The cold was mind numbing. It hurt to breathe, the freezing air stinging my throat and lungs. Every breath agony.
My body, too, screamed for death, an end to the overwhelming pain. Every muscle, every joint throbbing in stinging pain as cold, thick blood was forced around my body.
I knew I wasn't dead, not yet at least. But I couldn't see anything as darkness and blinding pain consumed my world. I could hear my laboured breathing and the gentle hum of a machine. I wished for death, an end to it all.
I raised a hand to rub my eyes and was surprised to find I couldn't touch my face, a mask of some sort preventing contact. Feeling around, I realised I was wearing a helmet. Funny, I couldn't feel it on my head through the pain. Running my hands over the helmet I found I was wearing a snug garment that sealed to the base of the helmet and completely encased me to my toes. Across my shoulders and waist I felt some kind of strap. A seatbelt, I soon discovered, had me secured well and truely to the chair I was seated in.
I felt around for the buckle to release myself but my fingers were to too numb from the cold to figure out in the darkness, how to open it.

It was at this point I heard a crackle in my ears, followed by a female voice. Barely able to think, I followed everything this female voice said to me, I did everything she told me to do. I pressed buttons on a panel to my right and the darkness was expelled by soft light. Then lights flickered all around me as multiple console panels came to life. I realised I was in a ship of some kind. The female voice belonged to the commander of a nearby ship. I thanked her for her assistance and powered up the drives.

Finding a station nearby, I set course for it. Upon approach, flight control welcomed me and gave permission to land. It was at this point I realised I had no idea who I was, let alone how I had come to be unconscious in this weird little ship.
By the time I had landed, ship life support had warmed me up greatly, breathing no longer agony, but the rest of my body still screamed in pain. Feeling back in my fingers, I worked the buckle open and stood up.
I left the little ship and entered the station, unthinking, no idea what to do, where I am or even who I was.
I took off the helmet in a corridor near the station services office, a passing child screamed and ran off. People all around me staring and backing away. I remember someone saying "he's Spooky looking".

I entered station services. The girl behind the counter screamed and hit the panic alarm, the office soon filling with station security.
One of the guards asked me "what happened to you?".
I had no idea what he meant or how to answer him.
"What is your name?" He continued.
"I don't know" was all I could mumble.

After a while everyone relaxed a bit. I was allowed to take on a paying job running data. I just wanted to get out of there and away from screaming people. Seems I was a freak of some kind.

I received a similar "welcome" at the next station. So I went and bought a new helmet, one with a darkly tinted visor. I found wearing this helmet made people wary of me, but at least they weren't scared of me or screamed and ran away anymore.
For months I lived this way, just running missions for random stations. Living in anonymity, gaining credits working, but to what end? I still didn't know who I was, or even how I ended up nearly dead in that little ship.

I grew rich. I bought a new ship and then another. This second ship, a Python I named "Multipass", quickly became my main source of income. Such an amazingly versatile ship.

I was docked at a station, I forget which one, and was walking back to my landing bay with supplies of food, alcohol and some narcotics for my next voyage when I was approached by a small group. They wanted to go and look at some nebula somewhere and mentioned they would pay forty million credits if I would take them. Forty million! Not that I needed cash, but no one had ever offered me that much for anything... so I quickly took the job.

An hour or so later, my rich passengers and their luggage was loaded up. I even stopped to get them some domestic appliances, they insisted that they required for the trip. I then tried to plot their destination into the mapping system and had a sinking feeling in my stomach....
A month later, some twenty-two thousand light years away from our starting station, we made it to the nebula. My passengers filed into the cockpit and looked at it for a minute or two. Then they took turns taking photos of each other, their fingers contorted into different hand signs for the holiday snaps. The they thanked me and said they were ready to go home.
No kidding, all this way for some photos featuring gang signs with a nebula in the background. Stupid rich people, I gave serious thought to spacing them all out the airlock.

Our first jump heading back ended poorly, caught way too close to the sun and caused huge amounts of damage to my ship. I quickly realised there would be no chance of returning alive without major repairs... I snapped open the map and scoured systems, looking for anything resembling civilisation. A couple of thousand light years away was Colonia, so I set course and off we went.
Around one thousand light years from Colonia, I jumped into a system to quickly refuel and the Covas system alerted me to a Generation ship in system. A generation ship way out here? I had to have a look.
On the way to the ship, I saw something odd on my HUD, a Non Human Signal source. Curious, I dropped in to see what it could possible be.
There was a destroyed ship, unidentifiable due to so much damage, there was no clue to the origin of the ship. I had been so intent on looking at the dead ship, I didn't see the giant alien ship move along side me on the left. First thing I knew was the entire cockpit lit up with yellow light. My instruments went dead, my whole ship shut down.
"This is it" I thought, "here is where I finally will die". I still didn't know my name or where I was from.
As quickly as it began, it stopped. Power returned to the controls and I boosted away. The alien ship jumped clear of the system too.
Shaken, I jumped system after system as quickly as we could, until we finally landed in Colonia and had extensive repairs carried out.

Weeks later, back in the bubble of civilisation, my passengers paid me and disembarked. I sold my data from system scans too. Now I was ridiculously rich! And yet, I still didn't know my name.
Even with all this money, nothing changed. My physical appearance still scared people. Security would still be called if I went into a station without a tinted visor covering my face.
People kept on calling me "Spooky", so I adopted it as my name.
Once this name was registered into station services, I received a message from a stranger, one Felicity Farseer. She asked to see me, so off I went. She asked me to bring some special metal or alloy or something, so I stopped at a remote station and bought some.
Still curious as to what she wanted with me, I jumped toward her system.
On one such jump, I thought my drives had gone wrong and I was about to be ripped apart mid-jump, my atoms forever scattered to the void. Weird colours flashed before my eyes, my ship pulled this way and that, before eventually being dropped into normal space.

A mind shattering sound rocked my very senses, my ship systems drained of power.
Looking around, I was surrounded by three of these giant flower-like alien ships. Same type of ship I'd been shut down by out near Colonia.
My ship rocked this way and that. The power not returning, my ship dead in space, defenceless, the aliens then attacked me.
It was obvious where this would end. I punched the escape pod eject and was bodily thrown from my ship, still securely strapped into my chair, now riding in an escape pod.

The alien ships destroyed my Python in seconds. I knew I was next.... and yet they all jumped out of the system without noticing me.

A passing merchant ship found me and took me to the nearest station. I filed an insurance claim and waited a week or two for a new Python to be delivered to me.

These aliens awoke something in me. I now knew what I had to do, I knew my purpose in life.
Twice now I had met these aliens, twice now they had shut down my ship. They had tried to kill me, unprovoked.
So now I would hunt them.

Over the months I have grown my fleet, grown my wealth, all for the sole purpose of killing these aliens whenever and wherever I find them.

I will kill them all. There will be no aliens to survive my revenge, my wrath.
I am Spooky Vanguard.
Wing Commander of The Hive.