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Outer Space Adventure Saga, Chapter 1

Griffin's confidence began to waver. He had been searching for hours, and still hadn't turned up anything he could use to escape.  The stars glittered above and the planet glowed from far below. It was so quiet he could hear his heart beating behind the sound of his breath.  The communicator was off, there was no one he wanted to talk to. He checked his oxygen gauge. Half-empty, with no refills. Just another day in paradise. No going back now.  There had to be ship that still had a spare tank intact out here somewhere. Griffin tried not to pay attention to the fact that he was floating in zero-gravity one hundred and fifty miles above the surface of the planet, and that absolutely no one knew where he was.  It wasn't how he'd originally envisioned his sixteenth birthday.

His escape plan had been simple, if a bit insane: make a surprise exit out of an airlock, use only the EVA suit's jets to drop down to the junk belt, use scrap parts to bring one of the derelict ships up to working order, and forever escape the Xenith system and the military life to which his father had exiled him and his brothers.  Phase one had gone swimmingly.  Griffin couldn't help but smile as he remembered the speechless shock on the face of the alien pilot when he had suddenly stepped out of the hold in a fully loaded excursion suit and activated the airlock controls. They were in transit between his father's flagship, the Vazanthia and one of the slightly less colossal warships, where he was bound for his first day of servitude. Hundreds of miles of empty space surrounded them in all directions, but Griffin didn't care. Let them all think he'd lost his mind. Not even once in the last six years had he intended to do what they'd expected of him.  He pried the homing beacon out of the helmet, and tossed it to the floor before popping the outer door.  Without the beacon, the only way to find him would be to actually look out of a window. As far as anyone was concerned, he was lost in space.

Lozan, Axar, and Griffin were 17, 14, and 10 years old when they were sent away from the only world they had ever known.  It was the same day their mother was laid to rest in its soil.  Their father's eyes, normally so full of fire, were empty that day.  After the services, he gestured to one of his aides, not looking up as his sons were escorted away to the waiting shuttle.  Griffin had not seen The Great Lord Zeskin since that day, and his confusion and pain had long since compressed and hardened into a tight black ball of rage.  He didn't care where he ended up, as long as it was far away from home.

The golden green glow of his estranged homeworld glinted from cast off bits of metal and glass, and made the orbital junk yard glitter before him like a string of jewels hanging in space. The burnt out titanium of a massive intrastellar engine drifted perilously close to his head. He recognized the model from the technical manuals he'd been reading for the last six years. He thumbed his backpack thrusters gently to maneuver to the side and grabbed on to the edge of the technological ruin.  A small metal disc detached from his belt with a twist, and a thin silver cable trailed from his suit as he attached the magnet and tethered himself to the side of the engine.  It was an from an older ship, he knew, based on the pulse amplifier technology of the Cantonius deep space vessels. A small amount of energy flows from the core and is recycled through the system, building up to a disproportionately large amount of power. If he was lucky, this would just be his first stop on his way out of the system.

Griff unzipped the pouch he had strapped to his leg. The various tools clipped inside had been borrowed or stolen from Vazanthia's multitude of hangars over a long period of time. He could still see the massive flagship, though it was incredibly far away.  It had been his home for almost half of his life, but not by choice. He turned back to the work at hand.  If-No, when he found a craft that was spaceworthy, he'd have to give it a jump start. There would be an auxiliary core inside the derelict engine, hopefully too small to have been worth the effort of removal for the salvage crews that disposed of unwanted parts. It would be more than enough for what Griffin needed to power the life support and engines of a small vessel. He had to climb halfway into the opening he had made before he could reach the core cartridge.  The tiny indicator lights showed the remaining charge.  He smiled. The core was almost entirely energized. The materials inside would be pumping out energy for another hundred years at least, if he played his cards right. He scanned the area again before jetting off down the ring of debris that hung in orbit, waiting to drop into the atmosphere and be burned away. All of the military's refuse was dumped here, from the enclosed but somehow still disgusting human waste disposal pods to malfunctioning parts and even retired spacecraft.  A blip on the scanner made him drop down amidst a particularly cluttered area of space.  At first, he couldn't see where the energy reading was coming from, then a slowly spinning training drone drifted out of the way and he saw it.  A true thing of beauty in the dark void, a softly glowing green light...

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NOTE:  My first couple of stabs at this story went off track, but I am enjoying it nonetheless, so expect more of this story to unfold here, a little bit at a time.  For now, I will call each segment I publish here a new chapter, but at some point I may go back and consolidate them into a larger, more cohesive unit.  For now, patience please!

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