Tales From Cassiopeia/The Rookie Soldier, Part One

## The Rookie Soldier, Part One

"**The Rookie Soldier, Part One**" is the first chapter and short story of Book Two of the *Tales From Cassiopeia* anthology series, serving as the fifth chapter in the overall series. This chapter was published to the site on November 21, 2023.

The story follows Ruby Ulnadia, a young soldier of the Cassiopeian Military, on an unexpectedly life-changing escort mission during the waning years of the Cassiopeian Civil Wars.

## Plot

Private Ruby Ulnadia was, for this current job, a pilot. She was not the *best* pilot from her graduating class during her days at the military academy—not by a longshot. At best, Ruby was an *adequate* pilot, which proved to be just adequate enough for the current job.

The current job. Right. A pilot. Not just a pilot, but an escort to two senatorial aides on a transport shuttle traveling through the outer reaches of space. Two senatorial aides to an important senator—of course—back on Cassiopeia Prime, the galactic capital of the Cassiopeian Republic. Yes, two important senatorial aides that Ruby, a representative of the Cassiopeian Military in this case, was tasked with escorting, protecting, and generally making sure that nothing horribly wrong befell them.

No pressure.

All Ruby could see in front of her was the darkness of space and the distant stars sprinkled throughout what was observable through the viewport. She and the aides were practically all alone. Ruby hadn't noticed how stiffly her hands were gripping onto the wheel of the ship until one of the aides asked her if she was okay. She wasn't, although Ruby was glad one of them was kind enough to check in on her at all. Not many of the others Ruby was assigned to were nearly as considerate—although to be fair, she could count her number of previous jobs on one hand.

But this one aide was a welcome presence. A Dremirian woman, her hair like crystal threads and her big eyes a glittery salmon pink. Short and frail, a delicate and radiant diamond. Ruby always thought Dremirians had an unmistakable yet natural beauty, mainly because of how their hair sparkled and shined when touched by light. It didn't help that the aide—Redara, she was told—styled her hair in such a captivating way that Ruby thought she'd only get to see in fashion magazines.

Ruby was not about to crush on the nice Dremirian woman sitting next to her in the cockpit! Redara was a client, and Ruby was a professional! A soldier of the esteemed Cassiopeian Military. She had an important mission right in front of her, with the lives of these two political aides in her care. Sure, maybe Ruby thought she'd be out performing more thrilling tasks when traveling through the cosmos. And maybe she thought her abilities would've been best applied directly to the war effort. The fight against Federation forces had been improving, sure, but Ruby enlisted to help fight them in the first place. And yet instead of fighting for the good of the cosmos, she was mostly relegated to escort duty. Yes, she understood the importance of her work—painfully so, with how nervous she felt despite the mundanity of it all. But the civil war had disrupted activity on countless worlds for several years already, and was there no better way for Ruby to apply herself? The fighting only seemed to intensify even when the odds were looking to be in the Republic's favor, and while so many of Ruby's colleagues were out being heroes on the battlefield, writing epic stories for themselves in real time, there she sat at the front seat of a starship as a mere-

Something blinked on one of Ruby's terminal screens, taking her out of her spiraling thoughts.

"What is it?" asked the other aide in the same instant Ruby dotted her eyes to the screen. The tall Coronan man, with hair of darkened red flames, already seemed shaky.

"Uh…" Ruby came to realize she was also shaky. She generally disliked the unexpected, and that included unexpected guests. But she pressed on, relaying the info from the screen. "We erm, have a few ships exiting h-hyperspace in the vicinity."

It was probably nothing. Yeah. Maybe some travelers who needed to be pointed in the right direction, or an odd trader in these outer parts of space or someone in need of extra fuel. Ruby was decent at directions, and she could turn people down if she had enough time to psych herself up.

Yeah, she could do that.

Three ships emerged from the starplane and into the physical realm of space. Black and white ships, prismatic and almost geometric in design. Tetragonian ships maybe? Ruby never saw the designs of the Shape People before, yet she assumed their ship designs would be similar to how they themselves looked.

But if they *were* just ordinary Tetragonian ships, why did Redara, who stood tightly next to Ruby, look so on edge all of a sudden?

"Is everything okay?" Ruby asked quietly, probably already knowing the answer.

"Yes, please do tell," the Coronan aide asked hurriedly.

The Dremirian aide leaned in with a tremble, propping herself up with her hands placed firmly on the cockpit terminal. She looked as if she was trying to get a better image from the viewport. She was hesitant. After a while, she leaned back out. Slowly.

"Oh dear," Redara said in a tiny, hushed gasp.

"Well? Out with it!" snapped the Coronan in his alarm. He was not helping.

"I-I think it's-"

A request for communication appeared on the terminal. These three monochrome ships wanted to talk. Not the most awful thing to happen.

Ruby gulped as she confirmed the connection—without input from the aides, she realized. Shoot. Her voice went hoarse.

"Uh, this is Prime Shuttle 31820 speaking. Is there something wrong?"

The response was so immediate that it almost made Ruby jump. It certainly made the senatorial aides jump, from what Ruby could tell after exchanging quick looks.

"Yes yes, loud and clear Prime Shuttle 31820," said the man from the leading ship of the convoy. He enunciated each word with eerie clarity. "It is to our knowledge that you have a *Dremirian* on board your vessel. Is this correct?"

Ruby and the Coronan aide turned to Redara, who froze completely still. Before Ruby could respond, the fire-haired aide—Hyacinth Reds, she was told—was quick to answer in her place.

"And to whom are we responding to?" asked Hyacinth, feigning confidence.

"The Praeliorian Empire."

Ruby didn't know much about the Praeliorian Empire, but she knew enough, and it seemed Redara and Hyacinth knew enough as well.

They hunted Dremirians down. They ground them into fine, lustrous dust.

In silence, all three Republic envoys in the cockpit exchanged hurried looks. Redara shook Ruby's shoulder, urging the pilot to flee, and fast. The Dremirian repeatedly mouthed something Ruby wasn't able to discern, but she could surmise a guess from the look of terror in her eyes. Hyacinth started pacing, his brisk footsteps almost rhythmic. All of this was enough to make Ruby even more on edge than before.

But Ruby was a pilot. Not the *best*, no, but one who knew enough to make a quick jump through the starplane, hundreds of parsecs away from this area of space. Trying her best to quell her own nerves, Ruby slammed a series of buttons on the terminal as quickly as she could, preparing for the jump. It didn't matter where they ended up, so long as their shuttle didn't blip into the center of a star.

So long as they were far, far away from here.

To Ruby's surprise—*damn it all, why now?*—the hyperspace maneuver failed to initiate. They went nowhere.

Why were they going nowhere? *Why?*

"You won't be going anywhere, Prime Shuttle. We've temporarily disabled your hyperdrive," the man on comms so nicely explained. Was he smiling as he spoke? "Prepare for boarding."

"How did they disable our hyperdrive?" asked Redara, the color somehow fading away from her gem-like face. If Dremirians could be ghosts, Ruby was looking at one.

"Can't you get it to work again?" Hyacinth pleaded. "We need to get out of here, try and do *something!*"

Buttons were pressed, switches were flicked, all hurriedly and rashly as Ruby slowly entered the same spiral as the senatorial aides who panicked beside her. How in the stars *did* they disable the ship's hyperdrive? Is this what made their hunts easier?

Is this how Ruby and her passengers would be easier to murder?

And that's when Ruby slapped herself—mentally or actually, she could not say—and remembered that a starship could fly fast even without hyperspace travel.

Whatever Ruby did blasted them straight through a narrow opening between the three imperial Praeliorian ships. For a second, she felt guilty for not warning the aides to strap into their seats first. The shuttle was going as fast as it possibly could without jumping through the starplane. There was no plan. No real destination. She just needed to get away. Get herself and the aides as far away from the Praeliorians.

She wouldn't fail one of her first assignments in what she hoped would be a long, fruitful military career.

Ruby went, and the Praeliorians followed. Comms were cut off between the shuttle and the imperial ships. The sound of laser blasts rang briefly through everyone's ears. As the Praeliorians fired intense bursts of energy from their cannons, Ruby took her piloting skills to the test. To the best of her ability, she dove and climbed, trying to zig-zag left and right to avoid getting hit. The ship rocked like some horrible roller coaster, but anything to avoid death was on the table to Ruby. With every hit the ship took and with every bit of damage taken to their shields, she cursed herself for not prioritizing her piloting classes during her days at the academy. She tried, with little success, to drown out the screams of those clinging to the seats beside her.

As if by a miracle, Ruby spotted what appeared to be a planet through the viewport, nearing and growing in size as they continued to speed through the void of the cosmos. A world to escape to. One where they could hide for as long as they needed. Blues, purples, and oranges decorated the planet, which made it hard to guess what kind of world they were headed toward. Ruby *really* hoped there was a breathable atmosphere. For a moment, she thought to ask Redara or maybe even Hyacinth what the ship's scanners were saying, but their cries of anguish made her decide against it.

Ruby approached the planet at sub-light speed, severely pushing the limits of the shuttle. Once the size of a marble, the planet was now enormous enough for its brilliant colors to clearly define the dunes and mountains of its surface, even from space. But as Ruby continued onward, try as she might, she was unable to dodge a number of the Praeliorians' more intense blasts. Many missed, but enough struck the shuttle to rattle every bit of metal aboard, all the way to the ship's core.

With one last, particularly heavy blast of energy, the shuttle shook with such intensity that Ruby thought she was going to fly right out of the viewport and through the glass, had she not been strapped in. The shields immediately went down and lights started flashing throughout the cockpit. Alarms screeched. The screams continued. A quick look at the ship's diagnostics told of critical damage to the ship's engines.

Their shuttle was falling through the sky at an incredible speed.

The ship shook *hard* as it plunged. Ruby wasn't even sure if the Praeliorians were still pursuing them. It took everything in her power to not scream with the aides, but she must have been too weak. Clouds passed them by like the lights of hyperspace—at a speed no living thing should have to experience. Eventually, purple and blue. Ruby was too busy letting loose a piercing cry at the top of her lungs to focus on the view. She gripped the wheel of the ship and tried her absolute best to guide it upwards, attempting to slow down the inevitable crash. Her ears continued to ring and the smell of dust and sand filled her nostrils as she thought about how these would be the last things she would ever experience as a living being.

It all went so wrong so, so fast. This should have been a simple escort mission, but Ruby wasn't cautious enough. If she had only dove and climbed at more opportune times, if she spent more time perfecting her piloting skills all those years ago…

Ruby thought about how she failed Redara and Hyacinth Reds. How she brought them down with her to their deaths as she failed to escape in time, to get them to wherever they needed to be. A destination so unimportant now as their shuttle tore through the sky. Their screams were nearly indistinguishable from the screeching metal of the ship now. If Ruby survived this, she'd immediately be discharged from the military.

Ruby wasn't too hopeful she'd even get to experience that. The thought of survival as a fleeting, impossible thing pained her. Terrified her.

Ruby thought of her family and friends back home on Cassiopeia Prime. She thought of how proud and how teary-eyed her mother was when she decided to enlist. She thought of the taste of the thin yet spicy soup her mother would make whenever she still lived at home, and how she regretted not savoring the meals enough.

As Prime Shuttle 31820 dove hard into the desert sands, Ruby hoped she had done some good in the short time she was a soldier.

Marshal Flame looked up at the orange skies of her home planet and shielded her eyes from the two suns. A small ship was cutting through the atmosphere like an arrow, headed towards colorful sand dunes just a few klicks away from town. As she stood at the edge of New Perdita—the hometown she protected like her own child—Flame saw tiny lights further up in space.

Falling stars, diving closer to the planet, following the crashing ship from afar.

"Argent. Lazawara." Flame addressed the human man standing to her left, then the Makuran woman to her right. "I want you with me. We're going to check this out."

Lieutenant Argent Spades, in his old age, moved his silvery hair out of his face for a moment and smirked. The edges of his grinning mouth wrinkled.

"Friend or foe, you think?" Argent asked. Flame huffed in amusement.

"Don't sound too happy," Flame said.

Lazawara Clubs, a thin woman with deep blue skin and three orange eyes, turned to Marshal Flame with a stern look on her half-masked face.

"Whatever the case, they'll be injured." Lazawara motioned to the medkit strapped to the side of her hip. Flame trusted the Makuran woman as the esteemed medic of New Perdita.

"We'll see if they accept our help," Flame said. "If they make it."

With the wildness of her crystal hair flowing behind her, patterned like a sunset, Marshal Flame hopped onto the back of a saddled sand strider and tugged at the reins. Lt. Spades made sure his sidearms were still holstered and, with that same grin on his face, clicked his tongue and made his own sand strider gallop after the Marshal. Lazawara followed suit, trailing closely behind on her own mount.

The planet Trepida had not been on the radar of most bigger (and frankly more powerful) worlds for a good few years, even with imperial Praeliorian forces occasionally passing by their area of space and with some galactic war being fought on the distant side of the cosmos. It was a generally uneventful, boring time.

Maybe today was when that changed.

## Appearances

### Dramatis Personae

* **Ruby Rundum** - Jiridanian. Nervous rookie soldier. Wants to do a good job.
* **Redara** - Dremirian. Senatorial aide, nice hair. Also nervous.
* **Hyacinth Reds** - Coronan. Senatorial aide, fiery hair. Nervous too.
* **???** - Praeliorian Elite. Faithful servant of his empire.
* **Flame** - Dremirian. Marshal of New Perdita.
* **Argent Spades** - Human. Lieutenant to Marshal Flame.
* **Lazawara Clubs** - Makuran. Medic of New Perdita.

### Locations

* Cassiopeia Galaxy
	+ Central Expanse
		- Praeliorian Remnants
			* Trepida
	+ Cassiopeia Prime (Mentioned only)

### Organizations and Titles

* Cassiopeian Republic
	+ Cassiopeian Military
* Federation of Cassiopeian Star Systems (Mentioned only)
* Praeliorian Empire
	+ Praeliorian Elite

### Sentient Species

* Coronan
* Dremirian
* Human
* Jiridanian
* Makuran
* Praeliorian
* Tetragonian (Mentioned only)