Within the cold prefab walls of a military starship's 4-bunk bedroom, the girl sat on a plastic stool, feet flat on the floor in front of her, hands held together politely in her lap. Desert-red hair sat pulled in a loose bun behind her, and she wore the uniform of the Imperial navy. She was young - still a teenager - but her freckled face bore clear marks of stress, and she spoke in a low, weary tone, staring dead-eyed into the camera pointed at her from across the room.

If I am going to die six quadrants from home with no heir, I will at least leave behind some tangible record of my life.

My name is Roza Bazayev. I was born on the third planet in the Taraz System, oldest daughter to Ulis and Tolkyn. I was the first of four. When the imperial conscription service came to our township I refused to let them take any of my siblings.

At first I considered it a duty, perhaps even an honourable one, but now I have served several months and I know the true nature of war. I know now the limitless depths of its cruelty, and the gruesome appetites of its architects.

They do not care about any of us. This battle we are hurtling towards here, within the Zonaris Stellar Region - it is meaningless, and us troops know we will be cut down. We know we are chattel, being used to make a political point.

My name is Roza Bazayev. This is my final will and testament, as I await death in battle tomorrow. Curse the Empire! Curse the Empress and her guard! On my immortal soul and the name of my family, curse the Empire to Hell!

When I watched messages I watched them on repeat; I took my time to poke around what was recorded, observe carefully the movements of the actors involved.

I thought about them over and over, the young teenager's words. Her voice - tired but strong - echoed through my head as I sailed full-speed through the Carsium Lunar Highway.

It was a pretty standard job: deliver a small personal drive, which held one video message, with transcription, to a post office box in the capital city of a planet at the fringes of the Empire. It would be a short overnight trip, quiet and well-paying; my favourite kind of job, the kind I searched for.

Still, the morbid shadow that hung over the delivery stuck with me. She couldn't have been older than 17 or 18 - that was how the Empire did it. That was how they'd nearly gotten me, so many years ago. If not for medical exemption I would've been a charred corpse on the Merle when it was sunk in the battle for Dacia, or blasted into space dust in a frigate like so many other faceless teenagers from the colonies. But they don't want you when you can't pass their mental exams, which - hilariously - meant I was allowed to live, for being not useful enough.

So now I had the port on the side of my head, underneath the waves of thick dark brown hair, that allowed me to view messages like Ms. Bazayev's. Sticking a drive into my skullport wasn't a feeling I enjoyed, but it was one I got used to, and as far as quality goes you can't beat beaming a message directly into the brain. These days most of my work as a courier revolved around these messages, little cyborg errand girl crisscrossing all over space, making pickups and deliveries and contacts where and when the app told me to.

It's a remarkable piece of technology, the skullport. Everyone has a handheld nowadays, but this sort of augmentation is much rarer. In the case of Roza's message, watching it was was like stepping into a snippet of her life hours before her death, which she awaited knowingly, and feeling the same all-consuming hopelessness that she had in those moments.

Most of my classmates growing up went out that way. It'd been centuries since the Empire had added scores of outer rim planets to its collection, all of which now functioned as a cheap and steady source of lives for the government. People had grown used to the scything cycle of the Empire's many wars and drafts, and conscription was only for a minimum of 18 months, 3 of those being training - so if you were lucky, you could get out with your life still intact, if not all your limbs.

Growing up it was hard not to be a little bitterly fatalistic about it, being just a couple years off from draft age and seeing the procession of funerals day after day, the coffins being delivered in bulk to the funeral home, watching the big excavators make additional space in the cemetery on my way to school. And now, ever since I'd fallen into courier work, I felt like I was rolling the dice on my life each time I picked up another gig. Space travel was safe on its own, but my work took me to some pretty lawless places, and as a result I stayed armed.

Given all this, I kept myself from getting too sentimental. I had no parents to worry about, most of my schoolmates were dead (and the ones that weren't I hadn't seen in years), and I floated around the galaxy wherever the work took me, the pay from one job enough to cover the costs getting to and pulling off the next one - ship repairs, boosters, food - and so on. No roots, and no ties to anything except my ship, an old modified imperial cop model I had named the Velenoso. Gray and red, an angular and sleek conical design that had aged, in my opinion, like fine wine. And sitting in the cockpit, small for some but just right for me, with the instruments and controls laid out in front of me in a compact, concave dashboard array, I felt more at home than I ever had on any planet, in any city.

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On really long hauls, when I felt confident enough, I'd hit the lights and lay on the cot behind the pilot's seat, letting the ship drift as I listened to the cold silence of space expanding ceaselessly around me.

I've learned to enjoy what I can: the pleasure of spaceflight in a one-man yacht, the rush of pushing my ship to its limits and seeing the results of my mechanical tweaks and programmatic edits and slowly increasing skill. The weight of the pistol on my belt and the satisfaction of a good practice session or a good cleaning. The comfort and style of my flight suit, a black-and-white racer model I got secondhand that's warm, but breathable. The bemused and begrudging respect offered someone as small as me when she waltzes into dive bars filled with gutter scum from the most inhospitable planets in the galaxy.

I've learned to love being an outcast, a weirdo. But war weighs heavy on my mind. I always think of the kids, the ones I knew and the millions I didn't. I think about how I felt on my way to the medical examination I didn't know I'd fail that day after my high school graduation: like my life was over and I hadn't realized it yet, like I had died and the physical experience of death was just waiting to catch up with my body. And now I found myself pondering that little girl Roza's words, 17 or 18 years old - at the most - and how hardened they were after what sounded like just a few months' tour of duty.

Curse the Empire! Curse the Empress and her guard! On my immortal soul and the name of my family, curse the Empire to Hell!

Braver than most, but vaporized to oblivion all the same. I understand the appeal of justice in the form of an afterlife - so people like Roza can get a fair shake, or a fair reward, for being put through the meatgrinder - but all I see is the grinder, so that's all I find myself believing in, most of the time. Lately I'd found myself spending more and more time alone in the cockpit with a bottle of something cheap and strong, in the acrid way that sort of thing always is, and it was hard to know what I'd imagined and what I'd actually done over the past few weeks. Whether at a given moment in time I was talking to someone who existed or just myself.

So that made it hard to figure out what I believed sometimes.

I knew a girl in school once, Heather, who Roza reminded me of a little - long brown hair and a sweet round face. When she smiled my heart would skip in my chest. Our last couple years of school she barely spent a moment away from her man, and any time you got her in a conversation she'd talk about the family they planned to have. Then she got drafted, and after graduation nobody ever saw her again. I never stopped thinking about Heather, about the baby she'd wanted, how much she looked forward to being a mother and a wife. The odds that her ship were recovered are infinitesimally low, meaning the coffin they buried in the cemetery for her was empty, just a military uniform folded inside and the imperial flag draped around it. Last week was my 29th birthday and I spent it alone with a bottle of the same trash I always drink, and I thought of Heather - where was her spirit? Trapped in that coffin, where her family apparently wanted her to be? Or floating aimlessly through space in whatever star system her ship was wiped from existence in? Heather had had an uncle who was a veteran, a longtime grunt, one of the few to serve like that and come out the other end in one piece, and he told her as a child that shooting stars were the spirits of comrades and enemies killed in old battles, melding together and traveling through space, warping together into such large masses that they leave fluorescent streaks in the sky. When I see nebulae out the windshield of the Velenoso that's what I always think of, Heather and her uncle and the old timers she joined out there in the infinite sky at age 18, nothing to leave behind but a heartbroken sweetheart and grief-stricken parents.

In high school I sat with my father through a long illness. My mother was never really around, so pop had raised me alone. He never liked me. He never liked how scared I was, how thin, how small, how jumpy. Then he got sick and wasted away in a forgotten hospital bed, and I sat with him and didn't flinch or turn away no matter how hard he coughed or how bad he pissed the sheets, and he told me how brave I was. I think he felt pathetic. I didn't care about that; I just wanted to show him I wasn't as weak as he thought I was, and that I'd still keep a dying man company even if he was a miserable bastard. I thought about telling him that, but I never did. He was a lot more pleasant in that hospital room than he ever had been before and I didn't want to ruin it, I guess. He passed away early one morning while I slept on the couch next to his bed. I woke up to the doctors responding to a machine alarm, but there was nothing left to do. I went back to sleep a little while after and didn't have dreams.

And after that I lived on my own in the apartment we had shared. I had always seen myself as doomed to military service, so when I was bailed out at the last minute by the thing that had long felt like it failed me - my mind - I felt a mixture of defiant and resigned, of proud and pathetic. It had taken me a few years to figure my life out, but I had, and now I was a properly established courier with most of my paperwork filed correctly. And this job, with its palm-sized cargo and generous timetable of a full week for a delivery that I could easily handle in a couple days, was a softball compared to some of the slogs I had been on recently, time-sensitive gigs hauling precious materials at unsafe speeds for pay that used to be better in a galaxy where everything was getting more expensive.

So why was a squadron of 3 imperial cruisers tailing me in an attack formation?