Chapter 1
31 Jul 2020Spud_
It is hard at 24 years of age to understand where you fit into the universe. So many things were happening then, and I had a less than stellar background. My mother worked hard in the parts processing industry and my father was a wore out old fighter pilot with a drinking problem. I had bounced from job to job with no goals or guidance, just living day by day. I was working in a fission assembly plant, cranking out fission bottles for the manufacture of frame ship drives (some of the first generation types), when one of my buddies say's "Hey, I am really thinking about that Merchant Marine thing, looks like good money and it gets me out of this shit." So I asked him what he was talking about, he explained, and the next day we both quit our job and applied for the Merchant Marine Academy. Two weeks later with our personal belongings we were loaded on a ship and sent to the Achenar system for our training. It was a new station then, the central logistics hub for the Empire. Jason's Station. Long since gone now, but then it was the largest thing I had ever seen off planet. The first weeks were new to all of us, uniforms, dress code, lessons on rules, equity, military discipline, laws of war... endless things that we really did not even know existed. Then the real training started, multi dimensional math, flight physics, astrogation, and finally simulations. Four years we struggled, learned, and grew and finally, graduation day. My parents could not make it, the flight to expensive, so I stood there with just my friends, classmates, now ship mates and earned that coveted Beret. The Grey Beret of the Empire Merchant Marine.