Chapter 8: Master Alamea

Everyone thought it would get easier after we got used to the stress and workload, but it did not; our instructors pushed us even harder.

I was sent for 24 hours into the no-light lock-up for having a bad shave after returning from a 75-kilometer force march through the jungle in just my underwear and a combat knife. The instructor argued that the knife was perfectly usable to perform a shave before reporting back.

Narth did not fare much better and was sent washing dishes by hand for the whole camp, having a mud stain on his robe.

Our martial arts instructor was an old Saresii, and the general consensus was that he knew every fighting technique and martial arts known to the Galaxy. I had trained our brand of wrestling and brawling, but he was beyond everything they taught on Nilfeheim.

For some unknown reason, he loved to demonstrate his skills on me. Narth told me that he was well-shielded, and it was even for him impossible to anticipate the next move.

I lost count as to how many times I left his classroom on the stretcher of a Med-bot with a broken bone or a serious concussion. Master Alema never expressed apologies for what he did; when I was lying on the mat with a broken limb and almost passing out with pain. He merely pointed out the flaws in my attack or defense to the class and showed them the slow-motion recording of my errors.

After we graduated, we could get skill implants that would give us instantly the skills of a wide choice of martial arts, but the Navy insisted that we learned the Navy standard style hand-to-hand combat the old-fashioned way. It was so, we were told, that the amalgam of the fighting techniques of thousands of cultures and civilizations honed and mixed into a technique and style very unique to the Navy.

Of course, Master Alamea did it to other cadets as well (at least to those cadets that could break bones). He even sent Limbur more than once with injuries to sick bay, and Limbur was three times his mass and much stronger. I just had the impression he picked on me more than the others.

One Sunday afternoon, we had a few hours to ourselves, and I thought I would use that rare free time to go swimming. Camp Idyllic had several swimming pools, and bathing in the nearby lake was fairly safe but way too warm to my taste. The survival and diving pool was the largest and deepest, and they usually kept the water much cooler than the others, and that’s why I liked it best. The water was still too warm for me, but it was clear, fresh water, and it was forty meters deep.

Usually, this pool was deserted outside of training exercises. Those other cadets that used their free time to swim preferred the warmer water pools or the lake.

So I was surprised to see Master Alema there. He was sitting at the highest diving board in the lotus position with closed eyes.

I cursed under my breath. I didn’t want to go to another pool, especially since I didn’t have too much time, but I really didn’t want to run into that Saresii transvestite.

All Saresii appeared to be female and stunningly beautiful, but some of them were men, made up to look like women. In class, we learned that the Saresii were among the oldest species with a continuous civilization. They had been traveling space for much more than a million years. Some event millennia ago wiped out all their colonies except their home world. It was blamed on male aggression. So the Saresii banned everything appearing male. At first, they had a matriarchal society, like the Saran’s, but it changed and developed differently. Why all Saresii men decided to dress and appear like women and make this aspect the core of their civilization, I did not know. Saresii joined the United Stars relatively late. Their technology was considered to be among the most advanced within the Union.

Saresii were most famous for their psionic abilities. It was believed that very few Saresii were telepaths of considerable strength; some had telekinetic powers. A known legend told that the Saresii rearranged the eight planets of their system into perfect orbits using their combined psionic powers. There had to be truth to the legend since the eight planets were arranged in such a way.

Narth was not impressed by the Saresii’s psionic abilities, and he told me that Narth considered the Saresii to be like children who just managed to walk.

Master Alema appeared to be a woman in every visual aspect. She could have been any age between 25 and 200. The face was very female, with much larger purple-colored eyes than humans, long lashes, and beautifully shaped lips. Saresii ears were pointed and usually hidden under their long hair, but I could see the tips of his ears between the strands of the long, silvery white hair.

The Saresii readily adopted Terran and Saran make-up fashions and used this ancient female art to enhance their faces and appearance. Almea’s hair was straight and fell below the shoulder blades. It had the color of shiny silver. The only way we knew he was not a biological female was because Commander Letsgo always referred to Alema as him, and we had to call him Master.

I turned and wanted to leave, but his voice caught me at the door.