5 years. 5 years of doing little jobs, from T'Ien to Kremmain. 5 years without piloting. Almost every night doing the same nightmare of this accident. The flames inside the cockpit, my flesh burning, my co-pilot, my wife... screaming. And then the silence as the ship derived in the obscurity of the space.

Two months before they located our ship, or what was our ship. The Scirocco was nothing more than a wreck. We just wanted to do our first expedition. We even had a formation with the Galactic Vikings Drakkars themselves, we were ready. We thought.

Two months... It's a lot with a 4th degree burned arm. It's a lot more without legs. The flames of the fire had devored Martha's lower body, we had to amputate them. We were prepared for that... in theory. I did everything, I was at her bedside every-minute-of-every-day. But we were far from everywhere, the fire burnt the beacons, the auxiliary systems were almost enough to bring us the electricity to survive, and enough to signaled us to the closest systems only.

Martha died from her fever... 4 days before the Vikings finally found the lost Adder...

One chance in a billion that it happened, and it happened. The most secured mechanical and electronical system ever created, disrupted by one dust of one rare mineral deriving from a mining site probably light-years from us. This little piece of Palladium, the only matter able to create this kind of disruption, was deriving probably since millions of years. To being sucked by our reactor cooling system at the exact millisecond the security vents opened themselves for 0.001 second before the initialization of the hyperspace jump. This resulted in a malfunction of the computer for 2.5 seconds during the jump. It rebooted itself as planned in case of this type of problem. The computer knew how to deal exactly in case of a dust of Palladium went in the cooldown system. Everything was foreseen by the computer. Every scenario can be countered by this awesome ship computer. But we ended to close from the star, a blue star...

5 years of doing little jobs far from a pilot sit. Doing nightmares of going too far from humanity. I left the Vikings after the accident, I wanted to be far, and have a new life elsewhere. I was sure it would help me to forget Martha. I knew I was never going to forget her screams. And during those years I hesitated so many times to join the civil security of a system, to help Marthas all over the bubble. I finally decided to join the Cubeo system where a friend lived. He sent me years ago a message about an Adder wreck with the 3 letters SCI barely visible on his side totally burnt. Lost in a recuperation factory in Medupe City.

This was the opportunity to fix my past. For Martha.