Prologue

"Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

But young men think it is, and we were young."

-A. E. Housman

My world is pain and confusion and shock, but mostly pain.

I drift in and out of darkness. In the moments I'm conscious, I'm able to grasp a scarce few things; I know that my ears are ringing, that the earth is beneath my face and hands because I'm laying on it, that my world is dead and gone. At some point I try to get up, but the agony in my body wrenches gasps from me, and the knowledge of what lays behind me puts that pain to shame, and so I fall and let sleep come.

I awake again, and lay face-down on the ground, unmoving and uncomprehending. There is the pain in my chest and the pain in my body, and I don't know which I prefer; they both seem unreal. I manage to crane my neck around to look behind me, and see only rubble and ruin strewn about the crater where my family should be.

Dead. They're dead.

The thought drains away my energy, and darkness washes over me.

When I next come to, night has settled over the world. I wish, for a long moment, that I could just drift back into sleep and never wake, because I know that what comes next will be hell. But I wasn't made for peace; I was made for war and blood and vengeance, and that's all I have now.

So I stagger to my feet, scream, and fall. My entire body is in agony, and my back is torture, and my legs are weak inadequate things. I rise and fall and rise again, crawling when I loose the strength to walk, inching forward agonizingly slowly. My ship is four hundred meters away, but it might as well be miles. I pass out at one point, and when I wake I wish again that I could simply lie here and sleep. Then I get up, fall, get up, and fall.

My world is pain and confusion and shock, but mostly pain.

Somehow, I get to my ship.