Fishing. Why did it have to be fishing? If the shirts had been overly aggressive about anything else, it wouldn't have been bad. Yet there were painful and beautiful memories attached to those shirts, memories of a simpler and lost time, memories which she would rather keep buried. On the other end of the cell, across from her bunk, the pile of shirts' taglines mocked her silently. DUMB BASS, one called her. At least, she could swear it was making fun of her. She pondered her life's choices and she sure felt like a bit of a dumb bass.
As she tried to force herself to sleep, she found a memory creeping at the edge of her consciousness, and she found herself on the water, the harmonious sway of a boat's hull beneath her feet, a bright eyed child of fourteen years old.
The stars were bright that night, and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky.
The mid-sized fishing boat sat moored off a small collection of islands on the southern coast of the Union of Atlantic States, a last stop before hitting the open waters of the northern Atlantic. The waves, subtle reminders of the mighty ocean beyond the archipelago, rocked the hull gently back and forth, though that didn't bother the man lying on the deck, staring up at the twinkling lightscape and taking in the sound of the summer wind and the mercifully calm waters.
The door to the cabin slid open, and a young girl in a red sweatshirt sat down next to the man. She had known him for as long as she could remember simply as 'Uncle Brian', though they weren't related— a fact that was painfully clear by appearances alone. Her father, she remembered, told her that she had saved Uncle Brian's life from a heart attack as a paramedic, and that after he had been discharged from the hospital he had found the paramedic that had saved his life, on the wishes of his son, so that he could thank him personally. They had discovered their apartments were on the same block, and their children at the same middle school— and eventually, family friendship became family.
She, too, joined him, her sight fixed on the stars. "H...hey, Uncle Brian. I… couldn't sleep."
"Tonight's not a bad night to lose a few hours," the man said, the subtle hint of his Oceanian origins slipping through his adopted East Coast accent. "Clearest I've seen it in a long time. What's on your mind, Nicole?" He turned his gaze to his adopted niece. "Bad dream? Don't like the way the boat rocks?"
"No," she replied, her vision fixed on the heavens above. "I just wanted to see them from something wider than the window in the roof."
He chuckled. "I get that, I get that."
The constellations danced across the deep blue overhead as the boat gently swayed in the waves. Nicole traced her vision across them, using her finger to piece together the ones she could remember off the top of her head.
"They're different back where I'm from, you know."
"Yeah, below the Equator, right?"
"Mhmm. Back in Oceania." He tucked his hands under his head. "Beautiful country. Wonderful people. I want you to see it someday, the way it should be. Not the way it is," he said.
She seemed more fixated on the stars. "I wanna go up to space one day. Be an astronaut, like the real famous ones on TV when the space shuttle launches." She beamed. "But you gotta be a pilot or a scientist first. And I wanna be a great pilot like you. So are you gonna tell me another story? I need to know everything about flying."
He sighed, chuckling. "Oh, I see what you're really out here for. You want more of Uncle Brian's war stories, don't you?"
"N-no."
He stared at her.
"Ugh… yeah, I do, Uncle Brian. But I want to look at the skies too."
"Lemme think up a good one to tell you," he said. "Nothing too scary. It's past your bedtime, and your mother will have my neck if I spook you."
"Ooh, ooh, what about one with your buddy?"
"You always do love the Larry stories, don't you?" Brian chuckled. "I think you two would get along well."
"What happened to him? I wanna meet him." She looked at her uncle with wide eyes.
"He had to… go somewhere else, Nicole, when we went into hiding. The Federation made us split up. One day."
"That's really mean of the Federation. Forcing friends apart. Dad never said the Federation ever did anything like that."
"Let's just say there's a reason I don't tend to talk politics with your old man," Brian smirked. "Keep this between us like usual, remember?"
"Okay!" She nodded. "I'm good at keeping secrets."
"That's right, you and Josh are good at keeping secrets. Y'know, I don't actually think I've told him this story. It's about Larry's craziest fight, and about fighting airships."
"Woah…" Nicole's jaw dropped. "You guys fought airships?"
"Yeah. And we won." Brian smirked. "So one day, right, we were helping friendly planes evacuate an airbase. The Feds threw a whole aerial fleet at us— lead by a carrier, with a few destroyers— but the base's squadron managed to whittle it down to a few escorts and a carrier by the time it was our turn to fight."
"That must have been a really big fight." She was trying to imagine it, the missiles and the tracers flying across the skies of an imagined Oceanian outback afternoon. She couldn't. "So there must have been like… a hundred missiles in the air!"
Brian chuckled. "Felt like a little more than a hundred, Nic. They sure were some fireworks."
"Yeah… if fireworks killed people."
"Anyway, we show up and get into the fray, right, and there's just the carrier and its escorts, but the friendlies had gotten so badly chipped away that it was all they needed. So Larry and I focus on taking it out." He held his hand out like a plane. "We zoomed off and got in real close." He held up his other hand, a stand-in for a Littoria-class air carrier. "Larry was focusing on keeping the fighters off my tail while I took out the airship's defenses— close-in defense guns and air-to-air missile launchers, right?— and eventually, right, I've picked them all off. It's just a matter of getting enough firepower on target— and it takes a lot— to take it down… and I look over to see what Larry is doing, and he's got a F/S-15 stuck on his tail. You remember those, right? Agile Eagles, we called 'em. And we were just in regular Eagles."
"Yeah, I remember! The ones with the canards." She loved to learn about planes, rockets, ships— anything mechanical, and Brian had happily taught her much of what he knew to at least a basic level. "Those ones look cool."
"Yeah, canards and thrust vectoring— y'know, the thing where the engines can move the nozzle? Anyway," Brian shook his head. "They're not so cool when you're staring one down in a knife fight."
"So what did Larry do? He went into hiding like you, so he couldn't have died there."
"You're right, he didn't die there." A knowing smile. "He lived there, in pretty spectacular fashion if I do say so myself. The man pulled off the craziest maneuver kill I've ever seen."
"What's a maneuver kill?" Nicole raised an eyebrow.
"It's when you win a dogfight not by blowing the other guy up, but by getting them to crash."
"Huh. That's neat. But I thought pilots were trained not to crash?"
"It's not exactly easy to maneuver kill someone."
"So how did Larry do it?" Nicole scooted up closer to Brian in anticipation of hearing the end of the story, watching him diagram the battle with his hands.
"The most genius way, or dumbest way, I've ever seen." Brian slammed his hands into each other. "He flew through the airship."
"He did what? How?!" Nicole jumped up to her feet. "That's crazy!"
"Yeah, no kidding! You remember when I showed you all the different classes of airship? The Littoria has a gap in its wings. Larry flew right through that, and pulled up. He managed to get the guy following him to slip up, and he slammed into the airship's wings. Took out a wing on the airship, too, and that wound up crashing— Larry got credit for killing the airship too."
"Woah." The young girl sat down, stunned. "That's really cool."
Brian turned his attention once more to the stars. "Sure was."
"I wanna fly like that one day." She stared at the sky, longingly. "Then I'm gonna be the greatest astronaut ever. I'm gonna go to Mars."
Brian was silent, staring into the stars. "If you're really as dead set on being a pilot as you always say, I guess I can't stop you. But I hope you don't have war stories when you're my age."
"Why not? They sound cool, Uncle B."
"They're not cool, Nic. War's awful. I just haven't told you about the terrifying, horrible, brutal bits because I want to protect you from them. You're fourteen, for God's sake." He shook his head. "One day, you'll understand. But if you ever do fly combat, promise me something." He sat up, turning to face her with an outstretched pinky.
"Alright, Uncle Brian."
"That you'll never fly for the Federation. Can you promise me that? That you'll use your place in the skies for good."
"I promise. Pinky swear." She smiled. Adults didn't usually pinky swear, so this had to be important.
The mercenary smiled. "Now, let's take in the stars."
They fell asleep on the deck, smiles on their face and eyes turned skywards.
She couldn't sleep in the bunk, a pained scowl on her face and teary eyes turned cellwards.
As they fell down her face, she wiped the tears away by burying her head into her pillow and screaming. He was right to cut me out of his life. I broke that promise to chase glory. I betrayed him. That's who I am, right? A liar. A traitor. I've betrayed everyone who's ever trusted me. She sobbed and shrieked into the pillow. That's not who I want to be. But do I even know how to be someone better?
She stared at the velcro Cascadian flag patch on her flight suit, a fresh addition. A symbol of what could be a fresh start. A chance to change.
I don't know if I know how to be better. But I'll figure it out.