FTL-8...Faster Than Life.

Chapter 8

I wake up to the sound of this low frequency vibration through the ship and through me. I get a flash on my implant saying. [Attention all personnel we are now entering a class two grav-front.]

A grav front is where you get two opposing forces of gravity or more too close together and the competing gravity sort of sucks space apart? It’s not really apart but it makes the stuff that makes up space sort of choppy. See the pull isn’t standard or constant there’s all these stellar conditions and variables that make ripples in space.

Chop (Shrugging).

It’s only class two so I’m pretty good but there’s a few moans, it’s kind of like what the used to call seasick? There’s more waves about every six to ten minutes and you just feel this sort of wave of kinetics wash over you/through you.

It’s been a few weeks since the funeral and there’s been even more adjustments in my life. I’m still in Astrometrics and doing more and more sit down at a station stuff even if I’m still kind of a gopher and secretary in a way I’m not going for coffee and stuff nearly as much. But I’m still a cadet. It’s interesting stuff and I’m learning stuff a bit ahead of the other astrometry/navigation recruits with the practical stuff.

Last week I ran skiff control for an hour. That’s like air traffic control between our smaller shuttles. Okay that was really cool getting on the comlink and talking to the pilots and the crews. I might like that as a job in Nav more than the actual Navigation stuff.

I still do PT (Physical training.) and doing hand to hand and firearms stuff too but not up to the combat trooper class or anything but I’m getting private instruction. Kendo for an hour every damned day with Stillwater and that’s out of my free time.

I’m bitchy because I hurt, I hurt every day because I’m getting hit with a bloody shinai. It’s the bamboo swords made up of all these strips held together by a series of rings and hilt and tip bindings.

Yes they hurt because they’re a lot harder than they look. I also think the old masters of this were sadists. See you get hit with a shinai and it will give, flex if you will and snap back before the blade leaves your flesh…yup…the things pinch you hard the while you’re still pinched the shinai gets pulled away.

Traditional Kendo you get armor, padding…Ha, ha, ha…no, no not when you’re training with Corporal Stillwater.

Why do I even do it?

Honor.

Yeah a pretty nebulous thing really something that wasn’t a big thing in practice home. But here it’s different. I walk into the mess all bruised and lined up with training welts and I swear it’s like some kind of weird make up.

Is it weird to have a guy watch your sword the same way he’d watch your butt?

But it’s so worth it with the officers and the higher ranked men and women in the rank and file. I mean I’m still a recruit but at the same time I’m not invisible.

It’s nice to actually have people see me.

……………………It’s up and off to the jogging and the gym and I’m okay but like I said this is like sea sickness it builds on you. Which is exactly why we’re flying through this crap. Testing, training and exposure. The ship has enough shielding and artificial gravity systems that if we wanted we could ignore most of this stuff.

But smaller ships won’t have the same luxury. We’re on a big ship, massive and it’s supposed to be. We recruit, train and run major supply runs as we’re doing it. Once we’re out in the fleets it’s a whole lot more frugal.

I’m good but going down the stairs had me swaying. We lose a few runners to the med bays with that. But this is going to be rough on all of us recruits. Carrington’s already looking almost menstrual with this. Sunshine too, It not too bad on the rest of us but about fifteen percent of people will feel prolonged grav sheer at twice the TVV ratings so if you’re in that grouping and you’re a three you’re in a bad way because after an hour of grav-chop that rating two sheer feels like a four.

I make my way to the mess and get my breakfast. It’s Thursday so I get the special biscuits and gravy. Like a lot of people I grew up on vat-foods, synthetic proteins and soy and such but here in the fleet we have real food put out for those of us that like the exotic.

Yeah exotic, mass populations and huge markets leave people going for these mass produced foods. I grew up on rice bowls and flavored soy and vat-meats. It was Holy Days we had real foods because they were so expensive. Of there were some things that were everyday like greens and sprouts and those things.

Here though we get a priority, plus we pay for the real food. I mean it’s only five credits but in a free mess that makes a difference. A big square biscuit gets brushed with oil or fat or something then grilled until brown. Then there’s this white cream sauce with herbs in it and real meat Turkey… I Love turkey. Home we have a semi-religious holy day called Turkey day, it’s supposed to be a holy bird these ancient biblical scholars had discovered and eating the turkeys when they were starving saved them and God told them to be ever thankful. It was one of the few times a year my family splurged for a turkey.

This stuff has turkey and sage and things in it and I always get slices of fresh tomatoes on mine before the sauce. I get a capsule of juice and a real coffee with full caf and I go and sit down not at the table with my bunkies but with Patrick.

I lean over and give him a kiss before sitting with him and smile. “Morning How’s Tricks?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s actually an ancient saying I found on the anthro-history network.”

“Why were you there?”

“Reading, learning, siming I wanted to pick up a few things on the side.”

“Oh and the saying?”

“Really old way of asking what’s up, but with you’re name…”

“Hmm, cute I guess?”

“Duh, I’m a girl I’m allowed to be cute.”

I start to eat and he pulls my fork of food away from my mouth and leans over the table and kisses me again. Yum…even if he’s eating fish for breakfast. He’s a Deltan though and his people metabolize food and stuff better like that.

Do we seem more together?

We are.

The funeral and parties had started it. I’m not sure if it was the foggy my vagina hurt memory of the party or the way he’d been good, just good to me after that but we started with just spending time together in my free time hours.

Talking it out, the combat stuff and having real coffee together. He took me to places on the ship you don’t know unless you’ve spent a lot of time on the Apollo or master fleet ships.

There’s something soulful when you’re up at the top of the ship in a one way (Five foot high by two feet wide maintenance hall.) with your back to the wall and boots off and stocking feet pressed to a big maintenance window and sharing a coffee with Patrick his arm around me holding me and us watching the stars go by and well that led to us kissing and spending time together like that more and more.

Having sex more and more.

I shouldn’t say stuff like having lots and lots of sex grounded me more into being me but it did and does. And it’s everything about the whole thing from the start of attraction in the moment to the romantic stuff around that to foreplay and then the tender sex, the happy laughing hard sex, the in a random one way hall or closet having a quick desperate fuck to the afterglow and cuddling or the good ache.

It’s a huge part of being a woman and feeling the way I do now.

Another part is being wanted. Patrick went through a minor hell getting his duty shifts moved around to match my training schedule and shifts. That’s huge really huge and even more in this really free hooking up sort of thing here that goes on it’s me and him right now. I mean I’m pretty, I wanted to be pretty but I still wanted to look like me if I was born like this and I’m in good shape too but I’m bruised all the time, so busy I yawn a lot and I’ve even dozed off in his arms a time or two.

And with all these women here who are moded out to be living wet dream fantasies he’s with me?

Having breakfast, kissing, talking just talking and having a relationship and for someone like me with my past that’s hugely defining. I get looks of all kinds from the other conversion girls from respect to encouragement to even jealousy. I sort of feel sorry for the ones still caught up in the thrills of sexuality.

I’m in a relationship, even it’s fated to be a short one. But if you’ve never been in a relationship before it’s amazing how you change because of it.

…………………… We eat and kiss each other goodbye for the hours we’ll be apart and we head off to our daily duties. I love what I’m doing, I do and there’s things that are just becoming important to me. Getting kitted up for my duties. Fresh uniform, my tunic and thin flak vest under my uniform jacket, the skirt, the putting up of my hair and the beret and the calf high boots all are so much me now. I get this look of this woman in the mirror on my final check that looks capable and professional and ever so much more than my self vision I knew that I was supposed to be.

My day goes normally with me on particle scan. That’s sort of like a old radar stuff and it sends out particles of different kinds that react to the different stuff in space that makes it up and I get introduced to shapes of the chop and where there’s carried rad pockets and magnetic fields and stuff. I guess it’s like when they used to give med patients stuff to drink in the ancient days to see stuff under different scans. I look at stuff in different ways using a host of sensors to get a weather report of sorts and to pass that on to the other departments. Why? Well take a magnetic pocket. Most of the smaller stuff will hit that and they’ll get an EMP effect and while they’ll not usually be harmed getting your thrust taken out and power until you get towed or move through the patch can be a pain in the ass or deadly.

This usually gets deadly if combat happens in the chop. Renegades, Raiders and other nasties use some of these pockets to hide from scans. Big ships like us can scan this stuff far better than smaller ships and for shuttles and fighters forget about it they’re blind relying on us.

The bust up lunch for fighter drills, all people to stations and back up positions. There’s more drills the next two days and I hardly get to see anyone I hit my rack alone in my bunk twice the only one in my room.

……………………….I’m woken by a bio-surge as we hit combat alert level one. My nervous system kicks in a shot of adrenaline and it’s up out of bed into the body suit and full pants vacc seal my boots and gloves, bind my hair back and arm up and run to Astrometrics.

There’s a heavy rattling shake of the ship heading into heavy chop rank three and my stomach’s a bit on edge but I can handle it.

[Going to lights dark.] comes over the Net.

Then the commanders voice. “We are heading into a heavy grav front zone, we have received a distress beacon from the Marie-Antoinette a heavy independent merchant transport under the protective charter contracts with the Union Government. Our probes have encountered unknown hostile resistance. We are duty bound to rescue and if we must engage. Cadets you have the option to join your assigned duty stations or move to the shelters until the mission is cleared.”

I head fast to my section and haul up short once I get there snapping into a salute. “Stone reporting for duty sir!” My section chief looks at me and points to a console. “There Erin, we need a body on select scan on stations D through G, this stuffs thick and there’s fog here too.”

“Yessir.” I take my seat, fog’s not good, it’s not real planet fog either but elements that get slammed together by heavier grav chop sometimes that mixes with the different particles to create a murky lightshow.

This stuff is a weird funky grey sort of streaky purple stuff and visibility is shit about ten miles.

[Combat silence conditions engaged.]

The ship goes quiet, low talking only when necessary Implant comlinks mostly.

That’s just taken not good to oh fuck. I’ve been studying this stuff up, this means that we’re playing cat and mouse with another warship in this soup.

Nav boring? Right now we’re our eyes and ears. We fuck this up and we’re dead freeze dried meat.

Please don’t let this be the Tekkers.