The Judge allowed me to sit while they listed the crimes I’d been found guilty of. There were a lot of them and reading every one of them out in detail took some considerable time. It soon became apparent the Galactic Court had failed to find me guilty of anything serious enough to warrant a death sentence, however richly they thought I deserved one. Finally, though, the list came to an end and a hoarse Court steward called for everyone to rise for the Sentencing. I struggled to my feet, ignoring the arm one of my guards held out to help me up.

  The Judge glared at me, then glanced at the overflowing spectators area full of reporters and sighed. Nothing she could say now was going to make anyone happy.

  “Brandel Hawk, While the most serious of the crimes you were accused of have been justified as legitimate military actions, the Court has still found you guilty of a staggering amount of crimes. You claim to have committed these crimes in the name of the people, yet the very people you claim to represent have condemned you as a terrorist. You have shown no remorse for any of these crimes, you have even questioned the legitimacy of the Galactic Court…” I held up my hand and pain from my arthritis shot through my fingers.

  “I merely pointed out the vanity in calling this court ‘The Galactic Court’ when its jurisdiction is limited to two species and a very small corner of the Galaxy. I am in no way questioning the legitimacy of this Court. Now that I’m out the way, this Court is the one thing that keeps that lot on a leash,” I said, gesturing at the anonymous row of Corporate lawyers and representatives, angry at how thin and pathetic my voice sounded, angry at my enemies for sending representatives to gloat on their behalf, but most of all, incandescently angry at Vanessa for betraying me.

  “Have you finished grandstanding? May I continue?” the Judge asked sarcastically, well aware that charging me with contempt of court was an exercise in futility.

  “You may continue,” I replied grandly, giving the judge a regal wave to the amusement of the spectators. The Judge waited until they’d settled down before continuing.

  “There is the dilemma of what to do with you. Your mere presence on Earth during this trial has become so politically charged, no prison run by the Courts is willing to take you. There is also the minor matter of you being ninety years old and to be frank, you are dying. Any custodial sentence you serve would be both short and last for the rest of your life. Therefore, I have decided you are to be immediately taken from this Court and placed in cryogenic suspension in a Court owned facility for a period of no less than fifty years.”

  “So you’ve decided to make me an interesting ethical dilemma for future generations,” I said, shrugging, not entirely unhappy with my sentence. It would mean I would continue to be a pain in the ass long after my natural lifespan had expired.

  “I hope that when you awaken, you will realise everything you attempted was pointless, your supposedly historic victories forgotten. The great revolution you worked your whole life to bring about never happened. So, Brandel Hawk, do you have anything else to say? Any last requests?” The Judge asked belligerently. I looked at the Judge who was, no doubt, expecting a tirade of abuse from me. Instead I smiled.

  “I have said all I need to say. I just have one last request. I’ve never felt Earth’s sun on my skin. Would it be possible to walk to the cryo facility?” I asked.

  Given my many unlikely escapes from justice in the past, I was genuinely surprised my request was granted. Of course, the Galactic Court weren’t bloody idiots and a whole company of masked Court guards accompanied me on my walk, supported by a couple of gunships hovering above.

  I walked slowly and painfully to my destination, taking my time, enjoying the warm South African sun on my face. Behind the hastily erected barriers around the Court’s facilities the roar of the protesters reached a crescendo as I came into view. It wasn’t the peaceful walk I’d imagined, but at this moment in time I was definitely more than an historical irrelevance and I made the most of it, waving to the crowds while trying to read the placards.

  In the cryo facility, a stony-faced observer from the Corporations impatiently watched my slow progress, the slight waxy sheen of his skin showing him to be a veteran of multiple rejuvenations, making him both older and richer than everyone else in the room put together. I doubted either he or the Corporations he represented would be bothered by any interesting ethical dilemmas if the opportunity to murder me presented itself.

  He sneered as I awkwardly stripped off, then lowered myself into the pod. I gave him a cheery smile as one of the silent technicians connected me up. Before the pod door was shut, the observer held up his hand to get everyone’s attention.

  “One last thing before they freeze you, Hawk. I’ve just received word they’ve captured your wife. What do you say to that?” I shrugged, hiding the wave of emotion that threatened to overwhelm me. They’d got Vanessa too. Not that she didn’t deserve to rot in hell after what she’d done to me, but still, we’d fought together for fifty years.

  The senior technician checked my connections one last time, winked and stood back. The lid of the pod closed over me. Despite the fact I was technically being frozen, I felt warm, the drugs they’d given me dulled all but the worst of the physical and mental pain. I smiled as I closed my eyes. This time there wasn’t going to be any last-second escape. I let myself drift off, at one with the universe...

  ***

  It felt like it was only a moment later that I awoke to pain so intense it was as if every nerve ending was on fire. Pain that wouldn’t let up. Pain so overwhelming that I was unable to comprehend anything else. For what felt like forever the agony continued, then, after what felt like an eternity, the pain started to recede. I gasped for air, coughed up what felt like half my lungs and, for a while, the pain that had been distributed throughout my body centred on my chest.

  After the last spasm of pain receded I realised I was lying on an uncomfortably hard, cold surface and risked opening my eyes. I found myself lying naked, alone, in a pool of viscous fluid in a dimly lit, long, tall, narrow chamber lined with rows of dark, vertically stacked, coffin-like pods. A few of them stood open and empty. The rest of them were firmly closed.

  I raised myself on shaking arms and looked around. There should have been someone here to gloat or commiserate. There should have been a machine to help with my defrosting. At the very least, there should have been something to stop me from getting up and wandering off.

  I got up and inspected the featureless pod next to my former prison, running my hand over the surface that was covered in a thin layer of dust, feeling the power humming through the box but no obvious defrost button made itself known. I shivered and staggered to the double doors at one end of the chamber in search of clothes and people, preferably in that order.

  The doors slid open smoothly as I approached. Emergency lights flickered on revealing a room full of industrial-looking medical equipment and uncomfortable-looking trolleys, their restraining straps dangling untidily. I guessed this was the defrosting room and it was as deserted as the chamber I’d just left.

  In one corner was a glass-walled shower big enough to wheel one of the trolleys into. As I was still coated in the goo that had kept me alive in the pod, I decided a shower was just what was needed. I entered the shower and pressed the ‘full cycle' button. There was an ominous rumble and the button flashed orange. Just as I was about to give up waiting, there was a ‘dong’, the light went green and I was assaulted by blasts of icy cold water coming from every direction, seemingly intent on deep cleaning every orifice. The water cut out and searing hot air blasted across my skin for a few agonising seconds. Then there was a friendly ‘ding’ and the shower door opened. I staggered out and leant gasping against a trolley feeling violated but cleaner than I’d ever been in my life.

  I decided whatever was going on I was going to meet my fate with some degree of dignity. I ignored the double doors that were the obvious exit and instead went over to a single door marked ‘Locker Room’. As I’d hoped, some of the lockers had been left open. I went over to investigate the contents and caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror.

  I stopped and stared. A slim, hairless, brown-skinned man of around thirty years old stared back. It was me, but me sixty years ago… If I’d been fitter, healthier and had a penchant for depilation. It was as if all those decades of living on increasingly dilapidated spacecraft had never taken their toll. I was no longer one sudden shock away from making a mockery of any punishment the Court handed down. I had been Rejuvenated.

  I wondered how this could have happened. The Galactic Court would never have granted someone like me access to rejuvenation even if I’d had access to that sort of money. And this didn’t look like a cheap patch job. Not only could I stand up straight and walk around painlessly but I had abs, I had muscle definition, I probably even had taut buttocks. Somehow rejuv had happened while I was frozen and I certainly wasn’t complaining.

  I turned away from the mirror to investigate the contents of the lockers and in short order, I’d found clothes to fit my shiny new body, my new outfit consisted of medical scrubs, and some surprisingly comfortable, if unstylish plastic sandals. I also found an identity badge dated thirty years after I’d been frozen. Considering my sentence, I was going to chalk that up as an early release.

  Dressed, if not to kill, then at least commit some serious medical malpractice, I walked out of the defrosting room into a long, wide, deserted, corridor lit only by emergency lights. I ignored the many doors to either side and walked down to the end, through an unfriendly grey reception area and out through the unlocked door.

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  No one tried to stop me, no alarms went off, in fact it was the most undramatic jailbreak I’d ever made. I looked around at my surroundings and realised I was on one of the hundreds of thousands almost identical, efficient, soulless Corporate Space Stations that dotted human controlled space. They were all so similar that I was able to instantly pinpoint my former prison as being located at the top of Level One at one end of the main central atrium. So much for my being kept in a Court facility, I thought.

  I looked down the centre light well to check for any sign of life. Nothing moved in the twilight of the emergency lighting, not even a maintenance bot. Even the skeletal remains of the long dead trees on the bottom level were still. It was a depressing sight, not helped by the stale dead smell of the air and I suspected the life support had either malfunctioned or been turned off. It looked like the station had been abandoned for quite some time too. That’s not to say the place wasn’t monitored. This was a prison after all and I guessed I had a very limited window to get myself off the station before some trigger-happy death squad arrived to investigate.

  Unwilling to trust the elevators, I found the stairs and descended past several floors of administrative and accommodation levels to the retail level, enjoying the novelty of being able to use the stairs again. I walked through the level, the slap of my plastic sandals against the floor the only sound, passing eateries and shops as I hurried to the viewing lounge at the end, hoping against hope I was somewhere relatively civilised… but not too civilised.

  It looked like the station had been abandoned in a hurry, the shops were still stocked, and even the eateries still had drinks and food on the shelves, although some of the cartons and containers had dissolved, their contents oozing over the various counters. I wondered how long it took for food packaging to lose structural cohesion and felt a pang of worry. How long had I actually been frozen? Why had the station been abandoned? My stomach rumbled as it informed me I’d been frozen way past dinner time. I chose to ignore it for now. Escape pods always had emergency rations on board.

  The pair of double airlock doors to the Viewing Lounge were wide open, another sign of either hasty abandonment or total incompetence. In this station the large spherical space was arranged as an amphitheatre, with balconies above, all looking out a huge seamless curved window. There was a small stage in front of the vast window but any performance held on the stage would have to have been absolutely fucking jaw-dropping to draw anyone’s attention away from the stunning view.

  The vast hugeness of a planet revolved below me, the white of a snow-covered landscape visible between gaps in the whirling clouds and I knew where I was. There was no planet quite like Jeckon, for a start it was one of the few habitable planets in human controlled space that had never been terraformed.

  Just because Jeckon was habitable it wasn’t exactly comfortable despite the atmosphere being breathable and the gravity being almost exactly one G. The problem was that the ambient temperatures ranged from mildly chilly on the equator to painfully fucking cold at the poles. For reasons that must have made sense at the time of colonisation, the planet’s main and pretty much only large settlement, the appropriately named Kacke, had been built in a canyon uncomfortably close to the South Pole.

  However, if I had been asked where I would have liked to be defrosted, Jeckon would have been top of my list. The government barely existed and the Corporations left it alone due to the population being small, broke, and lawless. That wasn’t the main reason it was my favourite planet though. Jeckon was a spaceship graveyard. Spreading for thousands of square kilometres around Kacke were an uncountable number of abandoned spaceships, dumped there because of treaties, downsizing or just stored there. Spaceships an enterprising soul with a bit of technical knowledge could acquire.

  Of course, if I wanted to pay a visit to Jeckon I needed to get off this space station first. With that in mind, I made my way to the Viewing Lounge escape pods. Not only were these the most easily accessible, but they were also the largest, most controllable and most valuable as these were the ones tasked with taking the station’s senior management to safety.

  They were also conspicuous by their absence. If the blinking red light on the airlocks weren’t confirmation enough, the little viewing windows showing nothing but empty space confirmed the pods were gone. “Fuck,” I swore, my voice echoing around the silent station.

  The next closest escape pods were back on the upper accommodation level. I headed back through the retail level, this time going through the clothing section. A high-end outlet selling survival and cold weather gear caught my eye and I decided to do a little light looting.

  I swapped my scrubs for a far more stylish suit and some sturdy shoes that didn’t seem to have suffered from it long sojourn on the shop shelves, helped myself to an expensive looking, chunky wrist-com that still worked, filled a backpack with more clothes, an emergency cold weather survival pack, a useful-looking multi-tool and a high-end first aid kit. Then, because I was bloody starving, I tucked into some MREs that were supposed to last forever. They certainly tasted like longevity had been more of a priority than edibility and after my third pack I had to pay a lengthy visit to a toilet as my body purged itself of the gunk that had kept me alive during cryo.

  Afterwards, feeling far more human, I made my way back up the stairs. The accommodation level corridors were littered with abandoned personal belongings and, unsurprisingly, every escape pod was gone. Now I started to get a bit worried.

  There was only one more place where there might be a pod. The engineering section, all the way down in the bowels of the station. And if there were no pods left I was going to have to get creative. The climb down took me as long as I feared, and by the time I entered the dimly lit, cavern-like engineering section at the base of the station even my shiny new body was demanding a break.

  After a quick breather I checked for the escape pod and wasn’t too surprised to find it missing. On the plus side, everything else needed to keep what was effectively a small city in space running was laid out before me. If I couldn’t make some kind of spacecraft, or weaponize something and steal whatever craft the death squad had, I’d really lost my touch.

  The maintenance airlock was my first point of call, or rather, the space suits around it were. They were the standard dirty orange general-purpose maintenance suits, the sort you see every EVA worker in the galaxy wearing. There is great debate about which brands are best but, in truth, they’re all pretty much the same and the best strategy is to find one that hasn’t been inhabited by an incontinent mutant with bad personal hygiene.

  I gave the suit storage area a quick once over and glimpsed something half-hidden in a corner that was much more my style than a well-used maintenance suit. I hurriedly moved piles of not quite rubbish that had built up over the years, not believing my eyes. It was a two metre tall, light grey suit made of a fabric that blended in with its surrounding. It looked like a genuine FYT suit but how one had found its way onto a civilian space station I could only guess, although if I had been searching for one of these, Jeckon and its environs would have been my first stop.

  Although it had been a very long time since I’d used one of these, you never forget the slightly rough texture of the outer skin that changed colour at your touch. Manufactured by some long-forgotten war-focused corporation during the last tech revolution, the suits were vulnerable to a short list of weapons usually only used in full-blown space combat. Whole new battlefield strategies had been hastily invented to neutralise them, and, when those had been deemed to be too collaterally expensive, treaties had been signed banning the suits from being used on habitable planets and space stations.

  And yet, here was a genuine FYT suit looming over me and I wasn’t about to turn a piece of good fortune down, just because some cabal of over-rejuved corporate power brokers had signed a treaty. I tripped the suit’s hidden manual override switch and with a hiss of air, the front of the suit swung open. Inside it was immaculate.

  I got up into the suit, sliding my arms into the arm holes, and, hoping against hope it hadn’t been booby-trapped, then turned it on. The helmet lowered down onto my head and the familiar head-up display beamed into my head. The good news was that the suit failed to kill or entrap me and the display was the original clear, easy-to-understand interface which hadn’t been ‘improved’. It even looked like it had the latest updates.

  “Thank you for choosing the Imperial Arms FYT suit. Properly maintained this suit will give you years of faithful service. Please take time to fill out your warranty to give you an extra… Warranty time frame exceeded by… 215 years… The warranty is now void… To go through the training simulator…”

  “Skip training,” I told the suit’s pleasant-sounding, if archaic sounding female voice.

  “Please take a moment to set up your user preferences,”

  “Skip setup,” I said.

  “Setup skipped. Standard settings loaded. This suit is currency running on emergency power as the fusion generator has been disabled for transportation. Please attach to a power source of 1.21 gigawatts or greater,” the suit told me as an armoured power connector sprung out from the suit’s groin.

  I smiled. I’d forgotten the power cable had been stored there. I jumped out, unfurled the charging cable from its storage space, wandered over to the nearest suit charge port and plugged it in. The station emergency lights visibly dimmed as the suit started to drain the station's power reserves. As the fusion generator powered up, the suit charge port started to whine, then smoke.

  While waiting I checked the fluids. Unsurprisingly, all were empty. The water was easy to top up, but the chemicals took a bit of searching for. By the time I’d found everything, the station lights were flickering, the industrial charge port was smoking and there was a strong smell of burning plastic in the air. I ducked behind a piece of machinery as the suit started humming. Then my ears popped as the station lights flickered and went out.

  For a few painfully long heartbeats there was darkness, then there were several loud clunks. All the lights in engineering came on, not just the emergency ones, as did everything else including a multitude of flashing red lights and the fire alarm. A breeze stirred the air. I came out from behind the machinery to see the charge port burning merrily. I grabbed a convenient extinguisher and encased the charge port in foam. There was a ping as the suit's undamaged charging cable detached and retracted into the suit, the smoke dissipated and the alarms stopped. Then, one by one, the main lights went out leaving only the emergency lighting to see by.

  I checked the suit. Despite generating enough power to power up the entire space station, it was cool to the touch. I filled up the fluids, refilled the water container, checked the suit a couple more times before I realised I was just putting off the inevitable. I put my backpack in the suit’s external storage, took a deep breath, and got in.

  This time the suit moulded itself around me. I forced myself to go patiently through the power-up checklist, and then, as all readings showed normal… Well, normal for an FYT suit, I squeezed into an airlock and ejected myself into space.

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