Space is Cold
Two Years Ago
The ship shook slightly as in touched down on the silent moon. Alexandra shut the engine down and got ready to leave. She grabbed her bag and old shotgun and hurried off to the nearest town. This was her home, a little piece of nowhere called Prosper. The town she was quickly approaching was where she’d spent her child but the war had taken her so far from here.
As she walked into the town she began to notice how quiet it was. She soon saw why. There was blood everywhere, bodies all over the streets. Reavers she thought and pulled her gun off her back. They were already gone but she held on to it tightly anyway. Alexandra walked up and down the streets from sunrise to sunset that day piling up the bodies in the middle of the town square. She found she parents, so brutally mutilated she vomited for an hour. That night she burned the bodies and began rooting through the houses, looking for anything valuable. She silently asked their forgiveness, but she needed to keep flying. Her ship was all she had left now.
Alex took what she found and hauled it back to the ship. She thought she should probably stay the night there, the reavers wouldn’t return, but she couldn’t take it. She took off, still watching the haunting glow off the fire was the ship slowly ascended from the planet.
Present Day
Alexandra sat on a stool at some piece of go se of a bar staring intently at the tiny comm. screen in her hands. “What did you do to my ship?” she asked the fuzzy image of a man on the screen. The man was an old army friend of hers called Jinx. She’d always thought the nickname was a joke but she was beginning to believe it. He didn’t answer her question just looked at her uneasily.
”My ship?!” she repeated angrily. Jinx ran his hand through his hair and said “It’s gone”.
“Gone” she practically yelled, but everyone around was to busy with their own “business” to notice.
“We got boarded, the Alliance took the ship” he said “they saw the cargo, half the crew’s in jail.” She slammed her hand down on the bar, startling several of the bar’s patrons. What am I supposed to do now? she wondered. Her ship was gone, its crew dismantled.
“Listen” Jinx said “I got another job with this guy, Niska, he’s kinda shady but the pay’s good, I could probably get you in on it.” She shivered at the sound of the name, she’d heard of him before. After the war a lot people got left no home, no money, no nothing. Some of her old friends had gone to him for jobs but it didn’t turn out quite right. Niska did things to people that would make a reaver sick.
“Hey” he said “a jobs a job, you just gotta walk away after.”
“Yeah” Alex said “no questions.”
“He got me a ship, I’ll be there for you in a couple days” Jinx said and the screen went blank. Alex picked up her stuff and went to find a place to stay. She was stuck on a backwater moon somewhere between there and nowhere.
