There was freedom, and then there was FREEDOM.

Nothing quite compared to the feel, rather than the sound, of a ship frame humming through the protective cradle of the pilot seat. He had missed it. He hated admitting that, and he never thought he would, but after 30 years he begrudgingly recognised that he had to be back out there.

Going back into the black and throwing himself into witch-space on a daily basis wasn't something he thought he would ever do again. He wasn't sure it was something he would have the yearning to do again, let alone the practical opportunity. Over the years he had blotted it from his mind, almost from his memory. His choices and the consequences of them had lead him elsewhere for the better part of half a lifetime. He had never been one to let fate take him in a direction he disliked. His imposing stature at almost 2 metres tall had often meant he held sway when issues had to be decided physically in some station bar. He had been smart, with an aptitude for engineering coupled to an attitude that wouldn't be happy in anything other than a pilots seat. For a few short years he had burned successfully bright, reached goal after goal ever more driven, ever richer, ever more in demand. Ever more useful to those with deeper pockets than morals.

But the galaxy was a big place, and there was always someone faster, better, smarter out there. That was a tough lesson, but one that couldn't be taught, you had to learn it. And he had.

That had put him away from flying, and stations docks, and bulk ore deliveries. Away from viper patrols, from the feel of a few kilograms of high value goods tucked under the pilot seat. Away from the shuddering impact of kinetic munitions and searing light of returned laser fire.

He had climbed that ladder so brightly and so fast with such focus that the fall had been shatteringly hard. Too hard. From go to guy to shunned outcast almost overnight. The subsequent prolonged solitude felt like confinement. It had put him out and away not only from the world of flying... but from life in general.

He had often wondered whether it was still like that, 'out there'. Over the years he had often imagined, or was he remembering? After a while it became difficult to tell the difference - time blurred memory into fantasy and vice versa.

He had never expected to be here. To have choice again. But within a few weeks of his unlikely and almost infeasible emancipation two things became brutally apparent to him.

Firstly the universe had changed - not all of it for the better - and it had had the temerity to do so without asking him; and certainly without taking him along for the ride. There was little an ageing out-of-practice ship commander, grade five technician and special circumstances operative with a three decade long inexplicable gap in his CV could offer this new universe.

Secondly, that no matter what the circumstances and his personal situation the idea of placing himself in indentured servitude - slavery by any other name - was not something he could countenance. He could not swap one choiceless situation for another.

There had been a short period when the state appointed 'Life Effort Resource Assignment Officer' had attempted to persuade him into a planet based life and career. He had imagined teaching, lecturing at some academy or college perhaps. But it quickly transpired that his knowledge and skills were seriously outdated. Apparently there were many desks that needed sitting at and a lifetimes worth of administration and paperwork that needed to be pushed. The simplicity of the arrangement had appealed to him, he wasn't against the idea of a simpler life, he had had enough excitement for two lifetimes.

His LERAO didn't understand. How could she? She was barely out of some virtual college from a backwater refinery moon with a single outpost. She still got sick when she experienced super cruise and admitted to only two hyperspace jumps in her life. She even admitted to feeling uneasy with the slow station-spin. She hadn't been out there. She hadn't lived. Her final report washed her hands of him, rating him as "Willfully Unplaceable" and thereby cutting all imperial assistance. She seemd to think this would be scary, that the threat might make him change his mind.

The real reason he hadn't taken the planet-side gig was simple physics. Station-born and then pilot-trained he had spent his life acutely aware of exactly what was under his feet. He innately understood how stations and ships moved, he understood and even felt in their movements the continual fight against gravity. A spacer looks at gravity as a force that reaches out unseen across the void and attempts to pull you off course, to play with your instruments, and to drag you into its deadly embrace. To a real spacer, fabric-warping gravity was the enemy. When your continued existence is reliant on the man-made vessel in which you crossed the dark, you looked after it, you learned to trust it. You knew where you were with the engineering and the science of it all, it kept you alive. Nothing offered a greater natural threat than gravity. Being trapped in a never ending fall into a gravity well too strong to escape pervaded the nightmares of many true pilots. Heat could kill you, but gravity would trap you forever. For some even the predictable looping of an orbiting station, gently and constantly skimming the rim of the gravity-well with engines barely capable of maintaining that precarious balance and certainly not able to arrest a slide into the well, was unnatural enough to keep them ship-bound in the deep dark. There were rumours of whole fleets of pilots with such deep barophobia that they had simply left the region of star studded space - seeking vast open expanses of pure flat nothing.

His fear wasn't that great,  but he certainly wasn't about to volunteer for a life planet-bound at the very bottom of a crushing gravity-well.

That really left him with only one choice. OUT. When he had told his LERAO that he needed to go OUT there, she had replied "Oh you mean UP there?" That simple language difference had hardened his resolve. This well-dweller didn't understand that UP was arbitrary and relative, but OUT was... everything.

So, he had put his print on her release-screen, wished her farewell with a hug and a smile she didn't understand and took the elevator to deep-storage. He recovered his meagre possessions and small stack of real credits from the store, a few expensive bottles laid down three decades before, some small crystals and ore nuggets.

An hour later and a visit to just the one pawn shop and his new account held a couple of thousand credits. An hour after that and he was stood on the station dock with a hold-all containing his life.

He hadn't wanted a new suit, but he couldn't get in the old one. It had been with him across so many light years back in the day, it had never failed him. Plugged into life support it had kept him safe and become a second skin. It had kept him warm during the canopy failure at Porlac III long enough to get help. It had kept him from blacking out in the crushing tumbling G of control-loss more than once. Probably more than a ship a pilot trusted his suit. But the one thing it couldn't do was encompass his expanded waist line - had he ever really been that thin? He didn't remember being grey either.

His new suit felt unfamiliar in design and material; awkward. Though pre-owned, it was still two decades newer than the one he traded in. The only part of the old suit was the Winged patch he unpicked and sowed on to the sleeve of the new one. The suit dealer had offered him a good deal for it. You didn't see Elite pilot patches for sale that often and certainly not vintage ones from the early days of the Pilots Federation. But nostalgia made him keep it. For so long it had been a goal, a symbol to be obtained... it had seemed so important all that time ago to race to be recognised as the best he could be. That old patch on the new suit was a reminder to him of just how unimportant that really was in the big scheme of things. That patch couldn't get him his life back, couldn't find those 30 years, but it somehow reminded him of how much he had changed. Besides, he chuckled, chicks had always liked it... maybe that hadn't changed?

The dock at Weaver felt huge to him. He had only been accustomed to the Coriolis design when he had been flying. The featureless geodesic slab slowly spinning its entry slot and mocking the inexperienced pilot was an iconic image, but the vastness of the cylindrical core and rotating ring dwarfed him as he looked across the dock at the range of sleek Gutamaya ships, the luxurious liners and slabs of practical Lackon hauling ships. He smiled involuntarily as an ageing Cobra slid a kilometre over his head and spun axially to perform a precise landing on the opposite side of the dock. He could tell even from this distance that the rear port thruster needed trimming and the forward lateral plane was shuddering under load. He new every millimetre of that ship, he had been everywhere in it. Every star in the then mapped galaxy - literally. He had even been to hell and back. Twice.

But that old friend was beyond his budget. Far beyond. On the pad in front of him sat a tiny cheese wedge of a ship, lopsided on its gear and with the accumulated pock marks and smears of extensive use. A streak of something dark smeared the starboard fin and the tell-tale freeze and bake skin-ripples of repeated cold vacuum immersion and with high temperature close-proximity scooping were prominent on the nose. The dealer had been confused, had offered to update the decals on the ships flanks free of charge. But as his new 100credit license pointed out he was starting from the bottom again and the patch on his suit was just that - a patch. It counted for nothing, he would have a whole world of learning ahead of him again, but this time he wanted to savour it. He was in no hurry, there were things to do, places to see.

He logged his first flight plan with the dock authorities - had picked up a couple of standard cargo runs from a dealer on the dockside. He had a hankering to earn a little and then maybe head off into the black somewhere - he'd never been able to do that before but exploring attracted him. Just a few hundred light years of runs to get some credits and get his hand back in, get a better equipped ship and then go and see some sights. But boy were those flashy Gutamaya's appealing.

This time, what ever would be - would be.