((Ok, warning, I'm tired as heck so I may ramble a bit. I'm looking for feedback, criticism, editing and all manner of goodness for this story. I've had it sitting around for about a week or two just staring at me and I swear it's started to gloat that I'm never going to "finish" it.
* I've been trying to work on my descriptive language as I've noticed I go a bit sparse on character and setting descriptions. Kinda hard to expect everyone else to know what I'm seeing/thinking in my head if I don't explain it eh? So any suggestions on that front would be appreciated.
* Certain elements of this story are doing my head in. I'm trying to come up with a "why would anyone care" angle and I'm just not getting it. Basically Mikram is sitting around, feeling sorry for himself and I don't think my hook (if there is one) is strong enough to pull people in.
* Also, I have an ongoing idea/story with Mikram and his Daughter (specifically his Daughter hating his guts) but I think I did a crap job of explaining it or even giving a logical reason in the story below. Thoughts?
* One more thing...transitioning from the "now" to a memory based story and back again. How do? Or at least how do I do it better than I've attempted here?
Anything you guys notice, corrections, ideas etc would be appreciated. And finally, if this is in completely the wrong area, a thousand apologies oh glorious moderators, could you please scootch it to the right place 
)) IT’S JUST THAT TIME OF YEAR
((Version 1))
[spoiler]Mikram slid down into the patchy armchair with a despondent sigh. He ran his long fingers over a crown of stubbly hair. His sad, green eyes slid around the dark frigid room. The armored glass with its view of the stellar traffic could not hold his gaze for long. With some trepidation, he finally let his gaze settle on the table to his right holding two holopics. The first was his former wife, laughing and pushing some of her long black hair back from her face. Even after all these years, that little gesture made his heart flutter. Gods he missed her. She was six years gone and it was coming up on the anniversary of her death. He hated this time of year. He looked at the second holopic. It was of a young Khanid girl. Her eyes were laser bright and her smile was radiant. She calmly smiled into the holo recorder until the image reset the loop again. She looked so much like her Mother, and the trust in her eyes made him wish he could go back and change all that had happened. Mikram clenched his fists as he looked away and fought the urge. The need, for a drink, for some drugs, for escape, was howling around his mind, jangling his nerves and making him twitch with involuntary shudders. He let the memories come, the ones that would shame him out of giving in to these weaknesses.
Six years ago he had been happy. He was at the tiny bar on a freezing backwater planet with his friends drinking to celebrate their latest victory. Some inane skirmish between capsuleer pilots. Ultimately it meant nothing. No one really gained anything and no one really lost anything but to him and his friends it was another high they could ride and use as an excuse to lose themselves in all manner of intoxicating substances. Mikram had just lined up a couple of shots and chased them with some new concoction of inhalant drugs. The thumping bass of the bars overpowered sound system and the fireworks going off in his brain served to deaden his perception. He was completely oblivious when his personal communicator chimed. His wife’s picture faded from its screen as the festivities continued.
Meredith looked down at the communications unit with a frown. “Not this time” she thought as she brushed a few strands of her long hair back “I am not going to let him miss her birthday again!” She grabbed her shawl and put on some snow boots. She had a good idea where he was. This rough frontier town was not big enough for him to hide. She stepped out into the cold night and wrapped the shawl around her tucking it up under her chin and across her mouth. Her breath steamed out through the soft, warm fabric as she shuffled down the dark icy street. She sighed as she walked towards what passed for a “bar district” in this no name town on this no name world. She didn’t even see the shadow slip from the alley a few houses back and begin to follow her. Times had been tough for most of the planets in M-M3DB but it was particularly harsh for those who chose to make their home on this ice ball. Nearly devoid of anything worth mining, growing or stealing there was little in the way of opportunity save for entertaining those who claimed to “own” the space or preying upon them in their weak moments.
Mikram finally heard his communicator when it set off a symphony of pain in his head. The thudding of its tinny pinging notes mimicked the thunder of battleship guns in a massive fleet fight. He patted himself down, searching for the offending unit fully intending to smash it and resume sleeping in the comfortable corner of the now closed bar he had curled up in. He had just managed to silence the damned thing when the door to the bar was roughly opened and a man in something resembling an official uniform pointed some kind of tracking unit at him. “There you are! Mr. Drak’naur I hope? You need to come with me.” The look on the man’s face was something of a mix of pity, anger, disgust and tiredness. Mikram was sober enough to realize that this was not going to be good.
The man, Peace Officer Jak he said his name was, took Mikram to the Morgue. Without much in the way of hesitation he took him into a room and showed him the cold, motionless body of Mikram’s wife. She had a single stab wound in her upper chest and a look of surprise on her rigid face. Officer Jak and then other local functionaries questioned Mikram and told him what they had pieced together so far. While it was true that Mikram’s body was present throughout all of this, his mind, at least the portions he directly controlled, was elsewhere. His implants would record all of this and allow him to play it back when he could handle it, if he ever could handle it.
It wasn’t until late that night when he finally stumbled through their, no, now his front door. He was shaking but he couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or from the shock finally wearing off. In the darkness of his now empty home, a comm unit pinged. He slowly walked over to it to find a missed call from his Daughter. Khalina was off attending Hedion University. A prodigy, she had secured entry at the age of 16. Yesterday she had turned 18. Once a quarter she was able to make a long distance neocomm call to talk with her parents. Meredith had planned to hold a little birthday celebration for her. The little cake with the unlit candles and two colorful plates was still sitting on the table where she had left it when she went out to find him. Khalina’s message was short and sarcastic. “Hi Mom, Hi Dad, although you’re probably not there. Out celebrating I’ll bet. I hope you’re both doing well. I’ll talk to you again in three months. Gotta go, I have a Stellar Macroeconomics test to study for.”
Mikram began to punch in the code and went through the process to connect to his daughter’s communication unit, so many light years away. Even using the best in Jump gate technology and paying a hefty premium for the best service he could get, the wait to connect was long, and the lag during the following call was crippling to anything resembling a normal conversation. This was anything but a normal chat. “Uh, hi Dad, I thought you guys were not going to call me for another three months. Where’s Mom?” The normalcy Khalina conveyed was heart wrenching. She was 18, beautiful and so intelligent. Her future was blindingly bright so it was no surprise she caught on quick. The look on Mikram’s face probably told her more than she wanted to know but she asked anyways. This time she spoke slowly, seriously and with a hint of fear “Dad, where is Mom?”
He told her. He recalled everything the various officials had told him throughout the day. He left nothing out. He told her how he had been out celebrating the meaningless “victory” the previous night and had totally forgotten about her birthday and the call. He told her how the Peace Officers had deduced that Meredith had been tracked almost from the moment she left her house and had been attacked when she was walking through a particularly dark part of town on the way to the bars where he had been. All of her possessions had been taken and the actual crime scene looked more like an accident. There was no struggle, only a single slip mark. The investigating officer had said it looked like the assailant had slipped and stabbed Meredith on accident. Khalina took all of this silently. Her usually beautiful and lively face going cold, slack and emotionless. Her eyes, normally so vibrant and full of life, went dull. Two icy blue orbs staring at him as if they were considering an object of utmost hatred.
“You…You killed her.” Khalina finally stuttered out “if she had not been out looking for you, you drunk, you addict, you killed her!” Mikram’s eyes went wide as he began to process his daughter’s outrage. A full day of grief after a wicked night and a brutal hangover left him rather unprepared to think reasonably though. Khalina went quiet and the next words out of her mouth were almost unintelligible “A dead Mother and a Father who as good as killed her.” She looked directly at Mikram then and spoke with a voice that sent shivers up Mikram’s spine. “Goodbye Father, don’t ever contact me again.” Darkness once again reigned in the cold empty home as shock hit Mikram and made him sink to the floor. He stayed there for a very long time.
When he finally managed to regain some sort of control over his mind he began down a predictable path. Revenge, vengeance, a satisfaction of his testosterone laden urges. His career as a capsuleer had left him quite well off and he put his resources to use. The assailant was not hard to track. A dirt poor criminal eking out an existence on the fringes of this frigid town. Mikram had him kidnapped and brought aboard his shuttle. A long trip to some very dangerous space and some drugs designed to amplify terror were all the man knew until Mikram’s voice came over the internal comms system. “I just want you to know that we are deep in Blood Raider space.” The self-contained life support was quickly jettisoned from Mikram’s frigate and began broadcasting a distress signal. Mikram simply piloted his ship a few kilometers away, engaged his cloak and waited. The screams from inside the little life support pod were being piped directly into Mikram’s communication system. They did not cease until the Blood Raiders showed up and picked up the life support pod. While he couldn’t hear the screams continuing, Mikram had no doubt they did.
Mikram returned to the tiny town on the frigid planet in the backwater of M-M3DB. He walked into the slums fully intending to begin wiping out the killer’s entire family tree, staring with the most recent branches. The pistol in his hand was to maintain order but the long serrated knife in his other hand was going to be the instrument of his revenge. The door to the tiny shack did not even hold up to a single kick. The screaming and pleading started but failed to find purchase in Mikram’s enraged mind. It wasn’t until he saw the face of a young girl, cowering and crying behind her Mother that he paused. A memory hit him like a punch to the guts. Khalina clinging to her Mother’s skirt as Mikram tried to convince her that the Horse he was riding was not dangerous. He had laughed as both Meredith and he had tried to persuade Khalina to approach and eventually ride the gentle horse. She had been terrified back then. Mikram dropped the knife and then the pistol and stood there stunned, simply staring at the terrified young woman who reminded him so much of his daughter. He came to a decision there, in that dirty, cold shack under the gaze of two terrified mortal women. He picked up his weapons, put them away and closed the door on his way out as best he could.
Later that day he was back in orbit and deep in a number of transactions and plans. The family, well the former Killer’s Wife and their young daughter were to be taken care of. They would not have to scrabble just to live. They were being gently moved back to empire space. Eldulf III was a nice, safe and prosperous world and even better, it was warm. Their needs would be taken care of by a sizeable trust fund Mikram was in the process of setting up at the moment. He had already lined up a few job offers for the Wife and the Daughter had an open invitation to a number of good schools there on Eldulf. His next few tasks were frustrating him though. Every attempt he made to ensure funding for his daughter or find out any sort of information about her was blocked. Sometimes it was a simple “file not found” or other times it was an “access denied” message that flashed across his neocom.
It took him almost three weeks and the assistance of some very talented and very expensive computer security “professionals” to crack into the system and get the information he needed. His daughter had placed a communications black out order against him and had backed it up with a number of trumped up accusations thus ensuring the local police would ask very few questions. She had switched her Major from Business and Economics to Starship Trade. She was already confirmed as Capsuleer compatible and, at this Mikram spasmed so hard in his pod mild sedatives were pumped into him, undergone the implantation process. She was alive which meant she was now a capsuleer. What little information he could glean showed that she was taking to the new course work like a natural and she would be flying within the year.
It took a lot more isk, frustration and time to funnel funds and favors through a number of intermediaries to ensure his Daughters tuition and future were assured. She may never forgive him, but he wanted to be sure she would be set up for success, never to be consigned to the same kind of poverty and hell that had ended up claiming the life of her Mother. With that, the last of Mikram’s decisions he had made standing in that frigid cold shack began to work up into a series of plans. There were a lot of people out there, unfortunates caught in cycles of poverty and exploitation. A significant portion of them were his people, the Ni-Kunni. He had been saying that he was going to do something for them for years in between shots of liquor or hits of various drugs. It was time he made good on those promises.
His eyes began to clear as the memories receded. He was no longer shaking from the need for a drink or a hit. The tears had left their wet trails down his cheeks but he felt ready for the last ritual in his yearly remembrance. He made his way to the pod chamber and began the process to join first with his pod and then with his ship. The cargo he requested had been loaded and the drones programmed specially. He mentally input some very specific coordinates corrected for a year of slow travel and began his warp. He came out in deep space. Everything seemed distant until his sensors picked up a tiny contact. He steered in his camera drones and locked on to his Wife’s casket. It was slowly making its way towards the edge of the system. He wasn’t sure if he would still be alive when she reached it but it was possible. After all, he was immortal barring a massive technological failure. Around her casket in concentric rings were five circles of roses. All were travelling at the same speed in the same direction carefully placed there the five previous years. Inside his pod, Mikram twitched, his body wanting to obey the desire to sigh. He began to talk to his wife. Telling her how their Daughter had graduated at the top of her class and how she was now a very powerful and influential trader. He told her how Khalina had chosen to return to her native Khanid Empire and was among a very select group of extremely eligible bachelorettes. He told her how much he missed her and how sorry he was for all of the ways he had failed her. The cargo and drone bay doors opened as Mikram directed his drones to begin constructing the sixth ring.[/spoiler]
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Topic: [HALP!] Looking for feedback on a possible story (Read 562 times)