Word that I’d beaten Cat’s gang spread through the neighboring streets in a single night.
And like all rumors, it grew in the telling.
Wandering all over the lower city became a regular part of my life after that.
I made friends on the surrounding streets—other gang-raised kids, same as most of the children in that part of the city.
At first it was hard to find common ground with anyone, but we bonded over ships.
Most of the kids in that part of the city were obsessed with space travel and starships.
We’d all climb across the roofs of the grim concrete buildings together, sneaking onto the restricted spaceport grounds just to gawk at the ships.
And they really were impressive.
On a screen, sure, they looked interesting enough, but nothing that took your breath away.
In person, it was a completely different feeling.
I think I’ll remember for the rest of my life that first rush of awe watching a cargo freighter take off—scorched all over and patched with metal plating, but still, somehow, magnificent.
It was enormous—fifty meters long, fifteen wide, painted dark brown, bristling with five imposing guns meant to fend off pirates.
Or maybe to hunt down weaker ships of its own.
It reminded me of pirate ships from some distant childhood memory—a reckless crew of daredevils drinking away every last coin before charging off into another dangerous adventure.
The other kids and I climbed as high as we could and watched that metal monster lift off.
It looked like some old but still-powerful beast crawling out of its den for one last journey.
At least once a week, we’d run out to see whatever new ships had come in.
Every so often, at the spaceport in the lower city—what the locals called our slum districts—you could spot Mandalorian ships, or other mercenaries’.
Fearsome, the kind that earned their owners grudging respect.
They were nothing like the sleek yachts the wealthy of the Upper City flew around in—beautiful, sure, but useless, and they never once touched down in the filth and stink of the lower city.
Too bad I never had much time for it—otherwise I’d have spent whole days at the spaceport, maybe even talked my way into apprenticing with the mechanics.
But there was always work to do.
As I grew, my responsibilities in the gang grew with me.
From an ordinary errand boy, I turned into a full recruit of our criminal outfit, the Shadow Front.
Mama wasn’t happy that I was getting pulled deeper into it.
By then I understood she was better educated than her friends, and unlike them, she didn’t live paycheck to paycheck—she was determined to leave this planet, or at least save up enough to move to the Upper City.
It upset her badly, watching me get drawn further and further into the gang’s inner workings.
But it was my choice.
I had no idea how realistic it really was to escape this swamp, so I figured I’d better fight my way up right here, in this planet’s criminal underworld.
At first it all repulsed me a little.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I understood that everything these people did was a flagrant violation of every law there was.
If I’d run into them back in my old world, I’d have called the police without a second thought—maybe roughed them up first, just so they couldn’t run.
Sure, I took part in illegal fights myself, but risking your own neck was one thing, and murder and theft were something else entirely.
Later I learned our real business was prostitution and gambling.
Even so, killing wasn’t rare either.
This far, far away galaxy no longer looked as rosy to me as it once had.
Violence and injustice thrived here just as much as they had in my old world—if not more.
But I guess your environment really does shape who you become.
What had first struck me as wrong and immoral barely stirred anything in me anymore.
Maybe it was because, whatever crimes these people—these sentients, I should say—committed, they treated me with warmth and care.
As the Boss liked to say about our business,
“We don’t force anyone to come to us.
They choose to, every time.
But if someone hurts my people, they’d better be ready for what’s coming.
I don’t pick fights for the fun of it—I need my people alive.
Better to settle things peacefully than throw them in front of enemy blasters.”
By then my duties included running messages between establishments—how much alcohol to order, where some important figure would be celebrating, which place needed more girls sent over, that sort of thing.
I also had to move small packages, and I was strictly forbidden from looking inside them.
When there wasn’t any work, they’d hand me off to the older kids to teach me how to ride speeders and handle weapons.
I picked up the local equivalent of motorcycles fast enough.
The strangest part was that they ran on antigravity repulsors and could hit truly insane speeds.
But that was just practice and habit.
Adjusting to the local weapons was another matter.
Oh, blasters deserve their own paragraph.
I was completely floored when I found out how the things actually worked.
They ran off a special canister of high-energy gas—tibanna—usually good for hundreds of shots.
No battery involved.
It’s not like I understood much about physics, chemistry, or any other science, but the idea of a gas serving as the charge just would not sink into my head for the longest time.
An even bigger shock was the lack of recoil.
Well, not quite none—but next to nothing compared to Earth firearms.
I’d once fired a pistol at a shooting range, back in that old life.
Burned through two magazines and still couldn’t get the hang of it.
Here, on my fourth try, I was nearly dead center on the target.
Like something out of a fairy tale.
And knowing how to shoot wasn’t optional—it was a matter of survival.
If the gangs only redrew their territory lines once a month, that counted as a quiet stretch.
There was one stretch when all of us hunkered down in the tunnels under the brothel, waiting out another gang war.
For a whole week, explosions and gunfire never let up.
To my surprise, though, nobody seemed worried or on edge.
Life just went on as usual.
One of the jobs for kids like me was dragging valuables off the battlefield afterward.
Looting, plainly put, was thriving.
Naturally, the rising generation of other gangs did the same.
There was even an unspoken tradition among the gangs: after a fight, they’d leave the small stuff for little scavenger crows like us to pick over.
Small pouches of coins, spare parts, shot-up armor not worth salvaging except for scrap, that kind of thing.
There were unspoken rules to it: no weapons; anyone who made it two blocks away wasn’t to be chased down; teaming up with other groups was allowed only with prior agreement between the elders—that sort of gentlemen’s understanding.
Naturally, the small stuff got overlooked, but there was still an effort to keep some order, so the younger generation didn’t just end up killing each other off.
Most of these scavenger runs ended in a free-for-all.
Whoever was still standing took everything.
And some tried to slip away with the best pieces while the chaos covered for them.
Accidents happened too, of course, during these little kids’ raids.
One boy scooped up a dropped blaster mid-run and just bolted, no direction in mind.
He was going so fast he misjudged a doorway and slammed the gun against the stonework.
The old, worn-out weapon couldn’t take it and blew up.
Nobody got hurt that time, but the risk of dying by accident was always there.
There was one time after a fight when more than just small change was left behind—there was a speeder bike, too.
And not just any speeder bike, either: fast, agile, and expensive enough that you could sell ten of them and buy yourself a starship.
Not a new one, but a starship all the same.
The winners of a gang fight rarely left something like that behind—usually they’d load up their speeders with as much loot as they could carry and ride off in a convoy to lick their wounds.
But this time, they either ran out of time, didn’t care, or just didn’t have room.
Either way, that little machine was left for us to fight over.
And it just sat there, tempting, right in the most brightly lit spot around—like nature itself was mocking us by shining a spotlight on exactly that patch of ground.
Its white sides, barely touched by grime, gleamed in the rising sun.
Even from a distance, the seat looked comfortable, and the control panel seemed to whisper an invitation for a ride.
Word got around, and packs of kids poured in from half the lower city.
Every house, every fence, every pipe was crawling with grimy, tousled-haired brats, eyes glinting with greed.
A kid’s head poked out of every hole in every wall, from behind every cracked window frame.
At first, they tried to work something out—some kind of tournament.
But right in the first round, the losing side decided to jump the winners as one, someone shoved someone else, and it all went sideways from there.
It turned into an absolute dogpile, a nightmare to watch.
Lucky for us, my crew stayed out of it, holed up on the roof of a two-story building where we could easily jump to the next one over and slide down an awning to the street if we needed to.
While most of the kids were busy beating each other senseless, one clever little brat just walked up, hopped on the speeder, and tried to ride off with it.
And he very nearly pulled it off—almost nobody noticed him at all.
The few who did try to break away from the brawl got knocked out cold before they got far.
But we saw everything.
So we climbed down, and the older kids cut him off at a turn and politely asked him to hand our property over.
Lucky for him, the poor fool had already crashed into a wall himself, and since he’d been going slow, the bike wasn’t damaged.
One against seven—naturally, he agreed.
We collected our valuable prize and strolled back to base, in no hurry at all.
That little rat went and told his own elders we’d threatened him with a blaster and he’d had no choice.
It nearly sparked a whole new conflict.
But somehow, things got settled.