0 : Christening

Three bodies struggle to shine through the industrial haze over my head. A moon and two space stations, all three eclipsed by a fourth light igniting overhead. The night air ripples with heat and noise from the exhaust of a boxy ochre cargo ship departing from the nearby port. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and even as the ship flees the jagged, dusty skyline I find myself reaching after it.

“What’s that one, Aulus?”

My brother sits forward and peers at the shrinking ship. “That’s a Saaw light hauler. A G-7 with an aftermarket fuel processor judging by the hump in front of the engines.”

As I jump in excitement the rusted metal roof clatters beneath my feet. Aulus laughs and grabs my shoulder gently chiding me.

“Sit down before you fall through, J,” he says and hands me the can of orange soda that Aulus had gotten us as a treat. The drink tastes as bright as the engine ignitions and another ship, a sleeker black and white shuttle, accelerates along the gauss rails. I know this one.

“That one’s a damn pig cruiser!”

“J! Language.”

Aulus and I share a laugh as the Sector Patrol officer transport rises away through the haze. The rush of engines gives way to the humm of rotors and a quad copter rises over the eves, projecting a hologram of a wrinkled, tube-nosed person in coveralls.

“Get offa my roof you damn kids! If I catch you up here aga-” the objecting cry is cut short as the can of soda makes contact with one of the rotors. The quad copter goes spinning and I look at Aulus with the biggest grin that I can muster.

“Run!”

Over my laughter and his, Aulus says something about wasting the drink as we clamber down from the roof.

****

I’m frantically washing blood off my hands when my mother comes home early.

*

A liquor bottle shatters across my face as I run for the door. Cheap rum stings my eyes and blurs my vision.

*

Behind me, my mother is screaming about how I’m as useless as my brother. A familiar tirade since he left. I barely make out her slurred insults as I slam the rusted sheet metal door to the bungalow I called home for sixteen miserable years. Another bottle breaks against the shut door behind me and I take off running, wiping booze and tears from my eyes as the slums fly past me in the night.

Even as my mother's incoherent cursing fades into the night, her words still ring in my ears. She never appreciated the money he sent home. Just drank it away and blamed me for not being able to panhandle or pickpocket enough.

I turn a cross an intersection and to my right someone barks my name like a slur. She was by best friend and now I don’t have time to blame her for the inelegant slag rifle in her unsteady grip.

Hot metal shrapnel falls around my heels like molten hailstones, the crack of gunfire drawing a couple of underprepared officers in dusty white uniform.

I run past them as they draw pulse pistols on my assailant and for the second time in as many minutes, the sounds of my name being cursed fade between cluttered, dusty streets.

An undeserved death behind me, before me is the gates to the shuttle station. I run up to the kiosk, lungs burning.

“How far can this get me?” I ask, passing a handful of grubby credit chips through the small gap in the glass divider.

The fat, blue man behind the glass looks at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Where're you headed, little miss?”

“I don't care. Just… as far away from here as I can get.”

“Right…” He nods, tapping on his computer console as he counts out the credits. After a moment, he hands me a ticket. Vespin to Magnasanti. One way.

“Thanks,” I say, mustering a small smile at the thought of finally fleeing into the void above the haze.

“Oh. And here,” he adds, slipping a bandage under the divider. Thinking about it draws my attention to the bleeding gash on my cheek. I hastily wipe it on my sleeve and roll the bandage over it.

“Thanks, mister.”

“Good luck out there.”

Less than an hour later, I'm kneeling up in my seat, staring out the porthole as I watch the dusty brown surface of my homeworld shrink away from me, a grin across my face for the first time in a very, very long time.