Draco scribbled over where his age was written. Just an extra curve and the 16 was turned into an 18. The clirk never even noticed. He was inn. Starship cadet Draco.
The red haired boy struggled to contain his glee and nervousness. The forgery had been so easy. So simple. His heart raced. He was finally getting off wold! He would get to see stars! Real ones, not just pictures.
He looked longingly up at the sky. Thick smog draped ever present over the night. They say that in ancient times people used to be able to see the stars from the surface with the naked eye. Jewels glittering across the heavens, too numerous to count. One group of them were even his namesake. The draco construction.
Humanity had long since moved out across the cosmos using ships full of chriogenicly frozen people. Faster than light travel was still not possible, so it could take decades to get to even nearby colonies. But it was all worth it. The Earth had nothing left going for it. A dead plannet stripped of basically all resources and polluted into a wasteland. Draco wanted more to life. And he wanted it now. That's why he'd forged his documents.
Faking his age let him leave years earlier. And switching around those sertificates earlier made the system assume he had completed his training. This let him skip the tests. Only a small percentage of applicants got accepted. He'd had to cheat to be sure. And it had all worked out. Or so he'd assumed.
"Cadette!" barked a Sargent out of nowhere, making Draco almost jump out of his new, slightly oversized uniform. He quickly fumbled a solout. Thankfully the Sargent was too distracted with his check list to notice.
"Beginning preflight procedures. Check the chrio- fuel purity." With the distracted, but determined man there, Draco had to improvise and fake his compliance. If he was caught now, he'd be banned from space flight for life.
Draco did his best, but with no training and no clue, he had no idea what he was doing. Fortunately, someone else screwed up a mech suit docking and the Sargent had someone else to berate. By the time he returned, Draco was packing up, pretending that all had checked out.
The time was finally ready. Boarding. The starship itself was too huge to enter the atmosphere. Instead, Draco and about 100 others, were sent up by shuttle ships.
Experiencing zero gravity made Draco want to dance and spin in summersaults and play. But he had to act like a professional. Everyone else seemed so greaceful compared to Draco's untrained movements. This was only a problem for the central area of the ship though. The majority of the ship lay in the spinning ring around the engines. There'd be plenty of artificial gravity if needed.
Draco's chriogenic stasus pod was identical to all others. It resembled a reclining couch chair set inside a diagonal tube. Or maybe a dentist chair and bathtub combined. As soon as Draco got in, a glass door closed over it, sealing Draco inside.
The strange teal colored chriogenic fluid he'd "inspected" began to fill the pod. It wasn't cold. People in suspended animation didn't actually need to freeze. It was more like keeping something preserved in fermaldahide. Though less lethal or stinky. This stuff was like a soft jellow. And soon it filled the chamber, and Draco was unconscious and un-aging for the remainder of the trip.