Space Cadets

By Adam Moon

Two hundred years ago, aliens came to earth. They abducted millions of people and then told the rest that they were going to evaluate humanity over the course of the next several hundred years. If the earthlings didn't measure up to their standards, they'd be back to eliminate them.
So guess what humanity has done since then?
They geared up for war.

Jack Peterson is a cadet training in Mars' orbit, trying to graduate from the academy. When his class goes on a field trip to a warship, events unfold that will change his life forever.
Onboard the warship his conscious mind is transferred to an A.C.E mechanized combat unit and a battle for survival begins as he tests the limits of his new mechanical body. He is now a super soldier and combat training just got real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Moon
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386568063

Adam Moon

Adam Moon was born in California, grew up in Scotland, and currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and two young sons. His oldest son wants to grow up to be the first American President who is a space-ninja sniper-robot from the future. His youngest son likes to punch things and say bad words. His long suffering wife just wants some peace and quiet for a change. Adam writes science fiction and horror. You can visit his website at: www.moonwrites.com

Book preview

Table of contents:

First Contact

First contact with an alien race didn’t go the way people had hoped. It sucked, really. I wasn’t even born yet when they arrived in Earth's orbit. Neither were my grandparents.

At first they did nothing. They just circled and watched.

Then, just as our ancestors started to get really frightened, they opened dialogue with some world leaders. What they had to say was even scarier than when they just observed us silently. They told humanity that it would be evaluated over the course of the next several hundred years. They said that if we weren’t up to their standards, whatever they were, we would be wiped out. Then somewhere between one and three million people simply vanished from the face of the Earth and the alien spaceship disappeared. We’re pretty sure now that those people were abducted. We think they were taken to be experimented on, but there’s no way to be sure.

That was over two hundred years ago.

Guess what humanity did in that time—we prepared for their return.

The nations united and space travel became more than just a fad or a means of discovery; it became our only hope of preventing our own doom. You see, we knew we’d fail their test, whatever it was, and we weren’t about to just roll over and let them kill us all.

The space program started out slowly but all our resources went into it, and now we’ve got our space legs firmly under us.

––––––––

My name is Jack Peterson, and I was a cadet at Deep Training Camp 87. I wasn’t a very good student, but that’s partly because I didn’t choose to be there. I was an orphan from birth, so it was the equivalent of a foster home for me, all paid for with tax money. I wasn't ungrateful, but it wasn’t much fun. The instructors were strict and I saw over a dozen fellow cadets die during training.

I looked forward to turning eighteen. That’s when I’d get to serve a ship. I couldn’t wait to get out of that dump.

Deep Camp 87 was in orbit around Mars. We’d gone landside that summer but it was nowhere near as much fun as any of us thought it would be.

I lost four close friends to Mars. They burned to death upon entry when they screwed up their spacewalk. No one mentioned it during the days following. It was too common an occurrence to fuss over.

Orphans got stuck with Mars. The enlisted and the elite got Earth orbit. That meant they got to go home every once in a while.

Convicts and lowlifes got Jupiter. Jupiter sucked. A lot of those guys got cancer later in life. They say if you fall into Jupiter you’ll fall for days before you hit anything solid. Of course you’d be long dead by then. The sun looks like a star from that far out. I hear that fact alone causes space madness. The instructors told us space madness was a myth, but there was anger and sadness in their voices when they said it, so I had my doubts.

I had the most spacewalks of any other active cadet. It didn’t mean much but it made me proud. The air thrusters sucked on the suits, though. I tried to tell new arrivals to never find themselves in a situation where they needed to rely on thrusters during a walk, because by the time they used them it’d already be too late. They were too weak. No one listened to me though, so screw ‘em.

Weapons training was my favorite class but the instructor hated my guts. She was pretty too, so that sucked. Her name was Mrs. Salazar and she was probably only a couple years older than me. She’d been there about a year, and was pretty critical of the way I carried myself. She said I got carried away and then my aim went to shit. I couldn’t help myself. I loved firing my PQ5000. It had regular physical projectiles that could turn an alien into Swiss cheese, and Poppers that’d take a chunk of hull out of a ship. My favorite attachment was the Zipper (we had nicknames for just about everything), an energy buster that’d put your insides out. Some of us called victims of Zippers Picassos because of what their fluids did to the walls behind them.

We only got to fire off our Zippers outside the camp. I always wanted to use one in atmosphere and actually hear what it sounded like.

They brought us some animals one month, goats and such. We used them for close quarters training. They looked like red pincushions by the time we were done with them. I don’t like to stab and slash defenseless animals, but if we refused, the instructors beat and starved us until we did what needed to be done. Danny refused to wash his knife afterwards because he said the blood gave it power, and Stacy Jones licked hers while locking the other students in an uncomfortable stare. I took a hot shower afterwards and my knife got rinsed.

I hate to admit that I kind of enjoyed the next thing we did with the animals, but they were already dead so it’s not that big a deal. We launched them out the airlock and then we all got to stand at the rails and shoot them with Zippers and Sizzlers. My aim was much better under those conditions. In fact, it was sort of legendary. I’d been asked by a couple of other students to bow out just so my fellows could get a chance at a hit. Mrs. Salazar seemed pleased that I took a step back and let them. I think she thought it showed character, seeing she knew how much I enjoyed it.

Teleportation

We got to board a real life warship one day, captained by Jonathan Hitchcock. I’d never heard of him, but the instructors told us he was one of the greats.

I was pretty scared. We all knew we’d need to teleport, but none of us were happy about it. There were just too many old horror stories about teleportation.

You get into a stasis pod but you don’t get cryo-frozen right away. Your thought processes are ghosted and then converted into pure energy and transferred as quantum packets across space to a receiver. So, your essence, as it were, travels instantly to a point elsewhere in space, leaving your body behind. A side effect of the ghosting process is that your brains stop transmitting electrical signals. Death occurs rather quickly if left that way. So before your real, fleshy body dies, they locked it up in a deep freeze.

Your thought patterns then get transferred to a kind of biomechanical super soldier suit on board the distant ship. The suits are called A.C.E., which is an acronym for Automated Combat Equipment, but we usually just called them skins or suits. They were made to look kind of humanoid, at least in the face, so nobody freaks the hell out when they look in the mirror after transfer. The last thing anyone wanted was for the soldiers to lose sight of the fact that they were human. I heard it took time to adjust, but I figured I’d find out for myself when the time came.

The reasons to be afraid of teleportation are almost too many to list. It’s instantaneous, meaning thought bundles don’t just go faster than the speed of light, they ignore its limitations altogether. Once in a while, the quantum bundles get to their destination so jumbled the transfer can’t take place, and since the screwy packets can’t be returned, your body basically gets put out of its misery and your quantum soul just dissipates into the ether.

One time, an entire cryo-facility lost power for almost an hour before it got restored. That resulted in four thousand men and women dying. Of course, they’re still alive ... kind of. They just have to keep the suits forever because there’s no way for them to go back to their real bodies. An interesting aside is that they were all officially pronounced dead. From that we learned a human mind in a suit does not officially constitute life to the bureaucrats in charge of such things.