The ready room of the Sacramento had few distinguishing features. Captain Ayres had been in command for too short a period of time to bring his personality to bear with trinkets. And he was uncertain that his particular brand of personality lent itself to interior decoration. Many born into the poverty and privation that had been Ayres’ childhood would have used his good fortune to collect, to amass belongings, to attach sentiment and nostalgia to them. He had never had that compulsion.

But he enjoyed the sense of ownership: it was his ready room. He decided who entered and when they left, a privilege of command. The certainty and control was comforting, even after decades of secure service in Starfleet. It was a space within which he could contemplate, including about paths not taken.

When he was a teenager, not older than fifteen, he had known an older boy, Sam, famed for poor decision-making. It had surprised Ayres at the time, and since, that Sam had survived long enough to make many decisions at all. Sam was not particularly brave or especially smart, but he was large and muscular and had a sweetness to him. Ayres considered, with the kindness of time past, that the people with whom they lived – struggled to live – had simply allowed Sam to fail, fail again, and fail better, shielding him from the consequences of his choices. More so than anyone he had known back then, Sam had believed that if he could find one lucky break then he could leave the colony and its hardships behind.

The idea behind one of Sam’s ‘lucky breaks’ was to sneak into one of the few functioning starports and steal from a shipment of isolinear chips, as many as he could carry. Ayres had thought it a foolish plan. Not because stealing from shipments was a bad idea but because isolinear chips were simply not valuable to them. Food, clothing, and other small, functioning items could be traded but isolinear chips were poor currency for children. He had told Sam as such. Unfortunately, Ayres was right. Sam was killed falling from a cargo container and no-one found his body for nearly a week. For Ayres, it was another sad story in a galaxy full of worse stories.

But what would have happened if he had helped the boy? Would Sam have lived, found the lucky break, made it off-world and lived a happy life?

A possible alternative

“You’ve got about as much luck as a man spitting into a sand storm,” he said, turning his back on Sam and huddling against the stinging dust, “How is this better than any of your other ideas?”

“They’re chips! They’re small. We can grab loads. They’re for computers! So we’ll be able to trade them for a lot of things”, Sam looked at Ayres, earnestly, with his pleading eyes, “Come on, I need you. I can’t do it alone”.

Ayres looked at Sam, fully believing that this was a pointless exercise that would yield nothing, but not having the heart to reject another of his ideas,  “Fine. Let’s do it. Why not? If we get arrested at least we’ll get some food to go with the beating”.

Sometimes, Ayres thought, being a friend meant doing something stupid.

Looking at the collection of buildings and the flickering lights, Ayres thought that the starport was a monument to disrepair. It was a haphazard array of crumbling structures without any meaningful sense of order. It had been built, he assumed, in more optimistic times, when Federation planners had believed the colony might amount to something. Those illusions had long since faded, leaving behind rusted docking pylons, flickering landing beacons, and a control tower manned by people whose enthusiasm for their profession had been drained by years of heat, dust, and poor nutrition.

From their vantage point overlooking the port, Sam and Ayres could see the landing bays stretched out in uneven rows, their concrete surfaces cracked and patched with mismatched plating, evidence of hurried repairs carelessly carried out. The atmosphere smelled of scorched metal and unwashed bodies, mingled with the peculiar tang that came from too many ships launched with inadequate maintenance. He breathed in the scent, imagining it was an adequate substitute for the hunger cravings that would never go away.

The local authorities were weakly represented, consisting of a single security outpost, its windows opaque with grime and its lone officer appearing so perpetually exhausted that Ayres suspected he had long since ceased enforcing any law that required more than a mildly disapproving look. If you stayed in the colony long enough, ennui was the best that anyone could hope for.

“We won’t get any trouble from him,” Ayres pointed at the security outpost, “And anyway we’re fast enough to run and we know all the best routes to leave him in the dust”.

“Yeah”, Sam looked at the security outpost, unconvinced, but without any better insight to offer.

“Let’s go”, Ayres gestured his head in the direction of the warehouses. They were in a similar state to the rest of the starport but with a few more attempts at visible security. A theatre of security: there were floodlights pointing at empty spots and fences patched in places but most were guarding crates that had already been picked clean.

The two boys picked their way down the hill to the warehouses, easily avoiding the static floodlights. Ayres stepped into a pothole that soaked his already meagre shoes and cursed at his misfortune. Sam, surprisingly light on his feet, was ahead and gesturing that they should climb on top of a cargo container.

“Ssshh, we can get in here”, he whispered, waving at Ayres to hurry.

Ayres joined Sam, panting slightly from the exertion and trying to hide it from the older boy. Sam cupped his hands together and bent low, readying himself to propel Ayres upward and onto the cargo container. Ayres obliged, jumping up with Sam’s strong support and scrambling up onto the top of the rusty container. He pivoted, dropped onto his front and exerted his hand to pull Sam up with him.

It felt like Sam’s weight was pulling his arm from its socket but he made it up. Sam pounced to his feet and jumped up and down in childish triumph. The container, rusted, creaked momentarily and gave way beneath Sam’s feet, rocking him dangerously to the opposite edge. Ayres grabbed at the boy, catching his grimy shirt and steadying him.

Sam looked over the edge, “Woah. Look at that. That’s a big drop. I could’ve been really hurt”, he smiled at Ayres, a toothy smile unsuited to their criminal task. The two boys looked at each other and burst out laughing, a moment of levity, of success, in their otherwise miserable childhood.

Ready Room, USS Sacramento

Ayres caught himself looking into the middle distance, wondering just how many other children, in many other colonies, had similar stories to his own. He resolved that there was little to be gained by dwelling on alternative histories: he was here, he had survived, and he would make the most of that for Sam and all the lost souls like him.