Sidereal

Part One: The Spaceship

"I know you don't know," said Max as he retrieves one shoe and chucked it at his brother's head, "Here, you idiot."

"That is not how you talk to your brother," grinned Kurt as he stuffed his shoe onto his giant foot.

I stand up and grab my black jacket that basically everyone else on the compound has. Reaching into my left pocket, I find a pencil. I take it out and twirl it in my hands and take deep breaths as I try to get rid of the terrible nightmare. Each of us has a coping mechanism with fear and stress. Mine is with twirling the pencil in my hands as I take deep breaths. Quinn winds her hair around her pointer finger and then unwinds it with her eyes closed. Kurt and Max both tap on either the floor or a wall and quietly count up to hundred in German and then back down again. Zaire makes a fist in his left hand and with his right hand he taps each of his knuckles over and over again.

On cue, the sound of metal balls tapping together begins. Tony is perched on the top bunk on the third bunk with his string that is attached to two metal balls. In one hand he holds the middle of the string and in the other he swings one of metal balls and watches it collide with the other as it goes back and forth. Tony must've had a nightmare this night as he copes with his fear. His olive Italian skin is invisible in the dark room, but I can almost see his chocolate brown eyes watch the two metal balls hitting back and forth.

"We need to move," muttered Zaire and broke Tony's trance as he places his string back in his pocket.

"What's the time, capt'?" Kurt said as he finished tying his shoe that Max finally found.

"40 seconds to get there," Zaire said with eyes straining looking at his hologram watch. It glowed a sickly green that caused shadows to dance across Zaire's hard face.

"Done!" said Quinn as she jumped down from the top bunk and landed besides me, "Baboon! Getting your lazy bum over here!"

Quinn always seems to get more perky whenever Kurt is last of the Squad to get moving. Kurt grinned at Quinn as he strode over to the middle of the room, "I see that you are completely a morning person."

Quinn only scowled at Kurt as Zaire exited the room. We followed in a jog, but more like a sprint for me. Everyone has long legs and fast strides while I have to speed up to catch up from my short legs. Zaire was muttering things ahead of us about how we are so slow. As a unit we jog through the dark halls, passing doors where the other squads slept.

We are living in a giant spaceship that is traveling at light speed towards an unknown planet. Squad Nine has been together ever since we were taken from our biological families down on Earth to begin training for this epic mission. A mission to save the human race. A mission that can make us all heros. A mission that can go terribly wrong in seconds.

Earth has been over populated and with depleting resources, a solution had to be found. A group of top scientist from all over the world brainstormed to figure out what is the best possible answer for this large problem. Their final solution was the get all the children who were born in the year B18 and place them on a giant spaceship and send them to a planet that is said to be similar to Earth. They rounded up the children and many officers who are to train us for the mysterious new planet. Immediately boarding the spaceship with nothing, but the fading memories of the life at home, we were split into groups called Squads. Each Squad has six kids from different places around the world. I was from America, Quinn from Australia, Kurt and Max from Germany, Tony from Italy and Zaire from somewhere in Africa. It is rumored that Zaire was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but no one knows for sure, he prefers privacy on the matter from where he was from. Also it was lucky for Kurt and Max to remain together, because most siblings were split up. The officials each selected one of the children from each Squad as the designated leader, Zaire is ours. Every Squad was assigned a number and that was that. It was lucky for us that we all got along together, because we are stuck together for life. They are my real family, not the ones from Earth. I grew up with Quinn's roll of her eyes, Kurt's jokes, Max's carefulness, Zaire's toughness and the watchfulness of Tony. We are a team.