I'm going to die out here.
Lieutenant Claire Gaynor sat back in the dark cockpit of her lifeless, Jaguar-Class Interceptor, staring through her helmet's visor and a cracked canopy into the void of Proxima Centauri. The blackness of space sparked with the remnants of a massive battle, and shattered ships and debris caught light from the system's red dwarf star as they spun, forever stuck in the inertia of whatever impact or explosion had destroyed them.
Another small craft would occasionally drift past the slow rotation of her tiny ship, either another Jaguar or the enemy's equivalent: the Jià n Scrambler. More often, it would be pieces of either and sometimes one of the bombers, gunships or battle cruisers of either faction would pass by her spinning view. The scale of the battle had kept the goriest aftermath out of view and there was hardly any reminder that each broken husk of a ship meant at least one person was dead.
Claire hadn't been paying attention at the start of the mission briefing, as was typical for her. It was the part when they explained whatever this particular battle's righteous justification was for the Alliance and why it was a cause worth dying for. There was an obvious formula to the ready room presentations that not many fellow pilots caught on to, but she had after the first few missions out of the Academy. It struck her as silly, attempting to inspire the troops as if they weren't already motivated every time they flew into battle by a desire to not die. There wasn't any real risk of pilots deserting when their small fighters could never make it back to a habitable planet or station under their own power. Space Force was a choice but leaving it before they were ready to let you go wasn't.
There was always a dramatic pause when they started discussing the real details of the mission and that's when she would start to pay attention. This battle was over a disputed, helium mining site and it must have been valuable to justify throwing away several divisions of the United Allied Space Force's best and brightest and so many of their expensive toys over it.
After her Interceptor had taken a direct hit that disabled all engine power and Comms, she'd spent the next hour watching the fight spin in and out of view. A United Alliance Interceptor would take out one of the Red's fighters and on the next revolution, a Red fighter would take out an Allied bomber. Attack Frigates of both sides were split into twos and threes or tens by torpedoes, far enough away so she couldn't see their crews being sucked out into the cold, darkness of space among the other debris.
In the end, it appeared to be a stalemate from her limited vantage. The battle died down, with only an occasional, stray ion bolt or an explosion in the distance. Eventually there was nothing left but remnants of ships, silence and the repeating view of the red dwarf star and the guilty planet they'd all killed each other for the right to plunder. It was possible =every last one of them had died, as apparently nobody had signaled for either fleet to come clean up the pieces.
Claire unbuckled her harness and floated out of a sculpted seat that hugged her almost as well as her void-certified, flight suit did. Twisting her torso to see around the inconvenient bulk of her breasts, she looked to her suit's Life-Support Control Monitor on the right side of her abdomen, below her bottom rib. The issue was non-existent for most female pilots but still, a system designed by men and for men.
Most prominently on the small, white box was the coupler where a messy braid of different-sized, black tubes and wires tethered her to the ship before flattening out into ribbons of tubes concealed in the weave of her suit. Most of them led down to the hub of her life support: poly-mesh underwear which were likely the most expensive boxer-briefs in the history of humankind. Universal Life-Preserving Undergarments was their official name but "iron undies" had become the informal nomenclature throughout Space Force rank-and file, a jab at their utilitarian lack-of-comfort. They were thick, a flattened out micro-factory that handled all the functions of keeping a soldier alive: on-board oxygenation of the blood, waste disposal and nanobot charging and servicing for health maintenance and trauma response.
There was enough slack in the braided cables and tubes to let her move about in the coffin-sized space but little more. The coupler could be simply detached from the suit with a twist but there'd be no need for that until she left the cockpit. That might not ever happen again.
She read the small, screen on the top of the box. Her suit's air scrubber and waste disposal were both functioning properly, though the clock was always ticking on oxygen. Water recycling was still working and there were a few days' worth of Calorie-Cap rations to be shot straight into her stomach via feeding tube. With some quick math, she determined the lack of oxygen would be what killed her, in about forty to forty-four hours.
With a sigh, Claire turned and reached around behind her seat then to fetch an emergency flare signal beacon. In the unlikely event of a second attack wave or rescue mission in that small window, she might need to signal them manually, as the distress beacons of the Jaguar Interceptors were foolishly connected to the rest of the comm system, which meant they were as dead as the rest of the ship. The advanced scout and rescue ships had thermal sensors to scan for life-signs but their lowest-bidder quality was a poorly-kept secret among Space Force personnel. It wasn't the kind of technology to trust your life to.
Flare in hand, she pushed against the cracked canopy at the metal frame to push back down into her seat. She buckled her harness again then waited to die.
* * *
Twelve hours passed with no sleep and with heavy eyes, Claire flicked through pictures on her datapad, which she'd plugged into her suit's comm to listen to a calming piano concerto. Her attention lingered on a childhood photo of her class at the Space Force School on Proxima: thirty-two, six year olds trained to live and breath the life of Space Force, including a young and bright-eyed, dirty blonde-haired, bob-cut Claire Gaynor. Another photo, dated four years later had the same group, now only twenty-three of them who'd passed all the flight training simulations. The others had been transferred to other military specialties that weren't so reliant on quick thinking, reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but she never saw any of them again.
A third class photo had an eighteen-year-old Claire in a graduation gown and cap, surrounded by the same group but now with fifteen strong. The rest had been removed for subversive ideologies, training accidents, suicides and two had just disappeared, including Claire's first boyfriend, Kevin. That was the last picture she had from Space Force School, before the lot of them were sent off-planet to one of the three Space Force Academies, where she would become a pilot and an officer. It was the last time she'd seen most of them.
The next set were pictures she snapped when she'd first arrived at the Academy Space Station. The bold, neon sign was strikingly un-militaristic and would be more appropriate for a Casino and the statues of various, long-dead Generals and Presidents were lined up out front. There were pictures from the Academy Hanger of cutting edge ships she'd never seen back on Proxima: her first up-close look at the venerable Eagle Fighter that had hung on her bedroom wall, the famous Humpback Torpedo Bombers and her favorite, the-then prototype, ultra sleek F-118 Jaguar Fighter Interceptor. It was in much better shape than hers was now.
The next picture was a selfie: a smiling Claire in front of the first "Upright" she'd ever seen: a six-foot two, regal German Shepherd, standing upright like a man, with broad shoulders and a tail tucked behind him. He wore a Military Police armband over green camouflage and carried a rifle, straight-faced, eyes-forward and scowling.
Uprights were animals genetically modified and hybridized to have human characteristics in addition to their animal ones. Home-grown, cheap labor, always kept very separate from humans. She'd never seen one on Proxima B but at the Academy, the dog-men were the posted guards of the highest security areas. In the two years that followed, she'd seen several breeds known for their strength and obedience, all standing like men and carrying guns.
Uprights were capable of speech, but they were never in any role permitting communication with humans. She had not heard one talk and it was strictly forbidden to initiate a conversation. Of course, that hadn't stopped some of her classmates from teasing them when they had the chance but the Upright canines were too disciplined to show any reaction beyond the focus of their sharp eyes. The only way they were allowed to interact with anyone outside of their Commanding Officer was a loud boot stomp of a deterrent, aiming their rifles in warning and shooting anyone who failed to heed the previous two.
The Upright canines were used for their strength, speed, sense of smell but in particular, their obedience. There were said to be entire infantry divisions of them in the United Alliance Army and Marine Corp but some of the most vicious stories were from them being used as Riot police on Earth, crushing uprisings and other civil disobedience without question.
In the years since the Academy, the MP dog-men were the only ones she'd seen but had heard of other species of purpose-bred Upright laborers, particularly in colonies, mines and more hostile planets. Some worked aboard the same space carriers she'd deployed from as ordinance loaders but their decks were the lowest of the ships and completely separated. The rules remained the same everywhere in United Alliance Space for Uprights: complete and total segregation from humans.
Since that first day, she'd been curious what they might be like and just how human these animal people really were. What would they have to say? Would they slur and pause like some slow children? Their orders were simple after all. Yet they were given weapons and others were trusted to load dangerous munitions correctly into fighter and bomber craft. The canine guards acted with a discipline so strict it was almost robotic and must require some intelligence. What were their lives like off-duty? What would they talk about over a beer?
Claire flipped pictures faster than with an impatient sigh. Bases, capital ships, space stations and sometimes a shot of a new galaxy or planet from afar. No trees. No deserts. No beaches. She was part of Space Force and Space Force stayed in space. All "shore leave" was taken in Virtual Reality simulations in the budget-conscious vastness of space.
There were no people in her life outside of her Division beyond a couple of confidants from School plus a handful of casual friends and shallow relationships. Nobody was going to cry for her like they did in the datapad movies, when they read off her name among the hundreds or thousands that had died today.
Thirty-one years of life to become an elite fighter pilot only to die fighting over a rock full of helium. Would suffocating in space even count as dying in battle?
A noise broke her train of thought: a dull thud of impact.
Something had hit the hull, echoing through the space-frame, small but a direct hit. That was nothing unusual in the drifting wreckage of a battle until she lurched forward against her harness and dropped her datapad at her feet, unplugging it and silencing the music. Her view stabilized and the ship was no longer spinning. She was being towed.
"Oh fuck."
Claire was awake now with a surge of adrenaline. She fumbled around the cockpit, the flare falling out of her lap and to her feet before she drew her pistol from a holster on her left thigh then slipped its tether around her wrist, a necessity of zero gravity. With the muscle memory of practice, she checked the magazine and chambered a round before pulling the weapon in against her chest, breathing deeply to steady her nerves. "Nobody takes prisoners in space" was what her teachers had always told her but there had always been whispers around the class that space pirates would take people alive as slaves: a far worse fate from what she had heard. All of Space Force were trained to fight til the death if ever captured by the enemy regardless and that's what she intended to do.
The canopy's view of space was framed by a well-lit overhang above her before it blocked the light of Promixa's star. The sides of a ship's hull came into view next and was between them. In her head, she ran through all the different spacecraft she'd studied but even as her dead Interceptor stopped and left her looking at the inside of a small cargo bay, it didn't click. No Space Force or People's Republic ship was laid out like this. Which meant it was a civilian ship: either junkers or space pirates.
