The first wave, an army

A short story

I kissed her for the last time there, in the bay of a beaten-up starship that smelled like shit, just before the doors slid shut and we lifted off towards an unknown world. She felt like home, like everything I had ever wanted and a piece of me all at once, and now I was leaving her.

She understood. We all understood. But that didn’t make it any easier.

Fuck the corporation.

The air on the cruisers was cold and antiseptic; I heard they put something toxic in it to prevent mold from growing in dark corners. It smelled like a fucking hospital. The bunks were noisy and uncomfortable and everyone was in each other’s business, which was made ten times worse considering it was a crew of teenage girls who were fucking pissed they were there in the first place. There was no privacy; no peace. At night, sometimes, you could hear someone sobbing quietly to themselves as the rest of us tried to get to sleep. Sometimes it was me. Sometimes you heard people swearing and screaming into their pillows, punching their mattresses and kicking at the walls, and sometimes that was me, too.

Most of our parents had been sent ahead to the colonies while we finished out school in a stuffy boarding hub in orbit of the homeworld. It was safer for us here, supposedly; more to the damn point, we could grow…