Lucky 13 (NaNoWriMo 2017)

Chapter 1: If a Tree Falls on the Moon...

Space, it's cold, it's dark, and it will rip the air from your lungs and boil your blood. Fun! It makes you wonder why anyone would ever want to be an astronaut. It makes you ask why NASA would want volunteers. It's a whole catch-22, you don't want anyone crazy flying your multi million credit starships, but to live in a tin can in the middle of the void you have to be crazy.

So what does that say about me?

The Academy has plenty of campuses and training sites. The Sol/Terra Lagrangian four shipyard, Cape Canaveral training facility, Corra defence station, but they all feed into the Luna Basic Integration NASA and Naval academy. We call it the Loony Bin.

We, me and 200 other cadets, stand up and salute. We're in a large cargo airlock, easily big enough to hold another 200 cadets with room leftover for a space shuttle. It's a little creepy that the roof could open at any moment and suck us into the void, but we've gotten use to it, probably something to do with us being crazy. Folding chairs stretch from one side of the room to the other, each with a cadet standing in front of it.

At the front of the airlock, two massive flags hang from the ceiling to the ground, forty meters at least. On the left is the Interplanetary Terran Alliance, or ITA, flag. While we refer to it as the ITA flag, it only represents the Terran half of the alliance. Stripes of yellow, red, and white with a massive blue stripe across the middle representing Terra, and a smaller white block in the middle of it representing us here on Luna. On the right is the Corrin flag, orange, yellow, green, and black stripes fill the flag from top to bottom with a red circle in the middle representing their sun. Standing on a dais in front of the flags, a Naval admiral has just finished her speech. I'm sure whatever she was saying was important, but I had been too nervous to pay attention.

Today is graduation day. No more tests, no more simulations, no more papers on the social relevance of tran-Human society. Even now dozens of shuttles are waiting to take us to the Naval cruisers and NASA cutters sitting above us in orbit.

We file out of the airlock, the biggest room in the Bin, and make our way to our cabins. Most of us have had our assignments locked down for the past week, but a few of us are still without assignments, and a few of us don't even know what branch of the service we've been assigned to.

I am one of the latter, but as I see it, I've got a few days leave, what a wonderful start to my term of service. And from where I'm standing, it can only get better.

<<>>

"The Terran's and Corrin's have a shared military three times our current strength," Reen'een'ee'a's commanding officer tells him/her. "While the Corrins have had a rather peaceful history with limited occurrences of race and... gender... discrimination. The Terrans are a different story entirely. Racial discrimination, gender discrimination, gīenetic discrimination... uh... I don't recognize this word."

"Sir, may I have a look?" The commander passes the tablet over. "Garecha," Reen'een'ee'a reads. "It's a Blait word. We have no equivalent in our language because of our lack of... gender."

"You commandos amaze me, that's your what, fifth language?"

"Eighth, although it was the fifth one I learned."

"And that's why you've been chose for this mission. You have proven capable of integrating anywhere, the Sveck aqua domes, the Pierin homeworld, even the Blait controlled planets."

"My grandparent served on Ava, I'm just following in his/her footsteps."

"Yes, but your grandparent merely had to learn one language, one body form, one fighting style, and had a fifty-fifty chance of dying before he/she made it to the ground. You know more about alien languages, culture, history, and traditions then a room full of xenologist. Which is why you were chosen for this mission."