by SF Edwards
***
Marda took a deep breath when her macomm beeped for her and opened the door. She stepped in, doing her best to look confident and scanned the room. She met Blazer’s eyes after he let out a sigh and nodded to him before she spotted an open chair next to Chris. She made her way over and stood behind it, waiting as Seri pulled out her own chair and motioned for her to go on. “You have the floor, Cadet Sciminder.”
Marda looked about at all of them and wanted nothing more than to just sit down and disappear. The last few cycles had left her drained both emotionally and physically. Security had rousted her from her bed the cycle after the accident and hauled her off for questioning. She’d slept and eaten little since and the funeral had drained what little energy she had left.
“I’ve met most of you already and for those of you that I haven’t, my name is Marda Sciminder. I have been assigned to the Blade Force as your new field medic,” she announced. It was all she could do to hide the fatigue and sadness in her voice. She knew that her eyes betrayed her. This is not how I wanted to join a new team.
“I know the ways of this unit are different from my old one and I will do my best to acclimate myself. I have wanted to join this type of unit for some time though I would have rather it had been under better circumstances. However, we must do as the universe guides us,” Marda continued. She looked around, making eye contact with Blazer, lingering there a moment too long before she continued with a hint of a weak smile touching her lips. “My schedule is being adjusted so that I can join your flight and ground training sessions.”
“That’s our training sessions, Marda. We’re all the same unit here,” Seri reminded her.
Marda nodded, tired. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just…”
“It’s all right. You can have a seat,” Seri interrupted her and Marda sat, exhaustion washing over her.
Marda did not realize that speaking to her new squad would be so emotionally draining. She looked around the table again. She did know most of them but her faith had kept her from ever getting to know Datt and Treb.
She glanced over at the pair of clones and really saw them for the first time. These two clones would be considered an affront to the sacred womb. Strict Messiahists held that life should only be born of the living, not artificial means. Marda was not so stringent in her beliefs but still wondered what her more devout friends and family back home would think of her new squad mates.
“Marda will be moving into the quarters that Chris and I share with Telsh and Kallie of the Explosions. It will help her integrate with the team better and allow me to keep an eye on her,” Seri announced, eyeing Blazer.
She must know that Blazer came to visit me after the accident. It’s none of her business, and the regulations are clear, the only thing Blazer did wrong was be abroad after lights out. Even if we’d, had sex. God, what was I thinking, throwing myself at him like that? Too ashamed to look his way, Marda just stared at the table.
Marda could feel Blazer and Arion looking at her. They all must be watching me, wondering what I’m thinking.
Marda continued to listen to Seri as she discussed their upcoming training assignments but only halfheartedly. What do I do now? Is this even my path anymore? And what about Blazer? For the first time, she began to doubt herself.
Marda thought about the accident. Her two squad mates who had died weren’t even those at fault. She wasn’t sure she could face more loss and didn’t think she could cope with something happening to this new team of hers either.
Marda looked up at Blazer and Arion. As she made eye contact, Arion nodded at her. What does that mean, does he finally accept me? The whole scenario began to make her head hurt.
Blazer looked at her with concern. His eyes spoke volumes. What do I do about him? God I’m so mixed up right now. What I wouldn’t give for my grandmother to be here, I could use her counsel right now.
Instead, she confided in Blazer’s orbs. They did not belong to him but it felt natural and right to describe them that way. They’d been with him his whole life and were like family to him. So why can I confide in them and not to the man that I love? Any other man would have taken advantage of me the other cycle. But he had said no, because he loves me. She looked up at him again but he had turned to listen to Seri.
* * *
“OK. That should be it then,” Seri announced. “One last thing. Chis, I need you to help Marda with moving her things to our room.”
“Not a problem,” Chris replied.
“Blazer, when do you have to report to Chief Flind?” Seri asked.
“My shift starts in a hect. The chief gave me a little time off this cycle.”
“Good. I need you and Gokhead to transfer Marda’s equipment from her squadron’s locker room to ours.”
“Not a problem,” Blazer replied. Which locker do I put her stuff in? We have two open units. Do I put her next to me, or Seri? He looked up at Marda. He wanted her near him but wasn’t sure now where she would prefer. “I’ll need your key code to get into your locker,” he said.
“Actually, my bags are already packed in my room. I knew I would be moving. I just haven’t had a chance to prep my locker though.”
“Good. Thinking ahead!” Seri commented.
“I can move my bags myself,” Marda offered.
Chris waved the notion off. “No. I can handle it. You should go with those two fools. Make sure they don’t find anything in your locker you don’t want them to.”
Blazer smiled and Chris gave him a quick nod.
Seri shook her head in displeasure. “Fine then. I have a Squadron Commanders Meeting to attend. Dismissed!”
Soon Blazer, Marda and Gokhead found themselves walking across the open areas of the academy towards the squadron’s locker room located underground between the flight and ground combat training buildings. “Gok, Marda and I have this handled between the two of us. Why don’t you go and see what’s going on with that stupid little robot they assigned us?”
Gokhead sighed with frustration. “Yes, it has been acting up again lately. I will see what I can do if I can find it. I will speak with you both soon,” he said as he headed in the opposite direction.
“Thanks, Gok,” Blazer replied as Gokhead trotted off to find their wayward, malfunctioning robot.
Blazer and Marda walked together in silence for a while as they crossed between the buildings. Blazer wanted to say something so badly but couldn’t find the words as the stairs down into the locker room facility came into view. Suddenly, he acted. He pulled Marda aside into a small clutch of trees and turned her to face him. “Marda, I just I wanted to say that I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you since right after the accident…”
“I know. It’s not your fault. You were busy and I was on lockdown. I wanted to call you. Believe me.”
Blazer nodded but still hung his eyes in shame. “I know. It’s just that I don’t want you to think that I was taking advantage of your situation. I realized something recently. I genuinely care about you Marda and as much as I want to, I’m not sure I can say the words yet.”
Marda took his hand as she held her hand up to his lips to stop him from speaking. “I know. I feel the same way. I just have a lot of things to sort out and right now isn’t…”
“I know. It’s not the right time.”
“I like the trajectory we were headed on before all this happened and I want to see where it leads us,” she continued enthusiastically.
Blazer smiled. I like the sound of that word a lot more now. “Along that vector, I was thinking, in a couple of cycles, there’s a live concert transmission of this band I like. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. They’re called Theater of Dreams.”
Blazer smiled as Marda nodded enthusiastically. “I have,” she replied. The smile faded as tears began to well in her eyes before she quickly wiped them away. “Merris loved listening to them. She was really looking forward to that concert too.”
Blazer didn’t know
what else to do so he grabbed her and held her tight against him. Merris had died in the accident. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have…”
She hugged him back and wiped her eyes. She pushed away but kept his hand in hers. “No, it’s all right. She used to listen to them all the time when she studied. I’m not sure how she could. It was always a distraction for the rest of us but it helped her to relax and focus her thoughts. I think she listened to it in the cockpit sometimes,” she said with a laugh.
Blazer could tell that it made her feel good to remember Merris that way. “I’ve done that once or twice,” he admitted with a grin. “Thing is, they’re doing a live trans to the academy over there in the gym,” he said motioning to the building next to them. “It’ll be a full holo setup like we’re actually there and I scored two tickets if you want to go.”
Marda nodded. “I’d like that. Are you sure Chief Flind will let you off?”
Blazer laughed. “Are you kidding? He threatened to, well, I won’t go into the details, but he said if I missed it that it wouldn’t go well for me. He’s a huge fan it turns out.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have thought a Rimdook would be interested in them.”
“Well, apparently he served with the lead singer so pretty much everyone in the Spacecraft Maintenance Division who’s off duty is required to attend.”
Blazer felt her soft hand press against his cheek and he took it in his own. “I want to go to it with you and I’ll make you dinner beforehand.”
“No, you don’t have to. I’ll take you out.”
“No, it’s OK. I have a line to the farm and I’ve got some fresh food I need to do something with before it spoils. Besides, cooking helps me relax and makes me feel better. The orbs, your orbs, got the farm chief to send a box full of my favorite things over this dawn. It helped but cooking it will help me feel like myself again. It was very nice of them to make sure I was comfortable.”
“The orbs have a way of doing that sometimes. They come up with creative ways to help you feel better when you’re down.”
“So why do you dislike them so much?”
“I don’t,” he replied and chuffed at himself. “It’s just that, when I was younger, it was comforting to have them around. They always knew when danger was coming and would warn my sister and me about it. But, as I got older, I kind of began to resent them. They reminded me too much of the Vaurnel even though they had saved our lives. I gave up when we were there and I didn’t have the strength to go on. They had to get the admiral, my grandfather, to come and rescue us. I was little but it made me feel weak.”
“And you don’t like that they remind you of that…”
Blazer watched her try to find the right words. “That weakness, yes. It was my greatest moment of weakness and almost my greatest failure as I nearly let my sister and I get killed. She was the only family I thought I had left. And yes, I know I was only a child at the time, but still. Seeing them reminded me of that as I got older. I came to resent them. My sister out and out hates them. She blames them for our parents’ deaths and won’t ever acknowledge them. Me, on the other hand, now that they’re not around all the time, I kind of miss them.”
She met his eyes again and smiled. “I want to do something.”
Blazer fixed her with a soft questioning gaze.
“You kissed me in my room.”
He nodded.
“I want to,” she hesitated for a moment and then grabbed him. She pulled him down to her lips and kissed him long and deep. They stood there for a long moment and Blazer wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her close to him again as he drank in the kiss and nearly lifted her off the ground. Every fiber of his being screamed at him that this was a good thing. This was right. He never wanted it to end and felt his hands wander.
He broke away from her, not letting her go. “We can’t be doing this. At least not here and not like this. A public display and all.”
“I know. I just needed to do that,” Marda stated.
Blazer nodded, his lips still tingling.
“I need to ask you a question though, before we go in there,” Marda continued. “Have you ever… how many girls have you been with?”
Blazer pulled away just a little and looked down ashamed. “Two. One back in school and the other was someone I got close to while in the guild. I came close with other girls but two little orbs I used to resent kept me from, well, as mad as it made me at the time, just doing what was right for me.”
Marda smiled.
“I didn’t love the first girl I was with. I thought I did but it wasn’t really love. It was just physical animal lust that we both fell for.”
“What about the other one?”
Blazer looked away, remorse in his eyes. Sadness brought from loss choked his throat. “I cared deeply for her but she died. I failed her, and she died.”
Marda didn’t press any further.
“Blazer,” she said, taking his hand and held it against her chest, “I want to be with you, but I’m going to make you work for it.”
Blazer raised a curious eyebrow. He liked where this was going and he wanted to be with her too so didn’t mind working for it.
“I’ve been with one other boy,” she continued. “Back in school. He was a mistake. I thought he loved me and he even said that he did and I believed him. I know now that he was just using me. I came to terms with it a long time ago but now he has a very angry spirit haunting him,” she said with a laugh.
Is she serious?
“I’ve been overly cautious since, and you’re the first guy I’ve let my guard down around.” She touched his face again. “I love you and know you love me too. I need to wait for now. Let’s go get my things.”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” he said to comfort her and, taking her hand in his, walked her to the locker room.
UCSB DATE: 1000.307
Star System: Classified, UCSBA-13, Main Hangar
I just can’t explain it, but Marda has this calming effect on Chief Flind. If she’d been around at first contact we could have avoided that war, I swear. Ever since Marda’s inclusion as a member of the Blade Force, Chief Flind seemed more lax with him. To his amazement, several times when she’d arrived on deck and asked nicely, Chief Flind would release Blazer from his duty early. God, I swear that last time she asked him so sweetly that he swooned, maybe even blushed.
Of course whenever I ask her how she does it she just says, “I’m a woman and we have that kind of power over you men.”
When he’d told the others in the squad about it, Chris and Seri laughed. But, when they tried the chief would look at them as potential lunch before roaring at them to get off his decks.
The additional freedom Chief Flind granted Blazer allowed him more time to work on his trainer and the modifications. The very cycle the chief had handed Blazer the scraps of paper he pulled together Gokhead, Chris, Gavit and Deniv to look over them with him. The quintet poured through technical manuals, engineering guides, designs, and even manufacturer’s documentation to make sense of it.
Half of what he wrote was ineligible or had something wrong with it. But, they were a starting point. From there, the team designed something amazing. When they’d finished laying out the modifications, they looked upon the designs and diagrams in awe. The changes would by no means elevate the old trainer to the level of a super fighter but they could give the craft a new lease of life in the modern battle space.
After the others had helped Blazer work out the kinks in the design, implementing them became his personal challenge. Blazer spent any free moment he had in the alcove with his trainer. He did homework and studied while he ran new cabling, installed software patches or new systems. Gokhead, Chris, Deniv and Gavit eventually came to help him, masking their purpose to be on deck as group study sessions.
Gavit would sit back and observe but not engage in any of the actual labor. He seemed uncomfortable working on the innards of the craft himself. Instead, he sat as
look out while the rest made the alterations. Blazer caught the subtle glances and looks of pain in Gavit’s eyes when he would watch his comrades, elbow deep in the fighter. I wonder if it has something to do with the falling out he had with his chief mechanic right before he quit racing? Though little had been released to the press, one very public shoving match between the two had hit the hyperweave.
Chris seemed the most enthusiastic about the work. She’d always wanted to work on fighters and had dreams of being a ship’s chief engineer some cycle.
Gokhead typically busied himself with the changes to the fighter’s programming. Even he was impressed to see their theories and designs turn real before his eyes. He commented that it was a sharp contrast to his university, where most of what he’d done was just theory or small experiments. However, seeing something he helped to design come to fruition lit a new spark in his eyes.
Deniv on the other hand, just liked to turn the wrenches. Building things relaxed him.
Chief Flind would come by every cycle. Gavit raised the signal when he would stop by. The chief would inquire about why access panels on the port side of the craft were open since no damage had been done there. Blazer was quick to come up with plausible excuses that usually involved regular maintenance tasks. With the fighter coming due for its regular overhaul, Blazer explained that with the fighter down anyway, now was the best time to conduct the task.
He just likes to check on our progress and ensure he’s got plausible deniability in case anything happens once I get flying in this. As had been said on nearly every world Blazer had heard of, “Forgiveness is easily given, permission not so much.”
It took nearly two tridecs of work, but Blazer finished it. He only had a little work left to finish this cycle since the others had stayed late the cycle before to reinstall the engines and complete the final software patch. As he watched the final BIT check pass from his maintenance terminal he stood up and sighed proudly. I wish the others could have been there to see this.
