Terminus Project: Mars (Dystopian Child Prodigy SciFi)

by Casey Herzog

  “Okay, turn off your electromagnets and pull yourself through the hole. I’ll go in after you just to make sure you don’t screw it up.”

  Peter flashed Alphred another irritated look before obeying. He took hold of the hole with one hand, then, disconnected his magnets. Weightlessness took him again, and he was quick to grab the hole with his other hand and push himself into the gap. He knew he should take it slow. There were sharp metal shards jutting out at all angles that could tear his suit. He didn’t care about that though. He wanted to be inside the freighter, safe from drift. With one thrust, he shot through the hole like an arrow.

  “Okay that’s good Peter. Reengage your electromagnets, but try to orient yourself so they’ll seek the floor. You’ll not do much good walking on the ceiling or the walls.” Alphred’s orders droned on in their monotone manner. Even though Peter hadn’t actually thought about which way was up in this ship and needed his commander’s reminder, he still felt like he was being treated like some dumb kid.

  “I know how to orient myself.” Peter looked for a railing, grabbing it and turning his body about so his feet connected with the ship floor, or at least what constituted a floor on a Zero-G vessel. “There, I’m in. You coming? Or do you want me to check my air flow and section seals too?”

  Alphred came through the hole with more care than Peter had and orientated his feet to the ground with far more grace. As soon as he was locked to the ground, he shot Peter a look. “I think we need to look at my command method at some point. Clearly, it is aggravating you, and I don’t want that to interfere with my ability to control my cohort.”

  Peter looked to Alphred, disbelief written across his raised eyebrows and open mouth. “Seriously? You want to have this conversation now? We’re on a ship that’s going to collide with the Unity, your second is coming around to do a cheery suicide run on this place, and you want to stop to discuss work relations?”

  “Fine, I’ll table it for later. I do think the danger is pretty much behind us now, though. The ship’s controls are up ahead. I doubt they’ve been destroyed, and it’s unlikely they are controlling her remotely. We should have an easy job setting a course out of the Unity’s way and making a stop.”

  Peter began to follow Alphred up the corridor; his ankles still making him wince in pain as he took slow, cumbersome steps forward. Following him into the control room, he looked around, trying to remember the various simulation lessons he had taken on commanding a space vessel. He had always scored reasonably well in those tests, but the mental pressure of doing it for real made this feel brand new.

  “I’ll take the operations log, and see if I can discern just how this ship is programmed.” Peter knew he was taking an easy job, simply reading. It was easy though, and he wouldn’t have to worry about messing up.

  “Go for it. I’ll look at their navigation and see if manual control is still available.”

  Peter let his commander do as he liked. Moving to a terminal, he moved through the ship’s records and began scanning through the various logs, shouting out any relevant information as he found it.

  “She’s bound from Jupiter station. No listed cargo, but there’s definitely something in the hold as she’s carrying heavy. Bringing up a vid feed…and there are crates.”

  “Probably explosives. If the secessionists sent this at us as a fire ship, they will want it to do a lot of damage.” Alphred’s assumption made a lot of sense, and Peter turned off the vid feed to those crates.

  “Not much else to tell. All flight systems are online and untampered with. She’s on autopilot, heading straight to the largest object it can find past Earth Gate, but that’s about it. You should be able to turn off the auto pilot, and that’s that.” Peter frowned. This was surprisingly simple.

  “Any evidence the crates are rigged to the ships systems? I don’t want to switch to manual control and trigger something.”

  Peter bit his lip as he tried to work out how best to find what he wanted in the ship’s computer. It took him a few minutes, and he could feel his commander’s eyes watching him as he worked. Alphred didn’t say anything, but it bugged him all the same. “I’m going to go on a limb and say, no.”

  “Can you give me a more concrete answer?”

  Peter took a deep breath, which Alphred must have heard through the comm. “No, I’m not sure. But if I’m wrong, and the ship explodes, at least it will do it far from the Unity. It’ll be no different for us than waiting for Minerva to ram us.”

  Alphred was silent, looking at Peter with no emotion on his face. “Fair enough.” The commander turned back to the controls and began the process of taking control. Peter just watched, praying his guesswork wasn’t about to get them both killed.

  A minute passed, no explosion. Two minutes, no explosion. “Hey…have you taken control of the ship yet? Still working?”

  Alphred came out of himself, blinking as though he was waking from some trance. “Hmm? Oh, yes. We have control and I’m bringing her to a full stop. No explosion.”

  Peter let out a sigh of relief and backed away from the computer terminal. He wanted to lie down. “Okay, personal suggestion for the future: let your team know when we’re not going to die. It helps us relax.”

  Alphred nodded and opened another channel, seeming to suddenly remember the other person they were working with. “Minerva, crisis averted. Disengage from flight course and get as close as you can get to our location on the fuel you have left. I’ll contact the Unity for a pick up.” Alphred eyed Peter again, lips raising into a rare and weak smile. “I think our cohort might be a little more appreciative of your presence after this.”

  Peter didn’t know how to feel. In that moment he couldn’t care less what the other members of his team thought of him. He was trying to process just how they had managed to wrest control of the shuttle so easily. And it did feel easy. Either Alphred really was a genius who could accomplish anything with contemptuous ease, or the secessionists who had planned this attack had been very sloppy. It didn’t feel right.

  He shook his head; he had to be overthinking things. Letting out a sigh, he tried to focus on the good feeling: the feeling of being alive and having come through this first ordeal for the Unity. If anything were amiss, the admiral and the chiefs of staff would work it out.

  CHAPTER 8

  Peter sat with arms crossed, eyes glued to the vid monitors hung above the mess hall. Most of the time, these vid channels would just play TV shows, movies, or other junk the crew could unwind to, but the channel monitors were currently set to a news network, taking in Earth’s reaction to the Unity’s first, and unexpected, engagement with their secessionist enemy.

  “The attempt to board the rogue cargo hauler was undertaken by three brave members of the ship’s Pluto Cohort, including our very own Peter Gabell. Viewers might remember Peter as the four-year-old orphan forced to toil under slave ownership in an illegal mining operation until the One Earth League Peace Corps found the boy and gave him the kind of opportunity every child deserves.”

  “That’s right, Sarah. And it’s amazing to think that Peter is only thirteen years old. It just goes to show what good our boys in blue are doing out there.” The man shuffled some token pieces of paper and looked straight into the camera as though someone had pushed the auto reset on him.

  “A reminder for those just tuning in, the newly christened Unity, the largest spaceship ever to be created by mankind, came under attack today just hours after receiving its crew and officers. A cargo freighter packed with explosives was aimed at the ship, but the brave efforts of our very own Peter Gabell halted the freighter and its mission of terror was ended.”

  Peter cringed. He had left Earth to avoid this, avoid the media and his face plastered over vid screens. He had thought, once in space, his tale would be played out, and he wouldn’t have to put up with hearing himself referred to as a two-dimensional charity case anymore. The media, it seemed, had other ideas.

  Very few people were talki
ng right now. Most were listening to the report, their eyes occasionally flashing toward Peter as his name was repeated over and over again. Each time he was mentioned, the mood in the room seemed to sour a little more, and Peter knew exactly why. It wasn’t fair what was happening. The story was being skewered in entirely the wrong direction as the two reporters chatted away about Peter Gabell and the remarkable way in which he had saved the Unity from a horrible terrorist plot. The names Alphred Armstrong and Minerva Tharsis were only mentioned from time to time. Still, the report took pains to relegate these two to minor contributors at best. Peter could not guess what the people on Earth thought about this, but it was clear no one around him on the Unity bought it. Worse, they judged him for it.

  After half an hour of listening intently to the various reports, the announcers began to repeat themselves: repeating clips and playing back the few interviews they had managed to scrape together. Peter tuned out mentally and focused on his plate of barely touched, rapidly cooling food. Between the hydroponics garden and rehydrated supplies brought up from Earth, the Unity was surprisingly well fed. It was still space food though, and space food still sucked.

  “You know, you look a whole lot better on the camera vids than you do in real life.” Minerva sat down opposite Peter, that happy smile still fixed to her face like it was the only emotion she could express.

  “With this thing on my face, I doubt I look great in any medium.” Peter pointed with his knife to the scar that marred the right side of his face.

  Minerva continued to smile, but she toned down the happy vibe a little. Now her smile on existed at the corners of her lips. “They’ve never bothered me before.”

  “Before? What do you mean before?” Peter’s gaze set on her, his food now forgotten. She was hard to look at. Most people never encountered Martians in their lives, but vids existed, and they all had this weird otherness about them. Minerva was no different. She wasn’t exactly ugly. She had a round, almost symmetrical face. Her smile was cute, albeit annoying, and her eyes were mismatched, which made looking at her hard. He didn’t know which eye to focus on, the blue one, or the green one. The blue eye was nicer.

  Minerva must have noticed she was being studied and began to run a hand over her scalp, her eyes darting down to the table as she focused on his question. “I know we’ve just met, but I feel like I’ve known you for a long time now. I grew up watching your story on all the vid feeds from Earth. Your face came up a lot. So, I guess I just feel like you’ve always been a part of my life.”

  Peter frowned. He couldn’t help it. The thought of being known to complete strangers who believed they “knew” him unsettled him. He took a deep breath and then poked at his meal to try and distract himself from her comment. It didn’t work. “Look, Minerva, you seem nice enough, but don’t go thinking you know me just because you’ve seen me in the news over the years. After what’s just happened, I thought you’d know better.”

  Minerva leaned forward. Her considerable height made eye-to-eye contact difficult, and only by leaning her head lower and resting it on her hands could she catch Peter’s eye again. “What do you mean?” The way her mismatched eyes sought his showed her desire to understand Peter. He was tired and not in the mood, especially considering her lack of understanding about personal space.

  “Well, look at that news feed!” Peter was talking louder than he meant to, a few faces turning to look at him as he pointed to the screens. Peter didn’t notice. “The only person they keep putting up on that screen is me. Peter Gabell, the damned lucky hero boy who blah, blah, Earth League Peace Corps, blah, blah.” He took in a deep, dissatisfied breath through his nose. “Your name and Alphred’s name have come up, what, three times in the last twenty minutes. Meanwhile, if I got a dime for every time my name has come up I’d be rich.”

  “Yeah, don’t pretend you don’t like it Gabell.” The shout came from a nearby table, alerting Peter to just how loud he was being.

  Minerva straightened up. Sitting up, she was almost as tall as some of the other girls were when standing, and she glared at the group mocking Peter with a steely gaze. “Hey, butt out. One, this is a private conversation. Two, I don’t remember Neptune Cohort lifting a finger to save the Unity.”

  Though Peter knew she was trying to stick up for him, he couldn’t help but cringe and sink lower in his chair. The others who had spoken out burst into fresh laughter at her words. He was sure they would both be mocked after this. Peter, Scar Boy, and Minerva the Martian Freak: a match made in ugly. That would probably be the angle the others would go for, and he dreaded to think how long that would take to get old.

  Minerva, not seeming to grasp the complexities of the situation, stood up and nodded her head in the direction of the exit. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Peter didn’t know what to do in that moment. He had no doubt the moment he began to follow her a teasing chorus of kissing noises would be made, but he didn’t want to sit in the mess alone either. So far, Minerva was the closest thing to a friend he was likely to make. Sure, there was Alphred, but the commander was like an artificially intelligent robot trying to work out what human emotions were. He took a deep breath and looked up into Minerva’s mismatched eyes. She still had that smile. Somehow the ridicule hadn’t dulled it. He put aside his tray and stood up, feeling just a little embarrassed as they walked out together, the top of his head barely coming to her shoulders.

  Out on the corridor, Minerva stretched her limbs, her hand caressing the ceiling as they strolled down the corridor of the rotunda. “Well, where to now? As Alphred’s second I have access to a lot of the areas on board ship that aren’t being used right now. As classes haven’t started yet, that’s most of the ship.”

  Peter looked up at his companion in disbelief. “You really aren’t fazed by what happened back there?”

  Minerva pursed her lips, eyes looking down to Peter. He felt like there was some feeling there, but she just shrugged her shoulders and put on her happy face again. “There’s the Zero-G combat room! That’ll be free right now.”

  Peter noted the way she had failed to answer his question. He was about to bring it up, but then noticed several other members of the crew watching them as they passed by. “Yeah, anywhere we’re not being stared at sounds good about now, just as long as you don’t expect me to fight you.”

  ***

  The Zero-G combat room was simple in its design. It was a large box of a room, able to hold a class of thirty with ease. It looked just like a gymnasium on Earth, except the lockers were filled with various weapons, and the class could float around the ceiling and walls while waiting for their turn to spar with one another. It was meant to be a place of violence, but with just Minerva there, Peter found it incredibly peaceful. There was something about being able to float in Zero-G, not having to worry about bumping into walls that really helped Peter relax. He let himself drift with his eyes closed. He was a consciousness adrift and alone. Well, almost alone.

  “Hey, Peter.” Minerva’s voice intruded on the blank void he had created. He didn’t open his eyes, just stretched out lazily.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “What you were saying earlier about the vids…” Minerva paused, no doubt trying to find her words. “I do get that the things on the news vids aren’t always right. I know I don’t really know you.” Another pause. Peter just drifted on in his silent void, waiting for Minerva to finish her thoughts. “If the vids don’t show the real you, then who are you?”

  That was enough to make Peter open his eyes. He couldn’t see Minerva at first, and he turned his head and found her floating a little way below him. She was staring at him with a certain intensity. Most folk who looked at him in such a way were looking at his at the scars on his face. Minerva was looking past those though. She was looking into his eyes. It was not often someone managed to do that. He closed his eyes again.

  “I was kept in a small squalid little shack. There, I was raised by the miners who
basically enslaved the orphans they took in. From our infancy, we were made to haul rocks and obey orders. We couldn’t do much work, but it was training. Those who took us wanted to know we were obedient, that we wouldn’t be trouble. Many of the kids had trouble speaking. We knew the basic commands our masters gave us, but that was about it.

  I was old enough to man the conveyor belts when the Peace Corps found me. I had to sort the crushed rocks passing through the belt, looking for stray diamonds that weren’t found at the main seams. The scar on my face…did the vids ever say how I got them?”

  “No.” Minerva’s voice was a whisper.

  “I’m not surprised. They tend to gloss over the worst bits of what happened to me and the rest of the kids they found. I had failed to notice some diamonds on the conveyor. I was tired and not concentrating on the work like I should have been. The masters took to inspecting the dirt piles left over from time to time. They wanted to make sure we were doing our jobs properly.”

  “They found diamonds in the pile.” Minerva chimed in.

  Peter opened his eyes and looked down at her in annoyance. “Who’s telling the story?” He waited for Minerva to respond, but she just kept quiet. He sighed and closed his eyes once more. “They did find some gems I’d missed, and taught us all a lesson by pressing my face into the conveyor. They set the machine’s drive motor to full speed. It worked like a belt sander, ripping the skin off my face. A few shards of rock caused the deeper scars.”