Dramatis Personae: Capt. John (Ericson) Vidja

Coulter Dark Claw

So...um I just look…yeah…um…ok got it. Sit…? There…? Got it.

Hello my name is James Vidja. I am a Captain in the United States Air Force, though I guess in traditional Air Force terms I'm a Colonel. With the Star Ship Fleet, The Air Force was convinced by the Navy that they should use Navy ranks aboard these craft. So they did. I’m thirty-five years old, seventy-four inches tall and one hundred ninety three pounds. Pure muscle all of it. My life’s not been easy and it’s about to become even harder. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 1, 2033. My mother died during childbirth and my father looked at me as the demon who took his wife away. Or that’s how I imagine that he did, for what other reason would you leave your only son at an orphanage.

Anyways I lived at that orphanage for the first eighteen years of my life. I’d tried to get adopted, but no one wanted me—I had much anger in me. Anyways, the day I turned eighteen was the day that I left the orphanage and on that day I walked to an Air Force recruiter and started the process to join the military for a four year commitment. I met the requirements or got the necessary waivers filled and went in as a hover drone mechanic. Basic was difficult and made me understand why it was that the military always thought of themselves as the cream of the crop. Tech school made my head ache and we had homework every night. It was hardly the worst thing that I suffered through in my life. I never knew my parents, I never got to be a normal kid. My life was full of what-ifs, whys and how-comes, but the military gave me family. For the first time in my life I felt something akin to love. At the very least it was comradery. During tech school, though was when I figured out in actuality that I was gay. I mean, yeah I’d occasionally try and spot the other boys in the bathroom when they were taking showers, but I hadn’t really put much thought into it.

For me being gay wasn’t really a bad thing. I mean it meant nothing to me at the time. As homophobia had made its way out of politics in the 2020s when The Definition of Marriage Act properly stated that marriage was a legally binding companionship between two people that constituted the upmost form of commitment a human could make to another human. But the military is dead-set in ritual and tradition and many haven’t gone away. Gays in the military were a huge deal and when Obama dropped the “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.” Policy it became obvious that the government didn’t care. Still though I feared coming out to any in my flight.

It was during my time in tech school where I got the tattoo you see here on my right torso on the ribs. I got it to honor my first love, a Japanese-American boy with a taste for Vietnamese/American blend cuisine and absolutely loved ph?

So after the four years and achieving the rank of Airman First Class I used the G.I. Bill to go to the college of my choice and went into the Xenobiology program at UC Berkley and graduated in four. I went to the recruiter the day after graduation and asked what I had to do to become an officer. We then set up the Paperwork for me to go to OCS and I went back into the military. After going through OCS and signing up as a science officer I awaited assignment. When I saw the location I freaked. Luna AFB. The base was on the moon approximately three hundred miles away from the Apollo 17 landing site. It was six months after reporting to my assignment that the news reached Luna, The USS Enterprise Starship had been destroyed outside orbit of a class M planet around 24 light years from earth. We had to act. It was then I was assigned the command of a scouting vessel, The USS Tiger Woods. She was a football field and a half long and forty yards wide. She was a beaut if I’m being honest. The ship was equipped with the latest ‘FTL’ drives and ion-propulsion-based ‘impulse’ drives.

The war was bloody. I still have nightmares. Loxians scared me the most. The leonid therians were rumored to eat humans whole. The problem was that we were underprepared for a war against a far-superior race such as the Vinjerans. So of course it was a massacre. Twenty of twenty-five ships lost that went into the campaign, to only ten ships of three hundred For Vinjera. Yeah, we only had fifty ships capable of warp at the time of the campaign. And half of those were still in ‘dry dock’ for another year and a half. And now with the war over, I await marriage to one of the generals against whom I fought. Ugh. Can’t wait.