17 Years Before

  Salvador Vigino was excited to see the new station he and his family were going to live on. Merlin had been wild, vibrant and full of nice families, but had always been small. Even at a slow pace for his age, Salvador had been able to walk from one side to the other in less than twenty minutes. Titanlock, however, was meant to be huge. He could walk around the streets and roads for hours and still not reach the end. His father had told him that in some areas, you could look up and see the ceiling so far up that it would take multiple Merlins to reach the top. Though Salvador was excited, waiting in the shuttle seating, his parents weren’t as enthused.

  “I’m telling you that running here won’t escape your problems, Marsale.” His father intoned, his deep voice a lion’s growl. Salvador wished he had a voice like than when he was older.

  “Oh, and what would you have us do Angelo? Just tell GaltCorp that we were super sorry about that cargo shipment we lost? You’re to blame as much as me. Fuck off.”

  “I would tell them it wasn’t we who lost it. It was you. You try to make it out that every problem, every issue is somehow everyone else’s fault, but when things go well, it was a solo effort, that you did it all by yourself.”

  Salvador didn’t like it when his parents argued. Sometimes he would sit and watch movies on his dad’s old computer to pass the time. Here, he was stuck listening to it and tried to pretend he wasn’t happening.

  He considered talking to Citra, his younger sister, but she had been grumpy with him since he accidently broke her toy. Salvador had tried to apologize, but when she acted like she didn’t care about making up with him, he decided wouldn’t bother, not for a while at least. The shuttle stopped and they unclipped.

  “Well, here we are kids. Our new home.” His dad turned and flashed a wide smile.

  “Yes, you can thank your father for it. Hope you like tight living and smoggy air.”

  “Marsale, not now.” His father’s voice was curt, and it seemed to be enough to stop his mother from responding.

  Salvador didn’t care where they lived, as long as they were all happy. That being said, he saw his mom and dad smile less nowadays. Maybe he could try to apologize, in case it was something he’d done? Salvador wasn’t sure, and Citra had already walked away from him in a huff. Maybe apologies weren’t worth it in the end.

  “Sal, hey, Sal.” Salvador’s father called out to him. Only he called him Sal, and he liked the nickname. His mother always called him by his full name when she was angry and referred to him as ‘you’ or ‘boy’ when she wasn’t quite so mad.

  “I’ve got something to show you.” His father beckoned him towards the rear of the shuttle.

  They passed the windows, bright stars speckling in the endless black beyond them. They came to one of the storage lockers. Most items had gone into the cargo of the ship, but some small bits had gone behind the cages. His father looked over each shoulder before crouching.

  “I probably shouldn’t show you this, but it’s a late birthday present. Sorry we didn’t have much this year, but things will be different now we’re here on Titanlock.”

  Salvador was jumping with excitement as his father quickly unlocked the door using a bit of straight metal. Salvador wondered why he didn’t use a key, but remembered only the staff should have them. Did one of them let his dad borrow theirs? From within the cage, he heaved out a black trunk, a label with their details on it stuck to the side.

  Placing it in front of young Salvador, his father clicked it open and lifted the lid to reveal the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Gorgeous wood, bright strings and a shiny pick held in place above the sound hole. The guitar must have come from heaven, if such a place existed. Both his parents seemed to damn God an awful lot, but if He could make something like this, Salvador would make sure to never damn Him.

  “Thanks dad! Can I play it when we get to our new home?” Salvador pleaded.

  “We can try, son. Your hands are a bit small, but we’ll give it a go.” His father clicked the lid shut, keeping it safe.

  Salvador embraced his father as they got ready to leave the shuttle.

  Five years later.

  Salvador could still remember his father’s warmth when they hugged that day many years before. Even though he had been dead months, Salvador could still feel the soft velvet of the huge coat he always wore. On the other hand, he couldn’t remember the last time his, unfortunately, very alive mother ever smiled at him or even looked at him with anything other than distain or dissapointment.

  Well, fuck her, and fuck Citra. They were still packing in the other room, and Salvador had no intention of helping them. He would say goodbye, and that was that. When he heard they were leaving for Heaven’s Doctrine, he was so stunned he figured it was a sick joke, an attempt to make him laugh since his father had died in a mining accident.

  But no, they had not only cursed everything he did in life by selling off almost all of his possessions but spat on his honour as a proud worker of the CCH by joining their enemies. Salvador would almost report them to the police, but he knew that would result in their deaths. Despite their leniency is most crimes, the CCH would not abide by those who supported their enemies. Salvador was almost tempted, and the fact that he could even entertain such an idea burnt a hole in his heart.

  As the racket had died down, Salvador reluctantly stood and entered the room, facing whatever was to come his way. His mother and sister stood, glaring in his direction.

  “Ready?” Salvador mumbled, wanting this to be over with already.

  “Y’know Sal…” Gods he hated that name when it came from his mother’s disgusting mouth. He would take ‘boy’ any day of the week over her corruption of his father’s beloved nickname. “I’ve told you before that if you want to come with me, there’s a place for you.”

  “Why bother, mother? He’s weak. Just like Angelo was.” If it had only been Citra leaving, Salvador was certain he would alert the authorities. He hadn’t seen a single spark of empathy or joy in her since they arrived at Titanlock. It was almost as if his sister never had a heart to begin with and merely pretended for the first decade of her life.

  Salvador didn’t have anything to say. He nodded vaguely towards the door and turned back to the tiny office his father had put together. Slamming the door shut behind him, and hearing the front door do the same, Salvador settled back into work. He scanned the job offers across the numerous pamphlets and papers. Most were either deadly, or low in pay. Salvador needed something long term, something he could rely on. Preferably something that wouldn’t kill him either would be nice. Something where he’d never have to care for a bitch of a mother, and a cunt of a sister ever again. Pushing down his flaring anger, he came across one for a company – Phetenov. It required basic, on-site training, time away from major stations, and would require no outside contact for multiple months. Running through the criteria, Sal marked a check, check and definite check. Salvador needed to be alone right now. The further from others, the better. He pulled his comm-device out to arrange storing his guitar at a storage locker and called Phetenov up. It was time for a change.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Three months later

  Salvador was going to die. He was sure of it. Limping along the hallway, alarms sounding out across Tartarus Nine’s emergency speakers, he made his way to the medbay. Someone had to still be alive. Sasha, Guren and Kian were all dead from the malfunction, and Salvador was in agony. The metal debris that had shredded through one side of his body, across his chest, and out the other by his hip was a blazing inferno of pain.

  Tears of pain and fear filling his vision, he weakly called out, “Silas? Jeroa? Anyone?”

  Only the alarms answered him. He turned, hand trailing blood along the wall, and entered the medbay. Silas would fix him up, Salvador was certain of it. The man was calm, quiet but intense. If anyone could save him, that man could. Instead, he opened the medbay to find a red stain against an impacted bulkhead where Silas once stood, the remains of his lab coat sticking from the debris. A mournful cry escaped Salvador. No, this couldn’t be happening. Was this what his father felt, the instant his ship was impacted by an asteroid? Please, god no. He turned, dripping blood as he made his way to the bridge. Captain Yrenz would know what to do. He could help him, fix him up, right?

  Instead, he was met with a corpse, a pipe sticking through one side of Yrenz’s head and out the other. Beside him sat Jeroa, cut in half from plating that had shout out from a gas explosion. Her nearly dead eyes trailed him as her mouth gaped open and closed, like a fish, Unfortunately, she wasn’t gone yet. Weak with agony and hurting all over. Salvador lacked the energy or drive to help finish her off and weakly held her hand, falling to his knees, until she passed a few seconds later. Desperate, Salvador made his way to the external command console. Instead of finding a glass screen, ready to call for mayday, he found a shattered wreck of metal, glass and wires. He was stuck on Tartarus. Unable to leave, unable to message for help. Of course, Tartarus was meant to be a hidden base, meant to recover resources from an asteroid belt dangerously close to Doctrine territory. Any messages had to be traced to separate series of satellites before contact could be made with anyone in the CCH. And now, he was cut off.

  Gods no, Salvador couldn’t die like this. Not like some weak, frail thing, unable to save himself. Not like his father. Perhaps his mother and sister had been right all along. Everyone was weak at some level; it just took acceptance to know that. As Salvador stumbled back towards the medbay, alarms silenced using the undamaged main console, his thoughts turned to anger. No, it wasn’t that people were weak, it was that the world was uncaring, cold and cruel. If there was a weakness, it was the inability to save oneself. Sliding open a door already coated with his own blood, he wobbled over to the automatic surgery unit, well known for being unreliable. If he couldn’t save himself now, he didn’t deserve to live.

  Setting the machine to scan and operate, to do what needed to be done regardless of the pain, Salvador steeled himself. This was a life he would rip from the teeth of death, one that fate had lusted after for some time now. As the blades cut into his chest, he knew he was right. And he would prove fate wrong. He would prove them all wrong.

  Nine months later.

  Damn God. He would damn God tomorrow, and the day after. He would damn God every day of his life if he had the chance.

  Sal ached. He always ached, burned, hurt all over. For months, it had been the regular, stabbing, bleeding ache of metal still in his torso, impaled through his mangled lung. Then, it had been the sorrow, the dark nights after the lighting blew out, the nights he expected his mind would collapse on itself. Now, however, it was the hunger that ached.

  And Sal damned God with every fibre of his being.

  Salvador had survived nine months after the station had fallen apart over the course of seven seconds, killing everyone. Everyone but him. The surgery machine had saved his life, but not well. Unable to remove the shrapnel from his body, it left it there, like a malignant tumour. Every day, he would inject enough clotting agents to kill a horse, reducing the internal bleeding his steel cancer made with every twist, every breath, every heartbeat. Prominently, a jagged shard that trailed from where his right shoulder down and across to where his stomach once was. He could eat, as long as it was pounded into soft mush, and let it slowly be moved through his rewired digestive system.

  Today was another day. Another day of living, breathing and doing. As long as Sal relied on himself, he would live. Or so he had thought. He could live with no lights – he had no desire to see himself or the blood stains he couldn’t waste water on cleaning anymore. He could live with no running water – his own smell and the smell of death had become natural to him - and the taste of stagnant liquid was no longer unfamiliar to him. But no food? That was an issue. The last of the supplies meant for the team of seven had dwindled over the months. No resupply from Phetenov had meant no new food. The last of the shelves stored the few packets he had rationed, and their barren sight gnawed at what mess of a stomach he still had.

  Sal wasn’t an animal, however. Though he’d moved the bodies from cargo to cold storage when he quickly realized help wasn’t coming, the idea of cannibalism still sickened him to his core. As long as he relied on his own instincts, his own skills, he would live.

  The pamphlet hadn’t lied. He certainly had learnt a lot of skills on the job, especially maintenance and repairing. With the station falling apart, he needed to keep it usable, lest it collapse and remove its last, parasitic inhabitant. As part of his daily routine, Sal made his way to the main console. The artificial voice was the only other one he could hear, aside from his own.

  “Good morning, Salvador.” Gods he hated the full name now. The computer couldn’t understand the concept of a nickname, and now he was Salvador – always. ‘Sal’ reminded him of his father, of better days. ‘Salvador’ reminded him of the husk he’d become, the ruined mess of a man still surviving.

  “It has been 212 days since the resupply was scheduled to arrive. Has there been an issue?”

  Sal had long since given up communicating with the computer. It only made him more pissed to get no useful information back. All he needed from the computer was to check the damaged components he could fix. The main antenna was still broken beyond repair, the short range one had already been altered by Sal to send out pulses in the form of a makeshift SOS, and the refinery was still the crumpled mess it was nine months before when it crushed Sasha and Guren.

  However, there was a new error. One of the solar panels needed adjustment. Great, more EVA. If there was an activity Sal hated more than anything in the world, it was EVA. Combining the constant pain of ingrown shrapnel with a tight, uncomfortable suit, and it was enough to break a man. Any man except Sal that was, if he could call himself a man at only fifteen years of age. Wait, sixteen years. He had his birthday some months before. Not that it was worth remembering at the time - he had probably been busy not dying that day. No, Sal could stay alive if he followed his doctrine, no matter what.

  Suiting up, he made his way out the airlock and moved to the panels. He avoided the sight of the shattered asteroid-side of the station. The amount of blood on the twisted metal there was too much to clean properly, but enough to be visible from a distance, so averting his gaze was the only option. He reached the panel in question and fixed the wiring that had come loose. A few solders here and there, and it read its normal values once more. He turned, preparing to move towards the airlock and re-enter the station when he looked out into the void. A beautiful darkness, like a black sea that went out forever.

  Sal had avoided gazing into space recently; it tried to pull him in, to focus on it until nothing else mattered. Now, however? With the constant itch from within his ribcage, the niggling of a slow death by starvation or suffocation? The night looked rather inviting.

  Self-reliance? What bullshit.

  Sal was destined to die, that was certain from the day he was a step away from being squashed to paste. Hell, he might have been destined to die the day his parents moved to Titanlock. Giving a deep sigh, Sal released his grip from the railing he had clipped himself to and stepped off into the void. It wouldn’t take long, simply slowly wind the tank’s output down to a trickle until he faded into a fuzzy minded blur. Definitely a nicer death than most of the crew had gotten. Yeah, in a way, this was self-reliance.

  He was relying on no one else to end his life.

  The station was becoming distant in his rear view camera. For a moment, Sal considered permanently disconnecting his EVA thruster system, to truly seal the deal, but still he held onto it. Some stupid sense of self-preservation? It didn’t matter. Sal twisted the dial on his air tank controls to reduce pressure output over the course of a few minutes.

  100%.

  90%.

  80%. Huh, he was kinda dizzy, that’s nice.

  70%.

  60%. Damn, that beeping was annoying,

  50%- Wait, beeping? He confusedly looked at his helmet’s HUD to see that a ping was being received by the station. A ping? That didn’t make sense. Tartarus had long since lost the ability to communicate outwards. If it was being received, that meant the only place it could come from would be…

  A ship trying to make contact.

  He flicked the tank back up to full pressure and blasted back towards the station.

  Salvador Vigino might be destined to die, likely by his own hand and relying on no one else…

  But not today.