Into the Void

Chapter 2

Nate sat alone in the back corner of a dingy little bar on the ship repair station orbiting his home planet, Caldania, staring wistfully out at a display screen showing space and the planet below them. The bar was just barely big enough for four small round tables. The lighting was dim and a haze of smoke filled the air. The haze was nice since it prevented him from seeing how dirty the place really was, and let him pretend it had been cleaned sometime in the past month. His table featured a lovely puddle of old beer that he could see his reflection in, sneering down at the patchwork of scars and the crude metallic eye that marred his hawkish features, he swatted at the puddle, soaking the grease stained sleeve of his coveralls, and sending a splash of cold running across the synthetic temperature sensors in his new prosthetic arm. The new arm was an ugly thing, a spindly set of silver alloyed bones supporting tight black bundles of synthetic muscle. Two years in the Void Corps and all he'd earned was a set of damned cybernetics and a medical discharge. His new eye and arm worked just as well as flesh and blood, better in some cases, but there was no way the Democratic Alliance of Free Colonies would tolerate cyborgs in combat positions. Anything they saw as sub-human was cut out and shipped home.

"Hey!" a rough voice shouted from across the bar. "Tinman! Pack it up, bus is leaving"

With a sigh of exasperation Nate gulped down the warm, flat, remnants of his beer and left the bar. The shuttle home was crammed into a tiny dock at the end of a short dingy hallway. The airlock cycled open with a wheeze, Nate shuffled into the ship and sat in a battered seat at the back. The ship was tiny, with enough seats for sixteen passengers and an aisle too narrow for two people to walk abreast running down the middle. The walls were a drab off yellow colour that he suspected used to be white and the cramped seats were upholstered in a light grey fabric. The whole ship had a stale slightly musty smell to it, like it was past due to have its air filters changed. The engine kicked on with a cough and set the whole frame vibrating. Much to his chagrin the man who had called to him earlier sat down beside him.

"I just can't figure it out Tinman" he said. "With all that steel plugged into your skull you'd think they'd have installed a clock so you wouldn't be so damn late to everything."

Nate ignored him, turning to look at the wall, and brushing his shaggy red hair away from his eyes. He didn't particularly care to keep his hair long but the length helped cover the scars crisscrossing the right side of his face, and the ugly metal sphere that sat where his right eye used to be.

The docking clamps unlatched with a hollow boom and the ship sputtered away from the station, filling the cabin with the soft grinding noise it always made when the engines fired. Nate was no engineer but he'd been working at the ship repair station long enough to know that something inside the ship was in need of some serious work. It hadn't quit yet though, but if it came apart mid-flight and killed them all that was fine by him. He caught someone staring at him halfway through the flight, it was a face he didn't recognize, most likely a new hire. His shift supervisor, Gary, sat next to the new guy. Nate could just barely make out what they were saying over the buzz of the ship's air recycling.

"The cyborg?That's Nate. He got shot to shit somewhere out past the new colonies, got that god awful metal shit hooked onto him and now he's here, working shipbuilding with the rest of us" said Gary.

The new guy nodded and whispered "Why didn't he go for cloned parts? All those cybernetics just aren't right."

"He says he has some kind of rare something or other that stops the cloned parts from taking. Personally, I think he just likes the metal. You watch the way he looks at a ship when it comes in, I swear he likes them more than he likes people."

The new guy shuddered. "Christ, last time we had folk get that fond of their hardware we had a war."

Nate shook his head, ever since the Construct Rebellions anyone who liked cutting edge technology, or had the misfortune of needing cybernetics was labeled as some kind of freak. Gary and the new guy continued to talk for the rest of the flight, going on and on about how awful it would be to be half machine, swapping stories about the Rebellions, and stating over and over how big of a mistake it had been to let sentient machines free. It was the same tired set of arguments that Nate had heard repeated his whole life. His grandfather had fought in the Rebellions and the old man had always been ready to preach about the horrors of artificial intelligence, or to berate an amputee for having the audacity to wear cybernetics instead of choosing cloned limbs. He wondered what the old man would think of him now. His grandfather had been so proud to hear he was carrying on the family tradition, taking up arms to defend the people, Nate was sure Granddad would give him an awful beating for being kicked out of the Void Corps. He was the first Levin in over one hundred years without a successful Void Corps career. Everyone had pushed him to go back, even serving in a non-combat role was better than nothing, but he'd seen what they did to cyborgs in the Void Corps and there was no way he was spending a whole tour stuck in waste processing.