I was about to speak, but he cut me off. “And you don’t need to say anything modest or conciliatory or anything like that. I know I’m outgunned. I mean, just freaking look at you: A mug like that. Effortlessly charismatic. Racing up the scoring charts. While I have this long, professorial kind of face.” He traced his cheek with his index finger. “I need time to win girls over, which by the looks of it is something I’ve suddenly run short on. It’s taken me a year to get half of where you’ve gotten in a couple weeks. Tells you that it would probably be best for everyone if I called it quits.”
He leaned back and stretched out his arms, his hands blue, glowing from the track lights of a nearby L cruiser replica. “But love rarely does what’s best for everyone. When I first met her, I thought . . . I thought that it would impress her if I made sergeant. I know, I know—she doesn’t buy into all the political bullshit, bless her heart, but still, at least subconsciously I thought it would help. It didn’t. I’d almost convinced Whistler to make me his chosen lieutenant when I figured out my promotion was actually hurting me. I’ve been backpedaling ever since, but I can’t seem to get rid of these.” He pointed to his collar stripes again. “At least they get me into the Ship Room . . . after hours. And considering it was—is my dream to command one of them someday, or a whole fleet, God willing, maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Just to let you know, this whole conversation seems like a weird attempt to rattle me. You do recognize that, don’t you?”
He rolled his lower lip over his upper lip and shrugged. “I just like getting things out in the open so we don’t mistake each other’s motives. Everything—this table, that ship, you, me—it’s all just cells. Nothing more. Meaning only comes from our own perceptions and a lot of people here like to perceive the worst.”
“So now it’s your turn,” said Simon, raising his eyebrows a little.
“My turn to what?” I asked.
“Get your cards out on the table.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Hey, if you want to spill your guts, fine. I’ll listen, but I never said I’d spill mine.”
He put his hand over his mouth, sizing me up, amused. “How about an easy one. What branch of the Fleet do you want to serve in?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Oh, come on. I’m sure you have to have some idea. No one flings the Corinth die without at least an idea of the roll they want. That’s all risk, no reward.”
“Sometimes the risk is the reward,” I said shortly.
“No, no, we’ve got plenty of real gamblers here, so don’t play that with me. Try again.”
“I suppose the Exploration Corps,” I said, although this was the first time I’d even thought about it.
Simon nodded. “Yeah, I could see that. But I guess I had you pegged as more of a Diplomatic Corps kind of guy.”
“I’ve already been in three fights since I got here; I’d hardly say that I’m cut out to—”
“That’s exactly what it takes to be a diplomat. Just how many concessions do you think you’re going to win from the opposition if they know you’re too squeamish to pick up a Pegasus rifle? You have to be a credible threat.”
“My mom was in the Diplomatic Corps and she wasn’t like that at all. She made D4 envoy. Negotiated trade relations with the Carolevengians, peace with the Entroposites, got the Traolono—”
“Yeah, but D4, exactly. I’m talking D7, D8. I’m talking being a real player.”
“That depends on your definition of a ‘real player.’”
“Admiral Sheffield: real player. Admiral Kerr: real player. Caelus Erik: soon-to-be real player.”
“And those people impress you?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter if they impress me, it matters if they impress other people. Or better yet, get them to do what they want. And by the looks of it, so far, so good.”
“But is that who you actually want to be?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m still trying to figure that out,” said Simon as he removed a couple of cigars from the box in the center of the table. “Want one?”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Neither do I, really. Or at least I didn’t. But it’s kind of the thing to do here. In the ‘Ship Room.’” He made air quotes. “Officers and gentlemen only. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, right?”
At first I’d found all of this to be a strange, uncomfortable breach of decorum. I mean, who goes out of his way to hang out with someone who likes the same girl as he does? But the more Simon talked, the less it appeared like an attempt to get under my skin; he seemed to be acting more out of a sense of old-school chivalry. An honor-among-rivals kind of thing.
He was bitter and sarcastic, but it was a sincere sarcasm that made me think he just liked calling things what they were—telling the truth as a form of therapy. And he seemed like he needed it, because accompanying the congeniality there was sadness seated just beneath nearly every word he said.
“Knock yourself out. I’m good.”
“Aaron, Aaron, you should work on your soft skills. When someone offers you something customary, you take it. It’s good social practice. People like dealing with people who are similar to them, and partaking in the same ritual makes you more similar. It builds trust.”
“You’re the one who said Diplomatic Corps, not me.”
“But, buddy, can’t you see? It’s all the Diplomatic Corps. Exploration Corps: Diplomatic Corps. Economic Corps: Diplomatic Corps. Even the Combat Corps . . . Diplomatic Corps. Kicking in the heads of the people below you and sucking the dicks of the people above you. Same everywhere. I’m not saying I like it, I’m not saying I’m even going to do it, I’m just saying.”
“It’s not worth lung cancer.”
“I thought you adventurous Exploration types don’t really worry about hypothetical, far-in-the-future diseases that we’ll probably have a cure for by the time it matters to them.”
“We haven’t cured it in thousands of years,” I said. “What makes you think we will in the next forty?”
“Cause of the pressure the Verex are putting on the Fleet to lift research restrictions. It’s one thing handicapping yourself if there’s no chance you could lose, but that’s not so certain anymore. People are grumbling. Hans Mylan would have been grumbling, too, if he’d realized how they’d repurpose his invention. I mean the guy figured out a way to communicate telepathically with his deaf son, and then his chip was used to keep anyone from ever doing something that innovative again.”
“With good reason.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said.
“I had a professor who used to say, ‘You can pick what you invent, but you can’t pick who uses it.’”
“Sounds like a killjoy.”
“He was—is—but he managed to have a pretty good time at it,” I said, imagining Professor Dalton puffing a cigar of his own. I don’t think we quite realized it until our second year, but we were really lucky to have someone of his caliber teaching us as mere high school students. Rumor was that a breakthrough thesis he’d written as a postdoc had gotten him flagged as a political dissident, which now precluded him from publishing research or being able to hold faculty posts at research universities. It all sounded pretty bad, and you definitely got the sense that it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about.
Simon gave me a funny look. “You seem to have a little trouble with your tenses. Where are you from?”
“Mars.”
“And they speak Confederation English there, don’t they?”
“Yeah. It’s just that home seems so far away that I can’t help . . .” I trailed off. And then, eager to change the subject before he continued down that path, I asked, “But what about you? What branch of the ‘Diplomatic Corps’”—I made air quotes—“do you want to be in?”
“Logistics. All of the real all-stars are tripping over each other to go into Combat or Exploration, but given the quiet influence that Logistics has,
you benefit from what some economists would call a pricing inefficiency.”
“Is that a good enough reason to pick a career? Just because you think there’s a pricing inefficiency?”
Simon laughed. “That does make me sound a little like a spiritually empty opportunist when put in those terms. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I really care about yet, and I think it’s when you know you don’t know that you start letting matters of terrain dictate matters of direction. It’s not good, but that’s the way it is when you’re forced to make the decision when you’re, what? Seventeen? Eighteen? How old are we? I’m losing track of time.”
“So you’re just guessing?” I asked.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Guessing wrong so far.”
“It can go that way. I do think I’d like logistics, though. I’ve got a nose for efficiency and order and all that sexy stuff; but then again, I just might have to do Science Corps.”
“Why?”
“To follow Eve, obviously. You’re going to have an awfully tough time hanging on to her exploring halfway across the galaxy.”
He said it genially, but some things sting no matter how you say them. “That’s assuming we’ve beaten the Verex by then. If not, you, me, she, everybody—we’ll all be on the Rim,” I replied.
Simon puffed out a long billow of smoke and grinned. “I like to think of myself as an optimist.”
Chapter 33
“Fine morning for some mineral surveying, no?” asked Daries as he strolled through the shuttle bay doors. The rest of us were already there, waiting for the pilot. “We get to keep what we find, don’t we, Mr. Katz?”
“This is a mission of scientific inquiry, not a mining operation, Cadet Maxwell,” the instructor responded.
“Those two seem to get confused where I’m from, sir. Things that get surveyed don’t tend to stay in the ground for very long.”
A few minutes after we boarded, an alarm sounded, red-flashing lights checkered the ceiling, and the outside main door began to creak open. Like the rest of the station, the bay walls were white and spotless, and most of the hoses and maintenance equipment were coiled and tucked away so the deck’s surface looked stark. Next to us, separated by a thick, transparent wall, was an identical bay with another row of three shuttles, polished and sleek, pushing up through the white floor.
“Why are the bays sealed off from each other like that?” I asked.
“So they can keep doing maintenance on the other shuttles while we take off,” Mr. Katz explained. “Modular means flexible.”
As our ship the Pulsar’s thrusters engaged and a larger part of the station entered our vision, I saw there were more of the two-pronged bays jutting out from the Inner Ring like the teeth of a gear, interspersed between larger hangars for the bigger freighters. Beyond them there were scaffolding, blowtorches, and the formation of something thin and needle-like pricking the blackness.
I was going to ask, but Daries beat me to it. “What are they makin’ out there?” He smudged his index finger against the plate glass, flexing it.
“An extra habitation section from what I understand, since we’re going to need more of you fine folks out on the Rim,” said Mr. Katz, with a strange enough expression that I couldn’t make out if he was being sincere or not. He was nice, devoid of the mean streak fashionable here, but a bit off, too; pausing and starting, betraying the gap between what seemed to come naturally to him and what he thought an instructor should say. I probably wouldn’t have noticed before, but ever since Caelus had confronted me in the locker room I’d been watching people more closely. Studying their faces. Scrutinizing their eyes. Seeing if their movements matched their words, and if their words matched their previous words. There was so much to listen for. Before, in conversation, I used to think about what I was going to say next while the other person was talking, but it was amazing how much you missed when you did that.
“I reckon that thing looks more like an array than a new wing,” said Daries.
“Probably both. Ever since the Verex hopped planets again to Vega Ten, the brass have been more mindful of outpost’s defensive capabilities.”
“We’re still the closest space station to the Rim, aren’t we?” asked Simon.
The question was unnerving. Just the mention of the Verex was enough to animate the images that had been burned into my head during the tie-ins. I’d thought the one we’d done on the first day was some type of one-off thing meant to help us grasp the Rim War’s ferocity, but when they kept having us do them every week I became less sure what they were after. They were all lurid and ghastly—terrifying me more than I’d ever been before—and at some point that kind of fear is debilitating. It paralyzes. And to think that we were closest was even more paralyzing still. It did make me believe, though, that given the proximity Eve was probably right about the scientists being here to synthesize the latest iterations of the antidote, and all science classes were mostly shams to give the scientists an excuse for coming since technically their Mylan Chips should’ve prevented them from making it.
“Yes, but close is relative in space, and seeing as we’re still several systems away, I wouldn’t let that keep you up too late.”
“Awfully kind of you to think of us, Mr. Katz, but I’ve grown quite fond of my nightmares. Great target practice.” Daries made his fingers into pistols and fired them into the darkness.
“I remember Dr. Mitchell saying that construction’s been nearly nonstop for years now. Since planets don’t get to have their own fleets anymore, the command schools are pretty much the only game in town for their military. So, it makes sense they’d pour a lot into them.”
“Good old Dr. Mitch—too bad we don’t see more of him,” said Simon.
“Yeah, what’s with all those meetings? Does every lesson plan need to go through some kinda committee or something?” asked Daries.
“That’s a question probably best addressed to him.”
“Oh come on there, Mr. Katz. No need for coyness. We’re all friends here,” said Daries. “What’s the worst they can do to you? Cut back your fake steak rations? Turn down the thermostat in your quarters a few degrees?”
Eve, Simon, and I exchanged glances.
“We won’t tell on you, I swear. We’ll be quiet as little church mice.”
“That’ll be all, Mr. Maxwell,” said Mr. Katz, half-amused.
Daries had a way of inflecting his drawl depending on his audience, and he was really playing it up here. Making Mr. Katz think that they were just bantering, that he was just one of the guys—which was smart, because it didn’t look like Mr. Katz had ever before been “one of the guys.” Daries seemed well aware that his biceps and wrestler’s frame invited a certain size-up and dismissal as a meathead, an image he initially conformed to. But then later, after everyone stopped paying attention, a new dimension emerged. He was trying to get information just as hard as I was.
There was a crackling over the loudspeaker and then the pilot’s voice came on. “We’re about thirty seconds from entering the asteroid’s gravitational field. Please secure all loose items and make sure you’re buckled in.”
“Seeing that the Explorer unit can only accommodate three people, I will be taking you down in groups of two,” Mr. Katz explained as soon as the intercom went quiet. “Eve and Simon, once we’re in orbit why don’t you suit up first.”
“Sir, that would normally be fine,” said Daries, “but seeing how Simon and I have a bet with those two over who can collect the shiniest rocks, I respectfully request that you allow us that pairing. After all, this is a station that values intra-team competition.”
Mr. Katz was preoccupied, typing something into a lightpanel. “You can divide how you want.”
“That’s swell of you, Mr. Katz. Mighty swell of you.”
Simon shot Daries a hard glance that quickly transformed into something more helpless, looking as if his number had come up but suddenly the roll had been altered. I could te
ll by the way he brought his hand to his face, veiling and massaging, before brandishing a forced smile that he was doing everything he could to keep from saying something bitter and small. I felt badly, but Eve’s feelings toward him were out of my control.
“Mr. Katz, what’s the failure rate for the atmospheric suits?” asked Simon, shifting his body towards the instructor.
“Something around one incident per thirteen thousand hours, condition-dependent of course. It’s not experience if there are no stakes, as they say.”
“That’s what I told Commander Marquardt when I tried to get them to raise the safety thresholds in the Boxes,” said Daries. “It’s like going into battle wearing a condom.”
“I’ll bet,” said Mr. Katz, turning to look at Daries. “But as much as I’d like to keep chatting with you, Mr. Maxwell, it’s time for us to head down. And I expect you to be on your best behavior while we’re away.”
“Scout’s honor,” replied Daries with a smirk.
I hadn’t been that nervous in the Challenges or when confronting Taryn in the cafeteria, but I’d never done a spacewalk before, and the knowledge that I’d be going down with Eve made me stammer and fade in and out of awareness, catching only pieces of her conversation with Mr. Katz. The floor wobbled as we exited the passenger cabin and entered a short corridor, the lumen in the lights reacting with my altered state, coating everything in a surreal blue shimmer. The hollowness in my chest, the shortness of breath, the grasping for words. Now that it was happening to me, all my trivialization of others’ descriptions was pushed away, as if I were the only one in all the worlds who’d ever felt like this.
“Okay, atmospheric suits are on our right, so let’s slip in, zip up, and run under the beam to make sure we’re one hundred percent pressurized. This isn’t the kind of place where you want the fabric to do any breathing,” Mr. Katz joked as we arrived in the equipment room in front of the airlock.
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