I hate space. Even the word is a misnomer. There’s nothing vast or open about it. Two years on board this ship and it’s still all I think about. I feel it pressing against the hull, cold and heavy. Hear it in the thousand creaks and moans of the Ingress as she pushes deeper into the smothering black.

The corridors on the way back to my compartment are empty, but elsewhere on the ship people are busily going about their work. There is no room for passengers on board a Thukker caravan. Everybody contributes. Outsiders, as I’ve come to learn, doubly so.

Fatigue hangs over me like a lead jacket. But even tired, I know when I’m being followed. I glance back. Nothing. During the downshift cycle the strip lighting in the corridors is turned low. Good for saving power, great for sneaking up on someone. I keep walking. The day Neera died – The day you killed her – I left. When I was done mourning, I stood up, walked outside and just kept going. I guess I always knew someone would come for me.

As I walk, the fatigue burns away, replaced with the savage anticipation of the fight to come. I round a corner, then immediately turn and step back into the corridor just in time to see a silky shadow disappear into the darkness of a small maintenance alcove. A shiver of familiarity crawls up my spine. Run. Something uneasy in the movement. Fear scratches at the back of my mind, frantic as a caged animal. Run. The shadow moves again, and this time the oil-slick motion triggers a star burst of understanding. The lab on Khabi VIII. The fight flushes out of me. RUN! I turn to run just as the heat of the explosion surrounds me. Scorching tongues of it licking my face and then gone, sucked out of the gaping hole in the corridor wall into the suffocating emptiness. And me along with it.

***

I wake in darkness. Gasping for air. Sucking in hungry mouthfuls that hammer spikes of pain through my brain. Lights spasm and arc across my vision. Dizzy. I reach out a hand to steady myself, but only succeed in falling over. I throw up. I lie there for a moment, floating in the center of my own spinning universe. Slowly, in the faraway galaxy of my mind, nebulous recognition forms. The spinning slows and confusion coalesces into anger.

“What the hell did you do?” I scream the words, but they wither in the darkness and barely reach my own ears. I try to stand, but the spinning starts again and so I lie back down. “That’s not how it happened!” I yell. Again, the darkness swallows the sound of my voice.

I feel numb. Every part of me heavy and slow, like being underwater. My mind slams into my skull as though it’s had enough of all this and wants out. I want to die. Instead, I focus on the ground. The ground is solid. The ground is real. Need to keep moving. But where? Forward, chintaku. People should always move forward. Even in my head, the sound of her voice is enough to make me cry. I start walking.

The darkness pushes against me. I lean into it. I’ve fought in heavy gravity before, but never felt anything like this. It tugs at my arms and leg. Clings to my ankle like a desperate lover. I walk for hours (Days? Minutes?), but each step feels no closer or farther than the first.

“Well, you would know, Traveler. They are your memories after all.”

I bow my head into the invisible storm and press forward.

“You can’t outrun them you know. Not forever.”

The darkness rises. A wave of shimmering heat and pressure, the tide of it carries me back to the ship and the fire and the screams.

***

The corridor is just the way I remember it. Burning, but intact. Up ahead, a woman runs past, a cloak of flame billowing behind her. She doesn’t scream. As the fire swallows her, she simply hunches closer over the small bundle she’s carrying in her arms. I turn away from the sight. There are some things even I don’t want to see. Thukker caravans carry entire generations on board. Families live and die without ever leaving the ship. But most live longer than this.

An arm reaches out of a darkened doorway and pulls me inside. The door’s still sliding shut as I reach around and twist the wrist on my shoulder, and in one smooth motion pinion my attacker’s arm and slam him into the wall.

“Hey! No, wait!”

He tries to turn around, but I apply more pressure and he grunts in pain.

It’s me! Jet!”

Jita. Calls himself Jet. I remember now. Strong kid. Worked a couple shifts down in the Skews together. His parents named him after the system he was conceived in. Parents can do shitty things to their children sometimes.

I let go.

“What’s going on?”

He squeezes his shoulder. “You almost broke my arm!”

“You’ll live.” I say, knowing I’ve hurt his pride more than his arm.

“We’ve been boarded.” He says, finally. “I was running a diagnostic suite when the entire board lit up. They blew a hole into the maintenance bay on Deck 4.”

“What! Who?” I imagine Valklears storming through the corridors. If this is my fault… If I brought this on these people… I shut the thought down before it can go any further.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes!” I say a little too loudly. “Yes it does.”

“Well, sorry, but I didn’t stop to ask. Vartigin says he heard you were a soldier before. Is that true?”

I ignore the question. “How many of them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten?” Still rubbing his arm.

“For a ship this size? They’ll need a lot more. And I’m going to need a weapon.”

Jet walks across the room, does something with a panel that I can’t quite make out and comes back holding what might as well be a rock for all the good it’ll do me. A Gistii-10. Small, compact and horribly inaccurate at range.

“Where did you get that?”

He shrugs. “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.”

“Stay here.” I say, and snatch the weapon from him before he can object.

***

I count sixteen. They’re armed and efficient – in ten minutes the entire sub-section is locked down – but they’re not Valklear. Dressed head-to-toe in black. No insignias or markings of any kind. Whoever they work for, they don’t like to advertise. Everything about them is low-key. Everything except the weapons they’re carrying. Shiny, hi-tech. I look at the aging Gistii in my hand. With no better option, I wait.

Eventually, they split up. I watch as the larger group disappears around the corner, give it a few minutes just to be sure and then, with a silent thanks to whichever miser son of a bitch insisted on the low lighting protocol, move round the corner in a bent-knee run, closing as much of the gap as I can.

Twelve meters out someone sees me, but three shots center-mass puts him down before the others even turn. I get one more shot off, tagging one of them in the ribs, before the shouting erupts and the shooting starts. The corridor boils with the hungry hiss of gunfire. A wild spray of shots. The sick sizzle of metal to my left. I ignore all of it, focus instead on the nearest target. The Gistii jerks in my hands. Once. Twice. And then he’s falling back, grabbing at the wall, collapsing. One of them is screaming into his headset, but as the others go down he pulls a rifle and rakes it across the corridor. The stutter-whine of impacts all around me, metal shards sting my face and arms. I blink something warm and wet from my eyes. Focus. I get the Gistii back on target and empty the clip. He jolts, staggers, still firing wildly, and then is down on the ground, bleeding over his friends.

If they didn’t know I was here before, they do now. Jesus, the whole ship must have heard that. I need a new weapon. I need to find cover. I know what I should be doing, but instead I’m screaming into the face of the only raider I can find alive.

“Who sent you?”

“Damnit! I said tell me who se—“

Something slams into me from behind and a warm wetness blossoms across my chest. I sink to my knees.

A voice, from what seems far away, “How did this Thukker trash get in here? Fuck. Look at this mess.”

Lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling, the corridor seems suddenly very bright. “I won’t let you take me.” I try to say, but my tongue feels too thick for my mouth and it comes out like a groan.

The voice looks down at me, weapon still in hand. “There’s always one isn’t there? Way to go, hero.” Then he turns back to his men.

“C’mon. Get that container on board and let’s get the hell out of here. G’dammit! Be careful. He wants it undamaged.”

I watch them leave through the makeshift hole in the wall.

Out into the crushing dark.

You’ll have to pay a one-off fee to play PlayStation 3-exclusive MMO shooter Dust 514, developer CCP has confirmed.

A payment of between $10 and $20 will be converted into in-game currency.

“In the beginning you have to pre-buy credits, so you pay something like $10-$20 to enter the game and you get the equivalent number of credits in the game once you do that,” CCP boss Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Eurogamer sister site GamesIndustry.biz.

“We call this the cover charge.”

Despite the payment, CCP insists gamers are getting Dust 514, which ties into PC-exclusive MMO Eve Online, for free.

“We might go fully free-to-play down the line, but in the beginning we have a cover charge just to manage the initial launch of it.”

What, exactly, you’ll be able to spend your virtual money on is yet to be decided.

“We have some initial assumptions but we’ll put it out there and see how the player base during the trials reacts to it,” CCP said.

CCP showcased the Unreal Engine 3-powered game during Sony’s E3 press conference last month. A closed beta will happen at the end of the year ahead of a full PlayStation Network download-only release in spring 2012.

The console shooter directly connects to the PC MMO Eve Online, which launched in 2003. Dust 514 and Eve Online will share one “vibrant universe” – one single-shard super computer server.

“Sony allows us to use our systems,” CCP CTO Halldor Fannar explained to Eurogamer.

“Microsoft has Xbox Live. They’re very strict on that. There are a lot of issues we run into. It may be a basic thing people don’t realise, but with Dust and Eve on Sony’s network, we can allow them to chat together. Voice chat, text chat, that’s all one world.

“One of the reasons for the partnership with Sony is because they’re opening up new ways to do these things.

“We’re going to be managing most of it. We’re using PlayStation just for credentials, stuff like that. Then it’s all our stuff.

“With our agreement with Sony they seem to be fine with our three month expansion cycle. They’ve been looking at the MMO space for a while, trying to understand why something like that hasn’t still happened on the console. They’re coming to terms with it. There are certain things they have to relax just to allow these things to function.”

They call us “Kilm’ach.” The Lost. We are the demons of their Scriptures.The Beast made real. We scare them, and they hate us for it. Or perhaps we simply remind them too much of the past. Of the heritage they’ve forsaken and the people they betrayed. More likely, though, the Ammatar who live here hate us because we came to take their planet.

Whatever the map says, New Eden ends at the borders of the great empire. Outside of the hisec systems, civilization does not exist. Not the way most people would like to believe anyway. Out here, you see the true face of humanity. And it is the face of madness.

By the time I arrive on Khabi VIII, a fringe planet in a highly contested corridor bordering Ammatar space, I have been in the Valklears for seven years. I’ve paid for my training in scars and nightmares. The past is a glove-skinned awareness, barely felt. Old memories numbed by the fresh pain of new wounds. These days, I find the pain comforting, a convenient distraction. It might not be peace, but it’s a good enough substitute.

We’re moving slowly, stepping across a carpet of bodies. Tanvalin ghosts through my head. This is what you do now? Kill civilians. Through a series of small, interconnected rooms – scattered equipment, more dead scientists – labs by the look of it, and into a long, empty corridor: the perfect place to get shot. I motion for Neera to stay close, and together we crouch-run to the end of the corridor. We’re halfway there when the door at the far end slides open. Neither of us misses a step. There’s nowhere to go but forward, straight into whatever’s waiting for us on the other side.

Inside, the rib-vault is twice as high as it is wide. Dirty light spills in through aging windows, filling the room with a sick, yellow glow. Cracks trace elaborate patterns across filigreed sections of the walls and floor, wrap around a statue, like decrepit fingers searching for something to strangle. Blood-red rust feeds on the faded gold surfaces. There is nothing quite as depressing as Amarrian architecture.

We move forward, glass shards from the shattered work terminals crunch under foot.

“It’s beautiful,” gasps Neera, either ignoring or having not seen the bodies, one of which is slumped at my feet, just inside the door. This must be what triggered it to open. Poor bastard.

“It’s a dead end. We should keep moving.”

But Neera’s not listening. She’s lost in whatever place she goes to. The same empty look on her face from a few nights before as we sat outside enjoying the cool night air.

“What are we doing here?” she asks. A light breeze tugs at her hair, dragging a rebellious strand across her harsh-boned face. Large, gray eyes stare through me, like distant stars shining in an ebony sky.

From my puzzled look, she asks, “Here. On this planet. Why are we fighting?”

I want to tell her that we have no choice, that we’re just following orders. But the truth is that I don’t care why we’re fighting. And I don’t want to stop. Because stopping means having to think. I say nothing.

“Of all people, the Minmatar should understand the importance of freedom. We should know better. But here we are. At the end of the day we’re just like everyone else. We take what we want and damn anyone that stands in our way.”

“I don’t think—“ I start to say.

“No! We’re worse than everyone else!” A flicker in her eyes. Rage maybe, or yearning. It’s all I see in her eyes lately. “At least the Amarr have something to believe in. They work for the future, while the past defines everything we do. We use it to justify our actions. But we’ll never be better than we are now, because we’ll always be chained to what we once were.”

“I want nothing to do with the past,” I say, and mean it. “But what the Republic is doing is important. What we’re doing is important. And as long as we keep doing it, the Republic will be free,” I lie, wanting to make it better, to fix whatever’s broken inside of her, and knowing that whatever I do, whatever I say, it’s not enough.

She looks away from me then. “You’re wrong. We’ll never be free.”

“We’ve got nothing, Sarge.” Squawks my headset, snapping me back to the present and a room full of bodies.

“Alright.” I reply. “We’ll finish up here and meet you in twenty.”

“You’re the boss.”

Shadows pool in the gaps between shafts of light. The darkness shifts, a twitch of alarm and the animal knowledge that something is watching. A wrong thing. Unseen, but felt on the edge of awareness. Watching. Waiting.

“C’mon. We still have two more floors to check out.”

Leaving, we both glance back, each of us looking for something we’ll never find.

It takes us hours to search the rest of the facility. We scour it room by room, but each one is the same. Dead bodies. No sign of the prototype. Occupation of the planet began months ago, and clearly, the fighting got here long before we did.

I’m almost ready to call it off when the dry cough of gunfire booms through the corridor.

“In here!”

Neera’s voice.

I kick into a sprint, but Lesik is through the door first. There’s another deep cough, and then a spray of gore blows back out into the passageway. Shredded tissue, long, wet strands of it, flies past my face and coats the wall opposite. Lesik, what’s left of him, is dead before he hits the ground. I step over him, weapon tucked into the crook of my arm. And what I see stops me cold.

Neera standing in the middle of the room. Daraket at her feet, wide-eyed, his hands tangled in his own viscera, the red of it gleaming brightly under the artificial lighting.

“I was hoping you’d be first through the door. I thought that if I didn’t see you, I could go through with it.”

Her words flush the adrenaline right out of me. My limbs suddenly feel very heavy. “Drop the gun, Neera.”

“I can make it better! I-I finally know what to do.”

“Drop the gun, Neera. Please.”

“Don’t you want to know why I did it?”

“The ‘why’ doesn’t matter. It’s what you do that matters, whatever the reason. And you just killed two men.”

“I freed them, chintaku.”

“Don’t call me that. Not anymore.”

She stiffens at that. Then drops the gun and spreads her arms at her sides, palms open. To the casual observer it might look like surrender, but I know what the gesture really means. Have seen it a hundred times in the sparring chamber where we practice. It’s a challenge. And I always accept.

Neera is all soft technique, always has been. But she catches me with a backfist strike to the side of the head that seems to surprise her as much as it does me. She smiles then and for a moment she’s the Neera of long ago. I smile back, in spite of myself. This is insane. Then draw my knife and drop into a combat stance. After that, things fall into a familiar rhythm. She moves like a liquid whirlwind. Punches slide off her as she slips in and around everything I throw her way. It looks effortless, but the sheen of fresh sweat betrays the concentration it requires.

The Sikan style she practices is all about redirection. Using the attacker’s force against him. But I’m giving her nothing to work with and the frustration is starting to show. She gets too eager and comes forward when she should be retreating. I catch her with a lateral chop that knocks her back, but even off-balance she falls into a leg sweep that catches me just above the ankle.I’m back on my feet in a single motion, blocking and countering with adrenaline speed. We could go on like this forever, a geometric blur of limbs locked together for the rest of our days. Some part of me wishes that we would. The rest of me wonders how I’m going to live without her. I make my decision and then wait for my chance.

When it comes, I see it in the tilt of her shoulders, the subtle shift of her stance. The memory of it wired into muscles through countless hours of practice. I telegraph the move, knowing she’ll see it and slide right by. Past my outstretched arm, hooking and then snapping my wrist, taking my weapon and then, while I’m off-balance, killing me with it.

The moment spreads out in front of me. I lunge forward.

Except this time she doesn’t move. The knife goes in easily. The cold knowledge of it shatters and pierces my heart. She pulls me close, a gasp escaping her lips as the knife slides deeper. I can feel the life beating out of her, warm and wet. She kisses me and I can taste her blood on my tongue.

“Thank you, chintaku.” My love.

She goes soft then, the weight of her sinking into my arms. I squeeze her tight, hoping that if I can just hold her close enough, that if I wait long enough, she’ll open her eyes again. That everyone will stand up and together we’ll walk outside, laughing and joking and everything will be like it was. As I wait, time falls away and I lose myself in grief.

The faint awareness of movement snaps me awake. Daraket’s corpse stares accusingly at me. You knew what she was. This is your fault. Neera is lying on my chest, her arms around me like so many good mornings before. Suddenly, her grip tightens, and I feel the muscles in her neck stiffen as her head lifts itself and fixes me with gray, dead eyes. And a voice that isn’t Neera’s speaks from a face that is no longer hers.

“Why do you try to forget? Memories, Traveler. They’re what make us who we are.”

The darkness swallows me.