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

[Enkidu]

Bingo.


Gunda Riehl had few talents in her existence, but one she could pull from the crowd and claim is that she had an ability to be first. First to discover the hull breach by blundering into the wrong compartment. First to take a bullet, first to get stuck in a jump hole phase aligned to the ass-end of the multiverse. Most people believe they are unlucky - Gunda disagreed. Gunda believed that the human machine was optimised for luck - it must be. How else could anyone live to turn old - or, at least, thirty four - without having their particles jammed into starstuff?


This wasn't one of those firsts. One of the few certainties that had remained true after the Undine had shattered into a field of steel bolides and human soup was that luck was what you made of it.

When a ship blows, most of the systems go. You don't have to hear the screaming and the terror of the people trapped in pressure pockets where the structure doesn't give out. You don't need to hear them freeze, or roast to death, scrabbling around in the dark. You don't need to see people choking on nothing, see them silent-scream, bobbing in place, wondering for a miracle with the last trickle of their electrons. See, small, tidy little coffins like fighters and shuttles have all their volatiles packed together in a cramped space with nowhere to hide. You go out fast. Battleships? They're blocks of steel and stone and circuitry, at the end of it. They're bodies where you can cut the heart out but the muscle, oh, the muscle's going to take a long, long time to rot away. And if you're trapped in that dead body, you don't know that you're part of a dead man, a dead ship, dead fate. No. That's where the desperation sets in, the belief that someone, somewhere out there, is going to risk their lives to rescue you. So you dig in, as you're roasting alive, blown wires arcing around you, dead gravity sticking you in the space between the wall and the floor, waiting for contrition. Watching the balls of oxidising reactants and creep towards you, cooking you through your protectivewear. There's a wet crunch in your body, the strange, unfamiliar break of a system you've always assumed, known, to be under warranty, failing you. Blood in your eyes, copper in your mouth - teeth, where are your teeth, where am I...?

And then the second wave of torpedoes blew their proximity fuses and saturated antimatter into the remains....


She was hyperventilating, stretched across a scalding pipe covered in cracked in insulation, her arm twitching, her leg, bent off to the side, as if trying to prove the slide rule in a puddle of her own piss.

Balls.

The terminal that had been in her arms until the blackout lay at her side. It was made of tougher stuff than she was, and refocused. Stared at the black beyond.

The window. The one, unprecedented break in the continuity of Gunda Riehl that was keeping her stitched together. It was the planetside service window; a cramped, midget of a cupola that gave just enough space for one person to sit and watch the methane creep across the Hannover side. By some divine intervention the fusilade of war had barely scarred the glass, nor had the debris, spreading their way across Hannover high orbit in a kessler event that would take a millennia to flash into nothing within the blue, nitrogen rich skies. The station's bar had larger viewports, but once all the expected alcohol-looting had ended, was as empty as as the chancellor's head; pressure was steadily dropping in the compartment from where a Hessian torpedo had lodged itself into the deck below. This was all she had. And Gunda Riehl had got to it, first.

It had become her private freak-out zone. Her seance, private to all. You, me, and the anticyclonic Ice Giant below.

Riehl shivered. A clammy, wet cold. That probably meant the dehumidifiers were broken. She tapped into the terminal a standing request order to check the atmospheric sensor lines in the outer levels. Someone would get to it. Somewhere.

Right. Work. She fixed the dim screen in the dull planet-shine before the flicking emergency lights glared her out.

Cargo containers. Forty feet Bretonian models, unmarked and unsigned by the Junkers who delivered them. They were filling the common areas. It was almost a blessing that the Alster Union had been reticent to move their people wholesale to the leaking prison given the cluster of junker supplies being ferried in with each freshly arriving transport. Gunda saw the inventory and whistled. Near forty thousand tonnes. It would all need to be installed by hand.

---

THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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