When the memories hit, I realized how screwed we really were. My panic built as I watched them flow into my mindspark, bringing me up to speed on what had happened.

  28.2 hours earlier …

  I managed to make it past the first three Whirligig ships, but my i35 took significant damage to one of the engines, and the ship was shaking. The warning indicators lit up in so many places that I decided to simply turn them off. I took a deep breath. Without a working DEAD drive, I would be dead.

  I had been in this situation plenty of times, but that didn't make it any more enjoyable.

  I forced myself to relax my breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, while I hit the max speed that was available, a mere 63.4% of my normal speed. That wouldn't be sufficient to outrun them, and I couldn't use my skip technique with a damaged engine. Skipping would surely rip it apart faster. But at least I could pick out a point in space, gun it, and see what would happen. There weren't any memories that I would mind missing yet anyway.

  I took another deep breath, then checked the HUD and ran calculations. Damn, Burners. They were going to get me. The three Whirligigs had circled around quickly, and the fourth was approaching firing range.

  That's when I saw it, something new on my scans.

  A sensor reading popped up that was not a disastrous alarm that my ship was dying. A new ship had popped up on scans, a small one. I redirected my ship toward it.

  Another deep breath.

  "Come on, shippy. Hold together." The Whirligigs were closing in.

  I made a call then that was stupid at the time, but I don't regret it. I had noticed something interesting, and curiosity killed the @kittyboy.

  The new ship wasn't a fighter ship. I could see that clearly from the scans as I approached. It was a short-range ship. I assumed it was deployed to pick up my remains. The Solar Union knew the inevitability of my explosion just as I did, as soon as I hadn't bubble-warped out of the area.

  That meant the ship took off from somewhere. Those types of ships weren't equipped with DEAD engines for warping. So I redirected my i35 to the spot where I had first picked up the ship's signature.

  I'll say this about the i35. While it was designed for us lowly Wavepilots who die a lot, it did have an eject button. I ran my computations. In a few more seconds, I could eject myself toward that location, with enough accuracy and thruster power in my suit to be able to reach that spot confidently.

  I tagged it in my personal optical HUD with a white chalk outline of my dead body, instead of the standard yellow marker. Hey, if you can't laugh about dying in this line of work, you're going to be miserable.

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  I wanted to wait longer, but the fourth ship had just gotten in range and fired, so I hit another big button, the large black one with a screaming person on it.

  Because you try being fired at insane speeds from a ship that's about to explode, into the freezing empty oblivion of space, and not screaming.

  I had a wonderful scream that turned into laughter.

  I felt the heat from the explosion behind me. A few bits of ship even flew past me, but I was safe for now. The beautiful brightness of my i35 erupting into flames was brilliant. As much as I hated dying, I loved the mini-suns that our exploding ships became, a little spot of light in the darkness.

  The explosion also illuminated my path, and by good fortune, in the light of my burning ship, I spotted an asteroid where the short-range ship had appeared.

  "There you are," I said to myself. Now, these were memories worth keeping.

  I adjusted my thrusters to point me toward the now visible asteroid. As the fire of my ship began dissipating, so too did my view of the asteroid. What was clearly visible in a moment started to darken and fade out of view, the space becoming so dark that, in a matter of seconds, it seemed like I was floating toward nothing at all.

  I took another deep breath and shut down 95% of the power to my suit. I trusted my readings. I trusted the direction I chose. I had to try to go undetected, or the ships would find me. The remaining 5% went into masking the heat signature coming off my body, a cooling trick intended to make us undetectable from most longer-range scans.

  I kept still and floated.

  Impact with the asteroid was sudden. I reacted on instinct, allowing myself a power surge to slow down. I landed on all fours, then quickly lowered the power again, hoping they didn't detect me. I gambled to increase the power so that my suit could adjust for gravity. I allowed myself to remain crouched there for a few minutes to take in my surroundings.

  My optic implants have some basic tech in them. Nothing as fancy as what advanced sensors could do on ships, but fancy and useful enough that engineers decided to build the tech into our eyes. Perhaps the most useful is that my eyes serve as a display. I can feed it information from the tech embedded in my cybernetically enhanced body, proprietary information within my personal firewall. I can also feed it information from external sources, authenticated and virus-scanned through a personal gateway, meaning I could connect to my ship and get readings directly from it.

  The problem normally was all the interference and signal jamming in our modern warfare. So we (members of the starmada who are operating out in the field) get pretty used to being isolated, disconnected from the broader world. I find that it's more peaceful, too, without all those signals everywhere. It can be a bit much when you plug in again after some time away from the vast network of information out there.

  Don't get too excited about the whole cybernetic thing, though. I'm a Wavepilot, so beyond cloning my human body, the military only does the basics, like the optic implants and some of the necessary tech to get a few readings from low-light sensors, bounced radio waves, and some of the electromagnetic spectrum. I just call it spacevision.

  Sure, I could purchase more tech for myself if I wanted, but given the high death rate, most of us at this level consider it wasted money.

  I can also self-destruct, which I've done on more than a few occasions.

  I personalized mine so that first it projects my voice screaming one of the various phrases I put on my self-destruct playlist.

  Thar she blows!

  Hold on, I'm gonna sneeze!

  Pull my finger!

  I'm the king of the world!

  Beam me up, Scotty!

  Bombs away!

  Here's Johnny!

  Dyn-o-mite!

  Quantum fissure, activate!

  You get the picture.

  I ventured a little more power to my suit to enable quantum sensors, feeding them into my optic nerves, and enabled my spacevision.