There's the momentary flash of a lighter in the midst of a room of pure black. It illuminates a rugged face, a man around the age of thirty with a pretty collection of scars. He has a cigar in his mouth, which the flames caress. As the lighter dies, the screen returns to darkness.
"Y'know," he begins in a gravelly drawl, "folks don't appreciate us. And by us I mean Rogues."
A slight pause. A deep inhale.
"People call us dumb pirates, two-credit thugs, cardi-sniffers. Y'know how it is. Now, I dunno about that last one. Some are. I ain't. And some are the first two as well. Nothin' but hired guns lookin' for a quick fix. Some of us got a lick of honor, though."
Another pause, another inhale.
"And even at his dumbest, a Rogue's got some smarts. Takes quick wits, quick hands, and a helluva lot of luck to navigate the Badlands. Sensors don't work, 'specially not on our rigs. I've seen more than a few shipments break on the rocks. Seen a Navy battlegroup get eaten alive. Patrol 27? I heard of 'em. Their ghosts haunt the rocks, sure as I'm smokin' me a fine Bretonian cigar right now."
There's a slight break, but no inhale.
"Yeah. Y'know how it is. Rogues may not be the most educated of folk, in the traditional way. They may not be the best of fighters. But damned if they ain't the most tenacious lot of losers ya'll ever meet." The man chuckles. "We're what society don't want. What the LPI terms 'vicious malcontents'. We're a product of the machine that is Liberty. The Xenos... they call themselves the freedom fighters. I've heard a few as call 'emselves the 'Knights of Labor'. We're all the same, though. Just..."
There's a thirty second pause.
"Just... we saw that the system was just too f---ed up to fix, and decided we may as well profit any way we could. That's what's got me right here, right now. In this Mule, floatin' in the Badlands, ass-end of nowhere."
He pauses, and inhales deeply for the first time in a while, as if he had forgotten of the cigar's smoldering existence.
He sighed. The cigar was gone, even the embers having died down. There was no light save for the random flash of charged particles reacting in the depth of the Badlands. Random moments of light revealed the cockpit of a ship and little else. The view-port was to his back.
"Well. I'm recordin' this cuz I figure someone should know. When I die, if anyone ever finds this wreck and bothers to properly loot it instead of just shooting things off the outside, well. If the asteroids don't pummel it to ash, of course. Then at least there'll be something of me left besides a vacuum-mummified corpse.
"I was born twenty seven years ago. 791. A good year, or so I've been told. My life is rather unmentionable. I could confess to any number of misdemeanors and felonies, from stealing a candy bar at the age of four to my first armed robbery at thirteen. My first kill at sixteen. Don't have a taste for that kind of thing. I do what I have to to get by, but I try to limit the blood. Got in space at seventeen. Bloodhound to Mule. Nice, sturdy ship. Three Bloodhounds hold down a transport and take care of the escorts, I roll in and blow off a couple cargo pods, loot what I can, and we all run."
The voice trailed off, as if stuck in the thrall of nostalgia. He picked up again:
"Anyways. Y'know how it is. So here I am. Hold full of filched food rations. Out of fuel, out of power, almost out of air. God it's getting cold in here..."
The next ten minutes were full of ragged, pained breaths and shivering. Hard to notice because of the poor lighting, frost started to form on the camera's lens. Then there was a rummaging sound, as if he was searching for something by feel alone.
"If you gotta die, might as well be in comfort."
A faint beeping sound came off to the side.
"What the deuce... proximity alarm?"
A blinding light filled the cockpit, and a grunt was audible from the man. The light passed -- it was a search light from another ship.
"Never been happier for another ship to come by..."
There was a loud clanking noise: the other ship latching onto his. Running lights from the other ship dimly lit the cockpit, and showed a man of medium size quickly looking for something. Finding it, he pulled out a handgun and checked the safety by touch. He moved out of view, deeper into the back of the ship. A loud pop announced that the seal on the airlock had been breached. Distantly...
"Hail to the boarding ship! State affiliation!"
There was silence for a moment, before an inaudible response was heard. A pause. No sound from the Rogue. Then the sound of gunfire.