Jose slammed the door of his house, stomped up the stairs, and dropped his backpack on the floor before throwing himself into his bed. He buried his face in his pillow and screamed as hard as he could, then broke down into giant, hiccuping sobs that wracked his entire body.
“Why? Why? Why, why, why, why, whywhywhywhy...” he sobbed, slamming his fists into the mattress for emphasis.
Someone knocked on his bedroom door and he turned his pimpled face to the side and screamed, “GO AWAY!” Then he buried his face back into his pillow and continued sobbing, but wordlessly this time.
He thought back to earlier in the day, when he was standing in line in the cafeteria to pick up his subsidized “poor people lunch” when the starting pitcher of their school baseball team sat down at the table next to where he was standing in line and loudly laughed about his name. The pitcher’s belief was that Jose was named after expensive tequila because his parents were dirt poor and couldn’t afford any, and it was all Jose’s fault for wasting all of their money.
Jose had clenched his fists hard enough to leave white fingernail imprints in the skin of his palms as the pitcher continued chatting and laughing with his friends, one of the spirit squad dance team members hanging off of his neck.
He finally got his food tray and was walking back to find an empty seat when he stumbled over the outstretched leg of another of his bullies. His severe acne, braces, and short, weak stature definitely hadn’t qualified him to join the popular crowd, so he could only join their target list. High school was just that brutal.
More knocking came at his bedroom door, followed by his mother’s muffled voice asking if he was okay. The concern was audible, even through the door, so he invited her in.
“Mom, why did you name me Jose Cuervo? We aren’t even Mexican!” he sniffled.
His mother, Katrina, laughed and said, “Well, your father was a bartender and I was a cocktail waitress at the bar he worked at.” She wrapped her arm around Jose’s shoulders and pulled him into her embrace. “And we were young, dumb, and full of cum. We fell in love with each other almost within minutes of meeting, and later that week, we fooled around in the back seat of his car. When I found out I was pregnant...” she ruffled her son’s hair, “we panicked! But it was never about the pregnancy, since we already knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. Instead, we were panicking over what to name you!” She grinned.
“So we went back and forth for a few days, thinking up names, and finally settled on naming you after something that reminded us of what brought us together. A shitty little dive bar brought you into our lives, but ‘The Pink Pussycat’ doesn’t really scream name material. So we figured we would name you after the first drink someone ordered that night and you ended up being Jose Cuervo. If you were a girl, you’d be Midori. And count yourself lucky, brat,” she giggled, “because we almost named you Pontiac Sunfire, for the car you were conceived in!”
“MOOOOMMMM! TMI!” Jose screeched, going beet red in the face....
......
[Coast phase complete. Prepare for unpowered entry.]
Corporal Cuervo woke up to the neutral tone of the VI in his coffin. He hated cold coasting; he always had truly weird, vivid dreams when his implants put him into hibernation. It wasn’t a unique affliction, either, as nearly every reaper trainee had the same issue with their hibernation state. It seemed like it put them into such a deep sleep that their brains dredged up the most deeply buried memories and replayed them in high definition with full surround sound audio.
(Ed note: “Cold coasting” is a relatively uncommon(ish) term in some science fiction novels that refers to the act of coasting unpowered through a star system to avoid detection by technologically advanced civilizations. In this novel, we’ll be using it for the same thing, stealthily inserting forces onto planets or into star systems that are populated by hostiles.)
The coffin heated up around him as it skipped across the outer layer of hellworld A-2485239/JS’ atmosphere. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, checked his internal storage and implant supply levels of combat drugs and other assorted pharmaceuticals, doublechecked the swords in his hands, then asked, “ETA to landfall?”
[Approximately eight minutes, corporal.]
The reaper trainee settled back into the impact cushions, or “crash pads” as they were called, and closed his eyes, delving into the quantum microcomputer in his brain. He took a few seconds going through file name after file name, then finally found what he was looking for: the video letter his mother and stepfather had recorded for him when the ARES recruiters contacted them to ask for one. A standard procedure in the recruitment process was to ask for video letters from loved ones for the troopers to play.
Ever since his father had died in a bar brawl where his parents had both worked, Jose and his mother had grown closer and closer. At first it was by necessity; they were the only two people left in their family after his father’s passing and they had to rely on each other. But later, it was because they had developed a truly deep, healthy affection for each other. To Jose, Katrina Jones was the absolute best mother on the planet. And to Katrina, Jose Cuervo was the absolute best son she could ever have asked for.
Katrina had remarried later, but the bond between the mother and son pair was never severed, or even damaged. Jose’s new dad, Dave, had made sure to respect his wife and step-son, and had been the first person to encourage him and teach him to stand up for himself, his family, and his beliefs.
Jose and Katrina both considered their lives better for the presence of the new man in it, both then and now.
......
Seven minutes and fifty-three seconds later, Corporal Cuervo’s coffin came crashing to the ground and the lid popped off. Impact gel flowed out of the pod, followed by a reaper. Hellworld A-2485239/JS was about to be introduced to one of humanity’s most finely tuned and improved killing machines.
