Matthew Madison lit a cigarette and stared at the mountain of paper in front of him. Paperwork, always ruttin paperwork he thought as he took the first welcome drag. He’d been stuck on this gorram crate for a nearly week now. One week stuck in the passenger dorm on this hole of a ship, if you could even call it that. The Lucky Star it was called; Lucky, he’d need more than luck to get anywhere in one piece on this dump. He didn’t expect things to get much better when they arrived at Persephone in two days time. He still had masses of paperwork to do before then. This was hardly the bright future the Alliance had promised them at the end of the war. He hadn’t even requested this assignment why would he want to go a border world anyway he’d seen enough of them in the war. Madison looked over at the clock on the wall: 0257. It was whatever passed for night on a ship like this, he wasn’t thinking straight though, he never slept well during spaceflight and the past week had been no exception. He stubbed out the remains of the cigarette and pulled a bottle of scotch from his pack, filling the tumbler a quarter of the way up. Sleep by any means necessary. How had he ended up here as a pen pusher for the Parliament, he’d grown up on Ariel, a supporter of unification, fought in the war, becoming a Lieutenant no less. That was where it all began to go wrong; he’d survived the war but not the reconstruction. When the war ended he transferred out of the military, met a pretty girl, got a proper job, got married even. But that was where the fairytale ended. Marie had gone, left him for another man. It had hit him hard, he’d fallen behind with work missed deadlines. All that resulted him being passed over for promotion, stuck in the same job for what, six years now, had it really been that long? Then the icing on the cake, that son of a bitch Malcolm Reynolds and his broadwave about Miranda that was when things really began to hit rock bottom. He’d been as appalled as anyone to see what had happened there but it hadn’t surpris