Prologue
19 Dec 2020.Cap.
Who am I? That's an easy one: I am no one. From nowhere...at least, nowhere you've ever heard of. My mother, Helene Capan, was a teacher in a small port town on a dusty red planet where few children were attending school anymore. Our planet was dying and we knew it. Our water reserves were disastrously low and we had nowhere left to turn. The people with the means to leave had already done so. Those without did what they could to survive, working the land, the mines, the streets to live another day. But my mother continued to work everyday for those students who continued to show, even when the rest of the faculty had long abandoned the school, the town, and the families. I've been told that Helene was a giver, that she genuinely cared for each and every child who walked through her door. She sounds wonderful; I would have loved to have met her had my first breaths not been her last.
According to my brother Jakob, it wasn't long afterwards that my father turned to narcotics: inhalants, hallucinogens, alcohol....whatever it took. Maybe it was my mother's passing that left him broken. Maybe it was the futility of trying to single-handedly raise two young children in a world that had no future. Whatever it was that took him, it took him quickly and without remorse.
My brother continued working the garage and trying to find ways to provide for the two of us. My earliest memories are of our times together in that dirty, tiny garage. My brother had inherited my father's gift and was trusted by our community to keep anything with an engine in it running. I watched. And I learned. And we lived day by day, neither of us ever really knowing which one would be our last.
The alarms never sounded on the day the Slavers came. In the aftermath, some people suspected sabotage, that the Slavers had long ago infiltrated our system knowing that the citizens of a doomed planet would offer little resistance. Perhaps it was just as simple however as someone not reporting to work that day or more likely passing out at their desk. But with little warning, most of us didn't stand a chance; hell, many people went willingly, hoping that days as a slave were better than no days at all. I wonder how they're feeling about that decision now.
My brother quickly stashed me in the cargo module of an old sidewinder that he had been restoring, and I curled up as small as I could behind the rats' nests and held my breath. I begged Jakob to crawl in beside me but he knew the Slavers' brutality only slightly surpassed their persistence: it would be obvious that the garage was functional and being lived in, and they wouldn't leave until they had found a warm body. His last words to me still reverberate: "I will die before I let them take you, Robyn..." And I huddled there in the darkness, crying, shaking, my senses overwhelmed by the carnage being wreaked outside...the cracks of the whips, the blood-curdling screams, the acrid stench of the refinery fires, the thunderous blasts of artillery.
Hours later I finally crawled out of that cargo hold. Through the haze and smoke, Jakob's blank eyes stared up at me from the floor of the garage. His face was barely recognizable, his body mutilated. I collapsed on top of his lifeless body and slept.
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It took me about 18 months to get that sidewinder, now named Helene's Hope, off the ground and through the thermosphere for good. I had nowhere to go so I opened my map and plotted a course to the nearest system I could find, hoping that I had done the calculations correctly; it seemed ludicrous that I had survived all that I had only to perish by jumping into a star or simply drifting out into the black on fumes and a few minutes of life-support.
But I did make it to that system, and the one after, and the one after, picking up odd jobs delivering data, goods, ferrying passengers....whatever it took to keep moving forward for whomever was willing to pay. Word soon spread: that young girl in the Sidey never quits and she never fails.
It was somewhere near the system of Mikunn that a commander by the name of Antony Birge first contacted me. He asked to meet with me at an old mining station called Spassky's Inheritance. Normally I would've not-so-politely refused; I had learned quickly that being a young unescorted pilot tended to attract the wrong type of attention. But Birge knew all about me, about my parents, about my brother. So I went and we sat for hours at an old bar, The Black Hole in the Wall. Birge and my father had been good friends years ago it seemed; in fact, my brother Jakob was named after him, Antony Jakob Birge. Now Birge was retired, living off of obscene amounts of credits made through some well-timed investments, occasionally dabbling in politics, something I had no interest in. His loyalty to my father, he said, compelled him to find me, and though I insisted that I was doing fine and needed no help, he offered to sponsor me in the Federation of Independent Pilots, the doorway to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. No permits, no borders, no boundaries.
And now I sit here in my cockpit in Cubeo, an officially licensed Federation pilot. It's hard to believe that it's been only three years since I left that garage back home; it feels like decades. Along with Birge, I've met plenty of good people who would give you the suits off their backs, and I've met plenty of others who would gladly stab you in it if it meant making a profit. Perhaps most importantly, I have to come to see that despite my initial indifference, even the furthest reaches of this galaxy cannot exist without politics. Like the ivy on the back wall of that old garage, it has intertwined itself into every system, every planet, every spaceport, every backroom of every seedy bar that you'd never want to be caught dead in...and very likely could be. But something is brewing here in Cubeo. The people of the Empire speak fervently, almost religiously of "the People's Princess"....an Aisling Duval. I know little about her, but I have caught some snippets of her speaking in the media here. There is something charming, slightly seductive, about the way she speaks, so passionately about her people, about bringing an end to slavery and the illegal narcotics trade that leaves nothing but pain in its wake. I do know that like me, she, too, has known great loss in her life from a very young age.
I don't know how I ended up here but maybe fate is real. Maybe it's time to take a chance, settle down, and cast my die in with the local faction here, the Prismatic Imperium. Maybe we can make a difference.
Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can be...someone.....