Compete

by Vera Nazarian

  I realize suddenly the true generous reason Aeson Kassiopei eats at his desk—he does not want to make his crew uncomfortable by his high-ranking presence.

  Now that he’s gone, I find myself feeling strangely vulnerable. I am all alone in a room full of Atlantean strangers. I take a deep breath, mostly for courage, and go up to the self-serve section of the food bar and pick out some unknown looking dishes that smell promising, and pile stuff on my tray. Then I take a glass and fill it with that same green nikkari juice, which I’ve gotten rather fond of in the last few days.

  I stand, looking around the meal hall with a very awkward feeling of being completely out of place.

  There is absolutely no one here but Atlanteans, and none of them look familiar. I squint, scanning the tables, and feel overwhelmed. However toward the back I see one dark-haired Atlantean in a sea of metallic gold, and he stands out.

  His long raven-black mane makes a stark contrast against the gold. At some point he turns his face slightly, talking with others, and, no way—I know him! It’s Xelio Vekahat.

  Wow, I think with excitement. Yet another one of my Instructors is on this ship!

  At this point it cannot be mere coincidence that all these Pennsylvania RQC-3 Instructors are stationed here on Imperial Command Ship Two. They must be Kassiopei’s select officers, the best Pilots in the fleet.

  They’re astra daimon.

  And this ship is naturally their home base.

  Thinking along those lines, I quietly find an empty table out of the way, set down my tray, and eat a lonely alien lunch.

  “Are you Gwen Lark?”

  I am almost done eating and I look up. It’s been at least half an hour, and the Officers Meal Hall is nearly empty. I’ve tarried here over my food, basically people-watching and not exactly sure what to do with myself for the rest of the day.

  A thickset Atlantean teen stands before me. He’s possibly older than me, or maybe not, with dark skin, somewhere between deep river clay and brown. His pleasant features are rounded, a flattened nose and blunt chin, with the usual kohl-enhanced eyelids around friendly dark brown eyes, and thick dark brows. His metallic gold hair is short and curling tightly against his scalp. He’s wearing a blue armband.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I am Gennio Rukkat,” he says in a slightly nervous tenor and a very light Atlantean accent in his English. “I am an Aide to the CCO just like you. Command Pilot Kassiopei instructed me to find you. You must have many questions, and other things I can help you with, before tomorrow.”

  “Oh, hi.” I smile at him, starting to get up. “Yes, of course, nice to meet you! Thank you so much, I have tons of questions! Let me just get this tray emptied—”

  He nods and follows me, while I pick up my empty dishes and take the tray to the recycling receptacle.

  “Why don’t we take a walk while I show you things and answer your questions?” he says. “And, I hope you forgive me but I really want to make it to the Observation Deck before the scheduled Mars orbit pass.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I say, remembering about the Mars orbit crossing this afternoon. “Is it time already?”

  “Almost two o’clock Earth UTC time,” Gennio says with excitement, as we exit the Officers Meal Hall and begin walking. “We enter the perihelion region of Mars orbital space at 2:13 PM, and I need to record the image of the Earth Sol as it is in that exact moment.”

  “Is that for your work?” I glance at him with curiosity. “Is that what you do also, chronicle and record events for the CCO?”

  “Oh, no,” he tells me with a shy smile. “This is merely personal. I am taking images of the journey for my own astronomy interest. I’ve photographed your Sun and other stars and cosmic entities at various stages of our approach, and now I am doing the same as we return to Atlantis.”

  “Sounds kind of awesome,” I say, as we quickly turn along the network of corridors heading toward the distant outer hull of the ship. “So, what exactly do you do for the CCO?”

  “I oversee the tech—central communication systems and other office computers—basically the CCO machines and their connectivity.” He shrugs with a small nervous gesture. “What is it you call it on Earth? Technical support nerd or geek?”

  “Oh, yes!” I can’t hold back a chuckle. “Okay, I think you and I are going to be new besties.”

  “Beasties?” The Atlantean glances at me in linguistic confusion. “Wild animals?”

  I laugh. “No, besties, as in ‘best friends,’ in old-school underage girl slang—apologies for being silly. It’s been a very long day, and it’s still only afternoon.”

  “I understand,” he says kindly. Already I am beginning to like this guy very much.

  “So,” I continue, with excitement of my own. “Now you can show me how to login at the CCO terminal tomorrow. . . . Also, I need to know how to call my sister and brother who are on another ship, how to check the ship location of other Qualified Earth refugees, how to store files, look up data . . . I’m assuming you have search engines and an Atlantean version of the internet, or ship-board intranet—”

  Gennio listens to me rattle away with an easy expression.

  Yes, I think, he and I will be getting along just fine.

  Chapter Six

  The ICS-2 space Observation Deck is grand and dimly lit, exactly like the one back on Ark-Ship 1109.

  Gennio Rukkat and I stop before the floor-to-ceiling tinted windows and look at the immensity of the cosmos outside. Quite a few other people are gathered here too, to watch the momentous non-event that is about to take place. Too bad Mars itself is hidden far out of sight somewhere beyond the Sun, near the opposite point of its elliptical orbit relative to us, and almost in solar conjunction with Earth. It would have been mind-blowing to see it up-close, instead of merely marking the moment we cross some theoretical trajectory path in space. . . .

  I glance around and see other Qualified teens with various color armbands and tokens, but no one I know—at least as far as I can tell. Soft conversations in Earth foreign languages sound from all directions. At one point, I am certain, someone recites poetry in classical Latin. And from somewhere else, comes a prayer in Arabic.

  “The ship computer is supposed to say when we actually do it. You know, cross the Mars orbit,” an older boy says in a confident voice, right next to us.

  “You mean a countdown?” a girl responds.

  “Yeah.”

  I turn around.

  The boy who speaks is tall and muscular, with an arrogant expression, wavy brown hair and a green armband. I am guessing he is North American, but can’t be sure of his accent. The girl is medium-height, with a toned body and waist-long straight dark hair with purple streak highlights. She wears a red armband.

  Next to me, Gennio Rukkat looks in their direction and says helpfully, “Actually not a countdown but an extended two-part observance for the duration of the orbit pass. The computer will announce when the vanguard ships of the Fleet enter the perihelion, or closest point of Martian orbit relative to the Sun. And then it will announce when we depart beyond the farthest point of its solar orbital range, or aphelion. The whole event will last about three-point-two minutes, give or take thirty seconds, though I believe it will be closer to exactly three-point-two minutes, based on our current timer calibration, the length of the Fleet formation, and our rate of acceleration. . . .”

  “Is that right?” the Earth boy says. “Thanks.” And then he and the girl look at each other, raise brows, and compress their mouths, repressing laughter. I recognize thinly veiled mockery, and oh yeah, these two really give off the unpleasant alpha vibes.

  But I don’t think Gennio notices. “Oh yes, you are welcome,” he says. “It really is exciting to experience, even though Mars is not in our viewing range.”

  “Look!” I distract him, pointing with my hand to a bright point of blue light, like a very bright star. “Is that Earth?” I am pretty sure it is, but I just want to get Gennio to confirm,
and to kind of stop talking to the boy and girl next to us.

  “It is Earth, that is correct, yes,” he says, immediately switching his attention. And then he reaches into the pocket of his uniform and takes out a small Atlantean gadget that looks like a mini-cube made of orichalcum. He presses something and it unfolds into the Atlantean equivalent of a flat rectangle viewfinder with a video display and a micro camera. “Since you mention it, let me just capture Earth in this moment too,” he mutters, then lifts up the device and stares through it at the grand spacescape, until the gadget blinks.

  In that moment, a bright violet plasma shooting star passes horizontally outside the ship’s observation windows. It is followed a second later by two others, and then a third, moving at incredible speed.

  “Whoa! Did you see that?” the muscular boy with the green armband says.

  “What was that?” the girl echoes him, and so do a few other people.

  “Just our shuttles,” Gennio says, not taking his eyes off his video gadget. “Likely, these are the advance transports that were supposed to meet up with the Fleet after picking up your Mars Station personnel and shutting down the station, on our way out of the solar system. Makes sense we would rendezvous at the orbital pass.”

  “Wow! Really?” Now I am genuinely curious. “I never heard anything about that!”

  Furthermore, now everyone in hearing range is staring at Gennio and me.

  “Oh yes,” he says, suddenly a little flustered. “Unlike your older personnel on the Moon, the current Mars Station crew is all seventeen to nineteen and their age makes them eligible for rescue. This was decided a few months ago, in joint agreement with your Earth United Nations. They were supposed to dismantle much of the Mars Station, gut the servers and useful scientific data. . . .”

  “Okay, big wow,” I say.

  “This is completely news to me,” the boy from Green says in a hard voice. “Why weren’t we told any of this? What the hell? These Mars Station personnel, did they even have to pass Qualification like the rest of us? How come they get special treatment?”

  Gennio Rukkat appears to be uncertain how to reply. I have a feeling that what he just told us wasn’t exactly supposed to be common knowledge.

  “I would think that being on a Mars mission and surviving the seven-month-long trip either via Hohmann transfer orbit or ballistic capture is Qualification enough,” I blurt. Okay, maybe I should’ve just kept my mouth shut, because now the boy turns to me with a withering angry stare.

  “Huh?” he says. “What did you say?”

  In that moment comes a timely interruption.

  “Now entering Mars orbital perihelion.” The machine voice sounds at last, echoing throughout the Observation Deck.

  Conversations rise and fall in waves as everyone on deck pauses to listen to the voice of the computer and stare at the “nothing” outside, as though they could somehow magically see the Mars-path in space, etched in stardust or something.

  “Oh! Oh! There it is!” Gennio says, forgetting everything, turning his camera gadget away from Earth and focusing it on the golden disk of the Sun. “This is the moment I need to capture the Sun. Isn’t it exciting!”

  The girl and boy next to us make snorting sounds. The boy still looks aggravated but the girl pulls his sleeve and rolls her eyes and then they move away—for which I am glad.

  For the next three-point-two minutes, I stand looking at the universe, while Gennio takes endless pictures of the Sun and mutters in excitement, occasionally switching over to Atlantean. “There!” he says at last, holding his index finger in the ready-to-stop-recording position. “I should have enough image data to render a composite video and see if I can observe the micro-evolution in the Sun corona during the whole three-point-two minute passage, and compare it to my identical video taken on Earth approach!”

  “Now leaving Mars orbital aphelion,” the computer announces in that same instant.

  “Wow,” I say, impressed. “You really timed that perfectly. Can I look at it when you have it ready?”

  “Of course. I can have it ready in an hour—but not now, of course, not this hour but another hour. . . .” Gennio nods with satisfaction, folds his gadget back into a cube, and puts it back in his pocket. There’s a look of pure enlightened joy on his face that I’ve mostly seen on people in physics labs. I know that look, since I’ve worn it myself on many occasions.

  Oh lord, I think. He is just like me. And we really are nerds.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I wander the ship with Gennio Rukkat, along endless corridors and decks, past Atlantean crewmembers and Earth Qualified refugees going every which way. For once I am letting him talk and point, and I don’t pay much attention or ask too many questions—my mind is back in a kind of dark, deep, inner place.

  My thoughts flip from sluggish to racing, and I think intermittently and feverishly of everyone I know. . . . Where are they right this moment? Gracie and Gordie, what are they doing on that other ark-ship, and oh, I need to call them somehow. . . . I think of Mom and Dad and George back home—on Earth, oh God, they are so far away now!

  Even now my mind cannot conceive the real cosmic distances, how far away everyone is. . . . Mars! Mars! We’re past Mars! And supposedly because we are continuing to accelerate like crazy, we might begin to enter the debris field of the Asteroid Belt by midnight tonight! That’s almost like the distance from Earth to Mars all over again, but in one night instead of the four days it took us to get to Mars! The rate of our acceleration is mind-blowing!

  Strange “space vertigo” strikes and overwhelms me all at once, and now I’m dizzy and reeling in my mind. Ever since the Qualification Finals I no longer suffer from a fear of heights. But now, I think, this fear of grand cosmic space has weirdly come to replace it. . . .

  And what about Logan? He’s on the imperial flagship, settling in as a Cadet to begin his new life and training tomorrow, just like all of us will be doing tomorrow, myself included.

  What about Laronda? And my other friends?

  Oh, I really need to try to find them!

  But first, I need to call my siblings.

  And so I interrupt Gennio as he’s telling me something remarkable about Atlantean systems networking, and ask him to take me back to the Command Deck and show me how to make ship-to-ship calls.

  “Of course,” the Atlantean tells me amiably. “Better yet, I can show how you can easily call anyone from the privacy of your own cabin.”

  “Oh, you can do that?” I say, coming alive. “Oh, that’s great!”

  We get to my tiny cabin #28 on Command Deck Four, Yellow Quadrant, and Gennio sits down at my single chair-and-table combo, while I sit across from him on the narrow bed, barely managing not to knock my head against the low overhanging storage bulkhead.

  Gennio presses a small recessed switch on the table surface and it activates a wall screen I haven’t noticed before. “I need your token ID, please. This will key the ship communication line to you.”

  I hand over my token and watch him as he passes it over the table and calls up a now familiar login screen with a virtual English keyboard.

  In minutes I know how to login and how to make shipboard calls, and how to run people searches. I am also set up for text and email.

  “There you go,” he tells me, somewhat impressed in turn. “You learn fast, that’s good. I don’t need to explain things over and over to you. Now I’ll go while you call your family or friends. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Maybe see you for the dinner meal? I usually eat at the Blue Quadrant Cadet Deck Meal Hall, or the other Cadet Meal Halls.”

  “Not at the Officers Meal Hall?”

  Gennio shakes his head. “Not as relaxing there. We can eat anywhere we like.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay, maybe I’ll see you there too!”

  He just nods, and exits the cabin.

  The moment Gennio leaves, I call Gracie. Apparently wherever she is back on the other ship, her own bunk has a similar video scr
een built into the wall, and if she is there I can video-call her, or leave a message for later.

  “Gracie!” I say, the moment I see my little sister’s face up-close in the display. She appears to be in a barracks situation, identical to what we had on the Residential Deck of her ship. The background is noisy with teenage voices, rowdy laughter, and stuff being thrown. So, this is what newbie Red Quadrant Cadets are doing on their first night, I think and smile.

  “Gee Two!” Gracie sticks her face so close into the screen that it appears distorted and her nose is big, as in a poorly taken selfie. I notice my sister has a couple of new zits on her chin that she forgot to cover up with her usual concealer makeup. “OMG, Gee Two, where are you? Are you in a little room all alone?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “I got my own cabin. Everything’s okay. So, how are you?”

  “It’s kind of crazy here—” Gracie squeals suddenly as I see someone’s hand yank her long hair from the side and a boy’s horsey laugh, then another girl’s voice speaking in what could possibly be Italian. “Oh man, everything, is okay here too, we got our schedule, classes starting tomorrow, I have Pilot class first thing, which is awesome—oh, stop it, you idiot!” Gracie turns to slap away someone’s hand again. Then she laughs. “Okay, Gee Two, I gotta go, call you later!”

  And the call goes dark.

  “Love you . . .” I mouth the words silently to myself, staring at the disconnected silent display and the main login screen.

  Then I try calling my brother Gordie.

  Gordie is not there, or at least not anywhere near his bunk to activate the personal line and receive my call. And neither is Logan. I leave messages for both.

  I consider if I should call Laronda—and momentarily get a sickening pang of fear that Laronda might not be in the Fleet—what if she didn’t make it?