I wake, the gel from the clone tank filling my mouth, nostrils and every other bodily orifice.
Disoriented, I allow the hands of the medics to do their work, massaging muscles, flexing joints as yet unused.
Then they start, the flashbacks, glimpses of what has just passed. A surge of nausea as I remember the first fleeting touch of the void, the cold, so cold and then nothing...............
I struggle to piece the flashing images together, they flitter just out of reach, its like trying to catch the Crimson Death Moth of my home world - Bourynes.
Then the realisation hits home, DEAD, not just a loss of ship but the life preserving cocoon destroyed too, ripped apart by the heavy drones. I had been so confident, after a year in space I wasn't a newbie. But then the mercenaries came.
Why had the mercs picked us? Who was paying them? Questions still to be answered.