Anstractor Vestalia, Page 2

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  “What are you doing there, boy? I thought I told you to go play with your friends,” Samoo LES said as he walked into the apartment and saw Rafian seated on the floor.

  “I don’t have any friends, I only have you.”

  Samoo sighed and removed his beret, placing it on the arm of the chair. He sat at the table and poured himself a drink, then ran his hand through the salt and pepper reeds that constituted his hair. “This is a military ship, Rafian. Do you know what that means?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rafian said in a pitiful voice.

  “It means that everything here is hard, son. The sooner you accept this fact, the better; do you hear me? We have good times periodically, especially after a victory, but we belong to a race that has no home. We are forced to live permanently on vessels of war.” He sighed, looking as if he were trying to conjure up a point to his words. “You don’t have to like the children, Rafian, but you cannot shun them forever. I know that they are cruel, but life is cruel!”

  “You talk to me like a child but I am not a child,” Rafian said. “Not like the ones in the cadet academy.”

  Samoo nodded as he sipped his drink, but kept his eyes staring forward, away from his ward. “I’ve seen your eyes. You haven’t been a child for a very long time, if at all. Still, your defiance to me and your refusal to get with the program is very childlike. This is why I beat you.”

  Rafian remained quiet, thinking on what Samoo had said, and decided in his mind that he would do his best to do what the old man instructed him to.

  “Did you know your parents?” Rafian asked and Samoo paused with the glass to his lips.

  “THYPE!” he exclaimed and Rafian wondered why his question had registered such an answer.

  An alarm started blaring and Samoo jumped up and quickly dressed in his uniform. “Talk later, son. Buckle in!” he commanded, then exited the room and locked the door. Rafian rushed to his chair and pulled the strap across his lap. He closed his eyes and prepared himself for whatever was coming next.

  A Geralos cruiser had come out of a Faster than Light (FTL) jump and the Helysian was now under attack. Explosions and alarms took over the airwaves and Rafian wondered if they would ever make it through the onslaught. He slouched forward and hugged his thighs, letting his head hang between his legs as he squeezed his eyes shut.

  An explosion shook him violently and his head struck the table, and he lost consciousness for a time. When he opened his eyes the walls had become a vid screen, displaying the battle that was going on outside the ship. Rafian couldn’t believe that what he was seeing was actually happening in real life. It looked like an action movie, the kind that rich people on Genese would watch inside of their homes. He used to sneak up to their windows to catch a few scenes and what he was seeing now reminded him of them.

  Fighters deployed from the Helysian’s dock ports, shooting out towards the Geralos ship to draw the fire from its batteries. But Helysian was no slouch in its own attack, firing rockets and laser traces back at the massive ship. Rafian realized it wasn’t doing much good. The Geralos deployed their own fighters to remove the distraction and it became quite the show seeing their aces go up against those of Helysian.

  This went on for over an hour and then another alarm sounded. The vid grew dark and disappeared into the wall and Rafian felt that this was a bad omen. The tears he had saved from Samoo’s beating began to fall as he thought of his doom and the alarms screamed louder into his ears.

  The ship lurched in a way that made his insides feel queasy, and then the explosions were gone as well as the alarms. Rafian stayed buckled in, wondering what the feeling was that almost made him vomit. He thought about dying and decided that if death really were coming, being strapped in at a dinner table was not the way he wanted to go. He unbuckled his seat and crept to the door, his hands trembling and his eyes wide with anticipation.

  Suddenly the door slid open and a disheveled Samoo rushed in and locked it behind him. He hurried over and grasped Rafian by his shirt collar and stood him up against the wall. “I thought I thyping told you to buckle in?” he said, the trademark cool now gone from his voice. “We were in a fight, boy. Are you out of your mind? One direct hit to our port drive and you would have been hurled against the ceiling to break your thyping neck!”

  “S-sorry sir, but that word, I don’t know what thyping is!” Rafian stammered.

  Samoo’s anger broke and he chortled. “Eh? Don’t use that word; it’s an adult word. Just open your ears and stop going disobeying my orders.”

  Rafian shut his mouth and listened to Samoo, whose emotions frightened him since he’d never shown them in the past. Whatever happened on the bridge had put him off and now he wanted to take it out on something or someone else. Samoo took a deep breath and recovered his drink, then sipped it slowly, which seemed to calm his nerves.

  “Did the screens come on while we were out there?” he asked and Rafian nodded at him. “Were you able to understand what you were seeing?”

  “Yes, sir, I saw the pilots going after the Geralos and I saw that big laser that shook the ship.”

  “Well that big laser took out a dozen of our people. The lizards really hurt us with that surprise attack so the captain had us jump to a remote area outside of our normal course. We’re off the grid, kid. This means that you have no choice in the matter of getting trained. Either you tighten up or I will personally air-lock you. Failure is no longer an option!”

  Memory 02 | Android Maiden

  It was the same nightmare that kept coming back to haunt Rafian as he lay on the cot tossing and turning in his sleep. “Anne Marie?” he whispered, his voice desperate but small. A sleepless Samoo watched him in the darkness, trying to imagine what was going on inside of his head.

  The nightmare always started with the bright light from the door when the Cel-toc first made her appearance. On Genese he had been kidnapped during one of his trips to rendezvous with Lendi. He had been hit with a stasis rod and rendered unconscious and woke up on the cold concrete floor of a 4x6 cell. The one that housed him was one of many, and none of the others were empty. He could see children, many he recognized, but none of them were moving.

  The Cel-toc waltzed gracefully into the room, scanning the cells. When it would pass one with a dead inhabitant, it would touch a panel, and the cell box would descend into the ground. Rafian watched it go through its rounds, feeding the living and processing the dead.

  She looked every bit like a human, but her arms were metallic with a gold tint to their smooth surface. Her face was sculpted from a plasteel substance, and her eyes had a look of intelligence.

  On close observation, the Cel-toc did not seem the soulless machine that they were rumored to be. She fed him a mushy, white substance and then sped away, onto the next survivor. The pasty “food” tasted like a delicious blend of several dishes, but he could not decide whether it was hunger or fascination that made him think it was tasty.

  The Cel-toc was almost through with her rounds, and he knew that once she was finished he would be in the darkness again. The light coming from the open doorway was very faint, but to Rafian, it may as well had been high noon with the sun beaming down in all its glory.

  It was just then that he saw her. A little waif of a girl standing off to his right, staring intently at him through the dark. The cell that separated them was one of the ones that had descended, so now they could see each other for the first time.

  “Hello?”

  “H-hey,” she replied, her small but nasally voice piercing the thick, musky air.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, and when she replied, “Anne Marie,” he realized that her voice sounded a lot like Lendi’s.

  Anne Marie turned out to be a street scavenger like Rafian. She had been born and lived in the upper class areas of Basce City, but when the riots occurred, she lost her parents and became homeless as a result. The pair chatted unguardedly for hours into the night. Not k
nowing how many days they had ahead of them, they held nothing back in their conversation.

  Anne Marie had a way of making hunger disappear for Rafian. In the still of the darkness, the anxiety-filled situation seemed to melt with the sound of her voice. He wished he could be closer to her. He really wanted to hold her hand.

  Days turned into weeks, and before long, a month had passed for the prisoners of the Cel-toc maiden. Rafian, after realizing that he and Anne Marie were the last survivors of their unit, came to the conclusion that they were the only children immunized prior to capture. It was an eerie feeling in that cold, dark place that stank of death, and the Cel-toc’s food was obviously not enough to keep their bodies properly nourished.

  The days went by slowly for the pair, and Rafian soon found it hard to focus. He began to ask Anne Marie a lot of the same questions over and over. It wasn’t much different for the girl, and they found that their conversation and connection was all that made their situation bearable.

  When Rafian would wake up, the first question he would ask was, “Hey, Anne, are you awake?” And if she had beaten him to rise, then she would be the one asking the question, looking to start another day of games and trivia to pass the time.

  The questions would be subjects they both knew and were interested in. These subjects ranged from street names to locations of buildings, and at times, stories that every child should have known. In between the questions, there was pain caused by their bodies looking for vitamin resources that were not being provided. The Cel-toc was slowly starving them, and the children knew it. The only thing they had was the other, and it was a small respite.

  “Anne Marie … can you hear me?” Rafian asked her one day as he curled up in the corner of the cell, trying to wish away his abdominal pains. It was becoming more frequent, and he could feel his ribs even more than he could in the past. He had always been skinny, but the thought of bones poking out frightened him, and the pain made him feel as if his body was eating itself.

  “Yes,” she replied, her voice so low that any noise would have—

  “Wake up, Rafian!” a gruff voice shouted and the nightmare memory was pulled away just as quickly as it had come. Rafian sat up on the cot and peered over at the clock whose symbols indicated it was time for his laucks and mosh.

  “Who is Anne Marie? Is that your mom?” Samoo asked as he placed the warm bowl in the boy’s lap.

  “She was a friend of mine in Basce City,” Rafian replied. “I lost her in the fires when we were trying to escape.”

  “You said that you were a prisoner. Was it the Geralos?”

  “No, it was a Cel-toc but I don’t know who it belonged to.”

  “That’s an old model of android; it could have been the lizards. I wonder what they aimed to gain out of kidnapping children.”

  “We were there for a long time,” Rafian said before his voice cracked and he stopped to fight back against the lump that had lodged in his throat.

  “Eat your food, it will make you strong. You’ve been through a lot, but you don’t want to waste away before you can take revenge on the lizards that did it to you.”

  “Why do they hate us, sir? Why did they take our planet?”

  Samoo shrugged and motioned for him to eat and Rafian slowly complied.

  “They bite into our heads, right up here, you see? Their teeth are sharp and long enough to pierce our brains, and once they do, they can steal our prescient powers,” Samoo said.

  Rafian looked horrified when he heard this detail and it took a much rougher nudging from Samoo to make him finish his meal. “So the Geralos set up Cel-tocs to kidnap us, too,” he said after swallowing the last of the bland, lumpy porridge.

  “I wouldn’t put it past them but who really knows? They aren’t the only race in this galaxy that hates our guts. Look at the Louines, those worthless pieces of schtill. They ignored our pleas when the lizards came and even now they hide away on their planet. You should remember who your allies are, Rafian, just in case you become a powerful captain like Abe RUS. Remember your allies and remember your enemies, but most of all remember the ones who didn’t offer a hand.”

  They got up, dressed, and Samoo led him out to the portside deck where they started their long walk towards the gym. This was the ritual, their walk and talk, and Samoo would recite stories of legendary Alliance soldiers, or the various wars that took place on Vestalia. Rafian found it amazing that the man knew so much, but the stories helped keep the bad memories at bay so he enjoyed the first hour of their mornings.

  After the walk came the run, and Samoo set a timer to track his speed. He expected Rafian to beat his best time from the previous week. If he failed he would be on pushup duty, and when the pushups became too easy it would be pull-ups and burpees. Rafian pushed past his limit and set a new record even though he felt fatigued from the night before.

  “That’s what I like to see, soldier, hell of a way,” Samoo said and clapped him on his back as he led him away from the deck. “That was some good running. How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. My heart is beating fast but my arms have that tingly feeling that I like.”

  “Do you want to look at some ships?”

  Rafian’s eyes almost jumped out of his head and the rare smile that crossed his face was all the answer that Samoo needed. He took him home to get his shower and then surprised him with some new clothes that had been donated by a group of soldiers. What had started off as a terrible day had become one of the best ever for the young cadet in training. He found a uniform that fit and quickly dressed, then looked at himself in the mirror.

  “One day you are going to have an official uniform like that to be proud of, Rafian. It suits you and after what you showed me this morning with that run, we both know that it’s meant to be.”

  Rafian stood at attention in the mirror and slammed his right fist into his left pectoral in the Alliance salute that all soldiers knew. Samoo stood proudly behind him, watching intently and Rafian wondered if what he felt was what children with fathers felt every day.