol and cigarettes and other narcotis not to be named here. But at that moment I decided there is more for me in the universe and I simply refuse to flush my life down the toilet like so many others stuck on these stations. So I kept grinding in the maintenance. Years went by and slowly but surely savings started piling up. Finally I had enough money to buy a ship. The prices for new ships were obviously astronomical but luckily I knew this guy from my liquor smuggling days who dealt in used ships. He managed to hook me up with this old, crappy Sidewinder. Thrown together from whatever used parts, I was lucky if that heap of junk made it to near by Cleve Hub in one piece. But it was my heap of junk. Fast forward couple of weeks and there I was, sitting in the cockpit going through the preflight procedures with just thousand credits left on my account. There was no turning back. I had quit my job, sold most of my belongings and handed over the keys to my apartment. This was it. My life was now inside this little rustbucket. The only way was out through the airlock and into the void. One of my friends, Jamie, was actually working at the bay when I took off. He gave me the thumbs up and some kind of imitation of what military personnel do when they send off fighters from carriers. Needless to say he failed miserably and just looked like an idiot.
Things seldom go as planned and in this regard I wasn’t an exception. I had gotten into the trading business and money kept flowing in. It was a small stream but if flowed nonetheless. I had also refitted my Sidewinder, visited systems I’d never been before and all in all, things looked good. But after a while I felt I could maybe widen the stream a little and since I had money to do it I went for a Hauler. Things looked good for some time but when I noticed an opportunity to make some serious cash for a change, greed took over. I stuffed my ship full of superconductors and hit the proverbial road completely ignoring the fact that I was heading into a low security areas. And as fate would have it, I got interdicted and my almost defenseless ship blown to pieces along with the cargo. I managed to eject and was rescued to the near by station. After sorting things out with the insurance company I got an equivalent of my destroyed ship. But it was an excruciating blow. Losing pretty much all my money and almost my life. It was clearly time for me to leave these parts of the galaxy behind. Thus I started a long journey towards the Imperial space in hopes to find better opportunities there. But depression seeped in and the following events got buried in haze. I remember docking at Sutcliffe Dock, getting a room and heading to a nearest pub but after that everything’s just a blur. I woke up this morning to a doorbell with a massive headache. I somehow managed to make my way to the door even though the world was spinning around me at a disturbingly high speed. After a slight struggle I got the door open and there was a delivery guy greeting me with a huge smile on his face. While I was trying to produce words to say out loud he ran a quick scan of my right eye, shoved a package in my hands and took off. I stared at the empty, swaying corridor for a moment before making my way back to the room. I sat down on the bed and looked at the package. My name was printed on it along with the apartment’s address. A TV-panel on the back wall was on, tuned in to some shopping channel.
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And so here I am. Sitting on a bed in a sleazy motel room, scratching my bald head and staring at an automated hair drying unit of sorts which apparently dyes hair as well.
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