"Preamble to Oblivion 03 - ´A Four Forty´" by Bristien FW Havenaar

I first met him seventeen years ago.

It was one of those unending night cycles that were common on Neg’Veghan. The lights had gone out weeks before hand and left in their place the slimy, thick glow of the emergency banks along the walls and floor. In most places the darkness was so grim and obscuring that you couldn’t see the ceiling. The people, like vermin, scuttled this way and that. Dodging the piercing dark, they shuffled about their business. Roaches and silverfish scuttled past me as I strode down corridor five towards the canteen, buying moldy fruits and stone stale bread to feed their nestlings. The darkness seemed to stain their garments and paunch their skin. It was altogether an unhealthy aura to drink in. On the other hand, these outages seemed to bring out the best in some. I remember one man, selling lightbars from a rickety stand outside his quarters, a crooked smile exposing his rotted teeth. There was no power running to the lightbar sockets, and so no reason for anyone to buy his stock. And yet, he gazed ever onward at the opposite wall, that damn grin boring into anyone who saw it. He seemed hungry, but content. Content to go on selling something no one wanted. Something no one needed in this climate of morbid gloom and hopelessness. I remember distinctly; it perked me up to see him soldiering on.

He died with the rest of them many years later, I’m sure.

I was a corporal in Strom Koto’s militia back then. A youthful exuberance that seemed to radiate from my starched uniform and heavy plasma blaster holstered at my hip. I still have the tattoos on my neck; three chevrons, pointing towards my brainstem. It was a mark of authority, and a mark of subservience. The young are not necessarily the foolish, nor are the foolish always young, but it sure seemed like there were a lot of us dumb kids in the militia. We wore our marks with pride, a young, foolish pride that eclipsed all other petty evidence of our worthiness. There were better, able men in the lower ranks that worshipped their foolish, moronic superiors and proven commanders that would gladly fight to the last man in revenge for a lost group of slovenly, slack-jawed pukes that had no future anywhere in the galaxy. I wore the standard boots that were issued to everyone who joined the militia. A steel plated pressure boot, slightly magnetized and seemingly built for kicking in the skulls of enemies and dissenting subjects alike. There was even a variant with spikes. Standard parade uniform pants; slightly striped and a deep brown that blended in well with the caked on grime that grew like a cancer on the station’s walls. A flimsy, cheap blast vest fitted snuggly round my chest and back covered the standard grey tunic that itched and stuck to your skin. Black gloves and a foppish beret to appease the faggots in the ranks rounded it off. There was the belt too, hooked securely into the holster. The gun kept your pants up, they said.

I hadn’t slept or changed or even washed in three weeks.

When you’re surrounded by a stench that is, literally, indescribable, hygiene can be overlooked from time to time. Imagine the stench of a million inferior rodents and roaches, all of them looking to you for some kind of balance or leadership. They trained you to ignore the fallen souls that hungrily snatched at you from the gutters and hovels along the corridors, but even the best man’s eyes could stray when walking down corridor five. Prostitution wasn’t illegal, but it was frowned upon when militia members were involved. Of course, the blind eye sees but it can’t talk. That’s the job of the mouth. The mouth didn’t look. It was okay. There was this woman, you see. She worked a small stretch of blank wall between a blaster repair depot and a hilariously overstocked pawn shop. I never knew her name, but I also never cared. She used to reach out to you, grab your unit and ask for ‘a four-forty’, whoring out for a bottle of cheap liquor. If you bought her a drink she’d teach you things about a woman’s body you never wanted to know. She was some kind of mutt, and had places on her where most women had no places. It was revolting, but we’d all been there at one time or another. Under the dirt, there was a rubbery layer of light blue skin, pocked with scabs and lesions. You always took a plasma bath after a liaison on the ‘Neg, but after her, you hung out in the reactor core for a couple hours, just to be safe.

That night, the wall was empty. She wasn’t there.

The spot where she usually stood seemed even darker than usual. I felt a sort of tingling sensation in the back of my brain, like something was wrong. It wasn’t concern rather it was more of a self-serving desire to get involved with someone else’s business. I stopped and bent over the faint grove her naked feet had worked into the deck plates over the years. The dust was shifted, like someone had stood there recently, but been dragged off. I stroked my chin absently as I followed faint grease marks on the wall, the kind that might be left by dirty fingers looking for a grip. They led a few sections down the corridor to a narrow engineering alcove that led about twenty paces off the main corridor. The blood red light from the computer terminals bathed a small child in their muted fury. A young boy, no more than five, his back turned to me, was kneeling over a lump of clothes and hair. He was sobbing. It wasn’t the bawling of a spoiled child or the whining of a stupid moron or anything so normal or common or petty, rather, his sobs where the pure, true overtures of grief that few of us are ever overcome with in our lives. His tears were like holy water, untouched by motive or guilt, just grief. His hair was disheveled and dirty. He was your straight up, run of the mill street urchin, his tattered rags pouring off of his malnourished body and lingering along the ground as if waiting for his sapling legs to grow into the sturdy oak trunks of a man. It was man’s cry, not a boy's that slipped from his chest, piercing and heavy, yet innocent. He grasped the body at his knees.

I approached him, unbuckling my holster’s guard. You couldn’t be too safe.

He turned as he heard my footfalls behind him and rose to his feet in a swift, urchin practiced movement that took me off guard. The angel behind his eyes startled me. It wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t even particularly moving, except for the fact that the angel staring at me from behind his glassed eyes was dying. I watched as the embers of the innocent mind locked in his head burnt out, and where smothered by the smoke of corruption and evil things. Then, as soon as the feeling had struck me, he had hidden it again and was once more a sobbing young boy, his hooker mother dead. He shuffled over to me and hid behind my legs, his head just barely reaching my waist. His grip on my pants reminded me of how I used to pull on my mother for comfort as a young boy. I felt responsible for him, responsible somehow for this mess he found himself in. I took a few steps towards the corpse and at once recognized her. Old blue, her eyes grey and dead, stared up at the ceiling. Her face was battered, nearly unrecognizable if not for the familiar hue of her skin and the horrible stench on her dead mouth. I knelt down and the boy put his hands on my shoulder, still shuddering slightly with the weight of his pain. She had been beaten, badly. I’d killed men before, with my own bare hands. This one was bad though, even by my standards. The way it had been finished came to me with a chuckle. Protruding from her pot-belly was a broken bottle, the label turned out towards me.

Four-Forty Brand, Finest Pilots Alkali.

I stood up, clearing my throat. The dead angel eyes of the little man gazed up at me reproachfully, silently begging my intervention. Those eerily familiar orbs beckoned to me helplessly. I shook my head slowly, a painful arrow straight through his tiny, broken heart. He alternated between me and his crumpled whore of a mother, his premature hatred for mankind becoming complete. He shook with anger, either at my incapability to help, or his own failure to protect his mother, which one I’ll never be sure. He fell down to her again and sobbing, closed her putrid eyelids with his filthy, skeletal fingers. Rising, he gave me the most hateful look anyone has ever given me and ran off round the corner, out to the main corridor. His anguished flight tugged at what I suppose was my heart. Before I left, I took her gaudy jewelry from her. It made me a couple bucks that night. Eventually, her body was disposed of, for when I passed by a few days later, only a bloodstain remained.

And now I had been chosen to pay for someone else’s crime.

Seventeen years later, retired from the militia and living off of my hilariously inadequate pension, unable even to buy passage off of the station. Seventeen years of self abuse and battle scars. Nearly two decades of brooding, hateful rage misdirected at me had turned him into a cruel, ruthless thug. He’d come back to repay me in kind for a crime that in his eyes, I was guilty of for not having been involved. It’s almost funny what insanity can come from a dead hooker. I had slipped into the canteen near closing time to get a bumper of Alkali to take my medications. The smoky haze of the brightly lit bar masked the identity of its occupants. It cost a lot to replenish the smoke filled atmosphere, but a hole like this couldn’t make any money without thick air to occlude the shady dealings it harbored. I rested my cane on the bar and tapped the smug barista for my juice. As he turned his back a metallic pressure snaked out of the smoke and prodded me forcefully in the back. I smelled a vaguely familiar stench on the air. A breath of hot, putrid memory stirred an image of a crumpled whore on the ground in an alcove bathed in hell’s own light. I turned slowly to meet a man whose appearance did nothing to help my failing heart. A mirror, lost in time stared back at me. There were my ears, full and whole as if I’d never lost them in that bar fight. The nose was unbroken and straight, like my own of so many years ago. The smile, lacking the gaping holes of my own gleamed at me. The eyes were the only thing not familiar. Hatred boiled in them, a rage left unchecked that had developed into a full blown obsession. He didn’t have to say anything to me, this young pirate. His blaster was going to do all the talking that was needed, that was made obvious. A grabbed my cane and limped off in the direction the tip of his weapon pointed me. Followed by feet, my own feet, garbed in the same kind of thick boots I used to stomp around in all those years ago.

We went into a dark ante-room, behind the gambling tables.

There were empty bottles and spilled liquor all over. That nostalgic stench of roaches and refuse I remembered so well met my nostrils. I took a seat in an old armchair at one of the cleanest tables I could find. He sat down across from me. Our eyes met for the first time in seventeen years. For seventeen hateful years, the young boy explained, he’d waited to return to this horrible place he’d once called home, returned to seek revenge for his dead mother. Over the years, I had become as good as the murderer to him. I embodied the very lack of compassion and general apathy the militia had shown to the less fortunate. My inability to restore life to the dead whore, my association with a militia charged with the safety and well being of thousands of people already doomed to a life of scavenging and unrest were crimes to be paid out. The wrinkled tattoos on my neck, he told me, burned his dreams every night. I was a prisoner on this station like any other, and yet my presence in the jailhouse seemed to make me into the crooked warden, the fallen hero of his eye. It made me the man who killed his mother.

I sighed. My age was wearing me thin.

I was just a man. The years my image had spent in his mind had made me a devil, but I was still just a man. His ashen eyes, gravestones of a long dead innocence drank me in. He saw the old veteran in front of him; the old man with a bum leg and a scarred face. I was the hero of sieges and space battles, the killer of enemies, honored defender of his birthplace, and yet, the murderer of his own mother. It was then, as he surveyed me in the light for the first time, that I think he first realized what I had fleetingly guessed at in the very back of my mind seventeen years ago. His skin had a pale blue tinge on it, but otherwise was as pink as mine. His face was compressed and dull looking, but adorned with my features. His build mirrored my own of the night I had first come upon him. Even the same dimples, just above the corners of our mouths. A night in the reactor core after the fact can’t change the deed once it’s done. I have no regrets. She had been, after all, just a lousy, old, drunken whore.

His moment of indecision was his own doom.

As he gazed at me, his maddened grin broken by a quiet sigh of realization, I snatched up my cane and swatted away his blaster. My old militia training took over and I grabbed a bottle from the table, smashing it open as he lunged for his fallen weapon, his long laid plans unraveling about him like a sweater in a dog’s mouth. As I sailed through the air, the broken bottle pulled back and ready to strike, he found his weapon and took his shot. A searing blast of pain in my gut. Not fatal, but uncomfortable. I’d been shot many times. I landed on him and struck his face with my left elbow. As he spat out his teeth, I plunged the broken bottle into his exposed belly. He should have worn a blast vest. He struggled, grasping for my neck as I beat his face with my fists, wildly. There were convulsions and twitches as I beat him down. Then it was over. He curled up, his knees nearly touching the horrible sight of a bottle filling slowly from the jagged, broken bottom up to its rim. I was breathing hard and fast. It had been a few years since I killed anyone, and I’d never killed anyone who I thought was my son. Strangely, it didn’t feel much different to me than any other death. He coughed a little, his throat rattling in its death throes. His eyes looked up at me, the ashen hatred replaced at the end with the tearful, repentant eyes of an innocent little angel. An innocent little fallen angel, sent to meet his maker. The lights suddenly went out, and we were once again bathed in the darkness of an outage. The red glow of a nearby food synthesizer enveloped the scene and cast those long, dense shadows over the room. I noticed as I looked to the ceiling that some of the light bars needed to be replaced. The poor boy’s revenge had failed, but that was okay with me. I didn’t feel much like dying tonight. I stood up and poked him with the tip of my pressure boot, tattered with age like the rest of me. He was stiff. Straightening my hair and wiping my brow, I looked down at the bottle I’d killed him with.

Four-Forty Brand, Finest Pilots Alkali.