With a huge feeling of deja vu, I awake and look around the small room I find myself in. Nothing much grabs my attention, so I get out of the bed and exit into the corridor beyond. Although I have no memory of this place, it seems to be familiar to my feet, as they turn and head down a flight of stairs. They take me through some doors and over to a small screen, where my hands take over and summon up a space ship. It’s almost as if someone else is controlling my body as I head towards a landing pad and find a small ship waiting there. I’m soon inside, and while the engine warms up I think of what I’d like to do today. The moby on my wrist lights up at the touch of a button, giving me a selection of possibilities. As usual, I take my ship up and into space before I make my final choice. Port Olisar is a small and receding dot before I finally stop, if anything in space can ever be described as unmoving. A mission caught my eye and so I find it again and accept it. It sounds like my kind of thing, helping others and all that. A ship has had an accident in space, some kind of explosive decompression. This, obviously, didn’t do the occupants any good. My task was to find a certain person and confirm they were dead, or not. An administrative error has lead to some doubt apparently. So I mark the position on my navicom and fire up the quantum drive. No matter how many times I do it, although I don’t know how I know this, it gives me a huge thrill. No racing car or jet fighter can accelerate like a space ship in full quantum. The stars turn to streaks of light all around, creating a tunneling effect which the ship blasts along. This time it only lasts a few seconds before the drive cuts out and I’m suddenly somewhere else. In front of me is what can only be described as a shipwreck. The entire cockpit section has been snapped off, leaving both sections strewn with debris and open to space. Things that used to be inside the ship, and parts of the ship itself, are scattered over a wide area. I’m no expert, but I’d say they were right, decompression of the explosive kind. It’s not my duty to decide if this was an accident or deliberate, I presume that’s already been done, so I EVA and get myself over to the main section of the ship. So far, I haven’t seen any bodies, but I get the feeling that’s about to change. The ship is larger than I was expecting, but the passageways are narrow, and dark of course. My helmet light creates a small cone of illumination in the dark spaces. I could say something about space being the loneliest place at this point, but I’m trying not to think about it. There’s very little debris inside the ship, most of it was ejected when the air pressure blew. But there is something here, which I discover suddenly when I look into a side room. A foot hits me in the face and I recoil, batting it away instinctively. The owner of the foot is no longer a danger to anyone, except as a projectile. He’s frozen solid, his body in a seated position, slowly turning now I’ve given him some momentum. I don’t know whether this is because he was sitting down when he died or a function of being in the cold vacuum of space. Either way, I move on. There’s no way of identifying him without an image, which I don’t have. After a few more turns I find more of them, frozen corpses in the same condition. None of them have any ID I can see, so I quickly move on, this place is starting to get to me. A picture forms in my mind of an alien larder, frozen humans stored for later consumption. And with that thought I decide to call it a day, or night, I don’t know which. With some haste I scramble back the way I came, taking a wrong turn somewhere and emerging on the other side of the wreck to where I left my ship. Another EVA follows, and I quickly realise my little speech about the loneliness of space wasn’t true after all. But this kind of company I could do without. I don’t think the other ship had seen me, as they targeted my own. A volley of laser blasts hit the wreckage, narrowly missing my ship and me. The attacker went over my head and began to turn for another run. Trusting his aim would be as shocking as before, I made a run for it. Well, I say run, it was more like swimming. I scrambled to the access hatch, punched the controls and waited impatiently as it swung open and the ladder descended. I’d never noticed how slow it was before, but the other ship was lined up again and ready to fire. My feet were barely inside and the hatch not even fully closed when I felt the ship rock. With it powered down for landing the shields weren’t up. I tensed for the explosion, which didn’t come. With my anger rising I leapt into the pilot’s seat and powered up. The shields came on and began to charge as the attacker came around again. The ship’s computer had barely announced they were fully charged before laser blasts came shooting straight towards my face. Most of them missed, but enough hit to make my shields fizz. I took off and headed straight for the other ship as it banked to come around again. My puny weapons caused the familiar clouding effect on it’s shields, but they were nowhere near strong enough to get through them. That wasn’t my intention, it was just a warning, I’ve got teeth as well. I pursued the other ship as best I could, these little Mustangs aren’t really combat ships, but I wasn’t going to let this bully push me around. I fired more shots, keeping my finger on the trigger and getting a warning about system failure. I didn’t really care at that point, I planned to get out of there in a few seconds anyway. With their shields recovering, the other ship continued to retreat in a relatively straight line, which I thought was a little odd. Until I saw the second ship. This pilot had a far better aim, and my shields went down and then my hull. My little Mustang practically broke in half and I was left floating in space as air leaked out and cold crawled in to my suit. As I reflexively tried to make myself smaller by pulling in my arms and legs, I understood now why the bodies in the ship were all in that position. As my body shut down, a final thought came to me. I don’t know why, but I knew I’d be back. Death, you have no power over me.