Star Binder

by Robert Appleton

  “Let’s see you do it,” he says.

  It feels stupid doing star jumps for him, but by the time I’ve finished I’m even more brilliantly lit than he is. “Wow,” is all I can say as I wave my arms about like a pair of lightsabres. This action somehow makes the suit fabric shine even brighter.

  “How do you think it works, Jim?”

  I’ve already passed the interview, but I guess the testing has only just begun. “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Think about what we did to power it up.”

  “Exercise?”

  “Yes. So how could exercise create light?”

  “I don’t know. Energy? Friction? Body heat and energy. The suits are using our body movements like batteries. If we stopped moving, would the lights go out?”

  I catch the glimmer of a smile behind the light glaring on his mask. “Yes, they would—eventually.”

  To my surprise, the walls, in turn, react to the blue light. Words appear inside the ice wherever the light is brightest. It’s only a short phrase, but it follows us as we go, sliding along the wall. It reads:

  FIRST YOUR FEET, THEN THE STARS

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  At the far side of the tunnel, Thorpe-Campbell speaks another command into his private com channel. A large circular section of the floor begins to lower, like an elevator, down into the ice. My heart’s drumming as we descend, and I imagine that crazy beat powering my glowsuit so that I, Jim Trillion, shine brighter than anyone who’s ever made this journey.

  I’m going to keep on shining, I tell myself, no matter what it takes. For Mum, for Dad, for Nessie, and most of all for Sergei. I’m going to ace this training like no one the facility’s ever seen. And then a Trillion will leave Mars...for the very first time.

  Ice on the walls of the elevator shaft is just for show. At about thirty feet down it disappears, revealing a grooved, black metallic cylinder, and the first of several access hatches.

  He extends his right arm out wide, then bends it at the elbow so that his forearm is vertical. He then pivots it through ninety degrees until it’s facing the wall in front of him. The action somehow stops the elevator. I guess it must be to do with the movement of the light from his glowsuit—a visual cue of some kind. A door in the wall peels to one side, flooding us with warm, pinkish light.

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  “Hey, Gladys.”

  “Who’ve ya got there? I didn’t know they gave you clearance to—”

  “They didn’t.”

  “Ah.” The female speaker, one of three armed security personnel barring our way out, pretends to zip her mouth shut. The other two shake their heads in amusement. I feel like asking what the private joke is.

  “Hendron in her office?” asks Thorpe-Campbell.

  “Probably.” Gladys, who’s kind of muscular for a woman, a little scary-looking, eyes him up and down a few times and seems to like what she sees. “I’ll still need to log in our new recruit.” She tosses me a wink.

  The guards are all dressed in matching green T-shirts, dark trousers, and clunky-looking, thigh-high metallic boots. Power boots. My first real clue that this is a military installation. I’ve only ever seen power boots on ISPA recruitment adverts, worn by infantrymen on far-flung moons. They looked more fun in the adverts.

  “Sure. Trillion, James. He won’t be on the official register yet. List him as a special transfer for now, and I’ll enrol him officially later today.”

  “Okay.” She whispers a few commands into her omnipod headset. “Well, he’s missed the commencement speech and the induction, but I’m sure you’ll be able to—”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Thorpe-Campbell removes his breather, then mine, and hands them to Gladys. “They in the Hex yet?”

  “I think they just went in. Poor little buggos. If they only knew...”

  “Don’t listen to her,” he assures me. “She’s just sore because we don’t let her play with the toys anymore.”

  “All except this.” She slaps the stock of her shock-gun, grins. “And that’s the only toy you’ll ever need.”

  “She was a lonely child,” he half-whispers to me so that she can still hear it. He leads me away down a tall corridor lit with rose-coloured light. It smells of pastry and hot rubber. We pass several closed doors. After the corridor turns to the left, there’s no wall on that side, only a vast empty space. It leaves me a little dizzy at first, seeing the full dimensions of the facility.

  It’s shaped like an enormous hexagon, with about twenty floors. The central shaft is about sixty metres wide. On each floor, the sides of the hexagon alternate between walled and unwalled, so that when you look out across the open space the whole thing appears to be a sort of pink and black honeycomb that’s really eye-catching once you get over the vertigo thing.

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “To see the M.O. and the quartermaster. We need to see where you’re at, physically, before we get you started. It’s pretty straightforward. Then I’ll take you down to the Hex myself, let you get acquainted with the other buggos, I mean first-years. If this all seems disorganized, it’s my fault and I apologize. The others have all had a few days of acclimation—testing and induction—but I’ve had to throw you in at the deep end. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. And to be honest, they haven’t had any real advantage. No one, not even the prodigies, has anything figured out on the first day. But you’ll soon pick it up, Jim. You’ve had a head start no one else has had.”

  “I have?”

  No reply.

  “Sir?”

  Still no reply.

  The floor and the walls and the cold reality of the facility might be solid, but I’m mentally walking on quicksand right now. Why did I have to miss the commencement speech, the induction, the days of tests I’m pretty sure would have told me something about this place, about what I’m getting myself into? Instead I got the mysterious Trench Coat Man who changes his name like the weather, seems to make up the rules as he goes, and hasn’t given me a straight answer since I met him.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  After letting the Medical Officer torture me a hundred different ways, with a variety of disconcerting instruments and an even more disconcerting smile—honestly, he only has that one expression, even when he’s getting annoyed—I visit the quartermaster, Graaf. He boasts a buzz-cut and a full moustache. Doesn’t say much. He burns a few tiny nano-ink tattoos on my skin with his laser-guided needle: one on my left temple, one on my right temple, and one on my left wrist. They don’t hurt at all, and I can barely see them in the mirror.

  When I ask him what they’re for, all I get back is, “This the curious one, Charlie?”

  “The same. Saved my neck over in Cydonia,” replies Thorpe-Campbell.

  “Not bad, kid.” The quartermaster lights a cigarette, then offers me one. If he’s joking, I can’t see it.

  I turn to Thorpe-Campbell. “Can I?”

  “By all means...if you want to flunk out on your first day.” He shakes his head at the quartermaster. “No wonder they never let you out.”

  “I know. This place’d fold in a day without me.”

  “Speaking of fold, is the game still on tonight?”

  “Uh-huh. Seven-thirty. Bring the kid if you like. You’ll need someone proficient at saving your ass.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Thorpe-Campbell escorts me out but I don’t want to leave. His banter with the quartermaster reminds me so much of Sergei and me, I’m feeling at home for the first time since the desert. I’d much rather spend time with these guys, who don’t seem like schoolteachers at all, than be in a classroom somewhere with a bunch of kids who all act like they’ve got a steel rod stuck up their—

  “Seven-thirty,” Graaf reminds him.

  “See you then...and raise you ten.”

  I’m shocked when they flip each other off—jokingly, of course—but isn’t this supposed to be a school of some kin
d? If only Sergei had seen what I’ve just seen, maybe he’d have stuck around.

  Now, more than ever, I have no idea what to expect.

  “So this is where it starts, Jim,” he says nonchalantly as we ride an elevator to the bottommost level of the facility. “Welcome to the Hex.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Hex

  I cross from solid metal to fine sand. Red sand. A hundred pairs of eyes zero me for a moment, as if I’m from a different species, but only for a moment. They quickly remember we all belong to the same species today—the dumbest, most helpless species in the facility—the freshmen herd, otherwise known as buggos.

  Herd is a pretty good description. We’re all dressed in blue glowsuits, we have the same clueless-but-trying-not-to-show-it expression, we’re all between the ages of about thirteen and fifteen, and we’re milling about inside a room that’s like nothing any of us has seen before.

  It’s hexagonal—hence its nickname, the Hex—and covers an area roughly the size of a football field. My first impression tells me it’s a fancy gym of some kind. Eleven bizarre-looking apparatuses are arranged inside the hexagon, ten around the sides and one, the largest, in the centre. An angry-looking red rock wall rings the central apparatus, with a single low gap for entry. The wall is bare except for a big, sloppy spray-painted phrase that asks:

  WHAT IS THE HEX?

  The room is around twenty metres high, with a flat, reflective roof that darkens whenever a message alert flashes across the perimeter walls. Every inch of the Hex is well-lit. On one side of the room are toilet cubicles, drinks fountains, and magno-lockers, all clean and well maintained. There’s a balcony about two-thirds of the way up the opposite side, with space for about twenty people on it, but I can only see one man watching over us—youngish, in his late teens. Even he isn’t really watching us; he’s leant back with his feet up, ensconced in his omnipod head-rig, nodding to himself like a boardwalk slacker.

  Ohh-kaay.

  Several boys and girls are getting up close and personal with the apparatuses, but clearly none of them knows how to work the things. So we’re supposed to—what—figure all this out for ourselves? Unsupervised?

  Thorpe-Campbell wasn’t kidding when he called this the deep end!

  On the wall adjacent to the balcony is a large screen listing dozens of names. Each has a zero next to it. I count seventy-two names. Mine is the last one: TRILLION, J. (0)

  “Where did you come from?” asks a skinny boy with a mop of blond hair and eyes way too close together. “Didn’t see you at the address. And you weren’t at any of the tests.”

  “How do you know?”

  He blinks repeatedly, as if I’ve just asked the dumbest question in the galaxy. “’Cause I know all their faces. I’ve got a photographic memory. You’ve only just arrived at the facility.”

  “Yeah? Well, what do you want, a prize?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jim. What’s yours?”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’re supposed to use first names, but I guess—” He gawps up at our names on the wall, shrugs, then saunters off without another word, searching for his next victim.

  There’s a digitab, like the one in Thorpe-Campbell’s shuttle, next to each of the apparatuses. The only difference is these are hexagonal, with six seats instead of three. I can’t see anywhere else to sit, so rather than wander around like a headless chicken (like so many of these kids seem to be doing), I make for the nearest seat. It’s located next to a large, pocked metal sphere resting in a kind of very tall egg cup. Long, flashing fibre-optic wires droop from the pock marks like computer hairs ready to stand on end at any moment. It makes no sense, but it does look kinda cool.

  A dark-haired girl with piercing blue eyes sits opposite me. Our glances meet a couple of times, but neither of us says anything. She’s maybe a year or two older than me and pretty in a harsh, don’t-even-think-about-it kind of way that makes me want to get up, go away immediately and, well, not even think about it.

  “Some first day, huh?”

  I have to look twice to make sure the smoky voice belongs to her and not to some vamp with long painted nails, slouching on a barstool somewhere.

  “Um, yeah, tell me about it. Helluva first day,” I reply in the deepest, most grown-up voice I can summon, complete with grunt. Unfortunately, I pull off the perfect thirteen-year-old-trying-for-deep-and-grown-up, and my grunt is about as manly as a mouse on helium. She rolls her eyes. “So I missed the commencement speech and all that,” I recover, badly. “Can you tell me what they said? What all this is about?”

  “We’re supposed to mingle. That’s the word they used—mingle.” She’s talking to me but she isn’t looking at me. Her gaze is drawn to the tallest and oldest passers-by, as if she’s mentally weighing up the competition. She has a slim, athletic build; it suggests to me she’ll be great at the physical side of the training, whatever that is. I, on the other hand, can run quite fast, but that’s about it. I’m not strong, I’m not a good swimmer, at most sports I’m second-best to Sergei, though I do have pretty sharp reflexes. Good for racquet sports.

  “I’m Jim. Jim Trillion.”

  “Lyssa. Van Buren.”

  “What are we doing here, Lyssa? Besides mingling. What’s this training facility really for?”

  Now I have her full attention. “No one knows. At least none of us buggos knows.”

  “But your parents must have some idea, or whoever let you come here. The guy who recruited me didn’t give much away, but he did say most kids our age would kill to be a part of this. What did he mean by that?”

  She shrugs. “It’s a huge deal. That’s all I really know. And graduates go on to do big and important things. What more do you want to know?”

  “Seriously? You’re not curious at all?”

  “Jim, we’ll figure it out as we go,” she answers a little impatiently, as if she’s reading a script written on the back of my skull. Yes, her stare is that piercing. “So who else shall we invite over here? Might as well get a group thing going. I guess that’s what they want.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Just a hunch,” she replies. “Eleven apparatuses, six seats for each apparatus, that scoreboard up there. Something’s telling me we should put a team together before they assign us to one we don’t like.”

  That actually makes sense. And she’s clearly the right team-mate to have—insightful, athletic and pretty. I’d be stupid not to grab this chance. “Good idea. Was it something they said in the speech? About the Hex?”

  “No. All they said was we’ll be spending a lot of time in here. Classes are on the bottom five floors, morning and mid-afternoon, but the rest of the time we’ll be in here. And they told us to mingle. That suggests teaming up, doesn’t it?”

  “For what?”

  “I told you I don’t know. We’re stuck here. Let’s at least do something.” She puffs her cheeks and blows a slow, cherry-flavoured breath onto the digitab. Nothing happens to the screen, but I end up snorting a laugh. She’s just so jaded and honest and bored by the whole thing; it’s the opposite of what buggos are supposed to be like.

  “All right, you go first.” I motion at the stream of aimless, gormless candidates passing behind her. They’re not interacting with each other; all they’re doing is walking in continuous loops around the Hex, weaving in and out of the various apparatuses, looking but not engaging. “See who can come up with the best way of recruiting a teamie,” I add.

  The sparkle in her eyes and the wicked grin twisting her lips tell me I’ve already lost this game. But one thing she doesn’t know is I’m a skimmer. A career skimmer. Craftiness is my trade. And I had one heckuva teacher.

  “Our goal is to fill the other four seats,” she says, pivoting her head this way and that in the search for fresh fish. “But they can’t be all boys or all girls. Let’s make it interesting: you have to recruit at least one girl, and I have to recruit at least one guy.”

&
nbsp; She’s ready to jump up and start when I add my own condition: “And here’s the best part: we’re not allowed to leave our seats.”

  “What? Then how do we—”

  “Figure it out as we go,” I remind her.

  She playfully narrows her eyes at me, then, with a crack of her knuckles, gets down to business. She sticks her pinkies in her mouth and lets loose an impressive whistle that stops everyone on this side of the arena dead in their tracks. I feel like hiding under the table, but I’ve promised not to leave my seat.

  Lyssa crooks her finger at one boy, bats her eyelashes at another. She pats the seat next to her, waves, pouts, even strikes a desperate fashion model pose to beckon people over. But no one takes her on. It’s either the funniest thing I’ve ever seen or the most pathetic.

  She finally folds her arms and gives up. “What’s wrong with them? Was I that bad?”

  “Not bad. Just not good enough.”

  “Okay, hotshot, let’s see you do any better.”

  I pretend to roll up my sleeves. “You can’t leave them to make the decision; you have to make it for them. Watch and learn.” I tug a girl’s arm as she passes. She pulls away. Flips me off.

  “Suave,” says Lyssa.

  “Shut it.”

  After seeing that altercation, the other buggos instinctively keep their distance, so I’m forced to resort to more creative methods of getting their attention. Before I can stop myself I’ve thrown a fistful of sand that showers at least five people. At least I have their attention—and the cumulative hostility of a five-strong stink-eye.

  This is harder than I thought. So I cup my hands into a loudspeaker: “Listen up. The next one who sits at this table gets ten credits.” I might not have shouted loud enough, so I repeat the offer.

  Not a single customer.

  “He means twenty credits,” Lyssa bids, and flicks her eyebrows up at me.