FTL-19...Faster Than Life.

Chapter 19

I’ve been right back to my busy schedule and training but really as much as breaking it off with Patrick had hurt me the shore leave on Durandal had me happy for a few days. It was one of those fun girl things that you feel when you’re like the way I was…I got to really have part of the fantasy girl life thing.

Shopping and touring and food with cute men that are into you and other languages.

And I’m not the only one that loved it.

Training and duty shifts.

Learn buy doing and doing and doing. It’s where you’re supposed to be able to go to station to station in Sense-Nav and be able to pull any job they have.

And then there’s more stuff that I’m learning like internal operational logistics.

Paperwork.

I’m pulled off Sense-Nav since my marks are good enough by my commanders reckoning that the station positions for cadets that need more station time to get up to where I’m at and my reward for good marks and experience?

I’m shipped off to secretarial.

Okay, so it’s nowhere as bad as it sounds.

I’ve always had a thing for that genre of Sims. There has always been a sort of thing about female office work and the way that they do things in both a professional way and a femme way that appealed to me.

Oh yes there’s all those fetish Sims but aside from starting curiosity in well any crossing gender Sim I was in I was more for living as me but as a real girl/woman in the Sims and not the sexual stuff.

So in a lot of ways this, this is right up “My alley?”

There is a lot of aesthetics to the job just like working in any of the command sections and there’s a lot of paperwork and things to process.

I actually get to use a non-powered typewriter.

Okay it’s not part of the class but there’s a whole course for typing and we do need to take that as a class since we’re mostly an OBC culture and then even off our computers it’s a massive amount of iconography in computers now. And in some cases like if coms and computer intership systems are compromised like say if Tekkers hack into things some orders are still in times of emergency passed by written orders.

The typing teacher had three of these ancient relics in our classroom. It was actually very fun to try my hands on those.

But it might sound sexist that we have to dress a certain way but there are men here too and they have all their own standards they are held to rigidly and it’s a credit to our training and protocol that we all are to look and act and dress very professionally.

How to sit, cross your legs how the lines of your skirt short match your blouse or tunic the hats and hose and the shoes all for office work.

But when you’re on a base and you see all those fresh made women and super clean cut men there is something to all of this.

I’m actually learning too wear a sidearm with my skirt uniform and how to deal with the sword with all of this. Yes even surprising me I’m expected to wear my sword ever since I’ve won it.

Just off my draw hip and slightly to the rear.

And I’m doing it in uniform with our sword masters learning to draw it while being dressed like this.

Drawing a sword is an entirely different affair in a skirt and heels. It can be done yes but it’s like other things we are being taught as well. Like how to draw and shoot in a skirt and doing hand to hand in a skirt uniform since things happen without making appointments.

Okay that was fun…there we several jokes about enemies calling to make an appointment.

There’s a lot to learn even getting to learn dining manners as well as service. It’s expected for us to know who and how and what to serve when we’re doing a meeting for higher ups. Yesh that’s usually a job for our moral officers and such but there are times when we won’t have those or that they’ll need help so we’re learning the basics to that and how to eat in a mannered way as well.

And languages…I think I mentioned this before that we’re being taught languages but we’re using them too in these scenarios, at least getting out table manners polished with them.

It’s been about a week though since Durandal and things have worn down and we’ve settled into a normal routine and we’re heading towards our last few pick up stops here on this “milk run”.

Selkirk’s Drift….

It’s my first look at a drifter colony.

That’s a really large asteroid belt that actually travels on a sort of a set loop. Here it revolves around or rather between a gravity well and a small blue dwarf star. The thing is that this entire belt id inhabited by mining and industries that are making a living off of the belt and because of their location they’re also a good place to act as a port of sorts.

Selkirk’s Drift itself the main part is domes and carved out areas of asteroids all held together by these bridge tubes that make up the bulk of the living and trading spaces in this big sort of web that is in three dimensions instead of just two.

How big?

Well I’m actually being nav-chair on some of the shuttle rides in since our ship is too big to get that close but when we do fly by’s of some of these connections I’ve seen trains. These are continental sized.

Our ship could fit in here but a ship our size has some problems with fine scale flight maneuvers in rough situations.

Should an accident happen or something else we’d be less than able so we err on the side of caution.

In space you always err on the side of caution.

I didn’t have shore leave but those of us on the shuttle fly crews had little spots of time around an hour or so as we were picking up new recruits here and I did get a chance to look around here.

It’s pretty for one most of the stations here have these huge meter thick sections of glass-steel or transpar-alloy or other thing to give you a great view. That’s usually the case in all of the shuttle ports we’ve stopped in here there were nine altogether and most had these nice terraces in the sides of the asteroid under the shuttle port domes making a sort of shopping area.

If the rock had a sort of nice appeal to it I noticed it was used in the construction and was cut and polished and then coated.

Water was expensive here all of it recycled and otherwise produced by converted ice brought in by ice miners or harvesters. I paid eleven credits for a one liter bottle while I was there.
Though I did get a pair of basalt and silver earrings there for cheap and a matching necklace too.

I think the best part was seeing all the spacers there. It’s a serious port and small ships are here doing things all the time and it’s mostly civilians so the amount and variety of them was impressive.

It’s the first time really that the whole galactic culture thing really had a face to it for me.

Then they were getting settled in and converted into who they really felt if they needed to be and there is always a small group of them in every stop…every stop so far because we’re on the “milk run” the bigger and main stream colonies it’s barely an issue…you go to your doctor in most of these worlds and once they’re sure you have GID issues they schedule you to get right with yourself.

Modifications are a whole different thing though that’s like plastic surgery used to be in the ancient days.

*……………………..Over the next two weeks we stop at a few other places all agri-colonies like where I was raised.

Quaker….Small and a lunar colony around a gas planet and I still don’t get the oats joke that one of the Marines had made.

Desulth… Medium sized and mostly grain and cattle and such their big thing that I found was they were all very caucasian there and they spoke a version of Spanish there. From what I seen though on the shuttle during a pick up flight lots of rails even more that roads and the place was vastly small communities.

Trenton…Another medium sized planet and one frankly that really reminded me of home. I actually got a sort of chill there in just seeing how many people there were plugged in all the time. Way too many bots doing things and way too many people going around with half glazed looks.

It was the first time since I started that I switched a duty shift with another person and took a shift in supplies over going planet side.

Toro…Toro I went down too despite it being a pretty fundamentalist place. It’s a very large planet but a lower gravity from its placement and rotation just puts it over the standard for human norm.

I went because some of the girls were going on shore leave there for a shift and I wanted to go as well and it’s a very large produce of meat. Mostly lamb/mutton and beef and they grow a lot of it from the sheer amount of farms and pasture there as well as other farmed foods.

The atmosphere here is water rich and it’s relatively warm here year round so lots of rain and lots of plant growth here too. The shuttles are picking up new recruits here and a lot of fresh supplies as well.

There was a scene at the shuttle-port with some anti-conversion protestors gathered saying “Gender conversions are Aberrations!” and “Deviations are against God!”

They were behind the security fences and there were close to a few hundred of them with signs and yelling out slogans mostly stuff we didn’t understand since Toro’s native language in Portuguese but there was enough English there that I understood.

Part of me wanted to go back in sort of protest but sunny convinced me to go with them.

“Erin, they don’t speak for everyone here and it’s bound to happen in some of the places that we go to.”

I sighed. “I know but I got this at home, heck my family cut me out of their lives for doing this.”

Carrington nodded. “Mine too, heck mine wanted me to get brain fixed so I wasn’t feeling like I was in the wrong body. But this is the right body and this is the right me.”

We shared a hug and once we got away from the spaceport and into Savone the city itself it wasn’t anywhere near as bad.

Actually despite the protestors I had a very good time and I’d come back if I could.

We bought while we were there. Leather goods are stunningly cheap and I’m using up space in my storage room with this but I bought five pairs of shoes…okay three are ship ready and functional dress shoes and the other two are for going out and getting dressed up and then there’s a few skirts that I bought…the first time I have bought a leather mini-skirt and I felt amazing doing it and I bought a leather aviation styled leather jacket. Carrington bought a lot of the fine wool things there and she bought yarn as well as she apparently can knit.

The shopping was only broken up by eating and we stopped at the Marketa Plaza which was this huge sort of mall that was all shopping hawkers and food stalls and we ate at this place called Seville and they cooked the meats on these huge wood fired grills and we ate.

I had short ribs grill kissed and then slowly braised and they came with fire roasted squash just cut into chunks and roasted peppers and this flat bread made on the grill and with some beef drippings so there was this richness but also this grilled sauce and char flavors to it.

They serve this drink that’s called horchata? there that’s like a sort of spiced rice milk thing but it really cut the heat and it wasn’t too heavy.

I felt like I waddled back to the transports with all of my shopping. Most of the things went into storage except two pairs of shoes and one of the mini-skirts. I can wear it off duty.

*………………………………I was on my rotation in Sense-nav when I heard the news. We just received orders to head instead of to the last five system stops we were going to jump all the way to Zodiac space.

The Zodiac colonies aren’t exactly like the astrological stuff but they are as well. The colonies that rule that cluster are named after the astrological signs but it’s more because the signs are associated with animals.

The Zodiac colonies are deviants.

Deviants are genetic or nano tweaked people that do it for fashion or in the cases of these places as a form or adaptation to their planets they’ve colonized.

The Zodiac colonies are on the edge of Aberrant space.

Aberrant’s are people that have gone too far like the Tekkers and they believe that humanity is only able to evolve to it’s ultimate for if it keeps continuing to mutate and evolve into something…

Well not human.

They have a designated space only in the sense of deep in the system closest to The Zodiac colonies was were the movement had started and it took of like some sort of insane virus throughout that region of space. Within fifty years they had gone from a fringe cult on the planet Genesis the most advanced leader in bio-technology to an invading horde of monsters.

Monsters that called themselves The Awakened.

The Zodiac’s were part of their madness for awhile and had been under Aberrant occupation until they threw them off planet when the Colonial Union was force to strike back against Aberrant intrusion attacks and raids.

The Zodiac’s are technically part of The Colonial Union since then and have been a sort of DMZ border base but they’re kind of out there and ships like ours don’t really go out there so there’s a lot of talk right now about why.

It should be very interesting really since a lot of very specialized things come from those planets out there but something tells me that this, this might get to be too interesting at the same time.