To: Anybody who knows me/cares up in Omi' Alph'|Unencrypted|

"...And I know, I know. Don't com people during preflight inspection of the spacecraft you're about to fly an impractical number of lightyears solo for hours and hours. I get it. Make all the crap, shoulder-nudging banter about women and texting you want to whilst rubbing out a stiff one over my freeze-dried, mummified cadaver; hell, whatever helps you sleep at night. Shi’… okay, that wasn’t a great way to open a com - first impressions lasting impressions whatever. I’m sorry.”

She tries to roll an eyeball, but doesn’t seem up to the challenge. There’s a strange dourness hanging about her shoulders that seems to want to draw Nishi into an ever-increasingly tighter ball of self-pity, until the very boundaries of matter failed her as she hit the point of singularity. But she’s a fighter. She can smile and wave.

"But this is the present and I'm alive in the present. So, I'm gonna' take the proactive, none-pessimistic course of action and plan for a state of pre-mortification, at least for the short term. Hell, I'm a freedom fighter - there's bullets, missiles, lasers and all manner of masers jumping at my gullet every other work day. Christ-on-a-crosshair, it seems like every woman and her attack dog wants to burn, braise, cook, perforate, shatter or squish me into a faceless, brainless, gooseberry preserve and stick me in a jar with the label on it: "Here lies the dead terrorist - hear ye; fear me and obey."

“There was a thing, y'know, back before the world had such physics defying fadangles as inertial dampeners, where a pilot could only prang out of so many ejector seats before your vertebra fuze together as your tush takes a 22Gee rocketjump into the base of your neck. Throbbing hematoma mixed in with a minor case of blood vessels bursting in your eyes and brain, if the lenses popping straight out from your face wasn't slapstick enough for the surgeon who'd have to stick you back together again. Post that, my lively eagle, no more flying for you - your wings are clipped. If the boredom doesn't get you the PTSD will.

Now, we don't have to worry about any of that fussy, atmospheric crap when we punch out. Velocities are relative and if somebody shot the gravity mimic away you could push yourself out with a well-aimed bottomwiggle. No atmospheric gas, no problem. Just an escape pod that swaddles you up in a skin of steel, titanium and carbon like some horrible, ghastly baby Frankenstein cocked up the creation of and promptly forgot about, or a long-dead, undiscovered resident that never bothered to check out of the Valley of the Kings. Just blind, cold vacuum, and enough solar radiation to send your sperm several steps back on the evolutionary tree. Oh, and the lasers. Missiles travelling at speeds barely subluminal. And the nukes - Freakin’ space crazing nukes that want to rip your constituent matter to hades without a “by-your-leave” or “do-you-mind-if-I-Vaporize-You-Into-A-Radioactive-Matter stream?”

Say you survive all of that, and can endure the scent of your own fecal matter pasted to your spine like you’re still some protozoic little crapper of one month; really humbling, yah’. If you’re lucky, life will quit making you into Neo-Job and you can go back to kicking arse in the manner to which you are accustomed. If you’re unlucky, you’ll drift around your parent star in cold stasis until your world goes nova. Perhaps if the universe really thinks you’re impure the Kay’ ‘En ‘Eff will catch you, and drip-feed you stabline in agony until the point of your death as every man, woman and child in the Fuchu tries to practice all sorts of interesting docking procedures with every orifice in reach. We may be the heroines Kusari needs, but hell, Kusari is a brutalistic little toddler who doesn’t like to be force fed her medicine. She’ll scream and she’ll bite and she’ll howl for sympathy until you realise you’ve got no fingers left to feed her with. It’s crap. It’s disgusting. You want my advice? Keep flogging the dream for green and don’t ever try and help the sick, disgusting wolves that are human beings."

She smiles without the slightest injection of life. You could turn her face upside down and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Just… Just look at me. Ejection trauma, right? One too many? Pity the woman, she’s been shaken up, a little bit doolally in the, y’know. Needs a lie down. Well, screw you. I’ve played my part and I’ll keep playing it until the jig is up, even if they string me up for a terrorist. Even if I have to have most of my organs shot away in the name of social stoicism. Even if I have to give it all - I acted my part.

Point is; I’ve seen a few too many of my Sisters die on me of late. I’m fatigued as firework post ignition and I need to get a few lightyears between me and Kusari before I do something totally insensitive and murder every dog-bedding corporate sycophant within a twenty block radii, or something. That’s the problem with being a bloody good terrorist, your cowardice gets institutionalised. No midweek hari-kari for me, heck no. But this…

…The people who try to kill me, the Naval and police forces grunts; they kill for money. No glory, no nepotism, just a free bunk and a wage - I’m sick of having my life valued by faceless navy vampires to be of less value to the stars than a bunk and a wage. Frickin’ skinhead punks.

Heck…. Look at me. I’m fried. Fried, packaged up in the old insanity bundle and thrown in the trash - I need a break from being the fox. In the next twenty five minutes the crew techs will have finished strapping drop tanks as fat as the Kanzler’s aunt to the Reipia and I’ll be flying the whole way up to Alpha on cruise control and caffeine tablets. Thing is, I don’t know where I’m going to go once I’m there and I’ll need landing permission for somebody’s estate, somewhere.

If you can give me a few acres of land to - metaphorically - crash in for a few days, I’ll put a good word up to the Goddess for you. grins crookedly. Oh, and I’ll also wire one million credits at you for the favour if you can grab me a room with a sea view over any of those caustic, skin-stripping oceans I’ve heard so much about.

“Be in touch. Don’t keep me hanging around in Maltese high orbit getting steadily sterilised by that over compensatory star of yours.”

“Thank you, my friend - and yes, I hate begging on people’s shoulders as much as you probably hate being beggared from. Eww me. Whatever.”

“Goddess go with you - hope the grass isn’t too spiky - cardamine really slashes the hamstrings”.