The Orpheus Plot

by Christopher Swiedler

  A reporter on the news feed gave a summary of the situation for the thousandth time, adding one new bit of information at the end. “According to authorities, six passengers have sustained serious injuries and are being treated in the ship’s medical bay.”

  “Who?” Rahul shouted at the screen. “Why won’t you say who?”

  “Maybe you could try calling them from the comm room?” Elena suggested.

  Rahul shook his head. “I tried. They’re directly sunward of us. There’s too much interference right now.”

  An idea popped into Lucas’s head. “What if you had a relay to route the signal through?”

  “Well, sure,” Rahul said. “As long as they were in a good position. But who—”

  “Come on,” Lucas said, grabbing Rahul and pulling him toward the door. “I think I know how to make it work.”

  They headed quickly down the Broadway ladder and around the rec room to the lower decks. When they got to the comm room, Lucas swung himself inside, nearly colliding with Ensign Mendoza.

  “I’d like to make a call,” Lucas said, out of breath.

  Mendoza frowned. “Right now?”

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” Mendoza said, sighing. He jabbed his thumb at one of the comm cubicles. “Booth one.”

  The three of them crammed into the little comm cubicle, and Lucas activated the privacy field. He looked at the screen and frowned. He could call his father on the Josey Wales and ask him to patch through a call. But his dad would want to talk about school and the Orpheus and a thousand other things, and right now Lucas just didn’t want to do that. Feeling a little guilty, he typed in the comm code for the Josey and added a password that would let him access the ship’s computers directly.

  “Is this legal?” Elena asked, watching over his shoulder.

  “Well—it’s not illegal,” Lucas answered. He pulled up the Josey Wales’s communications interface and turned to Rahul. “What’s your parents’ comm code?”

  Rahul typed in the code quickly. “Will this really work?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Lucas said.

  The screen flashed a dark blue for close to a minute, and then a woman’s face appeared on the screen. There was a crowd of people around her, and for a moment all they could hear was the chatter of overlapping voices. She looked exhausted, but her face brightened as soon as she saw them.

  “Rahul!”

  “Mom!” Rahul said frantically. “Are you okay? Is Dad okay?”

  There was a maddening delay of almost twenty seconds before her response arrived. “We’re fine—really, we’re fine. Some excitement this afternoon. But we’re both okay.”

  She smiled reassuringly, but it was clear that whatever had happened had been a lot more than just “some excitement.”

  “Where is Dad?” Rahul asked.

  “He’s getting something to eat,” his mother said. “He broke his arm, if you can believe that. I promised that I’d let him tell you the story. He’d be furious if I spoiled it.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Who are these kids with you?” she asked. “Are these your friends?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Elena said, giving her a little wave. “We’re his sectionmates.”

  “This is Elena and that’s Lucas,” Rahul said impatiently. “Are you sure you’re all right? Can I talk to Dad?”

  His mother looked around. “Of course. Let me see if I can find him.”

  “We’ll give you some time,” Elena said, nudging Lucas toward the cubicle exit. When they were outside the privacy field, she gave him a quick hug. “You’re a good friend. He was getting so worried he didn’t know what to do with himself.”

  Lucas was feeling an almost overwhelming sense of relief that Rahul’s parents were safe, so he could only imagine what Rahul himself must be feeling right now. It felt good to be able to help.

  “Sorry to break the bad news,” Mendoza said from his spot near the door. He flipped around his tablet screen and showed Lucas the headline: Miners in custody, all hostages safe. “Must be disappointing.”

  It took Lucas a moment to realize what Mendoza was saying. Disappointing? That everyone was safe? He opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out.

  “Are you trying to say that Lucas wanted this to happen?” Elena demanded.

  Mendoza shrugged. “It was his people who did this, wasn’t it? They always say it’s a fringe group, but I don’t buy it. Every ore miner I’ve ever met was ready to snap. You spend that much time out there on your own, you’re going to get a few screws loose.”

  “I wouldn’t—” Lucas sputtered. “There’s no way—”

  “Come on,” Elena said, pulling him out through the doorway. “I think it’s against regulations to punch an officer, and the longer I stay here, the more tempted I am to find out.”

  All of Lucas’s relief at finding out that Rahul’s parents and the other hostages were okay had suddenly been replaced by a burning fury at Mendoza’s accusation. How could anyone think that Lucas would be disappointed that the hijacking hadn’t been a success?

  “Let’s get back to our cabin,” Elena said.

  Lucas shook his head. “I just want to be alone right now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said, already moving down the ladderway toward the rear of the ship. He didn’t know where he was going, exactly. All he wanted was to be away from everyone else.

  He reached the hangar and floated down toward the floor. Chief Engineer Moskowitz was nowhere in sight, but Randall was still tinkering with the engine on one of the patrol ships.

  “Hey,” Randall said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said, though “okay” wasn’t anywhere near an accurate description of how he felt right now. “Can I go outside?”

  Randall raised his eyebrows. “Like, outside the ship?”

  Lucas nodded. Randall watched him for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Technically first-years aren’t allowed. But I don’t think you were quite what people were thinking when they made that rule. Be careful.”

  Lucas gave him a grateful smile and hurried into the prep room at the back of the hangar. He put on a suit quickly and headed back out to the main hangar doors, which were still open to the blackness of space. He looked at the shimmering barrier hesitantly. He’d heard of airfields, but he’d never actually encountered one. They were similar to privacy fields, except that they were designed to keep air from leaking out instead of just blocking light and sound.

  “I just go through?” he asked Randall. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Lucas stuck out his hand and reached through the field. His glove expanded a little as it adjusted to the vacuum of space. He took a deep breath and floated out through the field.

  Randall was right—that was it. No airlock, no waiting for pressure to equalize. It was like magic. One second he was inside, the next he was out in space, surrounded by the reassuring glow of the Milky Way.

  How long had it been since he’d been outside? Just a few days? It seemed like so much longer.

  He used his suit’s thruster pack to skim along the hull of the ship. Right now he just wanted a quiet place to relax. He found a sunny spot away from any windows and tethered himself to the hull so he wouldn’t drift away. He turned off the light filter on his helmet and closed his eyes, basking in the faint warmth of sunlight on his face.

  At least there was this, he thought. Space was the same everywhere. Out here it didn’t matter if you were a Navy cadet or a miner or some kid from Earth. There was just a reassuring, infinite emptiness and the warm glow of the sun.

  “Guess I’m not too surprised I’d find you out here,” Tali said over the radio.

  Lucas opened his eyes and turned around to see his sister pulling herself hand over hand along the hull toward him. He shrugged. “At least out here nobody thinks I’m the enemy.”

  “At least you won’t
have to put up with them for much longer, right?”

  “Actually, I talked to Captain Sanchez,” Lucas said. “It was all a big misunderstanding. I’m not getting sent home after all.”

  “You’re staying?” Her jaw twitched slightly. “Lucas, I know you think that’s a good thing. But I’m going to say it again: you’d be better off withdrawing.”

  For a moment Lucas wondered if maybe she was right. Nothing at the school had gone the way he’d expected. Everything was twice as hard as it ought to be, and after the news reports about the attempted hijacking, he was pretty sure almost nobody actually wanted him to stay.

  But this was his only chance. If he left now, he’d never be able to come back. He hadn’t even been here for a whole day yet. Was he really going to run away just because it wasn’t as easy as he’d expected?

  He shook his head. “I’m staying.”

  “You always were stubborn,” she said, sighing. “Even when we were kids, we spent more time arguing about the rules for games than we did actually playing. I remember being jealous of how my friends bossed around their younger siblings.”

  “You bossed me around plenty,” Lucas protested.

  “Yeah, I guess eventually I learned,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I’m here now, bossing around a bunch of groundhog kids.”

  He punched her lightly in the arm. “You’re welcome.”

  In response, she just looked away. What was weighing on her so heavily, Lucas wondered, that she couldn’t relax even when it was just the two of them? It was like she was always playing the part of Tali Chen, senior cadet from Mars, and couldn’t break out of it even for a second.

  There was something she was keeping from him—something big. He wanted to ask her, but he knew she wasn’t going to tell him until she was ready. He wasn’t the only stubborn one in their family.

  “I’m going back in,” she said. “You coming?”

  He supposed it wasn’t all that much of an invitation, but it was something. He nodded and followed her back along the hull. Instead of going through the hangar doors, though, she led him all the way down to the engine room’s maintenance hatch.

  “Isn’t this area off-limits to cadets?” Lucas asked as she cycled the airlock.

  Tali smiled wryly. “Don’t worry. If we get caught, I’m going to pretend I don’t know who you are.”

  The main engine room was a place Lucas could have spent a hundred years exploring. He’d seen pictures of fusion rockets, and he had a reasonable idea of how they worked, but he’d never been up close to one. He wandered around the main engine assembly, tracing the feeder lines in his mind. It was almost enough to make him want to give up piloting and become an engineer.

  “So, did you see it?” a man said from the other side of the engine. “There’s a spot. . . .”

  The voice trailed off. A moment later, an arm shot out from around a coolant tank and grabbed Lucas roughly by the arm. Lucas was suddenly brought face-to-face with a tall man with a silver-flecked beard. The man glowered angrily at him.

  “Eavesdropping?” he growled. “That’s not polite, son.”

  Lucas jerked his arm away. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just—”

  “This is our new cadet,” Tali interrupted, coming around from the other side of the engine. “Lucas Adebayo.”

  The man blinked in surprise. “The Belter kid?”

  Lucas nodded. How many times was he going to go through this?

  “And here I was accusing you of spying on us! Sometimes this ship makes a fellow too suspicious for his own good. What I ought to have said is how it’s a genuine pleasure to meet you. I’m Abbott McKinley, born and raised on Pallas.”

  McKinley grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down vigorously. Lucas stared at him in astonishment. He couldn’t have been more surprised if the man had just told him that he was Charles Darwin. “You’re actually from the Belt? I thought I was the only one!”

  “You’re the only Belter cadet in the Navy. But there are a few dozen of us as enlisted mates in the fleet.”

  “Oh, wow. I was starting to think . . . ,” Lucas said, and stopped.

  “You were starting to think you were the only sane person on this crazy ship?” McKinley clapped Lucas on the back and bellowed with laughter.

  A warm feeling of relief flooded over Lucas. He wasn’t as alone as he thought—there was someone else on this ship he could talk to! Someone who would understand him. It wasn’t like being back home, but it was light-years better than nothing.

  “Hey,” McKinley said, suddenly looking a little more serious. “Nobody has been giving you any trouble, have they? About all the nastiness on that passenger liner?”

  “A little,” Lucas admitted. “Ensign Mendoza.”

  McKinley grimaced. “I should have guessed. Don’t listen to him, eh? He just likes to stir people up.”

  “We should get back,” Tali said, tugging on Lucas’s arm. “It’s almost dinnertime.”

  “You’ll be fine, though, won’t you?” McKinley went on, escorting the two of them toward the ladderway. “Tough kid. I can see it written on your face. And you’ve got a friend now. Belters stick together. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said, smiling. “Belters stick together.”

  7

  ONCE LUCAS FIGURED out the basic rhythm of the ship, he started to feel a little more comfortable. Hofstra’s advanced class on orbital mechanics was fascinating, and with a little tutoring from Rahul, Lucas even stopped dreading Novak’s calculus lectures.

  Rahul insisted repeatedly that he was okay now that he knew his parents were safe. But Lucas noticed that he spent nearly all his free time sitting in their bunkroom staring at the wall and talking to his AI corneal implant.

  “Tell me about the power generation systems on Ceres,” he said one afternoon before dinner. Confused, Lucas had been about to tell him that he didn’t know much about that side of the colony, but then he’d realized that Rahul had just been running a query through his AI. Elena gave Lucas a concerned, inquisitive look. She was clearly thinking the same thing—why was Rahul researching Belter colony power systems? Lucas just shrugged. It was just Rahul being Rahul, he figured. And if it was his way of getting over the stress of being worried about his parents, well, it was certainly better than a lot of things he might be doing.

  Surprisingly, the one-on-one sessions with Captain Sanchez turned out to be Lucas’s favorite part of the day, though he wasn’t sure what most of it had to do with commanding a ship in the Navy. They mainly talked about ancient Earth history, some of which, Lucas was surprised to discover, was fascinating. He’d heard about some of these places—America, South Africa, Hong Kong—but he knew almost nothing about them or how they had formed. At the end of the first week, Sanchez asked him to write an essay on a historical period that had parallels to the current day. It was a fun project, and he turned it in with a feeling of pride and excitement.

  Sanchez had read through it—twice—and cleared her throat. “It’s a very . . . interesting comparison, linking England’s tariffs on tea to the taxes on soy milk in the Belt.”

  Lucas didn’t understand what she was saying. Interesting? Was that good? Why did she have such an odd expression?

  “So what do you think that implies?” Sanchez asked.

  “Ma’am?”

  “We study history because of what it can teach us about today. What was the end result of the taxes on tea in the American colonies?”

  This was actually something Lucas hadn’t considered. He thought for a moment, and then his eyes went wide. Did she think that he’d written that essay to argue for a revolutionary war here in the Belt? “I wasn’t suggesting . . . I didn’t mean to say—”

  “I didn’t read it that way,” Sanchez said reassuringly. “But it’s something for you to keep in mind. And let’s pray that nobody on Ceres decides to sneak into a hangar and throw a hundred tons of soy milk out into space.”

  On his way back to his cabin that af
ternoon, he stopped outside the comm room. He’d been here for seven days and he hadn’t called his dad yet—at least, not unless you counted the first day, when he’d used the Josey’s comm systems to let Rahul call his parents. He slipped inside, where fortunately the on-duty officer was Lieutenant Feinman and not Mendoza.

  “Can I make a call?” Lucas asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. “Booth two.”

  He settled into the cubicle and turned on the privacy field. It took him a moment to remember the comm code for the Josey, even though it was a number he’d had memorized since he was four years old. After a brief delay, his father’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Hi, Dad!” Lucas said, grinning broadly. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m doing well,” Tomas replied. “It’s good to see you.”

  Alarm bells went off in Lucas’s head. They hadn’t seen each other in a week, and this was how his dad responded? He was upset about something. Was it the hijacking of the passenger liner? Or something else? It was hard to tell over a video call.

  “Classes are going well,” Lucas said. “The teachers are all really smart. I got moved up to an advanced navigation class.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You must be very busy.”

  Maybe his dad was mad because he hadn’t called before this? “Yeah,” he said, nodding vigorously. “They keep us moving—it’s a super-busy schedule. And they have a special room where you have to go to make calls. High security, I guess.”

  “I see,” Tomas said. “So it’s been hard to find time to talk, I guess?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then I’m curious how you managed to find time in that busy schedule to route a call through my comm systems—without bothering to ask, or even say hello.”

  Lucas froze. How had his dad found out about the call to Rahul’s parents? He’d been careful to cover his tracks—a fact that only made the whole thing look even worse. And how long had his dad known? A horrible guilty feeling settled over him.