I wrote this. This is actually only the prologue.
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"You don't even want a radio?" Martin asked.
"Nossir. Just a room I can fit into, an air mattress and some blankets is all I need," the girl replied.
"Okay. We have your air mattress and blankets, but you'll have to sleep in the cargo hold until we can get a better room cleared out."
"Yessir." As the girl walked away, Martin thought. He, being the captain of the Tarolythe T-00 capital ship, had to approve of any new recruits, and he was impressed with this one so far. She was tough, and amazingly spartan in her needs and wants. Apparently, she was also an expert pilot, having inadvertently had to fly through an asteroid field to get to the T-00--and doing to without breaking a sweat.
She was a Sahwo, an alien human from an uncharted part of the universe. The Sahwo were called "alien humans" because they resembled humans in nearly every way. The mental capacity of a Sahwo, on the other hand, far outweighed that of a human. That's how you discerned a Sahwo from a human: give them a complex logic problem, and if they took less than three minutes to solve it, the person was a Sahwo.
Martin didn't have to do that for the girl, though: she said outright she was a Sahwo, and after seeing her flying skills, Martin believed her.
The girl--her name was Kyubi--made Martin a bit sad whenever she was around. It seemed that her spectrum of emotions ranged from melancholy to anger. She never smiled; the closest Martin ever saw her get was a slight twitch of the lips if something amused her.
As Kyubi neared a mechanic who had taken out a wall tile to work on the circuitry in the wall, the mechanic tugged on Kyubi's long black hair, which she always had in a ponytail. Kyubi promptly turned around and slapped the mechanic as hard as she could, generating a crack that made Martin wince. She turned down another corridor, and out of sight.
Martin went over to the mechanic, who was holding his cheek. "It's been a full 24 hours standard since she got here, and you're still doing that? Toby, you've got to--"
"Yeah, yeah. I've got to be less impulsive," said the mechanic, Toby. "Ah, well." He shrugged and continued his work.
Martin turned around and walked down the corridor, thinking again. Ever since the Aron, a warlike race of aliens, started claiming star systems as their own, things had gotten a little weird for the Myisan, one of the three human races and the faction to which Martin belonged.
About a hundred years had passed since Myisan introduced itself--so to speak--to the rest of the known universe. Now, only two years ago, Myisan was given the job of law enforcement throughout Raiyosin, or the known universe. This immediately put a stress on the Myisan, since they would have to produce more ships to supplement their still-small Orbital Navy for the job of law enforcement, and Raiyosin was a big place. Apparently, the Torosa--the second race of humans and the main military faction--was too preoccupied with the Aron uprising to maintain the police, so the job had to be given to someone else. The Myisan were chosen at random.
The Orbital Navy, then, had been taking a real beating, and fleets were being destroyed as quickly as they could be built. To augment it for the job of law enforcement in addition to defense of Mai'saan, the home planet of the Myisan, seemed like madness. Yet the wise minds of the Myisan council budgeted time, money, and spacecraft such that a new addition to the Orbital Navy could be created to act as Raiyosin's police.
Why then, Martin had thought, would the T-00--a military craft--be sent on a cargo run instead of assisting in law enforcement?
At first, it had seemed like an odd decision. But, it made sense after some thought: sens the T-00 on a mission that benefits the production of new craft, rather than a dangerous mission that risks its destruction.
Upon nearly walking into a wall, Martin snapped out of his reverie, and he stopped to drink from a small water fountain to his right. He then took a nearby elevator, walked through more hallways, and took another elevator, at which point he was in the bridge, where the ship was piloted. the bridge was deserted; the T-00 was on autopilot.
Martin sat in the captain's chair and gazed out at the vastness of space. It was so
big... How could somebody dare to attempt to comprehend, let alone govern, something so--so... infinite? Impossible! Humans could do neither. They could only occupy it, and destroy it with their wars and conflicts. The humans were just as warlike as the Aron, but at least the Aron were mature enough to admit and accept it.
A tremor shook the bridge. This was not surprising; these ships were built exactly wrong so that any piece of debris that hit the T-00 created a small shock wave that was amplified 100 times by the time it reached the bridge. It wasn't enough to damage the ship; it just really irritated whoever was in the bridge at the time. What was unusual was the alarms that went off a second or two later.
Toby appeared in the doorway, flustered. "A large beam hit the T-00. Duration: 3 seconds. Angle: 164 degrees yaw, 47 degrees pitch." So it came from behind and under the T-00. But that means...
Martin ran over and checked one of the panels. He swore loudly. "They hit the retrobooster fuel tanks! We can't slow down!
"Toby, put out any fires you find in the engine room. I'll find somewhere we can crash-land." The lights flickered. "And be careful if you use the elevator." Toby nodded briskly and exited.
Martin switched the view on one of the panels to near where the beam came from. Sure enough, an Aron frigate was drifting there, the giant beam cannon on the front cooling. Martin cursed the Aron to various unmentionable fates in several languages, then checked autopilot.
If they were still going on the optimal course, they would be going to use the gravity of a nearby planet for a slingshot effect to accelerate them toward their destination. Since it seemed morally wrong--not to mention illegal--to crash a capship like the T-00 into a small mine like the one to which they were originally headed, Martin decided to crash-land on the aforementioned nearby planet.
Martin turned off autopilot and pulled up specs on this planet. Its name was Sirou. It was a province of Oronaea, which was the home of the Oronii, third of the human races. Rain forests near the equator; polar ice caps. Mid-latitude were huge forests with many small lakes. Water made up about 45% of the landscape. Oxygen content in the atmosphere was a little thin, but anyone who's climbed a mountain would be fine.
Martin definitely did not expect the trip to go this way.
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I'm only 13, so don't expect much of a read from this. Also, to the sci-fi purists, I apologize if I don't know what I'm talking about sometimes.
I also know Kyubi is a Japanese word that means "nine tails" or something like that. I wasn't thinking about Japanese when I was writing this. So deal.
That should ward off any negative comments.
Kasran Community Member 
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