by Patty Jansen
Startled, Cory nodded.
Another lift took them on an even longer ride, where gravity increased until Cory's legs felt weak. He knew that in the past three months gravity inside the Venture had been less than it would be here at Midway, but he hadn't counted on feeling so . . . heavy.
They emerged into a large and airy hall, where a few people in blue overalls sat in chairs, cups on the tables between them. A man served drinks at a counter, like the school canteen.
They moved past the little cafe into a long corridor. Except it looked as if they walked through a tunnel where both ends curved up towards a surface they would never reach. His father had explained that the whole of the floor in the station curved like this, because, like a merry-go-round, gravity span away from the hub, and when seen from in space, everyone walked on the inside of the outer walls. Weird.
Progress through the corridor was slow. Sullivan kept stopping to introduce his father to passing staff. It was all rather dull. The wall screens displaying moving scenes from Earth cities soon bored him. He wished he could run and explore. If anything disappointed him, it was how everything looked old-fashioned. He knew Midway Station was fifteen years old, but he had expected there to be more Union-based technology. Small things Earth designers had been able to copy, like his reader, or DNA-recognition devices on doors. Even their simple unit at the Nations of Earth compound had those.
A long walk later, with many pauses to greet people and introduce them, Sullivan slid open a door. 'Your accommodation, Sir.'
Cory's father nodded. 'Thank you, Sullivan. I will settle my wife and son, and then I'll come to the command room.'
Cory stepped into a dark hallway of the unit that would be his home. Someone had brought up their luggage, which stood in a pile on the floor, blocking the door into what looked like the kitchen. Straight ahead was a living room, with two couches, a low table, a dining table and a large screen taking up most of the back wall, now showing a peaceful mountain landscape.
Cory's father thanked Sullivan and came in as well, sliding the door shut behind him. 'Home.' He smiled. 'Pick your room, son.'
Cory pushed past the pile of luggage into a short and narrow corridor to his left. Three doors opened onto it. The first door, on his left, was a tiny bathroom. Opposite that, a door which was closed. He slid it open to reveal a bedroom with a bunk bed and just enough floor space for a small desk and a chair. A faint glow radiated from the ceiling, where a screen showed a view down one of the station's arms, the inner ring and hub, to a background of black with millions of stars. Wow. He wanted this room.
He turned to tell his father, but his father stood in tight embrace with Erith, kissing her on the mouth. The poncho and face mask lay on the floor.
Cory stared at his father's hand tangling in Erith's hair, the silver ring glittering on his middle finger. Wasn't his father meant to be careful? Wasn't she meant to go in a separate room?
His father released her, cupping her face in both hands. 'Don't worry Erith. You're the director's wife. I don't think this treatment is acceptable, and I will make sure they apologise. No doubt they were following some kind of book.'
Erith's yellow eyes were wide. 'But, John, look, they've even unpacked all our things.'
He nodded, and the grim look returned to his face. 'It's my own fault, I guess. I've talked so much about security, they're trying to impress me with their immaculate procedures.'
'Hmmm—you're doing the job too well?' She smiled at him from under her heavy eyebrows.
His father pulled her close and kissed her again.
Pulling a face, Cory dragged the box with his things to his new room and slid the door shut. Inside the box, clothes lay piled on top of his books. His sports shoes had been jammed in a corner next to his rugby ball. Frowning, he stared at the mess. No way he had packed his things like this. The contents of the box had been searched.
He took all the clothes from the box and flung them onto the shelves in the cupboard, chucked his shoes in the bottom and then unrolled his posters. Grahame Roswell, Grant Smith and other rugby players. There wasn't much space on the walls of his tiny room. The far side was taken up by the bunk bed, the wall next to the door by a desk and cupboard. There was a mirror on the opposite wall and the in-station information screen behind his back.
He put the posters on the desk for the time being, where they rolled themselves back up, then tipped the box upside down on the bottom bunk. Comic books, disks and games tumbled into a heap. He stacked the books and disks on the shelf, but then he remembered something else. Hadn't he stuffed that letter with the threat in the bottom of this box? He rummaged through the things on his bed, but couldn't see it anywhere. Nor was it stuck in the bottom of the empty box, or on the shelf with books or in the cupboard with his clothes, or on his desk, or on the floor.
Someone had taken it.
Chapter 5
Well, that didn't make for a good start. Straight away, people at Midway found him interesting, and somehow, Cory didn't think it was the kind of interest he wanted. Somewhere, someone in the station would now be wondering why he had this letter, and worse, why he hadn't said anything to his father for the past three months.
A small voice in the back of his head said, But nothing bad has happened, right?
The letter said, We will follow wherever you go, but how serious could the writer be? Who could follow his father to Midway anyway? Why would anti-Union people want to make such a fuss over a man who had done nothing except marry an ethie woman, when instead, they . . .
The Union-Earth talks were going to be held at Midway to avoid a repeat of the attack of last year.
His heart thudding, he raised a hand to his mouth, but then shook his head. No.
His father was security-crazy; he would know. If anyone was planning another attack on the conference, would they give it away in a letter to the station director? Maybe he should tell his father anyway?
What would his father say? 'Why haven't you told me this before?'
All the while, Cory could prove nothing because he no longer had the letter. Which his father would find out about anyway, because the station's security staff had taken it. They would ask questions. Then his father would ask him about it.
And he would say he never told his father because . . . because . . .
It was too hard.
He sank down at his desk, flicked on the screen and turned his attention to the menus on the station channels.
The kitchen menu for this week. Station News Bulletin. Games.
Wow, there were hundreds of games he could play. He cast a glance at the door, still shut, although his father's voice sounded somewhere nearby. His father didn't like it if he played games, and he didn't even want to think about what Erith would say. He could just about hear her voice You should take your education more seriously.
Yeah—right. The word 'fun' didn't feature in her vocabulary.
Most of the games were new to him. He guessed they were either from America or—he shuddered— maybe they were the all-nice, non-violent games from Laakonen, the company that advertised 'family-friendly' games in almost every school newsletter in the world. In other words: kiddie-games.
Only one name in the list he recognised—he had played Doomland before, at Garreth's house. It was not a kiddie-game.
He selected the link, then realised he didn't have game gloves or 3D goggles. He slid open the drawer to his desk, but it was empty.
Meanwhile, the familiar Doomland start-up screen had opened. Oh well, for now, he'd just have to play with his touch-keys. He held his hand over them, ready to make the familiar dragon run over the lava field to the mountain of Doom, where he'd have to collect the treasure.
But there was no lava field.
Cory frowned. A new version of the game?
Instead, his dragon stood next to a set of bombs with burning wicks. The instruction panel said, select explosive. Cory shrugged and clicked on a purple bomb. It snapped into the dra
gon's claws and immediately, the sky buzzed with space craft, sleek, triangular things that one by one landed and again took off from an air field behind his dragon, leaving behind boxes with 'demon eggs'. A single pilot sat in each of the craft, a demon, according to the screen. Every craft had a number on its side - the number of points to be earned, Cory presumed—and he was meant to put the bomb on it to earn the points. By now, the wick had burned a lot shorter, so he didn't have much time to complete his task. Not only that, the space craft shot at the dragon once he came closer, but, after losing three lives, Cory managed to reach the craft just as it took off, and just as the wick on his fourth bomb had burned to nothing.
There was a flash.
An explosion rumbled from the loudspeakers—Cory quickly turned the volume down. Black smoke roiled over the screen so thick that his dragon vanished in it. A skeleton lay one the ground, the skull with one blinking eye - the iris black-rimmed yellow, like Erith's . . .
Cory stared at it, revulsion creeping up in him.
'Cory?'
He slammed on the off-button of the screen. Not the sort of game his father liked him to play. Not the sort of game he thought he'd be playing. Not at all.
His father stood at the door. Cory's heart thudded.
'I see you've made the room yours already. It's just as much of a mess as your old room.' A smile crossed his father's face. 'Are you hungry?'
'Yes.' Phew. No questions about games.
'Then come.'
Cory was glad to leave his room. That eye still burned in his memory. He followed his father into the hallway to the door. 'Where are we going?'
'Control room. The staff have put on a welcome party for us.'
Us? Cory glanced into the empty kitchen and then down the dark corridor. 'Is Erith not coming?' And then he cringed that he had even asked. She was meant to stay inside. Besides, he liked going with just his father much better.
His father answered the question anyway. 'She'd better stay here. She wants to rest. She's not hungry.' But his gaze went to the bedroom door.
During the three-month trip, his father and Erith had been inseparable, one never going anywhere without the other. A bit like his father and his mother, really, and suddenly Cory had a memory of himself sitting in the back seat of their car, and his father leading his mother from the entrance of some doctor's practice, while holding an umbrella over her head against teeming rain. His mother walked oh-so-slowly, each painful step leaning on her walking stick, her trousers—those familiar brown ones—flapping around her stick-thin legs in the gusting wind. How had the meaning of the doctor's words hit him at that moment: his mother was going to die.
And suddenly he was afraid. Erith did really have motion sickness, didn't she?
He wanted to ask his father, but he didn't know how to put his question in words that wouldn't hurt.
The control room was on the same level as their unit, on the other side of the hall with the lifts. The door stood open. The blank eye of a camera glared above the entrance, a touchpad on the wall next to it blinked a line of orange lights. A warning, Cory supposed, because someone had chocked the door with a chair. The sound of many voices drifted from inside.
As Cory and his father entered, many people turned to greet his father. Golden uniform buttons glinted in the low overhead lights. Most guests were men, most wore uniforms. They gave Cory strange looks, if they could be bothered to look down at all; a forest of tall and muscled men grew around him. There were no children.
He headed for the food table. After three months on the Venture, the smell and look of fresh food made his mouth water. He had become used to food in a plastic pouch. Breakfast, lunch and dinner all looked the same: like a piece of rock wrapped in vacuum silver foil. You ripped the seal, listened to the hiss of air sucked in, then connected the water to the hole. Sometimes you needed to let it stand, sometimes it tasted better when heated, but by the end of the three months, everything tasted the same.
And here... Freshly baked rolls, sliced meat, fresh salad. Fresh salad? Cory knew of course that Midway grew most of its own food in the agriculture section.
He loaded up his plate with bread—still warm—mini tomatoes, a fish fillet and another piece of meat that wasn't chicken and looked too white to be beef. In a corner, away from the chatting adults, he tucked into his food.
Voices mingled into a constant drone. Light twinkled in glasses. Uniforms, polished shoes. The occasional woman wore a dress.
Then something else struck him about the party's guests: every off-Earth base except the one on the Moon had a Union observer. That had been the price of Union's assistance in reaching other planets. But where was this person and the other ethie inhabitants of the station?
Chapter 6
In the morning, Cory was putting on his shirt when a door in the hallway clanged. Curious, his arm halfway down his sleeve, he slid open the door to his room. He almost crashed into his father's back. Erith was in the bathroom, splashing water on her face.
Cory asked, 'What is it?'
'Erith is still not well.' Worry etched his father's face.
A sheen of moisture covered Erith's cheeks. She hadn't been sick again, had she?
Not saying a word, his father led her back to the bedroom.
His father no longer spoke about motion sickness, because motion sickness would have cleared up a long time ago. What if Erith really did carry a horrible disease? Then it wouldn't be safe for his father to sleep in the same room as her, would it? Or for his father to go to work. Real, proper hospitals were weeks away on Taurus—that's why they had such strict quarantine on Midway—or so he had learned. What if everyone got sick through his father's fault?
In the tiny bathroom, he made an attempt to flatten his hair. He couldn't turn up to his new school looking like he'd just come out of bed.
Sullivan stood at the central bench in the kitchen, bent over a document. He wore his uniform, his jacket stiffly belted, the Nations of Earth symbol on his chest. Cory stopped in the door opening.
Sullivan said good morning without taking his eyes off the screen. Cory mumbled something about going to school.
'Yes, you better make sure you're not late.' Sullivan's grey eyes met his; there was an ominous tone in his voice. Cory's thoughts went to the letter He knows.
This man gave him the creeps without opening his mouth. If he had to face someone over the letter, he'd face his father. This afternoon he would talk to his father, he promised himself, when he came back from school.
Cory quickly crossed the hall, grabbing his bag and his access card from the shelf next to the door and was outside before he realised he hadn't said goodbye to his father. He hesitated, but decided against going back—he didn't like Sullivan.
He slid the card through the security door at the top of the stairs and went into the stairwell.
He thudded down the stairs, where the sound of his footsteps echoed. There was no one else here. Sullivan had explained that the morning shift started at eight, so most adults would be at work. There were no kids either, which made him feel uncomfortable. Just how small was this school? Why had Sullivan sounded so ominous?
At that moment, something fell on his head. He gasped and looked up. A door clanged up in the stairwell.
'Hey!' Cory picked up the scrap of cloth that had hit him and ran up, out the stairwell, into a corridor. He stopped, getting his bearings in the strange curving corridor. All corridors at Midway were like this, which was fine as long as you didn't look at how the doors ahead seemed to be slanting sideways, as if both sides of the corridor were about to slide towards you.
A blue-clad shape flitted into a room. Cory ran after it, into a laundry. Steaming machines hummed and a couple of overalls hung from lines. In the middle of the room stood a trolley with laundry baskets. From behind it came a small noise, the rustle of clothes.
Cory sank to his knees. In the gap under the trolley he saw a pair of feet, clad in station-issued work boots. Ha. 'You
can come out. I see you.'
He inched closer.
A figure shot out from behind the trolley, and the next thing he knew he lay on the metal floor and someone sat on top of him, holding him down by his hair.
'Hey. Stop. Stop!'
He pushed at the girl—anyone who pulled hair could only be a girl. Straddled across his chest, she looked down on him, her eyes light hazel, almost orange. Her skin was pale and blood-red hair spilled over her shoulders. An ethie child.
Cory tried to push her hands away. 'Ow, let go. You're hurting me.'
To his surprise, she backed off, her face now more puzzled than angry. Even her eyebrows were red. She spoke in Coldi, but Cory had never paid enough attention to his private lessons to make sense of her words. 'Do you speak English at all?'
She stammered, 'Father. Take me to father.'
'My father is the new director. You can see him in his office. No need to attack me for that.'
On second thoughts, he wasn't sure if the child was a boy or a girl.
'No, no. Not father—mother.'
'But I don't have . . .' Oh. She meant Erith. Well, that made sense. Ethies wanting to see other ethies.
'You can't see her. She's sick. The doctors say she has to stay in her room until the results from the test are back.'
'Sick?' Her shoulders drooped.
Cory felt guilty. He was being stupid and he knew it. 'I'm sorry, but I'm sure you can see her later. What's your name?'
'Madin Theariki Ethvos.'
'Uhm—excuse me?'
Her eyes blazed with defiance. 'Is my name. You ask my name. I tell my name.'
'OK, OK, keep your hair on. Are you a girl or a boy?'
'Girl? Boy?'
'Yeah. Like I'm a boy.'
'Excuse—what is "boy"?'
Cory bit back the urge to make a sharp comment. Why was he even having this discussion? He was going to be late for school. 'When you grow up, will you be like your mother or your father?'
