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our rooms. Balizar did take the time to tell me
that he was assigning my personal training to Banner as he didn’t
really feel anyone lower in the ranks would be able to teach me
anything considering my scores in my training classes.
    Life abroad the Astra quickly settled into a
comfortable, and busy, routine. My schedule on regular days was
twelve on, twelve off. That's 'off regular duty', not 'off duty'.
Six of those hours were for extra duties, such as the one hour a
day Balizar required me to practice my combat training with the
regular security troops and sometimes he had me penned in for the
whole six! Or work on maintenance details, or supplement the
technical department, or whatever. Then there was my usual workout
time in the gym, plus an hour three times a week working with
Banner on my hand to hand combat skills. Needless to say everybody
was kept pretty busy, though on Sundays, duty was normally pretty
slack. Probably why the monthly Clan meetings were always held late
on Saturdays.
    I didn't get to see as much of the Ship as I
would have liked to during that first month, I was just too busy
fitting in. I did get intimately familiar with the shuttle deck of
course and the gyms as well. The Gyms were an interesting affair,
they were actually multi-purpose rooms and only one of them was of
any size really. The rest were smaller affairs located wherever the
designers had felt there was wasted space. So they had some odd
floor patterns and were scattered around the ship, so finding
workout space wasn’t very difficult.
    I did get to take Herza up on the challenge
that Banner had made for me. She benched three twenty on sheer grit
and will. I was impressed; I didn’t think she’d be able to do more
than two eighty. I sat down then and benched four hundred,
twice.
    “Show off,” she grumbled but I noticed she
looked at me a bit differently than she had before.
    I smiled back, “Don’t feel bad, I used to
work out with a tiger who regularly benched seven hundred, used to
make me feel like a weakling.”
    “Yeah but people expect that of them, they’re
all bulk and no stamina.”
    I nodded, “Yeah that was the only thing I
could usually beat him in, stamina tests.”
    “You know I could use a workout partner,” she
said, “interested?”
    I nodded, “Sure, I haven’t found one yet.”
Then I added with a grin, “especially a cute one who can
powerlift.”
    “And who can kick your ass across the room,”
She smiled back.
    “Well, I’ll have to work on that I
guess.”
    “Let’s go hit the showers and get lunch.”
    I nodded, “Sounds good.”
    We got cleaned up and headed down to the
mess. The mess was pretty much like messes everywhere, a large room
with a moving wall, tables and a food service line. The only really
difference here was that the tables were attached to the floor, and
the food service area could be quickly secured as well. While loss
of gravity was rare in space, you still had to take precautions.
The mess was also one of the few places on the ship where they had
tried to disguise the fact that we were onboard a ship, a few fake
windows looking out onto some landscapes, a few plants, and a faint
background of nature sounds. It wasn't the greatest attempt, but at
least they had tried.
     
    Herza and I started to make a regular
practice of working out a few times a week together. We ended up
sparring a lot of course, nothing conditions as well as actually
fighting. She didn’t try to teach me anything really, not wanting
to interfere with the stuff Banner was working on with me, but
sparring with her was always educational and I always learned
something from it. Eventually I hoped to stop her from beating me
all the time as well.
    I did get to spend quite a bit of time with
Mist and Katrine as well, though that was more of a social affair.
Dating onboard a ship isn’t the easiest thing, and the only free
time I really had was my rack time. So I missed a lot of sleep, but
the