Guardians (Æthyrium Rising - Guardians Book 1)

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  The First Test

  The shuttle came to land in the Valkyrie’s tertiary hangar at the rear of the ship. It was small compared to other hangars I’d seen, but it could easily have fit fifty of the shuttles door-to-door from one side to the next, and half that from the hangar door to the entrance of the actual ship.

  We’d barely stepped out of the shuttle, along with at least a hundred other pledges, when it lifted up into the air and a coarse female voice spoke over the speakers, “Everyone not aboard a shuttle should get out of the hangar ASAFP. It’s about to get really cold in here.”

  I spotted a raised platform that led to some double doors on the opposite side of the room to the hangar doors, “Let’s go.” I said as I broke into a leisurely jog, my duffel now slung over both shoulders and banging against the small of my back.

  I’d almost reached the stairs to the platform when I felt an uncomfortable sensation in my stomach, like I was about to throw up without the actual sick feeling. It wasn’t until I’d taken another big step that I noticed my feet weren’t touching the ground anymore.

  “We’re still in here!” I heard a voice cry.

  All of the shuttlecrafts’ engines started to fire up, but the hangar doors still weren’t open. It only took me a few more seconds to realise what was going on, “Guys,” I said calmly, turning around in the weightless environment to look at my all similarly calm siblings, “I think this is just a test. I reckon they’ve turned off the anti-grav and are going to see what we do.”

  “And what do you think that should be?” Eira asked with an annoyed expression, clearly being in a weightless environment didn’t agree with her.

  I looked around at the other confused teenagers, floating around without any real plan. “Tyr,” I said when a plan popped into my head, “you grab Mouse’s arm and pull her toward you and the door, then you grab the guardrail and wait. After that Tyr can do the same for Eira and we-”

  “Build a people rope!” Mouse squeaked.

  I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to finish my plan, but nodded with a smile regardless, “Exactly. You think you’re up for it?”

  “Mmhm, as long as Tyr doesn’t miss and I go flying into a shuttle’s engine I’ll be fine.”

  Tyr swallowed hard and nodded, “Thanks for that Mouse.”

  “You’re… welcome?” she said unsurely as she locked arms with Tyr.

  “You ready?” Tyr asked.

  She gave a nod and stared at her target.

  Some had taken a liking to our little display as Tyr gave a small grunt of exertion and sent Mouse directly at the guardrail, while others started mimicking it at the other platforms around the hangar’s walls.

  Mouse grabbed the rail and held on for dear life as she continued moving over more than she’d expected, “You’re doing fine Mouse, just- whoa.” I said as I felt a powerful arm scoop me around the midsection and start dragging me along.

  I looked around and saw Tyr, Eira in his other arm, “I used her momentum to get to the ground, then did a bit of a kick and used Eira to guide me.” he said before I could ask. “Rather brilliant if you ask me.”

  “Well nobody did, so shush.” I said as I started pulling myself over Mouse.

  There was a keypad next to the door, but it was green and had an unlocked padlock on it, so I assumed the best and pushed it. The door disappeared upward and I pulled my top half through the doorway, which had a weak yet obvious shield, upside down. That’s when I made a horrifying discovery.

  The gravity was on in the next room.

  My top half fell as soon as it was through the doorway and only barely managed an awkward sort of backflip, landing me on my feet in the next room and then my arse promptly afterwards.

  I blew a raspberry before I got back up to my feet and rubbed my butt, it didn’t hurt too bad, but I figured it’d get me just over the sympathy line so none of the others could laugh at me. I was wrong.

  “Nice job.” Eira laughed. “What happened to all those years of gymnastics?”

  “Ha-ha. They weren’t inside a gravity free environment, were they? Just get in here.”

  While the others crawled their way in, I started to get a feel for where I was. It was a locker-room that was about as wide as the hangar, which meant the other platforms that were on the side walls probably led to some kind of engineering rooms or something. The head height lockers were broken up into around a hundred blocks of five, ten blocks going in each direction, giving enough clearance between them to have two people walk shoulder-to-shoulder on all sides.

  “Well that’s nice.” Tyr said when he’d finally climbed into the room and looked up at the white banner hanging above our heads, the words ‘Welcome Pledges!’ stencilled on.

  Eira nodded, “Mmhm. Shouldn’t there be someone here?” she said as she looked around.

  “Probably have something better to do,” I grumbled, “let’s just hurry up and find our lockers.”

  It took at least ten minutes of shouting out our names to the others as they came in to see if they’d found ours in the search for their own. I actually managed to find mine accidentally when I was guiding someone else whose locker I’d found.

  I pointed the guy in the right direction and came to stand in front of my locker, my name printed on it in big black letters, as well as my number below it in smaller characters. There was a simple keypad on the front with ’0000’ on a green display above it. I guessed that I’d be given the opportunity to get a real code soon enough, and pulled the handle on the left hand side of the door, opening it with a slight creak.

  “Hey! Tyr, Eira, Mouse! I found ours!” I shouted in all directions before looking in the locker to see one dress uniform hung up on a metal bar above a pair of formal black leather shoes.

  There was a small compartment above the bar that had the means to be locked, and a digital display with the message ‘Bring uniform with one pair socks and one pair boots to showers. Leave the rest here.’

  I opened up the duffel for the first time and saw a pair of boots along with five pairs of socks and five vacuum sealed bags of uniforms. I stuffed a pair of socks into the boots and grabbed them and a bag before shoving the bag into the locker and shutting it behind me.

  The others showed up and did the same when they saw me leaning against the locker with my arms full. “Where were you guys?”

  “Helping a few people out.” Tyr said as he shut his locker, “Met some really nice ones.”

  “One.” Eira clarified with a cheeky smile. “Tyr met a girl.”

  “Oooh, what’s her name?” I asked like an annoying little schoolgirl.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but… I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Mouse asked when she finished grabbing her stuff shortly after Eira, “Why not? We showed her right to her locker.”

  “I guess I was too busy paying attention to what she had to say.”

  Eira scoffed and cupped her hands over her breasts, holding her gear in the crooks of her elbows, “Yep, she had a great personality.”

  “Shut up,” Tyr snapped as we started moving toward the end of the room, another, smaller banner saying ‘Pledges this way’ above a three-person door, “I really did care about what she had to say, she was really funny. And you’d have known that if you weren’t spending the entire time being a perv.”

  Eira shrugged, “I like big tits, she had big tits. Not my fault I’m a hopeless romantic.”

  We all, with the exception of the incredibly embarrassed Mouse, had a little laugh as we continued to follow the direction of the banners. Most of the time over to what I guessed was one of many shower blocks was spent mocking Tyr and his little love interest.

  He was the most romantic of the group, no doubt about that, but that’s what made it fun to tease him about it, otherwise it’d just be jocky bullshit, and we weren’t really into that.

  Should’ve probably been nicer when we could.

  You never know what’s
gonna happen.

  A Brief Tour

  After we’d all cleaned off in what was basically a pool shower room, we’d got dressed and been ordered over the speakers by the same woman as before to dump our old clothes down a chute. Turned out the chute was actually an incinerator, and not a laundry area as expected.

  Eira stared down the chute in horror, “What. The. Hell? Why do they get to destroy our stuff?”

  I shrugged and walked toward the shower’s exit, “They get to do anything they want. That’s what the military is.”

  “Well it isn’t fair.”

  “Not supposed to be fair little lady,” a proper sounding male voice said as we entered the hallway outside the shower’s, “most of what you experience here won’t be.”

  I turned around expecting to see a guard, but instead saw a man in captain’s garb. Instinctively I went to attention, as did the others, and I’m pretty sure I heard Tyr squeak, but he quickly covered it up with a fake cough.

  “At ease,” Captain Vyard said with a little smile, “let’s move so that there’s room for the others.”

  He turned around and walked to the end of the hall which became a T-section, and we followed, coming to stand with our feet almost touching as we stood at ease.

  We waited patiently for the others to come up behind us, fast filling up the hall as we stood in four almost perfectly straight lines. All of us had had at least this level of training, how to stand in formation, how to march, how to salute when an officer went by, all the things you need to get by in the first few weeks of cadet training.

  The Captain found his place in the dead centre of our formation so he could stare right down the middle of us, put his hands behind his back, and cleared his throat. “Welcome to the Valkyrie,” he said loudly over our heads, “my name is Captain James Vyard. I am the man who’s going to keep you alive throughout this tour. You are here because you’re the top 100 we could pull from Kaltjarna, Vierces, and Thylios, but don’t for a second think that makes you better than anyone else. Of all the things that are going to get you killed, ego is the biggest threat of them all. You are not invincible. This is not a training ship, so get that idea out of your head now. This is a warship, with real soldiers and real death, so you’re going to have to follow every single one of my laws to the letter. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir!” we shouted back.

  After that we got taken to grab our duffels and then shown around, where we’d eat, where we’d sleep, and in between the rooms he’d tell us what specific codes meant, and what to do should all the lights go off and be replaced by flashing red ones. I don’t fully remember what it was that he said, but the gist of it was the shield’s had failed and overall hull integrity had dropped to less than fifty percent and we were all going to die.

  The rules, sorry, ‘laws’, were pretty simple. Don’t fight each other outside training, don’t kill each other, don’t keep weapons in your room or on your person, and basically a whole lot of very obvious stuff that really shouldn’t have had to be explained, although I did hear a few disappointed groans from people.

  I guess sometimes obvious isn’t all that obvious.

  We went into one more area, which was basically a giant empty hangar on the lowest part of the ship and the Captain stopped us. “This is what we call the RAC room, Recreational Activity Centre. It’s used for a variety of activities, from training to rapid deployment should we be forced to land and the regular departure and deployment bays are unavailable.”

  He pointed to four transparent viewing platforms at the top of each of the forty foot high walls, “Each of those will usually be filled by your fellow troops watching over your training exercises or pre-organised games of paintball, Minotaur, football, or any of the other approved sports.”

  I wanted to ask what the Hell Minotaur was, but it seemed to be an inappropriate time and we were already on our way back to the rooms, which was a block consisting of five rows of ten doors.

  “From here I’ll leave you in the care of Doris.” the Captain said before turning around and leaving, “Lights out in twenty!”

  There were a bunch of names called out before ours, but eventually Doris got to me, “Nokri, Freyja and Li-… ‘Mouse’. Row three, room ten. Jadari, Eira and Jadari, Tyr. Row four, room one.”

  “Aw…” Eira whined, “Here I thought we’d all get to bunk together.”

  Tyr nodded, “Yeah, but at least we’re still together, means we won’t be left alone.”

  Eira rolled her eyes, “I s’pose. I guess we’ll see you guys later then?”

  “Yeah,” I said weakly as we walked down our row, “later.”

  Mouse seemed excited, and I wasn’t upset to be bunked with her, it was just that Eira and I always got on a bit better in terms of what we could talk about. Boys, girls, guns, ships, Mouse hadn’t really shown an interest for any of it.

  But I made sure to keep a grin on my face as we opened the door to our room regardless, I’d gotten rather good at that. The room had two metal bunks on either side with a single mattress and a simple blue sheet and pillow, as well as a single set of long black pyjama pants and a white t-shirt, both of which had been folded and placed at the foot of the bed.

  “I can’t believe it.” Mouse said as she carefully placed her duffel on her bed next to her pyjamas. “We’re actually here. Do you know how insane that is?”

  “How do you mean?” I asked as I tossed my own duffel on the floor and collapsed on the bed.

  “We’re on a spaceship, a proper spaceship with guns, and training rooms, and just… ah! It’s crazy!” she shrieked as she carefully pulled out an eight-by-eight-inch wooden box from her bag.

  “Wha-? How did you get that on board?” I asked, instantly recognising it and shooting up into a seated position.

  She shrugged and sat down on the bed, “People weren’t paying much attention to me, and dad knew they wouldn’t, so he gave it to me when we were leaving.”

  It was a puzzle box, or a lockbox, or something else, could’ve been a ball for all we knew, but she’d come down with it when she landed on Kaltjarna when she was eleven. At least, we thought she was eleven based on the scanning equipment we had, she may well have been two hundred.

  Anyway, the box was covered in these markings, and if she ran her finger over them in a certain way they’d go blue, then red if she went the ‘wrong’ way. Again, we only assumed it was a puzzle box. Could’ve just been a toy.

  “You could get in a lot of trouble for sneaking that on board.” I warned.

  But Mouse wasn’t scared, she just smiled and put it in the furthest corner under her bunk, “They’ll have to find it before they can punish me.”

  I don’t know what it was, but something about being on the Valkyrie had changed Mouse. She was more smiley than normal, and much more talkative.

  I’m pretty sure she’s the reason why I was able to get to sleep that night, I was so sure that everything was going to be just fine.

  Bully

  My first morning on the Valkyrie started at 5:30 AM with Mouse and I standing at attention with our beds made in waiting for room checks. We stood like that for a full fifteen minutes before Doris’ voice came over our room’s speakers, “Congratulations Pledges Nokri and Mouse, you get first pickings at breakfast. Go to the mess hall.”

  I smiled and relaxed, “Nice job Mouse, didn’t think you had it in you.” I said as we left the room and made our way toward the mess.

  “It was easy, I like standing still for long periods of time. It’s like pretending I’m dead.” she said in her adorable morning voice.

  I decided to skip right over how creepy that was and go straight to “How’d you sleep?”

  “Good, didn’t dream though. How about you?”

  “Yeah, same.” I lied. I didn’t really feel like telling her that I was pretty sure I was suffering from space fatigue, which is basically jet lag coupled with seemingly unending nightmares and the feeling that your insides are going
to exit you from either end at any given time. I knew it was just because we’d started moving after we’d gone to sleep, and that it would pass pretty quickly.

  When we got to the mess we found that we were one pair in four that had made it through the waiting. The hall could’ve easily fit three hundred people with the stainless steel tables that lined the room.

  Then there was the food area, it was self-service, the only obvious choice when people could come in at any time, a collection of what I assumed were auto filled bain-maries built into a bench that appeared to be carved out of the wall, a plexiglass waist-high barrier acting as the line control.

  Mouse and I walked over to the end of the tiny line and found a ceramic plate and a set of cutlery before making our way down. There was some bacon, of which we were only allowed two strips, fried eggs, sausages, and some kind of green stuff that looked like mashed potato.

  “Make sure you have plenty of the green goop,” Mouse said as we shuffled down, “it’s got a whole bunch of nutrients and proteins. And it’s also the only thing they’re gonna feed us after today, at least until we stop off at another port or something that has ‘treats’ like bacon.”

  I frowned at the slop and then piled some more onto my plate. It was only once we’d left the line and we were on our way to the end of a bench that Mouse started snickering.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked with a little laugh.

  “You don’t have to get the green stuff,” she chuckled, “the other stuff’s cloned, we’ll never run out.”

  “You… dork.” I said as crossly as I could without laughing. It was one of her funnier gags, and I was only upset that the others hadn’t fallen for it, which got me thinking, “Hey, where’s Tyr and Eira?”

  “Here.” an annoyed Eira replied before sliding in next to me.

  “Where were you?” I asked as Tyr sat on the opposite side of us next to Mouse.

  “Ask him.”

  I turned my head to him and tilted it questioningly.

  He let his head roll back and sighed before straightening back up, “I scratched my nose.”