Traitor

Chapter 1

I sit in the cramped briefing room at the Socialist Space Academy. This is where we sit every time we get to do something interesting such as bombing practice. Our teacher Commander Fritz Müller walks in. "Silence!" He yells. The talking immediately stops. "Today we practice strafing. There are fake hover tanks, soldiers, outposts, and turrets for you to hunt down and destroy. Now get in your fighters!" Everybody stands up and salutes. Then we all turn and walk out the door toward the hangar.

When we get to the hangar I beeline for my fighter. I climb in and start the fighter. My friend Jack does the same to his fighter. "You are cleared for takeoff!" A flight controller tells me. I turn my repulsor lifts up to full. Once I'm thirty feet off the ground, I turn toward the open hangar doors and speed out. Twenty-nine fighters follow me. "Okay, this is squadron leader, Chase Mellamark. ¨¨Hunt and Destroy." I say. I drop down into a canyon. Jack follows me. The usually set up the "turrets" in these canyons protecting an "outpost". I see one ahead of me and I lock on. I pull the trigger on the control stick. A line of blue lasers stream toward the turret. These "training" lasers are low powered, so they don't do too much damage, but these turrets are made with wood, so the lasers penetrate, hitting the small hydrogen tanks that make the turrets explode. I fire on the next turret blowing it to pieces. Jack hits the ones I don't see. We do this until we reach the outpost. I fire 8 of my 16 ground attack missiles. They reduce the fake outpost to a smoking crater. "This is squadron leader, Grention Canyon has been cleared" I say. I pull out of the canyon and fly up to 6,000 feet and turn on my scanners.

After a while of looking I find a squad of "soldiers" protecting a ridge. I come around and shoot up the ridge with my auto cannon. After the dust clears I see most of the "soldiers" are down. The soldiers are just super cheap robots that we get to practice on. That way our targets can actually move. It does make it a lot more interesting. Suddenly our teachers voice interrupts my deep thinking session. "All ships back to base! We are under attack" I pull the stick hard to the left and shoot toward the base. By the time we get there though, it is already too late. The rebel attackers are gone. Craters and blown out areas are visible. The hangar somehow hasn't been hit. I start my landing sequence.

When I'm landed, I shut off the engine and climb out. After attacks like these, we have to help with clearing and rebuilding. Technically, during that attack we should have been manning the forty anti-ship guns around the base. I have a feeling that the rebels knew that we were away from the base at the time. I descend a flight of stairs to my sector. I start clearing away the rubble. The rebel's small proton bombs don't do too much damage, and most don't even make it past the shields. My friend Adrian helps in my sector as well. "Hey Adrian?" I say.

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to go on a speeder ride after this? I can probably get Jack to come too!"

"I don't know, I have to study for finals."

"Please?"

"Fine, but we have to be back by 22:00 hours."

"Sure, that can work. Meet us in hangar three at 18:00 hours. We might go down to the city."

"Okay."

Now that I got Adrian to go on a speeder ride, my work seems a lot easier. I clear the rubble away and weld in two sheets of armored plates to cover the hole. I then take off down the hall toward my mini-dome that I share with Jack. That's when the air-raid sirens go off again.

I rush to my assigned AS gun. I run toward an ammunition crate and unlock it. I rush with an ion shell to the gun. I hand it off to Jack who loads it in. As I run back to get another cartridge. I hear my gun fire. I hand off another round to Jack who slides it into the back of the gun. Another pilot finds a target and aims, and then fires. A red bolt shoots up into the sky and hit a rebel fighter. The AS gun I man is one of the big ones. There are a bunches of smaller Anti-Ship Auto-Cannon (ASAC) that send a long stream on proton projectiles into the lunar sky. I keep running back and forth until we have almost exhausted our ammunition supply. We are covered with ash from the exploding bombs. "We have only 2 shells left!" I say. The cannon fires. "Make that one." I tell them. I give Jack the last shell. A tongue of fire leaps out of the gun and a red streak shoots into the sky. It collides with one of the bombers, which explodes in a brilliant light show. We all cheer. We watch as the wrecked ship hits the lunar dust.