DURHAM RESIDENCE

TIBSHELF

GILLINGHAM

FEDERATED SUNS

07:00, 17 April 3044

It was the same routine every damn morning.

Elise would wake up drenched in sweat, her heart racing, the fog of sleep obfuscating when and where she was for a few panic-stricken moments until it cleared and she could finally ground herself again. A few deep breaths and she managed to haul herself into a sitting position, perched on the edge of the bed – the precipice between material and immaterial – while she gathered the energy to go any further.

In this time she would stare at the floor, her feet, her hands, anything to force out the last vestiges of the night before. If her leg was acting up – the scarred reminder of her last ejection and its botched landing – she might grab the bottle from her bedside table and down a pill or two to take the edge off. It mostly behaved these days. Mostly. There were still times it didn’t, especially after over-exerting herself, sometimes to the point where she could barely walk unaided.

Those were definitely not Good Days.

When she finally felt up to it, she hauled herself into a wobbly stand and went about the business of washing and dressing, raking her copper-coloured locks into something resembling neatness and binding it in a plait as a means of containment. Occasionally she would meet her green eyes in the mirror, underscored by dark bags, and quickly flit away from what she saw.

Made suitably presentable, she blearily made her way to the little kitchen-diner in her modest apartment and brewed some coffee before she even thought about the prospect of stuffing down some food. Stimulants to wake up and sedatives to get to sleep, Elise knew it was just a crutch to keep her functional, but “One step at a time” she kept telling herself. It had been “One step at a time” for years now, even if things were better than they used to be.

In the brutal months after Sadalbari, after the near-destruction of the 3^rd Fedcom RCT as an entity and her company with it… things had not been good.

By means of distraction she flicked through the local news. A farmer down on the plains swore he saw a wolf again. Elise snorted. There were no wolves on Gillingham; likely just a feral dog. More interestingly, the planetary capital had scraped enough funds to build a technical college, which would be a massive boost to this Outback world.

On the grand scheme of things, it still wasn’t big news; big news didn’t happen to places like Gillingham. It took months for even major events in the wider galaxy to percolate this far into the backwaters and popular music could sometimes be years out of date, let alone the time it took for fashion to catch up.

Not that Elise minded, it was why she was here after all.

Nothing happened on Gillingham. Nice, quiet, boring Gillingham.

A knock on the door made her flinch and, after she caught herself and checked her chronometer, she opened it.

On the doorstep was a man in his late twenties with a swarthy complexion, immaculately wavy hair, and a smile that showed perfect teeth and went all the way to his rich brown eyes.

“G’morning Elsie, you ready?” he asked.

When Elise came to this world, the first person she had spoken to called her “Elsie” and since then, not one person outside an official capacity had got her name right. Depending on the person, she might be “Elsie”, “Elle”, “Ellie”, or “Eliza”. One old coot with bad eyesight and worse hearing called her “Louise” but he was an outlier.

“Elsie” seemed to be most common and, in some circles, that was who she was. Elsie Durham, migrant worker. Plain old Elsie from down the road. Likes a laugh, good for a drink or two down Gem’s Bar, never talks about her past. Not that people usually ask. It was that kind of place.

“You’re early, let me get my shoes,” she replied, unable to stop herself from smiling back, downing the rest of her bitter drink and putting words to action.

Aiden Reeves was that kind of person, one who seemed to light up the room around him. He was easy to like and excruciatingly handsome, with the kind of face that would be an ambassador for designer brands if only he’d been born three jumps closer to New Avalon. Elise found quickly she was not his type – the “she” being the deal-breaker – and after five seconds of selfish grieving she struck up a deep friendship with the guy. It helped that he seemed to be a bit sharper than most of the natives, possessing an inquisitive mind and deep desire to learn that reminded her of some people she had met at the NAIS.

Again… if only he’d been born three jumps away.

They headed out into the world, the crisp mountain air – scented with a hint of pine resin from out of town – heralding the end of the planet’s long summer and bringing a promise of a winter to come, when the nearby peaks and the valleys below would be blanketed in deep white snow.

Tibshelf was barely a small town in terms of the wider Federated Suns – around two thousand occupants on any given day – but was practically bustling for a backwater like Gillingham. A vein of tungsten worth the effort of mining had been found under a nearby peak and the town had sprang up solely to service it. Half the residents either worked in the mine, the one-pad DropPort, or provided some kind of service to the others. The other half were either too young, too old, or too unwell work at all.

Elise had drifted into Tibshelf just over three and a half years ago, after picking Gillingham through a method that was little better than throwing a dart at a map of the Outback and hoping for the best. It was far away from the intrigue of the capital worlds, far from the stress of war, and far from the pressures of family obligation. It was a simple place with a simple existence and, after the first two and a half decades of her life, it was blessedly wonderful.

Tibshelf – and Gillingham as a whole – was the kind of place that if you were born there you were unlikely to ever leave, whether due to economics or ignorance, and you only ever moved there if you were desperate for work or running from something.

Like Elise.

She and Aiden were ambling down the road, taking in the warm morning sun and fresh air while they could, heading towards the DropPort. Both of them worked there – it was Aiden that had got her the job in the first place – and noticed the smokey column of a spheroid DropShip making its descent from orbit, burning hard as it shed velocity during its final atmospheric approach.

Elise twitched, a memory overlapping with reality for a brief second of a dozen columns like this, the droppers’ red paint and dragon emblems visible even from the ground.

Deep breath. In and out. As soon as it appeared, the vision was gone.

“Can’t be the pickup already,” Aiden commented, squinting up into the sky and so thankfully missing her lapse.

“Not due for another month,” Elise agreed, with a little too much forced brightness. “Too small to be the Mule they usually send anyway.”

“Oh damn, really?” Aiden stopped and peered harder, using his hands as a sun shield.

“Yeah, looks like a Danais or something.”

He was looking at her now. “How in the hell can you tell from this distance?”

“I’ve… been on a lot of these things, I guess…” she replied lamely.

Aiden’s expression turned thoughtful as he said, “You really need to tell me about that, one of these days.”

“Maybe…” Elise shrugged. He was the only person she would be comfortable telling, if it ever came to it. While not a healthy way of going about it, she was doing her best to distance herself from these memories, not drag them back into the light.

Though they did manage to find their way regardless.

“You fancy scabbing a lift off of Syed today?” Aiden asked, deciding to pull out some deflection rather than press the issue.

Elise looked at the clear sky, the distant blue-grey peaks, the smudge of forest that covered their lower flanks, and took a lungful of air barely tainted by the presence of a civilisation worth being called such.

“Nah,” she replied. “It’s a beautiful day for a walk.”

TIBSHELF DROPPORT

TIBSHELF

GILLINGHAM

FEDERATED SUNS

16:34, 17 April 3044

The ICE rumbled and fumes filled the air as Elise pushed more juice out of her Powerman, urging it to lift a heavy crate of ore from the back of a waiting truck. She then began to plod across ninety metres of open concrete, cracked and pitted with age, over to the gigantic storage hangar, in order to put it on a stack with its fellows. This was what her days tended to look like nowadays. Pick up the crates, carry them, put them down again. Pick up the crates, carry them, put them down again. Rinse and repeat until lunch time then do it all over again until close. Every two or three months she and her “lance” of Powermen would have the privilege of loading the waiting crates onto a DropShip for a couple of days and every so often they would be drafted in to help move machinery at the mine itself, or be subcontracted to construction projects in town.

It was hardly the same as a thoroughbred BattleMech, but the little Industrial was robust and reliable, even if having to refuel the ICE every couple of days had taken some getting used to.

In fact, the whole thing had been a bit of an adjustment period for Elise. Getting back into a cockpit whatsoever had been difficult, even just looking at a ‘Mech of any sort being a trigger for the worst kinds of memory, but she’d come with literally no other skill set. It took help from Aiden and several difficult weeks before she had managed to acclimatise. It helped that the control set-up was so different to a BattleMech. There was no neurohelmet for a start – all the controls being purely manual – and the throaty rumble of an ICE was entirely different to the slick purr of a fusion engine.

Once upon a time, she might have looked upon IndustrialMech pilots with naked derision, considering them as merely aping the noble profession of MechWarriors, just a cheap copy to be used; little more than the servants she had once terrorised in the corridors of her family home. Since getting into the boots of one – literally, she had needed to borrow some boots on her first day – and dropping a crate when she expected a neural link to pick up most of the slack, she had gained a newfound respect and humility when it came to her rough and ready colleagues.

With only manual controls, she had seen some pilots make the tiniest adjustments and movements with their mech’s great clunky hands, one even showing off by picking up his lunch and placing it through the open cockpit hatch without so much as squashing a sandwich – or himself. They may not have been Archers with battle fists, but she had no doubt a skilled pilot could deliver a punch with enough force to knock any light mech off balance.

It was hard, physically-intensive work, that always left Elise drenched in sweat despite the relative coolness of a cockpit free from the heat burden of fusion engines.

After another hour or so of labour – pick it up, walk it over, put it down – an elongated bleep sounded across her comms to signal end of shift. Traditional methods like a bell or klaxon wouldn’t have been heard over the loud ICE, so the easiest method was to deliver it straight to the pilot. She finished up what she was doing and joined the rest of her team in their long plod over to the stables on the other side of the ‘Port. Calling it a Mech Bay felt like a stretch, even if old Abe Sandoval did wonders with substandard equipment.

After a bit of friendly jockeying with Aiden for prime position that earned them a swift but toothless reprimand from the foreman, she dismounted and went to strip off her oil-stained jumpsuit and heavy gloves, changing back into everyday clothes.

When she emerged from the locker room, Arjun the foreman was waiting for her.

“Elsie! Mister Wyatt wants to see you,” he said.

Elise looked at Aiden then back to Arjun, frowning. “He tell you what about?”

The portly man shrugged, “How the hell should I know?”

“Right,” Elise replied. “I’ll be right over.”

Arjun made a vague noise and walked away, his duty dispensed.

“See you at Gem’s later?” Aiden offered. In a town like this, there was little else to do socially than go to the one decent bar.

“Yeah, might need it,” Elise joked, trying to put on a brave face.

Aiden smiled and waved a limp goodbye, leaving her to make the trek to the office of Tyrese Wyatt, owner and operator of Wyatt Haulage and Moving Co..

Her boss.

17:11

Mister Wyatt was a decent man. He was patient with the newcomers and always willing to take a chance on a drifter with a shady past, even if he knew they might not stick around past a few months. So long as everyone did their job, was decent enough to the people around them, and took accountability for their own mistakes, then he was happy to let people be. Micromanaging was not his style, so to be called in like this…

Elise felt her hands beginning to shake and stuffed them in her pockets. Even though Mister Wyatt was not that kind of person, it was instinctual that she would not show weakness in front of a superior offi- in front of her employer.

“Elle!” He was one of those people. Mister Wyatt smiled when she entered, the expression genuine but still undermined by a troubled cast to his eyes, and pointed to a seat on the other side of his cheap wood-effect desk. The office was built into the two-story DropPort terminal with a good view of the loading area and the pad beyond, where the mysterious DropShip was squatting like an ominous toad.

Up close it had definitely looked like a Danais, though so patched and repaired, with several different paintworks showing through in places, that the shape was blurred. Arjun had said that Dockmaster Norris had told him it was a tramp freighter out of Sodertalje, working its way across the Outback, running odd job cargoes between all these worlds that might lack something one of the others had. The plan was to stay here a couple of days, do some maintenance before a pad opened up in the capital, wherein they would pick up a bellyfull of potable water and head out to Mararn.

Elise had found herself repeatedly looking at it whenever she was in line of sight, some nagging feeling she couldn’t place making her almost suspicious of it. She told herself it was the lingering malaise of her episode that morning. Nothing ever happened on Gillingham. It was just a tramp freighter…

“Elle…” Mr Wyatt began, his demeanour uncertain. He was a man well-built from a life of hard labour, since softened a bit by middle age and years behind a desk. He was a man who knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it. He was never uncertain. He tapped something on his desk, a sealed envelope bearing the mark of Comstar’s communication service. “This, uh, this came for you via the Filtvelt HPG.”

It had gone on quite a journey. Gillingham had no HPG of its own, so any interstellar communication had to be relayed via the one on Filtvelt, a jump closer to civilisation, then couriered by DropShip the rest of the way,

He slid the paper across the desk and Elise was immediately on guard. Out of all the places on this remote world, her job was the only one where her real name was on record, and someone would have had to do a fair bit of digging to find even that.

“Did they bring it?” she pointed out the window, her meaning clear.

“Yeah nah, came on a Buccaneer that put into Harlow’s Landing fortnight back, made its way here in the post a couple of days ago,” Wyatt explained, still being evasive. The message was addressed to her, though via the company. Didn’t look like it had been opened yet.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“Don’t know about the contents but…” he scratched the back of his neck. “Read receipt was addressed to the office of a, uh, Colonel Levine in the AFFS...”

Elise blanched, dropping the envelope like it had burned her. By the time the 3^rd had quit Sadalbari, so much of the original command structure had been killed or captured that Levine was able to climb the ranks on a pile of corpses. In a small mercy, Elise had already fled before she’d had a chance to clean house. That she had found her here… That she had wanted to find her here…

Elise clamped her hands between her legs to control the shaking.

“Look… Uh, do you need some water or something?” Wyatt asked then, after a tight shake of the head from Elise, “I, uh, I don’t know how to say this… You’re a hard worker and get on well with everyone, I’m lucky to have you…”

But…? Elise thought, feeling the bottom fall out of her stomach.

“But… Look, Elle, I just can’t have this kind of attention from the authorities,” Wyatt explained, “I’m not exactly running a squeaky clean operation here and if someone like that is sniffing around for you then I’m going to have to protect myself – I’m afraid I’m gonna have to let you go.”

“But-.”

“Look,” he held up a hand, stopping her. “I’ll pay you up to the end of the month, give you a little extra to keep you going, and put in a good word for you with the guys at the ‘Port in Harlow’s. Might be a bit easier to get lost in, you catch my drift?”

Elise nodded, dumbly, unable to do much more as her life fell apart around her.

Again.

Wyatt reached over and hesitantly, awkwardly patted her on the arm.

“I, uh, I hope things go well for you,” he tried. “It really was great having you on board.”

“It… it was great to work for you,” Elise replied in a small voice, standing, not bothering to hide the tremors as she turned to leave. “Thanks again for giving me a chance...”

“Elle?”

She turned back.

“You gonna take that?”

Elise snatched the envelope from the table and shoved it in one pocket, uncaring if it crumpled, then, forcing back the tears, she headed out into the gathering evening.