by Dom Testa
“You would have loved Lita’s song—”
“Why are you whispering?” he called back to her.
“I don’t know, it’s very quiet and peaceful in here. All right, I’ll speak up. I said that you would have loved Lita’s song for Alexa at the funeral.” When he didn’t respond, but instead continued to push ahead through the gloom, she added, “But I understand why you weren’t there.”
“I’m so glad. It would have wrecked my day if you were upset with me.”
“Okay, Mr. Sarcastic. I’m just trying to talk to you.”
“Next subject.”
A leafy branch slapped back against Channy’s face. “Ouch. Excuse me, is this a race?”
“You wanted to come, I didn’t invite you.”
They popped out of the heavy growth into a diamond-shaped clearing. Bon stopped quickly, and Channy barely managed to throw on the brakes without plowing into his back. A moment later he was down on one knee. “Here,” he said, holding the flashlight out to her. “If you want to tag along, do something helpful. Point this right here.”
She trained the light on the two-foot-tall block that housed a water recycling pump. One of the precious resources on Galahad, water was closely monitored and conserved. Every drop was recycled, which meant these particular pumps were crucial under the domes. After a handful of breakdowns early in the mission, they were now checked constantly.
“I guess Gap will try to explain at the meeting what Tree did,” Channy said, sitting down on the loosely packed soil. She kept the flashlight trained on the pump, but occasionally shifted her grasp in order to throw a bit of light towards Bon’s face. “Although I have to admit, I don’t think I’ll ever understand why she did it.”
She waited for Bon to respond, but he seemed to want nothing to do with the conversation. She added, “Do you think she did the right thing?”
“Keep the light steady right here,” he said. For half a minute he toiled in silence before finally answering her. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Triana did what she did, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Channy said. “I know you like to play it cool, but you have to have an opinion.”
Bon wiped sweat and a few strands of hair from his face, then leaned back on his heels and stared at her. “You don’t care about my opinion. You’re trying to get me to talk about Triana, either because you’re upset with her, or because you’re trying to get some kind of reaction from me about her. I’m not a fool.”
“And neither am I. I don’t know why you have to act so tough, Bon, when we both know that you have feelings for her. And, if you ask me, you had feelings for Alexa, too. Did you ever stop to think that it might be good for you to talk about these feelings, rather than keep them bottled up inside all the time?”
“And why should I talk to you?”
“Because I’m the one person on the ship who’s not afraid to ask you about it, that’s why.”
“You’re the nosiest, there’s no question.”
Channy slowly shook her head. “If I didn’t think it would help you, I wouldn’t ask. I’m not here for me, you know.”
“Right.”
“I’m not. I just want to help. The two people on this ship that you had feelings for, and they’re both gone, just like that. Why do you feel like you have to deal with it by yourself? Are you so macho that you can’t—”
“Please put the light back on the recycler.”
“Forget the recycler!” Channy said. “Have you even cried yet? I cried my eyes out over Alexa, and I’ll probably end up doing the same for Triana if she doesn’t come back soon. You won’t talk, you won’t cry.” She paused and leaned towards him, a look of exasperation staining her face. “What’s wrong with you?”
He stared back at her with no expression. After a few moments, she tossed the flashlight to the ground, stood up, and stormed off down the path to find Iris.
Bon looked at the flashlight, its beam slicing a crazy angle towards the crops behind him. His breathing became heavy. For a moment he glanced down the path, his eyes blazing. Then, with a shout, he slammed a fist into the plastic covering of the recycling pump, sending a piece of it spinning off into the darkness. It wasn’t long before he felt a warm trickle of blood dripping from his hand.
2
A chair toppled over and dishes scattered across the floor, producing a startling crash that pierced the calm, early morning air inside the Dining Hall. Shouts punctuated the noise. Lita, sitting alone in her usual seat in the back of the room, propping her head up with one hand and neglecting the breakfast before her, bolted upright. A knot of crew members near the door rushed to break up the fight, which had materialized seemingly out of nowhere.
The two combatants, at first separated by a handful of friends who’d been nearby, broke free from the restraining arms and lunged at each other again. They twisted into a furious mass of wild swings before falling in a heap on the ground, where they continued to wrestle and jab while astonished onlookers again scrambled into the ruckus, attempting to pull them apart. Two more crew members fell to the ground in the effort, and another chair went skidding aside.
It had all happened in mere seconds, instantly transforming a rather serene setting into a boisterous melee. The shock of it kept Lita in her seat at first, trying to absorb what she was seeing, before she sprang into action. Leaping to her feet, she raced over to the tangle of bodies. One of the boys had managed to position himself above the other.
“Stop it!” Lita yelled over the shouts, dropping to her knees and helping to drag the boy away, even as he lashed out with more punches. In the pandemonium Lita felt his elbow strike a glancing blow against her cheek, momentarily stunning her. At last the two were separated again, and Lita stood up between them with her hands outstretched on each of their chests.
“Enough!” she said. “That’s enough!” She found her own breathing was coming in fits, matching that of the two crew members who stood poised, prepared to rush at each other again. Lita turned to one of them and narrowed her eyes. “Errol, what is this? What are you doing?”
The rugged boy from Scotland had a thin line of blood dripping from his nose, and a dark bruise had already formed near his chin. “Taking care of some long overdue business, that’s all,” he said.
Lita looked around at the other boy. He had recently completed a work rotation in Sick House, and she recalled that his temper had seemed short at times. It made this altercation less surprising. “You wanna explain this, Rodolfo?”
The Argentinean was also bloodied, but the cut near his right eye seemed worse than it probably was. He stared past Lita into Errol’s face. “Just tired of his attitude, that’s all. Tired of putting up with it.”
“Attitude?” Lita said. She looked back at Errol. “Overdue business? Would you both listen to yourselves? I don’t care what started this, and I don’t care if you never speak to each other, but this will not happen again, understood?” She turned back to Rodolfo. “We’ve been through a lot lately, and the last thing we need is for you guys to do something stupid like this. This crew needs to come together, and not react by collapsing into chaos.” She looked at the mess of food and plates on the floor. “Both of you, clean this up and get out of here. Then go back to your rooms and clean yourselves up. And stay away from each other until you can behave like adults.”
For a few moments the two boys glared at each other. Lita gave a disgusted snort and walked back to her own table. Sitting down, she looked back to see Errol and Rodolfo slowly gathering the plates and utensils from the floor and setting the chairs back on their feet. The entire incident seemed surreal, a frightful glimpse into the dark turmoil that resided just beneath the fragile surface of their mission. Up until now there had been scattered incidents of disagreements and rare threats of violence. Suddenly the violence was real.
Lita, already weary from a lack of sleep the night before, and now troubled by this altercation, again rested her head
on one hand. She wondered what might come next.
* * *
For a department labeled Engineering, its looks were deceiving. Unlike the stereotype portrayed in movies and television shows from the early days of the space age, it was not an expansive room filled with enormous turbines or stories-tall banks of equipment. If anything, it most closely resembled a compact series of laboratories connected by offices and storage rooms.
The majority of ship functions were under Roc’s control, which left the crew to primarily monitor the operations, and to perform physical maintenance and updates. Vidscreens peppered each room in Engineering, along with computer terminals and work stations. The department included separate rooms for life-support functions, Galahad’s solar sail and ion drive systems, and information storage.
There also was a room devoted to the ship’s defense. Unlike traditional defensive systems that utilized weapons, Galahad relied upon scanning devices that probed the path ahead. Contrary to a popular misconception, space was often anything but empty. A series of shields protected the ship and its precious human cargo from the deadly radiation which permeated the cosmos, as well as from potentially lethal debris.
A chief concern of early space exploration, the original long-distance vessels employed panels filled with water to block and absorb the radiation. Galahad’s designers knew that it was crucial to shield the crew, but, given the size and complexity with which they worked, water was not a realistic choice. Instead, scientists developed a magnetic shield which wrapped itself around the shopping-mall-sized ship and acted much like Earth’s own magnetic field. That field, which generally went unnoticed and unappreciated by a busy human population, made its presence felt through its effect on compasses, and the showy delight of the aurora borealis. The Northern Lights were nothing more than Earth’s magnetic field in a dramatic dance with the sun’s highly charged particles.
As Galahad raced outward from the Kuiper Belt at speeds that were rapidly approaching the speed of light, a protective magnetic blast shot ahead, diverting toxic radiation out of the way, clearing a path. Because it clearly was one of the most crucial elements of the ship’s defenses, crew members rotating through the Engineering section during their work tours were taught to monitor and maintain the radiation shield.
Ruben Chavez pulled up a chair and punched in his personal identification code at the work station. He’d finished a late afternoon workout in the gym, quickly showered, and reported to Engineering for a long stretch of work. After taking a personal day to catch up on some school assignments, he was making up work time in the radiation section, monitoring the forward scans. A few feet away, Julya Kozlova hummed while she charted the progress of a maintenance scan.
“What is that song?” he said to her. “It sounds like something my mother used to sing.”
Julya smiled and, rather than immediately answering, turned to him and began to sing the song, adding words to the melody that she had been humming.
He closed his eyes, nodding to the beat, but then chuckled. “Well, that’s no help. You’re singing in Russian; that version probably wasn’t a hit in Toluca.”
“Hmm, you’re probably right,” Julya said. “But it’s a traditional Russian love song; how it ended up in Mexico is beyond me. Perhaps your mother was more continental than you gave her credit for.”
“Uh, no,” Ruben said, laughing again. “It’s more likely that the melody just happens to sound like the Mexican lullaby that she sang when my sisters and I couldn’t fall asleep.”
“How many sisters?”
“Four. Yes, four girls surrounding me, teasing and torturing.”
“Made you tough.”
He shook his head. “You have no idea.” He bent over the console to pull up a tracking program, and allowed Julya to once again concentrate on her task.
The silence was shattered by a quick succession of tones that rang out from the room’s main panel. After a pause, the sequence repeated. Ruben and Julya exchanged a quizzical look, then both stood and walked over to the display.
“That’s odd,” he said. “It’s coming from the radiation control system.”
“Running a diagnostic right now,” she said, her fingers flying across the keyboard. She looked up at the monitor, then entered another command.
Together they watched as a response flashed across the vidscreen, then again looked at each other. “Uh, Roc?” Ruben said. “Are we reading this right? The diagnostic says the radiation shield went down for a second.”
“Less than a second,” Roc corrected. “But yes. I’d say Galahad just hiccuped.”
“So we were completely vulnerable,” Julya said. “That’s one deadly hiccup.”
Ruben scanned the monitor again. “Well, it seems fine now. But it can’t really be fine, not if it’s throwing off an alarm like that. Something’s wrong.”
“Correct,” the computer said. “I hope you didn’t want to spend this evening with a good book or crossword puzzle; this isn’t exactly the kind of problem that you want to flare up again. Let’s call Mr. Lee.”
Julya nodded and punched the intercom to hail Gap.
* * *
Toward the end, Alexa had called it “our spot.” It was the first time in his life that Bon had ever had someone reference “our,” or “us,” and he’d not responded to her. Instead, he had simply said, “I’ll see you in the clearing.” To him it conveyed everything that needed to be said.
He stood now in that same spot, a small clearing tucked back within a secluded section of the dome. Night had descended upon Galahad, which meant the lights had automatically dimmed in an attempt to replicate a traditional twenty-four-hour Earth cycle. In the ship’s domes that meant the artificial sunlight, which bathed the crops in a specially designed blend of ultraviolet and visible light, had faded away. It also meant that the brilliant nightly display was in full effect, a stunning shower of starlight through the dome’s clear panels.
It meant nothing to Bon at the moment. He’d worked late in the fields, helping with the harvest of spinach—backbreaking work that he refused to skip out of merely because of his role as a Council member—before investing another hour in the neverending pile of records and paperwork in his office. When he decided that a fourteen-hour workday would have to suffice, he fled not to his room and a waiting bed, but rather this garden-like patch that held a collection of painful memories.
Channy’s words from the previous night still haunted him: The two people on this ship that you had feelings for, and they’re both gone.
More accurately, two people that he had failed to share his feelings with. Both Triana and Alexa had given him every opportunity, and yet he had balked at the chances. Why? Because he was afraid to let down his guard, terrified of showing any sign of vulnerability? Was he subconsciously worried that he somehow wouldn’t measure up, that they would ultimately decide that he wasn’t worthy of their time and attention?
His mind drifted back, touching on the two occasions when he and Triana had been close. Their brief connection in the control room of the Spider bay had lasted less than a minute, but long enough to make it clear that something existed between them, something worth exploring.
It was the second time, however, when they might have taken a step in that direction, that tortured Bon the most. Here, in the lush crops of Galahad’s farms, not too far from this spot, it was a private moment that had irritated and confused him, and a scene that had replayed in his mind countless times. A quick, impulsive kiss from Triana, followed by a curious rejection when he responded. At the time Bon’s anger had flared, and he walked away. He could still hear the words he spit at her that day: You need to figure out what you really want.
And yet, looking at it through a lens of time and perspective, he understood that it was he, not Triana, who wrestled with what he wanted. It was he who seemed to waffle back and forth, at one point open to the idea of their connection, the next unsure and distant. Triana might have given off a similar air of u
ncertainty, but now he felt sure that it was merely in defense of her own heart, a shield to protect herself until he was willing to meet her halfway. Her appeal to him at that moment—This isn’t the right time—suddenly came into focus, and he saw the wisdom in her words. It had nothing to do with the ship’s crisis at the time; it was Triana’s acknowledgment that she was open and ready, willing to be vulnerable … but that he was not.
Triana, it seemed, was teaching him something about relationships, the necessity of two people being courageous enough to risk their hearts in order to meld. Teaching him, even now, across the winds of time and the depths of space.
He fell to the dirt and stretched out on his back, pushing his long, blond hair out of his face and then lacing his fingers behind his head. Staring up at the stars, and yet seeing nothing, he thought of the choices he’d made with both Triana and Alexa. If given the chance to go back and do it over again, what would he do differently?
Could he do things differently? Or were people hardwired to behave a certain way, with tendencies embedded within their genetic makeup, where no amount of conditioning or experience could alter their path? Bon thought of all the times that he knew—from experience—the right thing to do, and yet some stubborn side of him refused to go along. If that was truly the case, what did that say about the old adage of “learning from our mistakes”? Did we? he wondered. Did we really?
Despite his doubts, the fantasy of reliving the past year, of making different choices, forced itself upon him. He imagined an alternate history where he reached out to Triana, not merely in response to her, but through his own actions. What might have come of that?
Moments later his thoughts shifted, and he was here, in the clearing with Alexa, only instead of acting cool and detached, he responded to her gentle approach with openness and warmth.
She had deserved no less.
