The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1)

by Emilia Zeeland

  Albeit a little surprised by their eagerness to take on the task, Dana invited the two to follow her, and she made sure to note their names in the system. She probably thought they were in a hurry to get community service off their backs. Studying at STAR Academy was free, but the candidates did have to pitch in to earn their keep.

  “So, this is the detergent you should use.” Dana handed them a bottle of bluish liquid. “It’s very strong, so you’ll be able to get it all off. But make sure to wash the floor twice, as this is a hospital, and everything needs to be sanitized,” she added, handing over a bucket, two pairs of gloves, and some cleaning cloths.

  They assured her they would wash the whole floor once they got rid of the stains. As soon as the door closed behind Dana, leaving Yalena and Eric alone, gloves on and ready to clean, the two of them looked at each other victoriously.

  “Finally!” Yalena couldn’t help exclaiming.

  “It’s a good thing we seem to think alike,” Eric pointed out somewhat thoughtfully. Yalena feared he would fall silent if she didn’t nudge him.

  “Don’t put this off anymore. What’s going on?” Despite the strong words, she felt sheepish on the inside.

  “Let’s start cleaning. I’ll explain while we’re at it,” he said, opening the detergent bottle and making a face.

  The stuff smelled strongly, making Yalena cough a little. She took out cleaning cloths for the both of them, and after they soaked them in the bluish detergent, they started scrubbing. The stains came off more easily than Yalena had expected, letting her swap the frown from smelling the detergent with an impatient glare. The silent voice of indecisiveness she had been hearing at times was gone in a flash; she was hellbent on staying on Eric’s case until he fessed up.

  “So, first, I need your promise that you will not speak a word of this to anybody else,” Eric started, taking a deep breath. “And I mean nobody.”

  “Fine,” Yalena hurried to confirm, pushing down the feeling that she was signing a deal with the devil. “I promise.”

  “I had to make sure.” He paused, like the next sentence would require heavy lifting. “Now, the thing is,” he started off, forgetting the soaking wet cloth he was supposed to scrub the floor with, “I came upon some information over the summer, and it shook me. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s constantly hovering over my head.”

  “Does it have anything to do with either of the Migration missions?” Yalena had figured out that much.

  “It might. We don’t know yet.”

  “What do we know?” It was a stretch to count herself in that hypothetical “we.”

  “My dad has been looking into something new this summer.” He glanced at the door before continuing. “They detected something, and it’s quite unexpected.”

  “What did they find?” Yalena realized she had forgotten to scrub the floor, too. Eric’s tale had her wrapped up, and she leaned in, listening.

  “A radio signal,” Eric replied, anticipating Yalena’s look of dismay. She frowned instantly and coughed again after taking a deep breath of the heavy-with-detergent-stench air.

  “Coming from where?” she managed to ask.

  “A coordinates point in exoplanet radius.” Even as he spoke, Eric seemed to be working on the mystery in the back of his mind. “Its source isn’t close to anything, really.”

  “Someone is sending out a signal from the dead middle of space?” Yalena had to ask, as he didn’t continue.

  “The end of our solar system, to be more precise.”

  “Is this why you think it’s one of the migration missions?” Yalena imagined their society facing either a band of angry, defrosted prisoners or the third generation that had grown up on the same wandering ship. A toss-up—what would be worse?

  “That’s exactly what my father isn’t buying. It’s why he won’t let Cooper go to the source and check it out. Not yet, at least.” The tense way Eric looked at Yalena made her feel like he was searching for signs of how his words had sunk into her mind.

  “How can we not know what’s sending it?” Perhaps she’d skipped a step somewhere, so she retraced what she could remember form Cooper’s arguments. “Didn’t your father say it was a satellite?”

  “We know it’s human tech—it got in touch with us using the channel left open for the migration missions, but the message it’s sending doesn’t seem to be intelligible. Instead of sending us a written update or a voice recording, it’s just a blur of sound. Mechanical. Completely unintelligible.” He delivered the final piece of the riddle, and it squeezed the air out of Yalena’s lungs. “So, we know what’s sending it, but we don’t know who’s sending it, why, and what it means, if anything.”

  The thought of the Others crashed into Yalena like a wave. “Let me get this straight. You think...it’s an alien signal?”

  “None of the human bases, stations, or planets have ever used similar signals for communication. The computer ran all sorts of analyses on it—against communication systems like Morse code, Braille, even coding. It just...It doesn’t seem manmade,” Eric said, as if afraid to confirm it explicitly. “There are really two possibilities. Either someone who knows how to use a satellite sent a message that made sense to them, just not to us, or the migration ships are trying to get back in touch with us, but the tech malfunctioned, corrupting their message.”

  “Cooper thinks it’s a malfunction, doesn’t he?”

  Eric nodded. “And my dad and the Board think it’s alien, so they only approved a First Contact mission to go in about two years, tasked with reaching out to another potentially sentient species out there.”

  “Does it really take that long?” Yalena frowned, trying to trace the logic.

  “You mean to prepare for First Contact?” Eric raised his eyebrows. “They need to work out a new communication system, if possible, to evaluate how much about humankind to reveal, to assess contamination risks, and develop ways to ensure the crew’s safety, as well as a million other things,” he said. “In their eyes, this isn’t just a mission. It’s a risk we’ve never been exposed to before, and one we need to prepare for and protect ourselves against.”

  Something sunk hard in Yalena’s stomach, like she’d had pebbles for lunch. The tiny voice of caution in the back of her head grew louder, and she knew it was right. It had been right all along. Something was wrong. Panic closed her throat before she could say anything. Overwhelmed by how important, how huge Eric’s news was, she felt the need to distance herself from it.

  “The one thing you still haven’t explained is why you brought me here.”

  It was like making a U-turn in their conversation, and Eric didn’t miss the sudden maneuver.

  “Listen, Cooper wants to go there and draw conclusions from the satellite. It could tell us which migration ship it came from and whether or not it malfunctioned or was tampered with by, let’s say, Others.” His eyes begged for patience, and Yalena caught herself, against all her better instincts, leaning in to hear his explanation. “If these Others have a migration mission satellite, that means they took it from either Farsight or Demonfrost. That makes it seem like they’re preying on humans. We can’t afford to send any more ships their way, not until we have the First Contact team ready to handle whatever is out there.”

  Yalena felt trapped inside a cocoon of icy air. Someone must have tampered with the temperature controls, she thought as she shuddered. “I shouldn’t know this.”

  “Neither should I, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to let this go,” Eric said, plain and simple, like he’d given up on trying. “I had to help my father, even if he never would know that I did so.”

  Yalena swallowed, afraid to ask what this help involved.

  “Don’t you see? I brought you to him, so he’d have access to someone who might be able to understand that message, while the First Contact team is under preparations. If you can crack the message, we’d know what to prepare for. It would cut down the mission’s preparation ti
me and increase its chance of success.”

  All she could do was blink at the expectant way he waited for a reaction.

  “You have a very wrong idea of who I am and what I can do.”

  “Do I, though? If it’s a language or a means of communication of any sort...you’re probably the only person that could ever decipher what it means.”

  His clear, blue eyes had a shiny spark in them. How long had he waited to tell her this?

  “Eric,” Yalena said slowly. “I know absolutely nothing about signals. I don’t know if I can decipher anything. And I speak normal languages, not alien ones.”

  Backing out quickly was the only way. She had just started in this space universe, and it felt awfully early to be telling others what anything meant. What if she got it wrong? Or what if she didn’t get it at all?

  “Yalena, you don’t understand. My dad has listened to it a hundred times, and so have Cooper and the other trusted crew leaders, as well as the best IT people we have. They’ve mapped out the frequencies in every graphical way imaginable. If it were solely a technical or mathematical way to communicate, they would have figured it out long ago.”

  “What could I do that a computer can’t? I mean, I doubt it would jump out like a Martian accent.”

  Eric’s neck snapped in her direction. “What accent?”

  “Oh, come on,” Yalena sniffed, exasperated. “Don’t tell me you can ignore the way Adam and Alec drool on their vowels?”

  His frozen expression told her he was hearing this for the first time, and then her own smile grew stiff.

  “I’d like to see you give the signal a try.”

  “If your father asks for it, I suppose I’ll have to.” Biting on her lip, Yalena imagined the commander’s disappointment when the student he’d brought on board to decipher that signal failed before his eyes.

  “I knew she didn’t have it in her,” Natalia’s quack-like voice would mumble for all eternity.

  “He won’t ask it of you, at least not yet,” Eric said. “Students are only given mock-up missions as a rule, but once we graduate, I think he’d appreciate an opinion.”

  “Then, I’ll give it to him then.” She breathed a sigh of relief. At least that way, she’d have three full years to prepare.

  “It has to be now. What if this is, indeed, an alien message, and we can’t even tell if it’s offering peace or declaring war?” Eric was playing a dangerous game, getting her wrapped up in guilt. “What if these Others captured the Migration ships?”

  Stomach churning, Yalena realized with some discomfort that she didn’t want to disappoint him, but there was something else, too. Hope. What if she really was the only one who could ever decipher the signal? What if she could offer the answers no one else could?

  “And what if it’s a malfunction?” she fought back. “What if that satellite is nothing but a piece of space junk sending the same garbled nonsense for a century, which only now got into the frequency of the channel we’re monitoring?”

  “All you need to do is try, to give the First Contact mission a chance to anticipate what’s out there.” She couldn’t bait him into bargaining. Met with his burning eyes, she was starting to see that any further resistance would be in vain.

  Yalena wished her teeth weren’t chattering. “Fine. You win. I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 10. The Ball

  BEING SWORN TO SECRECY didn’t suit Yalena. She found it inconvenient at best, always tempting her to wander off on a train of thought too different from the one of those around her. At its worst, it was like a dagger she carried around with her everywhere she went, risking dropping it in broad daylight for all to see or cutting someone with it by accident. By the time their mid-term test results came out, whatever patience she was capable of had run out.

  “When can you show me that signal?” She confronted Eric in the study room after everyone but a few second-years had left for dinner. They were busy changing the interactive background of the room, like little kids with a new toy. They wouldn’t hear the odd question amid goofing around.

  “I’m still looking for an opening with my father,” Eric said, his eyes darting to the second-year students. Adam had taken the remote and held it up, while the tiny Kiki jumped about, trying to get it. She soon gave up and went to the control panel to activate the voice recognition capability. She and Adam then proceeded to give contrary demands to the computer, which switched from a desert landscape to snowy mountains in the blink of an eye, back and forth until one would give up. Chris and Katarzyna laughed as that did not happen.

  “Why can’t we just go to him and ask him if I should listen to it?”

  “I told you, it’s outside of STAR Academy policy.” Eric shut her down. “If he gives preferential treatment to one student, he’ll set a precedent and get a million requests from all the other students that want to make a good impression.”

  “I don’t want any preferential treatment.” She let her gaze wander to the four second-years still battling over the remote after Adam had somehow switched off the voice controls. “I just want to hear it and prove to you that I can do nothing to help.”

  It wasn’t the complete truth, of course. Nagging and twisting her was the idea that she might be able to help somehow. Fear of failure or fear of success—one would come out on top eventually. She just didn’t know which yet.

  “In order for you to hear the signal, I’ll need to sneak you up to my dad’s apartment.” When this statement wasn’t enough to get a reaction from Yalena, he went on. “I’ll need to get his fingerprint to access his personal computer, for starters, and we’ll need a big enough diversion so that no one will notice us going up there.”

  Yalena peered to one side, contemplating, before her eyes found him again. “So, never?”

  “Not never,” Eric said. “Perhaps over the Christmas break, when everyone goes back to their families. Or at the next big event, when a crowd gathers, and we can sneak out under the radar. It would sound less suspicious then.”

  What it would sound like was a date, Yalena observed, but she issued a small nod to confirm.

  “And we’d need something else, something you could get from Jen,” he said when he rose to leave. “One of those silicone patches they use instead of stitching wounds.”

  “Fine,” she said, already scheming how she could take one without Jen noticing. Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be fair to get her unsuspecting friend involved in this.

  “Good. Are you coming?” Dinner was served until nine, leaving them just twenty minutes to go get a bite.

  “She’ll be right over.” The reply came from Chris, and Yalena eyed him, suspicions rising.

  Adam said “bye” to Chris with that vowel-elongating accent of his, which still scratched against Yalena’s brain. How Eric claimed to not be able to hear it was bound to remain a mystery to her. The Martian then hurried Kiki and Katarzyna out of the room, with Eric close behind.

  Chris took a seat on the edge of the table, his legs outstretched and crossed. “You study too much.”

  “And you waste a lot of time picking out the study background,” she retorted, making him chortle.

  “Give me your first impressions,” he said. “I see you’re still in one piece, so space hasn’t broken you. Any regrets?”

  “None so far.” She surprised herself a little with the response. It was the truth. Not even overhearing Cooper and the commander or being in cahoots with Eric was a regret. Not yet, anyway.

  “You seem braver.” The smile returned to Chris’ lips. “I wonder if you’re brave enough,” he mused.

  “Don’t tease,” Yalena said, but her stomach tightened with a tingly feeling.

  “How else would I tell you about the best party you’ll ever go to?” His eyes sparkled. “Until next semester, at least.”

  “When is that?” Coming off as nonchalant failed.

  “Few weeks from now, before Christmas.” He studied her face for a more telling sign of enthusiasm. “Sha
ll I pick you up?”

  Yalena’s cheeks felt warm and tight with the smile she couldn’t shake. “Sure.”

  THE FIRST-YEAR CLASS was introduced to the concept of the Snowflake Ball one day in early November, even though Yalena and a handful of others already had an inkling about it. Heidi had, for example, long followed the evening gown trends for this event, and Eric harbored the not-so-fond memories of being pinched on the cheeks by his dad’s colleagues when he’d attended the ball as a kid.

  Eric explained it was a tradition dating all the way back to Unifier’s opening year, about forty-five years ago. On that evening in early December, the commander invited everyone on Unifier to the ball, as well as some long-distance important guests like the commanders of other stations and prominent crew leaders and scientists from Earth, the Moon, and Mars.

  With the semester coming to an end, though, Yalena and Jen couldn’t afford to obsess over the ball, at least not in isolation. The flight simulator leaderboard showed Dave and Alec’s names at the top, while Heidi had broken into eighth place. Second-year students would sometimes congratulate the freshmen pilots climbing up the ranks, never missing a chance to show off their own ranking in the sophomore class, where Chris hadn’t budged from the number one spot since the start of the year.

  With a heavy heart and not a single assignment left to do, Yalena had to roll up her sleeves and put in the compulsory flight simulator hours. But if she’d have to be stuck in that odd computer game—where every time she turned, her ship spun out of control, and every time she landed, she crashed into something—she’d at least do it with the girls and have the ball preparation talk in the background.

  “Does anybody have a date already?” Heidi asked, ducking to the side—an involuntary reaction from having lunged her ship forward to avoid Yalena’s attack.