Where to begin? God only knows. Mattick said I should keep a log - said it would help with the memory problems.
He's probably right - well, as right as a dead man can be.
And regardless, maybe there's some garbage I don't even want to remember. Better off not knowing, and all that. Well. I might as well introduce myself.
My name is Aleksander Radek. I was born in Rheinland - aboard a rusting transport, of all the forasken places this galaxy has to offer. My parents were fleeing Rheinland. Some business with my grandparents.
Ah, the grandparents. I never knew them - only heard stories. Apparently my grandfather was a diplomat - a decent one. He'd attained a fair station in the government, and was especially active in trade negotiations. He was married to a woman from Liberty, someone named Claire. Apparently, she was a terrible choice for a wife - she was rude, shallow, spent far too much of her time cavorting across Rheinland seeking out all sorts of exotic vices to entertain her pathetic impulses. But for some reason my grandfather loved her.
And then one evening, her travels took her just a little too far, in just the wrong direction - my grandmother's shuttle was seized by pirates. Unioners, if memory serves. Their demands were unreasonable - politcal, rather than financial, and not aimed at my grandfather, but rather at Rheinland as a whole. But the Rheinland government refused to negotiate, and my fathers offers of outrageous sums of money for her ransom fell on deaf ears.
I would like to say my grandmother died a brave, patriotic death, but that would be a terrible lie. She begged, pleaded, cried - she was weak. They executed her after two weeks of silence from the Rheinland government concerning their demands.
My grandfather resigned the following morning - and was found dead in his home a month later. Overdose.
My parents, at the time, lived aboard Ingolstadt in Munich. They both worked petty administrative jobs aboard the station, and were nothing of note. Until about three months after my grandfather's suicide - at which point they left in quite a hurry. They bought passage aboard a SynthFoods transport bound for Manhattan. Bought from the captain, that is - their bribes got them access to a partially full cargo hold to be transported across the border without being identified by the police, who were searching for my father for some reason I was never told.
They escaped Rheinland, and transferred off to another ship somewhere in Liberty. A refugee vessel by all accounts, smuggling people into Bretonia. They eventually wound up on Leeds. My father got a job as a mechanic on a BWE freighter. My mother worked at a small shop planetside on Leeds. They didn't see much of eachother - BWE kept my father on the move constantly.
I stayed with my mother on Leeds. I lived the first seventeen years of my life on that abysmal ball of filth. I watched my parents rot there, with no future or ambition. Eventually my father got caught up in some foul business - the captain of the freighter was smuggling cardamine on the side, and my father got wind of it. He went to the police, but had the most terrible luck in speaking to one of Leeds' crocked cops, who just happened to be on payroll for the same people the freighter's captain was smuggling for.
The cops arrested my father, faked a bust on the freighter, and pinned the operation on him.
I still remember the night they searched our house on Leeds. I was awoken by a crash from the living room of our small apartment. I heard shouting, one voice was my mothers. Something broke - a glass, or vase, I'm not sure. The officers stopped shouting and started swinging. My mother went down - was handcuffed, dragged off. My bedroom door was the next to be kicked in, but I was waiting. I swung hard with a heavy pair of binoculars. It staggered the cop, and gave me an opening. I sprinted across the short hall to the bathroom, and made it out the window before the other cops could react.
I was old enough to set off with a ship at that point - there was a mining vessel, the Bell Anne, that was shipping out that evening, and they were short on numbers. I managed to get aboard, convinced the man named Mattick that I would be useful to help work the engine room. I didn't know anything about engines - still don't. I ended up spending most of time with the laser crew, helping to guide the lasers that cut 'roids into manageable chunks. Learned to be a pretty fair shot that way as well.
I stayed with that crew for almost two years, until fate intervened and a gig went bad. The region we'd spent six weeks travelling to find turned up dry. We were barely able to scrape any usable ice off the surface of the rocks in that area, much less the endless veins of Niobium we'd expected.
The debts came due shortly after that, and with nothing to sell to pay them, the captain lost his mining ship. He had a small personal ship that he had "acquired" from some poor sap on a refinery station. The captain planned to head off to parts unknown in that broken-down starflier. But beyond that, he had no idea what he was going to do.
So I took him to the bar. Got him completely wasted, kept pouring alcohol into him to help drown his sorrows. And when he passed out, I slipped the archaic authkey for the Starflier off of him and set off for the hangar. Before he came to, I was long gone.
And so that's where I stand. Been a few weeks since I started flying - and still no marvelous revelation about how to improve my situation. No family, no friend, nowhere to go.
Surely there must be something good out in the void? Some small hint of hope amidst the blackness of space?
We'll see.
For now, this is Aleksander Radek, signing off.
>>> END RECORDING
>>> ATTACHMENT : ATTRIBUTES
Name: Aleksander Radek
Born: 06.28.793 (Age 24)
Height: 180cm
Weight: 77 kilos
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Brown
