making a living

While I am lost in my wonderings, Oberon gets back on-course for Verisan, and we are Running once more. There has been an upturn in ships entering the system, and thus an increase in the amount of Federal patrols. New settlers stream into the Michaela system every day, to Agrafena if they want any measure of security, to Miklund if they’re hearty or harbor any dreams. It used to be that these were carefully planned excursions, sent of with pomp and flare. Since the first colonies called for independence, however, settlement has been more scattered, contract-based. They come from Earth, mainly, answering ads for work. Some come from asteroids and planets they’ve booked passage from. Some come with no promise of work, unsure of what awaits on the next dusty plain. They will find fortune or they will find despair. Often both, for such is the way of life, terran or no.

I have had many lives, even since I left Earth, which I hardly regard as home. I wish to separate my actions from what my grandparents would have wanted for me: would they understand I have done what I have done not just to learn, but to survive? The scavenging, the fighting, the death…was it all somehow avoidable?

Once in the dark times I lived on Verisan, and survived by working out a deal with a local boarding house. I'm not proud of it now, and I know it ranks me among the lowest of the space debris on any heaptown, but I'm alive now because of it. My job was simple, simple for a woman who wasn't chemming and had some nerve. I’d meet a man and coerce him to book a room for the two of us at “this little place down the street, so quiet you can’t hear the dockings” and, once there, summarily abandon him. What was he to do, after laying down his coin for a room, and being left by his lady and imagined conquest? Complain to the manager that his odious personal habits had driven her to flee? In a few days time they wouldn’t remember my face, after all their pocket-books remained mostly intact despite the bruising given to their pride.

The deal worked for me, I got a decent room and good percent of whatever my mark had spent on lodging. However, the nature of the business was so appalling to me that I could not maintain it for long. It required lowering myself to the base of human appeal, and more than once I was forced to break a finger or a jaw when a man's fervor overcame my timely escape. In the end, it was dull and disheartening to play the same game with these tired men, and I blew out of that junkheap town as easily as I had entered it. Running once more.