Cadet Flight Methuselah

001

A sharp pain in the side of her chest rudely interrupted the pleasant melody of chimes in the fluffy dreamland consisting of an endless array of marauder fighters she was going to be allowed to pilot sans cadet maneuvering restrictions. The jolt was instantly followed by an irate, snarling but unintelligible sentence spoken by breath that smelled strongly of garlic couscous covered up by the minty variety of the standard-issue Navy mouthwash. A few moments later the garlic smell and the voice became clearer.

“Get the hell up, MacNamara!”

As her glorious line of marauders vanished into nothingness Nim sat straight up in her bunk and stared into the darkness in frustration, then halfheartedly swatted at the air on her left side when the lingering mint-garlic aura refused to dissipate along with her dream flight deck. “Christ, Shelke, do the O2 breathers of the galaxy a favor and brush after you eat that crap.”

When she found she was hitting nothing with her random strikes at the empty space beside her bunk she instinctively looked across at the single light in the room that was on. Ready with her other boot in-hand was her roommate, black hair looking as though they were in zero-gravity exercises even though the gravity decking was definitely on. Her hazel-green eyes were exhausted and seething with fury, and her death stare was making it fairly clear that she was about to launch her second steel-toed missile at her roommate's face now that it wasn't buried safely behind her pillow.

“Your dog is scratching at the damn door!”

The chimes, louder than they had been in her dream, sounded again in rapid succession. It was indeed the doorbell to their quarters and not her personal celestial fighter launch melody she had been hoping for. That was very disappointing. The dream had been pretty damn awesome until that point. She was suffering from severe withdrawals due to her recent lack of flight time. It was getting so bad that she was considering hijacking the astronomy lab's dome projection screen and creating a combat simulator she could control from her chair.

All she needed was to find someone in systems tech that could actually do it for her. If she got caught hijacking ship systems again she was going to be thrown out into space without an exosuit.

“And Gunnery Instructor Belkin says you can't aim worth shit. They should arm your marauder with combat boots instead of repeater cannons.”

Nim knew just how stupid her insult sounded shortly after she finished saying it, but she was not yet awake enough to come up with anything more clever to throw at the cadet who had been a pain in her ass for five years. Unfortunately her primary excuse of 'I hate Shelke Banoub's space rat guts' was not a legitimate enough reason for anyone in the Navy to be assigned a different bunkmate; coming up with even more creative ways to state the same never garnered any better results and usually got her in trouble for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” They were stuck together, for better or worse, like a married couple that only got along when they were at work. Shelke was definitely a whole lot less of a bitch in the cockpit of a marauder, that was for sure—and Nim didn't have to smell her post-midnight snack breath while her head was locked inside the helmet of an exosuit.

“It'd be my boot to your skull if it wasn't zero-God-thirty!” She pitched her second boot over-handed at the door to their quarters and immediately the chime ceased ringing. With a hollow thunk the magnetic seals in the tread locked it to the bulkhead. Just on the other side someone shouted something angry but unintelligible through the pressurized airlock between the cabin and the corridor. “Go see what he wants!”

Now that she was out of ammunition, Nim saluted Shelke with her middle finger and put her own boots on before getting up and going to the door. Shelke swore at her, entirely in her native language of course, and promptly switched off her overhead light and curled back up in her bunk with her face to the wall in a concentrated attempt to ignore the rest of the room.