“Trust your armour, warrior!”

  Those were the last words Jara Pell heard before the troop transport that carried her and her father along with a battalion of the Stj?rnrike’s finest armoured berserkers crashed into the exterior hull of Valrakee Station. The chief among the berserkers – a giant man stood nearly two and half metres above the decking, his helmet bouncing against the bulkhead in the turbulence – sang a battle hymn awaiting the glory of a fight;

  “Trust your brothers,

  trust your sisters!

  Here comes glory, glory,

  oh bloody and hardfought glory!”

  “Trust in glory!” the rest of the berserkers called out as if ignorant to the Jara and her father, Jonothen, cowering in their crash seats grasping on for what remained of their lives as the troop transport took a direct hit from enemy fire and began falling from the safety of starry void and into the artificial gravity well of the station.

  Jonothen had taken Jara out to Valrakee’s outer levels on a surprise space-walk for her fifteenth birthday. She had hardly contained her excitement as she wormed into an overused and oversized environment suit that Jonothen had rented for the occasion.

  When the attack had started, a battalion of berserkers had been running drills in the asteroid fields that were drawn into the station’s orbit. That put them out of reach of defending against in the first wave, but pushed fortune in Jara’s direction, who had been rock-jumping from a nearby asteroid cluster. Aside from getting chewed out by the berserker’s chief for an unsanctioned space-walk in a restricted area, Jara had counted her father and herself lucky for the rescue, as short-lived as that proved.

  With no riftspace drive, the troop transport was forced to return to the embattled station under enemy fire. Within minutes of re-entering the battlezone, and despite expert flying from the berserker’s pilots, the transport’s engines were struck with shrapnel from an explosion that rendered a large part of the Valrakee’s portside – that is, the section of the station’s rotation that remained tidally locked to the system’s star, Omikami – open to space.

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  The troop transport had crashed into an observation deck, blasting through several layers of steel to come to rest, wedged inside a hospital ward.

  When she next awoke, Jara looked up at the hospital ward’s ceiling from her back, her helmet still sealed. Her back, her neck, hells even her fingers – everything hurt. When she tried to move, Jonothen stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Remain still. You’re really hurt Jara,” he said through belaboured breath. In the distance an endless report of gunfire reverberated throughout off bulkheads all the while voices of the berserkers howled within her helmet.

  Jonothen's own helmet was off and Jara could see blood slowly leaking from his right ear.

  “Pappa, you’re hurt too,” she said with a wince, “who is it– who’s attacking us?”

  “Rest now, the warriors have this,” Jonothen insisted.

  “Let me up. We need to get out of here,” she said. Her entire body felt like it was on fire.

  “No, sweet daughter,” he said, his words calming yet stern. “I can’t move you, but I need you to remain calm. I need you to know that I love you. Your mother and I… just know that you are loved.”

  “Pappa, no, You’re scaring me.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said and leant over to give her helmet’s visor a kiss.

  Far in the background, the echoes of gunfire grew as the berserkers' voices in her helmet began to dwindle to a remaining few. She could hear the chief of the berserkers still revelling in the thrill of the fight, his words morphing from battle-hymn and into an almost joyous laughter. Following the report of the rifles, a shrieking clamour began to fill the hospital ward.

  Fear shown on Jonothen’s face as he tried to remain ignorant of the coming carnage. Instead he focused on what he was doing on the terminal beside the gurney Jara’s broken body rested on.

  “That’s it!” he said finally, with a sigh of relief. “That’ll do it.”

  He rushed over to her side and, without another word, squeezed her the gloved hand of her suit which sent daggers up Jara’s arm.

  “Pappa–” Jara tried to say, tears filling her vision as the distant roaring came closer and the last of the gunfire fell silent.

  In one fluid motion, Jonathan slapped a command on the terminal and the Jara’s gurney retracted into the bulkhead. Just before she flew out of sight, Jara painfully lifted her head to catch a final glimpse of her father, his hand raised over his heart.

  The gurney entered a chute, flew through several layers of the station and entered a coffin-like escape pod. With no window to the outside, Jara could only wait as the pod pushed its way out of the station, and ejected itself toward the nearest asteroid cluster. An overwhelming calm washed over her as she drifted off to cryo-sleep.