Randoms

by David Liss

  My ears were now burning hot. “The only friends I have on this station are Steve and Tamret, and I’m not—”

  “Yes, the Ish-hi is undesirable as well. I think you should also stay away from him.”

  “You can think what you want,” I said, walking away from her. “I don’t have to do what you say.”

  She grabbed hold of my wrist. Her grip was tight, and I could feel the points of her fingernails against my skin, and they were sharper than I would have suspected. “The president of the United States sent me here to be his voice, and the voice of our country and our world. And I am telling you to keep your distance from the other randoms. They are going to ruin their own delegations. I don’t want them ruining ours.”

  I could get lippy with adults I didn’t respect, but being outright disobedient wasn’t in my nature. I’d been raised to respect my teachers and authority figures, to assume they were right, even when I didn’t like what they had to say. Part of me was trying to figure out if Ms. Price could be right about all this, but I pushed that voice away. I didn’t want to believe. I did not believe it. I pulled my wrist away from her.

  “Dr. Roop is in charge, and he doesn’t have any problem with me spending time with Steve and Tamret, so you’re out of luck. You don’t have any power over me.”

  “Not here,” she agreed. “When we get back to Earth, I am going to be the only adult who will be able to report on what happened on Confederation Central. If I want to make your life, or your family’s life, difficult, I can do that.”

  She was now threatening my mother. I stared at her icily because I could not think of anything to say.

  “I’m trying to help you, Zeke. Please remember that.” She turned away and left me standing in the hall.

  • • •

  After class Tamret avoided us for the rest of the day, but she showed up at breakfast the next morning as though nothing had happened. She was in a good mood, smiling a lot, and her eyes lingered on me as she spoke. My breakfast porridge was a little bit better than palatable. A piece of Steve’s breakfast escaped and flew around the room, and we all had a good laugh.

  Then Hluh sat down at our table. Eager to prove that the jumpsuit was not a passing phase, she wore a bright pink one today that hurt my eyes if I stared at it too long. “Hey,” she said. “How are things?”

  Tamret glowered at me. “What’s she doing here?”

  Several government officials at a nearby table seemed to be wondering the same thing, since they were looking over at us. Hluh grabbed my wrist as though it were a piece of gardening equipment. “The human juvenile and I enjoy an inappropriate romantic entanglement,” she told the beings at the next table. She looked at Steve and Tamret. “Not really,” she said more quietly.

  I pulled my arm away from her. “No kidding, not really. What do you want, Hluh?”

  “I’ve got some information for you, like you asked,” she said.

  “Hold on,” Tamret said. “You’re cooperating with this freak again?”

  “You don’t have to say hurtful things,” Hluh told her.

  “Yes, I do, because you are a gigantic green freak. I don’t know how you convinced Zeke to cooperate with you after you made him look like a moron in front of the entire galaxy—”

  “I didn’t look that bad,” I offered, but no one was listening.

  “—but I’m not going to let him humiliate himself again so you can advance your career or whatever it is you are trying to do.”

  “I sense that you don’t like me,” Hluh told her, “but Zeke has promised me his full cooperation over the coming year, and I—”

  “The year?” Tamret exploded. “Zeke, what is wrong with you? If you don’t have the common sense to know that you need to stay away from this . . . this being, then how can I trust you?”

  There was a moment of terrible silence. Tamret was staring at me, her eyes wide, her whiskers twitching, and I could see that she wanted me to say something that would make her believe I wasn’t irredeemably dim or a publicity hound or something equally awful.

  Steve coughed diplomatically. “Sorry, mate. You’re going to have to work out your mammal affairs on your own time, but this is starting to muck about with my breakfast.” He turned to Tamret. “This data collector over here found out about me and you, love—that we’d spent some time in government housing, if you know what I mean. She told Zeke he could talk to her or she would post about us on the news outputs. He talked to Hluh to protect us.”

  Other than when Ardov was working his spell on her, this was the first time I’d seen Tamret speechless. She stared at me, blinking. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked quietly.

  “I didn’t want you to, I don’t know, feel bad about me having been in that position.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Can I talk now?” asked Hluh. “All these adolescent emotions are getting tedious.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tamret said, as if snapping out of a trance. “I get why you talked to her the first time, but why are you still feeding information to Miss Photosynthesis here?”

  I explained the deal Dr. Roop had struck, and I told her I figured I could use Hluh to find out some things that I wanted to know about as well.

  “Which is why I’m here,” she said. “I looked into the Ganari delegation like you asked me to. It turns out that Sessek, the Ganari random, was awaiting trial. She broke into a secure government building. Apparently, her brother was accused of a crime, and she wanted to steal evidence in order to prevent a conviction. She claimed her brother had been set up in the first place, and she may have been right—for what it’s worth.”

  “So three of the four randoms had legal trouble,” I said.

  “Correct,” Hluh said. “That is far outside the realm of statistical probability.”

  “They told me that I was selected from a ‘contoured’ pool of candidates,” I said. “They wanted someone male, from my part of the world, and so on. Is there some reason the selection committee would try to recruit kids who had been arrested?”

  “It’s a good question,” Hluh said. “I wanted to let you know this in person. I don’t trust that your messages aren’t being monitored, and I thought you should be warned.”

  “Warned about what?” I asked.

  “If the selection committee deliberately chose you,” Hluh said, “it means somebody wanted you here for a reason, and until you know what that reason is, you should probably be on your guard. It also means that the selection process was tampered with, and that amounts to all three of you being here illegally. If anyone finds out about this, you and your delegations are all finished.”

  I thought back to my conversation with Ms. Price. Had she wanted me to stay away from Steve and Tamret because she knew about their criminal records? I couldn’t imagine how she could have found out about that, but Hluh had, which meant it wasn’t impossible. Maybe socially challenged people were better at finding out secrets. The bottom line was that if Ms. Price knew about my friends, she could hurt them, and she might only be waiting for the right moment to do it.

  • • •

  The three of us went our separate ways after class that day. Steve wanted to spar, Tamret wanted to go to the coding facility, and I spent a couple of hours in the gaming room that afternoon, and then called it quits because I had already booked two hours in a spaceflight suite for later that night. I wanted to work on my solo piloting, which was a bit shaky, to be honest, and I noticed I earned more points when I worked on my weak areas.

  When I staggered into the hall after two hours in the sim suite, it was close to curfew. I was still a bit dizzy from trying to maneuver a small mining craft through a series of increasingly dense asteroid fields, but when I saw Tamret and Ardov going into the sparring room together, I was suddenly sharp and alert. Ardov was dressed for fighting, but Tamret
was not, wearing a long black skirt and a lavender tank top. I watched as he led her into the control room and then into the main sparring chamber.

  Pretty girls sometimes put up with guys like Ardov treating them terribly—I had seen it happen back on Earth—but I just could not believe that Tamret liked Ardov. She would do whatever he asked, but she never seemed like she was happy to spend time with him; it was more like she had no choice but to do what he said. I knew I might have been reading into things because I wanted to believe they weren’t close. The only thing I could be sure of was that their interactions gave me the creeps. All of which meant I had no choice but to spy on them.

  I went into the control room to make sure she was okay. That was all I was doing. I told myself that I didn’t have to know exactly why she was putting up with Ardov. It wasn’t my business—she’d made that clear—but I was just being a good friend and making sure she was okay.

  She was not okay. Tamret was on the mat, slowly getting to her feet. Ardov kicked her. The force field sparked blue, and Tamret let out a little grunt. Her eyes were narrow slits, glinting with anger.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, Snowflake,” he said. “Just tell me what you did, and fix it, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Tamret set her face hard and stony. She wasn’t about to tell him anything.

  “Be reasonable. I would hate to have to explain to Dr. Roop and the others that you asked me to spar with you. You told me you wanted to learn a thing or two.” He kicked her again. She grunted. “She turned the protection down to level one, but she didn’t tell me. You know what she’s like. Impulsive. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident.”

  “You’ll have to kill me,” Tamret said. “And I know you won’t do that. You won’t ruin our chances of getting into the Confederation.”

  He lashed out so quickly, I didn’t see the windup. I heard the crack, saw the electric jolt of blue, and then Tamret was hitting the wall mats, bouncing hard. Force field or no, Tamret was going to get hurt if I didn’t stop this. I checked the panel, hoping he had been exaggerating. No such luck. The force field was turned down to the lowest possible setting, and there was no way to turn up the shielding, not without turning it off entirely. I could try that, but if my timing was off, I could end up exposing Tamret to the full force of Ardov’s violence.

  “I don’t have to kill you, Snowflake,” he said. “I just have to make you wish I would. Now tell me what you did to my experience points.”

  “I didn’t do anything. You don’t need my help to be a loser. You’ve got that covered on your own.”

  Ardov struck Tamret in her face with his open palm, and she fell to the mats again. I stood there, stunned, not knowing what to do. I had to go in there and stop it, but I knew I wouldn’t last thirty seconds against Ardov, and having Tamret watch me take a pounding for her wasn’t going to save her. Ardov needed Tamret alive for his delegation to reach eighty levels, but he wouldn’t care if I was killed. A lot of people might not care.

  I sent a message to Steve. He would be able to handle Ardov. When he didn’t answer after fifteen seconds, I sent another message, this one labeled urgent. Then I sent a third. No answer. Maybe he was sleeping. It was close to curfew, after all. Maybe he’d turned down his data bracelet so it wouldn’t wake him. I wanted to go run to his room, bang on the door, but I didn’t dare leave Tamret alone for the five minutes it would take.

  Not that my being there was helping her. I stood by, helpless, while she took a swing at Ardov. The force field flickered, but he didn’t even flinch. She didn’t have the strength left to hurt him, even with minimal shielding.

  I should go in there, I told myself. Maybe the two of us together could do something. If we teamed up, we could overwhelm him. It sounded good, and it would work in a movie, but in real life I’d just end up being a punching bag on which Ardov could show off his strength. I didn’t have anything to bring to that fight. My increased intellect and agility and vision had helped me tell when Semj was lying, and these skills seemed to be making a difference in the spaceflight sims, but they wouldn’t amount to much against a guy like Ardov. I’d figured out a way to save the Dependable, but this wasn’t the same kind of problem. The sad truth was, I had no real skills other than pushing buttons.

  Which, I now realized, was what I needed to save Tamret. Maybe if I could rig things properly, then I could get us both out of this without anyone getting hurt. I called up my keyboard and did a quick search. All I had to do was program my data bracelet to keep me synched with the main console in the sparring room, and Tamret and I would be safe. I hoped. It was a crazy idea and a long shot, but it was all I could think of.

  My timing was going to have to be perfect, because if I got it wrong, Ardov could really hurt Tamret. He might kill her. I took a deep breath. I could do this, I told myself. This was nothing compared to the fight with the Phandic ship.

  I entered in the data, synched my system with the control room’s, and then went over to the door. I’d programmed my data bracelet to let me know about the cycle changes with a slight vibration, something no one else would notice. As soon as the first vibration kicked in—a long, single note—I opened the door to the sparring area.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, doing my best to sound oblivious. “What’s going on? Anything interesting?”

  Ardov had been turning on Tamret, but now he stared in disbelief. “So,” he said. “Finally ready to fight me?”

  “Nah,” I said. “But me and Tamret had a date to get milk shakes. Well, not a date. A plan. We had a plan. And she was running late, so I figured I’d track her down.”

  Ardov began stomping toward me. His fists were tight balls, like sledgehammers, and I wasn’t safe. Not yet. I needed to buy a few more seconds.

  “You can join us, if you want. Come on, Ardov. You know what I think your problem is?” I was blundering my way through this, but the moment I spoke, I knew it was the right move. Ask him a question, and he has to pause to answer. That would give me the time I needed.

  “What?”

  Then I received a vibration from my data bracelet—this time three short notes. I was safe.

  “Your problem is that you’re a big, smelly butt. That’s your problem.”

  He turned on me, his fist jerking back, and he slammed it directly into my face. I tried my hardest not to flinch, but I don’t think I was successful. At least I did not turn away. I held still and his fist collided with the plasma field, set to the highest protection.

  I’d set the sparring room program into a cycle, but in order for it to work, it had had to shut down for several seconds, which is why I’d needed to delay him. Now I hoped to get Tamret out of the room before Ardov forced me to take advantage of the next phase of the program.

  I gave Tamret my hand. Her grip was warm and soft and I liked how it felt. I pulled her to her feet, and she looked at me with gratitude and relief.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “You two aren’t going anywhere.” Ardov positioned himself between us and the door. “I’ll keep you here as long as I need to, and I’m willing to bet there’s a way to hurt you, even with the force field turned up.”

  “We don’t actually have to be enemies,” I said, figuring I had nothing to lose by trying something crazy—not hating each other. “Come on, Ardov. We could just start over.”

  “No.” He leaned back and then seemed to lift from the floor as he launched into a flying kick aimed directly at Tamret’s middle. I tried to get in front of it, but there was no time. It connected, and though the plasma field flashed blue, Tamret let out a grunt of pain.

  “Thought so,” he said. “Even with the field on, it still hurts where I’ve already kicked you.”

  He’d kicked her in the stomach. I felt a buzzing in my head. Ardov had hurt Tamret. I could not think of anything else. My jaw was clenched, and my own fis
ts were balled. Somewhere, beyond the buzzing in my head, Ardov was laughing, asking me what I planned to do about it.

  Then my bracelet vibrated, indicating the next phase of the cycle, and suddenly it was all clear. I had three seconds, and I used them. Ardov was in the middle of a speech about how we were too weak to stop him, too afraid, too pathetic. That’s when I hit him. I took him by surprise, pummeling him once in the nose with my fist. Maybe he would have reacted faster under other circumstances, but he thought the field was set to maximum. He might even have leaned into the blow contemptuously. In any case, I made full contact, and with the field completely down, he went reeling backward.

  He cried out in pain, and put both his hands to his nose.

  “That hurt!” he shouted, sounding nasal. And when he turned back to face us, I saw I had bloodied him. My hand hurt too. You don’t see that in the movies, but it was painful to punch someone in the nose. I shook out my fingers and turned to Ardov, hoping he’d had enough.

  It would be nice if when you hurt the bully, he turned out to be a coward—just like in all those books we read when we were younger. It usually doesn’t work that way, though. It didn’t work that way this time. Ardov rounded on me, but I stood my ground, and with the field back on high, his blow glanced off of me with some unpleasant pressure, but nothing more.

  He stared at me, his expression slack and dumb.

  Tamret took my hand again. Her eyes were cast down, and she hadn’t said anything, but she knew I’d come for her, that I had been there for her, and we didn’t need for there to be any words.

  “Turns out I’ve got a few moves,” I said.

  “You’re cheating!” he declared.

  “Yes, Ardov,” I agreed. “I’m cheating. It’s a rigged game, and only I know the rules, and if that’s how I keep you from beating up on Tamret, then I feel pretty good about cheating. So how about you step aside.”