Through near shattered windows, a maimed almost rag of what once was a solar sail was all I could see sans the void of space. Now the damage was awesome from what you can call a last stand, and many fundamental mechanics of the vessel had been hit, however the annihilation of half of my ability to steer at the helm was what I readily labeled to be the grandest of all the ship had endured. I continued to watch it in its ruined state long enough that I considered committing a punch, a kick– or any physical sort of assault– to a nearby bolted table full of pictures of people I didn't know, which were glued on to the table. I was up and ready to do it until, when I lifted a fist, I saw the state of my hands; I had already forgotten; they were encased in a material wet and drenched. 

So I held out my hands in front of me for inspection, while the remains of the sail flailed around in the solar wind– that I could see from between my fingers and through the window that backgrounded the sight– and I understood the finality of the circumstances: there was shrapnel in my hands, still. So much shrapnel. And I knew because some light came from the window– and the others around it in the eastern hall– and told me that my hands were massacred like maybe what you would do to a chocolate chip cookie: place the chips in the dough, moving the dough, entering the dough, disconfiguring the dough in a horrible preparation for the oven that invariably awaited all treats of that kind. They all have to face the oven.

Now the wound wasn’t what I would call terminal, though; I already bandaged it, but I had to triage, and I had simply left them alone for too long. They ached mechanically and around the joints– as if I had been climbing for all of the day prior and then today; it hurt to manipulate them, and the bandages had gotten so deeply red. I didn’t understand finality as in my own death from that injury– no, I understood from the truth that I cannot operate my ship with these ruined hands. Under my breath, I cursed the absurd jurisdictional technicalities that had wrought all this on me. I gnashed my teeth and sighed through the cracks between them.

 “You are pathetic,” I said to the window. 

The caulk sealing that I had done all throughout the eastern hall was shoddy but still capable of maintaining the proper difference between the vacuum of space, and the pressure of the cabins– only just capable, however.

Red faced, I stepped away from the window, and I let my hands fall down helplessly to my sides. They were ruined.

“The Army is hunting me, yet here I am, an invalid with a broken spacecraft,” I ranted to the eastern hallway. My ship wasn’t very big, and the hallway had only two rooms at the left, three windows at the right– all of them nearly shattered– and at the end the door to the cabin. So I suppose that my meaningless words could be heard from every point in the ship that was still pressurized, including the upper boards that I had often forgotten to clean. Wooden boards made up the ceiling, and a kind of brown fabric composed the interior walls. The previous owners had likely intended to install something like an attic, because the whole place looked something like an RV, but I stole it before the construction was finished. Now I’ve been there– sealed it tight– but that was all only on the day I got it.

I continued ranting as I walked up the hallway to the second room just before the cabin at the left: medical. The whole place was in disarray– not just the room I mentioned, but even the hallway I walked to get there because there was, although I wouldn’t call myself a huge documenter, a certain amount of manifests required to prove validity of certain objects that I have acquired, if my meaning is clear. Those items also require storage, and so the room had two designations in reality, although the sign was short so it was only ‘Filing’ and nothing more. That so-called filing room– which was on the other side of the ship, connected to the western hallway, had been hit. Naturally, I tended to the room shortly since it had very delicate items, naturally, but I had made something that you can call a mistake. And, through some unfortunate events, paper– and very valuable commodities– had gotten everywhere. Those that didn't were those that were lost to space. They had reached even this side, and there was a great amount of papers everywhere as well as some ‘delicate items’ that I had been yet unable to fence. General furniture not unlike that of a house was upturned, too, providing even more inconvenience– they came from the dormitory which was the only other room connected to the eastern hallway, preceding medical, nearest to the rear of the hall.

I closed the bulkhead to medical behind me and mused about strategies that I already knew would fail. I undid the bandages around my right hand.

“If I try to make it to the nebula, I think I will only meet there my end. I will not lose them there. They have no doubt covered that possibility.”

I tossed it into the biological waste bin. I moved to the wash basin and turned the squeaking lever above the faucet and let some water run. I still kept the pressure low, though, because I had not been to a settlement or station for what bordered on dangerously long and water was very important.

“If I pull the sails and stay here, The Army will close in on me. I meet my end in that scenario, too.”

I cleaned the many wounds on my right hand. I reached up into the medical cabinet above the sink, too, and grabbed the tweezers. With my non-dominant hand, I began to remove shards of metal and wood from my right palm over the sink that was gradually made redder and redder by the effort.

Through gritted teeth, “And if I turn back, The Army will be waiting there, too. They’re everywhere, so many… so many.”

More pain, this time from shoddy self-stitching.

“And yet–” a sharp inhale from pain, “Yet here I am, alone, and surrounded. With only the company of stolen items, and weapons that I can no longer use. Maybe ever, if my stitching is that terribile. Or if there is something deeper is in play about this pain in my hands.”

Before the filing room was hit, it was the cabin. From HAVE, of course. Most of them were from that. I hadn’t got in the range of any of the forefront squadrons when the first salvo came. The cabin held firm, but the instruments at the left– the ones for the secondary weapons and routing– were annihilated, still, and I was forced to cover my eyes and face with my hands. Glass and metal and wood. It had set the tone for the encounter.

The stitching was done. It was done by my offhand and subsequently horrible, but it completely stopped the bleeding.

“Grand.”

And then I attempted to begin again with my left hand; the bandages off, the biological waste, however– as I had put my hand under the water– there was a grinding further up, around my elbow, but a bit above. It didn’t hurt any more than the stitches, but it was a dull, fearful pain– a pain that induced fear because of its simplicity. Or rather it induced fear because I had encountered its kind before: the dull, unendingly monotonous pain of a ruined bone.

I had fallen to the ground, ceiling, and even the walls many times, especially during the encounter– and I came to terms with the reality that I couldn’t evade this injury for long like that. It was just the first time it happened on my ship, where I had to deal with it alone. And I felt very cold– and a nauseating feeling. I felt as if The Army was already around me, again, and encircling– choking me to death, a boa constrictor.

So I abandoned the sink and put myself against a wall. I let my weight fall against it– almost like a dear lover, you can say, but I had left any chance of that behind when I made this choice my reality. Only the wall was behind me now. And it was just me and the ship that I very often referred to as ‘she’ for some reason somewhere in the biology of a man very, very far from home– not that I am the kind to get homesick, but, well there is this limit I think every mind has– some arbitrary limit– not necessarily in stone– where they no longer are themselves. Now I think I have found that limit for me. I can admit that to myself, at least.

My heart was uncontrollable. My lungs kept up with it, but that only left me panting and so devoid of breath that I thought that I should die from asphyxiation. I slid down against the wall involuntarily, but maybe rightfully like a man moving to his position of death, that position in death where he is found not in which he has died, because I had already died. It was painful, but not more than the realization. My hands were not the only point of injury, after all, they were just what triage left for last. And my back was destined to have eternal scars. And so were so many other parts. The stitches were almost all gone.

And then it felt like everything was too close and encroaching more and more. There was a darkness in every corner of the room– and above every crack in the planks that constituted the ceiling. And then there were insects– all of them, only of the worst kinds– everywhere, and everywhere; so I needed to get them off. And I was excited now– I started scratching, but only to where to centipedes were at of course– the spiders are no big deal– and I scratched and– inevitably I caught a stitch on my right hand– but I kept going and then, well, of course there was a little blood, but it was only because there was these bugs all over me, and if I just got rid of them, I would finally have time to think about my grand escape– that was going to be successful, rightfully.

And then there was a very loud noise somewhere, and it interrupted me somewhat. The bugs seemed inconsequential. And then I suddenly looked back down at myself and then, ignoring them, focused on my two, bleeding hands. Both bleeding for different reasons. They felt a little numb and I thought it was probably a black widow, so I went and wrapped them both back up again, but with toilet paper this time; the bandages were all used up. So I had to wrap them up with bows since they wouldn’t really stick like gauze does. I made something like a sling for my left hand– it still needed to be set, though.

I turned the bulkhead with my right hand painfully and stepped through the fallen papers and furniture for an immediate investigation for what I hoped was just the ship settling and not yet another leak. Now nothing seemed particularly odd–  there were the moths eating the walls in large clusters there, and the termites here devouring a portion of the ceiling– one plank– that had fallen. A group of cockroaches moving in what you can call a herd across the carpet– I avoided them– and a number of millipedes I itched out of my ear, occasionally.

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The thing about bugs is that they don’t really mean too much alone, and even when there is a group of sufficient size, they never really pose any danger. You can say that it would take a lot of bugs to kill me. You can say that I have a lot of vitality in that way– it would take a lot to bring me to my knees. Or to the ground against a wall.

“Now that’s really what The Army is, isn’t it? A hoard of bugs. They all have their little roles and all– each and every one– but in the end they are nothing but insects, aren’t they?” I spoke to the window again. I recall the cruisers. Those are the ones with the HAVE; they are heavy and long; and they move fast despite what the void of space would suggest. They are not unlike a centipede. They use their width. They broadside in the distance alongside the stars and planets.

And they lined the distance. Everywhere. Hundreds– no closer to thousands. They looked small, but only because they were hundreds of thousands of miles away– truly each is the size of what you would liken to several towns. And each of them equipped with hundreds of the cannons– all loaded with HAVE. And even hundreds of thousands of miles away, they grate a ship like cheese. Or rather they are the machine that implants the holes into the cheese. A line of them– several lines– all firing, broadside at me so far that I couldn’t see them until it was too late. And then suddenly there was a wall of fire coming to me. Hundreds of cannons on each ship and thousands of ships. Millions of projectiles traveling through space all bright and glowing.

But they’re not really all that bad– no, they’re very fine, truely. The thing about HAVE is that it’s slower than most other projectiles, I’ve learned, and so while I did not yet see the cruisers, I saw that which they fired at me. I have become a little of a master of the sails, and there was a wind blowing from a nearby star that I rode– like a surfer a wave– and I altered the angle of the sails to turn and evade. It was grueling and manual; I had reconfigured the ship to run longer and disabled what you can call a kind of electrical power steering into a more mechanical mechanism to shift the sails.

“But even now I imagine them all straight and in a line, all going this one direction that will lead them to me.” I began to lecture the wall now.

“They are all centipedes, though. Nothing more. I will– I will overcome. Them, and anything else.” I punctuated my words by jamming a finger at the wall. “We will overcome, ship.”

I then suddenly remembered that I had left the ship on a particular course that sooner or later would be up and invalid. That is, I set things in order such that a general sort of desired arch would be followed, however once a certain point is passed those calculations would be meaningless, wrong, and will end with me heading the wrong way. And heading the wrong way means that I may meet The Army again.

I considered the dark and infinite void through the windows that surrounded the central wheel in the cabin. Like in other places, there was a general air of destruction here. The unique feature, of course, is the protrusion near the left of the wheel where the exterior underside of the ship was hit by HAVE that would have depressurized the entire place in an instant had it broken the hull. It, however did still destroy the control panels for the secondary weapons and electrical routing systems– although the latter was only what you call a quick access convenience; there is an additional way to route power although it is in the western hallway near to the end– too out of the way to reach during an altercation, and now completely breached and subject to the vacuum of space after an altercation. My eyes focus on the protrusion.

“Again, I am reminded of another way I could have met my end. And this one would have been instant. And I would have been gone before I understood the feeling of death– the threshold– the instantaneous change in life to death, the ultimate derivative of life.”

I was coming down now, and melancholic. I had downgraded the lighting system of the ship some time ago from electricity into candlelight since I was a fan of long hauls. So there was a region of the cabin that was dark and rotten– rotten wood and charcoal fabric– from what was a fire that I had put out– and aside from the light from the windows– the ship was left in total darkness since I had to, of course, snuff out all of the candles to avoid burning alive– another end.

“There were not really any bugs, or any noise,” I informed the helm. A strange light filled the room from the windows from a nearby white star. I had angled the ship earlier to get just near to it– since solar wind is always closest to any supranuclear body– to ride it far, far away, widening the distance between me and the fleet. I was banking now so only a small amount of the star itself was directly visible. Yet its light reached almost everywhere each window could hit. 

Of course the electrical systems– and the main routing control– had already been obliterated from what should have been my true end, so you can say that I had to do a fair amount of homework to get everything in order. Almost everything besides the cabin and medical room-- and the eastern hall-- had been breached and depressurized, so I had to measure the distance of the stars to triangulate myself in the void of space. I had made several maps and put them all along the back wall of the cabin– where there were the two doors on either side to the two halls that constituted the ship’s layout. The maps were in between them, of course. One for handling the vertical axis, one for the first horizontal, and one for the second horizontal, and together they made something of a three dimensional graph of my place in the universe. Of course, I had done all of these calculations after I had successfully bought myself time from The Army– time I am steadily wasting now.

You can call me something of a planner because I had brought a dictionary of solar systems, planets, and stars that I would have been lost and helpless without. Even more helpless without, that is. I verified that it was still in the drawer near the helm.

I was at ease, then, and I began salvaging some of the many candles that had collected near a corner of the cabin. There was never a gravity synthesizer on my ship. So I always angled the ship against the winds of some star so that the force applied by the wind would push against the ship, and against me, similar to an amusement park ride: I am stuck to the floor like I recall being stuck to the walls of a fast-rotating ride as a child back home. It was never perfect, though, and the present orientation of the ship had actually rolled them to that corner behind and to the left of the helm and the central dash that came immediately after it. The was a gap between the central dash and the windows at the front of the ship– the helm and dashboard were something like a kitchen island, made of mostly wood and trimmed with copper, furnished with copper switches and buttons, and built into the floor with a kind of hearty cement mixture that I had put a little rug on for my own comfort. The rug was nowhere to be found, however.

I gathered the candles and placed them fairly around the cabin. I ignited them with a lighter that I cannot do without. So a warm, orange light filled the room, and I would've drawn some curtains if I still had any. I was even more at ease, so I decided that maybe something productive could be done– although I was still hesitant about my arm, I didn’t feel like I was all there to attempt to set it. Not yet, at least. And the same went for the stitching. 'Triage' once again-- or rather something that you can call procrastination.

The captain’s chair had been incinerated from the fire, so I sat down on the dashboard. It has three levels, flat, curved, and then straight as it goes up to just below the ceiling. The flat part was low enough to comfortably sit on in terms of height, but horribly uncomfortable for wood.

“The weapons room is flooded with the vacuum of space, and so is the entire western wing. I am glad that I was so lazy as to move the refrigerator into the cabin, and all the food, because the western wing held the kitchen… and valuable item storage.” I glanced at the refrigerator that I had haphazardly placed at the side of the central control dashboard. Nothing was really being refrigerated-- no power-- but at least there was food in the fridge. Food that would rot, though. I turned away before I fully understood that I was in a wasteland where only bandits and 'the law' roamed-- that would have soiled my good mood.

My eyes settled on the planks of wood that lined the cabin ceiling. So I began addressing them as my audience, continuing my ramblings.

“The dormitory is also flooded, so I’ll have to allocate a place to bathe and other things of that kind.”

One of the planks moved and I answered its question.

“Yes, I should also go ahead and pick up whatever items and documents are still left and at least attempt to organize them. And the ruined sail I can still see in the corner of my eye may still be salvageable, although the EVA room is also flooded, and that has the space suits which is horribly funny, right?”

The plank was not one for laughter. But the one a few paces to its side was. It squeaked horribly loud– it groaned as if some pressure had been placed on it. I knew I should’ve done something about the strange roof design of the ship, but it looked like so much work that I only ever planned for it, yet never did it; in the filing room I had sketches of a remodeled ceiling, however I did not know if they had survived.

Then there was a cacophony of unanimous groaning. I laughed.

“Oh well there’s something new. I suppose the proximity to the star has altered the ‘gravity’ here so oddly that it is beginning to loosen the planks in the strangest way. And with the most perfect timing.”

I got up and bowed to the audience. Afterwards, I walked to the door to the eastern hallway to go ahead and start picking up some of the many things scattered around out there. But, then, something like a flower fell into my hair. Or I thought it was a flower since I was in that sort of playful mood– no, it was actually a note. Yellow. A sticky note. Like one of the ones that I had kept on the central control dashboard; I had thought they all were burned or lost in the vacuum of space since there were– and still probably are– several leaks on the ship. I had actually run out of calk and had to use duct tape– only on the minor leaks, of course.

“I should probably go and gather some oxygen from what water I have left. The episode earlier was maybe just from the decreasing oxygen concentration. Maybe. Although that is also quite manual and my arms are all sorry still.” I noted the thought for later and picked the yellow note out of my hair. Unfortunately, it had words on it.

“Companion, you seem to have gone a little mad. Would you like something to talk to?” 

The first of what I call bones of contention was that I do not have a partner. The second was that I don’t think I still have any pens that hadn’t been vacated to space by now. The third was that I do not often write notes to myself and set them on a sort of trigger to fall perfectly in my hair to remind me of anything– I usually stick them on a wall. Naturally, the fourth is that I do not want to talk to 'something' that can write. Something that had caused the disturbance earlier.

So I reread the note several times to myself, and at every iteration, I grew only more and more confused. And then the confusion became a terrible dread, and I moved my hand over my heart. There was something wrong now. Because I had wondered why The Army did not follow me directly, and so now that I have a very unwanted answer, only a sort of irrationality remained.

But the truth was that there was something on the ship that was good and able to read and write. Very able– too able– and that is stuck with me on a ship that was already small before half of it was depressurized. The planks began to laugh again, but I was no longer very much in a mood to laugh anymore; I looked up at the darkness behind the labyrinth of a ceiling.

“I think I really should have let The Army kill me. Because I suspect that they are now going as far as to employ biological weapons. Very biological weapons.”