Chapter 1

It had been 12 years since the end of the Second Tevarin War, and most of those involved had the chance to go back to their normal, boring lives, free to do as they pleased. Wars came and went, as did heroes and memories. Some wished that the memories would unchain themselves, free their owners from their mental prison; alternatively, some wished their memories would come back and lead them to a different time where they knew that those they missed could feel their love and reciprocate it, when they felt like they had purpose.

Purpose, an idea many had lost in the Oberon system after Titania Terraforming had failed and disappeared, leaving people without much, to mine Gann or freeze on Uriel. Many left the system as it had remained unclaimed, and every once in a while, pirates would come by, hoping for a chance to snag some old Titania equipment or slaves or both.

High above Oberon III, some ships remained in decay orbit moving in a ball of debris, the remnants of a battle between a hauler and some pirates. Bits of armor plating and pieces of blast engines and capacitors floated along in escort.

A faint glow aired about the bridge window of one of the ships, a maroon, medium sized salvage ship with a silver trim, about 140 meters in length, inside of which a man sat with an unlit stim in his mouth, staring at a dancing girl on an image panel. The girl was lonely, streaming her show out into the verse from some underground town on Uriel. He bobbed his head to the music and chuckled to himself in shameless agreement at her moves. "Dat dingo," he said as the stim slipped out of his gaping mouth and hit the floor.

The ship's bridge was littered with tools and machine parts, wiring and canisters. Everything here had been recently excavated from the wreckage showing that they had been out here for days, and tags attached to the more intact garbage revealed where they intended to sell them.

The man leaned back and listened to the music coming from the ship's speakers, listened to the girl talk to the stream as his mind wandered elsewhere. He fantasized about his lost loves, his relationships in passing, entertaining the idea of actually sticking around and letting them play out, even though the women were the ones who left him. He could barely even finish whatever short trip in that system he was on before proving himself a shallow fool: His boyish good looks matched well his immaturity. He thought of one particular girl and he exhaled as his eyes slowly lowered, the scene of the debris outside the bridge window phasing into the purple blackness of his closed eyelids.

An alarm across the control panel startled him, his adrenaline annoying him with awareness, though his body longed for the dream it was just slipping into.

"Dammit," he whispered. "What now?" Thousands of pieces of recently propelled debris grabbed his attention, and his eyebrows furrowed as he pressed a round red button on his console.

"Karath?" he called, squinting as his eyes focused, searching the mess for signs of life. He called out again and his ears felt anxiously at the empty, lonely static coming from the ship's speakers.

"Yeah!" she responded. The tone in her voice suggested that she was unexpectedly moving faster through space than she wanted to, grasping at a more stable bearing. "I," she blurted. "Just, shut up!"

"What happened?" he ordered, and switched on the ship's startup procedure.

Three hundred meters out, Karath was beginning to slow her rotation with her suit's thrusters just as she was hit by a speeding burnt coupling and lost one. She grunted and gripped at her side, tiny alloy fibers and shards splattering across her helmet from different directions like she was caught in a tornado of steel shavings. Her eyes managed to lock onto a metal storage crate tumbling towards her. While spinning, she timed the approach of the crate with its impact upon her body and gripped onto it with her arms and legs as it slammed into her. She clicked her thrusters on full blast in an attempt at some kind of stabilization, and as her spin slowed she eyed a maroon salvager speeding in her direction. Her comm clicked open but she could barely hear through the sound of the debris raining against her helmet.

"Karath, what did I tell you about cutting into ship engines?"

"That," she said, spinning, "some...parts...fetch...high...prices!"

"And...?" he replied.

She sighed and focused on a large piece of outer-hull she was nearing. At this speed, the impact would be devastating to her suit, so she placed her boots against the crate and positioned it between her and the hull piece. The crate buckled a bit, absorbing the impact, and with her hands and feet against it she yelled and pushed off into the direction of the ship. Within twenty seconds, she made contact with the bridge window and was gripping onto it, staring down through the shiny tint at where she knew the pilot's seat was. Her comm clicked on again, and her head tilted inside her suit as her jaw clenched.

"And...?"

"It's dangerous?" she replied.

"Get in here, Karath."

"Yes, Manne."

The alarm and the sharp pressurizing sound of the compression bay preceded a large single panel door sliding over and exposing a meter-and-a-half tall, thoroughly scuffed EVA suit with a missing thruster shuffling into the ship. Karath stepped through the escaping fog of the chamber as a pain shot around her side where the coupling hit her, and she knelt down on the floor, panting.

Sliding her helmet off, she groaned in discomfort as her bluish-silver head-feathers plumed out and twitched, and laid her head in her free hand attempting to ignore the sound of heavy footsteps clumping her way.

"I have a first name, you know," Manne stated.

Karath looked up at him through the vapor shadows, her mauve-colored eyes squinting at the amber signal lamps on the wall behind him. "Mister Manne," she said, nodding a sarcastic smile at him before burying her face back into her hand.

Manne chuckled. "Little tevarin," he said. "Did you come back with anything?"

Her eyes brightened and the corners of her mouth raised. "Maybe."

At 11 years old she was proving more and more capable by the day. So much so that Manne was starting to let her go off on her own to scrap-search. Over the past 9 years, he'd tried to teach her just about everything he knew, about flying, scrapping, building circuitry, using weapons, and she was soaking it all up like a sponge. Her physical tevarin abilities had been shining, too: Her agility and coordination, combined with her youthful vigor and the opportunities he was giving her to exercise them, were starting to really impress him. She still had much to learn, things usually gained by experience, things like patience and caution. As for Manne, well, even a 30 year old space-faring veteran still had a lot to learn.

"Here." She reached into the large storage unit mounted on her back. "I had my eyes on more before, well, you know." She pulled out an intact maneuvering thruster—alone it wouldn't fetch much, but any more than a few would call for a decent pack price.

"Not bad, Karath," Manne approved. "How are your ribs?"

Karath pressed on her side and flinched. "Bruised, maybe?"

"Okay well give me your suit and—"

"I can fix it! Can I?" she interrupted anxiously.

"No, no, you relax. I'll fix it, and—"

"And?"—she said, smiling in anticipation—"and?"

"Well—"

"Please?" she pleaded, in the long, drawn out syllable kids use that can break down energy fields.

"Well," he continued, "sure, a story, if you'll hurry up and get out of the suit."

She always looked forward to hearing his stories; he had a million of them. The Second Tevarin War stories, though, she was interested in the most. She'd been with Manne ever since she could remember, and he'd never told her who her parents were. When she finally found the courage to ask about them, he seemed to go to a dark place, always giving her excuses. "It's complicated," he'd say, or "I'll tell you when you're old enough." She stopped asking about them eventually. Instead, she would listen intently to the stories he would tell, putting together his past, piece by piece, waiting for the moment he'd slip up and give her something she could use to unlock her own. Sometimes, though, as he was all she'd ever known, listening to his stories gave her a measure of peace in the big dark; his tired old voice and the cadence he'd developed through telling so many stories gave her a real feeling of home, a warm sense of belonging in the spacial infinity of the cold, dark universe.

She watched as Manne repaired the broken thruster port on her EVA suit. She'd watched him do things like this so many times that she knew exactly what he'd do and in what order. She looked at the tool before he reached for it, knew how many times he'd have to screw to get bolts in, what order he repaired her suit in, she even predicted when he'd take a small break to smoke a stim while he contemplated his next move. Ever since she was 4 years old she watched him scrap around the systems. There was something zen in it all, therapeutic.

"Which one are you going to tell today, Manne?" she inquired.

"I have a first name, you know," he replied.

She rolled her eyes and looked away. "Which story are you going to tell, Ehhkosteeen." She hated saying his first name: Three syllables was a novel compared to Manne. He knew she hated saying it, so he always asked her to.

"What is it?" he persisted.

"Ehhhckwohhshmeeen!" she mocked, and hearing it tickled him so much that he stopped what he was doing to chuckle for a full minute while Karath tried to hold in her laugh, inevitably failing and giggling until her side gave her great pain. She favored her ribs, alternating grimaces and smiles between exhales.

Manne composed himself and continued his work. After a while he glanced up at Karath and then quickly back down at the suit before she noticed. "I'm going to tell you about my first experience with the tevarin."

He never told her this story, she thought. She got comfortable and looked over to him in anticipation.

"I had just turned 11 when whispers of a second war with the tevarin reached my home planet of Rytif, in the Bremen system, on the lips of settlers and transplants. When we got the official word through the relays I remember an immediate change of attitude falling over the people, like we all knew we were going to be involved, somehow. We knew that reclamation of the Elysium system would be the endgame of the tevarin, and being 4 jump-points away from there put Bremen Mills in strategic territory for the UEE.

"Rations. We grew a hell of a lot of food for the UEE, and in my little corner of the universe just outside Stalford, I was just old enough to help out on the farms.

"It was hard work, even though there were a lot of us. The fields were huge and the machines they were making then were getting pretty advanced. I worked mostly with a girl from school who was the same age as I was, and we'd take turns piloting and maintaining the machines. It went on like that for a while, for years..." Manne looked out the bridge window at the darkening horizon of Oberon III. He stopped and stared for a while before Karath audibly cleared her throat to snap him out of it.

"Sorry," he said. "It went on for years, and by the time we were 15 we were deeply in love."

"Ew," Karath spat, disgusted. "Can't you keep that out of the story, I thought this was a story about the tevarin."

"This is about the tevarin," he replied. "One in particular, but it's also about Lin."

"Who's Lin?" she inquired.

"Can I just tell the story, Karath? Can I?"

Karath audibly exhaled her impatience and turned away. "Fine," she said.

"Gods," he exclaimed. "Lin was her name." He went back to working on the suit. "She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. She was witty, creative, strong. She was perfect, which obviously meant that we were perfect, for each other, because I was perfect, too. I was a star athlete and video game champion, the best of my age!"

Karath glanced at his belly. "Sure, ok."

"I was!" he snapped, "and I swept her off her feet, twice. Well the first time was an accident, I was just learning how to pilot one of the harvesters and almost sliced her legs off. She hated me for a full year after that. But we were close, we grew close. One night, towards the end of the harvest, we sat on our gatherer and stared up at the stars through the blood-orange glow of the horizon.

"'Ecky,' she said, 'what do you think it's like, being out there fighting a war?'

"'Well I'm sure it sucks,' I told her.

"'Of course, but, we're here, making food and profit, feeding an army that might one day just all be dead.'"

"So romantic," mocked Karath. "Where are you even going with this?"

Manne dropped his hands to his side and looked up at her disapprovingly. "Karath," he said. "I will pluck out your feathers and deep fry you. I'm getting to it, there's a point to every story, but you have to wait."

"I am waiting," she replied. "For you to get to the good part!"

She laughed and he chuckled in head-shaking frustration. "You are unreal," he said.

"So Lin," he continued. "Lin went on about the horrors of war, and her concern of the war reaching Bremen's doorstep.

"'What if they came to Bremen, surely they'd come for Rytif,' she said. 'Surely, they'd come for Stalford.' I remember her looking at me with genuine fear in her eyes, a fear she always kept from me, until that day. She opened up to me, and I, completely lost in the look of her utter honesty, knew at that moment that I loved her.

"I held her hand and pulled her close, we kissed and I hugged her even closer. 'Then I would die protecting you,' I told her. I don't know if she believed me, but I meant it." Manne inhaled shakily, and pursed his lips, blinking away a tear. "I sure as hell meant it at the time."

"Seven years," he continued. "Seven short years—short for me, the time I spent with Lin could have lasted for an eternity and it still wouldn't have been enough.

"The war was ending, we were winning, and the tevarin had their backs against the wall. Your people are strong, Karath. They're strong, capable, if they were space-faring for a few hundred years earlier, they might have taken us out. I might've been your slave, Karath." Manne chuckled once, until he noticed a devilish grin across Karath's face. "But they didn't, and I'm not."

"Not yet, slave," she joked.

The notion put a bad taste into his mouth, so he puffed away at his stim a few times and continued the story. "She ended up being right. Some rogue tevarin found their way to Bremen, to Rytif, to attack and take what they could. I stood up to fight in Stalford, I had to. I was old enough, capable enough, I fought for my people there, people who couldn't fight for themselves, peaceful farmers and mothers, children, people who needed someone like me to fight for them.

"Before I left, Lin begged me not to go. 'I can't lose you,' I remember her saying. 'If you go you'll never return to me, I can't let you leave.' I assured her I would make it, I assured her that her and her family were safe, on the outskirts. They had bunkers, hideouts, and it seemed like all the action was happening towards the city, where Arcturus Koerner and his men held steadfast against the raids of the tevarin pirates.

"The fighting only lasted a week, and before long, the city had returned to its calm, and I returned home. I returned—" He stopped working on the suit and became distant.

"You returned?" Karath reminded him.

He looked at her. "She was dead. I returned and she was dead. Her family, slaughtered. During the fighting there was a pirate who eluded us, he would use his sword to slice a 't' somewhere on his victims, on their backs, their faces, it was like his calling card. I guess he and his boys passed through town on their way out and off the planet, and Lin's family weren't the only ones." He looked down at the suit, his hands still and unmoving. "I got back to find her and her family slaughtered like livestock, the letter 't' sliced into their backs. When I turned her stiff body around and held her cold face upon mine, something inside of me died.

"Governor Koerner awarded me with citizenship, I got some property and a nice house, some recognition, but I couldn't stay long. I disappeared and have been scrapping remnants of ships and battles around the galaxy ever since. I could never really get close to anyone after that. You're kind of the only family or friend I have left now." He snapped back to reality and resumed repair of Karath's suit.

She, however, wasn't done with the story. She laid there, staring holes into him, gritting her teeth. Finally, she sat up, and he looked up from the suit to angry eyes.

"When," she said, "when are you going to tell me about my parents?"

"K-Karath," he stuttered.

"No!" she snapped. "When? If? I deserve to know. You dangle these stories in front of me, are they even real? You've been scrapping around the galaxy ever since? What about when you met me, how you met me, where you found me? When am I going to know?"

"Karath," he said. "I've never lied to you."

"So tell me!" she replied.

"I just told you one of my most intimate stories, I opened up to you just then! Doesn't that account for anything?"

"I'm opening up to you right now," she replied. "I need to know who I am, where I came from, where you stole me from. I deserve to know, I need to figure out who I am, Ecklestein!"

Her eyes, the look she gave him reminded him of something he'd seen a long time ago, the forceful stare of an honest moment. That was who she was, she was showing it right then and there: She was growing up.

"Maybe it's me, who isn't ready to tell you," he said in melancholy. She broke her stare and looked down at the suit, her tensed shoulders relaxing a bit. He had always seemed so strong to her, indestructible. He had always given her everything, taught her so much; as a kid, it's hard to realize that your guardians can be vulnerable too.

"I'll tell you when you turn 12, Karath, I promise."

Her eyes slowly lit up towards him as she fully realized what he was saying to her. "But Manne, that's in a few—"

Her words were cut off by the ship's alarm, and the light in the room flashed bright red. Manne sprinted over to the control panel to examine the screens.

"No," he whispered, and glanced up through the bridge window just in time to see flashes of explosions among the orbiting debris field. He turned to Karath and straightened up, inhaling.

"Pirates."