“Right,” he said. “Uh . . . sorry about that. A friend of mine needed to talk to his parents. They were on that hijacked passenger liner, and I thought I could help them out without bothering you.”
“Well, it was good of you to help out your friend,” Tomas said, sighing. “Is his family okay?”
Lucas nodded. His dad was trying to make him feel less guilty, but somehow that only made it worse. Why hadn’t he called before now? He couldn’t even put his finger on the reason. The night he’d boarded, the thought of being here by himself and leaving his dad all alone on the Josey had seemed almost impossible. Had he really gotten so wrapped up in everything here that he hadn’t even wanted to talk to his father?
Promise you won’t forget where you came from, his dad had said. Well done, Lucas thought glumly. It had taken him less than a week to break that promise.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
His dad was silent for a few moments. “It happens,” he said finally, in a gruff voice. “I’m glad everything is going well there. Tell me more about your classes. Advanced navigation, eh?”
Was it going well? Lucas supposed that it was—at least since that awful first day. He talked for a while about the officers and cadets and the general routine of the ship. At first it felt strange, describing the Orpheus to his father, but gradually it started to feel more comfortable. His favorite part, he discovered, was talking about Elena and Rahul and how they’d already become friends. His dad listened carefully, nodding along or adding little encouraging comments.
“How is everything on the Josey?” Lucas asked. “Are you doing okay by yourself?”
“Oh, it’s all good,” Tomas said.
But Lucas could see that wasn’t entirely true. His dad was trying to hide it, but he was haggard and exhausted. Running a mining ship by yourself wasn’t easy, either psychologically or physically. Lucas’s guilt deepened. He’d gotten his chance to come to the Orpheus, the place he wanted to be more than any other. And as a result, he’d left his father alone.
“Any news on a copilot?” he asked hopefully.
Tomas shook his head. “Got a few recommendations, but none of them are what I’m looking for. I’m picky, I guess.”
Well, that was the truth. Lucas wondered if anyone would be able to live up to—or put up with—his finicky repairs and mind-numbing maintenance routines.
“Well, make sure you find someone, okay?”
“Sure, sure,” Tomas said. “All right, I’ll let you get back to your friends. I’ve got a clog in the starboard plumbing I’m going to try to fish out.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, feeling a little disappointed. “I’ll call you soon.”
Tomas smiled faintly. He started to say something and then stopped himself. “Take care of yourself, son,” he said finally.
“I will,” Lucas promised, but his dad had already closed the link.
He sat back in his seat. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to let himself drift away from his life back on the Josey Wales. He wasn’t going to forget where he came from.
No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to turn into his sister.
“Of course we get the same airlock as them,” Rahul muttered, glaring at Willem, Katya, and Aaron as they waited with their helmets on the other side of the prep room.
“Don’t get too dizzy out there!” Willem called, jabbing his thumb at the airlock at the far end of the room. A tiny patch of stars was visible through the transplastic window in the airlock doors.
“I’ll be fine,” Rahul shot back. “Just make sure you don’t get lost. It’d be a real shame if we had to leave you behind.”
For the entire fourth week of the term, classes for first-year cadets had been canceled so that they could practice basic spacesuit maneuvers. According to Elena, Rahul had done well and mostly managed to keep his vertigo in check. Inevitably, though, word had gotten out, and naturally Willem and his friends had made the most of it every chance they’d gotten.
To his dismay, Lucas hadn’t been allowed to join them for any of the previous training drills. Sanchez had helpfully pointed out that his time would be better spent in tutoring sessions to help him catch up in his academic subjects. As a result, after many hours huddled in a room with Novak, he finally had a decent understanding of logarithms and had moved on to matrices and linear equations. Today the first-year cadets were graduating from simple maneuvering drills to what the Navy called “full-scale exercises.” Lucas wasn’t exactly clear on what that meant, but the only thing that mattered was that he would be there with the other cadets instead of being locked inside. The whole thing made him feel like a prisoner released on parole for good behavior.
“Have you ever been to Volkov Station before?” Elena asked him.
Lucas shook his head. “It’s off-limits except to the Navy.”
He craned his neck to peer through the airlock window at the steel latticework floating a few hundred meters from the Orpheus. Most of what he’d heard about Volkov had been from older kids back on Ceres, most of whom had insisted it was filled with either mutant experiments or alien life forms from another dimension. It was slightly disappointing to discover that it was really just an abandoned monitoring station that was used for training by the Navy.
Randall floated into the room with an armload of thruster backpacks. He passed one out to each cadet, pausing in front of Rahul. “If you need to come back inside, let me know. Star vertigo gets better the more time you spend outside, but for god’s sake please don’t puke in your suit.”
“Yes, sir,” Rahul mumbled.
Willem opened his mouth to say something, but Randall snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “No comments, cadet.”
Willem’s eyes widened innocently. “I wasn’t going to—”
“Yes, you were,” Randall said. “Now, everyone listen up. The other cadets are already in the station. We’re going to meet them at the tactical sphere for a game of capture the flag.”
Randall tapped on a comm panel on the wall and spoke briefly with Ensign Weber, who was serving as the officer of the watch on the bridge. When Randall had gotten the go-ahead, he turned back to the cadets. “Helmets on, everyone. Let’s get going.”
They crowded into the airlock and Randall closed the door behind them. “Anyone familiar with explosive decompression?”
Nobody spoke up. Lucas cleared his throat. “Are you really going to—”
“Yes,” Randall said. “Everyone hold on.”
He flipped a large red handle, and the outer doors shot open. There was a teeth-rattling bang as all the air vented out into space. Willem, who had apparently not listened to Randall’s warning, was jerked out through the outer doors. Randall grabbed his leg to keep him from drifting too far away from the ship.
“Next time, pay attention,” he said over the radio.
There was a beep in Lucas’s headset as they were hailed from the bridge of the Orpheus. “Gee, thanks,” Weber said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Do you know how long it took me to get us perfectly lined up?”
Randall grinned. “I’m just demonstrating the principle of equal and opposite reaction for our young cadets,” he called back.
“What’s she upset about?” Katya asked.
“The force of all that air venting out may not seem like much,” Randall explained. “But in space, it’s enough to push the Orpheus a few millimeters per second the other way. Which, in turn, is enough to drive a perfectionist like Weber up the wall.”
Lucas noticed Rahul floating behind them in the doorway of the airlock. His face, lit from below by the light in his helmet, was looking a bit green. “You okay?” Lucas asked over the alpha section’s private channel.
Rahul shook his head. “I can’t stop thinking about how far away everything is. If I started drifting . . .”
“Keep your eyes focused on something,” Elena suggested. “And don’t think about it.”
“Have you ever tried to not think abo
ut something? It’s harder than it sounds.”
“All right,” Randall said, pointing at the flag sphere, which was floating inside one of the rings of the station. “There’s your target. There’s a beacon if you get too far off course.”
One by one they pushed themselves away from the ship and kicked in the thrust on their backpacks. Aaron’s aim was a little off, and he had to be rescued by the beacon, which overrode the manual controls and brought him back on course when he had strayed too far. Willem arrived only a few meters from the beacon itself, though Lucas would have called it more of a low-speed collision than a landing. Unsurprisingly, Elena did beautifully, following along behind Lucas and imitating the way he pivoted around to decelerate using the main thrusters on his back rather than the weaker ones on his chest. Rahul followed after her, doing surprisingly well considering how miserable he looked.
“I didn’t puke,” he said weakly when they were all gathered together again. “At least I didn’t puke.”
“Nicely done,” Willem said sarcastically. “Quite an accomplishment.”
“We’re about to play a game of capture the flag, right?” Rahul asked Randall. “Am I allowed to hurt him?”
“No,” Randall said. After a moment, he added, “Not deliberately, anyway.”
He passed out flags to each of them. Each had a little sensor on it that would detect when it had been pulled from the wearer’s belt.
“I don’t care whether we win or lose,” Rahul said to Lucas and Elena as they attached the flags to their waists. “I’m going after Willem.”
“I need to go collect the older cadets and get the game ready,” Randall said. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Randall tapped a button on his wrist screen, and a large circular hatchway slid open. He grabbed the edge of the opening and swung himself inside. Curious, Lucas peered through the hatchway, but all he could see were some hand-welded pieces of metal forming what looked like an obstacle course.
Willem stretched his arms and looked at Lucas mischievously. “So this is where you shine, right? I mean, as opposed to gravity. Or centrifuges.”
“I guess,” Lucas said.
“Well, I bet I can still beat you.”
“I guess we’ll see,” Elena said.
“I was thinking more of a race,” Willem said. “From here to the ship and back.”
“You’re dreaming,” Rahul said. “Lucas was born in space. Literally.”
Lucas resisted the urge to point out that he’d actually been born in the medical center on Ceres. He wasn’t sure what made Willem think he could maneuver out here better than Lucas could, but he wasn’t about to pass up the chance to show him he was wrong. “Sure, I’ll race you.”
“Okay, but no help from our friends back here,” Willem said. “So radios off. And no transponders, either, or else everyone will see us.”
Lucas shrugged. “Whatever. To the ship and back, no radios or transponders.”
“I don’t like this,” Elena said over their private channel. “He’s planning something.”
“He ought to be planning to lose,” Lucas said. “I’ll see you back here in less than a minute.”
He turned off his radio and transponder via his wrist screen and watched Willem do the same. He detached his thruster pack’s control stick and positioned his fingers on the controls. When they were both ready, Katya floated out a little ways in front of them and raised her hands.
“On your marks,” she mouthed. “Get set. Go!”
She dropped her arms, and Lucas pressed his thumb down on the control stick. The thrusters on his backpack fired, pushing against the small of his back like an invisible hand. As he accelerated away from the sphere, he stole a glance over his shoulder. Willem was nowhere to be seen. Lucas grinned. This was going to be a piece of cake.
With his radio off, the silence of space was soothing. All Lucas could hear was the low growl of his thruster pack and a faint hiss from his air unit. For a few moments, he felt more at home than he had since he had arrived on the Orpheus. See, he told himself. Not everything here is studying and classes.
He passed by the hull of the Orpheus near its midpoint, just behind the bulge of the rec room. He skimmed past the arm of the centrifuge and kicked in the attitude thrusters to bring him around and back toward the tactical sphere. The sun winked out behind the hull of the ship, leaving him briefly in shadow. As he curled around and came out into the light again, something caught his eye. Someone was crouched against the Orpheus’s hull, just behind the main sensor array.
Repairs? It seemed an odd time for that. And there was something else—whoever was down there had turned off their suit’s transponder, so that there was no indicator on Lucas’s heads-up display. If he hadn’t happened to glance down, he might not have seen them at all.
As Lucas swung around the ship and headed back toward the station, the suited figure next to the sensor array straightened up. The person was facing away from Lucas, so he couldn’t see the face. But even though Lucas only had a brief glimpse of the silhouette before he disappeared back around to the other side of the ship, Lucas was sure it was his sister, Tali.
What was she doing there? As a cadet, even a senior one, it wouldn’t be her job to make any kind of repairs. Especially not now, and not with her transponder off. If something happened to her, nobody would be able to track her down and bring her back in.
Which reminded him of what he was doing flying around out here, and how it was probably not the smartest decision he’d ever made. He looked around for Willem, expecting him to come out around the far side of the Orpheus. Why was it taking so long? There was no way Willem was this slow. And why had he been so insistent on turning off their radios? On an impulse, Lucas flipped his comm unit back on.
“—back right now!” Elena was shouting over the alpha-section channel. “Are you listening? Willem never left! He’s floating right here.”
Lucas banged his fist against his helmet. He’d been a complete idiot. Of course Willem hadn’t thought that he could beat him. All he’d wanted to do was get Lucas in trouble.
“Lucas, get back here!” Rahul called. “Randall will be back any minute!”
Lucas triggered another big burst from the rockets in his backpack. He had to get back as quickly as he could, even if it made for an unpleasant landing. When he was a few dozen meters from the sphere, he flipped around and kicked the thrust to its maximum. His head snapped back and hit the rear of his helmet, and pain shot through his legs as his knees suddenly bent ninety degrees. With a bone-jarring thud, he landed against the surface of the sphere a little ways from the other cadets.
“Are you okay?” Rahul asked, helping him up.
“I think so,” Lucas muttered, glaring at Willem. Like the alpha cadets, he was on his section’s private channel, but he was laughing so hard Lucas could practically hear it without audio.
“Okay, I’m with you,” Elena said to Rahul. “Win or lose, we take him out.”
Randall poked his head out of the opening of the sphere. “All right, we’re ready.”
Lucas and the others followed him inside. The interior of the sphere was a jumble of randomly placed struts, fuel tanks, and cargo containers. Bright floodlights glowed all around the inner surface of the sphere, but the obstacles inside still made for lots of shadowy places to hide. The rest of the cadets were already there, gathered into a few groups.
“All right, listen up,” Randall called out. “We’re going to play capture the flag—alpha and beta versus gamma and delta. Section leaders, gather everyone up and make sure they know the rules.”
Oliver, the beta-section leader, shepherded their team into a clump near one wall while Hanako and Maria gathered up the gamma and delta cadets. “Where is Tali?” an older girl from alpha section asked.
“She had to go back to the ship because of a problem with her air unit,” Oliver said. “She should be back any minute.”
A problem with her air unit?
Tali had certainly seemed fine when Lucas had seen her. An uncomfortable feeling settled in his stomach. What had she been doing out there on the hull of the ship?
The more senior cadets gathered together and started discussing strategy. The girl who had asked about Tali floated over to Lucas and his friends. Lucas recognized her from Hofstra’s class, though they’d never spoken. “Hi, I’m Britta, and this is Kai and Samir. We’re alpha-section second-years.”
“Any advice for us?” Rahul asked.
“Stay out of the way and don’t try to do too much,” Samir suggested.
“If you see someone who looks like they know what they’re doing, run away,” Kai added.
“Great,” Rahul said. “This is going to be fun.”
Tali appeared through an entrance on the other side of the sphere and pushed off toward the alpha cadets. “All right, everyone. Are you ready for this?” she asked as she landed next to them.
“Everything good with your suit?” Britta asked.
“All better now,” Tali said. “Let’s get this game started.”
Lucas watched his sister as she talked casually with the other cadets. When had she gotten so good at lying? There was a time she couldn’t hide anything from him. But if he hadn’t seen her outside the ship, he would never have guessed that she wasn’t telling the truth.
“The rules are simple,” Tali said. She held up one of the flags that Randall had passed out. “If someone from the other team grabs this, you’re out for sixty seconds. Head over to the neutral area there to wait it out.”
She attached a large red flag to a buoy and placed it just outside the opening they’d come through. “This is our base. If they get this flag, they win. So don’t let that happen.”
“How do you capture it?” Rahul asked. “All the other team has to do is play a little defense, and it’s impossible to get to.”
“As far as I know, nobody has ever captured the team flag,” Oliver said. “But your team gets a point each time you get someone’s personal flag. If nobody wins outright, then the side with the most points when time runs out is the winner.”
The Orpheus Plot Page 8
