They don’t tell you where you’ll be stationed when you sign up. It’s simply, “Congratulations, you’re now a part of the Space Force,” and you’ve become a part of a misfit family of nearly a million souls from a hundred different moons, planets and space stations.

Me? I was assigned to the Eminence, the oldest and largest mothership in the Space Force. I didn’t make it to officer so I was just one of the ‘spits’ as they called us. The equivalent to a ‘grunt’ in the army.

Thus, amongst the Space Force I stopped being known as Harran Plam from the planet Zar and started introducing myself as The Eminence’s Spit Private Plam ‘The Baker’. Of course, not to officers. My introduction only furthered the accuracy of us being named ‘spits’.

So, after enduring too many weeks of boot camp, I walked aboard The Eminence when it was berthed at Zar’s military spaceport. Quite a few grunts came with us, course, we all knew they wouldn’t do much more than sit around playing cards and stinking up the place. They would only be useful if we invaded a planet, were boarded, or desperately needed food.

Ahem, sorry about that last one. It was a joke.

The Eminence didn’t live up to its name at all. It was like a pauper puffing himself up and announcing he was king.

The bathrooms were stained and old. I’m pretty sure its furnishings were the original ones that had been on the ship a hundred years back. I’m all for building things to last, but, you gotta replace some things at some point.

The beds were actually quite nice. The mattresses pushed you up ever so slightly so it felt like you were lying on a thick mattress and not something only two inches thick. But, we paid for it in headspace. I can empathize with sardines nowadays.

Even though she was an old ship, she didn’t have a lick of rust on her. We’re way past that in this age, even a hundred years ago. However, that doesn’t stop the slow buildup of…of…I don’t know what it is. I could feel it each time I brushed by a doorway. I couldn’t get it off even when I tried my hardest when on cleaning duty. Apparently, composite alloys can stain, or something.

Now, the ship wasn’t all old. You could tell where they put their money. Like the guns, or the missiles, or the equipment they put on board. I realized just how much the Space Force loved this old ship when they were able to cram a turreted sixteen inch double-gatling cannon in the place of one of its old main guns.

Yeah, that’s right, fourteen sixteen-inch barrels. Battleship-class main guns made into gatling cannons.

Now, its old guns weren’t anything to sneeze at. I haven’t seen anything yet that has been able to stand up to an eight-hundred millimeter shell.

Thing is, its guns weren’t even the most notable about it. It looked like it was metal from the outside, sure, but once you stepped to the inside you could tell it was something different. Stone maybe? Sometimes you can’t ever tell with these composite alloy thingys. Anyway, it was brown. I had to grind off all the layers of paint down to the base coat one time on maintenance detail. All those high-tech paints were a pain to get off. Well, it was brown underneath all those layers.

The weight of The Eminence is still confidential after all of these years, but the way she handled, my guess is she is a whole lot heavier than what they have the civies reading. Her power plant is bigger too. It almost takes up a fourth of the ship by itself.

Well, just listen to me talking. I guess I’m kinda proud of her. She’s got personality. That’s more than what I can say for the new ships. Those have a feeling of ‘plastic’ about them that feels cheap. Eminence only swayed softly when in the worst solar storm. These new ships bounce around like they’re a leaf.

You might ask why I’m not with the Eminence if I liked her so much. Well, there’s the story to be told about her if any. I’ve heard tons of stories cuz the Eminence is as big as a city and I certainly haven’t seen the entirety of it. You wouldn’t think she was big if you were inside, but she is, despite all her small hallways and cramped quarters.

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I learned just how big she was, and why she took so many grunts onboard, and why the spits we passed when boarding her looked so tired with bloodshot eyes.

It was just a normal night on my second week aboard The Eminence. I was drifting off to sleep trying not to think about the KP duty I had tomorrow.

Now, sound doesn’t travel through the walls of the Eminence. It echoes. Yet, suddenly, I hear as if next to my ear a soft moaning sound a large metal beam might make. It repeated, just at the edge of my hearing. At first, I was a bit troubled and I leaned over to look at by bunk buddies. They were doing much the same.

“You hear that too?” I asked them.

“Yup.” Stoneface said, “You know what it is Baker?”

“No clue.”

Stoneface turned back in and I heard him snore after a minute.

With no clue as to what was happening and no alarm going out, the rest of us tried to do the same.

I was almost asleep when I started to hear the faintest sound of scraping intermixed with the moaning. I decided I’d had enough and put my pillow over my ears.

It seemed like I’d only slept a moment when the general quarters alarm sounded.

I let Cud jump out from his bunk above me before I jumped out of mine and soon we were strapping on our combat gear together. In just a few minutes we rushed out as a group joining the line of other spits coming from their quarters.

When we reached our 5 inch gun post our sergeant gave each of us a plasma carbine and a grenade. Standard issue for fighting back boarding parties. He then marched us out with a whole company of other men and we trekked most of the length of the ship to the rear.

There, we met a few engineers in charge of repairing the engines. We were to escort them and protect them until their job was done.

Then, a heavy set of double doors was opened and we entered into a place of the ship I couldn’t have imagined was there. The rooms and doorways were big, there were pillars and stone carvings, halls and rooms like we were walking through a mansion. Then there was the machinery. It soon twisted through the place as if overgrowing old ruins. It became so thick that it was like a jungle navigating it. Only, machetes wouldn’t do any good here.

We reached the place the engineers needed soon enough. As they worked we started hearing noises much like the ones we had heard when trying to go to sleep. Only louder and closer.

The engineers quickened their work almost frantically and that’s when my nerves started to fray. We hadn’t been told something. There was an enemy on this ship and for some reason the engineers knew about it.

I’ve seen and felt the Eminence get hit by the worst weapons of our enemies and it didn’t receive a single scratch even with full shields down. I don’t know how anything was able to board the ship, but it had been successful and it had stayed.

I won’t tell you what we fought that night, or the gruesome details that followed. I will tell you that the engineers fixed whatever was broken. I will tell you that none of us died. Some of us were wounded, some for life and all of us were scarred mentally.

I know why those spits looked so tired and bloodshot. It’s because they could barely get a wink of sleep after their first encounter with what lived with us on that ship. We feared them not because we couldn’t kill them, but because we couldn’t get rid of them. We feared them because those before us couldn’t get rid of them and our ancestors couldn’t get rid of them. We feared them because we lived on the same ship as they and a single mistake by some hapless crewmate could let them past the barriers.

I would say we should run The Eminence into a sun if I knew it could destroy her. But I’m not so sure. She’s priceless. I haven’t seen our enemies turn tail and run so fast before. The only time they turn and shoot is if they have some new weapon they want to try out on us.

It never works though.

I heard that in the wars two hundred years ago that The Eminence rammed straight through a space station ten times bigger than it was.

I believe it.

But she’s rotting from the inside. It’s no wonder the new recruits get assigned to it. After working on her I’m twice as willing and able to work on any other ship in the known universe and be happy for it. She builds character.

It was the only time I saw ole Stoneface break from his stoic ways. Then, after a month, he was back to it. He slept like a baby where all the rest of us were waiting for the moans to start again.

We didn’t stay in the same group after we were reassigned, but I heard stories of Stoneface killing wild animals with his bare hands later on. I guess he had gotten bored with his new ship and took the first opportunity to do some hunting once he got short leave.

Then I heard even that didn’t suit his tastes and asked to be put back aboard The Eminence again.

We’re not friends anymore. He’s changed.

I’ll be your sergeant for the rest of this boot camp and if your thick skull can remember anything I teach you then you had better remember this! They don’t tell you where you’ll be stationed when you sign up. Pray it’s not The Eminence.