Constellations of a Soldier
A Science Fiction One Shot
Thanks to for his Flash Fiction Friday prompts, last week was Cold Stars and the prompt I went with was “Write about stargazing”.
Uldeer lay there staring up at the stars. Another planet, another cluster of constellations to create, another swarm of new stars to add to the charts, this time there were a couple of blood red ones and a single blue behemoth that dominated its constellation. Whatever the constellation was, he hadn’t decided yet, that blue star would be its centre piece. He coughed, speckles of red marking his visor, his breath steaming up and obscuring his view of the stars. He blinked, vision blurred, then blinked again and drifted into endless sleep. He never had finished his book of stars.
‘You up on the deck again?’ Sun Xiao groaned as she said it, but in a playful way.
‘Of course. Everywhere we go there are new ones you know. New constellations, new stars, new horizons,’ Uldeer said. His slate showed an undulating line as he spoke, it wasn’t accurate but it let him know his voice had been heard and transmitted.
‘Exactly. Always new, never the same, always on the move. Don’t you get tired trying to find them all, note them all down, make those silly little patterns with them?’
‘What else am I to do between worlds?’ He didn’t say battles or fights or missions, that would be too real for him right now.
‘Drink, cards, fuck around, like a regular soldier. Whoever heard of a stargazing soldier? Sun Xiao’s voice crackled, their cruiser was decelerating out of light speed.
‘I do all that too,’ Uldeer said.
‘So you need extra assignments, is that it? You’re bored? I’ll make sure to mention it to your Bearer.’
‘I have plenty of assignments thank you Miss I’ve-had-two-weeks-on-recovery-because-of-a-strained-elbow.’
‘Oh shut up, you know how much pain I’ve been in.’
‘Not enough to stop riding me all night,’ Uldeer teased. He knew no line was entirely private and could feel Sun Xiao’s burning cheeks through the call. He didn’t care who had heard, unless it was someone of particularly high rank but he doubted such a person would be listening to personal calls at this hour.
‘You bastard, you’re getting nothing tonight. You can draw and draw to your heart’s content.’
‘Uh-huh, sure. I need to organise them into a proper collection anyway if I’m to publish,’ he knew she was bluffing. The line went dead in response. Uldeer continued his sketch of the sky. He used a black sketchbook with white, blue, and red pens, making small or large dots to chart the sky he saw and then make a note of the galactic co-ordinates in the bottom left for later reference. Each chart was only the size of his hand and he had hundreds back in his footlocker, with the plan for a book after his tour ended.
Stars of the Galaxy, he’d call it. Or, Night Skies from Aboard the Pegasus, though he doubted he’d be allowed to use the name of the ship. Maybe, Illustrations of a Service Afar, in any case Uldeer had four years remaining and plenty of time to decide on a name.
He drew the final blue star from the patch of space he was focussed on and called it a night. He was the last to leave the stargazing deck and the last to make it to his bunk, the other five who he shared with were already sound asleep. He deposited his sketchbook and pencils in his footlocker and drew back the curtain to his bunk. Sun Xiao lay there, naked. She pressed a finger to his lips as he climbed in and she drew the curtain closed.
A klaxon sounded throughout the ship. A recording of a stern woman said, ‘This is not a drill,’ on repeat.
Uldeer rolled out from his cot to wrestle with his overalls and then race down to his unit’s armoury. Sun Xiao would have been doing similar but she was an anti-craft gunner responsible for aiming and telemetry. Uldeer was, by contrast, infantry and expecting to be in the thick of the fighting should it come to it, whether ship-to-ship, ship-to-surface, or the rare, and doom laden, surface-to-ship. He wouldn’t find out which it was until he was in combat gear.
Sheridan, Lucas, and the rest of his twenty man unit were already half kitted out when Uldeer arrived. Bearer Turan was a moment behind Uldeer, combat helm under his arm and a bandolier across his chest, ‘Look alive, soldiers, we descend in twenty minutes!’
Ship-to-surface then, Uldeer thought. He grappled with the various sections of body armour that went into slots on his overalls and then with the vest and belts that would hold his weaponry. ‘What’s the situation, Bearer?’
‘Enemy base on the moon of Eniron, caught us by surprise as we were spooling up to jump to the next sector.’
‘The moon surprised us, Bearer?’ Sheridan scoffed. There was a chuckle from half of the unit.
‘Strange things happen out in space, soldier, the enemy having a base on a moon perviously thought barren is one of them,’ Turan missed the joke entirely.
‘Yes, Bearer,’ Sheridan turned and rolled his eyes out of Turan’s view.
‘Thirty seconds!’ Turan screamed.
The twenty soldiers assembled into pairs with Turan at the head and on his whistle jogged out of their armoury and down to the hangar deck. A hundred or more units were ahead of them in a conveyor belt of infantry, with another hundred or more behind. Heavy weapons infantry had already descended judging by the gap in the transport fleet, while the regulars, Uldeer’s division, were next. He thought it odd light infantry and reconnaissance had not been first but he’d learned in his first year never to voice such thoughts, the higher ups knew what they were doing.
The Pegasus shook from missile impacts along the bow. Sun Xiao’s team would be responding, or someone near to her, in trying to neutralise the anti-craft cannons on the surface of the moon. Uldeer was never sure exactly what she was firing at when she described her view of a battle through a screen and a flurry of buttons and lights. It all seemed distant and cold compared to his frontline experience of blood, heat, and body parts.
The hangar deck thronged with activity as tens of thousands of soldiers raced to their transports. Ships took off, filling the bay with an unbearable heat, all the while the monstrous guns roared drowning out the klaxon and the woman repeating, ‘This is not a drill.’
Soon enough Uldeer’s unit was loaded onto a transport, crammed with hundreds of others, and shot off into space, his most hated part. Uldeer hoped the pilot was skilled enough to avoid any salvoes from the moon. The transport rocked and swayed, dove and twisted, and was shook by grazes and almost hits. Uldeer gripped his rifle until his knuckles were white in their armoured gloves. He thought of the stars. Sun Xiao entered his daydreaming draped in the stars to accentuate her curves.
‘You can unclench, soldier,’ Bearer Turan slapped Uldeer on the shoulder. ‘We’ve landed.’
Uldeer opened his eyes and got to his feet, surprised he’d missed the landing. The ramp was down and hundreds were pouring out onto Eniron. He could breathe the air and there was little lift to his step, the moon had an atmosphere and a strong gravitational force and he wondered if shouldn’t be re-classified as a planet. Sheridan marched beside him as they stepped off the ramp and head on into enemy fire. Lucas was ahead of Uldeer and was cut down by a burst of laser fire. Uldeer dove to the ground, shoving Sheridan down too. The pair hit the chalky dirt together, a thin red mist hanging in the air overhead.
‘Find cover, now!’ Turan barked in their ears. ‘Crater, nine o’clock, regroup in ten minutes!’ Bearer Turan leapt to his feet from behind a large boulder and pegged it for the crater. A stream of laser fire from the enemy base burned through the atmosphere reducing him to a pile of ash.
Sheridan was cursing non-stop, his head buried under his hands. More ships were landing, their hulls battered by laser fire, mortars, and small rockets. Uldeer rolled onto his back to see the Pegasus in orbit, its missile bays unloading with frequent rhythm. Sun Xiao would be at her targeting computer, he hoped she could see him and help somehow. Missiles careened through the moon’s atmosphere and exploded in mid air. An ethereal ripple spread out over a dome shield that engulfed the moon base. There was little chance of piercing it, it was up to the infantry to bring it down. It was up to Uldeer. He leapt to his feet, ‘Sheridan, get up!’ he cried, and sprinted toward the crater. Laser fire flared to his left, searing his vision with streaks of red and white. He threw himself through the air and dipped beneath the lip of the crater as a red bolt streaked an inch above him. He landed with a thud in the dust. Hundreds of heavy infantry were already cowering in the crater, their Bearers organising an assault with a projection map of the base. Most of the map was merely outlines of structures rather than details. Sheridan slid down the side of the crater, a burn on his upper arm from a lucky laser bolt, he was still cursing.
‘We need to get under one hundred metres to the base, then the gatling lasers won’t be able to lock on quick enough. If Unit Fourteen offers covering fire they may even take a few out as Units One through Five assault,’ one of the Bearers of the heavy infantry was suggesting.
The other leaders nodded along eager to follow. The orders were agreed and disseminated and before Uldeer had a chance to search for his own unit and the second-in-command there was a great war cry as one hundred thickly clad soldiers charged over the top. The Fourteen climbed up to west side of the ridge and opened fire on the enemy positions.
‘What are you doing! Get up there!’ the Bearer yelled at Uldeer.
‘I’m regular, not heavy!’
‘I don’t care!’ his voice was drowned out by the burn of laser fire and the thundering rockets from the heavy infantry’s cover fire.
Uldeer understood and charged for the ridge line. He could do it, he could be the one to win the day. He’d done it on Resier and Olsa, Eniron would be no different. He emerged over the ridge. The man ahead of him took a hit to the shoulder, spun, carried on, took another, and landed in the dirt. A flare of light blinded Uldeer and he was somehow on the dirt. He lay there, staring up at the stars. Another planet, another cluster of constellations to create, another swarm of new stars to add to the charts, this time there were a couple of blood red ones and a single blue behemoth that dominated its constellation. Whatever the constellation was, he hadn’t decided yet, that blue star would be its centre piece. He coughed, speckles of red marking his visor, his breath steaming up and obscuring his view of the stars. He blinked, vision blurred, then blinked again and drifted into endless sleep. He never had finished his book of stars.
Sun Xiao studied the star charts a little larger than her hands. The stars were nothing more than pinpricks, some a little wider, some a little smaller, but there were thousands on a single sheet of thick black sketching paper. She had always mocked Uldeer for his fascination but now, staring at the result, she understood. His illustrations were like admiring space itself, all she needed to do was organise them by coordinates and thread a journey through them, one that didn’t reveal too many military secrets. Uldeer would have his book of stars, Constellations of a Soldier.
Thanks for reading!
Good story