There's an infernal rumbling as I put my Falcon through its paces, I see brief glints of brilliant blue light shoot past the edges of my cracked but mended canopy glass. Come to think of it, this entire ship has seen better days. Handed down between various pilots who have perished fighting this same fight, one we have fought for three hundred years. The communications suite crackles to life, a wingman no doubt trying to communicate advice given the situation.

"Black-5, break left! Repeat, break left!" He yells frantically, barely audible over the groaning hull reinforcements and protests of this ship's engines that I have pushed past all advisable safety parameters. If the pilot shooting at me fails to be my undoing, a catastrophic decompression of my own accord will make up for it. He asked the same question most do - why. Didn't really have an answer for him, needed to think it through for myself what brought me here. Would be right in assuming that this isn't really the time for self reflection, but there may not be much time left either and so I can't logically be picky about it.

I never fought when I should have, doubt it would have done anything but at least it would have been a fitting response. Not when our home was repossessed out from under us, not when finding shelter in the nearest metro station amounted to vandalism and not when they shipped my son off to die in a war that wasn't his. I just took it, got through the day to day and turned the cheek whenever prompted, thought it might mean something to somebody and that maybe if it did they could tell me what it was. But what do I have to show for it? A laundry list of legal infractions that speak volumes about the creativity of the people who accuse me, and nothing and nobody of value to my name. I'm fighting now, but for what? Not so deluded as to think I'm making this world a better place, not after just tearing the atmo-seal of a luxury liner full of women and kids open. Not after I've heard people scream and beg for me to stop shooting, only to be met with the retributive whoops of my fellow men who have gone mad with their own grief, who have had their moral codes destroyed by the weight of unending tribulation. I can't even call this vengeance, I know for a fact it's not what any of the people I love would want. Even if they've turned back into dust and departed this mortal cycle of hopelessness and hard times. Still, it feels to me that I'm desperately trying to come up with ways to sate guilt for having done nothing in their defense. For letting this happen to the other people around me who have been backed into a corner and turned rabid. All those years I spent believing that working hard and keeping your head down would help you, that all you had to do was ignore these naysayers and what the men above called hearsay. I just didn't want to believe it, I didn't want to believe it could happen to me and then I didn't want to believe it was happening to me even when it was. So when they ask you why I did all this, tell them I didn't want to. Tell them all I wanted was to see my son grow old and have his own kids, tell them all I wanted was to die in the arms of the only woman I ever went down on one knee for. Not any of this.

In the background of all this grief I've long denied myself, I hear a wing come clean off the frame of the craft I'm in control of. Even as I want to weep I can't find the resolve to do it, it would almost feel wrong for a man like me to pretend like I can still grieve. The rumbling just gets louder at this point, and I feel no reason to put effort into trying to fight with the ship's failing stabilizers. I never did it before when it would have counted for something, why start now? After all, the flight computer just warned me to eject and I know for a fact I didn't have the tools or the reasons necessary to repair that function. From the sounds of it, we're starting to win but it doesn't feel like it. The sight of reinforcements arriving just makes me feel worse, that people like this are so commonplace. That at any given moment in my life or the lives of people who come long after me, there will still be a readymade army of people pushed so far down the barrel all they can do anymore is punish the world with weapons forged of their grief. There's no freedom to be won here in Hudson, despite whatever the well dressed demagogue will tell you, the promise of starting over to ensure the misdeeds leveled against you don't carry forward is already false given our methods. No way I can see myself as the victim in all of this when all I've done are create more of them.

The mixture of pain and conflict I feel within seems to translate with what's happening around me. I hear a crack and then silence, a rush of heat passing through me before everything slips and I can no longer see the misery we inflict on others. I can't help but wonder one thing in those fleeting moments of clarity.

Am I forgiven?