Zac dropped down on his bed, ready to relax. Lunch was over, and, as punishment for being late for something again, he had had to help clean up the cafeteria afterwards. He had never realized how messy they all were. Now, he just wanted to relax. He wasn’t really tired, he just wanted some time to relax before he had to go take the pod out again.

      "Oh man, that was the longest hour of my life," Jax complained unhappily as he, too, threw himself down on his separate bed. He had been downstairs in the cafeteria cleaning as well.

      A pleasant silence fell in the room, and Zac became so relaxed that he was nearly asleep when an ear-splitting, headache-inducing alarm began going off. Zac and Jax jumped up, uncertain of what it was.

      "I bet its the emergency alarm!" Jax suddenly yelled, pushing his feet back into his sneakers before following bolting out the door right behind Zac.

      Zac pounded down the hallway, now sure that they were being attacked or something as people were shouting orders and relaying messages about having to get to positions. He took the flight of stairs down to the docking area three steps at a time, his boots pounding hard on the metal but being drowned out by the siren and the yells. He burst into the hangar where the fighter pods were kept, and he broke into a dead run. He could already hear the missiles and lasers that were being fired at their ship.

      He was inside the pod, the door closed, his headset on, and his hands on the controls in a matter of seconds. He was out the door of the ship even faster.

      Then, the fear that had welled up in him gave way to a weird kind of exhilaration as he got used to the feel of the pod once again. He felt almost invincible.

      Crackle. "What was that phrase you used the other day when we first got these things?" Jax asked, slightly breathlessly as they watched the huge, Avanti space craft advance and fire on them.

      Zac broke out into song. "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Need a little bit more of that 12-ounce nutrition!" **Song credits go to the Dixie Chicks**

      Jax laughed. "That was it…oh shit!"

      Zac had seen the streak of deadly light shoot out from the main Avanti ship, but hadn’t realized that it had been aimed at Jax until his friend had shouted and moved his pod out of the way. Now Zac was more alert as he began watching all around him for anything that could hurt his precious ship. Suddenly, a door on the Avanti ship opened and a wave of pod fighters came out. The pods were similar, but bigger and bulkier, and obviously not as swift and agile.

      "Stupid sons of bitches," Zac muttered as one headed straight for him. It was firing at him, but Zac was nearly ripping the joystick out of it’s socket as he dodged. He got a couple indirect hits in, but it kept coming. He remained unscathed, for the moment. Suddenly, he got a bright idea and began messing with his frequency button.

      "Hey," he said brightly. There was shocked silence.

      "Who are you?" The person on the other end asked in halted English with a bad accent that Zac didn’t recognize.

      "I’m the guy you’re shooting at," Zac replied as he licked off another shot. "I believe in Karma. Do you?"

      Suddenly, he slammed down on the button and got a direct shot in. The Avanti pod ship blew into a billion tiny pieces that went spiraling out in every direction.

      "Great shot, Hanson, but stop taunting the enemy," Tucker said through a wave of static before cutting off.

      Zac laughed under his breath before dodging out of the way of an oncoming missile . He glanced behind him, then off to the sides, and then ahead of him. He had about twenty pods on him now. They must have picked up his transmission.

      He let loose some very inventive obscenities as he wondered how he was going to get out of the way of the approaching pods. Finally, he glanced down at his feet, and, pleased to see that he could see through most of the bottom of the pod, decided to try something. He forced the joystick straight out as far as it would go towards the window, and he did a very steep, almost vertical, nosedive. He sucked in a breath as he dropped, and then pulled up slowly, coming back up in a slowly loop. He still had those pods on his tail, but at least they weren’t surrounding him.

      "Little help here?" Zac asked into the headset as he set the frequency to all. "I notice that y’all don’t have much to deal with, since they all seem to want to pick on me!"

      "Coming, coming!" A couple people replied as they began following behind the Avanti pods and shooting at them from behind.

      Taylor stood slightly behind Isaac’s console chair, staying out of the way while at the same time watching the battle outside. The infiltration squad had been told to simply stay out of the way, that they couldn’t do anything during these until a later date when they were trained for something else.

      "Which one is Zac’s?" he asked, hoping that Isaac would answer him, since he had kept quiet for as long as he could.

      "See the one with about fifty Avanti pods chasing after it, with the five or six fighter pods of ours chasing after those fifty or so Avanti pods?" Isaac asked, pointing out vaguely what he was talking about. Taylor nodded.

      "Yeah."

      "The one being chased in the very front is Zac. He smarted off to some Avanti fighter before blowing him and the ship to a billion tiny particles, and I guess the Avanti got pissed off and decided to take him out."

      Taylor sighed. ‘Damn it Zac, why do you have to go and be so…Zacish? For once just keep your mouth shut!’ he thought, though he knew it was useless. Zac didn’t think in normal, rational terms. He thought in ‘Gee, what would be fun to do today that I probably shouldn’t do because it could cause me some big trouble?’ terms. He should be used to it by now.

      Suddenly, there was a crackle across the board that stood out among all the cursing, shouting, and other exclamations. It was Zac’s voice, sounding a bit pissed.

      "No, Taylor, its your turn to do the dishes!"

      Zac was beginning to get pissed. These guys just wouldn’t leave him alone! Sure, a few were fighting the other pods, but the majority were tailgating his ass, shooting at him and doing a piss-poor job of it, because he hadn’t even been hit yet! And all because he blew one of their friends into oblivion, and asked him a simple question, albeit sarcastically, before doing it? It must be that ‘little-brother gene’ that he had that just attracted trouble to him.

      ‘A game of cat and mouse, and I’m the mouse,’ Zac thought humorously. ‘But what if I don’t wanna be the mouse? What if I wanna be the cat? Huh? Did anyone ask me?’

       Zac sighed, and, after a moment of dodging and swerving and returning a single fire, he finished his thought. ‘I think I wanna be the cat. Yeah, I wanna be the cat!’

      "No, Taylor, its your turn to do the dishes!" he yelled into the headset as he set the frequency on an unknown one that must have been an Avanti frequency. Little did he know that not only the control room on the Universal Destiny 1 heard his comment, the control panel on the main Avanti ship, along with all their pod fighters, heard it as well. It shocked them enough so that he got a couple good shots in, blew up a couple of the pod ships, and then high-tailed it out of there, dodging more oncoming lasers. He wasn’t completely suicidal.

      "Good job, Hanson, keep it up!" A voice said enthusiastically over the headset.

      "Huh? Good job? Are you insane? I’ve got fifty of these guys on my tail!" Zac shouted back as he dodged some more fire.

      "Fifty-four, to be exact, and that’s all that were left at last count. You’ve got every one of our pods in the back of the Avanti pods, shooting and blowing them up ASAP. Just be patient and keep the Avanti distracted…they’re barely even noticing our guys until they’re hit. They’re not very good communicators, or very alert, either. They’re too focused on kicking your butt to notice anything else."

      Zac let out an unhappy snort as he did another vertical nosedive. "Oh, gee, thanks."

      "Hey, we’re all in here cheering you on," the voice said with a slight tinge of humor. "Watch it!"

      Zac was thankful for that brief warning as an Avanti pod managed to cut him off somehow. He shot it before it could shoot him, but a laser from behind managed to knock the back end of his ship, and he was jolted forward as an almost electric charge went through the pod.

      "Oh, Hanson?" The voice began again.

      "WHAT!?"

      "Taylor and Isaac say to stop being so Zacish."

      Zac laughed. "But how can I be something I’m not…crap!"

      There were a few minutes of silence as he desperately dodged the Avanti missiles, doing everything he could think of to stay out of their way. He did a couple circles around the main ship, more nosedives, a circle or two around a useless UD1 pod that had been hit and was left there in the middle of space floating after another pod had rescued the fighter inside, some more nosedives, turned to fire a couple shots, and more nauseating circuits through space.

      "Keep it up, Hanson! Only about twenty more!" Tucker exclaimed excitedly.

      "Hey, what happens if I run out of gas?" Zac wondered.

      "You can’t. Its like a cohesion system. You know how water goes upwards by one molecule dragging another molecule dragging another molecule, etc?"

      "Yeah, but there has to actually be more water molecules for it to drag up!" Zac exclaimed desperately.

      "Recycle, boy, recycle. Burning fuel makes waste products that go through a brief system that changes it back to the original fuel! You won’t run out for a very long while yet!" Tucker exclaimed. "Hit that one…the one right on his tail…yeah!" he ordered in the background.

      Another well-fired Avanti laser hit his pod, knocking it to the side and knocking the air out of him. Zac cursed under his breath and turned towards the ship.

      "Forget this…I’m coming in…make sure the door’s open when I get there," he said, his voice making it clear that he wasn’t open to argument.

      "No problem, Thompkson’s working on it now. We’ve got plenty of pods to take care of the few remaining Avanti," Tucker informed him before cutting out. Zac raced towards the ship, wanting nothing more but to get out of the direct line of fire.

      He reached it in almost record time, and the door was barely open wide enough for him to get in. It began shutting behind him immediately. The door clanked shut safely, and Zac sat back in his pod, breathing heavily and trying to calm his racing heartbeat.

      "Just stay there, Hanson, until the rest come in. Just calm down and relax," Tucker advised. Then, he cleared his throat. "By the way, absolutely awesome job out there."

      "Thank you."

      **Back to present, December 1999**

      Zac took a deep breath and sat back in his chair and looked around. Everyone, including those who had been there, looked astounded.

      "I honestly don’t know how he did it," Tucker commented finally. "Even in Hollywood, you don’t seem something like that. He must have been out there a good twenty minutes dodging fire from fifty Avanti fighters, and he was only hit a max of about ten times, none of which were serious enough to cripple his craft. You never even dream of something like that!"

      "It was desperation," Zac admitted. "What else was I supposed to do but dodge it and stuff? I planned on coming home, I did."

      Diana suddenly stood up and walked over to where Zac was sitting. "Stand up," she ordered. Zac did as told and was soon towering over his mother. She hugged him tightly like she hadn’t done in a couple years. He hugged her back, and then they both sat down. Family love. Such a pleasant thing.

            **Narrative, Late October, 1999**

      ‘Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?’ Taylor wondered to himself as he crouched beside Theo and some girl named Jana that he didn’t know just inside the entrance door of an Avanti ship, the same one, in fact, that had attacked them earlier. They were hidden behind a large, empty computer console, or something to that effect, and, ACE guns in hand, ironic that the technology for which had been given to them by the Avanti only years earlier on more peaceful terms, they were determined to get what they had come for. A information cube that, once unfolded, hacked into, and brought up on a computer screen back on the UD1 would hold many secrets of the Avanti ‘empire’.

      "All right, now, we’ll go forward on my command-" Jana was saying when Theo suddenly shot her an aggravated look.

      "Jana, we are not under you command! We’ll just go when the coast is clear," he shot back, slightly bitterly. Taylor sighed and wondered how on Earth, no, wait, space, that he had gotten paired up with those two.

      "Well, somebody certainly needs to take charge, Theodore," the overly-confident eighteen year old replied. "And I, being the oldest, naturally should."

      "Are you counting chronological or maturity?" Theo said to Taylor while shooting a sly look over in Jana’s direction. She shot him an almost murderous look, prompting Taylor to jump in.

      "Look, we don’t need to be arguing with each other. Let’s forgo this pointless argument about a leader that we don’t need and just get on with it?" he suggested, rolling his eyes in frustration and fingering the trigger on the gun warningly. They took the hint and shut up.

      "Whoops, get back," Theo said, ducking back behind the console. Taylor and Jana ducked back as well as an Avanti guard passed by. The thing looked mostly human, though it was instantly obvious that it wasn’t.

      Taylor suppressed a shudder and watched as the entrance hallway cleared as the guard continued on it’s way and turned down a corner.

      "All right, let’s go," he whispered, checking the area quickly before moving across the hallway to the nearest hallway. Theo and Jana followed, just not quite as discreetly. The wall right in front of Taylor’s head was hit and blackened from a shot from an Avanti guard gun.

      "Oh fuck!" Theo shouted, doing a dive and roll out of the way and a bit down the hall. He ducked down behind a cargo box that had been carelessly left out, and, if Taylor hadn’t seen him disappear behind him, he would never have believed that Theo, who was bigger than Taylor, could have stuffed himself behind such a small box.

      Jana was taking aim on an Avanti guard who was still shooting randomly down the hall, and slowly she pulled the trigger. The shot was invisible, but the force knocked her back against the wall so hard that Taylor heard the breath get knocked from her lungs.

      "Damn," she breathed, staring at the gun in her hand with an aura of awe about her. Taylor shot her a look before taking a loose aim on the guard and letting loose with about six shots. If he hadn’t of been prepared by Jana’s experience, he, too, would have been thrown backwards with possibly fatal results.

      Theo let out some kind of war-whoop that had a slight Mid-Western, ghetto accent to it, and sounded as if he had yelled ‘Oh, now its on!’

      "Where’d the hell you learn that, boy?" Jana yelled back as she dodged across the hall to another pile of cargo boxes, ducking down to avoid the hail of fire that was aimed in the general direction of her head.

      "Indianapolis, baby!" Theo yelled back while shooting back. "Oh bloody hell!" he added as his arm was grazed by an ACE fire. Then, he let loose some extremely inventive obscenities that he had to have picked up on the west side.

      Taylor smiled a bit before doing a well-practiced tumble roll across the floor to end up landing beside Theo. The two boys smiled at each other conspiratorially as the Avanti gunfire increased, and then decreased as the Avanti missed their targets. Then, in one liquid movement, they each flipped over and, their heads barely appearing over the edge of the box, and they pulled off four shots each before disappearing and rolling in separate directions. Neither directions were good choices, for they both landed at the feet of Avanti guards. A sharp pain in his temple was all that Taylor knew before falling unconscious due to a vicious blow to the head by the butt of the Avanti gun.

      Taylor woke up only God knows how much longer, his head resting against a cold metal wall, sprawled out on a floor. There was a song, melodic and distant, though not too far, but he couldn’t place it, or even know what it was. He was staring straight at a dingy set of bunk beds, and he longed to be on the mattress instead of the hard floor, but he seemed to be drained of energy. Theo was laying on the floor near the beds, still out more than a lightbulb that had been smashed a couple times against a brick wall and then run over by a bus. Taylor groaned as the sound that he had heard when he had first woken up continued to run through his head.

      "…Me with sing and come you won’t, ABCs my know I now. Z, X, Y-"

      ‘What the hell?’ he thought. ‘Some psycho is singing their ABCs backwards!’’ He turned his head to the left and found himself staring out from behind a set of electronically charged bars that kept him in the cell. Across the hallway lit by florescent lights of above was another cell, identical in length, width, and furniture (bunk beds and a small partition behind which is a toilet and sink). There, on the bottom bunk, one girl was fast asleep, tucked underneath the coarse woolen blanket. On the top bunk another girl sat, hanging upside-down, singing the ABCs backwards without so much as a pause or hesitation. When she noticed him watching her, she smiled brightly.

      "Up you’re, good oh," she said with another bright smile as she flipped nimbly off and landed lightly on her feet. "Oh good, you’re up!"

      Taylor squinted his eyes briefly as his head continued to pound. "Uh, yeah."

      "You were out quite awhile," she replied, sitting down just before the bars on her cell. "I was kind of getting worried…been out a good twenty hour or so, you two have."

      "Hey, um, have you seen another girl…she was with us…black hair-"

      "Screaming her head off as she flew threw here trying to escape those sons of bitches we call Avanti?" she finished with a nod. "Yeah, we saw her. She got out just fine, don’t worry."

      Taylor sighed and relaxed again. At least Jana was okay…damned bitch. "Okay."

      "By the way, I’m Yarmila," she said, not seeming to notice his now uncaring tone.

      "Taylor."

      "Yeah, I know."

      A few moments of silence followed, and Taylor closed his eyes, beginning to think that maybe she’d leave him alone. Of course, that never happens when you want it to, so it didn’t.

      "What ship are you from?" she called from where she still sat by the bars of her cell.

      Without opening his eyes, Taylor answered. "The Universal Destiny One."

      "Oh." She seemed slightly disappointed that he didn’t elaborate on that point, and she, too, fell silent from across the hall. For some dumb reason, Taylor suddenly felt guilty, as if he had hurt her feelings or something. Feeling like the biggest idiot in the world, he opened his eyes and turned his head so that he could see her.

      "What ship are you from?"

      She smiled a bit at his attempt in conversation. "The Myriad."