No more looking back
10 Jul 2021pr1sm
The blinking lights of numerous navigation beacons came flashing into view as the last thin wisps of atmosphere tore themselves from the sleek edges of the asps frame, over his shoulder he could faintly make out the cluster of light around one of old earths many tourism hubs. Just hours before he sat languishing outside the flight planning center with a single thought "as far as possible it has to be as far as possible" and then just like that his journey into the unknown began. Until that moment in time he had had and then lost it all, a good family life that proffered form a hard earned wealth made through years of toil in the junior ranks of the federation navy before quickly rising into the role of an elite espionage pilot. His wife only knew of him as the excitable pilot that lavished her with affection and provided everything they could ask for never once questioning the vast sums of credits he would return from "deployment" with.
All anybody else ever knew of them was for the being the perfect family always in good spirits and fantastic hosts at their many social gatherings, offering friends and acquaintances alike to spend time at their private social space "villas" in one of old earths more eloquent tourism hubs where they would spend long weekends visiting the museums and remains of humanities first steps in the universe. She would spend hours entertaining with endless evenings of talk over drinks in the surroundings of an antiquated bar complete with authentic media from a time eons before. He on the other hand would spend days away at the federations training school that he once had passed through as an eager young pilot himself, a life journey he remembered fondly as he guided the small craft through the labyrinth of unseen lanes in space marked only by beacons .
The flight school occupied the grounds once adorned by the federations first ever joint command center housing human kinds first coming together in order to prevent it's own destruction, with a finite amount of resources and a planet ravaged by generations of war and human destruction the need to find new planets to settle brought an uneasy peace and the newly formed coalition forged ahead recruiting and training an army of epic proportion with which to keep the fragile peace and core to this were the pilots. There wasn't much that a pilot couldn't find a role for from transport to defense, reconnaissance and pathfinding pilots were the real heroes though and in the early days it was they who made the first tentative forays out into the black and both his father and his father before him had been some of those early pioneers.
Flight school if you made it through without either dropping out or dying was a place where you found friends that would be with you for life, the long weeks and months in deep space would see bonds form that little could ever break and relationships that were in ways more intimate than that he had with his wife. Those friendships had grown over his years and he had to come to depend on them, after all being a federation pilot meant long periods of inactivity with time to think spattered with moments of intensity and fear but those friends kept each other going through the very best and the very very worst.
Time though had passed by quickly and there were few of his original pilot graduate friends left around, most had served their requisite time and then moved on to new projects many forging a path supporting others in making a name for themselves amongst the stars. Not all had moved on though and he often spent time when he could reminiscing over old times with friends in the villa. One or two had even continued their service like himself and began roles training new recruits or joining new and expanding arms of the navy such as pathfinding a high stakes high adrenaline and high credit reward job. The navy pathfinders went from system to system locating points of interest that included resource rich planets and moons as well as locations for potential human habitation.
Pathfinders though were often sent on dangerous search and rescue missions trying to locate those that had fallen foul of any one of the many ways space could kill a person not least usually by some energetic unseen force tearing craft apart or simply getting to close to any of the galaxies trove of beautiful yet deadly sites, think boiling to death inside a gas cloud slowly after the last spare power regulator has just blown, and pathfinders faced down these threats regularly but it took more than the threat of the unknown to shake them.
It was as a path finder that he honed his flight senses and the ever present piracy threat saw enough skirmishes to keep his combat proficiency off the annual training session radar, it was also as a path finder that he re joined his flight school buddy, they had already formed a bond that saw them brawling together in bars at night then performing flight demonstration tests the next morning like they were impervious. It was a relationship that had stood the test of time and tragedy, joy and terror, moments of amazement and moments of realization about the universe and all shared together.
It was that relationship now that kept invading his thoughts as he maneuvered to avoid a badly damaged tourist liner that was drifting powerless in the busy space lane that was heading away from earth towards the asteroid belt where large craft were moored in a virtual space dock. The words, the tone in which they were spoken, they felt so powerful that he shuddered involuntarily, for so long there so many things left unsaid that had burned away, answers to questions that made no sense. His mind was racing again, his wife stood tears streaming down her face as he had walked away, the feeling in his stomach and the heavy sensation in his heart.
Easing away from the heavy traffic around earth he relaxed a little and tried to focus his mind, those last words!. He knew what they would be before he heard them it was something he had thought about for years but hearing them brought about a reality that stunned him more than seeing the galaxy from high above its plane for the first time. Three months since he heard them, three months since he last slept or ate properly and three months since he last felt like he knew himself.
His buddy had been there through it all, together they had conquered their fears and complimented each other in a symbiotic way that saw them quickly assigned to the most important and dangerous missions. Individually they were already elite, together were dangerous and they were unstoppable. His thoughts kept switching irrationally one minute his wife stood there in shock and the next his buddy and those last words echoing and reverberating like some bad dream, he thought of her and then he again though of his wife.
When she said those words though..... his mind instantly filled with memories and his emotions began to well, his wife wasn't the first to notice something wrong but she wasn't long in expressing her concerns, he was withdrawn and quiet rarely speaking except to call in sick to work or announcing he needed some space before vanishing for hours. It was like he was tortured and his wife was scared, she had never seen him so detached from reality or so evasive. She tried talking to him pleading him to talk to her, he couldn't bring himself to tell her though, not yet. He needed to get away, as far as possible and he didn't have much time................................................................................
More to come.