EVE Fiction

The chime grew steadily louder piercing the layers of sleep that enveloped Takamori. A groan, a curse under the breath, and then one word, 'off', the chiming ceased. Another day lay ahead of him, another day in the long grind in a life that effectively meant nothing, just bland existence and then eventually death. In fact perhaps the only cruel like point to his miserable life was to survive each identical day, no family, no real friends, always the monotony, the noise and the dirt.

Taka was of Gallentian birth, but he had never known his parents. He was too young to recall the transport they had been travelling on and the surprise attack from a Caldari skirmish fleet. Left for dead on a half wrecked and looted ship, he and his parents were eventually picked up by Amarrian salvagers. His parents soon died from a combination of their injuries and from the maltreatment of the salvagers. However, Taka was young, he was valuable, the salvagers took care of him, and he survived. Transported light years away he was eventually sold into slavery to work amongst the mostly Minmatarians in one of the thousands of Amarrian ship yards.

At the age of 25, he was 15 years in, having started in the yards at the age of 10, at the most he had another 10 or 15 years before his body began to break down, unable to work he would be unceremoniously bio massed. A slave baseliner, even in death his body would be forced into servitude, his atoms recycled and used in one of the millions of ship component production processes.

He opened the door to his habmod, and stepped onto the walktrack outside. Winter was fast approaching, there wasn't much change from one season to the next given his latitude but the days were getting slightly shorter, and the weather was worsening. With the planet's wind gusting and howling around him, the foul smelling rain striking his face, he trudged the two km's along the walktrack past the line of old fullerene scrubber plants, and over to the land-shuttle waiting area. The small rusty colored land-shuttle would take him the 30km or so from the slums to the ship yards.

At the entrance to the yards, many long parallel queues of thousands of people edged slowly forward to their respective entry points. Taka inched forward until he was at the front of the queue. The entry gate scanned his slave chip. The system acknowledging his identity sent the relevant code to the holographic security gate, with a slight shimmer the display indicated he could enter.

The ship yards were a collection of sprawling complexes of factories and warehouses of all kinds of shapes and sizes, each one designed and built specifically for a part of the production process of building parts of interstellar space craft, from there the parts would be lifted into orbit to the satellite plants, where they would be assembled into the many different kinds of sub capital and capital class ships ready to be piloted by his Amarrian masters.

Taka finished his shift, his body aching, and his mind numbed from the days grind, he started the journey home. Waiting at the land-shuttle station he stared up at the row of billboards. These huge glowing facades blared out the relentless Amarrian religious dogma 24/7, however he had noticed that the tone of news articles was a little different of late, not quite so triumphant, perhaps a little less frequent too. Had the newsreader even appeared a little shaken on that last news item?

Rumors and gossip at work abounded, stories of a new type of covert super class ship that the Gallente Empire had developed which was able to cyno in waves of rapid attack craft across many more light years than previously possible, and far surpassing anything the Amarrians had. Some talk even suggested that the Sisters of EVE might be behind the technological breakthrough and were siding with the Gallentians. These thoughts and more flitted across Taka's mind as he boarded the rusty land-shuttle and began the journey home.

Shattered from the days grind, he arrived home at around 21:00hrs and crashed out on his bunk. A few hours later loud excited shouting woke him from his slumber. Overcoming the inertia of his aching body, he pulled himself onto his feet and peered out the small window of his sleep room. There was a sizeable crowd outside, more and more people were pouring from their habmods swelling the numbers already stretching up and down the walktrack. Then he saw it, faint at first, he had to strain his eyes, then growing more prominent before fading away again, red, yellow and green streaks burst across the dark sky, the frequency was intensifying as he rushed outside.

Although he had never seen it before, he instinctively knew what the light show represented. This was low orbit warfare. As his ears tuned into the voices in the crowd, they confirmed it. The Gallente-Amarrian war had reached his planet. A strange new feeling welled up from within him, something he had never before felt, hope. Hope filled his heart that he might be freed from his masters, free from slavery, able to escape his benign existence. His eyes filled with tears as the emotion flooded forth, and he joined the cheering throng of slaves staring up at the sky, just in time to see the Gallentian assault ships begin descending in their hundreds on to the surface of the Amarrian shipyard planet.