Fighting Monsters

During my second year in the academy, I was still trying to decide what I wanted to specialize in. At that point, it didn’t matter; I was going to do anything that got me into space and away from the outer colonies for good.

One afternoon, there was a test of a new vectoring thruster built by the engineering students. It was supposed to be super-efficient or some other thing.

There were several of us watching on the periphery; just something to occupy our free time. They were testing on the perpetually “Coming Soon” soccer pitch. It hadn’t ever been sodded in the fourteen years since the academy opened and was just a gravel field with stadium furniture. The thrust mount was in the middle of the field, and to one side, the empty trailer they’d brought the thruster in.

She stood near the trailer, and I was just a little past her from it. We had a decent vantage on the test, but not as good as the people in the stands.

It started out underwhelming and somewhat expected. The thruster sat in its stand and fired up, the big display over it showed the angle of vector, thrust in kilo-Newtons, and fuel consumption per second.

Then all hell broke loose. The bottom of the mount failed, and the thruster twisted parallel to the ground. The people in the stands were safe, as well as the testers, as the thrust was pointed away from them, straight at us.

I pushed her into the trailer and held the door closed as well as I could against the blast of the thruster. The pain was intense for just a moment, then I’m not sure whether it was nerve damage or shock that numbed me. It was then that the thruster exploded. The shockwave knocked us both out and ripped the door out my hand and off its hinges.

I woke up to someone holding and stroking my left hand. It was the girl I’d pushed into the trailer, but she was bald.

“Hey,” I said, “you were in the trailer. Your hair…are you okay?”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m fine. My name’s Cora Martin. We didn’t get a chance to get properly introduced. Thank you for saving my life.”

“Hi, Cora. I’m—”

“Zephyr Langstrom. If it’s all right, I’ll just call you Zeph.”

“Why are you bald?” My voice was weak and croaky.

“I didn’t want you to be the only one.” I started to reach for my head with my right hand but was stopped by the intense pain. I looked down to see a ruined arm and hand under translucent burn bandages.

I reached up with left hand and felt a bandage on my head. She held up a mirror so I could see. It looked like the right rear quarter of my scalp was bandaged like my arm but didn’t look nearly as bad. The rest of my head had been shaved and a standard bandage covered what I later learned was where a piece of shrapnel had almost pierced my skull.

“How long was I out?”

Cora helped me drink some water while she answered. “You’ve been out for two and half days. I’ve been here the whole time.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“I think I did,” she said. “It’s the least I could do. You’d better get used to it, as I’m moving you into my dorm room so I can help out.”

“Help with what?” I asked.

The doctor came into the room, then, and Cora gave my hand a squeeze. Before she could leave, though, I stopped her. I don’t know why, but I wanted her there. “You can stay. If you’re helping out, it might be nice to know what’s going on, right?”

The doctor explained my injuries and what it would take to recover. I’d need several muscle and skin grafts to repair my arm, repeated surgeries to free up the scar tissue to maintain mobility, and constant physio. He guessed about nine to twelve months for recovery up to sixty-percent mobility.

Tears burned my eyes. Without hope of a full or nearly full recovery, I could forget a career in space.

A gentle hand wiped my tears. “I’m here for you, Zeph. You held that door against the blast of the thruster and saved both our lives. You’re tough enough to push through this.”

The doctor nodded. “Not every position requires full mobility,” he said. “In fact, my son is a pilot even though he lost his left hand in an accident in childhood. He was recently promoted, too.”

“What you’re saying is, if I get at least as much mobility as a prosthetic, I’ll be okay?”

“Exactly.” He made some notes in his tablet. “You should get some rest. Ms. Martin assures us that you have care available at home, so we’ll be releasing you in the morning. You’ll have to come in each morning to change your dressings and physiotherapy, and we’ll start laying out a schedule for your surgeries.”

The year following was an exercise in overcoming pain. Cora provided constant support and encouragement. If it hadn’t been for her, I never would’ve been able to keep up with my coursework, and probably would’ve dropped out of physio due to sheer hopeless frustration.

She even kept me going in electives, even getting me through philosophy, which she wasn’t taking. Studying Nietzsche while undergoing daily physio and six surgeries seemed impossible, but Cora made it happen by reading the material to me and making sure I could paraphrase. By the end of the term, she hated the course, and especially old Friedrich.

Contrary to the doctor’s estimate, I recovered more than eighty-percent use of my right hand, and by the time I’d recovered from the last of twenty-nine surgeries, I didn’t notice any impairment. I did however, end up being decently ambidextrous after spending most of a year doing everything with my left hand.

Some fields were unavailable to me due to my injuries. Some things require fine motor skills and two hands, other things involve working around extreme heat or cold, both of which cause me a great deal of pain.

My choices for specialization were limited to combat, pilot, loadmaster, and any of the paperwork jobs. I chose to be a pilot. Of course, what you end up piloting depends on what’s needed when you’re nearing graduation. In my case, it ended up being interdiction patrol ships.

The last year of academy, I received my license to pilot most every ship flown by law enforcement, as well as law enforcement training. Cora had chosen to specialize in interdiction combat, combining law enforcement, close-quarters combat, and ship-to-ship action. She’d told me, “I want to board pirate ships and take ’em all down. Maybe I’ll be on the ship you’re flying!”

Once we had graduated, we received our badges and first assignments. The last few days at the academy we bid farewell to our fellow cadets that were heading off to careers in the military, commerce, law enforcement or government. Since then, I’ve been piloting the Vicious Rabbit, a.k.a. LIV 39-Z-434.

I never saw or heard from Cora again, at least until I stood behind the captain this morning, looking at the report on the screen. It didn’t make sense.

“What’s wrong, Zephyr?” the captain asked.

“I spent most of my time in the academy with her. I thought I knew her.” I rubbed the scars on my arm and hand, feeling the difference between the lumpy burn and graft scars, and the smaller, straight scars from surgeries.

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“No, sir. You get me close, and I’ll put us in boarding range.” A dark thought floated through my mind. “Be careful, she’s trained in ship-to-ship combat. She’s had all the same training our guys have.”

“We know, we have her records.”

“Is there a reason we can’t just…let her do her thing?”

The captain stood and sighed. “I’ll be honest. I would’ve recommended leaving her alone when she first went rogue and was only targeting pirates. Yesterday, she attacked a commercial freighter. She’s made the transition from vigilante to criminal.”

“Cora hated Nietzsche, but she should have listened. ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.’”