"IT IS TRUE THOU WRETCH, THAT WE HAVE LEFT BEHIND US OUR HOUSES AND OUR CITY WALLS, NOT THINKING IT FIT TO BECOME SLAVES FOR THE SAKE OF THINGS THAT HAVE NO LIFE NOR SOUL; BUT WE STILL HAVE A CITY, THE GREATEST IN HELLAS, OUR TWO HUNDRED TRIREMES." -- THEMISTOCLES

 

 

 

 

This man is built like a runner losing his race with time. Sunlight may never have touched his gaunt face, and wind may never have blown his silver-shot black hair, but he remains one of the tallest and fittest men in the room. He is built much like a spaceship, efficient and powerful without wasted mass. By no means a body-builder, every sinew is still strung with purpose and every ounce of flesh steel-hard or omitted. His features remain just as hard. Only the crow's feet in his eyes and the creases on his brow break the scowling mask he wears.

He laughs genuinely and hard, grins at his own honest jokes, dead-pans sarcasm with a smile under the veneer, and shouts orders with the most violent contortions of sneering force. But sometimes his face shows nothing. Spattered in blood, reeking of acrid smoke, surrounded by alarm klaxons; sometimes he is in a cold quiet place behind his eyes, weighing everything as threat, obstacle, or duty. It is then that his eyes snap into brutal focus and the world is divided for or against him.

A native-born Martian, Hayden grew up inside a Thyssen-Krupp hematite mine. Learning technical skills as an apprentice mine electrician at the young age of twelve, by his late teens Manfred had developed a knowledge of industry and engineering that put him in supervisor positions over newly arrived college graduates. He was earning Thyssen-Krupp "Continuing Workplace Training" certificates whem most Earthside children were getting plastic participation trophies for science fairs. After catching a few executive's eyes, he began to be groomed for bigger and better things.

His career with Thyssen-Krupp came to an end following strikes and violence that spread across Mars in 2391. Like most modern firms, Thyssen-Krupp's hiring practices had long been merit-based; women were never discouraged from becoming continuous excavator operators or foundry workers. However, they were never encouraged to. Between stricter radiation exposure limits for non-sterile women, which were as old as the Space Shuttle, and cultural norms regarding gender and workplace roles, there became a decided imbalance between the industrial complexes and the supporting bases. Most wives or girlfriends of workers were a weekend's leave away, and violence over infidelity caused many "other men" to be pulped in milling machinery.

The tension broke after a news-feed scandal circulated regarding sexual harassment and even coercion by executives and managers against women who, being kept anonymous, could have been any worker's significant other. The violence left thirty-eight dead before corporate security, hitherto used to dealing with drunks and union agitators, saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to mediate on behalf of the workers. Any male worker who wished to terminate their contract could do so, without penalty, and seek employment with another firm.

Hayden had been the protege of one of the implicated executives, so his local prospects were now severely impeded. The Mars Orbital Guard was eager to take on the mechanically inclined miners, and the red-uniformed marine assured him he'd be scraping women off his great-coat at every port. And for twenty years Hayden served aboard everything from salvage tugs to cruisers, until at long last he realized that once, as a younger man, he had dreams bigger than a ship's engineering compartment.

Cashing out his compound-interest ballooned wages and throwing caution to the wind, he bought a grandfather-generation light freighter from the scrapyards and spent a long month eating soya bricks and busting his knuckles in her iron guts. But now the reactor has been fueled and the lights mostly turned on, and the Captain is going to need a crew...