Nix turned around, looked at her and his ears turned a bright red.
“Uh, hi,” he said.
Dothin turned, smiled. His eyes went from Ashla to Nix and his smile went wider. “What say we go and get some breakfast?”
He turned, and started for the galley. Nix stood there for a minute, smiling at Ashla. He turned to look for Dothin, saw he was a few steps ahead, chuckled and then turned to catch up.
Ashla followed as well.
The galley had a few others inside. Ashla tried to remember their names. Jac Lanjer was there, sitting at the table and eating noodles with a pair of chop sticks out of a bowl and looking up at the wall screen, which was playing some kind of news feed Ashla didn’t recognize.
The engineer girl was there, Nat, sipping coffee and staring at a tablet standing on the table. As Ashla and the boys stepped in she lifted her link and started talking to someone she called “Fish.”
Ganyasu was there staring at a tablet of his own while a plate of food sat cooling before him.
Dothin walked up to the equipment and started putting together some food for them. Captain Kol didn’t have a cook, and so most of the stuff in his galley was ready-made box meals.
“What do you think, Ashla?” Dothin said, holding a box in each hand. “Curried chicken or steak and eggs?”
Ashla chuckled. “A dizzying array of choices, but I’m feeling breakfast-y, so steak and eggs. Also, I’m either allergic to curry or the taste of it makes me want to be sick, one of the two.”
“Suit yourself,” Dothin said. He started unwrapping the packaging around the steak and eggs when Ashla put a hand on the box.
“You don’t have to do it for me, Dothin. I know how.”
Dothin’s eyes were kind. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right.” He handed her the box.
While Ashla heated her meal up Dothin and Nix picked out their own breakfast in a box. When Ashla was done she dumped the contents onto a real plate from the galley’s cabinet, then she picked out a fork and knife.
Dothin and Nix opted to eat their food out of the tray that came with it. Dothin sat down next to Ganyasu. Nix sat next to him. Ashla sat down next to Nix, which put her a seat away from Nat Ginsey. The engineer didn’t seem to notice. She swiped again at her tablet and sipped her fizzy pink drink.
“What are you looking at there?” Dothin asked. Ashla looked up and saw he was talking to Ganyasu. She didn’t mean to, but Ashla looked the Shaumri—ex-Shaumri if he insisted—in the face. His expression was awe as if the text scrolling on his tablet was the meaning of life.
Gan shook his head. “This,” he said, pointing at the tablet, “is a copy of the text from Remnant’s artifact.”
So he was looking at the meaning of life, as far as he was concerned. Ashla well remembered the care he took with the ancient thing he had pulled from the stasis box. The way he cringed when handing it over to the Captain and Dothin. Of course, if it was what he said it was, maybe it warranted such care. Except that it couldn’t be what he said it was.
And, as far as Ashla knew, it could have been an ancient cookbook. Nobody could read it, including Ganyasu, so the meaning of the text was open to the wildest of speculation.
“What?” Dothin asked.
Ganyasu nodded. “Captain Kol has a scanning machine, used for penetrating heavy boxes so the crew could see what was inside without opening them. But the machine can scan with a high level of fidelity. He let me scan the artifact with it.
“Neat,” Nix said. “So is it still scanning?”
“No,” Gan said. “It finished. The artifact is sealed up in my room. Now I’m using some of the Jessamine’s processing power to try and translate it.”
“Getting anywhere?” Dothin asked before scooping a spoonful of soup into his mouth.
Ganyasu shook his head. “Not really. The Jessamine doesn’t recognize the text, and there’s no examples to translate against, so until...until I can get Remnant back, it can do little more than record an alphabet and scan for linguistic patterns.”
Dothin nodded. Their conversation continued but Ashla felt a gentle nudge to her right. She turned and found Nat had scooted in next to her.
“Hey,” she said, “I saw your ship. Got yourself a nice little ride down there.”
Her voice had something of a drawl to it that reminded Ashla of conversations she’d had with people from Antarus’s second habitable world, Lingas. Her words had a relaxed feel to them.
“Thanks,” Ashla said.
“I couldn’t help but notice it doesn’t register with any F-Scale ship models that I or the Jessamine know.”
“That’s because I designed her myself.”
“You don’t say?”
Ashla nodded.
“Now who would have expected a wealthy heiress to be building her own ships? I would have figured you’d be dressin’ up and going to balls and diplomatic meetings and the like.”
Ashla shrugged. “Well,” she said, “Under Antarii law I’m not allowed to be the next governor, I’m not allowed to hold any public office even before...” a shock of pain cut her breath off, almost like someone punched her in the stomach. Being with Dothin and Nix, feeling comfortable in their company, had helped her to forget about her problems. The comfort had lulled her into thinking she was just on another diplomatic cruise, but one with a more colorful crew.
Nat seemed to pick up on Ashla’s feelings.
“Where’d the name come from?” she asked. “Lunar Seed, it’s pretty.”
“Thanks,” Ashla said. “I don’t know. When I was a kid I wanted to go to the moon. Eltar has a big white moon in the sky and I remember seeing the lights coming from the cities on it during new moon, and wanting to go up there. I also remember learning that the moon was airless and had no plant life on its surface, so I thought about going there one day and planting the first flower.”
Nat laughed. It was a sweet, melodic sound. “I love it.”
Her wrist chimed. Nat lifted it and tapped at the strip of graphene strapped there. Nat’s link was of the virtual-screen variety. All the hardware was in the smaller package and the device projected a holographic interface instead of using a traditional screen. An image popped up from it, displaying a man in his twenties with a patchy five-o-clock shadow. The image was dark, and the man looked like he was in tight confines.
“I checked out the forty-eights,” the man said. “A few breakers were blown, and I had to swap out a bit of cabling, so we should be charging again.”
“Hold on,” Nat said, “I’ll check.” She gave Ashla an apologetic smile and grabbed her tablet. She swiped a few times. Graphs and charts whizzed past faster than Ashla could read them. Then she stopped on one screen. Nat typed a command into a little prompt at the bottom of the tablet and the screen started spooling. To the left, taking up most of the screen space a line graph started updating, the line dancing up and down. To the right the screen started printing lines of technical data in text form.
Nat made a small “hmm” noise in her throat. “We are charging but at three percent below baseline. We’re still bleeding power somewhere.”
“Three percent?” the man said, his voice still coming from Nat’s wrist. “That’s not much.”
Nat shook her head. “It’s well over the margin though,” she said. “You must have missed something.”
As they talked, Ashla ate. The eggs were scrambled and a little too well done. The steak was rubbery. But she was going to have to get used to eating food that wasn’t prepared by a well-paid chef. She ate it down, missing Rifa’s round, smiling face and bubbling personality, while keeping her eyes on Nat’s screen.
“I’ve been crawling through this mess all day,” the man in Nat’s wrist whined. “I didn’t miss anything.”
“Then why is my screen showing—”
“It could be the sensor buffers,” Ashla said.
Nat turned to her and said, “What?” and Ashla realized she had spoken out loud.
For a moment Ashla froze. She didn’t mean to make a suggestion out loud. Nat and the man she was talking to were trained engineers and familiar with this ship. They’d probably long considered anything Ashla could think of.
“Um,” Ashla said. “Well...” She took a deep breath and found the words. “I remember when I accidentally created a big feedback loop and shorted several of Luna’s systems. Her breakers blew and when I fixed it she was still showing a power bleed. I found out that the short sent the sensor buffers all out of whack. Once I figured it out and reset the buffers, everything showed green.”
Nat looked at her with an expression Ashla couldn’t read. Was it annoyance? Finally, she said, “huh.”
“What?” the man said. He must not have heard Ashla.
“Did you reset the sensor buffers?” Nat asked.
“Um...no.” The response was slow and Ashla heard a sudden tinge of nervousness in the man’s voice.
“Well, get to it,” Nat said.
“Could you, boss,” the man asked. “I’m a mile deep in this mess.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nat said. “Standby.” She folded her tablet and stuffed it into a pocket in her belt. She then stood, dumped her drink into the sink and headed for the door.
Nat turned as she left and winked at Ashla. “Good thinking, sweetie! Thanks.”
“No problem,” Ashla said at the closed door. She returned to her overcooked eggs and rubbery steak, finishing it off, when she could feel the attention on her. She turned and saw Nix staring at her.
“What?”
Nix looked around, as if wondering who she was talking to. Then he looked down at his food. His ears got red again.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m surprised at how smart you are.”
“All the girls on Lodebar are dummies?”
Nix chuckled, still nervous. “No, but you just helped fix a starship without even looking at it.”
Ashla shrugged. “Only because something similar happened to me. If it was anything else I might not have known.”
Nix shook his head. He looked ready to speak but Dothin interrupted him with a hand on Nix’s shoulder.
“Did you take your medicine?” Dothin asked.
Nix’s eyes rolled so high they took his head with them. He put his hands on his pockets, feeling for something, then looked sheepish.
“I forgot them in—”
Dothin lifted a small bottle of pills from his pocket. “In the room,” he said. “I know.”
Nix looked at the bottle as if it might contain poison. Dothin shook the bottle once and Nix took it from him. He twisted the top off, dropped a white pill into his hand and then popped it in his mouth. He swallowed it with a mouthful of his soda. Then he shoved the bottle into his pocket.
Ashla spied a peak at the bottle’s label as he did so.
“What is Palicept?”
Nix shot her a glance that was angry and embarrassed. “Orphan Candy,” he said.
Ashla opened her mouth to further question, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not my business. I don’t mean to pry.”
Dothin took notice, put a hand on Nix’s shoulder. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Niko.”
Nix shrugged and gave a sideways nod.
“When you were born,” Nix said, looking at Ashla, “you were injected with a colony of immunity-boosting nanites. These stayed in your bloodstream, waiting for you to get sick, so they could teach your immune system to fight off infections better.”
He took a deep breath. “When I was born, probably in some unlicensed...” he looked nervously at Dothin and censored what he was about to say, “place, I wasn’t so lucky. So now I have to take these pills, so I can catch up.”
Dothin gave Nix’s shoulder a squeeze, like a hug in miniature. “It doesn’t matter where you started,” he said. “It only matters where you’re going.”
Nix nodded. “I know.”
Ashla felt a wave of pity for Nix. Her father might be dead, but at least she’d had one. She had happy memories and life lessons she could look back at to help her. She had grown up surrounded by love, not to mention wealth and social advantage. She was in a bad place now, but her origins had given her positive momentum. Even if she could never go home, she had everything she needed to thrive. She didn’t have to worry about money. If she needed it, she could sell her Lunar Seed design and become an instant millionaire.
Nix was not so lucky. He was born into poverty, disadvantage and neglect. He had Dothin now, but how had the years of living on the streets disadvantaged him? But, no. Nix was strong. He wasn’t educated like Ashla, but he was clever. He guided her through Lodebar Station while it was under lockdown and the only time they encountered trouble was when she failed to do what he said. Even then he got her out. And he was brave, willing to endanger himself to help her. Maybe, had he never met Dothin, his courage and cleverness would have been wasted, but under Dothin’s influence, Nix flourished.
Ashla took his hand under the table and squeezed. For the first time since the conversation started Nix looked her in the eyes again and smiled. He squeezed back.
Ashla heard her name called. Her ears perked up and she looked at the source of the voice. It was coming from the newsfeed on the wall screen.
A woman in a gray suit stood in front of the Meritene Palace. The splash card below her read “Kidnapped Heiress: Update.” Ashla leapt from her chair and went over to the wall screen. She tapped the little control button in the corner of the screen and rewound the footage a few seconds. The woman’s lips moved silently, speaking her name but backwards. A flock of birds flew backwards, then the screen faded. Ashla tapped play again and turned up the volume.
“Thank you, Kimzen,” the woman in the suit said. The little nameplate on the screen called her Kora Leng, Onsite Reporter. “That’s right, Alliance officials today have offered two new pieces of information regarding Ashla Vares, the daughter of former governor Annister Vares and the Antarii Systsem’s resident sweetheart.”
A window appeared beside Kora Leng showing photos of Ashla, most of which she recognized. Her father’s cabinet members signed the cast she wore on her arm when she broke her wrist in one photo. In another she was accepting a plaque from the Secretary of Education during Math and Science Appreciation Month with Luna in the background. There was a picture of her with a class of preschoolers she had visited on one of Vorea’s moons.
Ashla tapped the pause button.
“Resident sweetheart?” she asked, turning to Nix and Dothin. “Why did she call me that?”
Dothin’s face was blank, his eyes peering at the screen. Nix gave her a confused look. “That’s what they always call you on the news feeds. You didn’t know?”
Ashla felt heat rise in her face. “No.” She turned back to the screen and hit play.
“Ms. Vares was kidnapped four days ago from the Meritine palace, but Alliance officials have stated that her ship, the Lunar Seed, which was taken with her, was spotted fleeing a Naval blockade around Lodebar Station.”
Pictures of Luna started popping up, including footage of her maneuvering away from the station. Ashla narrowed her eyes. Somehow, they’d managed to find or doctor footage that didn’t include her and Nix getting shot at by Alliance fighters.
“Kidnapped?” Ashla said. “Why are they saying I was kidnapped?”
“It makes sense,” Dothin said. Ashla paused the feed again and turned to him. His eyes looked pained. “The Alliance isn’t going to say you ran away. They want you back. So, they’ll sell your absence as a kidnapping and suddenly everybody’s on the lookout for a kidnapped girl instead of one running away from corrupt elements of the government. You see?”
Ashla nodded. “That means every well-intentioned person who sees me is my enemy.”
“That’s their plan,” Dothin said, nodding at the screen.
Ashla turned back around and hit play on the screen.
“Furthermore,” Kora Leng said,
“officials from the Ministry of Defense have told us they have made two arrests regarding the kidnapping. Two members of the former Meritine guard were arrested and are in custody.”
Ashla gasped as Cel and Lita were both pictured on the screen.
“No!” she said, not meaning to yell. “No, they can’t have Cel and Lita, they can’t.” She started hyperventilating, her lungs going out of control. Tears stung her eyes. Strong, gentile hands pulled her gaze away from the screen and enveloped her. Dothin.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Ashla pushed away from him. “No, it’s not! We both know they weren’t ‘arrested.’ They were captured. They weren’t put in jail and awaiting a fair trial. They could be tortured, or, or...”
Ashla couldn’t finish. Dothin and Nix were now both on their feet, ready to offer comfort. But she couldn’t accept it. She was only glad the room was empty besides the three of them. Lanjer had ducked out some time during Ashla’s conversation with Nat and Ganyasu had exited after talking with Dothin.
That’s what Ashla had to do. She had to leave. She didn’t need comfort. She needed to do something. Ashla ran out of the galley, Dothin and Nix calling her name.
She turned right, ran down the hall and kept going when it converged with the starboard corridor. She came to the door at the end of the hall and slapped the entry request button on the console. The console screen flickered to life, displaying Tally’s high, sharp cheekbones and large, inquisitive eyes.
“Hi, Ms. Vares. I—”
“I just need to know where the Captain is,” Ashla said over her.
Tally looked away from the camera, tapped at her screen, then looked up again. “His cabin,” she said, pointing. “Just behind you and to the left.”
Ashla nodded. “Thanks.” She stepped over to the door and slapped the console there. No feed came up on the console. Instead, the door slid open.
Ashla stepped into a small office space that almost rivaled the executive suite on the Elpizio. It was small but finely furnished. Captain Kol’s desk might not have been real wood, but it played the part well. A hutch filled with strange artifacts stood against one wall and works of art hung from the other. Salazar Kol sat behind the desk.
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