It's 2037. I'm Mike Williams, but you can call me 'Magnet'. Everyone else does. It's short for 'Chick Magnet'. Good old-fashioned military humour at its finest. At age fifteen, my face picked a fight with the propeller of my family's boat, on a shoal near Broome, off Western Australia. It was an accident, but, needless to say, the propeller won.

Twelve years later, I was a not-so-ruggedly-handsome fighter pilot assigned to the TFR Sydney. Not the Captain, or flight leader, or anything similarly exciting. Nobody special, just one mostly-unmemorable pilot among the many nameless, faceless masses.

I'm Magnet. This is the beginning of my story.

A 5500 word story in the Lacuna universe, set during the events of Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi but suitable to read as a stand-alone story.