An excerpt from Mongruxx: Starship Umbra – Book 2 (Chapter 23 – Scene 9)
Golgoth looked down at his feet. His enormous belly partly obscured his view, but it still put a smile on his face to see his old combat boots on his feet. The loaner pair sat in the corner of the driver’s pit. Seneca, the Ol’ bastard complained that Golgoth was turning it into his shoe closet, he thought with a chuckle.
Perhaps something sat wrong with the gods. The wholesale slaughter of the Ogin armour felt wrong somehow. Like it wasn’t a fair fight.
It wasn’t.
In war, nothing is fair. Innocents are often killed as collateral damage.
Life itself is capricious and often uncaring. The universe isn’t a nice place. It’s dangerous and deadly, full of people, places, and things that want to kill you and worse.
We’re just bugs on a rock, hurtling outward at forty percent of the speed of light for the few brief moments that we live.
Hubris.
Golgoth looked at his boots again, a gentle smile on his face. One could only enjoy the small things: friends, laughter, love, a good pair of boots.
Seneca the Ol’ bastard looked over at Golgoth for a moment. “Everything ok?”
Golgoth nodded. “Just contemplating this life and my place in it.”
Seneca scratched his head and looked uncomfortable. “The introspective and the unaware both die the same way, my friend.” He took a pull from his drinking skin, then offered it to Golgoth.
Taking it, Golgoth leaned back and took a hard pull as well.
Handing it back, he said, “Yes, tis true, Ol’ bastard.”
Seneca chuckled and took another drink.
Golgoth smiled sadly. “Tell me, Seneca, why do you drink so much? I ask not in judgment, for a Mongruxx may choose to live his life as he pleases. But in curiosity. I have known you for many years, and I don’t believe I have ever seen you sober.”
Seneca’s eyes narrowed. “Life has too many hard edges, Golgoth. The drink sands off the edges. Makes things seem nicer than they actually are. For our lives are as we perceive them, no less, no more. So I choose to live in a world where the edges are rounded off a bit. Where the hard metal bites not into me.”
Golgoth stared at him for a moment before turning to look ahead at the endless white sand.
