Will Work for Farm

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. What they don’t say is that if you’re in a space suit with comms you can hear them just fine.

I can still hear his screams. They wander through the hallways of my subconscious and drift into my dreams. Poor Malone, he wasn’t the nicest guy or the brightest, but he was a Ranger. He was one of us. He picked up some contaminate on the planet, but no one knew about it until we got to the ship. Apparently, he stepped on some goo or at least that’s what he called it.

“Aw man I got goo on my shoes, gross.” He proceeded to wipe it off. He knew how to deal with life forms or fauna of any kind on a hostile planet, but it was just goo after all.

They wouldn’t let him enter the ship; they wouldn’t let any of us on the ship at first. The captain just couldn’t risk it, I understood but it sure was nerve racking. There we were hanging in the dark, a stone’s throw from the ship, watching our oxygen gauges go down and listening to Malone scream. His death could give the gnarliest monster nightmares. Whatever got him ate him from the inside out, while he was still alive. I’m glad I couldn’t see him, hearing him was bad enough, thanks very much. Eventually he stopped screaming, but only because the goop got to his throat. They let the rest of us back on the ship because our oxygen was getting low and put us straight into quarantine. That was great, I love quarantine showers in front of half the crew, most of whom are men, it was just peachy.

Malone just reminded me, and the rest of the Rangers, that life is short especially for a Space Ranger. We explore, we expand, and we die. Ok, that is totally not the motto of the Space Rangers, I guess his death is making my morose. Our motto is: Explore, Protect, Expand, we are the hope of humanity. Sounds awfully grandiose, right? The Space Rangers explore and catalogue colonies for the Human Territories. We also figure out the deadly stuff and protect colonists. We aren’t military we don’t fight other aliens. Despite what most books and vids tell you there are not a bunch of hostile aliens out there trying to suck out your brains or lay eggs in you. They aren’t after our colonies either, space is big. Also, our needs are specific and rare, the few species we know about have different living requirements. Mostly we leave each other alone, and that is just how the Human Territories likes it.

The Space Rangers have state of the art training that is put literally right into your brain. They push you hard to get you in shape. Which really sucked by the way. Then you go on several training runs to make sure all the information has stuck in your brain and then you’re put on a ship and sent on your way. The death rate for the Rangers is insanely high. I mean you find a planet that might be able to sustain human life, what do the Human Territories do? Throw some Rangers at it and see what happens. You would think no one would be stupid enough to volunteer for something like that but there are some perks. If you do five years in the Rangers, after training, you got some land on a colony and enough money to get started. If you saved what you made in those five years you had enough to have an even better start. If you did ten years the cash pay out was bigger and farmer wasn’t your only option, but ten years is a long time and luck runs out.

Five years, that was my plan, or at least when I went in that was the plan. That was before… well, I am getting ahead of myself. Where was I? Oh right. Why I decided that joining this insane group of people was the way to go. I lived on a small farm on an old colony, and I was happy enough. My mother died when I was young and even though my father kept on getting up every morning, he died that day too. Nothing mattered to him anymore, including his daughter. It didn’t take long for him to start reaching for booze to take the edge off, he crawled into a bottle and pretty much stayed there until he died about ten years later. He worked the farm some and young as I was, I worked it too. I figured that when he died, I would get the farm and live there, and live well, for the rest of my life. Our farm was small, but the land was good, and the colony was well established and prosperous. I’d find someone to marry, have some kids, and work the farm. Sounds pretty dull right? I was young. It sounded ok to me at the time. Honestly, I probably would have gone stir crazy and done something insane after a few years of trying to live that way… but I never got the chance to screw up my own life. My dad did that for me just fine. He died, and honestly it was hard to be sad for someone who had basically checked out ten years before, all I could think was good I don’t have to buy him booze anymore. I suppose you’re thinking that I should have cared more, he was my dad after all, flesh and blood and all that, right?

Well, daddy dearest decided to sell the deed to the farm years ago, without telling me. It was his farm until he died and then it didn’t go to his daughter, oh no, it went to the company he sold it to. The best part is he sold it for peanuts, almost nothing. He wanted more booze, they gave him more booze, and they gave him a little money. After all they didn’t get anything until he died.

There I was, hardly any money, no farm, no family. I was boned. Thanks dad. I could have worked on someone else’s farm. The jerks that bought my farm out from under me offered to make me the manager of my farm. I could work it for the rest of my life, I could even keep my house. It sounded good until I realized that I would basically be a slave on the farm that should have been mine. No thanks. I was sitting in the one bar in our town feeling miserable telling the bar tender, who I’d known all my life, what a scum-bucket my father was. Then the guy next to me told me that if I wanted a farm and was willing to work for it I could do it in five years. He was a Ranger. No idea what he was doing in that place, but there he was and there I was and that is the story of how I became a Space Ranger.

They are always looking for members, they train you, feed you, clothe you and all that. All you have to do is show up. I showed up, managed to live through the training and planned on getting out after five years, eyes on the prize cadet. I wanted that miserly pay out and that little parcel of land. They always put Rangers on new colonies where there might be a bit more danger than your average colony, that would have saved me from the boredom and life would have been good.

I had less than a year to go. I had, so far, beaten the odds. I hadn’t been eaten on some random planet, or lost in space, or crippled, or, well you get the picture. I had dodged all the dangers that a Ranger can run in to. I had hardly spent a credit since I signed up, and any chance I got, I was in the library reading about different farming techniques. I was good to go. On track. Eyes on the prize.

That is, until we got to Deyga, the newest candidate for colonization for the Human Territories. The first step was sending the Rangers there and I was one of those Rangers. That is where I found out that there was a darkness coming for our galaxy and I was supposed to stop it from happening.