This story contains material that may be considered offensive, shocking or be qualified as adult content to some readers (murder, torture, extreme torture, terror, horror, horrifying terror, terrible horror, scariness, afterlife, sexual and domestic violence connotations and other not so cheerful things). Proceed reading it at your own discretion.
Heartbeat
He tried to take a breath, but no air would come.
Heartbeat
He tried to move, but his muscles wouldn't listen.
Heartbeat
He tried to utter his final words... only a gurgle was forthcoming.
Heartbeat
His eyes started dimming.
Heartbeat
Darkness began to surround his vision.
Heartbeat
Everything went black.
Silence
Then... there was nothing. No thought, no emotion. No love, no hate. No wars. All the former things passed... and he was at peace, though he was not aware of it. And on he floated in the oblivion, the darkness, the void. And he floated for what seemed forever.
Before he had floated unconsciously, neither knowing nor feeling, with no aim. Random. Now, he floated towards the light, feeling returning to his extremities. Extremities? What an odd thought. What were they? Who am I? What am I? Philosophers must wonder... what are these words?
Then, he came to the light. And it was bright, and blinding. And there was a door. He reached out a hand (a what?) and turned the nob (surely this must be some alien dream). And he stepped through the threshold, confused, unknowing what lay before him. The light... the landscape was light. White, brilliant, beautiful light. He had been floating in darkness so long, that he had forgotten what it looked like. But... what was there to forget? Nothing had been remembered. We go into life with no memories of any former lives, we leave them with none. It's only logical. How he knew these things baffled him.
Vincenzo Piccio.
The thought that came like a sound originated from behind. Vincenzo (my name?) turned his head back and saw nothing but light. Fields of white that went off in every direction. He turned back to face forward, and there was a nothing.
Vincenzo Piccio. This time it resounded from every direction.
"What? Where is this? Who are you?"
And there was silence. Vincenzo had weird premonitions. And he looked down at his hands, and what he saw made him scream. He saw blue mist, instead of flesh and blood.
And Vincenzo screamed, for memory flooded his mind. And he writhed on the floor in agony, and if he had been anything more than a wisp of cloud at the time, he would have wretched and coughed up blood for the pain. He reached oblivion once more, but this time he had memory. And he floated back the way he had come.
It was a dark, quiet night on Malta. In a room in a large house of a wealthy man, the fall of Vincenzo Piccio was being carried out. It was the age old story of love and tragedy... namely, he slept with the wrong woman. They loved each other with passion, but it was not meant to be. The reason was that the father did not take with Vincenzo, a poor boy who had been admitted to the 101st fighter squadron on skill alone, without the padding that most men and women got by coming from rich families that could 'grease the wheels', so to speak.
That glorious night was the best Vincenzo had. His love, Esmeralda DeJesus, was all he wanted in life. He had her that night... and a few other nights, as well. It was easy... there was a vine-covered wall that led straight up to her second-story window, and there was even a balcony of all things. To them, they imagined themselves as modern-day Romeo and Juliet.
Oh how the father despised the boy. He couldn't see through his social background. He knew what was going on, what he was doing. How he was dishonoring his family. He couldn't let it happen. So he took matters into his own hand one night. He waited by the wall, being informed by a servant that had seen Vincenzo come a few nights before. He waited... with a knife.
Vincenzo came, eyes aglow and back straight, not paying attention to his surroundings. The father stepped from the shadows in front of Vincenzo, who was startled for a moment before the knife went into his stomach. And twisted. The father forced him back to the wall, pinning him against it. His eyes were red and he was breathing deep. Vincenzo was gurgling on his blood, barely keeping consciousness. And then the man said with hate, "Now, you will never have my daughter again."
As he came back from memory, he was whole again. His memories had returned, he remembered what he had been. A 101st squadron ace. A lover. And he had been murdered, his love and life ripped away because some man had had too much bigotry to see beyond his social status. He was furious, he was boiling. He was fully aware now that he was nothing more than a mist floating through the infinite blackness that must be death... and he grabbed that fury, grabbed that hate. He held onto it with a passion. and fed on it. He drew all the power from it, and the floating turned to flying, turned to going so fast that light would be made to look like a turtle. And he came back... to the Siniestre Cloud, to the Omicron 90 jump hole. And there his Sabre was, 101st markings still on it, his corpse still preserved inside.
He floated to it, phased through it and came out in the cockpit. His body was there, as it had been fifty years ago, stab wound and all. And he tried to enter it, to possess it, but he could not. He bounced off like it was against the laws of nature, unholy. More rage came, he tried harder, and was rebuffed harder. He screamed, or at least tried to. It came out as static, the background noise of the universe.
Letting go, he moved the body over and sat down. He solidified as he sat, instead of phasing through. He tried to take the controls, but his hands floated through. Venting some rage, he tried again and his hands were solid. He became solid, but did not become human. He was a mist that had taken the form of man, eyes glowing red. He hit the 'open canopy' button, and overrid the safety. He threw his own body out into space, and closed the canopy.
The Sabres in the burial site all had no fuel, but it moved nonetheless. Vincenzo willed it to move, and somehow it did. And he was flying towards Malta, back to where he had come from, his homeland, for lack of a better place to start.
The Sabre streaked across Omicron Alpha towards Malta, quite literally the mode of transport for a ghost. It was an old Sabre, paint peeling, guns scarred from use, and engines pitted. But it flew nonetheless; shields, engines, weapons all powered by a superhuman force. It approached the docking ring, which hesitantly granted it permission to dock. The ship piloted through the atmosphere and set down on a landing pad.
Apparently the dock authority had noticed that the ship was decommissioned and had been used as a grave. This would normally set off alarms. The alarms were, in fact, set off on that day by that ship. The Sabre was quickly surrounded by elite troopers, assuming that some grave-digging bastard had decided to hijack a tomb. Boy were they wrong.
Without opening the hatch, Vincenzo phased through the Sabre, walking because it had always been his habit to walk, like most humans. Suffice to say, this was unnerving for the guards. Guns were hefted with what could best be called trepidation. One was unlucky enough to be the closest to Vincenzo. He reached out and touched him with his hand that appeared to be made of blue mist with the occasional lightning bolt of electricity coursing through. The man spasmed uncontrollably, eyes flickering beneath closed eye lids. Vincenzo hadn't meant for this to happen, but now that it was he couldn't stop it. And he didn't entirely want to.
The other guards started shooting, but the shots went through him. He looked up slowly, eyes beginning to glow red. They each took a collective step back, and years of discipline and training was all that kept them from running. Eventually the poor fool that had been touched fell to the ground, unconscious, and Vincenzo set out to see what he could do. Test his potential. It was good to be alive again. Or at least half alive. Beggars can't be choosers.
Word had gotten out that a ghost ship had landed and a ghost had been its guide. The people scrambled when they saw the blue apparition walking down the streets, some screaming, others too scared to even moan. Rumors spread everywhere, and as always they were blown out of all proportion. Some fell to their knees and begged for mercy, others stared on in some sort of reverence, seeing an angel and a harbinger of the apocalypse at the same time. He ignored them all.
He kept walking at a slow, measured pace towards his goal. The place where he had died, to maybe, just maybe, kill the man responsible. The same ancient house sat there, a citadel against time. It was empty. Vincenzo phased through the wall, and found tarps over old furniture. The power and water were cut, and all signs of life were gone. Vince's eyes went to a shade of purple. He was furious.
He stormed out, and with one stroke of his arm the building collapsed in a deafening explosion; one of the most prominent landmarks in the main spaceport city.
Vincenzo went to the spaceport bar. Even though he couldn't drink, or eat, or breath anything, he felt that the familiarity of it would help soothe him. He sat on a stool of the bar, and a drink was timidly placed in front of him by a rotund barkeep. The patrons of the establishment eyed him fearfully and gave him a wide berth, and most beat a hasty exit.
Vince's eyes had moved from purple to blue, and they were unnoticeable when compared to his face. Or what passed for his face. He was content to sit there and let the movement of time and space and life and afterlife just flow by. For a while. Business in the bar dwindled, but a crowd was growing outside, people coming to get a glimpse at the ghost... from a distance. As he did nothing threatening, business slowly returned.
Finally, restlessness moved him. He got up and went back to his ship, which was under protection by several guards. They saluted as he walked past. Respect, veneration, and more than a little fear in their eyes. He boarded his ghost Sabre with no destination in mind, no objective in mind, just to get away.
Weeks passed. Vincenzo was scared of it all, the changes, everything had changed. As a spirit come back from the ether, he alone knew exactly what death entailed. Darkness, void. Hopelessness. And it scared him more than anything to return to that state. He wandered Outcast space, every once in awhile returning to whence he had come; the graveyard of Siniestre. He didn't know what drew him to this place, which had been where he had slept for fifty years, but it brought a calm over him. Calmness was dangerous. Vince had long since discovered that it was emotion that gave him his power; the stronger the emotion the better.
And he loved to bask in the warm-coolness of the black hole in Omicron 85... he had always stared at it from Corsica's decks, wondering and dreaming about it. He had to leave his Sabre behind, of course, but it was worth it. He had a transcendental moment where he became one with the universe.
And restlessness moved him on still. His legs got itchy and he moved. Back to the graveyard, this time... and there he found a friend. He felt the presence of... anger. Fury. Hatred. And he was drawn to it like flies to honey. There, a Sabre that looked freshly placed. The overpowering emotion emanated from it. Vince left his Sabre and floated towards it, phasing through the Sabre's hull and into the cockpit. There was... a heart-shaped locket. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet, the pain, sorrow, anguish, hatred, and most of all, rage, came from it. Vince reached out slowly and touched it, and.... a light shone, and... there was pain.... and.... then, there was.... another man. And memories. Painful memories.
From childhood he had been tailored for the task he now performed so well, so brilliantly. Corsairs and Outcasts were of the same heritage, and their shared past meant a strong and lasting bond. So strong in fact, that centuries after they parted, they still had a lot in common. Of course, each of them had grown cultural idiosyncrasies over the ages. Still, with enough of training, one could become well learned in the ways of the other culture. Not everything, however, can be achieved through training.
His destiny had been chosen for him before he was old enough to understand it. To drive him on his purpose, he had been fed hatred for fifteen years pure hatred for his long lost cousins. That and the one thing that really separated them, not only from the Corsairs, but from the rest of the humanity: Cardamine.
For twenty years he wore the mask, probably taken from a dead pilot's corpse. Now that he finally realized it, there was no sense objecting to it. He wouldnt be able to live without it anymore. Not that any of it mattered, now that he had a gun pointed to his face.
Renato realized it was already morning as the sun reared in the horizon. He couldn't really sleep the night, not the night before such an important mission as the one he was about to fly. Not with all the risks involved. His self-preservation instincts kicked in hard now that he looked at his watch and realized no more than six hours separated that very moment from the one when he would be sitting in his Sabre's cockpit, inside enemy territory.
His wife still asleep, searching for him in bed, pressed her arm around his waist. He looked long at her, admiring her black hair against white sheets. The night before they went to bed together and made love. As she slept, he just sat there all night reviewing the mission he had planned.
Two months before that morning
"There's only one man I trust to fly wingman for me in this mission. That man is Umberto Mani. As for the rest of the team, alpha group will do. They won't be having much of a resistance once Umberto and I are done with its escorts."
Six hours past that morning
"Mani, cover me..."
"Hola! Long lost brother", a voice interrupted, "You finally made it back. And brought gifts. How thoughtful! What an amazing gesture. The voice laughed through the radio, Renato Bianchi himself and a whole wing of Sabres for us to play with."