Aspen forced the lid of her footlocker closed and thumbed the biometric lock, sighing as it clicked shut. She stood and stretched her back, looking around her small dorm room, double checking that she had everything, somehow fitting all of her meager belongings into her footlocker and a small backpack.
Terrance sat at the edge of his bunk and watched her, his chin resting in his palm, “I’m gonna miss you, y’know.”
Aspen gave Terrance a sad smile, “I know. I’ll be sure to text you a lot - they say the network relays are pretty close to instantaneous through the Bifrost - but on the fringe I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Terrance stood and embraced Aspen in a rib cracking hug, the petite young man’s size belying his physical strength, “Maybe one day when I get a commission and my pilot’s wings I’ll run into you again in person, yeah?”
Aspen returned the embrace, her eyes watering as she tried to squeeze the air from Terrance’s body, then held him by his shoulders at arm’s length, “I doubt your next bunkmate will be even a fraction as cool as I am, but I hope they work out for you.”
Terrance gave a weak chuckle, a tear running down his cheek, “Well whoever it is they have another year and a half of my shit before I’m out of here, but I doubt they’d be any comparison to you.”
Aspen pulled Terrance back in for another hug and held it until her tab chirped at her, letting her know it was time to go.
\\\
Aspen stepped off the shuttle ramp and into the airlock on Neptune’s largest moon, Triton. Chosen for its retrograde orbit around the big blue planet, Triton’s orbit allowed for better timing when judging the distance between planets for use of the Federation shuttle’s hyper-helical “faster than light” drives. Speeds ranging close to three times the speed of light depositing her from the surface of Mars to Triton’s personnel and logistics base for the Bifrost in just under two hours.
Shouldering her backpack, Aspen made off towards the freight porters to ensure the transfer of her footlocker while pondering the complexities of g-forces, time dilation, inertial dampeners, and artificial gravitational fields. Just as she was starting to get a headache, she’d arrived at the porter liaison and showed her orders to waive the fee to have her footlocker transferred to the next shuttle bound for the Bifrost.
Working her way towards the port’s terminal, she took in the sights around her. The once star-white metallic hallways and floors of the station now dyed with the stains of millions of footprints, the thrum of air recyclers a constant background noise to the din of the crowd inside the station hustling about their business. The cold glare of the LEDs from the overhead lights mixed with the faux neon signs plastered across the walls around various restaurants, stores, and ‘massage parlors’ created a kaleidoscope of colors across the otherwise mostly Navy standard gray sea of uniforms currently occupying the port’s hallways.
Picking her way through the crowd of the gate was easy enough, managing to only accidentally shoulder check two different people before finding her way to her port gate. Looking up at the display hanging above the gate entryway, Aspen saw that she had a good thirty minutes left until her next transfer to the Bifrost staging area.
Plopping down on a bench, Aspen dropped her backpack on the ground in front of her and dug out a protein bar, and thumbed her tab awake. After quickly skimming the headlines on the news feeds and not seeing anything eye popping, she opened up her orders once more to double check that she was in the right location and had the appropriate passes to get through the gate’s automated security.
As she reread the destination system listed on her orders and idly chewed her protein bar, a somber feeling overcame her. The very same system in which she would be spending the next five years was the very same one her parents had been on a shortlist to be some of humanity's first researchers in another solar system - a title quickly made unavailable to them when it was discovered that Aspen’s mother was pregnant with her.
The thought of her parents compounded her feeling of sadness slightly, though the event of their death close to a decade ago, the mere simplicity of how they died was not something Aspen would probably ever get over. An improperly sealed heating element inside a cryovolcano research vehicle making them quickly succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. Aspen remembered the director of the research mission kneeling to meet her eyes as she sat in her family’s hab module at the research station and the hollow feeling she felt as he explained that her parents would not be returning from a mission they had routinely done a hundred times before.
The hollow feeling she felt about her parent’s death stayed with her, as the vigil prepared by her parent’s peers at the research station came and went, and as she was shipped from Titan across the solar system to Mars - a trip made possible as her status as an orphan of the Federation of Sol’s commissioned research officers granting her access to the Navy’s boarding schools, saving her from a life of poverty in the slums on Earth. The reality of her parent’s death finally rang true as her chaperone closed the door of her room at the boarding school, the crushing weight of loneliness and despair curling her into a ball of a person atop her bed.
Aspen shook her head, curling a finger into one of the locks of her hair as she tried to clear her thoughts of the past. She’d gone on quite a rebellious streak for her first few months at the school, testing the boundaries of her newfound and unwanted semi-independence. She cringed at the actions of her past self, and remembered the conversations she’d had with the councilors she’d worked with to understand and process the grief she’d been inappropriately expressing through mostly self destructive means, escalating to a point that the dean of the boarding school had personally assigned her those same councilors.
She knew that looking back at her past self and not liking what she saw in the behaviors of a troubled teen were signs of growth for herself and she strived to continue to grow, both to prove to herself that she could surpass any obstacle, and to honor the memory of her parents. A goal some would scoff at, but one she held close to her heart.
Aspen swiped to the net application on her tab to kill some time, intent on distracting herself away from thoughts of her parents with pictures of cute cats or maybe frogs. As she was watching a disembodied hand place a small strawberry atop a rather grumpy looking toad’s head, her attention was quickly captured by several new arrivals to her same gate.
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Several men and women in the same style uniform as Aspen’s, though a shade of pale blue rather than gray, arrived as a group, their well muscled persons and arrogant swagger had Aspen quickly dialing this group of people as Marines. The group roughhoused and shouted their way across the terminal before piling together at a cluster of seats not too far from her. Aspen rolled her eyes and pulled her attention back towards her tab, rewinding the video to watch the strawberry clad toad.
Aspen scrolled through several more feeds, feeling herself cheer up and largely ignoring the people around her before the glare from the overhead lights on the screen of her tab was replaced with the reflection of a tall woman in a Marine’s uniform standing directly in front of her.
Aspen looked up from her tab, craning her neck to attempt to make eye contact with the Marine in front of her. Standing at at least 2 meters in height, Aspen’s eyes dragged across the Marine’s well developed forearm muscles which were crossed over her chest as the woman looked down at her, the slight smirk on her face making her pale lips stand out on her olive skin, a faux-hawk visible in the atop her head as she leaned forward seeing that she had Aspen’s attention, “Hey there,” her smile widening slightly as Aspen lowered her tab.
“Uh, hi,” Aspen looked around the woman’s tree trunk of a leg to see the other Marine’s unabashedly watching the two, then looked back up, “Did you need something?”
“Oh, no, I saw you sitting over here all by yourself and was wondering if you wanted some company,” the large woman sat down next to Aspen, “I’m Tara,” she extended a large hand.
Aspen cocked her head to the side and took Tara’s hand, feeling the rough calluses on the other woman’s hands as she shook it,”I’m Aspen,” she looked back over to the group of Marines still watching them, “Are they going to watch us talk the whole time, or…”
Tara looked over toward her fellow Marines and chuckled as they all turned back around and began to pretend as if they hadn’t just been watching the two, one was even doing a terrible job of whistling a tune, “You can ignore those idiots. So,” she turned her attention back to Aspen, “Headed to the Bifrost?”
Aspen nodded, “Mhmm, going to fringe space. You?”
Tara nodded in return, “Yeah we got assigned to some bucket of bolts flying through fringe space too,” her eyebrows came together, “Mieli?”
Aspen pulled her orders back up on her tab and showed them to Tara, “Yup! My first posting!”
Tara leaned forward and squinted at the screen on Aspen’s tab and then raised an eyebrow, “Oh shit, you’re an SRT? Damn,” she leaned back and gave a low whistle, “remind me to stay on your good side.”
Aspen gave a small laugh, “Oh don’t you worry, everyone gets equal treatment from me until the magic of triage happens.” Aspen pocketed her tab and looked from Tara to the other group of Marines nearby, “Why are Marines going on a border patrol mission?”
Tara shrugged, “We asked the same thing and they told us ‘training’.’ I assume it’s for the possibility of us having to do some kind of boarding maneuver or whatever. As far as I know we are the only ones that’ll be on the ship, everyone else is Navy.”
“Huh,” Aspen eyed Tara again looking at her lapels, “Weird. Are you squad leader or something?”
Tara gave a short laugh, “Eh, kinda. I’m just a corporal. We have a second lieutenant over us for some reason - never heard of them putting an officer over a squad this small when they could just ship me as an NCO, but you learn quick to not question things in the Marines,” Tara scanned the crowd and gave a frown, “Speak of the devil - gotta run, see ya up there!”
Tara stood and quickly moved back to the group of her peers, “SQUAD! ATTEN-TION!”
Tara’s group of Marines immediately all stood and snapped to attention just as a small man wearing Marine colors with a receding hairline pushed his way out of the crowd and stopped in front of the group, the gold bars on his lapels glittering in the overhead lights, “What in the fresh fuck are you doing, Corporal?”
Tara snapped a crisp salute, “The squad is all accounted for and ready for transfer, Second Lieutenant!”
Aspen watched amusedly as the officer dressed down the group of Marines for no apparent reason, their attitudes making it apparent that this was completely normal for them. The lack of attention from others making their way through the port and terminals affirming her assessment.
Aspen turned her attention back to her tab and opened a match three game to kill some more time until their transfer, the sound of the officer and the Marine’s shouting in response echoing in her ears.
\\\
Aspen piled into the shuttle with the squad of Marines and their officer, the rest of the shuttle filling with civilians - mostly scientists, engineers, and homesteaders - everyone eager to carve out a new life in Alpha Centauri.
As the shuttle took off from the staging location, it was joined by multiple others, Aspen quickly losing count after ten as she lost sight of the blocky metal ships as they blended against the background that was the darkness of space, the window next to her seat giving her little to look at now with it’s current viewing angle.
The shuttle approached a large ring of lights floating in space. A highway of lights reaching down to Neptune marking the pathway of the hydrogen siphon. A few indicator lights on ships darted around, visible to Aspen as she tracked them through her window as they sped around in space.
Aspen gave a small gasp as she spotted the cargo freighter approaching the gate, its bulk blocking out a large group of stars behind it, indicator lights along its hull giving her a visualization of how absolutely massive it was. By her estimates it had to be close to a kilometer long, the lights stretcher back farther than she could see from the angle of her window.
The overhead speakers in the shuttle buzzed and the pilot’s voice crackled through, “We are syncing with the other shuttles around the freighter, activation in five.”
Aspen gripped the harness on her seat as the pilots maneuvered their shuttle, watching the lights and stars shift in her view through her window, a slight nauseating feeling welling up within her as the lack of g-forces or feeling of movement absorbed by the lack of gravity and inertial dampeners did not come with the visual knowledge that she was moving.
“Sync complete, activation in two,” the speakers over head squawked and the shuttle gave a small shudder, a panel moved down in front of the window Aspen had been looking through, obscuring her view.
Aspen looked to the seat next to her to find a middle aged man holding his harness with a white knuckled grip, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips moving silently in what she assumed was some sort of prayer. She gulped and closed her eyes as well, gripping her harness in her hands until it hurt. The Marines on the shuttle behind her began to hoot and holler, their officer’s shouts to shut up being completely ignored.
The overhead lights in the shuttle all shut off, a brief moment of total darkness enveloping the passengers before a small red light over the escape hatch towards the front of the ship lit up.
The shuttle shuddered again.
A klaxon alarmed.
“Bifrost activation is go, 5…4…3…2…1…”
Aspen’s sense of proprioception ceased to exist and her consciousness tumbled away.