In the deepest, darkest reaches of space, there is light.

Even if that is the flaming wreckage of a crashing ship.

Oh dear, I’m unconscious. There isn’t much you can do while you’re unconscious. It’s a pretty linear state of mind. You lay still, maybe drool if you’re unlucky. Maybe your body will twitch. At least when you’re asleep you get dreams to pass the time. This is just blank black nothing. Your conscious? It’s taking a nap. Your subconscious gets its hands on the wheel and it’s joyride city, like some doped up kid let loose on sin city. It won’t last for long though, it never does. The shattering of glass brought me out of it, or at least half way.

Hello again life, I’m awake, what did I miss. Evidently, a fair amount. You see this boats a-rocking and dangers a-knocking. I would get up from this piss-poor excuse for a bed, but I appear to have ingested a brewery, or at least that’s what the stench on my breath would have you believe. So we’ll settle for sitting for now, and hoping that we don’t fall over, shall we?

Tip my hat at the mirror, “Morning, governor.”

It’s quite peculiar that it was the bottle of whiskey shattering that woke me, and not the sirens (I wonder if there’s something in that), but better late than never. According to the screeching over the sound system, THIS SHIS IS CRASHING ABANDON SHIP ABANDON SHIP. Unfortunately, someone replaced the lifejackets with a huge cache of illegal drugs. Even more unfortunately, depending on which way you look at it, a little spark has sent some of it up in a blaze and filled the cargo bay with an intoxicating smog that makes you think it’s really worth that much effort jumping ship and like whoa those pink gungans are weird.

But enough of that! Well, we can get an arm full can’t we? Going to need a little money to replace my- their- this ship. Miraculously, the escape pod is a-okay, folks!

The man in orange-tinted glasses had wrapped his package in the flight jacket he’d found on the pseudo-bed and, while blaming the narcotics for his thinking of himself in third person, found he spied with his little eye something beginning with wallet. Time to find out who the I in this story is. Aside from being stone cold broke, I was once a clean-shaven fellow with a sparkle in his eye and far too much lacquer in his hair. There’s an ID number and a name, though the latter has been half-smudged with something dubious, leaving only a ‘Joe’.

“Hey Joe, whaddya know.”

That talking to yourself is the first sign of madness? Insanity’s the only way out of this one, anyway. It’s a blessing that I’m so tripped out on whatever that I can’t see straight, because if I could I think I’d panic. A trip or two for the loot and we’re off into the escape pod, only it doesn’t look like we’re alone. Time to panic now. Unlike those sexually ambiguous gungans of minutes earlier, this little kitten looks a shade on the substantial side of reality – and so does the pistol she’s packing.

Ben’ma and Buck Harkon were shades of the past. It was startling, she always thought, how quickly she was able to move on, forgive and forget – or at least forget. Her time on the backwater planet, that she still did not know the name of, had been brief and while her experiences there had included one of the most painful moments of her life, it still did not give the place any sense of sentimental value or weight in her mind. As always, she drifted away and left as small a trail as could be made, burying or burning evidence of her existence.

The boy had found her, helped her, even begun to love her she suspected. In the dark of each evening he had slaved for her, ran to and fro fetching this and that, culminating his efforts finally in the retrieval of her weaponry from the sanctum of the town church. Foolishly, the preacher had not bereaved the weapon of its clip, and thus round after round poured from the barrel as – in a blaze of madness and death – she had fought back the zealous people of Ben’ma, until all but the Harkon family lay still and dead.

Buck Harkon had come to her side then, his eyes misted with tears, and looked up into that face, with its ageless eyes and discontented frown, and asked what did she – the plague of Ben’ma – think she would do with herself now, now that she had brought ruin down on them. She did not answer him at first, instead holstering her weaponry and beginning to walk slowly away. The truth was that she had not the heart to tell him that she was to leave, to fade into the desert from which she had arrived. While she carried on, their lives would come to a grinding halt, the burden and guilt for which lay entirely on her shoulders.

Nevertheless, she was without remorse. We are all a product of choices, the tutors had said, and she had made hers. She would not lay blame on the ignorant preacher, who had first nailed her to the cross, or to the people of the town for following so willing at his heels. No, she did not believe in censure. What was done was done and no action or words could change that. Therefore, the only logical step was one forward, one on to better things.

The elder Harkons had reined a beast for her, bundling it with supplies of all kinds that they said would no longer be needed in small-town Ben’ma. Idly, she wondered if they believed that all hope was lost for them, and that this sacrificing of food, clothing and such like was an act of self-condemnation. Only Buck did not seem to share their fatalistic mentality, and clung to the hind end of the creature as she slid into its saddle with practiced ease. He wept openly, and some small part of her felt sad, but the emotion was suppressed almost at the very moment it flourished.

“Sweet water and light laughter, Buck Harkon.”

He choked on tears again, but she did not look to see it. She would never see his face again. The heels of her boots drove against the animals sides and it began to move. She did not, then, know where she would go, only that she had to go. At one end of the town she had entered, and at the other she would leave. The bastard Hutt who had abandoned her here would have thought her long dead. She would not allow him the satisfaction of dying, however desolate and barren the future looked.

At that very moment, it looked very bleak indeed. The sounds of the warning sirens aboard the smugglers ships had roused her from a restless sleep. As her memories returned, she recalled how she had come to be on the vessel, and the troublesome thought that there was another being somewhere, who was not aware of her existence. At least, he was not for a time – but within moments of rising, gathering her wits about her, he had stumbled into the escape pod that she had stowed away in. Lightning fast, her hands were on her weapon and the weapon on him, as he stared in horror at her from behind thick orange glasses. Whatever he was carrying fell to the floor, and for a second Vega thought that he might too, as he swayed from side to side precariously.

“I don’t want to shoot you.”