In the meantime

Introduction

    With one firm boot crunch, a large, slender, man in an old UTF dress uniform steps onto the platform off of the shuttle he had landed on. His head was embraced by a light infantry ground combat helmet, it was painted a pale yellow with a faded and worn red stripe down the middle. Dents and scratch marks cover the dome, tally marks accompany all these features, painted in black they number thirty three. His goggle shaped smart visor was a vibrant reflective orange, his neon green eyes peered through them surveying the area around him. The dress uniform's olive drab was accentented by a tan collar and gold buttons. A special operations badge was on the right shoulder, no rank was displayed, tear marks and stitches make the jacket look more like a patchwork quilt. The only visible features of the man being his nose, normal in proportions, and his small mouth, what little of the lower face was visible was in a similar state as the jacket. Scars and stitches littered the pale face, covering what under further scrutiny was revealed to be the face of a young man. Upon the second foot following the first, a heavy breeze accompanied by a most pungent smell pushed the jacket open enough for a holster to be barely visible on the right thigh. The man's hands moved from his pocket. His gloves were reinforced with metal and an a powered exoskeleton. The gun was visible for but a split second as he quickly, yet smoothly brought his jacket back into its proper position concealing the holster. Reaching afterward back into his pocket the man pulled out a device, he pressed a button. Sound was welcomed to his ears through the speaker of the helmet. What followed was revolution era mars rock playing through his headset, music he got from an old friend, a grin stretched across his face as he picked up the pace as he exited the space port.
    He watched the people walk by, the many faces of strangers doing strange things. The thing about port cities, he thought to himself. Is that they always have a more than adequate amount of crime. He thought this as he walked past a man being coerced into taking an unnecessary "gift" from a lone shark, several street hookers, an alley way of teens doing hard drugs while blasting of some kind of over the top electronic industrial music, lastly a cop taking money from a short man in a suit. The stranger in the uniform towered over most of the people around him, it was not always this way he thought to himself. Once he was  just like everyone here, even a little shorter than some of them. He had made bad mistakes and associated with the wrong people in the past just like these people. He remembered a comrade from seemingly a past life, he was just like him, except cruel, his malice was a deadly kind, his delusions so intense they brought death to thousands, but in the end a lot of his choices made things better for a lot of people.
    This man was a fellow security officer on the Thermopylae, a man who had also fought the collective raiding parties, but that man's fighting didn't start with the collective, or on the Thermopylae as the man in the olive jacket had. The man in question started his fighting as a teenager, fighting against a super power that was using with far superior weapons and supplies, an enemy that fought on behalf of the man in olive while he was still in school. Ray had known about the colonial revolutions, the revolution was supposed to be the most significant thing to happen in their lives. While Ray sat there in school learning about the events on the Moon and Mars through biased media outlets, Xander, the violent man in question, was on Mars, he was killing, and he did a lot of killing, he also was put through far more brutal tortures, both emotional and physical, than Ray would ever want to know. He had met Xander in a unstable period of chaos, and their actions together would create more chaos, but in small cases some order. Ray grinned again as the song faded, the song gifted to him by Xander.