Jenna’s face actually started to flush after hearing what he had to say. “I’m sorry? Your wife?”

Alex nodded. “I used to be married. I had a wife once. Her name was Sophie. If you’re asking what kept me grounded at the time, it was her.”

Alex felt some tension develop in Jenna and she scooted away for the briefest of moments.

“How did you two meet?”

Alex took a deep breath. “At a hospital actually. In one of my many fights, I was wounded in action. I took a shot from a pulse pistol directly through my calf muscle.”

With those words, he rolled up the leg of his suit, showing off the circular scar just a short distance below his knee. It had mostly discolored by now, but the tissue was still different from what surrounded it.

“I was due to leave back to Earth for a month so Gatton arranged for me to be sent to a hospital in Arizona, where I grew up,” explained Alex. “That was when I met Sophie. You see, my wound was pretty minor but they still forced me to stay for two days anyway just for observations, in order to make sure the tissue around the wound didn’t start to die off. I hated being stuck in that room, and I’d frequently make my way to the cafeteria to find some real food. At the time, the food available to the battalion was subpar. Anyway, Sophie was an accountant for the hospital that happened to take her lunch in the cafeteria when I usually did. One day we got to talking and that was it. We hit it off.”

“What did she look like?” asked Jenna.

Alex closed his eyes as he remembered her. “She was pretty. Dark hair that was usually cut at the shoulders or that she wore back in a ponytail. She had brown eyes and a very welcoming smile. Sophie was very analytical, which of course explains her position as an accountant. She liked to keep to a schedule and she hated deviating from it even for just a minute. She was a generous spirit but she definitely hogged the covers at night. She was my wife.”

His eyes turned misty for a moment, and Alex fought to swallow the lump in his throat. He kept his eyes closed until he felt Jenna’s hand on his shoulder. When he opened them again, she was looking at him with sympathy.

“How did she die?” she whispered. “She’s not here anymore, is she?”

He shook his head. “No, she’s not. That’s where the story gets a little more complicated. Sophie and I started seeing each other right away. We got along so well. Now, I’m not saying we didn’t have our fights but usually, we managed to put aside our differences and remember why we were together in the first place. I was really welcomed into her family, and that’s how I met Rick for the first time.”

“Rick? You mean Rick from the Racine?”

“That’s the one. Rick was Sophie’s brother. Even when I was still dating Sophie, Rick and I became close friends. We still are to this day, and I can only hope that his pod made it to Vesta intact. I still have hope that we’ll find him in the city when we get there.”

Alex took a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, let me tell you the story of how I ended up on the Racine. I told you the Orbital Wars were intensifying and getting increasingly more deadly in a period of time that was about three-four years ago. The last major operation that I was in was a full-scale assault on another elite’s section of the ring. This particular elite had already raided our section so he was due for some retribution. Well, we certainly took the war to him but in the process, we heavily damaged the orbital ring to the point that it almost lost pressure in that section. It’s only by a small miracle that we all weren’t killed in the course of the fighting. The battalion ended up slaughtering the men of our opponent but that’s where it gets a little dicey.”

“You see, we were never meant to actually kill the elite that owned the private army fighting against us. The man in question was an ex-politician from Earth that had largely retired from public life and was now amusing himself with his private army. Well, once his army was completely destroyed, the soldiers of our battalion were still eager to quench their blood lust. They ended up invading the man’s living quarters and slaughtering his entire family. Three generations lost entirely.”

Jenna shuddered. “You were part of the battalion that did that?”

Alex shook his head. “No, I didn’t take part in that. I don’t know if I could have done it anyway. Like you said before, I was hardened by my time in the battalion but I hadn’t lost my soul like so many of the other men. No, I was injured when part of the ceiling of the orbital ring cracked and fell on me, breaking my back in the process.”

“Oh my god, Alex. Are you all right? I mean obviously you’re all right now but that must have been hell.”

He nodded. “It certainly was. I ended up having to be sent back to Earth again for rehabilitation. It took so long for my back to heal, and I was entirely confined to the hospital bed to make that happen. But a good thing happened while I was still in the hospital. The Orbital Wars were brought to a decisive close. As it turned out, our battalion's slaughter of the politician’s family made some serious waves. It was enough of an uproar that the Consortium banned the use of private armies in the orbital ring and all fighting was outlawed. That put an end to the reason for being for the Bastards Battalion and it was disbanded at that moment.”

“I take it that was a good thing though,” said Jenna. “After what they did?”

“Absolutely, it was. I didn’t like where that future was going, and I knew they would probably create more atrocities if we’d been left intact. The best thing about the Bastards Battalion was when it was forcibly disbanded. But then I found myself back on Earth, at the age of thirty-six, with a broken back. I didn’t have great prospects for the future.”

“At least I didn’t put off marrying Sophie while in the battalion though. She was looking forward to getting married and we finally tied the knot when I was thirty-four, two years before we were disbanded. We had two years of marital happiness but then I found out that my past could still haunt me after the wars were over. I figured out that the battalion wasn’t entirely dead.”

Alex took a deep breath before he launched into this part of the story, always hating the memories of what happened next. Jenna said nothing in the process, only watching him with rapt attention.

“I told you before that the battalion didn’t always attract the most upstanding people into its ranks,” continued Alex. “One of those men that it attracted went by the name Xander. He joined the battalion around the same time that I did but we never became friends. Xander grew up outside what remains of Toronto, before it was nuked in World War 3. He was a low-level street hustler who graduated to killing just to keep chasing the edge. He was a natural soldier but he was cruel, often taking great pleasure in killing someone else.”

“Since Xander and I never got along, we usually gave each other a wide berth so we didn’t have to communicate. But as we rose through the ranks of the battalion, it became all but impossible to ignore him. He was in charge of his own platoon as was I. We needed to coordinate together, and I think all those operations where we had to work together kept poisoning our relationship. We grew to hate each other, especially because I was chosen to plan more and more of the missions, whereas previously that had been his role. Our battalion commander favored me, no doubt about that, but I think Xander thought my advancement could only come at his expense. Our working relationship became nonexistent, and we even came to blows twice during the course of the wars.”

“After the battalion was disbanded, all of these men found themselves without jobs and no prospects of a future. They couldn’t stay on the orbital ring. No, that was the domain of the rich and powerful so they made their way back to Earth. And that’s when they started to go around looking to settle old scores. Commanders that had been too hard on their men found themselves targeted by their former comrades. Those that were not liked by the group or stood out in a bad way found themselves targeted just because they were different. And then Xander decided to strike at me.”

Alex swallowed heavily. “Sophie was pregnant at the time. We’d been trying for a long time to have a child and we weren’t having a lot of luck. Finally, a miracle happened. She became pregnant and we were about as happy as we could be. I’d decided to finish trade school so I could become the welder I was meant to be, and that forced me to be away from the house for long periods of time. Well, Xander had a score to settle with me. And that’s why he decided to target Sophie one day when she left the house to get groceries.”

“Oh my god, Alex,” said Jenna as tears formed in her eyes. “That animal killed her?”

Alex nodded. “Him and a group of followers beat her to death. They stalked her until they could get her alone and then they killed her. All just because Xander wanted to prove that he could hurt me. Well, he proved his point. I was devastated by Sophie’s loss, even more so by the loss of our child. I had a huge hole in my heart from her loss but I also found another emotion that was quite strong as well.”

“Vengeance,” whispered Jenna.

Alex nodded. “There was no way I was going to let Xander get away with what he did. Rick was just as angry as I was to lose his sister. He found out about what I was planning to do to them and vowed to help me. Well, we got retribution and more for what they did to Sophie.”

Alex turned to look at her. “Are you sure you want to hear the rest of this? It gets a little gruesome.”

Jenna nodded quickly. “Tell me. Please?”

Alex took a deep breath. “We cornered Xander and his men outside one of their local hangouts, a trashy bar on the side of the interstate highway. Rick was the one to draw them out at which point I quickly took out his men with a rifle from close range. When there was only Xander left, I ditched the rifle and closed the distance. I beat him to a pulp, Jenna. I didn’t stop punching him until his face was completely bashed in and my fist was covered in blood. There was nothing left of him, no features to even recognize him by. I took out on his face what he did to my life.”

“Good,” whispered Jenna. “He deserved it by what you told me.”

Alex shrugged. “He did but it meant the end of my life as I knew it. Rick and I were charged with murder. We were swiftly convicted and thrown in prison to serve life sentences. It was a sentence that I was happy to serve, if only because I got some retribution for Sophie but I did hate how quickly my life had changed. I should have been a father and a husband, maybe potentially a welder too, but here I am instead. That’s why when the colony program came up, I volunteered after Rick talked me into it. He was the one that said we could get our lives back in check. And he’s been the one telling me that I can move on after Sophie. Even if it meant getting a companion as the program stipulated.”

Jenna started to flush again as she looked in his direction. “Alex, are you even in the position to move on after what happened? I mean, this was only two years ago that she died, right? And you’ve been in cryo-sleep for a good portion of that time on the Racine. I guess what I’m asking is does your heart still belong to your wife?”

“I’ve asked myself that very same question every day since joining the program,” admitted Alex. “And it gets hard at times, it really does. But as much as I loved her, she’s not coming back. Everyone that I knew told me that I had to move on someday, that I couldn’t live in the past forever. In a way, they’re right. I wouldn’t have entered this program if I didn’t feel like I could start over again with someone new. I knew that getting a companion, getting you as a companion, would force me to confront those feelings again. And do you want to know something?”

“What’s that, Alex?”

Alex forced a small smile. “This is the first time I’ve told the entire story to anyone since it happened. I don’t exactly know what that means. Maybe it means I’m ready to move on. I guess only time will tell, but what I’m telling you now is that I’m willing to leave the past in the past. I’m ready to move forward all the same.”

He was rewarded with another one of her heart-stopping smiles. Jenna scooted closer to him again until their shoulders touched and she looked genuinely pleased that he’d shared his story with her.

“Thank you, Alex,” she whispered, bumping her shoulder against his. “Thank you for telling me. I hope we can make that future happen.”

“I hope so too, Jenna. I really do.”