by Joe Vasicek
A small line had formed in front of the commissary, just like at the start of each dayshift. Fortunately, it moved quickly. Aaron passed the time by staring at the floor. The tiles were white, with different colored lines designating the paths to various locations on the ship. MESS HALL, he read in bold letters next to the one in blue. BARRACKS, said the green one. He couldn’t quite make out the yellow one. The lettering stood out enough, but the words were unclear. However, the orange one read BRIDGE.
“Next,” the middle-aged woman called out from behind the commissary window. She was short and pudgy, her eyes half-open and her mouth turned down into what seemed to be a permanent frown.
“Me?” Aaron asked. He glanced around, but the line was now behind him.
“Yes, you. What do you need?”
“Headache,” he said, pointing to his head. The pain had started to become excruciating. “Need stims, very bad.”
“That’s what they all say. Hangover?”
Aaron nodded, moaning a little. He was already in too much pain to deny it.
The commissary lady left the window and came back with a small black canister the size of his thumb. “Take one pill every hour. Don’t forget to return the canister.”
“Thank you,” he said, accepting the canister gratefully. He opened it up and popped one of the little round pills in his mouth after taking only a couple of steps. It took a little effort to swallow without water, but he forced it down and headed for the observation deck.
The Aegis was a light Frontier-class frigate built mainly to protect larger settlements from pirates, bandits, and other marauders. Even though she was a lot smaller than a typical Imperial battleship, she was designed to operate mainly in one planetary system, rather than across an interstellar theater. Consequently, a lot less of her mass was dedicated to the power reactors and jump drive systems, letting her carry about the same amount of personnel in a much smaller ship. Still, compared to most Outworld starships, she was positively enormous. At 850 meters in length and 400 meters at her widest point, the Aegis was larger than some space stations Aaron had visited. He still couldn’t get over the fact that she had a deck just for observing the stars. Of course, with all the available space converted to carry as many troops as possible, the deck also served as the ship’s only public lounge and recreation space, but the place was generally pretty quiet at the start of the dayshift. It could get a lot busier later on, though.
He found a large chair in front of a bubble-shaped window and sat down. On his reading tablet, he brought up a Gaian language primer and synced the device with his wrist console in order to run it through the autotranslator. It wasn’t a perfect system—much of the time, the instructions made little sense—but it was better than nothing.
As he read, though, something made him frown. The words on the tablet made just enough sense that he could gather their meaning before turning to his wrist console. He couldn’t understand everything without the autotranslator—there were a lot of words that were still foreign to him—but the basic grammar and sentence structure came naturally, and he could infer most of the rest from context. In fact, there were spots where he could tell that the translation was in error.
The neural stimulator program, he realized, his eyes widening. He hadn’t noticed it before because of the headache, but now that it had more or less subsided, he could tell that the program had made a big difference.
Brimming with excitement, he closed the Gaian primer and opened the basic dictionary. Here, most of the words were unfamiliar, but by reading through the definitions and using the autotranslator to fill in the gaps, he was able to decipher their meanings. Whirl. Mote. Presuppose. Idealist. Remove. His mind soaked them up like a black hole soaking up light, warping all of his preconceived notions of language. After just half an hour, it became hard to tell whether he was reading Deltan or Gaian. Since the alphabets were mostly the same, he could barely tell the difference.
His wrist console chimed, alerting him that it was time for his platoon to take their first meal. He switched it off and slipped the reading tablet back into his vest, a grin spreading across his face. His headache was starting to return, but that hardly mattered anymore. He could barely wait to see the look on Mara’s face.
* * * * *
Aaron joined the rest of the platoon just as they were entering the mess hall. Lieutenant Castor led the way, though they came in no particular order. At thirty-something standard years, Castor was by far the oldest member of the platoon. He kept his light-brown hair cropped closely to his head, and a bushy mustache covered his upper lip. Hektor came after him, followed closely by three or four other soldiers that Aaron didn’t yet recognize by name. They all nodded in acknowledgment as they passed, but no one actually spoke to him until Mara.
“There you are,” she said. “How was your language study?”
“Good, good,” said Aaron, falling into step beside her.
She grinned. “Ah, getting better I see. Did the neural stimulator help?”
“Very much.”
“You didn’t overuse it, did you?” she asked, her expression suddenly serious. “That program is highly experimental. It could do serious damage to your brain if you do.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. No problem.”
They fell into line behind another platoon at the food buffet. Mara grabbed a tray for each of them and handed him one. At the front, Lieutenant Castor stepped aside to let the rest of the platoon go first.
“How’s our new pilot doing?” he asked Mara in Gaian as she and Aaron passed him.
“Doing well, I think,” she answered. “He did better in the last simulation than the one before.”
“So I heard,” said Castor. He said something else that Aaron didn’t quite catch—about the other soldiers taking encouragement or something like it. He turned to Aaron and smiled.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Castor’s eyes lit up. “Ah, making progress with the language I see.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Very much.”
He patted Aaron on the arm. “Keep up the good work, Cadet.” He added something about being promoted to ensign soon, with or without a uniform. The soldiers behind them chuckled. The Flotilla was far too scattershot to have an official uniform for anyone, much less for drop-ship pilots. But Aaron only got the joke after the lieutenant had moved on.
“You speak very well,” said the soldier in line after him. She was about Mara’s height, with dark skin, a flat nose, and an unusually wide mouth. Her teeth were whiter than an A-class star.
“Hello, my name is Aaron,” Aaron said, falling out of habit into the familiar phrases. “What is your name?”
“Talya. You’re not from the New Pleiades, are you?”
They arrived at the food trays, where server bots distributed equal portions of black and brown mush according to the soldiers’ preprogrammed preferences. The line was moving fast, faster than Aaron had realized. He’d already missed his chance to grab a bowl, but Talya wordlessly handed him hers and took one from the person behind her, who retrieved another from further up the line.
“No,” he answered. “Oriana Cluster. I am—I was—star wanderer.”
She nodded approvingly. “Very good. We’re all happy to have a real pilot flying us.”
Aaron was going to ask about their previous pilot, the one who now flew Paladin-2, but he’d already gotten to the server bots, which were flashing red at him. Apparently, this wasn’t a meal he’d registered for. Not wanting to hold up the line, he pointed to the tray on the left—until he saw the sign that said VEGETARIAN. But by then, it was too late. The first serving bot dropped two perfectly spherical scoops in his bowl and stopped flashing.
He was careful enough with the next ones to read the label first. Besides the brownish goop that served as the main meal, he got a scoop of corn and a scoop of rice, with enough spices mixed in to make it red. With a tall glass of white fruit juice to wash it down, the meal was more or less comple
te. He joined Mara in the search for a table.
“Talya’s right. You’re learning the language very well,” she told him in Deltan. “Here, let’s go sit by Hektor and the others.”
Aaron followed her to a table with exactly two empty places, both next to each other. When Hektor saw that they were coming, his eyes lit up, and he started waving and gesturing with his hands.
“What do you think I am, idiot?” Aaron asked him in Gaian.
The table erupted in laughter, so much that soldiers from the other platoons glanced in their direction. Hektor rose to his feet, clapped both hands on Aaron’s shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek.
“No problem, my brother. No problem,” he said. From the thickness of his accent, Aaron realized that he couldn’t speak Gaian either. That surprised him.
“Please, sit,” said Jason from the opposite corner. He gestured magnanimously with his hand. “And Mara—good as always to see you.”
Mara nodded curtly and took her seat. Aaron joined her.
“So when do you think we’re going to leave?” the soldier across from him asked. Aaron glanced around in confusion until he realized that he wasn’t talking to him, but to Mara.
She shrugged. “I have no idea.”
The soldier rolled his eyes and said something about her being more connected than anyone else. At least, that was what Aaron gathered.
“I honestly have no idea,” Mara repeated. She then said something about Aaron’s brother being in some wing of the Flotilla having to do with espionage. Instantly, every eye on the table turned on him.
“What?” he said, holding out his hands. “Don’t know anything.”
“It’s okay,” said Hektor. “Just cabin fever, is all. Want to go, get on move, anything better than sitting here.”
“Too true,” Jason concurred. “Life is boring when you’re not getting shot at.”
“The shooting will happen soon enough,” said Mara. She stabbed at her food with her spork and forced down a mouthful.
“How long you all been here?” Aaron asked. The others looked at each other, not sure where to start.
“I have been here four standard month,” Hektor answered. “Came from far side of New Pleiades. Was bored there too, and lonely. Here, only just bored.” He grinned boyishly.
“Two weeks,” Jason said. He took a long drink of the dark, syrupy substance that filled his glass. “Was a star wanderer from Oriana Cluster, not far from both of you.” He nodded in acknowledgment at Mara and Aaron. “Anyway, they wanted me to fly in one of the supply convoys. I did that for a while, but not much action, so I switched and came here.”
“I’ve been in this platoon for almost three standard months, and still no action,” said the soldier across from Aaron.
“What is your name?” Aaron asked.
“My name? I’m Nestor.” He was tall and thin, with fair skin and reddish-blonde sideburns that came down to his jawline. His lips seemed to curve up naturally into a grin.
“Sorry,” said Mara. “You probably don’t know everyone yet. You’ve already met Hektor, our heavy weapons specialist. Nestor is one of our scouts, while Pallas is a sharpshooter. Lino and Tzaf are on my fireteam, Phoebe is the platoon medic, and Talya, who you met in line, is one of the supports in our squad.”
“Right,” said Aaron, reverting back to Deltan as he talked with her. He waved at the others sitting around the table, but it was clear they didn’t know that Mara was introducing them.
“I’m Lino,” said the stocky, round-faced soldier sitting across from Jason. “Came here with Tzaf and Phoebe just a month ago. We’re all from Iayus—came because the Imperials invaded our homeworld. So yeah, not so boring for us.”
From the grim way that Mara nodded, Aaron gathered that was an understatement. Phoebe was a small, quiet girl with short, red hair and a cybernetic eye implant, while Tzaf was bald with a trimmed black beard and an arm that was clearly prosthetic. With his large, metal hand, he looked like he could punch clear through a bulkhead and not feel any pain. Lino didn’t seem quite as strong, but he carried a knife strapped to his chest that was almost as long as Aaron’s kukri. He didn’t doubt that the man knew how to use it.
“So why are you here?” Jason asked the last soldier—Pallas, the sharpshooter. He wore a set of shades so that it was impossible to see his eyes. With his dark olive skin and distinctively sharp facial features, Aaron guessed he was from somewhere in the region of Nova Alnitak.
“To kill Gaians,” said Pallas. His words were just as economical as his motions.
“Same here,” said Mara.
Phoebe said something about wanting to take back her homeworld. Her voice was so soft that Aaron couldn’t quite catch every word, but the meaning was clear.
“I’m here for the adventure,” Nestor admitted. “When the recruiters came to my home station, I signed up right away. Life is too short to live it all out at one star.”
I like that guy, Aaron decided. He nodded his approval, and Nestor returned the nod.
“Is same,” said Hektor.
“What about our pilot here?” Jason asked, looking pointedly at Aaron. “Why did you come to fight someone else’s war?”
Aaron shrugged. “Adventure, too,” he said, glancing from Nestor to Mara. “But also, for … unfinished business.”
“What sort of business?” Mara asked.
He thought of the henna girl in the cryotank. He could still remember her from his dream the night before, floating away from him with her arms outstretched. Come for me, she had said—whether in Deltan or Gaian or some other language, it didn’t matter. The meaning had struck him right to his soul.
“Is … complicated,” he said. “Sorry, cannot explain.”
“You’ll have to tell me later, then,” Mara said in Deltan. From the way she eyed him, it was clear he wouldn’t get out of it easily.
* * * * *
Thirty-one, Aaron counted as he pushed himself up from the floor. Thirty-two, thirty-three … Sweat dribbled down his neck and between his eyes, while the muscles in his chest and arms burned. All around him, the other soldiers were practically flying through the exercise. Tzaf was doing his pushups one-handed, just to keep from relying too much on his cybernetic prosthetic. After almost an hour of strength exercises, even the women were outdoing him. His cheeks burned almost as much as his arms, and even though his body screamed at him to stop and rest, he determined to push on with the exercise.
At length, they finished. Aaron collapsed face first on the mat, his whole body shaking. The floor never felt so sweet to him. But the others only waited a moment before pairing up for the next one.
“Come on,” said Mara, standing over him. “On your back, soldier. Time for another set of leg throws.”
“By the holy stars of Earth,” Aaron whined. Still, he rolled over and complied. Mara stood with her feet below his shoulders, on either side of his head. He gripped her ankles and lifted his legs to her chest.
“Keep ‘em straight,” she said. Pain shot up and down his thighs as she threw his legs back to the floor. He winced. It felt as if the lower half of his body were struggling against five gees. He just barely managed to keep his feet from hitting the floor—which was, of course, the point of the exercise.
“Again, soldier,” said Mara, clapping her hands to tell him to get a move on. “That’s one—give me nineteen more.”
Aaron gritted his teeth and groaned as he lifted his legs for the second rep. All around him, the others were already on their second or third. He’d have to hurry if he didn’t want to fall behind.
She threw him down again, sending fire through his lower abdomen. He gasped, his legs quivering, and lifted them again on nothing but pure force of will. Just as they were vertical, she threw them unexpectedly to one side, sending spasms throughout his body.
By now, his vision was starting to get blurry. Traces of the fractal images from the night before started forming around the edges of his sight, though perhap
s he was just imagining it. Time slowed, and everything around him seemed to turn to a blur.
Somehow, he managed to lift his legs one more time. He braced himself, expecting the pain to hit him again at any moment, but nothing happened. He opened his eyes and saw that Mara had stopped.
What’s going on? he opened his mouth to say, but the words refused to come out. It was as if he had a rag stuffed halfway down his throat—he just couldn’t shape his mouth to make the words. He heard some sort of sound coming over the shipwide loudspeakers and realized that it was some sort of announcement, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. In fact, he couldn’t even tell what language the person was speaking. To his ears, it was all just noise.
The fractal patterns started forming again on the edges of his vision, even with his eyes wide open. A sharp headache struck him like a hammer to the face, momentarily drowning out the pain in his legs and abs. He blinked and rubbed his forehead, and as quickly as it had come, the headache went away.
“—this is what we’ve all been training for,” the voice said. It took a second for Aaron to realize that it was Commander Ajax. “The people of the Outworlds will long remember this campaign against the Imperials. I trust that all of you will give nothing short of your best. Report to your posts in four hours.”
A cheer erupted through the bulkheads, which the soldiers in the physical training facilities soon took up. It was as if a spell had been broken, or a massive falling object had finally struck the atmosphere. Aaron moved to sit up, but soon fell back, exhausted.
“What’s going on?” he asked. His inability to speak had fled with the headache.
“Didn’t you hear? Admiral Tully is moving the Flotilla out. We jump in four hours.”
“Moving out? Where?”
“To Bacca or Iayus, probably. The main fleet’s at Colkhia, and we want to cut off their retreat. Aren’t you excited? Finally, some real action in this war.”
