The corridors were packed with people and the strobing yellow lights that were part of the station’s emergency evacuation system. When the yellow strobes were lit it was the safety protocol of the station to load all life rafts and eject them into space. Anyone who was current on their payments for housing on the station was guaranteed a spot on a raft, and those visitors to the station were expected to board their own ships and make good on their own escape.
The station was part of a larger hub of space trade and travel, so it would only be a matter of days or even hours before everyone was picked up. At least, that was the theory, as the station, according to the locals, had never had to actually go through the protocol of launching the rafts.
Sura had held Orion close to her breast and reluctantly joined the pushing and shoving crowd that moved chaotically through the corridors and spilled out into the central station decks. Once she was able to see the central station Sura saw to her absolute horror that Pier 16 was under attack.
Through the plexi-glass shield that served as a barrier between the causeway and the market deck Sura could see what she assumed were assault ships that had smashed their way through the hull of the station. As she watched, frozen in place by her first experience of war, a five man squad of soldiers in the gold and green hued armor of Helion Corporation engaged just over half a dozen Pier 16 security staff in a firefight.
In just a few seconds it was over, leaving all of the security staff dead and only one Helion trooper dead or unconscious on the deck floor. Sura could see that more soldiers were arriving and soon the whole deck was swarming with enemy soldiers.
Finally, Sura was able to snap out of her fugue and started running for the life rafts that she hoped hadn’t launched yet from the observation deck above.
The usually well-ordered station had become a riot of activity, as security staff fought a losing battle against more and more Helion troops. Sura barely stayed one step ahead of the advance as she made attempt after attempt to board life rafts only to find that they’d either launched or been captured, as entire launch bays were already held by the enemy.
At some point either the security staff or, most likely, the invaders, deployed acrid smoke projectiles that created a thick fog that burned the eyes and seared the lungs. She had run blindly then, her only though to keep Orion out of the smoke and away from the enemy soldiers who seemed to have started shooting civilians.
Dar had found her mid-ship, as he and two of his crew, Braden and Yanna, fled Helion troopers who had driven assault craft into the lower mechanic decks. The prospectors had been negotiating a sale of unrefined ink-rock when an assault craft had smashed into the deck. The vacuum seals of the station compensated for the intrusion, though the shooting started just as everyone had re-gained their footing.
Sura had come to find out later that the buyer had gotten greedy, and when given the chance, attempted to keep the money and the ink-rock. Sadly, Dar’s sharpshooter had died in the resulting gunfight and the captain and his two surviving crew were forced to flee before collecting the money or recovering the ink-rock as troopers flooded the deck.
Sura had barely been conscious when the prospectors found her, having breathed in so much of the smoke and, though she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, she’d been shot in the back. The round was too small caliber to have been from Helion, and in the chaos there were people shooting troopers and each other.
Orion was conscious, and Dar recognized the boy and his beautiful mother. Though Braden had complained, the captain had been determined to bring Sura and Orion aboard their ship. Sura remembered little of the actual escape aboard Dar’s ship, only that she and several other refugees were taken aboard before the ship’s crew cut the moorings and ignited a full burn right out of the launch bay. The hard launch might have cooked the bay and ruined much of the equipment that kept it functioning, though it was of little concern to the fleeing prospectors.
Word had finally reached Samuel a few months later, as communication signals were dreadfully scrambled across the Ellisian Line, and Sura had to talk the marine out of deserting his post right then and there. She could hear the weariness in his voice, see the looming emptiness in his eyes, and had done her best to assure him that she and Orion were safe.
With the trade war constantly escalating in scope, the possibility of the expatriation ban being lifted was nil, and victory over Helion seemed unlikely any time soon, there was just so much land to fight over on the other side of the Line. That was when Samuel had admitted that a unionist movement had taken root within the ranks of the Reapers, and though he could say no more on the unencrypted line, Sura could tell that he was strongly considering joining their ranks. Perhaps a union could use its collective bargaining power to demand the lifting of the expatriation ban even if that meant that the war effort might suffer. Sura had thought it seemed an impossible task.
Samuel was trapped in a war on the other side of the universe and Sura was drifting through the frontier. Never had their fortunes been so far flung from each other, and yet, here they were, still fighting to reach one another. She had insisted that she was safer aboard the Rig Halo than she had been on Pier 16, and certainly more so than her husband on the front line of a war zone, and that seemed to mollify her man somewhat.
The concept of safe had taken on a vastly different meaning once she had reached the frontier, and it took a great deal of spin doctoring for her to present an account of life aboard the ship and on the frontier to Samuel.
She knew what it felt like to be in constant fear that the next communication would be news of his death, and even worse the long stretches of unknown silence, and she wanted to spare Samuel that feeling. Sura decided that Samuel did not need to know just how lawless and violent the frontier was, despite its primal beauty and limitless opportunity.
A person could truly find freedom and realize radical growth potential, but it was often a literal fight get that freedom and keep it.
With no corporate society to govern the fringes of space, everyone out here made it up as they went along, and more often than not the rule was ‘might makes right’. A person could be and do whatever they wanted on the frontier, with more freedom and advantage than they’d ever have in corporate civilization.
The trade off, as Sura continually learned, was the loss of security and infrastructure. While there was no elite class or dramatic wealth inequality, there was also no structured healthcare, or enforcer corps to punish wrong doers or adjudicate disputes, or even high rating tech professionals to keep everything in good repair. Something as simple as replacing an air filtration cogitator for the Rig Halo life support system required a journey back into corporate space or at least to one of the trading outposts on the fringe of mapped space.
Life was so vastly different than the storybook existence that Sura and Samuel had once imagined and since he was entrenched in the most brutal trade war in a hundred years, Sura had worked to spare Samuel the burden of the truth. The story she told was one of adventure and vast unclaimed planets, which was true in the most basic way, though she regularly left out the often violent competition over those unclaimed places.
As the months had dragged on and their communication continued, Samuel endured the grinding and bloody monotony of war while Sura had found herself and her son caught in a whirlwind of deep space adventure. It was unlike anything she’d ever dreamed of, even if often difficult and dangerous. She updated him as best she could, when and where communication signals were solid enough to get messages or videos through.