Gate was a young boy, not long after his 14th birthday. It was the dark season in Taranis Prime, and the night-time temperatures had already dropped well below freezing. If you spent the entire season indoors, you would go mad from cabin fever, especially in the overcrowded hab complexes of the mid-hive. The best way to shake off the dark season blues was an evening stroll along one of the open air promenades with your family. These were some of the fondest moments of Gate's young life. The many coloured lights of the commerce arcades, the smell of hundreds of street kitchens preparing local food, the groups of young heirs from uphive and strange off-worlders. He was safe amongst his siblings and under the watchful eyes of his hulking father, free to explore a night-time world of childish excitement.

Occasionally, however, Gate's parents would be otherwise occupied and he would instead venture out with only the company of a few of his siblings. This time was one such occasion, and Gate was walking through the streets at the end of the evening to return to his parent's complex. The streets were beginning to empty at this time of day, as the shops and markets closed and there was little reason to be outside. As Gate walked he forgot to look where he was going, and ended up colliding with a man walking in the opposite direction and sending a bottle the man was holding shattering upon the ground. The man had the look of a vagrant, and immediately turned on Gate in anger. Rather than taking the man's side, passersby immediately assumed that - because of his appearance - the man was some thief or lunatic attacking the young Gate. Gate made no effort to be honest; he let the gathering crowd assume the man was an attacker and revelled in the privilege imparted even by his modest social status. This was an important formative moment in Gate's life. There was no feeling more reassuring than knowing society was on your side. You could look upon the less fortunate through a glass screen and never have to know their fate.

...

As lasfire blew white-hot pockets in the ruined buildings, Gate wondered if this is how that unassuming vagrant had felt. The other penal legionnaires trying to blow his head off weren't interested in his side of the story. The officials from Redemption didn't bother to differentiate him from the next legionnaire, regardless of how much more valuable an asset he might be or how harmless his crimes may have been.

The deafening percussion of a grenade blast thudded from nearby as Octavia and Tigranes made their manoeuvre. The blast triggered some additional memory, a continuation of the scene. Gate remembered that whilst the crowd did not care for the life of the vagrant, the vagrant stood his ground and pressed the truth on them anyway. They didn't listen - the vagrant was arrested and might have even ended up on a penal world like Redemption - but there was nevertheless something admirable in the futile defiance of the vagrant. At any other time Gate might have found it a pathetic sentiment, but in this situation is stirred something inside of him. Grabbing his lascarbine, he drew in breath sharply and fired it blindly over the top of his cover.