by Travis Hill
EIGHT
I didn’t get to visit F-Deck again. I also didn’t get another “date” with Captain Jun, though she spent a few minutes with me every day, and even convinced my father to open a comm gateway when we were in our creches. Captain Seong Jun and I spent most of our few minutes trying to convince each other to become a Marine or a Navy fighter pilot.
I was smart enough to know she would never be my girlfriend. It made me feel sad and defeated inside, and more so the few times I saw Alyna, who teased me mercilessly. She especially loved to tell me how I wanted to have the captain’s baby, which was biologically impossible but didn’t seem to matter to Alyna. When I mentioned it to my mom after she asked why I was such a grump, her eyes grew wide and she tried to hide a smile.
A few hours later, my father tried to talk to me about girls, boys, and how sometimes when they are being nasty, evil little trolls to each other, it was actually a form of flirting. I questioned his logic, asking why Alyna would say such mean things if she liked me. Dad simply raised one eyebrow and asked me if I hadn’t learned a single thing from my time on F-Deck. The memory of my confusion at how they talked like they hated each other but acted like they were all best friends led to the memory of Captain Jun and Sergeant Blaine, and how I’d hated the Marine at first sight for kissing her.
That led to the memory of him telling me soldiers sometimes acted married, but only for a few hours whenever their schedules coincided. Dad nodded his head while watching my expression change as I put it all together. He laughed for a long time when I announced that love and girls were stupid, but worse, they didn’t play fair.
When I told Alyna what my father said about how girls flirted with boys, she looked scared, as if she’d been caught cheating on a test and chastised in front of the whole class. When she called me some choice names that weren’t complimentary, I reminded her how it proved my point. I didn’t see her for two days after that, but from the third day on, we were inseparable. The best part was how our hands were inseparable. No matter how much mine sweated and felt like a disgusting, slimy, lukewarm clam, hers was just as bad.
When we sneaked a kiss behind one of the emergency lift tubes, I thought my shoes might explode along with my head, heart, hands, and lower down, which almost caused me to throw up on her. She giggled and we kissed again until the sound of boots approaching forced us to run, laughing like crazed mental patients while praying we weren’t recognized.
—|—
Two days later, Captain Jun ordered all crew into the creches once again as we began our final series of jumps to rendezvous with TCN Dante, TCN Athens, and TCN Osaka at GS-23, then make a unified jump into GS-38 to where all passengers would transfer to Genesis-3 and -4. The ten days at 1g had been a small morale booster for most. For me, my time with Captain Jun, Lt. Kurtz and the 109th—and especially with Alyna Prajapati—kept me from dwelling on the horrible fate of the Daedalus system. Part of me mourned the loss of two billion citizens—dozens of them my friends, hundreds more my teachers, neighbors, opponents I regularly played online games or physical sports against. The other part, the much larger, louder, more demanding part, convinced me to forget the sadness, the horror, and savor every moment I was allowed to spend with Alyna.
I decided to record as much as I could remember since the day Mom woke me up in a panic. I spent a lot of time—when not suffocating under the heavy pressure as we moved through space under extreme acceleration—thinking about who might be on the other three ships like Icarus, what the Genesis seedships might look like, and what kinds of strange places the seedships might decide to choose as our new home (or crash into). The rest of the time, my thoughts returned to Dya Guzman, her fate, and of course, Alyna.
The crushing gravity on the fourth day of maneuvers combined with the crushing emotional strain of losing everyone I ever liked or loved finally brought out the tears. At first I cried because I could no longer remember Dya’s face. Then I cried because it was too painful to cry since I could barely take a breath without fearing my ribs would crack into pieces. The creche’s gel material was capable of transferring medication, which helped with the pain, but helped more by allowing me to sleep. My dreams were tangled, jumbled, chaotic scenes of aliens eating my legs, missiles raining down on my neighborhood on Daedalus, and terrifying space battles where I replayed twisted, corrupt versions of my mother’s heroic deeds.
When I woke after an unknown amount of time, my right foot was so numb that I cried out for a medic. We were moving at 12g and no medic was available, but my my mother’s strained voice in my earbuds was the sweetest sound in the universe.
“Dennis? What’s wrong, baby?” she asked, her words coming in short gasps.
I told her I thought my foot had been severed because I couldn’t feel it, then told her about the ugly dreams that tortured me. Dr. Kim, a Chief Warrant Officer, tapped into the conversation and explained that he had my creche’s sensors in his goggles and my leg was most assuredly still attached. He spent ten minutes working with the ship’s AI to restructure the gel around my foot without making things worse, calmly talking to me (and my mother) about how my foot had probably locked into place when I was asleep and the gel hardened during acceleration.
“Unfortunately,” Dr. Kim said once I confirmed I could feel a burning, tingling sensation below my knee, “Jun says we’re stuck at ten-plus for another eighteen hours. I did the best I could, and hopefully it’s enough for you to be a little more comfortable and a little less worried until we decel and you can actually wiggle and flex it.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kim,” I said.
“Your mom says you were having some pretty bad dreams?” he asked. I told him what I could remember. “Gotcha. Do you want to try sleeping without the meds?”
“I think so,” I said, deciding the pain from my foot was better than a continuous loop of nightmares.
“Okay then, Dennis. If you still have bad dreams without the meds, I’ll figure something else out. If you don’t, then I’ll know to distribute those meds to all the children onboard.”
My mother’s strained laugh mixed with a short chuckle from my father. I hadn’t even realized he was listening. I didn’t think Dr. Kim was all that funny, but nothing was funny at that moment. It would probably be hilarious once I could get out of the creche and see my foot with my own eyes. I then imagined popping the creche and looking down, screaming as a green-black rotted foot sloughed off the bone and onto the floor. It took me almost an hour to fall asleep thanks to my brain focusing on the many disgusting conditions I might find my foot in when we finally escaped the creches.
—|—
The wake alert brought me out of a deep black well. I wiggled my fingers, then activated my goggles when I sensed I wasn’t locked in by the gel. I replayed the tactical logs for the previous nine days.
The only interesting moment happened when we passed near a system that had five stars orbiting each other in a death spiral and Icarus had to make a course correction because of the intense gravity. We arrived in GS-23 and TCN Athens spun down within six light-minutes of our position at almost the same moment. I marveled at how much human and computer processing power had gone into timing such an event, considering how many FTL jumps Icarus had made on its own. Factoring in the time dilation from relativistic speeds on top of that was akin to sorcery as far as I was concerned.
TCN Osaka was already waiting around GS-23’s sixth planet, a gas giant that was anything but giant. Icarus’ sensors claimed the small gas giant had an unusually strong gravitational field, as if deep below the thousands of kilometers of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane was a solid core of incredible density. Osaka accelerated away, joining Icarus and Athens midway between the sixth and the seventh planet, another odd gas giant with multiple ring systems.
My foot reminded me that it had only received ninety minutes of freedom in the last nine days. It didn’t tingle so much as feel like it was on fire. I popped the creche and lifted my leg. Mom was already wa
iting and began to massage my foot. It hurt so bad I couldn’t help biting my lip to keep from screaming. Dad appeared next to me and reached in for my hand. I squeezed it as hard as I could to balance the pain from the nerves in my foot finally waking up.
I walked with a limp for a few hours, which flipped some sort of switch in Alyna and put her in ruthless mode. She badgered me the entire time, but the way we held hands deflected all of her insults and jokes. My parents had dinner with Alyna’s father, though thankfully they knew we wanted to be anywhere but within ten meters of them. We ate behind the emergency lift tubes from disposable plates while our parents and a number of other officers turned the cafeteria into a meeting hall.
The sound of footsteps normally made us break apart as if the other had cooties and body odor, but we kept our fingers locked together even when the click of boots came closer than any others. A head popped around the corner and I felt Alyna’s hand squeeze tight enough to make me wince. Captain Jun stepped into the little alcove we’d made our own.
“Well, no wonder I’ve not been able to get a date with Private Shaw,” she said, sticking her tongue out at Alyna.
Alyna looked like she might want to fight the pilot, but must have realized Jun was messing with her. The captain grinned and nodded her head as if seeing Alyna and me together had been her plan all along.
“Don’t you have a meeting to be at?” I asked, immediately regretting the tone of my voice.
“I just wanted to let you know that TCN Dante translated into the system and will sync with us by 0900.” She stuck her tongue out at Alyna again. “And to tell you that you better slurp each other’s saliva as much as you can in the next two hours since we’ll be back in the tank until we jump.”
Captain Jun disappeared before Alyna or I could voice our disgust at slurp each other’s saliva. She giggled while I couldn’t stop thinking about spitting into each other’s mouths. I’d always thought adults kissing “for love” was nasty, but nowhere near as disturbing as some of the other things I’d seen on the Wire that adults did “for love.” I felt weird that I enjoyed holding Alyna’s hand, and I disappeared into another universe every time we kissed. I felt even weirder thinking about how I would eventually do a lot of the disturbing things I’d seen on the Wire or heard older boys talk about.
I realized Alyna had stopped giggling. I looked at her, but couldn’t see her face in the shadows other than the faint glint of light reflecting from her eyes. The way she kept my hand locked in a vice grip told me she probably wasn’t smiling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s bull,” I said, refusing to talk like a Marine since we weren’t around Marines and weren’t Marines yet ourselves.
“I’m scared. No one seems to know what’s happening.”
“I know,” I said, regretting it before the words even left my mouth.
“I’m sure you do, Admiral’s son.”
“That’s not fair. I can’t help who my parents are.”
“I’m sorry, Dennis. That was too mean.”
I pulled my hand from hers and put my arm around her waist, pulling her close. My heart nearly beat its way out of my chest but I didn’t care.
“So… what’s happening?” she asked after resting her head on my shoulder, which was awkward since she was taller than me.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, hating myself for even bringing it up. “It’s classified.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I’m the Admiral’s son. But I think my dad only told me because he didn’t believe we’d actually get away from Daedalus.”
Alyna shivered. “I don’t want to think about it ever again after we get to wherever we’re going.”
“Me either,” I agreed. “But don’t be freaked out. Whatever is happening is kinda scary, but it’s not bad.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. It’s actually pretty cool, other than the part about the Kai wiping everyone out for it to happen.”
“Stop,” she said, leaning into me to kiss me on the lips. “It will just make me more curious until I have to torture the information out of you.”
She kissed me again, blowing at least a thousand fuses in my brain at once.
—|—
“Systems synced,” Captain Jun said over the command channel. “Osaka, Athens, Dante are all five-by-five.”
“Roger,” my father said. “Commence jump.”
I gritted my teeth. No matter how many times I made a faster than light translation to another spot in the galaxy, I always expected to explode or freeze or maybe just disappear.
“Jump complete,” Jun said. “Osaka, Athens, Dante are present and the board is green.”
“How long before we pick up Genesis on scanner?”
“If they’re where your tac-ops info says they’ll be, then about five more hours, and at least three days to rendezvous unless we want to burn all-out.”
“Negative,” Admiral Shaw said. “Unless the Kai show up, but we’ve made almost fifty translations in the last month. I don’t have the tac-ops intel the others followed, but I have a feeling we’ve criss-crossed their paths dozens of times to keep the Kai confused—or at least thinking it’s someone other than humans.”
“Standard 1g, Admiral?”
“Affirmative. Let’s live in comfort for three days. Who knows how long until we’ll get to take a hot bath or shower again?”
“Roger that, Admiral,” Captain Jun said with a chuckle.
“I know you’re listening, son,” Dad said. “I want to talk to you while we’re on this private channel.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Denny…”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“You’ve read the intel on Icarus and Genesis by now, I presume?”
“Yeah. I didn’t understand all of it, but I think I know what’s happening.”
“Good. Some stuff was locked to you, but there’s a reason for that. One day, if we end up wherever we’re going, I can tell you what it was since it won’t matter anymore. But for now, I want you to understand that once we board Genesis-3, we’ll be going into hibernation within minutes. There won’t be any time to mingle with any of the other kids from our sister ships. In fact, the schedule is set so that I won’t even meet with any of the other COs since by the time Icarus begins shuttling passengers, the other three will have already completed their transfers.”
“Are they really going to fly into the sun when we’re aboard Genesis?” I asked.
The disappointment in not being able to meet all the others from Athens, Dante, and Osaka was nowhere near as crushing as the fact I might not even get five minutes with Alyna.
“Unfortunately, that’s the only sure way to guarantee the Kai never discover what we’ve done,” he said. “Beyond the tragedy that these ships cost trillions upon trillions of credits each just to design, let alone build, the technology employed by each is so cutting edge that if we’d perfected it two decades ago, it might have evened the odds a lot more. But it’s too little too late.”
“Will hibernation on Genesis be just like Icarus?”
“Yep. In fact, it’s supposed to be even better. Icarus was built for speed and stealth, not comfort or luxury. The tanks on Genesis aren’t necessarily the pinnacle of luxury in a normal sense, but Command was adamant that they were built to last for up to ten thousand years. I think that’s a bunch of manure, but then again, we better hope they’re right. It’s better to laugh at how foolish we were to not believe than to not laugh at all because we were right and the life support systems failed after only a thousand years.”
“Are we really going to be asleep for thousands of years?” I didn’t know if my mind could fully grasp the concept of a thousand years. I’d been trying ever since I first read the data on Nightfall.
“I don’t know, Dennis,” he said. He suddenly sounded very tired, very alone in the galaxy. “I honestly don’t know anything
anymore, and it frightens me. It frightens me more because I know a heck of a lot more than you about the big picture, and I’ve got a few decades of actual experience. That experience has almost always shown me that plans and big pictures never end up working out like they’re supposed to.”
“Are we going to die?” I asked after hearing the dread in my father’s voice. I didn’t like to think about what he might have already experienced to believe that we were probably doomed.
“I don’t mean it like that. Sometimes we think everything will unfold exactly how we predicted—and most of the time, everything we predicted happens—just not the way we predicted it would.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty confusing. Do you remember learning about Prohibition in History class?”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering old black and white 2D video footage and pictures of men in strange clothes and hats smashing wooden barrels filled with alcohol.
“Okay. The point of Prohibition was to remove the ‘evils of alcohol from society.’ A lot of people thought drinking beer and such was the reason why their country’s morals were going down the tubes. So the government outlawed it, which did have a bit of a positive effect on society. But the unintended consequences that arose from alcohol being illegal started to become worse than the public’s perception of the evils of simply drinking alcohol.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The big one was organized crime. Think of them as pirates, but instead of sailing through space or the oceans of Earth, they were gangs of criminals who made or smuggled alcohol throughout the country. These gangs fought each other for territory to sell their illegal wares in, which meant each gang had to find more men and fight with more and more deadly weapons.
“This violence—and the sudden lack of taxes since criminals don’t pay taxes—spilled over into civilian areas. Innocent citizens were killed, buildings burned, terrible things like that. Does that make any sense?”
