Aiden's Story: We've only Just Begun
By Sage
Sometimes being a leader isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it's frustrating, and
hard, and sometimes it gets you into trouble. Sometimes it's just plain annoying.
My name is Aiden. Aiden Aram Goddard, to be exact. I come from a long line of
leaders, heroes, and legends. My parents, who have personally saved the UPP on any number
of occasions. My grandfather and namesake, Aiden Davenport, Stardog hero turned
Staracademy principal. His great-great-great-great grandfather, one of the original founders of
the Stardogs.
I've got a lot to live up to, and I've spent my life trying to make sure that I'll rise to the
occasion. I've always dreamed of being a starship captain, leading a crew of adventurers
through one dangerous situation after another, exploring the galaxy. Being capable of handling
anything. Someday I will be, but I realized a long time ago that I have to work hard if I want that
day to arrive. As a direct result of this, I take myself very seriously. I laugh rarely, and I never
get into trouble. Myra tells me I'm sixteen going on sixty. Yeah, I know. The thing is, the others
need someone to look after them. And I'm the oldest by three and a half years, so I've been
doing that for most of my life.
Today was no exception.
The five of us, the Christa's oldest children, sat sullenly against the wall in an office on
some tiny backwater planet at a place entitled "Camp Rapids". I'd given up talking to the camp
director, a petite, uptight woman by the name of Mrs. Miller who constantly wore a dizzying array
of pinks. She was in no mood to listen, but at least she was no longer in a mood to lecture. That
was much worse. It was difficult to take seriously a woman who didn't come up to my armpit.
We'd been in her waiting room for hours, mulling over our fate.
"Well, my young delinquents," Mrs. Miller announced as she finally entered the room, "I am afraid that I just--I just don't know what to do with you. I have given you every opportunity to adjust
to your stay here. Out of respect for your parents I have made more allowances for you than I
have ever, in all of my years made for any camper. But considering your track record, I'm afraid
that I have no choice but to send you home."
"Can't we discuss this? There has to be some way--"
"I've already notified your parents. I'm sorry, Aiden. I wish this wasn't neccessary." A
moment of genuine sympathy crossed her face before she turned and left the room.
As you may have already surmised, this wasn't the first time we'd gotten in trouble
here.
Every year, our parent sent us to camp for a month so we could meet other kids, learn
"work and play well with others". I guess they had a point, we couldn't stay on the same ship
with the same small group of people forever, and our people skills do need work. I usually
enjoyed it; I liked to meet kids my own age and get planetside for awhile.
However, not everyone shared my point of view. Rell found that it was hard to make
friends when he constantly stopped to talk to the air beside them. Myra's inability to stop cracking jokes irritated almost everyone. Hary spent the rest of the year dreading these four weeks; he was a bully
magnet. His half-Spung, half-Andromedan, entirely enemy race status simply begged for trouble.
The other campers made life miserable for him, and those who weren't downright cruel were still
suspicious. Suzan might have done all right, but her fierce loyalty to Hary kept her glued to his
side, and her short fuse and sharp tounge made her few friends.
In fact, I guess you could say that's where this all began.
Hary and Suzan were playing sonic kickball with the rest of their age group--he was doing his
best to stay out of the way, she was pitting herself directly into the center of the action--they played
the game the way they did most every thing in life. But in an unfortunate twist of fate, Hary's
carefully crafted anonymity would not protect him today.
The sun had been scorching all afternoon long, and the temperature was long past what
most races would consider comfortable. Everyone was hot and sticky and irritable--it was the
perfect sort of weather for sparks to fly.
A kickball shot towards Hary, and he looked at it in panic. Glancing around, he attemped
to pass it to the first team member he saw, but he overshot the distance by half a kilometer.
Brilliantly, the only adult supervisor went after it, leaving the disgruntled children to their own
devices.
Hary sat down in the middle of the field to wait and put his head on his knees, muttering
disgustedly. Suzan started to make her way over to him from the far side of the field, but she
wasn't the first to get there.
"Thanks a lot, Spungoid! It's gonna take half the exercise period for Coach to get back
with the ball!" The speaker, a particularly detestable Earther by the name of Jake Peters, had
been giving Hary crap all summer long.
"Hey Peters, what's the holdup?" another kid called from the far end of the field.
"Reptile-boy here lost the ball!" The second speaker was Peters' best friend, a dark-
haired Uranusian named Mitch.
"I'm sorry, okay?" Hary said pragmatically. "It was an accident."
"Awww, it was an accident! D'ya hear that, guys?"
"Well then, that just makes it all better, now doesn't it?"
"I think he did it on purpose."
"Did your reptile mommy teach you that trick before her own people blew her into a
million tiny Spungish bits?" Peters grinned.
His jaw tightening, the halfling rose slowly to his feet. "Leave my mother out of this." He
pronounced each word carefully, straining to speak without the rage that the derision had
evoked.
"And what'll you do if I don't? You gonna hurt me? Or are you gonna run away? Both 'a
your peoples seem real good at that." Peters stood so close that Hary could smell his fetid
breath.
"Get away from me."
"Make me."
"If he won't," came a voice from the crowd, "I will." Suzan positioned herself in front of
Hary.
"Suzan, please--," he began, attempting to push her to the side.
"Stay outta this, little girl!" Peters interrupted.
"Make me, you close-minded, rednecked, bed wetting, slime encrusted little piece of--."
Breaking off as Peters' fist flew towards her face, she blocked with one arm and sent a
punch of her own at his midsection with the other. He let out an involuntary cry of pain and
started to double over. Then, straightening, he looped a leg around hers and shoved. Caught
by surprise, Suzan went down--but not before she took Peters with her. They rolled on the dusty
ground throwing punches, each attempting to gain the upper hand.
"Suzan!" Hary made to pull them apart, but Mitch stopped him.
"Just 'cause you don't know the meaning of the phrase 'fair fight' doesn't mean I'm gonna
let you cheat, Spung!" The Uranusian drew back a fist and landed a blow between the halfling's
ribs.
Now there's something you should understand about my friend Hary. He abhors fighting,
but not because he's a coward. The opposite is far closer to the truth. He's not afraid of getting
hurt, he's afraid of hurting other people. Hary is half Andromedan, which means that he
has strength far beyond that of most humanoids. He's a lot tougher than he looks.
So when Mitch punched him in the stomach, it did not exactly elicit the desired reaction.
I would give almost anything to have seen the look of horror on the Uranusian's face as he
realized that he'd hit something that felt like a brick wall. In point of fact, Mitch was the one who
found himself writhing on the ground in pain. "You broke my hand!" he howled.
"I'm sorry!" Hary yelled.
By now, the crowd had become a mob. Kids were screaming and yelling
encouragements, dust was flying, and confusion reigned. Another came to take the Uranusian's
place, accompanied by three or four friends. Apparently the phrase "fair fight" only extended so
far. Then the brawling really began in earnest.
It was at this point that I came racing to the scene. I had been in Arts and Crafts making
an ashtray for my mother when a boy ran by screaming about a fight on the soccer field.
Instinctively aware of the fact that Suzan (and therefore Hary) would inevitably be at the center of
any kind of trouble, I abandoned my work.
Myra and Rell arrived at the same time I did, and we jumped into the melee without a
second thought. I won't deny that the five of us don't always get along. We argue plenty, and
we get on each others nerves more often than not. But when it comes right down to it, we're a
team, and we are inevitably there for each other. So we took our knocks together and we got in
trouble together.
Boy, did we get in trouble together.
Now we sat in stony silence, unwilling to break the ancient, unwritten Code upheld by
kids everywhere, the Code forbiding you to tell any adult who started the fight or why it
happened, even to save your own neck.
I put my head in my hands and pictured what my father would say. Fleetingly, I wished
that I'd never have to face his dissapointment.
I didn't know how ironic that would soon be.
Mrs. Miller came rushing into the room and halted, patting her hair into place and
attempting to regain aplomb. "The starship Christa is in orbit around our planet."
"Already!?!" Rell exclaimed. "You can't have called more than a couple of hours
ago!"
"I didn't." She seemed as puzzled as we were. "This is highly irregular. I think that
perhaps you'd best come with me."
She led us into the camp's main communications room and went to stand in front of the
viewscreen. Flicking several toggles, she opened a channel. "Camp Rapids to Christa. Come
in please. Camp Rapids to Christa--come in please." At the last, she sounded a touch
desperate.
"We're recieving a digitally encoded message," Myra reported from beside the director.
Absently, she punched the accept sequence. "It says...'Send children home to Christa.' That's
it; that's the whole message."
"There's probably just a malfunction in the comm system or something. If they were in
trouble, they would have said so." I dismissed the thought of danger or an ambush out of hand;
no one besides our parents would be able to use the Christa's systems. "We'd better pack up.
You heard 'em, Mrs. M. We're supposed to go home. That is what you wanted, isn't
it?"
"I was hoping to talk to your parents before you left. I don't feel entirely right about
this..." she began, but we were out the door before she could finish.
Less than forty-five later we were loading our equipment into the small transport cruiser
our parents had allowed me to pilot to the planet's surface. It was a short trip up to the ship in
orbit.
I rotated the cruiser so that the Christa lay straight ahead of us, shining beautiful against
the inky blackness. I had to admit that I'd missed her.
"Does she look okay to you?" Hary questioned, biting his lip nervously.
"What do you mean? The ship looks the same as always."
"It's just... just a feeling. That's all. It's stupid; forget I said anything."
I shrugged and turned my attention to steering our transport. Five minutes later we
entered the cargo bay. I landed in the cruiser's space and we stepped out into the Christa.
Oppressive silence greeted us.
"Where is everybody?" Myra suddenly looked every one of her eleven years, small and
vulnerable. I put an arm around her reassuringly.
Returning home from camp in years past, we'd been greeted by our parents and siblings,
embraced and smothered and generally fussed over by people who insisted that we'd grown in
the scant time we'd been gone.
"Let's get to the Command Post. Maybe..." I reached for a plausible, yet innocuous,
reason. "Maybe they're all working on that communications malfunction that stopped them from
sending us a visual message." Even as I said it, I knew what a pathetic excuse I'd come up
with.
"I don't like this," Suzan muttered quietly.
"I really don't like this," Hary added a moment later.
We made our way to the Comm Post, our speed increasing as we grew more and more
apprehensive, until we found ourselves running at a break-neck pace.
As we entered the room, I attempted to shove my misgivings to the back of my mind.
They'll all be in here, this is just some big misunderstanding, they'll all come running to
welcome us home and everything will be okay--. I stopped in my tracks. The Comm Post was
empty.
"Oh, no." What was going on?! If the adults were anywhere on the ship they would
have be here.
"Thelma!" Suzan rushed to where the android lay unmoving on her back. "Her crystal's
missing." The place on her forehead where her memory chip usually sat was a small, empty
crater.
"Everybody freeze!" I ordered. "Start looking, and be careful where you put your feet."
The last thing we needed right now was to make Thelma function any worse.
After several frantic minutes, Rell held the small, cracked crystal aloft
triumphantly.
"Lemme see," Suzan took the chip and inserted it in it's place on the android's head.
She remained motionless.
"Thelma, can you hear me? It's Suzan! Suzan Band!?!"
The android's eyes snapped open. "Hello, Suzan Suzan Band. I am Thelma."
I stepped forward. "Thelma, where is everyone?" At her confused expression, I added,
"Where's the crew?"
"Oh," she smiled, relieved. "They're right here!" She spun me around to face my fellow
kids.
"No, where are our parents? Please, Thelma!" I couldn't keep the panic from my
voice.
"They're gone, Aiden. That's why you're here." If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn
there was a tinge of sorrow in her voice. "Screen on." The viewscreen faded into an image of
the Command Post, complete with our parents at their posts.
They worked the way they always did, efficiently and with an amazing synchrony I
couldn't help but envy. They were like appendages of one body with a single, unified purpose.
And suddenly, that quiet productivity was over.
Alarms began screaming all over the ship. "Something's dropping out of hyperspace
right in front of us," Aunt Cat began, an edge of panic in her voice. "It's...I don't know what it is."
The view tightened on the screen and we saw what they saw, a glimmering, multi-colored, oddly
beautiful ship. It was more or less round, but had countless bulges strewn haphazardly about it
surface. More importantly, it was gigantic--dozens, maybe hundreds of times the size of the
Christa, and they was on a course that would very shortly smash them into its massive
hull.
Harlan wrenched the controls hard, pulling the ship to a halt seemingly meters from the
colossus. "What the--!! What is that thing?"
"I've never seen anything like it."
"It's huge!"
"That's the understatement of the decade," Bova remarked dryly.
"Raise the sh--" Dad began, but he was too late. In the space of a heart beat, they were
quite simply gone. One moment, our parents--our crazy, silly, boisterous, eternally loving
parents--had been standing at their stations, working frantically to combat this new situation, the
next, they had vanished. A quiet pop followed as air rushed to occupy the space they had
vacated. Then the screen went blank.
I felt numb. And, for the first time in my life, utterly helpless.
"Every adult and child on the Christa vanished, reguardless of their location. When she
realized that she could not retrieve her crew, the Christa opened a white circle and came to find
all of you. You are now the crew."
Quiet snufflings from behind me, and a small, pink hand which had found its way into my
own brought me back to reality.
"Momma," I heard Rell murmer plaintively.
With her odd, duck-like walk, Thelma shuffled to his side. "I am sorry, Rell. Although I
am only a machine, I have come to regard your parents as friends. I sincerely hope that
nothing... unpleasant has occurred."
"You've never been 'only a machine' to us, Thelma," he said, wiping his eyes on the
sleeve of his coveralls.
"What exactly happened?" Suzan asked.
"The Christa's sensors recorded that everyone was transported."
"To that ship we saw, right?"
"That is certainly possible. It is also possible that they were beamed into the vacuum of
space to die an excruciatingly painful death."
"Thelma!"
"Or high into the atmosphere of a nearby planet, to plummet to an excruciatingly painful
death."
"Thelma!!!"
"Or maybe their particles were never reformed at all, but spread across the galaxy in an
excruciatingly p--." My hand lept across the distance to clamp itself securely over her mouth.
"They're not dead!" I barked fiercely. "Why go to the trouble of beaming them out in the
first place, just to kill them later. You saw that ship, it could have made mincemeat of the
Christa. And if it had beamed them into space then the scanners would pick up nearby
fragments of organic matter, and they don't, do they?"
Suzan ran to her station. "Not a trace," she concurred.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and heartily thanked every deity I'd
ever heard of. "Our families are alive. I know it. The question is, what do we do now?"
"What can we do? We have to find help; report this to the UPP so they can send out
search parties."
"No search party will ever find them. Didn't you hear Thelma? They were exploring
some uncharted region of space, far enough away that they had to open a white circle to get
there. The Christa is the only ship in the entire UPP capable of doing that. And we are now the
only people capable of operating the Christa." My mind was racing ahead of me, already making
plans. "Don't you see? We have to find them ourselves!"
"That's insane!" Myra protested, "We're just kids!"
"Kids who have spent their whole lives learning how to run a starship," Suzan interjected.
"Aiden's right. We can do this. We have to do this."
"Say, just for the say of argument, that we did. Hypothetically speaking. Can't we at
least tell the UPP what happened?"
"Yeah, we'll walk right up there and say 'Please, Mr. Stardog Admiral, we know that
we've never graduated from the academy, have non-existent combat training, and are too young
to shave or buy alchohol, but could you give us the most powerful starship in the UPP and free
reign to run it all over the galaxy? They'd pull us off the Christa faster than you can say 'pretty
please', mount a rescue mission themselves that'll never go anywhere, send us to live with
relatives and in foster homes and we'll never see our parents,our younger sibs, or each other
again. We have no choice."
We sat in silence, pondering that grim future for a moment. Hary broke the silence. "I
say we take a vote. All in favor of going after them ourselves, raise your hands."
In the end, it was a unanimous "yes".
We stood poised above an uncertain future, more alone and vulnerable than ever
before. We could get hurt. We could die. Or we could make our parents proud.
When they first boarded the Christa, our mothers and fathers had no idea that their ship
itself was creating the white circle that sent them careening across the galaxy. Most of them
were inexperienced young cadets who could barely function as a team. However, by the time
they discovered after the seven years, four months, and twenty-two days it took to get
themselves home that all they'd had to do was command the Christa to open a white circle
directly to Earth's solar system, they had become one of the greatest assets the UPP had ever
had. And none of them could bring themselves to regret the journey.
"Prepare to open a white circle," I commanded.
Maybe this was our chance. Maybe instead of a horrible calamity, this was our
opportunity to live up to the rather impressive-sized shoes our mothers and fathers had left us to
fill. The fact that their lives--all their lives, parents', siblings', and my new crew's--depended on
me was terrifying. Yet, as terrible as it was, I coudn't help but feel a small tingle of joy at the
thought of commanding a starship. I was finally going to have the chance to prove
myself.
Maybe I'd live up to my name and rise to the challenge. Maybe I wouldn't.
Either way, it'd be an adventure.
"Ready or not, here we come," I whispered as I pushed the helm controls forward. The
Christa roared through the white circle into parts unknown.
