Content with my inspection, I eased myself into the flyer and settled into the gel-cushion. With a sigh, the flyer sealed itself. I waited, knowing that as my flyer sealed, a ready light had appeared on the pilot's board; and that as soon as all the lights from this chamber were lit, we would be ready to proceed with the mission.

Unlike the colony ships, transports such as the one we were currently chambered in were stark and bare in their interiors, devoid of anything not absolutely vital to the mission. This left me with little to meditate on as I waited. Almost against my wishes, my thoughts turned toward the mission we were about to embark upon. My reluctance to think about the mission did not spring from a reluctance to fight or a fear for my personal safety. I am a Tzen. However, I personally find the concept of genocide distasteful.

Finally the flex-walls, both the one my flyer was affixed to and the one across the chamber, trembled and began to move. The mission was about to begin. Slowly they straightened, changing the parabola-cross-sectioned shape of the room into a high, narrow rectangle. The flyers on my wall were now neatly interspaced with those on the far wall. The net result was to stack us like bombs in a rack, poised and ready to drop.

As our flight team made their final preparations, we knew that the chambers on either side of us would be spreading their walls, taking advantage of the space vacated by our walls to ease the loading of its flyers. As I have said, there is no wasted space on a transport.

The floor of the chamber opened beneath me. As the bottom flyer in the stack, I had an unobstructed view of the depths below. I experienced a moment of vertigo as I looked down at the patch of darkness. We are not an aerial species.

Then I was in a free-fall. There was no jerk of release; I was just suddenly falling. Although I normally avoid stating opinions as fact, this is not a pleasant sensation.