~ * ~ * ~
By the time he was fifteen, Rafian was the textbook cadet, all “yes sirs” and discipline in action. He was now a second-grade cadet major but disallowed from graduating to colonel due to the violent episode with Weine and the boys so many years ago. Still, the other children looked to him as a leader, and he carried himself as one—not an easy thing for the adults to miss.
In the life of a cadet, you are given military ranks along with your grades. At sixteen, a child would need to be a cadet colonel in order to graduate into the actual Marine Corps as a private. The grade numbers denote skills, with the lowest being the best. So a sixteen-year-old who managed to be a third or second grade along with the rank of colonel was normally considered so advanced that he or she could get a special assignment to attend a college of leadership aboard the ship. The advantage of all this was that after two years, one would emerge as an officer and leader of men.
Rafian didn’t care for any of the leadership ambitions of his less talented peers, but he desperately wanted to become a pilot. Life aboard the ship had become tolerable, but he would throw it all away just to have a chance at flying his own vessel into battle. Since making third grade, he practically lived in the flight simulation booth. He had won all the top awards for simulated flight so in his mind he was already an ace.
One day he was called into the office of the cadet commander to talk. It had been three years since he had spoken with her directly.
“You are a very special young man, Rafian,” she said to him after returning his salute. “Cadets with your talents are normally first-grade colonels. You do know this, right?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“But you do understand why you are where you are?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Do you regret what you did to those young men and their careers, Major?”
He looked at her and replied, “No ma’am. But if you allow me to explain, I can and will.”
“Go ahead, Rafian,” she remarked and took a seat as if expecting a long, drawn-out answer.
But Rafian’s reply was not long, and he explained how his past had given him enough experience with people like Weine to know that he was not going to stop or change. The adults would never believe him, and something had to be done sooner or later.
By the time the meeting was over, Rafian was given the rank of colonel and clearance to take part in the planetary drop he needed to be considered first grade.
It was the rarest of honors. This drop was an insane test of resilience and knowledge for a young marine. The honors that came from doing it were so high that they had to be sure that the person getting it was much more than a well-trained bookworm.
To become first grade was to become a member of a fraternity of galactic elite who could easily become officers. It was a privilege one had to earn, and the final exam was extremely dangerous. For Rafian, a child rushed into adulthood by experiencing life’s worst circumstances, the first-grade test was a no-brainer.
Memory 04 | First Grade
The Teradac-11 cruised low and silent above the jungles of Qyeran, a small colony in the country of Flisx, Geral. This operation was an unusual one. Rafian was to be dropped into enemy territory and find a way out, then rendezvous with the drop ship, which would stay cloaked in orbit awaiting his return.
The mission was to be completed within a week, or he would be left behind. These were the parameters set for a cadet who wanted first class. Typically the location was a moon or a remote planet with less enemy presence, but Rafian’s trial was during a hot season of fighting and since Geral was close, Captain Abe RUS decided that they would risk dropping him there.
Rafian was more excited than afraid as he sat aboard the vessel, decked out in an all-black 3B suit with an Adaptus facemask firmly locked onto his face. He was armed with an assortment of weapons, liquid-form food, and fluids that would keep him nourished for up to a week. The atmosphere on Geral was poisonous so he was expected to stay in the suit until he was safely off the planet.
The ship drifted in silently to avoid detection and with Qyeran being a low-tech country, it was nothing for a skilled pilot to plant a young cadet onto her surface without any of the locals noticing.
Rafian nodded at the pilot and Samoo LES, who had come along to wish his boy an extra bit of luck. Though they couldn’t see each others’ faces through the masks, Rafian was appreciative of his teacher making the trip to see him off. The nod also told the pilot that he was ready to deploy as he folded his arms across his chest.
A hatch dropped from beneath him and in an instant, he was falling towards the lush, green expanse of the planet. Rafian hoped this would be the beginning of an eventless adventure. The pilots had told him at his briefing that the way to remain undetected was to delay releasing his wings until he was a few hundred feet above the trees.
According to Samoo, the Geralos considered Vestalians to be an extremely tasty meal, so on discovery, they would not hesitate to tear him apart to snack on his innards. Rafian also had the seeker blood of his mother, and upon that discovery, his remains would probably be shipped to the top authorities for consumption. After hearing all of this, Rafian had decided that he would eat his gun before risking capture by the Geralos. But until then, he would do what he was told to do and deploy his wings at the last possible second.
The wind must be hot, he thought as he fell, because his goggles became foggy and it took some time to adjust to the humidity. His computer was set to trigger an alarm when he was at the lowest altitude possible for safe deployment, so he relaxed and waited for its buzz.
The maroon sky reminded him of nights on Genese. It was dark, but light enough to see the tops of the trees along with millions of lights in the distance.
When the alarm sounded, he delayed for two seconds and then released his wings, which flipped out from his backpack and forced his fall into a glide. He flew in circles, spiraling down towards the trees, the process faster than he had expected. Before he knew it, he was on the ground with his vilo-sword drawn and wrist map out. He plotted a course to the nearest city, where he would have to find a way to return to the ship.
Being able to breathe in his flight suit was hard due to the time it took to turn the planet’s atmosphere into clean, breathable oxygen. It felt as if he was constantly out of breath and being forced to breathe from a straw. However, he couldn’t dwell on this discomfort, knowing the panic it could bring. So, putting breathing to the side, he focused and kept his mind on the task at hand.
As soon as he calmed himself and set out towards the city, a rustling in the bushes caused him to spin around. A herd of dhulon bulls had seen him land and sought after him out of curiosity. These animals had the heads of cows and humanoid bodies, but they walked on all fours and had eyes that seemed to flash red fire. The alpha of the bunch immediately charged, but Rafian jumped out of the way just in time to avoid being gored by the creature’s horns.
When he righted himself from the dive, Rafian let the blade of his vilo-sword arc towards the neck of the bull and took its head cleanly off. The heat of the blade cauterized the wound so the blood stayed in place on the two severed ends. The remainder of the dhulons retreated then, and Rafian took the opportunity to dash between the trees.
He was on foot for the better part of an hour before he decided to stop. He climbed a tree, secured himself tightly with straps, and activated his cloak to disappear from view. He was tired from the drop and slept for a few hours before waking up hungry, dehydrated, and disoriented.
Drawing a fluid-sustenance canister from his pack, he hooked it into place on his mask and sucked in the syrupy juices with much need and effort. It tasted like heaven, and he was good to go after a while. The skies had lightened, and the clouds lessened, which on Geral represented high noon.
Finding a better position at the top of a broad, massive branch, Rafian pulled out his binoculars to view the city in its entirety. From his observation, the
lizard people seemed pretty civilized, and they dressed in very expensive-looking clothing.
Their faces were a flat mask of teeth, but their heads held rough, bumpy ridges. This particular race had webbed feet and scaly skin, which looked to be rough to the touch. Rafian had never imagined that he would ever see the Geralos up close. He was now looking at them as they lived out their lives very much like human beings. It dawned on him that the Geralos were people and not the monsters he’d always thought them to be.
His joints were on fire from the position in which he lay but there was not much he could do about it. He noticed that he had chosen a tree near a popular trail and many Geralos walked below him now. He was forced to stay up there for a couple more days until he learned their patterns well enough to know when it was safe to climb down.
In terms of waste, the suit was wonderful and efficient, as there was no cause to take it off. He needed only to urinate or defecate as usual, and the suit would filter the waste into a reservoir. As soon as things settled down, he could empty it at any time. The reservoir could hold five bowel movements and a gallon of urine, but he was hoping that he wouldn’t have to accumulate anywhere near that amount before he could leave.
One of the more exciting happenings of his day was when a hunter brought out the head of the dhulon for the other hunters to inspect. They stood around it for a long time, possibly wondering how it had been decapitated so cleanly. The head seemed to tell them a lot, as uniformed officers got involved and began making a lot of ruckus. Rafian realized that his time on Geral would end up being much less than a week because he would have to get out of there fast or be found and consumed.
When it got darker and the streets of the city thinned out, a team of Geralos assembled, seemingly with the intent to search the jungle from where the head had been discovered. One of them appeared to be a tracker. Rafian hoped he would not start tracking until they were much deeper in, since it would mean he would be discovered. He concentrated on the task at hand, which was to get into the city and commandeer a space ship fast. The other dilemma he faced was that the battery on his cloaking device was charging, and he was at the moment very much in the open and visible.
The hunting party was about two hundred yards from where he was perched, and if any of them thought to scan the trees, he would be discovered within the minute. There was a path that led from the forest into the city, and it cut through a large expanse of tall grass and flowers.
Rafian slid down the tree to the forest floor and then moved through the grass, angling away from the approaching hunting party. When he reached the city wall, he climbed it effortlessly using the suction technology of his suit’s gloves and boots.
Once atop the walls and crouched low, Rafian descended the other side into what appeared to be a market. He then thought about what his next move should be.
The city was a small one and appeared to be surrounded by a thick metal wall. A few sentries were patrolling the wall, and Rafian felt extremely lucky, since a more high-tech city would have had a flobot camera tracking every single thing that moved.
As he thought about his strategy, an older Geralos began shouting at him. He had discovered the stranger’s movement as he tore down his stall for the day.
The language was foreign, but Rafian didn’t need to understand. He hopped down and rushed the old man, and then bound and gagged him within minutes. Next he found the rooftops and began dashing along them recklessly in search of a ship or some sort of vessel to help him escape.
When he finally found what he was looking for, he realized that it was in the worst possible place—the center of a military barracks. This compound, as small as it seemed, was packed with angry lizards that were well trained, armed, and extremely dangerous. It was in the center of the city and had towers facing to the north, south, west, and east. The walls were mere chain link fences but they emitted a bluish glow that Rafian assumed would be death if he got anywhere near them.
The towers were laden with bricks and could be scaled easily with his suit, so he would only need to get to one of them to be inside within a matter of minutes. Rafian hopped down from the roof into an alley that ran perpendicular to the barracks. He made his way towards the nearest tower and used his knife to take out one of the guards who got too close.
He dragged the body to a pile of discarded boxes, hid it beneath them, and kicked dirt over the blood that stained the earth. He then climbed the tower and hung near the edge, waiting for a guard to get close. When a lizard was close enough, Rafian swung up behind him and shoved his blade into the base of his skull. The Geralos died silently, and Rafian pulled him into the tower’s station, stripped him of his clothes, and then placed them over his own.
When he was done with the disguise, Rafian placed an acid pill into the naked lizard’s mouth, and the body quickly dissolved into a liquid that flowed silently down the edges of the tower.
From his observations of the past days, Rafian knew that the Geralos kept a few guards on watch all night long, and they rarely used their ship to leave the surface. He hoped the ship could actually fly, because it would really be a bummer if he risked all this only to find out that his ship was inoperable.
He counted at least twenty guards walking the grounds and doing their duties. The only ones he had to worry about were the ones in the tower, who appeared to be armed with high-powered weapons. He thought about it for a minute and realized there was one small snag he hadn’t considered.
Robbing a craft, flying it out into space, and rendezvousing with the ship was the task, but the marine ship Helysian was cloaked. This meant that he could not have Geralese space vessels chasing him when he tried to dock. He was supposed to escape undetected, and it was starting to feel like an impossible mission.
The city of Qyeran was powered by Zynerian crystals, which were pushing out fuel from a plant built deep underground. Rafian knew this because it was how planets like Geral had unlimited light and power.
Shutting down the city’s power in order to escape was not a realistic plan. His other option was to kill them all, but how could one man take out twenty when they had the advantage of knowing their terrain and could call in backup on alarm? The solution came to him faster than he expected, and he was fine with trying it despite the odds.
Sneaking down to the ground level and into the parked vessel, Rafian found an area in the rear to hunker down and hide. Taking the opportunity to catch his breath, he ejected the refuse canister from his suit and sighed in relief at the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to sit in his own feces if his wait lasted a day.
He took in some fluid from his reserves and then closed his eyes to calm himself from the excitement of the past few hours. Much time passed, and the next day, the city came alive with panic when a tracker figured out they had been invaded. Even worse, the panicked old man had told the tracker about the shadow who bound and gagged him by his stall.
A soldier was found dead and another was missing, with traces of his DNA all over the tower. Rafian could imagine the Geralos thinking he was some hellish creature that had come up from the jungle to prey on them. Despite himself, he smiled at the chaos he had wrought in only a few hours. Everything was working according to plan, and he knew in time they would take the ship above the city to do a manhunt.
Rafian didn’t have much longer to wait, as two loud Geralos came onboard and the ship began to rise. He took out his sidearm that was rigged with a silencer and attached an elemental selector. He watched the pilot intently to see if he could figure out the controls and was relieved to see that it was not unlike the ones he had used on the simulation ships.
When they were airborne and circling the city, Rafian moved the elemental dial to ice and shot the co-pilot in the head. As his innards froze in a slow, painful death, he slipped behind the pilot, cut his throat in one motion, and pushed him out of his seat. He took over the controls and righted the stalling vessel, knowing it would look suspicious if he moved to escape too quickly.
So he continued to circle the city as the deceased pilots would have. While he did this he established some familiarity with the various switches of the HUD. After several cycles he pointed the nose of the ship upwards and jettisoned the engines to launch into space.
The whole process of killing the pilots, flying circles, and breaking into space took less than an hour since the time of his boarding. Yet for the tense teenager whose nerves were like icepicks, it seemed like an entire day.
Once in orbit and with no trace of anyone following him, Rafian signaled the Helysian drop ship. It materialized in front of him and he managed to dock the alien vessel.
They flew for hours before jumping to Helysian where he was rushed into the decontamination center to be scanned for parasites and biological weapons. While this was standard protocol for planet jumpers, the process was one that he would never get used to.
Rafian felt a twinge of relief as the boom of the engines let him know that they had jumped into deep space and out of range of the Geralos horde. He was made to sit in the chamber for a couple of hours as various scientists and doctors looked over his body to make sure he was not a danger to the crew.
Once cleared, he was given a new uniform and was met by Vani, who was tasked to escort him to the bridge. Rafian felt the entire situation was bizarre since Vani was being nice and actually talking to him. She had always been rude and cold before, but now she was talking to him excitedly as if they were old friends.
She was praising him, but the events of the past day were still so fresh in his mind that he just could not focus on her. She was saying things about how amazing he was and how they all felt he would not return. However, his thoughts were on how his racing heart had felt, as if it were bursting as he flew up and out of that city, knowing that a trace laser could tear his ship apart once the Geralos realized what was going on.
The couple emerged from the detox station through glass sliding doors and was met by five thousand people cheering and clapping for Rafian. Vani was pulled out of the way as photos were taken, holos recorded, and congratulations were issued to the ship’s outcast stowaway now turned recon graduate.
From the crowd emerged the cadet commander and Captain Abe RUS in full decoration. They stood in front of the tall, slightly embarrassed Rafian, who could do nothing but salute.
“Congratulations, Colonel,” the commanders said in concert, and Abe RUS pinned a badge to Rafian’s chest that had the symbol of a phoenix rising from an orb.
“Cadet Colonel Rafian has been awarded the topmost rank and designation of first grade!” the captain bellowed.
“Congratulations, Raf, you did it!” the cadet commander whispered and she threw formality to the wind and hugged him tightly.
Memory 05 | Starfighter
At sixteen years of age, Rafian was a man. As a first grade cadet colonel he was able to choose his own destiny, so he chose the one thing that he had been fighting for all along: the right to fly ships and rain death from the skies on the enemy. The one thing he didn’t account for, however, was the amount of book reading and writing that came with piloting.
To be able to fly expensive warships, you first had to become an engineer. Then you had to study the history and theory of flying. After you knew your history, you had to dabble in the sciences to learn about the properties of space. A pilot also had to know the galaxy, the location of the various planets, and how to plot a course to each. It was a grueling ritual, and Rafian felt as if his time on Geral had been a hundred times easier.
In the days that followed his promotion, he and Vani had gotten close. She was a very pretty girl, and many of the boys on the ship were trying their hand at getting with her. Vani had long, dark-brown hair and light-brown skin. She had large, curious brown eyes and a button nose that was trumped only by a mouth that always stayed slightly open, revealing a row of perfect white teeth behind a set of full, dark-red lips.
Vani paid more attention to her appearance than any of the other girls on the ship, and Rafian could tell that they hated her for it.
Though her beauty could not be questioned, Vani could be annoyingly critical at times, and it resulted in many arguments with Rafian over trivialities. Vani hated his clothes, his background, and his ways. But for Rafian, she was a godsend due to her relative ease with academics. He would often sit with her to do homework and then take her out for lunch or dinner so that she could maintain her status as the first class’s chosen love interest.
While Rafian was aware that he was being used for his status by this girl, he genuinely loved her big brown eyes and her beautiful crop of hair, which she always fashioned in the coolest way. This was the reminder he would recite to himself whenever she was at her most critical.
At age sixteen, the former cadets were given their own apartments, and Vani made sure hers was next door to Rafian’s. She did this so that she could always be with him whenever he wasn’t training or in class. But her antics wore on Rafian, and when their relationship would not get physical—oh, how he tried—he turned his attention to a fellow pilot by the name of Kim.
Kim had a reputation for being quite generous with the boys, and he got to know her in his off-hours—while ducking and dodging Vani. Things eventually took a sexual turn, and Kim became his first. This first time was awkward, disappointing, and nothing like he had imagined or had been told by his peers. When Kim learned that he didn’t like it, she made sure they did it every afternoon, and before long, he found himself unofficially living with her and telling the other boys that she was indeed his girlfriend. Vani did not take to this well and felt hurt and embarrassed.
“Vani, we were never actually going out. Why the sudden attitude over me and Kim?” Rafian asked when she finally confronted him.
Vani flinched visibly at the confrontation as she stood in her doorway, barring his entrance. She unloaded a reply to end all replies. “Don’t even pretend we weren’t together just because you dumped me for some whore who, by the way, has slept with every guy on the ship. Yup, uh huh, even some of the men! I bet you didn’t even know that!”
And with that, she pressed her lock switch and let the hard glass slide loudly in his face, almost taking a few of his fingers with it. Rafian felt a strange twinge of irony from being told off by a girl who only wanted him as an accessory. He felt he had closure and could pursue a real future with his beloved Kim.
He found her to be perfect in all of her scandalous glory, and she knew how to touch him in ways that made the pain retreat into the recesses of the night. Their love was wild, crazy, and uninhibited, as teens their age tend to be when unchecked.
The military only cared about young Rafian’s future as a pilot and young Kim’s future as an officer, so the two were left alone to be completely careless with their love life. They threw every care to the wind, including the need for birth control. They utilized sex as a means to everything, not limited to argument resolution, sleeping aid, and, of course, motivation.
It was three months into their relationship when Kim approached Rafian with some alarming news. He was with his friends when she told him quite loudly that she was with child. In his naiveté and love for Kim, Rafian was excited at the news and grinned ear to ear at the thought. But Kim didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the child. It was then that she stated the baby was not his, but was in fact his friend, Marce’s.
The embarrassment was too much for the young soldier to bear, and he beat a hasty retreat towards his room to be alone. As he neared his door, Vani was leaving her apartment. She was about to shoot him her customary look of disapproval but she was stopped short by the tears in his eyes as he ran inside his apartment and attempted to lock the door. But Vani was quick. She barred his door with her body and slid behind him, then locked it behind her and inquired as to what was going on.
“Kim’s pregnant, but it isn’t mine,” he admitted to her after her incessant pleading. He switched his disheveled bed into table mode, and Vani sat with him t
o discuss what had happened.
“You do know this is karma, right?” she asked in a very matter-of-fact way, and he nodded despite himself and apologized to her.
“You were using me, Vee…” he said as he picked up the old pistol Samoo had given him and took it apart as he always did whenever he felt alone.
The room went silent after he said that, and she sat there as still as a rock, staring at him quizzically.
“We could try again,” she said after what seemed like an hour. He snapped the barrel pieces of the gun in place, laid the completed pistol on the table, and muttered, “Why would you want to?”
Vani walked over to his refrigerator and helped herself to a vial of milk. She plopped down with it by the wall, staring at him as she batted her big brown eyes in a way she knew he would notice. She was in civilian clothing and had probably been on her way to the mess hall when he had come dashing in. Her beauty made him feel low for choosing Kim.
“I know that nobody likes me, Raf,” she finally admitted. “I know the boys only want one thing, and the girls want to string me up. I know, but YOU liked me, even when we were kids. It’s like our connection or whatever.”
She let her words sink in, and the room stayed silent with nothing but the clicking of the gun being disassembled again. She took a deep breath and then uttered, “Please.” She said the word so softly that had Rafian not been looking at her, he would have missed it.
“Yeah, Vee, of course,” he said.
“You will stay faithful to me, and you will never leave me unless it is mutual, OK?”
“Do you think I want to go through this again? I can’t even show my face out there after Kim announced to the world that I’m an idiot.”
“I don’t want to hear the name of that dirty girl anymore, either.”
“OK, Vani. I will forget her.”
“One last thing, and you won’t like it. We will wait until we are older for sex, and we will always take precautions.”
This last bit seemed a bit much for a boy whose last girlfriend did it every single day. But this was Vani, the girl of his dreams, and despite himself, Rafian finally promised.
Vani was quite different after their relationship vows. She was much more physical in her affection and very loving. Rafian’s hesitation to face his comrades died after they realized that he had “upgraded” his relationship status, but it was still something he refused to talk about with anyone.
He pretended that Kim did not exist and spoke very bluntly and directly with Marce whenever he was forced to speak to him. Marce felt terrible about the entire affair and tried no fewer than seven times to reconcile with Rafian, who had an eerie way of pretending he was over it while avoiding any gestures of friendship with the boy he had once called friend.
Although he knew the entire planet system and was doing very well in his studies, Rafian knew he would have to take an actual flight test before he was given his wings. This was tough for the teen as he desperately tried to fit the very needy Vani into his life.
“I hear that the final exam is extremely dangerous, Raf,” said Vani, whom he playfully called Vee. They were sitting at one of the circular tables in the mess hall near the food dispensers that lined the north wall. The selection of food was actually good, so it was the popular spot for cadets.
“I looked into it, Vee, and it is—which is why I’ve had to start doing some simulation time after classes. From what I understand about a pilot’s exam, they put a few of us into broken ships and force us to fix them and fly. The thing is, the ships are drifting in space when they place us in them, and the controls are normally alien. The danger comes with accidentally turning on a self-destruct switch or firing at another person. Any number of things can go wrong.”
Rafian was rambling, but Vani looked petrified. “All of you guys going out are friends. What if someone gets shot or blown up?”
“We’re at war, Vee. People are going to die. Look around. This is an alliance war machine; dying is what we signed up for.”
Vani wanted to say something, but she knew it wouldn’t make a difference.
“I will visit the temple for you,” she said quietly, and he smiled at her and squeezed the finger that held the ring he had given her a week ago.