I tugged at my new dress uniform, trying to get it to fit right. It didn't work; my clone-father's tinkering saw to that. The Imperial Marine Dress Uniform gave me the same basic shape as every other Cadet. The idea that it fit everyone equally well was complete clutter. Most girls were comfortable enough, but most of my classmates weren't tweaked to fit a two-thousand-year-old Marine's idea of the perfect shape of a pretty young woman.

The high, stiff collar that most of the Cadets complained about fit me fairly well. Apparently, my clone father liked necks just a little longer than average. My neck didn't make me look like a giraffe or anything, but it gave me just enough slack to avoid the collar constantly cutting into my neck or chin. The benefits of his tweaking ended right there. If I didn't stuff the squared off shoulders with rolled up socks they flopped around, choking me when they dangled backward, pulling me into a hunch when they fell forward.

Just a little further down from that lived the reasons I didn't just wear a smaller jacket. The refractory black fabric of the uniform was stiff, deliberately so. It prevented inadvertent slumping and stopped small arms fire pretty well. Of course, the material didn't give even a little bit. An Imperial Marine Dress Uniform Jacket sized to fit my breasts had way too much room in the shoulders and waist. It made me want to slap my clone-father upside the head, but I couldn't, me being a Blank and all.

The pants fit me a little better, but only a little. The bottom of the jacket covered my waist, so I could cinch the top of the slacks tight without ruining the line of the uniform. Of course, my butt made the tails on my jacket stick out like a rooster, but I couldn't do anything about that. Below the hips I wallowed in a ridiculous amount of extra fabric. Fortunately, the heavy, flat soled boots weren't integral to the slacks, or I'd have blisters the size of my thumb. Besides that, the old man tweaked my calves and feet to be comfortable in heels, which meant my feet were almost in proportion to my hips. Of course, it also meant I didn't fit comfortably in anything with flat soles, but apparently the old man hadn't thought about comfort, just about looks.

I tugged at the bottom of the jacket again, hoping it would jostle the socks back into place. Normally I'd have the ship's AI whip up some shoulder pads, but I was on a shuttle, not a ship. A shuttle with an autopilot about as bright as a dead star. The autopilot could fly a sub light ship, take verbal orders from people far higher ranked than me, or tell me when we arrived at my new school. The lack of companionship was just another minor annoyance in a fifteen-year gauntlet of indignity and frustration my clone father set me up for when he died.

My clone father's legacy to me: the body of his exotic dancer mother, the flame red hair and jade eyes of his dead wife Grace, and two thousand years of his unwanted memories.

I wanted desperately to change into my PT gear, but the schedule said I would board my new school before the watch ended. Soft, stretchy pants and a short-sleeved tee shirt with my old fleet's nickname and mascot blazoned on it probably wouldn't make the best of first impressions, especially combined with the rubber soled pumps I wore to work out in. With a frustrated sigh, I flopped back into the acceleration couch that was my bed, chair, and workspace for the duration of the trip. Of course, the collar took that opportunity to cut into my neck, but I couldn't bring myself to care. My essie would close the wound and clean up the blood before it became an issue.

Somewhere ahead of the shuttle lay the ship where I would live and learn until I graduated. I figured I should at least get a look at my new home before I went aboard and settled into the endless cycles of training that would fill my next nine years. Under a year until I could talk to my essie, maybe convince them to make my looks a little less extreme. Eight more after that until I left the school a newly minted Marine. Forty-eight more to complete my compulsory service and I could finally decide my own fate. I could stay in the Corps, transfer to another branch of the service, or even leave Imperial service altogether and try out life as a civilian.

My future as depressing as my clothing options, I tried to see the school again. Despite the clear synthetic sapphire ringing the passenger level of the shuttle, I couldn't quite see in every direction. The acceleration couches took up most of the passenger level of the shuttle and were just a little too high for me to see over. I ignored the aggressively stiff fabric of the uniform and slouched, leaning on one elbow in the pose cultivated by thousands of generations of teenagers to convey the full weight of their boredom to anyone watching. Not that anyone was watching; since the courier ship dropped the shuttle off in system, I'd been alone, with no one to talk to except the shuttle's stupid autopilot.

I looked through the view ring at a panorama of stars far thicker than the one back home. I was born on a ship in the Outer Rim fleet, which cruises along the upper edge of the outer rim. Hence the name. Only the distant suns of galaxies too far away for Imperial drives to reach lit the skies of my youth. The dim glow of the Milky Way around me touched off the faintest hint of claustrophobia. Never in my fifteen and a half years had I looked outside the ship and seen this many stars.

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Without any more prompting than that, my clone-father's memories overwhelmed me. Visions of space near the galactic core, a view that glittered with stars in every direction. The view, unimpeded by anything so crass as the hull of a ship, stole my breath away the way vacuum could only try to. Enthralled, I reached out to touch a star, to cup it in my hand and see if it burned me.

My fingertips slammed into the bulkhead above. I bit off a curse, hoping the shuttle's autopilot hadn't heard me.

No such luck. "Cadet Dabig, are you injured?"

I rolled my eyes at the machine's androgynous, attentive, idiotic tones. Distance prevented any of the fleet's AI from controlling the shuttle directly, so I dealt with a preprogrammed moron instead of a near immortal genius. With no other passengers on the shuttle, that meant no good conversations, but at least I could mess with it a little.

"I'm not sure. I jammed my fingers on the ceiling. They hurt." I whined, hoping I could get the thing to instruct my essie to put me under until we arrived.

"Please keep your hands within the confines of the acceleration couch. There may be a need for high gravity maneuvers before docking. Are you familiar with acceleration gel?"

"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?" Long habit kept me from cursing where even a dumb autopilot could hear me, but I couldn't believe the shuttle might need to fill my crash couch with gooey shock absorbing gel. The stuff mucked up regular clothes something fierce. If my new uniform got doused, I would be forever getting it clean. I hated my dress blacks, but I didn't want to deal with the dirty looks I'd get if I messed them up the first time I wore them.

"You forget we're in a combat zone?"

I blinked at the sound of a stranger's voice. That smooth baritone was most certainly not the autopilot. The little ovoid shuttle left the courier ship days ago. Some guy hiding from me for that long definitely set off my creep factor.

I popped up out of my seat and scanned the compartment. Other than mine the acceleration couches were sealed up for the pending 'maneuvers'. I crept down the middle of the row, swiping at seat controls, wishing I had all my upgrades, or even a rank higher than Middie Cadet. I couldn't interface with the couch doors remotely or even order the autopilot to open them all. I tapped the manual controls one couch at a time, waiting just long enough to look inside. His couch might be locked, but even finding a locked seat would be better than not knowing his location.

I didn't really think about my search until I got halfway down the aisle. The moment I heard a creepy guy in my shuttle watching me, I went looking for him. I didn't lock myself into my nice, safe acceleration couch and hide. I was definitely a Marine brat, even if I was a Blank. At the first sign of trouble, I ran to the sound of the guns. Or the creeper voice. Whatever.

"Cadet Dabig, it is imperative that you enter an acceleration couch immediately."

My mechanical nanny jumped up and down on my last nerve, so I did what teenagers since time immemorial have done with things that annoyed them. I made a rude gesture and continued my search. The standard troop transfer shuttle wasn't really intended as a glorified school bus. There were enough seats for a platoon of fully loaded Imperial Marines, and each one took a few seconds to check. I took a few seconds more searching each one, hoping in vain to find something in a former occupant's personal storage bin. A gun, a knife, at this point even something to throw would be better than my bare hands. My trainers reminded me repeatedly to avoid leaving that kind of clutter lying around, but my classmates always did it anyway. Someone must have forgotten something.

Of course, none of that mattered if I couldn't find the creeper stowing away on my shuttle. I was halfway through the seating, and still not so much as a marred seat cushion. I'd started at my seat, most of the way back on the port side, working around the front to the starboard aisle. The tiny mess section and the bathrooms were in the back, I'd been to each at least twice a day since the trip started. If my mystery stalker's couch was behind mine, he'd been there the entire time I'd been aboard.

Unless he moved when I slept. That really freaked me. Mr. Creepy Stalker really pissed me off. First, he snuck onto my shuttle while I went out and visited the crew of the courier, then he hid back near the head, where I'd showered, for the Empress’s sake, and now he...

"Maximum acceleration in five... four... three..." Lost in angry thought about my unknown travelling companion, it took me a moment to figure out what the idiot autopilot was talking about. When I figured it out, I scrambled for an acceleration couch. The last seat I'd checked wouldn't be done its pressure check for another few seconds. I leapt for the next one in line, slapped the controls, and wrenched at the couch cover the moment I heard the seal break. My unaugmented muscles couldn't budge the hydraulics, but I couldn't stop myself. Full thrust would fling me at the back of the...

Before I finished the thought, gravity shifted and threw me through the compartment. Hundreds of hours of training let me twist like a cat in midair, but the shuttle was under max military acceleration. Most of the inertia was damped by the drive, but about ten gees got through. I was falling nearly fifty feet under ten times the force of gravity, the equivalent of a five-hundred-foot fall in normal gravity. The fact that I was falling feet first was about as useful as flapping my arms.

My life flashed before my eyes, only it wasn't my life. Scenes from millennia of life, love, and battles under alien stars washed through my mind in a torrent. My clone-father's memories.

I hated him so much. Hated him for not showing up. Hated him for leaving me to fill the shoes everyone expected to see him in. Hated him most of all for letting me fall to my death before I'd even had a chance to live my own life.