On Sunday after sermon my mother always made fresh sweetbread. The taste is gone. A memory still floating somewhere in the void, but I can remember the smell. The complex smell of rich roasted grain with hints of cinnamon, cumin and sugar. Every Sunday as it came out of the oven I would run to the stove, enticed by that smell.

Once I was careless. Treading on my expensive Sunday dress, I tripped. I reached out instinctively to break my fall. My palm pressed hard into the hot cast iron stove.

“When we are careless, there is always a price to be paid,” my father scolded as my mother held my throbbing hand to a block of ice and wiped away my tears. It was a cold burning sensation, uncomfortable but not painful so long as I kept my palm on the ice.

My wounded coercer hung in space above the decimated remains of an asteroid mining colony. The battle had been vicious, stripping the armor from my hull and exposing the delicate internal systems to the harshness of space. A cold burning sensation covered my entire body. I rubbed my palm, though my clone no longer bore the scar.

“Is anyone still alive out there? Anyone have eyes on the situation,” the comm channel slid into my attention buffer almost undetected behind the cloud of warnings, diagnostics and system error messages.

I cleared my mind.

“Red Seven reporting in. I’m still in my pod, though my ship is essentially slag.”

“What do you see, what’s the situation,” the voice asked.

I was in total darkness. I blinked a few times to make sure and felt around. I could feel the colony below me, feel the gritty debris around my hull.

“I’m about five clicks above the colony asteroid, there’s a lot of debris. Camera drones are offline, I’m going to eject and take a look.”

“Roger that Red Seven.”

I initiated eject protocols and pushed free of the remains of my destroyer. It was a feeling not unlike disrobing: free, unrestricted and vulnerable. The capsule’s emergency systems leapt to life. I saw a blur, then a haze and then my surroundings eased into focus.

Carnage.

“It’s pretty bad, Sir,” I started. “Colony is depressurized. bodies everywhere. I don’t think anyone else survived.”

I looked upward, the enormous broken hull of a navy apocalypse loomed above me, recognizable fragments of Rifter still protruding from the bridge. They had no business attacking a fleet of our size, they fought wildly, savagely and died to a man.

Reckless. Careless.

And yet somewhere deep in Minmatar space eight Rifter pilots awoke in new clones, reflected on their mission and smiled. My father had been right. Carelessness always incurs a cost. Who gets left with the tab is less certain.