by Tarah Benner
“We’ll all be eating shrimp cocktail and Niçoise salad?”
“Exactly,” he says. “Not to mention all the fresh fruit your little heart desires.”
“Really?” I say, suddenly interested. “That’s on the record, you know. I’m gonna hold you to that.”
He laughs. “I just sort of assumed that all parts of our conversation were on the record.” His eyes flash devilishly. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you wanted to come by my suite later for some fun that would be strictly off the record?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say coolly. I refuse to be charmed into submission by the heir apparent to a tech dynasty.
“Suit yourself,” he says, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back in his chair so that it balances on two legs.
“But . . . I could use your help with something,” I say, throwing caution to the wind.
He laughs and runs a hand through his long perfect curls. “Is this a quid pro quo situation?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. ‘Quid pro quo’ always sounds so hot.”
I shake this off, wondering when he’s going to realize that I’m not interested and give it a rest. “It would be really helpful if I could get my hands on some colony specs.”
“Specs?” he repeats.
“You know . . . How much money went into building it. How much Maverick is spending to fund programs like the galactic press corps, the Space Force . . . How much the company has budgeted for very-berry fruit blast.”
Tripp quirks one eyebrow, studying me for a moment. “I’ve gotta say, Mags . . . I’ve watched every piece you’ve published on Topfold over the last month, and private military spending doesn’t strike me as very Layla Jones.”
I open my mouth to respond, but no words come out. He’s watched every Layla Jones story for the past month?
“That’s the thing about immersive journalism,” I stammer. “The good stuff always looks effortless, but I’ll have you know that a lot of work went into that donut piece.” I feel my face heat up. “And don’t call me Mags.”
He laughs. “My apologies. I loved the donut piece. But honestly, I’m more of a big-picture sort of a guy. I leave the very-berry budget to the bean counters.”
I let out a huff of disappointment. “But you must have access to that sort of information.”
He leans forward, and a tantalizing curly tendril falls into his eyes. “Of course I do . . . I’m an all-access kind of guy. But it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as an in-depth interview with the man who made it all possible.”
I roll my eyes and sit back in my seat. “The guy who made it all possible?” I look up as if I’m wracking my brain to figure out whom he’s talking about. “Would that be Miles Lapain the engineer, Cassius Blain the venture capitalist, or your father the space architect?”
“Ouch!” He grins in a way that tells me that his ego is not at all damaged by the slight. “I’ll have you know that the honeycomb design of the suites was my idea.”
“So you’re the reason I’m living in a hobbit hole.”
“The coach suites are a little small . . . But you have to admit that the beds are comfortable.”
“They’re all right.”
“Come on . . . I bet it was the best night’s sleep you’ve ever had.”
I don’t respond, but he seems to take my silence as tacit agreement.
“Beds are very important to me,” he continues. “We spend half our lives in bed.”
“I think you mean a third of our lives.”
“We spend a third of our lives sleeping,” he corrects. “But I meant what I said.”
I roll my eyes, and Tripp shakes his head. “You’re a tough girl to impress, Maggie Barnes.”
“I’m really not,” I say, “once you show me something impressive.”
Am I flirting with him? What the hell is wrong with me?
“All right. Point taken.” There go those dimples again. “Tell you what . . . Why don’t you stop by my office tonight around seven-ish — no funny business — and I’ll get you whatever documentation you want.”
“Really?”
“Yes — on one condition.”
I roll my eyes. Here we go. “What’s your condition?”
“You let me take you out.”
“Take me out?” I repeat. “Out where?”
“Is that a yes?”
“No,” I shriek. “No. Dating a source would seriously damage my credibility.”
“Oh, come on,” he says. “How’s it going to damage Layla Jones’s credibility if I go out with Maggie Barnes?”
I turn this thought over in my head. I’ve got to give Tripp credit — the guy can think on his feet.
I take a deep breath. I am in way over my head.
“We’ll see what you’ve got,” I say. “Then we’ll talk.”
It takes me a good twenty minutes to shake off the Tripp hypnosis after I leave the dining hall.
Even for someone like me — someone whose job is to cut through the bullshit to see people how they really are — that unshakable confidence is disarming.
Still, Tripp is so not my type, and I didn’t strap myself into a space shuttle and rocket three hundred miles away from Earth to sleep with some overprivileged tech titan. I came here to make a name for myself, and getting involved with someone like Tripp would be a huge, huge mistake.
I finish up my story for Alex and start working on a story for tomorrow. I take a trip to the food-science lab on the upper deck to get some footage and hopefully interview a couple of employees. It’s located in Sector D, right across from the mall.
When I reach the sector, I find my path blocked by a set of heavy metal doors with little portholes cut into the top. I can see through them to a long sterile hallway illuminated by long strips of fluorescent lighting.
I pound on the door for several minutes before someone comes to answer. It’s an irate middle-aged man with glasses and a lab coat. He’s thin and gray and very pale, and he does not look happy to see me.
“Hello!” I say brightly as the double doors swing open.
“Who are you?”
“Magnolia Barnes,” I say, sticking out a hand for him to shake. “I’m a member of the press corps, and I’m doing a story on Elderon’s food.”
“We’re very busy,” says the man, looking as though he’s wishing he never opened those doors.
“I know,” I say. “Mr. Van de Graaf told me you would be. But after hearing about the food-science labs from him, I absolutely had to come see for myself.”
“Mr. Van de Graaf?” says the man, furrowing his eyebrows.
“Yes.”
A-ha! I’ve said the magic words. It isn’t a lie — not exactly. Tripp really was bragging about the food labs.
The man studies me for a moment as if he’s trying to decide if I’m the real deal. “Very well,” he sighs. “Come with me.”
I follow the man down the long narrow hallway until we reach the very end. I have no idea what’s inside the dozens of rooms we passed, but it all seems very top secret. Everything is quiet and utterly opaque.
A scanner on the door registers the man’s face, and he holds it open so I can step inside. The room seems to be some kind of holding area lined with shelves of boxes. The man reaches into one and pulls out a blue smock — the kind that surgeons wear.
“Put this on.”
I put it on. I even don the ridiculous paper bonnet, face mask, gloves, and booties.
Once we’re both fully scrubbed in, my tour guide scans us through the door on the other side, and we emerge into another world.
I’m standing on a metal catwalk suspended over a two-story warehouse. On either side of me are shelves of plants stretching toward grow lights: tomatoes, strawberries, pole beans, and greens. Each plant seems to be bursting out of a small pallet of soil with tubes carrying water and nutrients straight to the roots. The shelves below
us seem to be on solid ground, while the shelves on our level are suspended from cables.
Below us, I see a dozen of the creepy humanoid bots circulating between the aisles, adjusting the nutrient tubes, picking off dead leaves, and harvesting fruit from the more mature plants.
It’s fascinating to watch the bots work. Their movements are almost childlike: slow, deliberate, and calculated.
“Growing plants in space has its challenges,” says my tour guide. “But we’ve managed to outsmart Mother Nature.”
I’ll say. All I can do is stare. I can’t believe they’ve managed to grow all of this stuff in space — or that there will eventually be enough food to feed five thousand people.
The man leads me down the catwalk to a rickety set of stairs, and I follow him down to the lower level. We exit the warehouse from a set of doors on the other end and peel off our scrubs outside.
At first I think that the tour is over, but then he leads me down another hallway past a long line of doors. This hallway is different from the one we were in before.
Instead of numbers, these plaques have words: chicken, pork, tuna, and mutton. We stop at a door with a plaque reading “beef,” and he scans us in.
I half expect to find myself in a gigantic freezer, but we’re standing in another lab. The room is lit by harsh fluorescent lighting and hemmed in on both sides by solid walls of glass.
There are two rows of stainless-steel tables in the middle, where men and women in lab coats are busy taking samples from petri dishes and examining them under microscopes.
I pan around the room with my Optix and step up to the glass. On the other side are four enormous steel tankards as tall as a man with a maze of metal tubes and knobs bursting out like tentacles.
“These are our bioreactors,” says the man. “We took our satellite cells from live animals on Earth. We feed them our proprietary nutrient serum and allow them to propagate. The bioreactor provides the ideal environment to grow and exercise the cells.”
I shake my head in stunned silence and walk around to the window on the other side of the lab. This side contains a solid wall of meat — or, rather, a wall of steel arms holding what appear to be rib-eyes with tiny tubes of red liquid stuck down in the center. The arms are holding the steaks vertically, squeezing and flexing them in a constant gentle rhythm.
“Processed meats are easy for us now,” says my guide. “Unprocessed meats are a little trickier . . . They must be individually exercised on scaffolds of artificial bone and flooded with nutrients. These rib-eyes will be served at the welcome banquet at the end of the week.”
“Wow,” I say, utterly stunned.
“Would you like to try a meatball?” asks my guide, gesturing over to one of the lab techs, who’s poking and prodding a lump of beef under a microscope.
“Uh . . . no thanks,” I say, trying and failing not to sound disgusted. Suddenly, my freeze-dried beef stroganoff from Earth is sounding much, much tastier.
“We can cook it up for you in a jiffy,” he says. “It’s no trouble.”
“Really, I’m fine,” I say. “I, uh . . . just ate, actually.”
My tour guide gives me a brief smile and beckons me out of the lab. “Don’t fear the beef,” he says, holding the door open for me and leading me back the way we came. “I promise you won’t be able to tell the difference.”
I’m a little queasy by the time I stumble out of the food-science lab. On the one hand, I got some excellent footage for my story. On the other, I have to relive the entire experience in order to cut the thing together.
I decide to take a quick break and see what became of my cargo. It wasn’t in my suite when I stopped by during lunch, so I walk down to Sector E to harass the hospitality people.
When I reach the desk, a different woman is working. She’s a perky porcelain-skinned redhead with a freakishly helpful smile. She tells me that my cargo was delivered this morning to a pod in Sector Q, and it takes every ounce of my self-control not to strangle her on the spot.
According to her, the human who handled my cargo must have misread the tag. They punched the destination into the computer as Q325 — not O325. Whatever. All I know is that the bot dropped off my undies with a total stranger, and I am not happy.
Sector Q is part of the defense module, but the pods in the barracks are nearly identical to my own. Still, I feel a little self-conscious as I walk through the pod lounge toward suite Q325. The men and women here are all dressed in Space Force blues, and I stick out like a sore thumb.
I sidle up to the door and take a deep breath, hoping whoever lives here is friendly.
The door flies open after my first knock, and I find myself staring at a hard muscular chest attached to a body in uniform. The insignia near his shoulder tells me that he’s some kind of officer, and the name embroidered in bold capital letters says that his last name is “Wyatt.”
I follow a row of very straight buttons all the way up to his face and get the immediate sense that I’ve seen him before. He’s tall — well over six feet — and his short brown hair is meticulously trimmed. His pale chiseled face is crinkled in surprise, and he’s got the most intense blue eyes that I’ve ever seen.
“Can I help you?” he asks, clearly wondering what the hell I’m doing here.
I clear my throat. “Yeah,” I say, forcing myself to meet his gaze. It’s hard — almost like staring into the sun. “I hope so . . . They told me my cargo was delivered to this suite by mistake.”
“Oh,” he says, though I can’t tell whether he’s annoyed or relieved. He takes a step back into his room, and I gather that he’s inviting me in. “I was wondering when someone was gonna come claim this stuff. The stupid thing tried to drop it off last night, but I refused delivery. Then I came back after PT to change, and here it was.”
“Weird,” I say, feeling embarrassed.
I look around. I’m standing in the cleanest room I’ve ever seen. The officer’s suite is very similar to mine, except that there are no pretzel wrappers or dirty clothes strewn over his bed. His room looks exactly the way it must have when he first arrived, except that there’s a toiletry kit on the bureau and a family photo tucked above the headboard.
He reaches up into the cubby over his bed, and I try not to stare at his magnificent ass. It’s hard to do when it’s right there in front of me, and I have the urge to give it a smack.
He pulls down my cargo bins one at a time, and my insides squirm at the thought of him opening them. It’s bad enough to have a total stranger rifling through my unmentionables. Having Mr. Tidy see that I keep my underwear in a tangled ball of fabric is almost more than I can stand.
“Thanks,” I say, bending down to pick up the bins. I have no idea how I’m going to get them all the way back to my suite, but before I even lay hands on them, he swoops down and picks them up — one on top of the other.
“Where to?” he asks.
“You don’t have to,” I say quickly. “It’s bad enough that you had to hold on to these for me. I can take them.”
“It’s not a problem.” His tone is flat — completely neutral. Does he want to carry my cargo for me, or is he just doing it because he feels obligated? What are the army values? Duty, honor, selfless service?
“Okay,” I say, my throat suddenly very dry. “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
My heart speeds up, though I have no idea why. Maybe I’m just not used to such chivalry. Maybe it’s the thought of having him in such close proximity to my bed.
I lead the way out of his suite, and when we walk into the lounge, every set of eyeballs snaps on to me. I keep my head down and march through the sea of blue. The other Space Force people look astonished, though whether it’s my presence or Officer Wyatt that they find disconcerting, I have no idea.
The walk to my suite feels unbearably long, though it’s only two sectors over. Officer Wyatt moves in complete silence. I don’t even hear him breathing.
“This is me,” I say in a weirdly chipper voice. I don’t know what it is about him that makes me so uncomfortable, but I’m anxious to be rid of him.
“I can take them inside for you,” he says, shifting the bins slightly so he can see me.
“All right.”
I scan my way into the room, cringing internally at the state I left things in.
He sets the bins down on the floor, and I sense his eyes scanning the mess.
“Thank you,” I say. “Officer —”
“Jonah,” he mutters. “My name’s Jonah.”
“Thanks,” I repeat, feeling like a total idiot.
“Don’t mention it.”
Jonah walks out, and I slam the door behind him as though I’m trying to keep out a horde of zombies.
My skin feels electrified, and my heart is racing. I have no idea what’s wrong with me, but at least I have my underwear.
13
Maggie
I’m halfway through my Franken-meat story by the time today’s shuttle is due to dock. I ate a pitiful supergreens granola dinner at my desk instead of going to the dining hall. After my little field trip to the meat lab, my appetite has been nonexistent.
I can’t seem to get Jonah out of my head, which is completely ridiculous. It isn’t as though the guy stripped naked and tossed rose petals at my feet. All he did was carry my cargo from one sector to another.
I finally put together why he seemed so familiar. He was the guy I saw on the shuttle to the base — the guy who looked as though he was headed into a war zone.
I’m so absorbed in my thoughts that I almost lose track of time. I glance at the little clock in the corner of my desktop and do a double take when I see that it’s a quarter ’til seven. The shuttle will be docking on the lower deck any minute, and I need to be there to see who disembarks.
I shut off my desktop and jog down the escalator to get to the waiting area before the passengers come flooding out. I position myself in one of the uncomfortable white chairs just as one of the perky hostesses opens the door to the jet bridge to let the first wave of passengers disembark.
