“Is something wrong with it?”
“No. Let’s go,” he said. He didn’t make eye contact.
I balled my fists up and held my arms in front of me. How was I supposed to know what was right for First Dinner? Neptune should have known, and he was the one who told me which dress to wear. And now that my arm was weighted down with a giant carbon security cuff, everybody would know I was in custody. If I looked bad, it was all his fault. The knowledge didn’t particularly help me overcome my self-consciousness.
We arrived at the quarterdeck. The Space Bar was the ship’s top-notch restaurant and entertainment hub. Sunken down three steps, the interior of the restaurant and lounge was carpeted in turquoise and fitted with aluminum tables and chairs. The ceiling was the darkest purple I’d ever seen. Filament lights hung from overhead, tiny luminous threads that exploded in light at the ends like clusters of stars in a manufactured nebula.
Ever since space travel became a thing, the world had changed. Well, not the world, but the whole universe. Somewhere in the late twenty-first century, earthlings had taken what they’d learned from decades of space exploration and colonized Mars. Shortly after, they’d branched out to Venus, Saturn, and beyond. There had been so many medical advances that the lifespan of earthlings had created an overpopulation that led many to relocate even outside of their solar system. It wasn’t unusual to find interracial populations on any of the planets.
Inside The Space Bar, colorful couples and families sat in groups, some with officers of the ship and some alone. A kitchen staff member who looked like he was afraid of being seen maneuvered a handcart filled with a crate of aluminum tanks marked NO. I’d heard the Moon Unit leaked a mixture of nitrous oxide with oxygen during Happy Hour but until now hadn’t believed it. The crew member pushed the cart behind a sparkling white floor-to-ceiling curtain, vanishing from my sight.
A hostess in a short white uniform and white gravity boots led Neptune and me to a table for two. The uniform guide indicated that employees in the passenger-facing aspects of the service industry were to wear white, and those who worked in the back wore black. The stark color coding might have seemed extreme, except that behind-the-scenes jobs lent themselves to stains. Even in space, practicality took precedence. My position as lieutenant of uniforms wasn’t important enough for me to dine at The Space Bar. The only way I’d ever be seated in this room was as someone’s date.
I waited until we’d both been served Saturnian wine before attempting small talk. “You’re with ship security. How’d you get started in that field?”
Neptune looked up from his drink. “You don’t have to make conversation.”
“Just because you have no table manners doesn’t mean I don’t. My mother raised me right.”
“And your father? What influence did Jack Stryker have on the way you turned out?”
“Fine. We can eat in silence.”
The day after I’d hacked into the ship’s computer, I worried about being caught. Had the Moon Unit been a government ship and not an entertainment vessel, the sentence would have been the placement of a tracking chip in my head, jail time on Colony 13, and a permanent mark on my record. Punishment for tampering with a cruise ship was a little murkier. The owners of the ship would have final say, and after the troubles with Moon Units 1 through 4, most likely they’d want to avoid a scandal. That’s what I told myself when I couldn’t sleep at night.
When the orientation packet arrived with a welcome letter signed by Captain Swift, it finally dawned on me that no one knew what I’d done. The computer said I was the replacement uniform lieutenant, and the computer was always right. From that point on, I filled out every document truthfully and submitted them by the deadline. My credentials arrived shortly after that, including my day one uniform, EZ guide of best practices for the ship, and a copy of the information I’d submitted. Nowhere on that application had I mentioned my dad’s name. And Neptune had brought him up twice.
“If you have something to say to me about my father, then just come on out and say it.”
“I’m not the one who expunged him from my personal history.”
“There was no expungement. My dad wasn’t relevant to my application. My mother raised me. She’s my reference. She’s the one who filled out and submitted my initial application.”
“I know.”
“See, I don’t get that. How do you know? That information was not made public. It’s bound by Federation Council’s Secrecy Act.”
Unlike when we’d first arrived, Neptune appeared to enjoy the turn of the conversation. “I know more about you than you think, Stryker. Don’t forget it.”
I wadded my napkin in my lap and then clawed at the magnetic cuff around my left wrist. My efforts were useless.
The employee handbook had specified that senior officers were to remain in uniform at all times, and they’d been provided with standard issue garments to ensure compliance. To anybody who looked our way, I was Neptune’s date.
He wished.
Around the rest of The Space Bar, sets of guests celebrated their first night on Moon Unit 5. It didn’t take much effort on my part to mentally record the details. In spite of the fact that I was dining with a Neanderthal security officer who was blackmailing me, I was enjoying myself.
Mostly.
It took only a moment to realize my unexpected invitation to First Dinner came with the perfect opportunity to look for suspicious behavior. I sipped my wine and studied the other attendees.
Thanks to the Moon Unit policy of requiring officers to wear dress whites to dinner, I couldn’t identify crew by the color of their uniforms. Not a problem, I thought to myself, but an opportunity. An opportunity to practice my powers of observation.
At the table to my left sat two green Martians. They wore dress whites, but the spectrometers dangling from the belts indicated they were part of the communication crew. Two tables past them Yeoman D’Nar sat with Purser Frank.
D’Nar looked at us and then looked away as if our table was still empty. The Yeoman’s blond hair was in a pile on top of her head, and her dress and lipstick matched her pearlescent blue nail polish. Blue lipstick made me look cold. On her, it looked ethereal. I’d never been ethereal a day in my life.
Purser Frank, a friendly looking man with black hair and white glasses, was in charge of Moon Unit entertainment. He downed two glasses of wine before D’Nar had finished her first. Nerves, I assumed. Or the prospect of dining with Yeoman D’Nar required a little something extra to take the edge off. I snuck a glance at my dining companion. Guess I knew how Purser Frank felt.
The captain’s table sat directly in front of the stage. Captain Swift, a tall, thin man with fiery red hair and black glasses, looked at ease with the guests at his table. They so perfectly exemplified the target demographic of the newly revived Moon Units that they might as well have stepped off the pages of the promotional materials. Would the Moon Unit Corporation have hired stand-ins to play the part of cruise ship passengers to maintain their image? It was one way to ensure the standards on the ship. Captain Swift made a point of acknowledging Neptune’s presence with a gesture to his own uniform and feigned applause to show he took note of Neptune’s adherence to the dress code.
A woman in a long white dress approached our table. “Neptune.” She squinted her eyes at me for a moment. “Who is your date?”
“Lt. Stryker,” I said, smiling graciously. “Uniform ward.”
“Ah, general crew.” She turned to Neptune. “Still haven’t learned, have you?” She leaned down closer to him. “You can act however you like in your quarters, but while you’re in here, you are to keep your voice down and pretend to be civilized. The passengers don’t know you’re ship security and I don’t want them to find out tonight. Guests of the captain have already commented on your intimidating presence. If you want to be invited to The Space Bar again, I suggest you act like a guest, not like a bull in a china shop.”
I closed my eyes and
mentally flipped through the pictures I’d seen of Moon Unit’s crew until I connected a name to the woman in front of us. “Uma?” I asked. Quick, Sylvia, what else do you know about her? “Uma Tolst. You’re The Space Bar hostess. You trained under Captain Murray on the USS Charles.”
“That’s right,” she said, surprised.
“You’ve done an impressive job with the dinner tonight.” I raised my glass of Saturnian wine. “This is a particularly refreshing vintage. What will you be pairing it with?”
Uma stood up straighter. “Tonight is a special menu. Protein mix with a side of grains. Oxygen-infused dry ice cream for dessert.”
“From Plunia?”
“Of course.” She smiled and tapped the table by my plate. “Make sure Neptune uses his table manners. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the captain at our First Dinner.”
I smiled back. Uma left the table, and I looked at Neptune. “She seems to like you about as much as I do. What did you accuse her of?”
He glared at me and downed his glass of water. His wine went untouched.
We spent the balance of the dinner in silence, not that I minded. I finished my glass of Saturnian wine and Neptune’s too (he’d offered after a wee bit of prompting from me). His reprimand hung over my head, but the short conversation with the hostess had left my spirits high. I’d come across as refined compared to Neptune. Score one. And she served a mean bowl of ice cream. The oxygen charge in the dessert perked me up considerably.
By the time the plates were cleared, I was ready to sit back and enjoy the floor show. The general lights of the dining area dimmed, and a ring of pink bulbs glowed in a circle around the base of the stage. I was so engaged in what was happening that I didn’t notice Captain Swift standing next to our table.
“Neptune,” he said. “A word.”
Neptune stood, and the two men conversed. The captain glanced at me and then returned to his table. Neptune pulled me out of my chair by my upper arm.
“Don’t grab me,” I said.
“Sabotage in engineering.”
“That can’t be. I tried to tell you, Lt. Dakkar was the saboteur and he’s dead.”
He glared at me. “We have to leave.”
I moved his beefy paw from my arm to my hand. “Better make it look good,” I said. He pulled me past the guests just as the opening act, a shimmery gold woman draped in transfugitive silks, started to sing.
8: A New Crisis
I had to practically jog to keep up with Neptune. “What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Captain said maintenance confirmed a problem with the computer readings in engineering. Security protocol requires me to oversee the technicians while they work.”
“We’re going to miss the floor show? That’s not fair. That woman was gold. Do you think she was painted? Or was she born that way? I’ve never seen a gold woman before.” We were away from the crowd, so I pulled my hand out of his grip. “How about this. I’ll go back to our table and watch the floor show. You do the security thing and come get me when you’re done. If anybody asks about you, I’ll say you’re in the men’s room.”
“The BOP dictates that I can’t leave a prisoner unsupervised.”
The Saturnian wine had left me ever so slightly buzzed. I jabbed my finger into Neptune’s chest and pouted. “You’re not going to keep calling me a prisoner, are you?”
The ship tilted, and we both stumbled. I felt a vibration under the soles of my boots. When I looked up, I saw a new expression on Neptune’s face. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it wasn’t a joke.
“Come on.” He turned and ran down the hallway to the elevator.
“We’re not done talking about this,” I said under my breath.
As we rounded the corner, it wasn’t hard to see that things were more critical than I’d thought. Emergency bulbs mounted on the walls cast the room in a bath of red. With a sweeping glance, I counted two men passed out on the ground and a panel of blinking buttons on the computer that the men should have been monitoring. The red lights canceled out everything but the glow of the buttons, and almost immediately I recognized that the warning lights indicated a problem with the hull. I stepped over one of the bodies and prepared to override the system with a manual entry when Neptune pulled me away from the computer.
“Don’t touch it.”
“But there’s a problem with the hull. You said it yourself, earlier, when you were in the uniform ward. I heard you. You thought you fixed it, but you didn’t. There must be a gas leak making these men unconscious.”
He looked from me to the computer panel. I knew I was right. Apparently, Neptune recognized that I was right too. He shifted me out of the way and overrode the system. A loud alarm rang out, a series of Woop! Woop! Woop! sounds that made it difficult to hear anything else. One of the men on the ground stirred and grabbed my ankle. Instinctively I kicked his hand away. He locked eyes with me and grabbed at his throat like he was choking.
He was suffocating. I grabbed Neptune’s arm and pointed at the man. Neptune abandoned the computer and broke into a locked case of oxygen canisters. He threw one to the man on the ground, who pulled the pin and inhaled the pure air.
The noise level was deafening. Piercing sirens on repeat bounced off the walls, reverberating back at me and echoing inside my head. Neptune dropped to the ground and forced the other men to inhale from the oxygen canisters. I knew I wasn’t supposed to do anything. I knew he wanted me to stand to the side of the room and wait until he had things under control. I knew right now I was yet another problem Neptune thought he had to handle and the more I stayed out of the way, the better off he’d be. At least, I suspected it. But what Neptune didn’t know because he wouldn’t listen to me was that I could be of help. There wasn’t time to try to explain it. Not when I could demonstrate my skills and deal with the consequences after the crisis was over.
I hiked my aqua dinner dress up to mid-thigh and stepped over one of the bodies on the floor to get to the computer. It took a moment to remember the code sequence. I pressed two white buttons to the left and the red one to my right. The alarm shifted from Woop! Woop! to a more subdued Beep! Beep! and the red lights turned off. A moment later, they flashed on the far side of the room. I went to the wall and ran my fingers over it. In a matter of seconds, I located a tiny plastic hose jutting out from between two panels. I held my fingers in front of the opening and felt a stream of gas escaping from it.
There was no issue with computer readings. Someone had purposely rigged a gas leak in the engineering room.
I tried to get Neptune’s attention. He squatted next to the first officer and held the oxygen container to his mouth. The oxygen would revive the men temporarily, but we needed to move them, or they’d pass out as soon as Neptune removed the tank.
I ran forward and grabbed Neptune’s arm. He looked angry. I pointed to the wall where the plastic tube was hidden He pushed me back. I stumbled into the computer. I grabbed Neptune’s wrist with both hands and leaned back with my full weight. He barely budged.
I let go with one hand and pointed again, and then hollered, “Gas leak! Get them out of here!” but the siren was too loud, and even I couldn’t hear myself. I dropped Neptune’s arm and ran to the wall. The only way to keep more gas from leaking into the room was to divert it. I put the plastic tube to my mouth and inhaled it into my lungs.
Neptune’s eyes widened when he realized what I’d been trying to tell him. He lifted the officer next to him and carried him the way we’d come. Seconds later he returned and repeated the routine for the next officer. My eyes blurred with tears from inhaling the noxious gas. I had to make it a few seconds more, a few seconds until I could erase the toxins with a hit from the oxygen canister on the ground.
I put my thumb over the end of the hose to keep it from spewing out more gas and tried to hold my breath, but it was too late. The lack of pure oxygen in the ship, my being without my filtration helmet, and whatever I’d inhaled from the hose to keep
the leak from further contaminating the air in the engineering room clouded my mind. I let go of the hose to put my hands over my ears and my legs buckled underneath me. I collapsed onto the floor and the world went black.
9: Toying with The Truth
I woke up in the holding cell. I was on the narrow cot clutching a canister of pure O2. Pika the Stowaway was curled up in the shadows in the corner of the cell. She still wore the gray flex crew uniform I’d given her, but the grime was gone from her face.
“How did I get here?” I asked warily. This was the second time the pink Gremlon had shown up in a place she shouldn’t have been and that alone was suspicious. I wasn’t ready to trust her yet.
“You’re awake! You’re awake! You’re awake!” Pika said. She jumped up and bounced back and forth from one foot to the other. “Shhhhhhh,” she said. “We have to be quiet.”
I shifted my weight and sat up. Someone had removed my boots, and they sat along the wall at the back of the cell. My feet were cold against the painted black floor. “What happened?”
Pika dropped down to a squat and looked at me. “I went looking for you. You were in the engineering room. The giant picked you up and carried you here.”
“Did he see you?”
“No. I’m good at hiding.” She smiled sheepishly. “I followed him so I could see where he took you before.”
I wasn’t ready to trust her, but, at the moment, she knew more than I did about my circumstances. I leaned forward and looked out of the cell. The beams hadn’t been activated, and Neptune wasn’t at his security station. “Where did the giant go?”
Pika shrugged. “I don’t know. He carried you in here and put you on the bed and then left. Uh-oh!” Pika dropped down to the floor and rolled under the bed. Seconds later, Doc Edison came around the corner with Yeoman D’Nar and Neptune.
“Lt. Stryker,” Doc said. “I’ve been expecting you in the medical ward. When you didn’t show, I went to your supervisor.”
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