Jackson Davis gathered all he loved into the pockets of an olive drab duster. A cigarette case, a multitool, a pair of dog tags, three hundred dollars in good old American currency, and a purple sticky note with a scrawl of his mother's handwriting. He opened the dingy silver case and pressed the well-worn paper to the back cover. It slipped and failed to adhere, it's glue long dried. Thinking on his feet, he laminated the whole thing with tape. 

"You'll always be my Jack of Hearts. - Mom"

He closed the case and took the car keys from his bed. He bid his posters and high school trophies a final goodnight, and left his home for the last time. He threw himself into the driver's seat and pressed his palms to his eyes. She wasn't even in the ground, yet here he was resolved to never allow himself the closure of seeing it through. Could he really go through with it? 

There was nothing left. Even tears had run themselves desert-dry. He started the car. 

"Veronica."

The device magnetized to the dashboard lit up with a brief flash of the Lexington Corporation logo, and faded to a lightly oscillating purple circle. 

"What can I do for you?"

"Take me to Coriolis Starport Dallas."

A lighter dot whirled through the circle, a stock car of data blazing around it's track as Veronica dutifully compared each and every route. It stopped and became an exclamation point, then the screen faded into a GPS display. 

"I have highlighted the fastest route. Please drive carefully."

He would drive however he damn well wanted. That was a fact. With everyone in his life who could tell him what to do, to command him; to advise him, to assist him, all gone his life demanded he take charge. It started as it began, at a hundred miles an hour on a winding Texas back road. 

He reached the starport in under an hour, around thirty minutes faster than he had any right to. In ten more, he took up a spot in a line packed with families toting their entire lives on their backs just as he was. 

The line proved to be the most time consuming obstacle. While Jackson couldn't tell how much time had passed on a conscious level his nicotine craving had gone from a simple afterthought to a thing that had great gravity within his mind. It sucked in all his other thoughts which grew in speed as they approached the singularity. Overlapping stories of evacuations and losses in the Great Siege brushed away the layers of dirt he tried to throw over his own losses. 

"Can I help you?" 

Jackson snapped out of his haze and tried to orient himself to the clerk. 

"Hey uh,"

"Are you a displaced individual? A refugee?" 

"I guess," He stammered, "Well not exactly."

The clerk crossed her arms in front of the exposed portion of her white silk shirt, "Are you an expatriate? Moving to the colonies?"

"Look, I'm just tryin' to get a spot in whatever leaves first to wherever leaves first."

She pulled a drawer out from beneath the desk she stood behind and began to type on a keyboard. Jackson wondered if everything he had would even be enough to cover a ticket off world. Come to think of it, he could barely cover a plane ticket."

"Alright, I can get you on an outgoing ship to Eden departing at seven forty-five. I'll just need your passport, traveling authorization, tax stamp, and fingerprint. We'll also need to run a quick background check and--"

Nope, there it was. He got out of line and left, cursing to himself about wasted time when time was all he really had. He left his car, walking on the shoulder of the highway past shoving crowds of refugees, the latest batch to leave the temporary housing centers after the Siege. 

The port police had their hands full maintaining order in the crush he had waded through hours earlier, and that drew away attention from him as he walked along the shoulder of the starport expressway. Passing cars also taking advantage of the police inattention blew past and kicked his coat up like great wings. 

Thirty blistered minutes of walking passed, and the terminal and facilities gave way to a view of the runway behind a ten foot high chain-link fence. The shuttles maybe a quarter-mile away cast the road in darkness, their sharp noses all trained skyward as webs of hoses and swarms of crewmen prepared them to leave their mother. Jackson vaulted over the guard rail and rolled down the sharp bank until the fence caught him. 

Tightly wound razor wire meant that over wasn't an option, but he remembered his dad's old Leatherman. He pulled it from his pocket as he gathered himself into a squatting position and unfolded the ten or so different tools until only the wire cutters remained. Not much needed to be cut, only a few feet from the bottom up, enough to allow him to move through with his coat over his head. 

He squatted as low as he could make himself. The unregulated traffic flew along the uphill curve completely oblivious to the break in just off the side of the road. Jackson pressed until the metal made deep purple impressions in his palm, and through sheer force of desperation the links broke one by one. By the time he had the clearance he needed, his right hand felt like he had been in an arm wrestling match with a flame elemental.

After pushing through the broken portion of the fence, protecting himself with the canvas, all he knew was to run. The closest ship was his goal, and he was going to get on the only way he could afford to. His pumping heart drove burning muscles in his legs, overriding the pain from his blistered feet, and propelling him as quickly as he could force his body to go after five years of smoking.

As with anything, colonies needed to eat. The provisions kept better during relativity when kept in sealed and pressurized storage containers. One of these 'Goldilocks boxes' made for the perfect vehicle. Fate guided him to one yet to be sealed, yet to be loaded. He squeezed himself among the crates, and carved himself out a little corner. 

Jackson was sealed inside, and when the shuttle was intercepted and gutted by the Blackwatch less than two days later Jax emerged in blood.

---

The hospital on Soria kept him for five days. 

In that time, he had:

Racked up a docking tab of 5,000 credit points on top of the repair and refuel costs. 

Spent the equivalent of 1,200 points at Diatrus' bar, all covered by the house. The reptilian snuck the alcohols in using a hollow 'smuggler' version of his prosthetic. Jax was very lucky that no blood tests were taken on him after the wound had been opened, cleaned, and dressed once more. 

Attempted to contact Kuria nineteen times despite not possessing any of her contact information. 

Mulled over the events of the mutiny enough that the thoughts had etched permanent images into his mind. He thought a lot about Cosmo. He thought the most about Arna. 

"I did the best I could the way I knew how."

That was the mantra. The punctuation of a cycle just before it begins again, replaying in his mind as it had in his life. There he could be trapped in each endlessly torturing moment, observing, evaluating, studying with his mind's eye. 

He left Soria with a goodbye to Diatrus and good riddance to everything behind him. He paid his tab, and boarded the vessel he had coveted and bid it's intelligence to take him away. 

At this point, it was destination anywhere. Another time around. Another trip around another coil. He picked a border planet, a Freehold with a currently-minor Blackwatch presence. Then he locked the navigation and took to wing into the black. 

The trip would be long, and the ship could fly itself. With a gut still aching with the memory of shrapnel he carried himself to the captain's quarters. He took his cigarette case from his inner coat pocket and set it on the end table next to the quarter-full carton of Nepton Gold. Next in the process of making the room his own, he removed his coat and hung it on a piece of jagged metal that extended from a gap between two partially-fused plates. He left Ferantyl's gauntlet on; strapped to his forearm with lashes of velcro. The weight there felt good. Weight of memory, and of triumph. 

Triple Regret came off and went into the top drawer. The twenty pound or so weight of the weapon dragging his right side down had been comforting in a strange way. The ability to kill anything short of a tank. 

He laid down in what was Cross' bed, and tried to relax. 

---

The ship lurched to a halt,  and Jax was thrown from his bed by the force. He tumbled over the foot of the bed and laid in a heap of blanket at the end. He emerged and shook his head, trying to shoo away the lingering sleep on the periphery of consciousness. 

He looked to the ceiling in order to address the consciousness that inhabited THE HAMMER but instead felt a rising anger when he found the power to have completely failed. Clearly the ship had it's problems, but with the good coin he put down on Soria he expected a professional job. A crawling terror cropped up at the edge of his mind. 

He was in the black. The space between star systems. With no power. No way to call for help. And, as always alone. 

His only chance to get to a port where he could have someone worth their salt take a look, was if he could get the reactor going himself. He opened the drawer which stuck with the sheer size of the weapon inside it and worked the weapon free. Along with that, he took his lighter and flicked the top, creating a bubble of flickering amber glow. 

As he left his quarters a bright light pouring through the windows of the observation deck caught his attention. He rounded the corner into the square on the floor and raised his weapon. 

In the center of the room of windows stood a pale man with burning red eyes. The symbol of two concentric eyes across his forehead, and a close fitting ornate garb of the finest blacks and golds. 

The space outside was a deep back-lit gray, with distant rocks like jagged stars. A point of light shined far away. All was silent. 

Jax acquired his target and fired. Triple Regret exploded in his hands, sending a slug nearly a quarter of a pound in mass toward the stranger. Only it didn't. The sequence played out in Jax' head like a dream, and upon realizing that there was no wound on his target or any other evidence he had taken a shot at all he rolled out the cylinder of the weapon. 

"Something wrong?" The stranger said, their voice calm and level. 

He clicked the cylinder back into the pistol and took aim again, levelling the sights with the concentric point of the eyes tattooed on his forehead. 

"Don't. I'll let you do it this time. And when you do the bullet will pass through me," He pointed to the pane of glass behind him, "bounce off of there," The stranger turned his outstretched finger back to Jax, "pass through me again, and then hit you fatally in the heart."

"I will be unharmed. Your journey will end. I will move on. Now make a good decision."

Jax lowered the weapon, "How the hell did'ja get on my ship?"

"Does that really matter?"

"Then why're ya' here?"

"I'm just checking in on you. It was a wonder to watch you work, so ruthless. But careless. Just as I had suspected."

The Stranger kicked his back feet off the ground and he leaned on the air, lounging about a foot and a half from the floor. 

"You're getting the idea now, Jax. Redemption lies not in the blood you shed but in the blood that binds."

It was this existential remark that tipped Jax off as to the identity of his guest. This was the transcendental asshole that gave him the tarot reading on the prison ship! The urge to try to shoot him flared up again, and he felt himself squeeze the textured grip of the weapon tighter. 

"Did'ja seriously come here just to... philosophize at me? Look, I have a reactor problem I need to solve."

"You have a character problem you need to solve, Jax. And you're getting closer, but I want to splash the pot."

Triple Regret came up again, "What the fuck're you talking about?"

"You'll go around again, once more. Another try. Another step in a journey that never ends, as nothing truly does."

The Stranger held up coiled fingers; their tattoo burned with a scarlet light that outshined their eyes. Jax pulled the trigger, and they snapped their fingers. 

---

The ship lurched to a halt,  and Jax was thrown from his bed by the force. He tumbled over the foot of the bed and laid in a heap of blanket at the end. He emerged and shook his head, trying to shoo away the lingering sleep on the periphery of consciousness. 

He tilted his head to the ceiling and squinted at the glare coming from one of the recessed lights in the ceiling. In a dream, or maybe a memory, he had lost power and simply drifted. 

He got up and stretched, then threw the covers back onto the bed. Shaking his head when he saw the strapping that he neglected to use. Classic Jax. 

The habitual craving for a cigarette hit him, and he grabbed the case and stepped into the observation room. An earth like planet hung on an invisible string in the void, surrounded by glittering lights. He opened the case and to his pleasant surprise found it stocked with gold-filtered smokes, and where a simple note had been left was a picture of his mother. 

A memory tugged at him, he had taken that photo with a Polaroid camera. Susan was half-hidden behind a fanned hand of cards, smiling coyly. The photo itself was printed on the front of a card marked by that concentric-eye symbol. He was watching, alright. 

Jax closed the case and ejected the lighter, nearly missing the catch from the weighty launch of the completely full device. He put the cigarette between his lips and lit up. He pulled in breath, held it, and let it out. 

"Captain, we're receiving an SOS Transmission. Patching it through."

The distressed voice of a young girl caught in a world of trouble came through the ship's speakers.

"We are so screwed."