There will be a Future - Vierlande Prison Station - Hoffnung.

[The Syndicate Leagues]

Die Hoffnung - Vierlande Prison station.

It was an ossuary, here. Not that there were any bones aboard. Not that every unioner knew what the word was, but they understood, nonetheless. You are in the crypt, here. They had been flushed out of the airlocks in the adjoining days; wrapped in glistening anti-flash foil and committed to the dry freeze of open space. A penumbra of blue specks shimmering above the Hannover sunrise. It had moved from a funeral to a steady, non-committal industry – shuttling out the dead and picking them clean of everything from the small curios to pressure suits, battle rifles, down to the credit chips in the pockets and the implants in their flesh.

Unity, amongst the living, conspiring with the dead to ensure that some still lived.

It had been several weeks since the slow, stunned circulation of the lost, scattered survivors of the in-space Alster Union families found themselves dredged up against the prison that they had once feared. Many refused to land; refused to see the hulk as a refuge. But hunger and fuel shortages had sapped away at old fears, and old disgust. The stomach was pragmatic.

The docking bay, a functional, slab-walled, military cylinder, had been gutted apart. Without landing codes, dirigible airlocks had been strapped to the breaks and pits within the plates where antimatter had mined the bulkheads apart, turning solid neutronic steel to ordinance within the glimmer of a wavelength. Power had been restored through a brace of cables strewn throughout the long corridors, headed from heavy radionuclide batteries hacked together from reactor products and no small amount of improvisation. Transports, shuttles and fighters, offloading human waves of the shell-shocked and the confused huddled around portable heaters and flickering emergency lights. Without the internal shields that had shut sound from structure, the prison would shudder and moan as plasma beams sintered fresh alloy over the pitted hull, bolts clanged as damaged, unrecognisable, or unusable equipment was stripped, torn apart, and cannibalised. In the labyrinth of the dark prison, clusters of Unioners from cells that would have barely shared a wrench under conventional circumstances, huddled in annexes and old guard barracks quarters around the outer edges of the hull. The prison, once permanent home of near sixty thousand of Rheinland’s most desperate and their jailors, had turned into an enclave of improvisation.


The old prison was a monument, now. Not that there was any solemnity in the empty halls. No. Even the children had retreated into a workmanlike frenzy. It was a pack-mentality coping mechanism that had saved lives before and was now being tested to the limits of endurance and sanity; when all you have has been taken away from you, you work. You perform what you know. You create, to survive.

It was the old dictator's belief that death is purifying. Perhaps that was the point.

A plasma pack, from a coalition rifle, edged with the hard Vee of the Volvograd ordinance combine, had been sliced away from its weapon. It lived a new existence providing power to an oxygen bubbler, cracking out breathing gas under high temperatures in an improvised water splitter that subbed in for the station’s creaking life support.

“That which takes life now gives life to others. March 826 Never forget. We were here. We survived.” had been scrawled into the plasteel case, etched with the Hammer and Cog of the Alster Union, the V stretched out into a hard U. The air had a strange taste to it, that old, washed out bloodstains and the cleaning aklines hadn’t been able to mask with their chemicals. A mass to them. It weighed at the lungs.

Perhaps it was the desperation. But the sounds of hammers whispering through the steel sang a different chorus. Perhaps bitter, perhaps not without naiveite; but it was what it was. Hope. There would be a future.

But for now, there was only the hammers, working at the bones.

---

"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga,  do not fold"
"For suits or saints or beggar's gold.
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