Nolan stares over the rifle, not in inspection, but with worry. He did tell me earlier that the gun he used back in Ta'Shiala pretty much blew up in his face. Maybe this would have done the same. It was unlikely, obviously, this was freshly stolen from the ASS itself. I thought he might as well learn, it's a cruel galaxy out there, and part of the job was often blowing people's brains out.

"This is a bit... heavy, innit?" He remarks, a bit muffled to me over the noise cancelling headphones.

"It will keep you alive," Mikhail, this Russian guy who runs the armoury, shouts from the end of the shooting range.

"Go on then," I say, "Give it your best shot."

Nolan relaxes himself and stares down the rifle's iron sights, aiming at the crudely armoured mannequin positioned twenty metres off. He pulls the trigger, before realising it was stuck in place.

"The safety's on," I tell him.

"Right." He turns the rifle. "How do I turn it off?"

I point it out, "Just this little switch here."

"Okay."

"And put the butt of the gun to your shoulder. Firmly. Recoil can be a nightmare on these things."

Once more, he relaxes, sinking the rifle into his shoulder. He aims at the target, placing his finger on the trigger, and—

"Keep it on single fire mode, by the way," I bring up. "Settings are here."

He sighs, very much frustrated. Nolan switches, prepares himself again, and pulls the trigger.

"The second engine just went," I said, not long after the ship exited subspace. I pulled back the throttle, shutting the engines off and dispersing the red warning signs.

It had been... at least ten hours since I did those dodgy repairs. During that time, I decided to get familiar with at least some of the controls. Flying this thing was like doing one of those egg and spoon races in primary school, except the yolk was already oozing from the dozen cracks throughout the shell. And somehow, some-fucking-how, we qualified for the finish line.

"The journey remained successful," J'Kkreh said. "I told you the vessel would hold."

"Well, your highness," I said, "It's not much use of it holding if it cannot go anywhere now, is it?"

He paused for a second, "No, I suppose not."

"And I don't supposed AA operates in this part of space."

"AA?"

"Forget it."

A screen suddenly popped up, INCOMING TRANSMISSION, it said, strangely feeling like a breath of fresh air after all the warning signs. I pressed accept, and a Russian man started speaking through the console, "Starship Mc... McSpaceyFace? Starship McSpaceyFace, please submit your credentials, over."

"Credentials? Right, right. Hey, listen," I said to the Russian, leaning back on my chair, "Both our engines are just... well, one I think is dangling and the other might explode and I have no idea what to do."

There was some silence from their end. "State your business, please."

"I am transpor—"

The Russian guy then interrupted me, speaking in his own language. It was clear he was speaking to someone else, I just about managed to hear a voice in the background. That same voice then took over, "Abdi, it is great to see you!"

"Errr, hi?"

"Sorry about Baurzahn here, he's new. So, which job is it this time?"

"I'm transporting someone, I guess. Prince J'Kkreh?"

"Yes, yes, the Ehnid."

"Listen, I don't supposed you do me a favour... old friend?" I cringed just saying that, I didn't even know the guy's name.

Another moment of silence came, he knew something was up. I wondered why I even bothered pretending, maybe I just didn't want to offend him, he sounded really happy to see me, after all.

Whoever was on the other end finally spoke, "Is everything okay?"

"Our engines are gone," I casually told him.

"Right? Are you okay?"

I might as well have told him. I gave him a quick run down, obviously he was baffled, but he, who said his name was Sacha, stayed nice, and told us that a tow was coming.

"That was lucky," J'Kkreh said.

Well, funny thing, it did blow up in his face. He did manage to hit the mannequin in the shoulder after six misses, but then something inside malfunctioned maybe, and now all of a sudden, Doctor Williams is pulling shrapnel out of Nolan's face in the infirmary. I should be worried more for my friend, but bloody hell, that rifle cost me nearly a grand.

"Ow, fuck!" He cries. "Jesus Christ, could you at least give me some anaesthetic or something?!"

The Doctor then offers him her joint, blowing out all the smoke. "Here."

"You're joking, right?"

"Anaesthetics are expensive out here, kid. Come back to me when your chest has been blown open." She puts the joint back in her mouth, and tears another piece out.

"Fuck!"

"All right, that's the last one. Hold still now." The Doctor grabs a regenerator from the side, and slowly begins healing all the wounds on Nolan's face. "If you don't mind, I want to do a scan on you."

"Why?"

"Just something for the files in case you're ever in here again. And you likely will be."

Nolan gains a few additions to the collection of scars on his face, but the wounds are all cleared and sealed up in the end.

"I don't need to take anything off, do I?" Nolan asks.

"Feeling embarrassed are we?" She gestures her head over to me.

"Oh piss off, Carrie," I tell her, reading some translated Russian messages on my mobile.

"I'm just messing. No, Nolan," the Doctor says. She cracks her aging back, and grabs a scanner. A bit of a noise goes off from it, uploading all the data about his body. "Well, that's weird."

"What's weird?" Nolan asks, very much worried.

"You haven't got a liver."

"You have memory loss," the medic, Tariq Saidov, said to me. I was in the infirmary of the ship transporting mine, and Sacha I guess just wanted to make sure we were all right.

"Memory loss?" I repeated.

"It's clear you cannot remember anything from... perhaps the past few years? His highness there told me you were quite intoxicated. I find it highly unlikely you have brought yourself into this situation through alcohol - bumping your head, maybe - but thar appears to be the most plausible explanation as of now. What I cannot understand, however, is your backstory."

"What are you on about?"

"Earth is cut off from here, you understand that, yes?"

My eyes widened. "What?"

"To my knowledge, we have not had anyone come from Earth in fifteen years. The... wormhole between here and Earth has been cut. Now, how old are you?"

"Twenty-f—" I cut myself off, and did the maths in my head. "Well, twenty-seven I guess. Then I finished processing what Saidov said about Earth. "Hang on did you say we're cut off?"

"Yes. You did have a proper life in Britain, didn't you?"

"Right?"

"Well, someone your age wouldn't experience all of that. It all may be as a result of something surrounding cryogenics. Maybe."

Immediately, I called bullshit. "What if I'm just from Earth?"

"And how would you have gotten here?"

I paused. "How far are we?"

"Thousands of light-years away. It would take decades to find a subspace route back to Earth."

"So I'm stuck here?"

"Yes."

Another pause came from me, realising I had not processed any of this at all. "Do you have any beer?"

"I haven't got a liver?!" Nolan exclaims.

"There's augmentations in its place, if that makes you feel any better," the Doctor says. "You might want to stay away from any EMPs, though."

He looks over to me. "Do you have a liver?!"

"Two tiny ones, apparently." I lift my shirt a bit, revealing the scar from the drunken surgery on my abdomen.

"Two?!"

"A medical marvel, she is," The Doctor states. She suddenly gets a notification on her flip-phone. "All right, get out. Some idiot's just blown their leg off in the engine room."

The hissing cry of J'Kkreh in the medical bay could be heard all the way in the ship's break room. Apparently, he stepped in glass. That's right, glass. I don't know how given the fact the ship wasn't exactly like the landfill of mine earlier, all I knew was that it managed to puncture his exoskeleton, and now Saidov was pulling it all out.

One of the crew members, a tanned humanoid, patterned cracks all over her forehead, just told me in what little English they could manage to ignore it. They should have been using some anaesthetics or something, but judging by all the rust on this vessel, I was surprised they could afford to hold this ship together.

Out the window, the ship had already breached Juno IV's atmosphere. And sighted below was a vast, rocky terrain of mossy hills and grey lakes. Through the clouds, we were now subject to a heavy drizzle, water droplets covered the window within a matter of minutes.

Metallic infrastructure began to slowly replace the mossy hills, I think a lot of them were farms, greenhouses, the like. Eventually, they evolved into towns and then I finally gained the view of a bustling metropolis. Vernadsky. It wasn't major major, like Birmingham or Brussels, or any city back on Earth. There weren't enough colourful lights or skyscrapers for that. The place just seemed... cold. Just some settlement in the arse-end of the galaxy.

Another of the Humanoids, this one with paler skin, spoke in Russian over the radio. Two minutes, and we had landed. They lowered the McSpaceyFace first from the underbelly, and a crew below had pulled it out of the way.

J'Kkreh came over to me, and told me, "We are leaving now. My people will be expecting me."

"How's your leg?" I asked him.

"It is... how do you say? A bit shit."

We left the starship, entering the busy starport below, amd meeting with multiple more of J'Kkreh's kind below, these ones wearing either decorated wrappings or armour. I was beginning to think that J'Kkreh had been a nudist.

They conversed in patterned hisses, one of the armoured Ehnids crawled over to me, passing on what appeared to be an envelope.

"All right, see you," I said to J'Kkreh.

"I do hope not," the overgrown daddylonglegs said, and then skittered off with his people. No word of thanks.

I opened up the envelope. Inside were two thick stacks of golden-printed strips of paper, wrapped in a rubber band and the writing very unfamiliar. Were they business cards?

"Mila!" A Russian man called a distance from my side. He was probably in his late thirties, perhaps early forties. Hair slicked back with some cheap hair product and a goatee in desperate need of trimming. The Russian was wearing a camouflage army outfit, similar to some of the security guards and such roaming the starport, sharing some of their white, blue and red banner patches.

I strolled over to him. "Sacha?"

"Yep. Enjoy your trip?"

"I mean... I guess? The prince was being a bit of a dick."

"Royalty. What do you expect?"

"So errr, what exactly is this?" I showed him the paper rolls.

"Your payment."

"Payment? These things?"

"Were you expecting digital currency?" He asked.

"Oh, this is... paper money? Paper money, all right, I can hand— how much is this?"

"Those are Dominion Sovereigns, the golden prints are each worth five-hundred."

"Is that a lot?"

"Half of one of those stacks could afford you the repairs for your vessel," he gestured his chin to the McSpaceyFace, which was in the process of being transported somewhere else in the starport.

"They won't knick my stuff, will they?"

"As long as you can pay them," he said. "Are you hungry?"

The second after he mentioned it, my stomach rumbled a bit. "All I've had in the past ten hours was a stale granola bar."

"Come on, I know a place."

Leaving the starport, since I had nowhere to go at this rate, I was met with a strange, salty smell from the city. Fumes were present across many buildings, and some of the cars driving by even exhausted a grey smoke. It all appeared the same on the ground as it seemed in the air. We took his car parked just outside. It wasn't any model I recognised, this looked strangely ancient. No touch screen, no cup holders, nothing else of the sort. Even the radio seemed to be one of those old ones with the notches. Car stereos, I think they're called.

I entered the passenger seat, and put my seatbelt on. "Did you rob a museum or something?" I asked Sacha.

He chuckled. "Yes. I made sure there were no witnesses."

I turned to him, my eyes widening in a bit of horror.

Sacha's smile faded. "I'm obviously joking, Mila."

"Right, right."

"They told me you have memory loss." I nodded at him. Sacha started the car. "How far do you remember?"

"Last thing I remember was getting drunk at a new years party back on Earth."

"Drunk? Well, that would explain a l— I'm sorry, did you just say Earth?"

"Me and my friends, took a ride down to London, got drunk."

"A woman your age? Earth?"

I then knew this was going to be a thing from now on. As if I wasn't already stressing enough I couldn't get back. The medic told me I was in cryo or something during my alcoholic adventures, and the more I would explain to these people how rubbish their theories were, the more they might think that I was probably just a loony. Besides, what proof did I have? It wasn't as if I could tear open my head and go through a very embarrassing photo album to file as evidence.

"You know what? Just forget it."

After another of the ancient cars passed by, Sacha turned onto the road. He turned the radio on, dialling the notch to some guys chatting in Russian to each other.

"What model is this car?"

He was still bothered by my whole Earth thing, but still said to me, "J'ra-Sai. I bought it off a Loreqi."

"A what now?"

"They look like us, lines on their forehead, golden eyes?"

Immediately, my mind went to the tanned humanoid back on the tow ship. "Right. What's wrong with Human models? Or Farahali ones, some of their countries are good with cars."

"Cheap, easy to replace." He then couldn't keep hiding his bothers anymore. "I'm sorry, Earth? Are you sure? Okay, how long ago was the party?"

I leaned back on the seat, sealing my eyes in thought. Bright fireworks popped into my mind, being the numbers '2300'. "Two y— oh shit, two years ago."

"Two years?!" The smile had completely gone now.

"Drunk for two years. How am I still alive?!"

Sacha calmed, turning the radio's volume down. "Okay, run me through everything about your life."

"What?"

"Mila, I just want to know if you're not bullshitting me. Or going on some strange schizo episode again."

"Again? I've been awake for... not even a day. I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. Hell, I didn't even know who you were until an hour ago. Why would I lie to you?"

"Just run me through."

He wasn't going to stop heckling me about it, so I took up with his urgent request. "Fine, okay. I was err, I was born in the late seventies in Nairobi. Because of my parents' jobs, I moved to Birmingham in the UK when I was seven, errr, I went to Queen Anne's Boarding School for Girls (shithole). After fucking up there, I went to George Stan—"

"Okay, okay. Before you got drunk. What did you do?"

"Oh erm, err, I worked in tech support."

"Tech support? Which company?" He asked, before beeping his horn to the military vehicle in front of us. He rolled the window down, stuck his head out and cursed at them in his native tongue.

"Joseon. I joined back in '98."

He was still pissed. "Those assholes are still around?!"

I nodded, suddenly having the urge to direct him to their website. "Well, they were last time I checked... two years ago. Can I stop now?"

"National insurance number."

"Are you fucking—" I took in a breath, and calmed down. "Oh God, what was it? AW 32 58... 20 A."

After a few seconds of processing all this information, Sacha stated, "You're from Earth."

"Are you sure? You don't want my IP Address, or maybe my credit card number?"

"Two years ago?"

"It was the dawn of a new century, I don't just get drunk at new years parties."

There was some silence. Sacha then said, "Do you remember how you got here? A subspace route?"

"Just a party with some friends. And I think someone tried to raid parliament naked."

He said something in Russian to himself. "Nobody will believe you, you know."

"How come you believe me?"

"Too much detail in that backstory. Plus, there was something strange about you the whole time.

"I mean I was drunk."

"You didn't seem so," Sacha slowed down, as we got caught up in traffic. I was thinking what he meant by that. Before this, the worst case I got drunk was waking up in a walrus costume outside of ASDA.

"I don't exactly think you can hide the fact you're drunk."

"And I don't believe anybody noticed you were. I mean you were strange, I won't lie about that. People your age do not act so... I can't describe it."

"Posh?"

"Not posh, no." Sacha parked in an alley, and said to me, "Come on."

He led me to a vibrant, market area, just as it started to rain. An oasis of light in the grey of this city. Goods of all kinds sold in shops and kiosks, ranging between foods and souvenirs, as if anyone would want a souvenir from this place. Passing through, we arrived in what was likely the city's Chinatown. It had all the usual decorations and architecture you would see in one.

"In here," Sacha said, opening the door to a restaurant. The sign was in Russian, but underneath were the words 'Taste of Asia'.

It was a basement restaurant, not much to say about this place, other than all the different Asian flags flying around, from Japan to Tibet, and then from Vietnam to Baluchistan. There was even a holo— well, no, it was a television. Flatscreen. Silently playing the news, VBN. The place was packed, mainly Humans but also those 'Loreqi' people, a couple Janrayi Arvans too. The Chinese waiter, who thankfully could speak English, directed us to our tables, we immediately ordered drinks, the menu thankfully having an English side, him jasmine tea, me a pint of lager, hoping to forget about the very real chance I was never going to see my loved ones again. Unfortunately, Sacha told me to lay off the alcohol, to which I sighed, asking for a glass of coke.

Before I began to browse, I asked Sacha, "So... what was I?"

"Hmm? Well, you were a contractor. People paid you for transport."

"So I was just a cab driver?"

"A heavily armed one."

"Of course," I say to myself, sighing.

"You were not a serial killer, don't worry about that."

"But I have killed people, right?"

"Oh yes, definitely," he casually stated. "Drunk you had some very funny stories."

I dug my faces into my palms. I felt like crying there. This is going to sound cheesy, but the idea of me taking a life just had too. No tears came from me, though. My palms dropped back to the table, and I took a deep breath.

"You and me? What were we?" A disturbing thought came to mind. "We weren't... you know, were we?"

"No!" Sacha's smile dropped. "I'm happily married. We were just work friends."

"Thank Christ."

"Why, someone at home waiting for you?"

"Two years... he, well, everyone probably thinks I'm dead." Back into my palms I went.

The Chinese waiter came back around, providing our drinks, and asking in English if we were ready to order. We did, I dropped my arms again and randomly picked some rice off the menu, and Sacha just asked for some Pad Thai.

"Good food here, you know," he said. "Go anywhere else, you will end up with syphilis."

"Of course you do." The sound of the kitchen sizzled up, steam engulfed ever person going in or out. Better than the fumes outside. It did prompt me to ask, "What's the deal with this city? It's not really the nicest, is it?"

"Not used to all the grey, I see," he said, analysing each word on the menu.

"It looks like—"

"The Soviet Union?"

"No, I was going to say Skegness."

He was about to say something, then just chuckled, clearly pretending he knew what shithole I was referring to. "That is a new one. The city used to be a Russian colony, the first one on this world."

"I could think of nicer places to set one up." I glared out the now drenched window.

"Well, it's better than most places out here. You won't get sold into slavery for one. Less likely to be bombarded from orbit.'

I stared at him, utterly confused. "I'm guessing I haven't woken up in a very nice place."

"Understatement of the year."

"What was last year's?"

"Something with one of our politicians. You wouldn't get it."

"I forgot to mention, your English is very good," I said.

"I speak three other languages for the radio. I recommend it out here. You do speak other languages, yes? Swahili, I'm assuming?"

"Are there any Swahili speakers out here?"

"Not really. There is a town, an hour flight, used to be part of East Africa before we took over."

My trust in him wained slightly. "Took over?"

"Not like that," he said, "Long story short, when we were cut off from the core systems, we had to improvise. Most people went with an Au— well, I think he is British. They went with a British General backed by multiple coroporations, formed the Allied Sovereign Systems (absolute mudaki). Do not bother doing jobs with them. They call themselves a 'beacon of stability', but they are just oligarch bootlickers. A lot of us did not like that road. So, about a year after that, many settlements, old UN military outposts, and so on, formed something called the Vernadsky Accord."

"Excuse me," the voice of a Gairik man came from the side. He was lanky, missing a pointed ear, and wearing camouflage clothing, quite similar to Sacha's.

"All right?" I said to him.

"I sorry, I am not interrupting anything am—" He sealed his eyes for a couple seconds, then asked, "You Mila Abdi?"

"Don't tell me. Space Taxi?"

"Pad Thai." A Senveri Arvan waitress came around, holding a tray of our food. I would go here again, fast service.

"That's me. She has the Tikka Masala."

She placed the food down, and left. I said to the elderly lady, "Sorry about that. What did you want?"

"I come from the Arms Guild in this city, we want to hire you."

Sacha got confused, and asked the man something in Russian. Eventually, after a short untranslatable conversation, he told me to, "Carry on."

"Look, no. I'm not going to take any job at this point," I said to the Gairik.

"We have money."

"I'm not too concerned with money, thanks."

Without saying a word, the Gairik sighed, and began to make his way out of the restaurant.

"You understand you have to make money out here, yes?" Sacha said to me after swallowing a mouthfull of noodles.

"I can do it a different way. I'm not risking my life on that glorified camper van."

"Doing what exactly? Tech support?"

"I... errrr." He had a point. Okay, risking my life for transporting government officials had not seemed like the best option. But from the look of this city, I highly doubted anyone would want to take some person who once worked a job in tech support. I thought perhaps I could open up a mobile... an ice cream ship. Those exist, right? No? Okay then. It was something mobile.

I sighed, went with option one, and ran off out to the Gairik.

"Okay, take it for a spin, try it all out," Bao says over the cockpit's comms. I slowly push the throttle forward, feeling the rumbling of the new thrusters. The Centaurus had popped by a port on Draconia, and after some of the crew members decided to get involved in some skirmishes on that snowy world, the spoils they brought back involved ship parts. Conveniently ones linked with the McSpaceyFace's model, certainly making the lives of the engineers far easier. The hull has mainly been repaired, now it is just a matter of the hardware.

The screens on the window remains green, nothing is exploding yet, and I'm still moving forward. The pressure is rising the more I push, and yellow begins to creep into the green. I rotate the ship, checking the manoeuvrability; it's quite clunky, but manageable, it isn't as if I'm going on a race.

"It doesn't seem to be the next Tsar Bomba for now. How are things on your end?" Bao asks.

I flip a few switches and then press on the comms. "Oh, comme çi, comme ça, I guess. I'm going to give it an extra push. See how things are, okay?"

"Copy."

The rattles soon grow more intense, some of the displays on the screen shift red. I continue, testing to check the capabilities. More red on the screens, and the electricals and hardware audibly strain. Eventually, I rotate the engines around, attempting to slowly my venture, and turn them off, the chaos soon stopping.

I press on the comms. "We are going to need to do more work. Should be up and running properly in the next few days."

I was up and running and I had no idea what I was doing. This was a mistake accepting the job from that Gairik, I should have just waited until I figured out how to fly. It was luckily just transporting medicine, I wasn't exactly chauffeuring Queen Victoria III around now, was I?

I didn't understand why flying had to be so hard. Why couldn't we just... I don't know, write things down and tell it where to go. Some starships do that, why couldn't this? Hell, maybe just label everything at the least. There was a manual in one of the cabinets downstairs, but that had more than enough pages to fill a library, and it was in Arabic. Come to think of it, I think that was a Qu'ran. Eventually, I found some DVDs. Actual DVDs. I was told this ship was from the early twenties, sure, but nobody actually recorded on those things, right? Then again, I did have a Qu'ran on board, so at this point you could have left an old iPhone in the fridge, and I wouldn't be surprised.

After scrounging around in the cockpit, I found something to insert the disc into. And for the next two days I was binging and experimenting with the controls and sorting out some maintenance, all still whilst residing in the Juno System. My deadline was six more days, and about twelve light-years, that should be enough time, right?

Sacha was considering helping me out, but of course he had work. We did consider getting someone to help me out, but all of Sacha's friends available were either busy, unqualified, or didn't even speak English. But it was just a transport mission, what was the worst that could have happened?