• Still half asleep, Kairen gets up and struggles passed the news plates and JayDee, who just rests on the couch doing nothing. Kairen walks himself to te fridge in search of some water only to discover that there are no more capsules.

    "JayDee, why do you always have to drink up all the water? You know that there's a shortage and my job doesn't pay enough to buying more every single week."

    "How do you know it wasn't me?" JayDee replied with a stupid look while rubbing his eyes fighting to stay awake. "How do you know it wasn't one of the drones?"

    "'Cause drones don't need water...they don't need food moron. " Kairen walks himself over to the closet to get his work clothes for clean-up. "You know this stuff isn't cheap and my job doesn't pay enough to keep buying another set of capsules every single week. You should get up and go find a job so you can buy your own water." Kairen quickly got dressed observing the activities by the drones outside through the window.

    "I have a job already: watching this dump of yours."

    "The drones do all the work while you just sit there doing nothing but wasting the last of the good air that we've got to breathe." Kairen activates his suit and a high whirring sound virates through the small shack and his mask glows a bright blue. "Well, anyway, I gotta get goin. Take care of the drones."

    As Kairen makes his way out the blast doors, JayDee shouts to him, "Don't forget to get more water on your way back. Careful out there K-man, the radioactivity has been a little spikey since the last launch of that new armada fleet!"



    Kairen was out the door and on his way to the nuclear pit with his white suit, satellite wrist monitor and a power brush. On the way to the cleaning site, he tags along with Uroku, Kisuke, and Mr. Orihama. Since they all worked at the same cleaning site, they were pretty close friends and all had the same dream: getting out to deep space and off this wretched planet.

    "So how's our little space pilot doing?" Mr. Orihama asks with a smile on his face.

    "Classes are almost over and the istructor says I'll get far as soon as the files are complete with transfer. But I don't think I'll get anywhere cause the dude sounded a little shaky. Then he went into the backroom after getting a call and it sounded like they were abandoning the space flight project."

    As Kairen said all this, the smiles from his friends quickly disappeared.

    "They can't abandon it now! There are way too many people who have dedicated their lives to getting into the military and gettig off this planet. WE have worked too hard to get kicked aside now! This can't be true." Kisuke showed strong emotion as he yelled at Kairen and staring him down like a dog.

    "Don't worry," says Uroku, "I'm sure it's just talk from the imperials. They always have something to say.

    "Here's the thing though," Kairen began, "I heard the headmaster saying that if the project was abandoned, there are only a select few who will be chosen to be the crew of the Vandread Shuttle, which of course is the confederates new battleship that just got off the assembly line." His friends, still staring through their masks bumped into the outer shell of the cleaning site. "But I could've misheard."

    "Why do you always do this, build suspense for us? We're much too stressed to hold anymore of this nonsense, Kairen."

    Sorry, but I couldn't help it. Let's just get to work and then we can tak about the new ship.

    As they reach the sanitation section of the site, a large shadow was looming over the cleaning site and was gettng bigger and bigger.

    [to be continued next time]

    sorry if it's a little skippy, don't have too much time online