Eric Olafson, Midshipman (Vol 4)
Copyright© 2008 by Vanessa Ravencroft
Part 1: YEAR TWO
Arsenal Gate
I turned the viewer to aft view as we emerged from the Igras Nebula and the USS Rosinante was in normal space once more. I had christened the Katharian Raider after the horse of Don Quixote. Like the old lame steed of that fictitious character it was hapless piece of junk. Bolted and glued together from parts of of at least seventeen different space ships, each ship from a different space faring civilization no less. Somehow it all worked and the ship did not let me down when I needed it to work.
Only two weeks ago I had arrived here, in a shiny new Sturgeon Courier ship and nothing that should have worked. The Command seat in this rust bucket had been a leather sofa, bolted down onto the deck plates with actual screw bolts. That sofa floated somewhere in space between here and Coven, the secret planet of the Netherworld Witches, along with whatever vermin was hiding between the cushions. The red scaled lizard, that was there to hunt the vermin tuned out to be a coward and as soon as I let the thing out, it gorged itself on the Vac Packed supplies and hid inside a ventilation shaft when it heard the sharp teeth vermin squeal between the cushions.
I had learned, the red scaled pirate pet was called a Hantkit and it had a better home now. I had sold him along with everything loose and not absolutely essential to a Vendor for pretty much everything aboard a Scooper station two days ago. They let me land, and it turned out the Karthanian ship of mine had a few tons of Good Scoop aboard, it and the rest of the things gained me a small bag full of gold and Platinum chips. Union Credits had no meaning out here as I found out. For the chips they sold me something like an old fashioned dentist chair that was now my command chair, a big bucket of Scrub-A-Deck and seven bulbs of fuel. Hopefully enough to take this piece of junk back to Union Space.
It had felt like a cold shower, like being evicted from a castle to turn back to my male persona, but I really wanted to complete my Academy and not complicate things even more. But my experience on Coven had shown me what I wanted and what I would do as soon as I could. The doubts and the pain of not knowing what I was were gone.
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