My folks made Kuhn Station their home long before I was born, even before they met. Mother had secured a residency at one of the station clinics and my father has somehow lucked his way into a unionised job at the docks. I don't think either of them have left the station since they arrived, for certain they have never travelled anywhere else in my lifetime. True home bodies, both, and I would have likely ended up exactly the same as them without knowing any better if not for that conversation I had with Commander Parker Hawes when I was just ten years old. The mere thought of that absolutely horrifies me now.

My father is a drunk. I don't mean the cruel, beat the ever-loving hell out of you drunk, but every night after his shift on the docks he would hit a dockside bar called Traveller's Respite with his ground crew. Since my mother was almost always working a double shift or responding to some emergency call or another I became a semi-permanent fixture of that bar, sitting in a quiet corner doing homework or playing video games, desperately trying to find ways to amuse myself while father drank and shot the shit with his friends. Despite the presence of my father and his crew, the Respite's clientele was almost exclusively pilots soaking up some much deserved R&R whilst cargo was unloaded and ships were refuelled and resupplied.

No offence is meant towards my father and his friends when I say that listening to the pilots stories of narrow escapes from pirate ambushes or claims of sightings of eerie, inhuman craft in witch space were infinitely more enthralling than the dockers crude jokes and boasts of sexual conquests that I honestly was not yet old enough to fully understand, let alone appreciate.

Over the years the pilots, at least those corporate stick-jockeys whom regularly frequent the same stations, came to see the little kid in the corner of something of a mascot and good luck charm and were always more than willing to entertain me with their stories. Each, trying to one-up the next to the point than I was no longer sure which stories were truth and which were fictions designed to entertain a bored young kid while his father drank and all but ignored him. The day that Hawes walked into Traveller's Respite it was immediately apparent that this huge bear of a man was a different breed to those I had grown accustomed. His salt and pepper beard and hair had grown out long and wild. He wore an open, fur-lined leather coat over the top of an old and clearly well used flight suit but it was the golden wings emblazoned on his his right shoulder plate that drew my eye. It resembled, to my eye, a great bird of prey with it's wings spread wide as it sat atop a crescent moon. I had been around these pilots, and others, long enough to know what the logo represented. It marked Parker Hawes as one of the Pilots Federation's most accomplished independent flyers.

Commander Hawes was an Elite.

As a young, possibly naive boy, I was in awe of those wings and the scruffy giant who had earned the right to wear them but the salutations that the other pilots aimed toward Haws not only lacked the deference and respect I believed he would receive but held an undertone of mockery and contempt that I would not come to understand for many years yet.

"Home empty handed again, Hawes?" One of the corporate pilot's chuckled as he touched his half empty glass to his forehead in a mock salute as the big man muscled his way to the bar to order food and drink. Even my father turned towards him at the comment with a look of embarrassed disapproval and pity.

"Leave him be, Brookes", A young woman chided her companion, seemingly defending the other man but her voice lacked any real admonishment or sincerity but instead carried an equally mocking slant," I'm sure once he is fed a watered, the Commander will regale us with tales of his triumphant return from Raxxla with a cargo hold bursting at the seams with priceless treasures and mysterious alien technology."

The bar descended into a cacophony of laughter, my father and his friends joined in. Hell even the server behind the bar had tears of mirth streaming down his cheeks as he handed his customer a plate of food and a tall glass of lager.

I did not laugh, instead, without thinking I asked into the din, "What is Raxxla?"

 The reaction was instantaneous, the laughter died away into a deafening silence of rolling eyes and pained groans. Hawes stood with plate in one hand and drink in the other and levelled his icy gaze at a suddenly terrified little boy. I think maybe he saw immediately that I had been sincere in asking as he smiled broadly and his eyes came alive with a warm fire.

"Let an old man sit at your table to eat and drink, maybe tell him your name and he'll tell you about Raxxla and of the many other wonders he has seen during his search for such an elusive prize."

I nodded and told him my name in a strained croak. He sat across from me and proceeded to devour his food. My father gave a troubled glance in our direction but made no move to protest or intercede. After a few minutes on angry glaring he turned back to his drink and his friends.

Look there, you have that same expression on your face now, the one that's two parts pity to four parts scepticism and you were the one who asked. The truth is that Hawes lifelong search for Raxxla and the many many wonders that his had seen during the hunt for it's hiding place is exactly the thing that drove me to sit behind the stick of a ship and throw myself into the void. I wanted the adventure, I wanted to see the things he had seen and even discover things that he had not. No, that's not true, I didn't want those things. I needed them. The sedentary life my parents and so many millions, even billions of others were content to live was a terrifying and alien thing to me that made me want to lay down and die simply to avoid having to endure it.

Now I said that my father wasn't an angry drunk and that he had never hurt me. That's not technically true. He has, on two occasions raised his hand to me. The first was the night we met Hawes and I really do believe that was more carelessness than intent to harm, the second was the day I packed my bags to attend the Pilots Federation academy. That one was full of bloody intent but by then I was a grown man, fully capable of defending myself and things didn't go the way that he was expecting but I'm getting ahead of the curve here.

So, when we left Traveller's Respite that night, I was literally bubbling over with excitement at the thought of becoming the next great galactic explorer and told my father as much. His reaction was an immediate and completely unexpected rage. He grabbed my arm. Hard. His fingers bit into my as yet undeveloped bicep with enough force that it would take more than a week for the bruises to fade. He physically dragged me across the walkway to a railing that overlooked the docking bays and threw me against it. Those bruises, across my sternum and collar bone would take even longer to disappear. Actually spitting and frothing, father pointed at a Type-6 cargo ship moored a stones throw from the shipyards shiny glass and steel show room. Thinking that his directions were not clear enough, be grabbed the top of my head in a meaty hand and wrenched my head in the direction he had indicated, the muscles in my neck popped and burned in a way that was anything but good.

"Look at that, boy", He raged, "That ship belongs to your friend Jules. It was brought in by system security this afternoon. Pirates jumped her at the nav-beacon and it was all over but the kicking and screaming by the time the security patrol could respond to her distress call.

"If you're wondering why she wasn't at the Respite tonight with all the other stick-jockeys you so admire, I'll tell you. Her cockpit was cracked open like an egg and she was exposed to vacuum, her life support had all but run dry by the time security lifted her out of that wreck and brought her back here. She's probably in your mother's clinic now fighting for her life. And even if she does live to see morning what exactly do you think is going to happen? Do you think the corporate suits are going to give her a commendation, or time to recuperate properly?

"No they're going to charge her for the cost of repairs to that boat, assuming it can be repaired, and they'll withhold payment for the run because she lost the cargo. That's if she lives, if she doesn't, well they'll just find someone else just as gullible to take her seat and her family will be left with her debt to them and the cost of funeral arrangements.

"I'll tell you now, Cyrus, what you are going to do with your life. If you're smart enough you'll go to university and become a doctor like your mother and if your not, which is my current opinion,  I'll get you a job on the docks. Hard, honest work for a decent days' wage, but most importantly safe."

I looked at the Type-6 with my guts twisted in fear, though more of my father than the fate that might await me out in the black. He was not wrong though, the ships hull was streaked with black carbon scoring and peppered with dozens, or maybe hundreds of holes from ballistic weapons-fire. The cockpit canopy was gone and the only indication that it had even been there to begin with were a few stubborn pieces of reinforced glass clinging to the framework. At the rear of the boat, the cargo hatch had been breached, peeled open like a banana to access the valuable cargo within. I wanted Jules to be okay but I also wanted to tell my father to go to hell. Scary as the sight of that ship may have been, if was still infinitely less terrifying than become a clone of either of my parents.

Hawes was a regular fixture at Kuhn Station and the Traveller's respite for the next couple of months as his ship was repaired, refuelled and resupplied and he took another out of storage to hunt down and restock the materials he needed in his hold for extended sojourns into the black. Often he kept me company while father drank and while it was apparent that he did not approve he did not intercede, I don't think he dared to confront the giant and intimidating Hawes in quite the same way he had his own son. As long as I spoke with the commander in quiet voices so that my father did not overhear me quizzing him on how to follow in his footsteps and I showed no more overt interest in becoming a pilot Father seemed content to let us be. Probably it meant he would not have to take time away from the bar and his friends to deal with me.

Hawes found me in school one day, just waltzing into the class room like he owned the place, walked right up to me and shook my hand with a firm, but in no way painful grip. I believed that I had gained more from our interaction than the old man had, yet there he stood thanking me for enduring his madness and keeping him company. He was leaving again. A year out, at least, he told me before sweeping out of the class the same way he had entered, leaving in his wake a befuddled teacher and a brood of chattering, curious children. It was the last time anyone saw the commander. He never returned from that last trip out.

Sometimes the dreamer in me envisions that crazy old man laying on the beach of some tropical archipelago on his fabled Raxxla, finally happy and free of the judgement of his peers. Unfortunately the realist in me, the scientist, always reclaims the helm and I know that he is dead. Fallen foul of pirates, those mysterious alien ships, sightings of which are becoming increasingly more common of late, or simply dead in water because he ran out of fuel or suffered some other kind of system malfunction. Truth is, it's a big place out there and because he always closely guarded his intended routes and destinations to avoid other taking advantage of his own Raxxla research there's a good chance I will never know what befell my accidental hero and mentor.

I've bent your ear for long enough already, so I'll try to keep the rest of this as brief as possible. When I turned thirteen I got myself an after school job as a data clerk for the station administration. I spent my afternoons in a dimly lit room purging or preserving data entries or correcting errors as I found them. To say it was dull was an understatement, but it meant that I spent less time with my parents and it put money into my bank account that would one day pay for my academy fees and buy my first ship. At least that's what I hoped.

After graduation, I took that job on the docks with my father, not because he had wanted me to, and certainly not because I wasn't smart enough for university or medical school. It was because he had been right. The docks were unionised which meant good pay and decent working hours. During the day I operated a cargo lifter, loading and unloading the ships I dreamed of one day flying, at night I attended night school, studying linguistics, astro-physics and other sciences. The courses were hardly doctorate level but they gave me enough understanding of the subjects that I would be able to expand my knowledge and understanding later. Every credit not spent on those classes or the simple cost of living, which I kept to a minimum by staying home with the parents rather than finding my own quarters was deposited in a high interest savings account. Still it took me a decade of that mundane, soul destroying existence before I finally had the funds to cover my entry into the academy and to buy my first ship.

Why didn't I go corporate, get them to cover the cost of my training? Well I had initially thought that was the route to go, but both Hawes and my father, however inadvertent the later might have been, had demonstrated how this was a bad idea. Sure a corporation sponsored your academy training but once you're in their employ you have to pay that expense back, plus interest. You lose your cargo and you don't get paid, you damage the ship and you are responsible for covering the cost of repairs. Corporate life is tantamount to slavery, just far enough removed that the Federation and Alliance both recognise it as legal. The Empire? Well we all know they endorse slavery, or more precisely, indentured servitude so why would they bat an eye at corporate employment policies.

I sat my entry exams and waited impatiently for the results. When they came back with a passing grade it was both positive and negative. I had achieved a near perfect result, however my physiological testing had revealed previously un-diagnosed anti-social personality disorder. As troubling as that was, it was the news that I would have to wait thirteen months for a spot in the academy to become available that nearly broke my will. Another year of soul crushing normalcy was more than I would face now that I was so close the to goal I had chased for so long.

It was a long year, painfully so, but I endured. Using my time to do my own research into the legends surrounding Raxxla. No, don't give me that look again. It might have been something of an obsession when I was a ten year old boy in awe of Parker Hawes but the years have tempered that particular fire. I'm not the crazed seeker that Hawes was, but I had thirteen long, painful months to fill with something beside the monotony of work and I really do think any explorer worth their mettle should have an encrypted file on Raxxla in their info-link before they throw themselves into the black for extended periods of time.

Finally the day came, the transport bound for Mawson's Dock in the Pilots Federation controlled system of Dromi was due in just a few hours. I quit my job without notice and packed my bags. My father was barring the apartment door when I emerged from my room and he was furious. He demanded to know what I was doing, when I told him his hands balled into fists and he came at me with a crazed fury I had never witnessed from anyone before that day. I dropped my bags behind me, turned sideways to avoid the first of the blows he aimed at my head and delivered two sure and steady strikes of my own. The first hard to his kidney and his wild swing and miss left his back exposed to me, the second came in the form of my elbow versus his left ear and just like that my father hit the floor, conscious but dazed and disorientated. Like I said, the second time he raised his hand to me, things didn't work out the way he expected. I didn't speak, or drive his defeat home with another blow. I simply picked up my bags and walked out of the apartment. I had a transport to catch.

Academy life was tough but rewarding. Three long years of theory lessons, practical flight instruction and combat drills, the Pilot's Federation like to ensure that every graduate has the skills to survive the rigours and dangerous of the black. Just yesterday I graduated with distinctions in both combat science fields. I have my ship waiting in the hangars below, a second hand Sidewinder called Intrepid IV. My combat instructor Rellis sold it to me just an hour or two ago. She says it's been doing nothing but gathering dust for years since she retired from the black to become a full time teacher at the academy.

Tonight it's drinks and celebrations for the class of 3305, tomorrow it's out into the void to earn some credits and revel in the wonders of the milky way. Maybe I'll see you out there.