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that.”             
    “True, but I aim to see we deliver some payback. SpaceCore is assembling a fleet with the help of the Alliance. It will be our biggest operation yet. We aim to beat those bastards back where they came from.”
    The woman pounded her fist on her knee. He could see the excitement mixed in with grief brim through her eyes. Perhaps it was holding back an anger at seeing such a huge loss at the hands of the enemy. The disappointments with the military and the SpaceCore were always abundant, with victories few and far between.
    “So what brought you out to Meridian?” she asked. “I hope you didn’t lose any friends back there.”
    The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. Friends, he had none on Meridian, except maybe a few acquaintances, Mac the bartender, being one of them. What had become of him, Julian didn’t dare to envision. He had no connections with that place, nothing but his job. He could only feign his sentiments, saying he hoped most of its crew had escaped.
    “I just came there for the work. It was easy, nothing too hard.”
    “I guess that’s gone now,” she said. “This war seems to ruin everything, doesn’t it?”
    He stared down at the floor, slowly nodding to the woman’s comment.
    “You should rest. I’ll take you to a room, where you can lie down. It’ll be a short while or so before we reach Haven.”
    She was right. He was exhausted. Julian rose to his feet and Nalia came to his side, interlinking her arms with his.
    “It’s a pleasure to meet you Julian,” she said. “When the shit hits the fan, somehow you still end up meeting good people.”
     

***
     
    He had been shot. The blood everywhere. In his eyes, even in his mouth. His vision red; his brain matter was scattered about. A hole passing in and out of his head. His body about to collapse.
    It was a nightmare, one that left Julian shaking from the bed. He rose from the thin mattress, his heart rate racing, like his body was trying to stay alive. He told himself it was just a dream. A figment of the imagination. Out of his control. But the lie would never take hold. This was an actual memory. A broken shard of one, the images a flashback — so graphic and real. The past incident perhaps altering his mind for the worse. 
    Julian felt sick. He wanted to run away. Hide like a scared child. But as his senses came to, he realized that he already had. He had been discharged from the military over three years ago. Exiled into a different kind of work, disgraced. A washed-up pilot running freighters, in a floating warehouse, he had no attachment to.
    He left the bed, and ran his hands into a nearby sink inside the personal quarters. 
    As the cold water hit his face, Julian couldn’t help but remember. The call to evacuate, the emergency alarms, and the erratic rumbling across Meridian station. A muted scream of an unlucky engineer sucked out into space. The empty void wanting to claim him too. Images of the dead ships all flooded into his mind. And suddenly, those distant memories, filled with violence, appeared as well. He now saw himself again, dying on the floor, the back of his head punctured, the guts bleeding out.
    Why? Why did I do it?
    Julian’s hands jerked, clasping together to stop the shaking. The physical pain in his body had largely disappeared, but Julian shrank as the trauma came knocking into his mind. He could only hold on to the sides of the sink, clutching them tight, when the reality of the nightmare reared its ugly head. Julian sucked in the air, as the long sigh then came from his breath. Already, he could feel it. The nose bleed aggravating once more.
    “Shit,” he said, the red rivering down to his lips. Julian then thought back to the lieutenant and what she had said earlier. Indeed, this war had ruined everything, especially him.
     

***
                 
    Hyperspace, the means in which interstellar travel was possible, throbbed in the distance. The violet