Here's the first submission for round 4.

Stranded

Tom J. Ferguson

 

  Sometimes I think that being the only Beriskevic female deep space fighter pilot is great. It sets me apart from the crowd. Just getting the position was a great feat in and of itself. I mean, where I’m from on the planet Beriskev, women do a lot of stuff, but I’m the only one who flies fighters. It was only by a fluke that I got the position. See, the Navy is skeptical about letting women enlist, simply because there are so many men that join, and we go into deep space in warships. A woman’s privacy is all but nonexistent, and that only leads to problems. So, typically, women don’t enlist in the Navy or Army. There are lots of women in the First Response Defense Patrol though. The FRDP is a branch of the military, however, they never go any farther than the edge of the farthest moon’s orbit. They are strictly a defensive force. The FRDP is where I got my start. I have been flying all my life. I started flight school when I was five, at my own request. Most little girls want to learn ballet, or horseback riding, or acting school, or singing. Stuff like that. Not me. I’ve never been comfortable as long as my feet were on the ground for as long as I could remember. So, I asked my parents if I could take flight lessons when I was little. I was a natural right from the very beginning. Flight controls come to me easier than walking or talking.
  When I was eighteen, I enlisted in the FRDP as a fighter pilot. I already knew how to fly- so it wasn’t hard to learn combat maneuvers, and I took to it naturally. I became the best pilot in the FRDP in a matter of months. So, naturally, when the Remissian attack came, I tore up their squadrons. I had already established a reputation by that time, and though I stayed right with my squadron, I still got more kills than the rest of them combined. The Remissians surprised us, but we still held them off. During the fight, and Navy Admiral on shore leave ended up in the FRDP Flight Control room, and he saw first hand what my skills were like. He recruited me personally, and asked me to fly with the Alpha Squadron of his flagship. Me fly in an Alpha Squadron? A nineteen year old girl only out of Combat Flight School for a few months, and they wanted me to fly in a Navy Combat Fleet’s most advanced, best skilled squadron? Wow, what an honor. Of course, I said yes. I would be flying with the Fifteenth Tactical Fleet in the Beriskev Navy’s oldest, and most reputable combat fleet. The Fifteenth is where every Navy crewman wants to be. The best of the best. The Fifteenth Fleet was one of fifteen formed for the Beriskev Navy during our revolution fifty years ago. Before that, we were just an outlaying colony of Earth, the only human settlement in the Andromeda Galaxy. We were so far away that Earth didn’t bother with us, until we formed our own government that is. Then suddenly, they were right there to remind us who was boss. After two hundred years of nothing from them, no supplies, no funds, no contact whatsoever but to replace the governor as needed, we decided to form our own government. Suddenly Earth remembered that we exist. We beat them after ten long years of war, and fourteen of our fleets were completely annihilated. We suffered ninety percent casualties in our army through the whole war, but somehow we won. Now we are facing an enemy that hates our guts for who knows what reason. The Remissians are the plague of the Andromeda Galaxy. If one person looks at one Remissian the wrong way, the Remissians will try to wipe out that person’s entire race. So, of course, when our Prime Minister told the Remissians that they can’t mine on our moons without the proper permits, they got really ticked and attacked. That’s when the Admiral found me. Now, two years later, at the age of twenty-one, I am still the only female fighter pilot in the Navy. And, it is quite an accomplishment. It can get a little depressing being the only woman in the Navy, especially when I’m deployed. I have no other girls to talk to. The guys all pretty much give me what  I want- having a woman aboard the ship is a luxury for them- or so they thought right at first. Then they found out that I don’t date every guy that I see, and then I was just part of the crew, just another lieutenant from one of their squadrons. And then we get to the first of the Remissian colonies, and the fight starts. My entire squadron gets blown away, and I am left to fend of twelve Remissian fighters alone. Okay, I am a great pilot, but even I am not that good. I shot down six of them, and retreated into the low atmosphere where I could use the abundant magnetic fields of this planet to keep them from getting a missile lock on me. And that’s when I found out that their fighters didn’t have that problem with their missiles. Yeah. I found out the hard way.
“Great, Miena, great. Now you gotta sit here behind this big, red, iron rich boulder until the rescue team finds you,” I muttered to myself.
I don’t get what the value of this planet is, the only mineral it’s got is iron, and it is very abundant in it. Useless stuff anyway. Weakest metal in the Andromeda galaxy right there.