No running, no looking back. No point in dodging the question.
"Well... It got me thinking. Had never been a friend of the government, you know that much..." She took a short sip, seeing Lia nod slowly. "I started publicizing critical papers. Political ones. Ones that the people in power could not ignore for long. I think if it hadn't been for Professor Jensen, I would have vanished a few months earlier. He kind of covered me with the university. He's dead now, as I heard. 'Robbery' they call it. I call Bulldrek...
Anyway, I'm getting distracted. Remember that big paper I was working on? The last one? You probably don't remember the title, but generally, I went a bit... too far with it."
Nika looked out of the window, breaking eye contact for the first time. The skyline of Harburg, glooming over the conversation, especially at nighttime, seemed a fitting background for her dark mood.
"Hannes... I mean Professor Jensen sent me a warning, and I left immediately. The moment I left the floor, I heard them kicking my door in. Shouting, gunfire... They turned my whole floor, every apartment into a nightmare made of Lasers and screams. Turned out later that they blamed the Unioners for it, by the way."
Her face filled with determination and a bitter smile, as she continued on.
"As it showed, they weren't guarding the spaceport pretty well. Took the first ferry off-planet, slipped into a cargo container and burned my ID. Then I collapsed. Was just too much, and I hadn't been sleeping the night before anyway... Well, and as I woke up, the ship's security kicked me out on Freistadt. You know, that drekhole in Omega-7."
