Space Cadets

by Adam Moon

  Relations were already smooth enough that our side didn’t bristle at being told what to do. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Novans had no idea where the Bleeder planet was.

  We nicknamed the alien ship carrying the weapons, Boom.

  The Novans insisted that the Boom ship be allowed to travel to the outskirts of their star system, for safety’s sake.

  That made sense so we agreed.

  All in all, we got along like long lost cousins, which is exactly what we were.

  Dreadnought

  Everything went to shit as soon as the Dreadnought showed up beside us in orbit.

  At first no one knew what to make of it. It took Captain Wilkomen a full minute to even recall where he knew the ship from. When the realization hit him, his face fell and went ashen.

  The Dreadnought didn’t try and open a line of communication with us. And they didn’t wait around for long.

  Almost immediately, they broke orbit and headed right for Nova. We tried to stop them but they ignored us. They must have known already that the planet was friendly but they didn’t care.

  We fired on them but their ship held up.

  Only then did we notice that the alien ships orbiting Nova with us were being taken apart from the inside. The humungous Bleeder ship that led us here exploded, breaking clean in half. Novans drifted out of the gaping holes on each side, dead or dying very quickly. And then mechs (our mechs) appeared in the openings and launched themselves towards the planet. They looked dirty and rusted out, even from so far away. They belonged to the four thousand who’d lost their marbles.

  I watched as the Dreadnought nose dived into the atmosphere. It would burn up but the occupants didn’t give a fuck. We saw them exit the warship right before it disappeared from view beneath the clouds.

  Four thousand space Marine mechs jumped ship. The sight of that will haunt my dreams forever. I’ve never seen anything so formidable and menacing in my entire life.

  I couldn’t even guess what they were up to, but after twenty minutes of stunned silence, we found out. They were killing off the population en masse.

  A council member hailed us from the surface and asked why we were attacking them. We insisted it had nothing to do with us, but the council member didn’t buy it.

  The four member council onboard the Conquistador with us watched in stunned silence in the command room. They looked at us like we had something to do with it, even though they must’ve known we didn’t. Then they fled for their shuttle as though we might stop them.

  This was very bad news for us.

  The captain sent word to the President about our situation and then we waited for instructions. A decision like defending an alien planet from our own soldiers was way above the captain’s pay grade.

  But no matter what was decided, this was not going to end well.

  Too Late

  It took almost two God Damn hours to hear back from the President. By the time he told us to intervene on the Novans behalf, it was already too late.

  As soon as the captain was done talking to the President, we got hailed from the Novan surface. The captain brought the hail up on the screen and when we saw a mangled, defiled A.C.E. unit staring back at us, we knew we were way too late to assist the Novans.

  The mech said, “This is our planet now. Here, we can forget all about our past lives and create an existence that makes sense to us. If you attack us or come down here, we will destroy you all.”

  Captain Wilkomen asked, “Will you allow the survivors to go into exile?”

  “There are no survivors.”

  The captain disgustedly severed the link and as soon as the mech’s face disappeared from the screen, he ordered, “Drop the biggest EMP we have. In fact, drop them all.” Then he ordered the other two warships to do the same.

  We waited as the EMP’s dropped beneath the cloud cover. When we were not immediately attacked, we knew the EMP’s had done their job. The four thousand insane mechs had been taken off-line; in effect they’d been killed.

  It had all happened so suddenly. It was anticlimactic.

  Rick whispered to me, “That’s why it’s important to shield your components.”

  I nodded even though I was barely listening to him.

  We had just orbited a planet while its inhabitants had been rendered extinct. We were complicit in the mass extinction in that we had created the very things that caused it.

  Then we actively killed off the next generation of inhabitants, the mechs, before they’d even named the planet.

  The whole affair was idiotic, uncalled for and horrifying.

  One of the ensigns started to cry and Peggy walked away in disgust.

  We didn’t have much time to dwell on it though. We received word that the Boom ship with the weapons of global destruction had disappeared.

  Save Earth

  I’ve never before seen people take their battle stations so quickly. Peggy was ordered back to her body which was in orbit around Jupiter. Me and Rick were ordered back too, but then the captain realized the error of that order; we had no body’s to go back to.

  He mulled it over for a second and finally said, “Take the dead cadets' bodies.”

  Rick gasped so I guess taking over someone else’s body is not a good idea.

  I’ve never seen someone refuse a direct order before so it surprised me when Rick did.

  He said, “You know what’ll happen to whoever gets put inside the girl’s body. He’ll change on a fundamental level. The entire biology and therefore thought processes will change. I won’t risk losing my consciousness. It’s all I have left.”

  The captain’s face went beet red and he yelled, “You are a dead man. Dead men do not refuse orders. In fact, you are literally property of the Conquistador, and as its captain I am banishing you from your suits.” He took a breath and then said more evenly, “If that Boom ship is headed towards Earth, we’ll lose our planet. I might not make it there in time, even with the warp drive working at full capacity, but you two can instantaneously teleport to Camp Eighty Seven in Martian orbit.”

  Rick said, “Fine,” and then said to me, “I’ll flip you for the dude’s body.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what we could do, even from Mars’ orbit, to stop an alien ship loaded with weaponry and piloted by a crew of Novans hell bent on exacting revenge on the people who had betrayed them, but I wasn’t gutsy enough to refuse an order.

  The truth of the matter was that we still didn’t even know if the Boom ship was headed to Earth.

  Sabotage

  Rick is a badass but he looked like a punk when I won the coin toss. I got to take over Danny’s body and he would get Becky’s.

  He insisted he wasn’t being a sexist about it. He said that the conflicting signals from biological urges and commands could really change a person taking over the body of someone of the opposite sex. He said it could make you insane if you were kept in the body for too long.

  I called him a princess and he pointed his PQ5000 at me so I shut up.

  Luckily we hadn’t already left because right then, the ship started to act funny. The captain could tell from the readouts that it was not normal wear and tear or simple systems failures. The ship had a saboteur onboard.

  When three dirty, charred mech skins appeared in the command room and started to kill the crew, we knew we hadn’t killed all of the four thousand mechs that attacked Nova.

  When the warship beside us listed to the side and then went end over end, we knew we weren’t the only warship they’d boarded.

  But these guys sabotaging the Conquistador were up against two recipients of the Platinum Shield. That didn’t make as big of a difference as I thought it might.

  They blasted away fearlessly. Rick ran right up to one of them, caved in its chest-plate with a punch, and then with both hands, ripped it in half. As the guy twitched around, Rick brought his steel foot down on his head hard. I’ve never seen anything so barbaric in my life but it d
id put a little spring in my step.

  I didn’t know the first mates name and I’d never get a chance to ask her because she exploded right in front of me. I ran at her killer and jacked him up against the wall. Before he could fight back and get the better of me, I shoved my PQ5000 into his face and turned it to shrapnel.

  I got hit in the back with small arms fire but before I could react, Rick melted my assailant like butter with his Sizzler.

  If we thought we’d handled business quickly, we were wrong because in the seconds before we reacted, the saboteurs had already killed dozens of crew members.

  We piled the metal husks in the airlock and jettisoned them before anyone could ask us not to.

  By the time we got back to the command room, we were told the worst.

  Dead

  Earth

  Captain Wilkomen looked like he might cry. Finally he said, “I just received half a dozen reports that an explosion was seen on the surface of the Earth. I’m still waiting to find out what it was and what damage was sustained.”

  But we already knew what it was. The Bleeder ship had made it to Earth and crashed. The Novans had exacted their revenge. We couldn’t have ever hoped to stop them anyway. Whatever propulsion system that little ship used was far superior to anything we know about.

  We waited in silence for confirmation and when it finally came, crew members openly wept. Some even sobbed.

  The training camps in Earth’s orbit monitored the surface and gave the fleet hourly updates. Each one was more grim than the next. Within six hours it was confirmed that humanity had been obliterated. The weapons were apparently biological because the structures did not sustain damage. But Earth was now uninhabitable for humans. The water and soil were contaminated. The air was teeming with a biological agent that would kill us on contact.

  Our cousins had killed us off because we had killed them off. It was at that moment that I had an epiphany: No wonder the Bleeders wanted to destroy us. We suck.

  Back to Camp

  I was ordered to teleport back and take Danny’s body. Humans were now an endangered species so a soulless body was deemed a waste.

  Because the threat was over, Rick wasn’t forced to take a girl’s body.

  We found out a little later that several of our mechs aboard the sabotaged warships had been destroyed so that meant there were several male bodies for him to inhabit, locked in stasis orbiting Jupiter.

  The captain said to us, “The Admiral has issued a final order. We are to round up everyone from the solar system and ship them out here to Nova. We’ll take this planet as our own.”

  Rick asked, “What about the Bleeders?”

  “They’re the least of our worries now. There’s a warship near Saturn that will swing around and pick everyone up. Make sure you two are there when it arrives for you.”

  Mass Exodus

  Of all the odd things I’d experienced in the past couple months; teleporting into a foreign body was by far the creepiest.

  It took a long time for me to even feel at home in Danny’s meat.

  Mr. Humboldt made me wear a nametag because he said cadets would call me Danny otherwise. I thought he was being silly until one of my classmates did call me Danny. The look on his face when he realized his error was devastating to me. The guilt I felt at stealing Danny’s body was overwhelming. The guilt I felt about failing the human race, even more so.

  The warship took up orbit beside us and we abandoned camp like a piece of trash. I hate to admit that I will miss it. I’ll miss my old life but only because it made sense to me.

  The warship was already half full from all the prissy cadets from Earth’s orbit.

  Once we were all rounded up, we then picked up the cadets circling Jupiter. A beautiful woman in her early thirties introduced herself to me. “I’m Peggy. It’s good to finally meet you.”

  I smiled even though she wasn’t actually meeting me; she was meeting Danny, because I was dead.

  A tattooed thug with a shaved head approached. I nearly crapped Danny’s pants until he said, “I’m Rick. Sorry about my appearance. They lied to me and said this guy was handsome. I guess I’ll have to just get used to it.”

  We shook hands and the three of us wandered the ship, taking in the sights and enjoying the final dregs of humanity.

  The warship finally left the Jupiter camps behind and left orbit.

  With that accomplished, and the ship packed like a can of sardines, we made a course to Nova. The trip would take seventy nine years. I had not expected that. Truth be told, I hadn’t thought much about it, really. It meant I’d never again see captain Wilkomen. He’d be long dead by the time we reached him. It meant we’d have to go into stasis and hope like crazy that Nova was still in human possession by the time we got there.

  Some of the instructors from the various camps wept openly but the cadets took it all in stride. Most of us had never called Earth home anyway. Most of us would have died in battle or onboard a warship had things not turned out the way they had.

  Now we’d get to call a planet our home. No one said it out loud, but most of us were happy about the situation.

  I followed Peggy and Rick below deck to the stasis pods and we went to sleep.

  Wilkomen

  I awoke lazily. It took a few minutes before I realized I was wearing Danny’s meat. It took a few more before I remembered that I was a rare commodity because humans were now an endangered species.

  Peggy woke up next and then we helped ease Rick’s transition.

  The three of us had been woken earlier than the others because of who we are.

  We were given armored suits and then we made our way to the Conquistador. It looked about the same as I remembered it.

  I was wrong about captain Wilkomen too. He was still alive, just a whole lot older than before. He’d been taking shifts, rotating in and out of stasis with the other members of his crew. It looked like they’d been procreating too because the population was about five times what I remembered. That was a good thing. The more of us the better.

  Wilkomen had done just enough terra-forming to Nova to clean up the atmosphere.

  He said in his old gravely voice, “The air’s cleaner down there than it ever was on Earth.”

  I noticed Peggy take Rick’s hand in hers. He looked down at her hand and smiled.

  The captain continued, “We’ve had people down there for fifty years already. They’re starting to piece together the technology the Bleeders left behind. It’s truly a brave new world for humanity.”

  Rick asked, “Have the Bleeders showed up yet?”

  The captain got a far away look in his eyes. “They sent a peace envoy twenty years ago. They said they no longer want anything to do with mankind in any way shape or form. You know what's funny: They said we passed their tests. They were going to leave us alone. They had no idea they would be the one’s to unlock our potential by threatening us.”

  I asked, “So what happened? Are we at peace now?”

  The captain laughed a cold, mirthless laugh. “We only let them keep talking so we could get close enough to destroy their ship. There will never be peace with the Bleeders.”

  Rick shook his head sadly. “We will never be at peace because it's against our nature. I doubt the Bleeders will ever come near us again.”

  Wilkomen said, “Well I can’t risk that. If they come back, I'll be ready. That’s why I brought you three here. I wanted to give you guys the first option to take an A.C.E. unit and join my crew.

  We all said, “No,” at the same time. We’d seen enough unnecessary combat to make us sick to our stomachs.

  New Life

  Whatever small measure of fame I had in my previous life did not transfer when I’d transferred to Danny and for that I was thankful. I had blood on my hands as a result of the things I did to gain that fame. And what exactly had I achieved in the long run anyway? Nothing of consequence.

  I got a few more curious looks from girls so I guess Danny
was more handsome than I ever was. I’m thankful for that too.

  A few overzealous and misguided people agreed to take mech skins and stay in orbit to protect Nova but I wasn’t one of them. I knew as well as anyone else, that if a race was to succeed in killing off mankind, it would be mankind itself. We’d killed ninety nine percent off already and it seemed there were still those who hadn’t had their bloodlust sated yet.

  I decided that I should find out what it meant to be human, free and on a world of my own, before I decided whether it was worth dying for.

  I doubt the Bleeders would be stupid enough to ever tangle with us again anyway. They awoke a murderous, suicidal sleeping giant and that giant has their scent now. If they know what’s good for them they’ll run forever because I have this lonely feeling that humanity will never stop.

  They should’ve never threatened us but we should’ve never let our fear turn into such white hot hatred because so far it has only burned us.

  Who cares though? I have a real life to live now and I won’t let fear, perceived or actual, slow me down.

  I got in the shuttle with Rick, Peggy, and a bunch of kids from camp Eighty Seven and we descended to our new home. I’d never seen so many smiles on so many faces at one time.

  As we broke the cloud canopy I couldn't get the captain's voice out of my head: They said we passed their tests. They were going to leave us alone.

  The End

  Thank you to everyone that made it to the end of the Space Cadets series. This was a fun series to write.

  I hope you enjoyed it.

  Adam Moon