All My Sins Remembered Read Free

had to do some things that made us lose a piece of our soul.” Hawke paused as memory threatened to choke him up.  Roughly clearing his throat, he took a sip of his scotch.
    “Now, that chapter in my life is complete, and a new one has begun.  For those of you who have chosen to join me, you too are beginning a new journey.” Hawke held up his glass of scotch in a toast. “So I say this to you tonight, ‘To new beginnings.  May our road be long and amazing.’” In solemn toast, the officers in the room lifted up their glasses and joined in the toast.
    The sounds of the retirement party faded a little as Hawke walked into the viewing room attached to the banquet hall a little over an hour later.  It was one of the main attractions of a restaurant like Dugan’s.  He had always enjoyed coming here to look out the station windows that overlooked the planet below while he enjoyed a cigar and a glass of scotch.  There are some sights you never get tired of seeing, such  as gorgeous waterfalls, colorful nebulas...and yes, something as common as the sight of a planet from a window.  This was part of the reason why he had commissioned the construction of the Heaven’s Gaze .  It was a capital class ship, based upon the Gadari Republic’s Starfury carrier design.  All of Heaven’s Gaze’s systems were designed to be somewhat modular so that they would be adaptable to changing situations, but the systems being installed on her now were primarily geared towards exploration.  After years of killing, destroying, and doing distasteful things that gave him nightmares, Hawke felt that peaceful exploration may be the one way he could contribute something positive to humankind.  While he was aware that he was both feared and respected as a product of his past actions, he did not want to be remembered for his sins.  He wanted to be remembered for something, he hoped, that would be far more meaningful.
    Hawke reminisced about his company, Hawke’s Talons, and about how difficult the transition had been.   His so-called retirement caused no small amount of controversy among the other private military companies.  So-called, because in a brief press conference he announced that the Hawke’s Talons would no longer be a PMC, but rather w ould be repurposed towards exploration.  The moments directly after the press conference were troublesome as many investors sold off mass quantities of Talon stock, while other investors clamored to purchase stock in droves, heralding Hawke as a true visionary who saw that the future of mankind was not in warfare, but in exploration.  Meanwhile, the Gadari Republic began making inroads towards transitioning the Talons out, as they had been their most actively utilized PMC for any action requiring more than a platoon of Men or a single ship, because Hawke’s Talons was one of the few PCMs that had an entire fleet at its disposal, as well as nearly three hundred thousand employees ranging from research and development to nearly forty thousand well trained and well equipped Marines.
    In another shocking move announced scarcely a month later, Hawke announced that the company was drastically downsizing, reducing its workforce by nearly two hundred and fifty thousand, leaving the company with only fifty thousand employees, most of which were experts in all manner of scientific fields.  This left only twenty thousand personnel that were made up of pilots, Marines, and other support personnel.  Also announced was the commissioning of Heaven’s Gaze , one of the few privately owned capital class ships, a carrier, which would be heavily modified to be used specifically for the purposes of research and exploration.  Again the Company’s stocks were bought and sold frantically as nervous investors sold, and excited ones bought, but after it was all said and done, Hawke didn’t care.  Not one of the remaining Talons was worried about getting paid.  Every last one of them wanted nothing more