In the years following the downfall of the Realm and the formation of the Federation, the First Betelgeuse Corps. were known as the 'Blasters', since it was they that blasted the controllers of the Realm. They were the fiercest, rowdiest bunch of ruffians ever to have been brought out of any planet as an 'army'. No-one dared cross them, not even other soldiers of the Fed.; in war and peace they made their own rules about death. They always got the dirtiest jobs as a result, such as fighting the best soldiers and cyborgs in the Realm to get to the controllers and blast them. The other fact about them is that they are the unhappiest people that you could ever meet.
To say that they are inhuman is wrong. They are, to my mind, ten times the human that I, for example, shall ever be. Nesta values them even higher, if that is possible. I am sure that, id Nesta could be made into a normal human (Caffrin forbid!), she would rush off, just as Sampa did many years ago, and join up. But with a difference. Nesta, by virtue of the fact that we know all that Sampa does now about the 'Blasters', would be aware of the changes that her life would undergo. Sampa had marched in as an ignorant teenager and came out again sadder, wiser, changed.
We first met Sampa on Betelgeuse VI where she was guarding a quarantine hospital.
'Passes,' she said, dispassionately. We were not ignorant of the reputation of the blasters, so I took our passes out of my pocket.
'She should carry her own pass,' said the stolid soldierette, face and emotion hidden behind her featureless helmet.
'Where? I have no pockets,' Nesta replied for herself. She still wore her traditional Darran clothing, though she had started wearing boots. I could not remember a time when she had worn anything else; well, standard issue is useless for her, considering her mutation. I simply passed through before the blaster could knock my head off. The Betelgeuse Blasters respected no rank bar their own. This behelmeted, armoured Blaster was looking impatient, so I thought. As if you could see feelings through that helmet.
'F127179?' Nesta was noting from the soldierettes' badge, embossed on her breastplate. 'Don't you have a proper name?' I fully expected to see F127179 pound Nesta into a befeathered pulp. I reckoned without the soldierettes' own feelings.
'It is Sampa,' she replied in a surprisingly happy tone.
'Sampa,' Nesta mused, hopping a little on the spot, not noticing the effect that it had on the soldierette. 'I'm known as Nesta.' (She always said that, rather than naming herself as Nesta. It is a Darran custom that only close friends to address a mate by her proper name.) It surprised me to hear Sampa laughing. Nesta hopped in, smiling in a puzzled way.
'What's wrong with her?' I asked. Nesta simply shrugged.
'Whatever it is,' and I guessed that, with a name like Sampa's, it was Nesta's everlasting lisp at the root of the joke, 'it made her laugh. She needed it.' How did Nesta know?
We could not leave the hospital until the quarantine was lifted. It was just Crosatis, a discomforting illness which causes weakness, loss of appetite, a marked watering of the eyes (hence the nickname 'Weepers' disease' or 'Weepies') and mild hallucinations. No-one died of it; I could not see how anyone could, so we left as soon as the quarantine lifted with hardly a sweat worked up. I do not know, and Nesta certainly did not, who the soldier was that guarded the entrance as we left, but it was not Sampa.
We got to the ship and, while Nesta busied herself in the galley, I had a good soak; and it was then that Sampa visited us.
'Hello,' she called, and Nesta answered. I finished up, drained and cleaned the bath, dressed, shaved, then went down to the galley.
'Look what Sampa made, Apha!' Nesta said eagerly, showing off her new jumpsuit. It was rather similar to standard issue, but with a shaped hole in the back secured at the top by a couple of buttons, tied at the waist with a standard belt. It fitted perfectly, but I did not find that too surprising. Blasters have an inordinate amount of 'pull' in the computer regions, with access to all but really secret files, so a quick check in personnel would be easy enough for Sampa.
Sampa herself looked the same as when we had met her. Her body was armoured, as I mentioned briefly before, with rather angular looking, light-weight but indestructible alloy plates, coated with plastic of a muddy green colour. Most of these are moulded on at induction, so we found by our own methods, but the helmet, gloves and pelvic plates can be removed. Their appearance, however, leads many to think of them as robots or a variation on the war cyborg. This, however, is merely ignorance talking (as Cherra Cormaidi used to say). The helmet reduces the voice to a metallic rasp, almost totally devoid of emotion, but humanity lurks behind it.
Sampa removed her helmet by twisting it slightly and pulling. To our amazement, Sampa was only in her teens. That menacing soldierette that was so frightening to us (or me, at least) when we first met was but a girl! I felt supremely silly. Her hair was mouse-brown and her skin was also browned, suggesting an old Terran mix, since most Altairans are, by heredity or otherwise, white and pale (the sun radiation is at root of that); her eyes were grey-green and had no malice in them as you might expect of a member of the most feared army in the Fed. She also removed her blaster units to reveal her hands; permanently coated in black plastic but slim and neat - just right for fiddly work. Unhindered by the helmet, Sampa's voice rang clear and rich, a few tones lower than Nesta's high voice.
We stayed on for another week - well, no sense wasting time in space travel when you do not know where you are supposed to go next, and Sampa came over whenever she was off duty.
We learned more of the Blasters through data retrieval than through Sampa. Whenever we quizzed her on the Blasters, she merely said one thing before changing the subject: 'If you love your life, do not join the Blasters.' However, as data retrieval supplied all the information that we could wish for, we did not quiz Sampa too often. We knew about the armouring of a Blaster; the black plasticised 'skin' which kept out all kinds of radiation; the green alloy layer which was proof against lasers, percussive bullets and shells, most blasters - in fact, a Blaster could survive an attack that could knock out a cruiser permanently. From what we found, this is the last thing that a soldier receives, permanently bonded to his or her body, before training. It seems that they are partial cyborgs; not in the old sense, as with the old war cyborgs. Every member joins voluntarily and all are screened for mental and physical defects before they are considered. If accepted, the transformation is complete in a month (Terran standard) and training is of a years' duration.
The cybornetic side of a Blaster is the way in which the skeleton of the soldier is strengthened by moulded struts of the same material used for the armour. The transition period is a painful one but, once the body is chemically modified, all discomfort is relieved. The chemical modification is two-fold. The first is an injection given after the cyborg skeleton has been installed, before the armour is fitted, which increases the soldiers' self-healing capabilities far beyond normal, increases immune systems and temporarily increases the soldiers' strength by about twenty times. It also causes irreversible sterility. The maintenance of the soldiers' strength is the second phase, done by means of an orally administered compound. This compound preserves the effects of the first injection, prevents the rejection of the skeleton and depresses any thoughts of self-destruction or suicide. A soldier bereft of this compound (known colloquially as 'Boost') would, in time, cause the soldier to revert to their original state. The immediate effect would be paralysis, arthritis and (eventually) death from internal bleeding due to the rejection of the skeleton. It is through the 'Boost', which must be regularly taken by all Blasters, that the loyalty of the Blasters is held (Do as you are told or face the consequence...)
Nesta had been reading that when Sampa had come to see us for the last time, shortly before we were to leave. She removed her helmet and read, face sad.
'All true, Nesta. It's no life in the Blasters, always hungry for the next dose.'
'Could you recover from Boost starvation if your armour and cybornetics were removed?' asked Nesta.
'Unlikely that you could use surgery on me,' Sampa replied. 'The idea of all this armour is to keep us from getting hurt by lasers and stuff. I doubt a surgeons' knife would even make a mark on me.'
Nesta looked keenly at the sad face of the girl.
'Nesta,' Sampa added, earnestly, 'don't join us. If you ever see anyone that wants to, tell them all you know. The public image is vague, and they take too many recruits because of that. I should know.'
'My name is Fenerra,' Nesta said, slowly. 'Please call me that.'
'I know,' Sampa said. 'I read Apha's first report on Darra. Thanks, anyway, Fenerra.'
It had been a hard tour of duty. Three years on, and I had almost forgotten Sampa as the ship glided down to the rebuilt Darran spaceport. Cherra was waiting - she was coming with us on the next tour. Tapping one white feathered foot; imitating one of my habits, the cheeky brat!
We hugged and talked, then I walked alone to the village while Nesta and Cherra flew above me, blue and white, chattering all the time. Who needed birds here, with all the noise made by my brood? As I walked, I thought, gazing up at my wife and daughter, and completely failed to notice that I was about to walk into an FBC soldier, and one of the Blasters to boot! Crump!
'I'm sorry; I wasn't looking where I was going,' I stammered.
'Neither was I.'
So far from Betelgeuse - F127129? That rang a bell.
'Sampa?' And off came the helmet to reveal Sampa, grinning.
'Don't hug him, Sampa,' Nesta called from above us. 'I want some husband left!'
I cannot remember the last time when Fenerra dropped out of the sky so fast...