The Orpheus Plot

by Christopher Swiedler

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “But the important thing is that it’s over. I’ve already told them I’m done.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would you—”

  “I don’t want you to understand, Lucas. I don’t want you to get anywhere near this. It’s bad enough that you’re here at all.”

  For the hundredth time he wondered how his sister kept finding ways to be so amazingly, indecipherably frustrating. How did it help to keep him in the dark? Being here was all he’d ever wanted, and she was making it sound as if it was some kind of prison sentence.

  “I know you don’t believe me,” she said. “I wish I could persuade you that everything here isn’t as great as you seem to think it is. Sometimes I think that if I could just find a way out . . .”

  “A way out?” he asked. “What do you mean? Where would you go?”

  “Someplace where I don’t owe anyone anything,” she said, squeezing the control stick with her fingers. “Like what if you and I just took off, right now, and headed for the outer planets? The Navy doesn’t have any jurisdiction there. Nobody cares who you are or where you came from. We could go to Titan, maybe. Start a new life.”

  There was a wistful, longing tone in her voice that Lucas had never heard before. She was the strongest person he knew, but he could tell that the pressure she was under was almost too much, even for her. He put his hand over hers and squeezed it gently.

  She turned her head and looked at him, and for a moment he thought that maybe she was going to tell him something. Then she seemed to catch herself and sat up straighter. “It’s just an idea, okay? All I’m saying is that there’s more out there than just a stupid asteroid belt filled with miners and cadets.”

  She flipped on the radio and cleared her throat. “Cadet Chen to the Orpheus. Requesting permission to land.”

  “Permission granted,” Sanchez called back.

  Lucas sighed. “You have to promise me something, Tali. You have to promise me that whatever you were doing, it’s all over.”

  “It’s over,” she replied.

  “You promise?” he said. “If I’m going to keep all of this quiet, I have to know for sure.”

  She reached out toward him with her little finger extended. He hooked his own finger around hers, and they shook hands solemnly.

  “I pinky swear, Lucas,” she said. “It’s over.”

  A small cluster of cadets was waiting for them at the back of the hangar. As soon as the mining ship’s hatch opened, Rahul and Elena rushed forward. “That was awesome!” Rahul said.

  “It was nicely done,” Elena agreed. “The captain had all of the cadets watching in the rec room. Though I don’t think she expected it to be quite that interesting.”

  “Someone tell me which one is the damn ship!” Rahul shouted, in a decent imitation of the captain.

  “None of them!” Elena answered, doing her best to sound like Lucas. She and Rahul doubled over laughing.

  Lucas smiled shyly. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

  The three of them headed up the ladderway toward the front of the ship. Rahul paused at deck nineteen. “So what will happen to them?” he asked.

  For a moment Lucas wasn’t sure who he was talking about. Then he saw an armed guard outside the brig, where two grimy miners were sitting against a wall. In all the excitement, he’d practically forgotten that the crew of the Charlemagne would be arrested as a result of their mission. The two men stared blankly at the floor with dejected expressions, as if they’d just lost everything they had in the world. Which, Lucas thought, was probably true.

  “Their cargo will be impounded, at least,” Rahul said.

  “More than that,” Elena said. “Evading pursuit is a serious offense. They’ll lose their ship, and probably get jail time too.”

  An ugly feeling settled in Lucas’s stomach, pushing out the pride that he’d been feeling for the success of the mission. This wasn’t a game or an exercise, he told himself. Those two men were now going to go to prison.

  “Well, they shouldn’t have tried to run,” Rahul said.

  “Come on,” Elena said. “Afternoon classes are about to start.”

  She and Rahul headed up the ladderway, but Lucas stayed behind, watching the miners in the brig. Rahul was right. Why hadn’t the crew of the Charlemagne just stayed where they were? Mining an unlicensed asteroid would only mean getting their cargo impounded. They’d made a stupid gamble, and they’d lost.

  But still . . . who did it benefit to put them in prison? Was the only point of the Navy to arrest people like this? How did that help anyone?

  “That’s Hampton and Nichols,” McKinley said quietly, coming up the ladderway from the hangar. “Good men. Families back on Vesta. This will hit them hard.”

  “It was all because of me,” Lucas said in a monotone.

  It was true. If it hadn’t been for his bright idea, the two miners would still be out on that asteroid. The guilt he felt was harsh and stinging, but even so, it wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how even now he could feel the excitement of the chase and the thrill of doing his job. What was happening to him? How could he feel both proud and remorseful, all at the same time? Was this what his dad had been talking about when he’d asked Lucas to not become “like one of them”?

  “I was listening, like everyone else on board,” McKinley said. “Hampton and Nichols were too smart for their own good—and still not as smart as you. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I didn’t want this,” Lucas insisted. But at the same time came a thought that he couldn’t push away. This is exactly what I wanted.

  “I know,” McKinley said. “But this is what serving on a Navy ship is. Someday you’re going to have to decide which side you’re on.”

  Sides. When he’d arrived, Lucas had insisted to himself that that there didn’t need to be sides—that it was possible to be both a Belter and a Navy cadet at the same time. But was it? How could he do his job as a cadet when the job meant putting miners in prison? Maybe McKinley was right. Maybe he was going to have to choose one or the other. The thought made Lucas feel like he was being torn in two.

  He watched Hampton and Nichols follow Palmer down the ladderway toward the rear of the ship. Ships impounded. Families back on Vesta. This will hit them hard.

  And it was all because of him.

  12

  “WHAT’S THAT CRAZY pulling sensation?” Rahul asked as the patrol ship they were on with all the alpha and beta cadets settled into the hangar on Vesta.

  “It’s called gravity,” Lucas said, rolling his eyes.

  “Gravity, right,” Rahul echoed, his face comically innocent. “I remember now. That’s the thing that makes stuff fall downward.”

  “Barely, in this case,” Elena said. She held out a small water bottle and let it go. It drifted lazily down to the cabin floor.

  “Well, it’s way better than nothing,” Rahul said. He stretched his arms and leaned past Lucas to look out a side window. “I thought this was a Belter station? It looks just like the hangar on the Orpheus.”

  “This must be the Navy’s part of the station,” Lucas guessed, peering out. He’d been to the Belter side of the Vesta colony lots of times, but he’d never been inside the naval base. Rahul was right; other than being a lot bigger, the hangar looked just like the hangar on the Orpheus.

  Ten meters away, the gamma and delta cadets were climbing out of the other patrol ship. Willem jumped down and looked around with a bored expression and then ran off with Aaron and Katya. Lucas wondered what they were going to think of the Vesta bazaar—and what the bazaar was going to think of them.

  “All right, listen up,” Oliver said, standing up at the front of the cabin. “Shore leave is six hours, which means the last shuttle leaves seventeen hundred sharp. Mass allowance coming back is ten kilos, so don’t buy any baby elephants.”

  “Do they really sell baby elephants?” Elena asked.

  “�
�If you can buy it, you can buy it on Vesta,’” Lucas said. “That’s the official motto here.”

  “Technically you’re allowed anywhere in the naval base or the bazaar,” Oliver continued. “But I recommend you stay on the high street. Things get much crazier the farther out you go. Not to mention dangerous—at least for your wallet.”

  “I want to see crazy and dangerous,” Rahul whispered, his eyes gleaming.

  “Until you get used to the gravity, stay close to the walls and pull yourself along on railings, just like you do in zero gee. Don’t try to run, and for god’s sake don’t jump.”

  He opened the cabin door and hopped out onto the floor of the hangar. The rest of alpha section filed out behind him. Even the second- and third-year cadets had trouble moving—the gravity here was too much to ignore completely but not enough to be able to walk normally.

  “It’s easiest if you think about it like pulling yourself with the soles of your feet,” Lucas explained to Rahul and Elena. He showed them how the floors were rough and slightly sticky. “Get traction with one foot and then propel yourself along. Like this.”

  He glided toward the wall of the hangar, brushing his feet against the floor to keep his momentum up. When Rahul tried to imitate his motion, he ended up launching himself in a high arc and crashing into the wall above Lucas’s head. Lucas grabbed him and helped him back down to the floor.

  “Thanks,” Rahul gasped.

  Elena watched the other cadets for a moment and then glided in three long strides to where Lucas and Rahul were standing.

  “Show-off,” Rahul muttered.

  “Until you get used to it, just stay close to the railings,” Lucas said. “So where do you want to go first?”

  “I want to eat something that doesn’t come in a pouch,” said Elena.

  “Yes,” Rahul said, rubbing his stomach dramatically. “That.”

  Lucas pulled up a map on his wrist screen. He looked around the hangar and pointed toward a door on the far wall. “That way.”

  It would have been much faster for him to just walk across the hangar floor, but he stuck with Rahul and helped him use the waist-high railing to pull himself along. The hangar door led to a long, wide hallway that ran slightly downward. Officers and crew members passed by them in a steady stream in both directions.

  After about thirty meters Lucas could hear whispering and giggling, along with the occasional thunk. They turned a corner and found Willem, Aaron, and Katya hanging from a wide doorway that led to the base’s rec room.

  “My turn,” Willem said. “Make some room!” He swung himself back and forth for a moment like a trapeze artist and then launched himself down the corridor. Lucas, Rahul, and Elena moved aside to avoid being struck, cannonball-style, as Willem somersaulted along the hallway. After a few meters he collided with one of the walls and bounced up, wearing a who-cares-what-anyone-thinks grin.

  “Maybe you should find a better place to do your acrobatics,” Lucas said, a little irritably. He pointed at a small glass-covered box on the wall just above Willem’s head. “That’s an evacuation alarm you almost ran into.”

  Willem peered at the switch inside the box. “Oh, really? So if I pull it, an alarm goes off? A loud one, I’ll bet.”

  “That, and every door in the base opens up,” Rahul said. “Weren’t you paying attention in Weber’s class yesterday?”

  “Every door? Even the bathrooms?” Katya asked.

  “This sounds like fun,” Willem said, reaching toward the box.

  Elena grabbed his arm. “Are you really that stupid?”

  “Come on, I was just kidding,” he said. “I wouldn’t actually set off a basewide alarm.”

  “Good.” Elena pushed him toward his friends and stomped off down the hallway, though in the low gravity the effect was more comical than angry. Rahul gave Willem a withering look and followed her.

  “At least, not unless I thought it would be really funny,” Willem called after them, sending Aaron and Katya into fits of laughter.

  “Sometimes I really wonder about the Navy’s recruiting standards,” Elena muttered to Lucas as they headed down the hallway.

  Soon the corridor made a sharp turn to the right and ended in a wide archway with a sign that read YOU ARE NOW LEAVING RIESCHLING NAVAL BASE. A bored-looking guard sat behind a small desk. Past the archway, the corridor opened onto a large plaza, ten meters wide and thirty meters tall.

  “Welcome to the bazaar,” Lucas said, waving his arm.

  A large thoroughfare led off toward the center of the station, and a half-dozen small alleyways radiated out from the plaza in all directions. Shops and buildings of various sizes lined the streets, ranging from tiny metal shacks to massive concrete apartment buildings. The center of the plaza and the sides of the streets were packed with small kiosks, each nearly identical except for the merchandise. Long, rickety-looking catwalks crossed over the main street to connect some of the larger buildings. The ceiling, around twenty meters above their heads, displayed a gigantic image of Titan’s swirling orange clouds.

  Hundreds of people milled about on the street, buying, selling, and haggling. Small kids as young as three or four years old bounded along the streets, shouting at slower pedestrians to move out of their way. Some shoppers were officers or cadets in uniforms like them, but everyone else was dressed Belter-style in loose-fitting, multicolored jumpsuits.

  “And this is still the not-so-crazy part?” Elena said.

  “Come on,” Rahul said, pushing forward through the crowd. “I want to see more.”

  Lucas led them off the high street and through a residential area. They passed a small grassy park with an artificial sun where a dozen people were stretched out on blankets and towels, and then the avenue they were on ended in an oddly shaped intersection with four other streets. At the center of the intersection was a tiny plaza with a bubbling stone fountain. Elena stood on her tiptoes next to the fountain and craned her neck to see what was offered along each side of the intersection.

  “That shop is selling Earther clothes,” she said, pointing down a small street where a sign read SMYTHE’S HABERDASHERY. “Somehow that seems weirder than the store selling Titanian goat cheese.”

  A boy and a girl standing near the shop exchanged a look and walked over to the cadets with long, fluid strides. The boy was a little older than Lucas, while the girl was around nine or ten. Both of them had long hair tied in complex braids that hung down to their shoulders. The boy bowed deeply, sweeping his arm so low it almost brushed the pavement. “If you can buy it, you can buy it on Vesta.”

  “So we heard,” Rahul said.

  “I’m Jo Smythe,” the boy said. “And this is my friend Mai.”

  Mai produced a stack of small glowing cards and passed them out to the cadets. Each card had a picture of a martial-arts ring with the caption “The Janusarium—Fine Low-Gee Combat Sports.”

  “This sounds good,” Elena said, inspecting her card.

  “First bout in twenty minutes,” Mai said, curtsying with ridiculous sweetness. “Tell them I sent you.”

  Jo took Elena’s arm and ushered her toward the store. “Twenty minutes will give you just enough time to examine a number of amazing, one-of-a-kind items—”

  Lucas grabbed Elena and pulled her back. “She’s not interested,” he said to the boy in a low voice. “Find some other logs to sap.”

  Jo’s eyes went wide, and then he snorted. “Are they teaching Belt-speak in the baby academy now?”

  “No,” Lucas said, irritated at the boy’s tone. “They teach it on Ceres, where I was born.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mai said. “You expect us to believe that you’re from the Belt?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Lucas said. “But I’ve been downstation enough times to know a pick-it-up when I see one. So like I said—find some other mark.”

  “We all gotta make eat, kid.” Jo’s voice was lower pitched than before, and not nearly so pleasant. “Apparently some o
f us even sign up with the muskrats.”

  “We all gotta make eat,” Lucas agreed, staring levelly back at Jo.

  Jo snorted again and shook his head. He and Mai glided over to a group of older cadets from gamma section. “Greetings! Is there something I can help you find today?”

  “What’s a muskrat?” Elena asked.

  “That’s what Belters call a Navy officer,” Lucas said, heading off across the intersection. “Come on.”

  “Why don’t Belters like the Navy?”

  Lucas sighed. Did he really have to explain all of this again? “Because our job is to arrest them.”

  “But we do a million other things too,” she said. “And we only arrest people who mine illegally.”

  “Elena, every Belter who has ever lived has mined illegally,” Lucas said.

  “Hey, there’s the Janusarium,” Rahul said, pointing down a wide boulevard that dead-ended into a round building with a sign that read SEE GARTH XI—FIGHTS DAILY. “You wanted to see some low-gee judo, right?”

  Elena’s eyes gleamed. “Perfect.”

  “We can we buy food there, right?” Rahul asked Lucas.

  “If you can buy it—”

  “—you can buy it on Vesta,” Rahul finished. “Got it.”

  The Janusarium was built to resemble an ancient stone amphitheater. The seats were plain stone benches carved out of the ground, encircling a rectangular stage about five meters long. A metal cage had been set up on the stage and a short, wiry man with a shaved head was prancing around inside, shouting challenges and insults to the small crowd. A blue-white hologram of a two-faced, bearded man floated high above the stage.

  “I’m buying,” Elena said. “Three tickets, please.”

  “Fifteen sols each,” said a bored-looking attendant at the door.

  “Oh . . . I’m supposed to tell you that Mai sent us,” Elena said.

  “Wow, that’s great to hear,” the attendant said in a sarcastic voice. “Fifteen sols each.”

  Unfazed, Elena pressed her thumb into her handheld screen and bounded down the stone steps into the amphitheater. As he followed along behind her, Lucas suddenly noticed McKinley sitting on the opposite side of the arena. Their eyes met for a brief moment, and then McKinley whispered something to his companions, a burly man with jet-black hair and a pale-skinned woman in a yellow bodysuit. Immediately they both craned their necks to look at Lucas.