Ever since they had given him that bizarre translator, his memories were hitting him over the head like bricks.

Relentlessly.

It was honestly getting to the point where he wished it would stop, but whatever triggered the effect seemed to act on it's own accord. Spitting and firing, as the new neural connections continued to ping and trigger the old and forgotten.

Honestly the feeling was more difficult to cope with than he had thought possible,as the memories could be anything at all. As if the mind's equivalent to being force-fed, he could only grit his teeth and watch each memory in it's entirety, while trying to maintain focused on the tasks at hand.

Problem was, he had an actual job to do now, and the random bursts were starting to border on the point of ridiculous.

They always started with a headache, usually giving him a moment to head back to his quarters and hide behind a closed door and a gravity field. Sometimes though, they just hit him like a bolt of lightning, and there was nothing he could do about it.

His stare down with the new crew member had been one of those, and he was extremely glad that crazy six legged thing had backed down. There would have been trouble with this one, and his blood might have ended up on the walls if he'd needed to fight with a crippling headache... though, maybe the other guy's would have, too- as it wasn't a perfectly peaceful memory he was riding out.

He groaned as it formed.

Just bits and pieces now, but any moment...

He barely had time to fall into his room and feel the embrace of gravity before it started to crash into him. The barrier broke, and it came at him in a flood beyond his control.

...

“Tough shift today, how you holding up?”

He glanced up at the monitor to see the familiar face of his relief squad leader. A smile on her face as always, she was optimistic to the point of insanity. “I'm doing alright, glad it's finally over though.”

“Get some rest champ, we're going to be pulling doubles from here on in.” Her smile held even through that. He was amazed at her dedication sometimes. Unlike her, when he reached the point of exhaustion, he could watch the world burn and be okay with it.

That probably was why he wasn't a squad leader.

"Understood." He chuckled then, as the communication line broke off. This was a real mess they were in.

As he docked his fighter into the lockport, he listened as the air breach cleared the chamber and pressure was established. The lights above his ship went green in a sudden click, and his hatch opened to free him from his confinement. Zero gravity awaited him as he pried himself out of the belted seat of his ship and into the hanger. Directly outside of the ship was a steel ladder he used to pull himself up towards to rotation merger. When he had first started he had accidentally let go of the thing, and had to drift around for a full hour before managing to get back to it. Zero gravity was a giant pain in the ass sometimes.

As he pulled himself through the secondary airlock he joined the group of pilots in the rotation merger, as they waited for the next shuttle. All of them were dead on their feet, sleep deprivation evident. It was getting rough recently, there was no getting around the fact that they had been undermanned for a full year now. Ever since first contact, and then the slaughter at second. Shit was fubar, through and through.

With a hissing gasp, the sealed door slipped open and the pilots pulled themselves into the pod-ship that awaited on the other side. Finally, they could go home- even if it was just for a day. He felt a smile rise to his face as he strapped in and stared out the window. Home sweet home.

The ring station below was one of hundreds, all of which had been assembled outside of earth orbit. Evacuation was well underway, they just had to keep things going on schedule. That had been getting a little tricky though. Hard to bring people up when there was so much debris, they were forced to limit planet to orbit travel based on the "weather patterns" of all the shit floating around.

As he looked out upon the great rotating ring city, he glimpsed the moon as it made it's way slowly through the sky. It had been fixed with ever practical weapon humanity had to offer, as had the other moons of the system. Eradication of the projectile threats had been of the highest priority, and so far all they had lost were the orbiting bodies past Jupiter. Nobody really gave a shit about Pluto, but when the rest went, people started to get concerned.

That was good though, they should be concerned. If they thought this was all going to blow over and by, they were crazy.

Whatever it was that had established itself on Pluto, it hadn't stopped. They had watched it in curiosity from orbit, and eventually sent a team down to see what they could come up with. Brave bunch.

They were the first casualties.

Whatever it was, it consumed pretty much anything it got it's roots into. On the most basic level, all it seemed to do was modify material so that it could continue to go on and modify more material. People, ships, planets- it didn't seem to matter much, and it was only a matter of time until it finished with that cold desolate rock and showed us what it could really do.

Damn thing blew up a planet.

Pluto was there, looking a bit strange of course as whatever it was had spread over it's surface, and in an instant the tiny planet was gone. It had been replaced by hundreds of asteroids shooting out in every direction. Some of which made it towards other matter by pure dumb luck. It was the lottery method of distribution, but with gravity pulling some of those into orbit, it was working.

Jupiter lucked out, having a boat load of moons to establish long range interception units paid off in spades. No such luck for the others. Saturn, and everything past it was simply outside of the protected range. It hit those and began turning them into ticking time bombs, and at the same time managed to spread into the inner asteroid belt. Collectively this was when people came to realize we were experiencing the large scale version of being in deep shit.

Cities grew larger as the pod came in for a landing on grassy soil. Automated systems checked and beeped as their belts released and the doors opened. Stepping out of the pod, he felt his body embraced by the artificial sensation of gravity. He checked the digital display on his forearm. It was already 20:25, but if he hurried, she might still be-

A colossal explosion rippled through the night sky, and he was thrown to the ground.

...

With a gasp he broke from the trance. He was alone. The bare room was all that greeted him, dim lights above him, and the soft mat beneath. The air was still, and no sounds could be heard from the hall. The only thing he could hear was the steady pulsing of the ship's engines, and the rise and fall of his chest. He lay there for hours.

Though it had nothing to do with the ship's temperature, the human felt chilled to his core.

...

[Xios]

Tracking down the trade ship had not been hard; all the work had already been done for him. He simply had to follow the crowd. Xios felt a rush of freedom as the ship left port. He was finally breaking out of the Union's greasy clutches: once and for all.

Grabbing a small civilian shuttle, Xios had attached himself to a group of job seekers looking to join up on the famous vessel. They had taken the fastest route to arrive at the next outpost's port before the freighter, and they were not alone. Dozens of civilians milled about in the cargo lobby, some looking for trade, others looking to stand out enough to earn a place on the crew. The regular staff in the bay had a variety of irritated looks that his synthetic's global translator interpreted. Military outposts like this one were not used to large influxes of nonmilitary personnel, luckily though, Xios wasn't a civilian.

Not yet, anyways.

Pulling rank got him to the front of the room, and after a few conversations with the standing lieutenant, Xios was placed next to the awaiting mechanized units and their pilots in front of the loading port. On his military linked network, he readied the documents and digitally signed several hundred of them. He had thought through exactly how to retire several hundred times over, and now he had the motivation to pull the trigger.

Now, he just had to wait a bit longer.

Admiring the view from his position near the open bay doors. Thick glass waited, but beyond them, out before him stretched thick layers of clouds. This was one of the few worlds along the border systems that had never been consumed, and therefore had never been purged. Below the platform was a primal world that had probably never even seen the stars above. It had been announced as a class two, non-intelligent zone, when the shuttle had landed. He supposed the military had larger concerns than trying to domesticate a planet they would be all but abandoning as they pushed past.

More shuttles cruised in, streaming through the many loading gates of the platform, or docking along side them.

To join a trade crew... it had never really been considered as an option before now. Despite all the careful planning, the actual means of his retirement had been left undecided. Considering his current profession, such a position might seem like a large step down when it came to prestige. After 400 cycles of military service though, Xios had all the prestige he could care for. The fact he had lived as long as he had could be more attributed to luck then skill, and his species rarely got to choose their own careers, often being carefully monitored to be certain they didn't fall back into their ancestor's mistakes.

To have some control over his surroundings would be a nice change of pace.

Ships came and went, as he waited.

Xois had often thought of the comparisons between FTL engine travel and warp-jumping. Statistically the FTL ships were much more dangerous, as they had a 0.1 percent chance of "Potentially fatal scenarios" over long term studies. Those of course, were based on the Union as a whole, and not any specific sector. The fringes were likely to be far worse, the inner systems far better. Compared to Warp-jumping as a whole, FTL flight was similar to spinning a light rifle chamber and putting it to your central nervous system: stupidly dangerous.

Those who thought this way missed a very crucial point.

Unlike a crew member on a Trade vessel, Xios had been as close to physically forced into his military position as the Union deemed legally possible. He suspected that the only reason his species was still in existence was purely because they were the only creatures with intellect that could fill these much needed roles.

Statistics aside, there was no ability to interact with your survival odds as a warp jumper. You either lived, or something went wrong and you died. Lowering that statistic to a rarity did not change the fact. Of the 1000 Gemynd that had gone through training when he joined, to the best of his knowledge, at least 700 of those had died. A majority of the rest had retired, trapped in the political gridlock of the inner systems. Without military service, they did not have permission to leave. They were simply tools. After use were to be put into containment until they died.

Just a few examples of the red tape that came with the classification of a "Highly dangerous" Species.

Until he had stayed in for over 400 cycles, he didn't even have the legal right to act on his own accord. It was an interesting chunk of bureaucratic nonsense that had been thrown in just to seem as though the Gemynd were getting a fair bargain. Obviously no creature would risk the odds of warp jumping for that long. Not unless they were clinically insane.

Well, Xios did wonder about that sometimes. Still, he had called their bluff anyways, and his potential insanity could be sorted out some other time.

A ping notified that the sector credit tab was finally connected and operational. The tab would be maintaining his digital currency for this sector, and had to go through a lengthy process of identification and connection before the device could unlock for use. A quick glance was pleasantly rewarded with a long list of digits. An extremely long list. It seemed the investments he had left on the fringe had done quite well for themselves over the last 100 cycles.

He was easily richer than every other individual on the platform combined, perhaps worth more than the platform itself, and that greatly simplified things.

One way or another: He would be riding first class.