I was laying face down on my pillow as I slowly reviewed the last two weeks. It wasn't as bad as week two, not by a long shot, but it had been tough on the mind. We had spent the first day getting the protocols and formations training complete for the Server Lieutenant then the rest of that week in a classroom studying we apparently had to know every inch of our ship what each part did and how to clean and service it in the field just in case something went wrong, and we couldn't get back to a carrier or orbital station.

That was also when I found out the damn thing had been upgraded and the ones we flew had been upgraded with built-in planet side camouflage emitters that could literally turn the damn drop-ship invisible. Seriously, that would have been nice to fricken know during week two. On the bright side, like all weekends, this one also came with a promotion exam. My team now had three corporals and was led by my bright shiny new Flight Sergeant stripes. I did look into that and apparently there is a difference. A flight sergeant, like myself, is a sergeant that is an active pilot, but a Sergeant is a ground sergeant that focuses on office work and other things like that or if they are in the marines then I guess working with marines. Honestly, going through week three was a bit of an adjustment for all of us.

Sergeant Ritz had been resigned, demoted or something I'm still not really sure, but she was replaced by a husky fellow named sergeant Jones. Who was a very literal type of man and insisted everything be done right and would not give an inch. So, failure wasn't an option and if you did fail you redid it three times over to make sure you didn't fail it again. At that point, I also knew the week ahead was going to suck. Sergeant Jones had already told us what was coming and that I had better pass the surprise promotion exam in the middle of the week, if I wanted to lead my current team after I graduated. He had also warned them that they had better pass it if they didn't want to wash out and fail to get their flight clearance. To say we were motivated to pass was an understatement of the century.

That flight clearance passed over to the real world even during our off time, It would allow us to fly military grade ships. The beautiful part about that is if I had a ship in my home solar system I could fly it around to my hearts’ content, but I don't, and now I have to figure out what this orbital station thing is and get it and hope to hell my three friends can actually fly their own ships to the system or the station is going to be a kind of useless hunk of metal floating in space. I let out a groan as I rolled over and decided to check my status screen. There had been no time for training simulators, so a bit of money had piled up.

Name: Kenna Rowan Mackenzie

Clan: Mackenzie

Clan rank: P. Baron-Tak

Military Rank: Flight Lieutenant

Military Position: Boot Camp Alpha Squad, Team Leader, Star Hawks

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Galactic Credits: 301,962

Class: Void Pilot

Titles:

Survivors guiding light.

Scion of clan Mackenzie

I let out a soft sigh as I looked over my status, we had all passed the not so surprising promotion exam. However, I knew there was no way I was going to pay for that orbital station with credits, so saving my medium perk was definitely out the window. I sat up on my bunk as I glanced at the time and then turned my thoughts to the final week. It had been a roller coaster ride of combining everything we had learnt and then implementing it. Yesterday was the final exam. They spawned us into clones of our body. We were in the real world, and they had us board our drop-ships that the engineering class had printed, then assembled.

Our mission was to take squads of marines down to some planet. There were hundreds of thousands of them, and we were not the only drop-ships flying down. Each of our drop-ships only had space for one squad, so we had to fly them down, drop them off and come back to pick up the next squad. I hadn't even managed to get all of them down before our orders changed to retrieval of all planet side squads. Apparently we had dropped off some elite squad called the Steel Hellians, and they had gotten impatient and simply stormed the objective, completing the entire mission alone.

We also finally learnt what it meant to lose a clone body during a mission when Ripter missed a change in our formation and was out of line when an orbital laser hit his drop-ship, killing him instantly. When we got back to the carrier, he was standing at the edge of a cordoned off area watching the engineers rebuild his ship. We took down two more squads before his ship was complete, and we finally got the chance to ask him on the ship's com channel. It had cost him a thousand credits to respawn inside a tube that he pushed open and stepped out into a room full of those tubes and lockers, it took a while, but we did manage to get him to admit he and everyone else was respawned naked. And the reason he was out of time was because a scuffle had broken out in his ship between two marines over some girl.

We all learnt the valuable lesson of why we should always use the lockdown button to seal us inside the cockpit. It was three drops later that we found our next scuffle in Flight Sergeant Walkers’ ship as she came down to land. I remember I was feeling annoyed at how these damn marines were treating our ships and told her to open the drop door, then pointed the nose of the ship at the sky and drop the fools on their heads. She did, and I got to watch marines falling out of a ship and hitting the ground, not all of them got back up. We didn't get any more scuffles after that.

I shook the thoughts from my head as I got to my feet and walked over to the nearby locker and equipped my uniform, getting ready for my graduation day.

“Graduation day, we finally get to go home, are you excited, Ms Kenna?”

“Why, Ms Zeo if I didn't know any better I would say we were both ecstatic”

This caused us to both laugh before turning and walking across the barracks to the door and stepping outside. We looked at the oval field in front of us, all done up and made pretty for a graduation ceremony. We both grinned and walked towards our Sergeant.

“Big day, are you four ready for it?” he asked us.

“What's to be ready for? All we have to do is show up and look beautiful” Zeo Walker replied.

“You are about to find out,” he said with a big grin on his face.

I groaned as I turned to look around myself quickly. I had never liked it when someone had said that it always seemed to come with a surprise or twist that I wasn't expecting, and it wasn't always to my benefit.