Chapter 27 (Vanguard, Alice Jones)

Alice looked into the gulf of hyperspace and clutched her Vanguard insignia. The swirling clouds always looked the same, even if they'd traveled quite a distance from the city they'd left. Nevertheless, Alice was sure they were close to their destination and she felt excited.

As she looked at her Vanguard insignia, circled by a green band, she knew that her task was almost complete. It was only a matter of returning all the messages from the facility to pass the test and be promoted to the next stage. But she was focused on the bonus prize. If she could be the first one back, she'd win a large amount of credits.

During the job selection process, Alice had used her quick mathematic skills to calculate the shortest travel time against all the others. Since it wasn't posted on the messages, she had to calculate that from the coordinates posted. She was sure it was part of the test, and she was sure her rival Allan would have selected the longest and easiest route.

However, as she daydreamed on what to spend the money on, Samuel said. "Alice, according to the computer readouts, we're at the jump point."

"At last! You know how long I've been staring at the same swirling clouds? It's making me dizzy."

"What happened to the, 'ho, I can do anything' attitude?"

Alice grew annoyed. She scrunched her nose and deliberately ignored her partner. Still, out of the corner of her eye, she caught his boyish smile.

He does have his uses, Alice thought, but before she could think about it further, she was pulled towards the matter at hand.

"Primary booster accelerator is online and functioning at eighty percent." said Samuel.

"Good, just remember that the pulse input must not reach the primary's booster function level..." She hesitated for a moment. "You know the mess it would cause if the calculations were off."

"Yes I know," replied Samuel, "What a mess that would be. Do you remember the last incident?"

Incident. Yes, Alice remembered the incident well. Back in the days, when the Vanguards were first starting out, Alice's father liked to tinker with new and exciting ships, making them move faster and harder to catch.

She had always assumed that her father was a thrill seeker and wanted to show off to all the other clan members. But on his maiden voyage with his first craft, the pulse charge was off and it superseded the booster function. His vessel exploded, leaving her father floating in space with failing life support and a puncture in his suit.

Luckily he had been rescued, but he hadn't been lucky enough to escape a broken back that could have been repaired back on Earth. With Earth destroyed, however, there were no facilities to repair the damage. Alice had to spend the rest of her childhood taking care of her father. Her mother had died during a Minbari raid on Babylon Three and her father perished several years later due to health problems.

She'd joined the Vanguard group later that year to be with a family and was soon paired with Samuel. Together they slowly learned what it took to be Vanguards.

Their first introduction had been a shy and slow start. Alice was slowly recovering from her father's death, the man she'd grown to adore. Her father's disability had been something she fought long and hard to overcome and his death made it that much harder. She closed herself away from the rest of the universe until she met Samuel.

Samuel was a fun and outgoing person with all the energy bubbling to the surface. His humorous side was something Alice was not in the mood for and at first, she often dismissed his kind words and help.

As the training progressed, his constant cheery attitude began to grow on her, although there were still a few times when she wanted to throttle the guy. However, she was scared to develop a bond with anyone, because of the ordeal she had suffered through with her father.

Once she was promoted from beginner to fledgling, things really took off.

She hadn't known why a Vanguard needed another person, but as her training progressed, she'd learned the reason. It was required that two Vanguards pilot a vessel in hyperspace, with the exception of a select flew. Telepaths possessed certain skills that computers simply couldn't handle.

She recalled her old teacher, Maverick. He was a strong-minded individual who would drill the importance of teamwork into his students. His motto 'never fly alone' was something he'd learned from past experience. He'd never explained what that past was, but Alice had assumed that it had something to do with a previous solo flight.

Most of his lessons had focused on flying the van-ships and controlling the onboard systems.

The most important onboard device was the Vanguard module. The small black cubicle device had a huge storage capacity and was used to store the locations and grid patterns of every city, eddy stream and dangerous location. There was a complicated method to removing the Module, something only a Vanguard knew. Simply removing them from the reader would destroy the device completely, a lesson Alice knew all too well. To her embarrassment, she burned fifteen modules before learning the routine.

Next had come the tedious task of learning the hyperspace storms and eddy currents. The paperwork and books she had to learn turned her desk into a landfill and she still forgot chunks of it. But her module and help from her companion saw her through the basic tests to where she stood today.

Although she was close to Samuel, she never considered him romantically. First he wasn't her type, and she never bothered herself with such nonsense. It would only complicate things and Alice liked to keep herself to herself.

That didn't mean no one was interested in her. She'd had her fair share of romantic requests and confessions from many young lads who would hide in the shadows, waiting for their moment. But to all of them, she'd offered a shy smile and made her excuses.

But times had moved on and the final stage of her training came. This was her moment of truth; a way to finally validate her life and do something that would make her father proud. She knew that her mother and father were watching her.

A voice nudged her out of her thoughts. "Alice, are you okay?"

She glanced at her controls and replied, as if she'd just woken from a deep sleep. "Yes I'm okay, just thinking about how I got here."

Samuel shuffled around in his cockpit and smiled. "It was hard times, yes?"

Alice shrugged the comment off and then got down to business. "I'm deploying the jumping node. Are all the systems ready?"

"All systems ready Alice. We can jump."

"Okay, let's see what this complex has to offer."