Navigating the Stars

by Maria V. Snyder

  “Mom, you’re going to be down there tomorrow. Nothing’s gonna change because you know the answer now versus later,” I snap.

  She gives me a sharp look, but then softens. “Sorry. You’re right. You’ve had quite the day. What was it like?”

  “Zero gee sucks,” I say.

  “Really?” my dad asks. “I thought it blows.”

  I groan at the lame dad joke. “I’m going to bed.”

  The next day is a flurry of activity as the shuttle transfers equipment down to the surface. My arm muscles ache from loading crates and containers. My mom and dad rush around checking things off and sending me on emergency errands. Once all the supplies are unloaded, the rest of the passengers begin to leave.

  At the end of an exhausting day, our family is going to be the last to board. Captain Harrison arrives to give the official send-off. More thank yous are exchanged and handshakes.

  The captain pulls me aside as my parents head to the shuttle. “You managed to impress both my Navigation Chief and Chief of Security. Tace said you handled yourself like a professional during the mission.”

  Wow. Not expecting that. Unsure of how to respond, I nod importantly.

  “I hope you consider joining DES. I’ve already written you a letter of recommendation and added it to your permanent record.”

  I’m struck stupid. Did he just say… Oh. My. Stars. I finally manage to squeak out a thanks. The word seems inadequate and small for such a gesture. He waves it off and says good-bye. I’m halfway to the shuttle when he calls out, “Remember the view, Miss Daniels.”

  “I will.” I don’t think I could ever forget. When I board the shuttle, I search for Niall even though I know the security team went down first. The quartet of girls are sitting together, laughing. The rest of the scientists are chatty and their faces shine with eagerness, ready for a new planet to study. I plop into an empty seat.

  My emotions are a strange mix. Despite my determination to not make friends when we left Xinji, I did. And while I’m looking forward to a change of scenery, I’m going to miss the captain and Chief Hoshi. Reconstructing artifacts will no doubt be dull in comparison to navigating the stars.

  What about Niall? Will our friendship continue? Will it deepen into something else? What happens when the next Interstellar Class ship arrives in four E-years? We’ll both be over eighteen A-years old. I close my eyes. Perhaps I should worry about it then? No. I need to protect my heart. It’s already been torn into quarters at least. How much can it take before it’s turned into tiny pieces that not even the best reconstructionist can fit back together?

  The shuttle lifts off, jolting me from my thoughts. Perhaps the best thing to do is focus on figuring out my future so I have a direction in mind when the next Interstellar Class ship arrives. A responsible decision. Very adult. It’ll probably last until Niall kisses me again. If he kisses me again. I hope he does. My raging teenage hormones agree. So much for being an adult.

  The first few days on Yulin are very similar to the last few days on the ship. Moving equipment, running errands, but unpacking instead of packing. Our housing unit is super nice. Mom and Dad both have offices with terminals and there’s a conference room between them. My room is twice the size of the one on the ship and I have my very own washroom. My possessions are still meager, but I fill my extra-large screen with a collage of images, including the new ones of the captain, Hoshi, and of the Galaxy. My terminal is still a standard one, but after employing a few tricks I learned, I have wider access to the Q-net. I grin. Officer Radcliff is going to have a harder time tracking me down.

  It takes a surprisingly short period of time for everyone to settle in and get to work. Good news for my parents. Me, not so much.

  “The socialization area is operational, Lyra,” Mom says at dinner that night. “You are to report there at thirteen hundred hours tomorrow.”

  Two hundred and twenty-one more days of soch-time left until I turn eighteen A-years old. Not that I’m counting.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she says.

  “You can’t yell at me for a look.”

  “She’s right,” Dad says in my defense. “For once in her life, Li-Li didn’t argue about soch-time.”

  “Hey!” He’s exaggerating, but I play along. “There was that day when I was five.”

  “My apologies.”

  “It’d be nicer without the sarcasm,” I say.

  “It would.”

  “After soch-time I need your help in Pit 4,” Mom says. “We need to assess the damage and determine just how many Warriors are missing.”

  “All right.”

  She studies my expression. “That was too easy.”

  “Maybe I’m maturing.”

  “Or maybe you’re up to something.”

  I laugh. “Already? We’ve only been on the planet for five days.”

  “We have high expectations of you,” Dad says.

  “Don’t encourage her, Spencer.”

  I arrive at soch-time at the proper time and sign in. On the research bases there’s a specific set of rooms just for socialization. Not like the ship, which takes over the rec room for a couple hours. The younger kids run around and the quartet of girls hold court back in the far right corner. And sitting on a chair that’s too small for him is Niall. His supernova glower keeps the others far from him. I know I shouldn’t be surprised that his dad is such a stickler for the law, but his birthday is in twenty-five days after all. Poor Niall.

  “Come on,” I say to him.

  He glares at me.

  “Unless you’d rather stay here with the younger kids?”

  Niall stands.

  “Thought not,” I say.

  He follows me back to the game room. I step through the door half expecting to see Jarren, Belle, Cyril, and Lan waiting for me since the room is an exact duplicate of the one on Xinji. But it’s empty and a pang squeezes my chest hard as I remember Lan is dead.

  Niall scans the area as if assessing it for threats before he sits down.

  “The game system is much better than the one on the ship.” I point to the speakers. “It has surround sound. And during soch-time this place is teens only.”

  His demeanor doesn’t change. It reminds me of when I first met him.

  “Where’s your sketchbook?” I ask, hoping to draw him out. Get it? Draw.

  “My father has taken all my sketchbooks.”

  That’s harsh. “Why?”

  “Insubordination.”

  Not quite an answer. “Will he give them back?”

  “No.”

  Okay then. I quickly change topics. “What do you think of living planetside?”

  “I hate it.”

  “But it’s only been—”

  “Lyra, stop. I’ve no interest in making the most out of a bad situation. I’m going to serve my time here on Yulin and as soon as that Protector Class ship arrives, I’m enlisting.” He gives me an icy smile. “My father always wanted me to go into security, and that’s the ultimate experience.”

  I’ve a feeling that’s not exactly what Radcliff wanted.

  The Protectorate is a whole other beast.

  “Just leave me alone.”

  “Fine.” What else can I say? I’ve been there and I personally know there are no words, even well-meaning ones, that will ease his pain. He’s viewing this assignment as a punishment. Time might help him or it might not. And I’m sure he didn’t intentionally mean to hurt my feelings when he called me Lyra and not Mouse— but if he’s dead set on leaving when the ship arrives in two years, it’s probably best I keep my distance as well. Perhaps by then, my heart won’t care. Because the stupid thing didn’t listen to my “no friends” directive. Pah. I load up a game and spend the next two hours playing by myself.

  The meteorologists have given the all-clear for the atmosphere and they slowly incorporate the ambient air into the base. A light peppery sweet scent fills the rooms and hallways, reminding me of Niall. Curse you, Yulin!<
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  Despite what I said about leaving Niall alone, I’m determined to distract him from his broody funk. Trying to entice his interest, I pull up Lan’s files with the alien symbols through the game system. I wonder if he still has the sketchbook he used to copy them. As I attempt to pick up where we left off, Niall sits in stony silence.

  So tonight, I’m on a mission. I’m taking advantage of one of the benefits to being my parents’ errand girl. I search out the base geologist, Dr. Roy Carr, and confer with him about some minerals I found in the pits. Turns out they’re limestone. Perfect. Then I visit the chemists for a little help in creating different pigments. My final stop is with the botanists. That’s a harder sell and I’m told no. So close!

  The next day I do a little research and discover an alternate recipe. After raiding the kitchens, I visit the chemists again. The process involves more effort than they’re willing to give so I offer to help them in the evenings for six days in exchange. Free labor is always welcome and they agree.

  You might be wondering why I’m doing all this. Niall’s miserable. He’s acting as if his time here is a prison sentence. He needs a distraction. He needs a friend. Plus his birthday is coming up. I know I’m probably setting myself up for a big hurt, but…I just can’t…not help.

  Exactly thirty-one days after we arrived at Yulin, I bring my gifts for Niall. Normally, the babysitters and all the kids make a big deal over a person’s last required soch-time the day before their eighteenth birthday, but not for Niall. Everyone’s been tip-toeing around him and they’ll all be glad to see him go.

  “What’s this?” he asks when I set the package in front of him. “I told you to leave me alone.”

  “And I have. After this, you won’t have to see me again.” I’ve never run into him outside of soch-time. I suspect it is on purpose.

  “Promise?”

  That nasty comment slices right through me. That’s it. I tried my best so my conscience is clear, but I’m done being nice. “You’re a jerk. I promise you can keep wallowing in self-pity all by yourself.” I leave the room. I tell the babysitter I’m sick.

  “Do you need to see the doctor?” she asks.

  “No.”

  She glances at the monitor on her desk that allows her to see what’s going on in the game room, but not hear. “He’s having a hard time adjusting.”

  “He can go to hell.”

  A smile, then she sobers. “I’ll have to report it to your parents.”

  “Fine. I’ll go straight back to my room to lie down.”

  “All right, you can go.”

  Wow. “Thanks.”

  “I understand. I’ve been in love before.”

  “That’s not…I’m not…” My stomach twists at the thought. Now, I really am sick. I bolt.

  My mother has determined that there were two hundred and twenty-eight Warriors stolen and six hundred and twelve Warriors destroyed. The base’s engineers have deployed the robotic diggers to start uncovering Pit 5, and I’ve been drafted to help piece together one of the broken Warriors—I’m pretty sure it’s the general. In fact, I’m working on reconstructing the lower half of him when I kneel on something hard. Not a surprise as there’s shards and pieces littering the ground. But this is a smooth hard. Plus it’s at the bottom of a long deep gouge in the sandstone that must have been made by the looters’ equipment. Perhaps something is buried here.

  I sweep the sand away and uncover a… I’m not sure. It’s flat and gray instead of light tan like everything else and it has no markings. I wave my mother over and she, with much excitement, calls the techs to do their thing. Believe it or not you have to be trained to remove sand and dirt. They expose more flatness—it’s about a meter under the Warriors. I’ve discovered a floor. Yippee for me.

  But this doesn’t deter them and like a dog after its bone—do they really do that?—they keep it up. For hours. And I’m curious why no one has thought to dig underneath the Warriors before.

  “They did, on Xi’an and a bunch of other Warrior planets,” Mom says when I ask her. “Not all sixty-four pits, but a random sample. For the rest they used Ground Penetrating Radar.”

  GPR is a device that uses radar waves to penetrate the earth. If there’s something other than dirt or rock, the waves will bounce off it and alert the techs that there’d be treasure below, mateys…ah, sorry.

  “Nothing has ever been found below and since it appeared all the planets matched, we stopped doing it. Plus we needed the funds for other things,” Mom says.

  The diggers take a break and the lead man consults with my mother. She returns to me and says, “We’re waiting for the GPR. It’s being used out in the desert to map the location of the other fifty-nine Warrior pits. Team two is going to bring it back.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “Probably not, but we have to follow standard procedures.”

  I stand and work a crick from my neck.

  “Go to bed.”

  “But I…”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll wake you if we find anything exciting,” Mom says.

  “Thanks.”

  Archaeology is not a fast-paced endeavor. It takes them two more days to figure out there might be a room or cavern below the floor, which, despite its name, the GPR can’t penetrate. It’s another three days until they locate a hatch. And that causes massive excitement because there’s an octagonal shaped groove in the hatch about three centimeters deep. In the groove are eight different symbols. They’re etched in the stone. Rather deep, I’d guess a centimeter at least.

  My heart just about stops when I see the glyphs. “These are similar to the ones on that octagon I found,” I tell my mom.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Can I access your terminal?”

  We return to the archaeology lab and I shove my tangs in. My parents stand behind me as I bring up the photo of the octagonal artifact on the screen.

  “Row three,” Dad says. “They almost match the style.”

  I open file three, which is where the Q-net placed all the Warriors with that symbol together. “Lan sent this to me,” I say before they accuse me of stealing the document.

  “I know some of those Warriors,” Mom says, pointing to a few statues. “The pathfinders. See, they hold scrolls. We think they’re maps. And these are chroniclers. Each pit has one, supposedly to record the battalion’s adventures.” The Warriors hold a small rectangular object against their chest with one hand and grasp a strange knife with a thick block on the end with their other hand.

  “With a knife?” I ask.

  “No, it’s a stamp. See the markings on the base? They press that into the wet clay. It’s rudimentary, but if you’re going to write the same thing on thousands of Warriors, it makes it easier to just use the stamp.”

  Oh.

  “Can you pick out the ones that just have those eight symbols that we uncovered around the keyhole?” Dad asks. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  I drag the file into a cluster and make the request. The Q-net sorts the Warriors. Eight chroniclers remain.

  “Pits 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 24, 32, and 56,” Mom says.

  “But not all from the same planet,” I remind them.

  “Yes, but a scribe from Pit 2 on Xinji is the exact same as a scribe in Pit 2 on Ulanqab.” Dad flings his arms up. “Which is why I think they were mass produced and not on Earth. The aliens used Earth’s clay and asked the Chinese craftsmen to teach them. Then the aliens went their merry way and created all these.”

  “There’s been no evidence of a factory on another planet,” Mom says.

  “And there’s no evidence on Earth of such a massive endeavor,” he shoots back. “The Emperor had eight thousand to guard his tomb, and it took a dozen men thirty days to create just one Warrior.”

  I ignore their argument because I can recite each of their responses by heart. I stare at the screen. Actually, I study the stamp. The markings are too hard to see. But I don’t need to strain my e
yes. Instead, I consult a map—Row 1, Column 16—that should be easy. I stand up.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asks.

  “Pit 2, to take a closer look at that scribe.”

  The Warriors in the pit stand in precise rows and columns. They also form a giant octagon, so the total number in each pit is one thousand, four hundred and forty-eight—there’s an empty square in the exact center, that’s about two by two meters. One general leads them, and I’m sure my mother can tell you what each of the Warrior’s ranks and jobs are—archers, swordsmen, pike men, infantry carrying maces, and now pathfinders and scribes.

  Row 1 is easy to find as they stand in front. I count the columns and stop at 16. Like all the Warriors, he’s close to two meters tall. His features are serene and his uniform is plain. Only a few symbols mark his tunic like the Chinese calligraphy that is the name of the artist who made him and those alien glyphs.

  But it’s the blocky base of his writing tool that I’m interested in. “Ha! Look at that.” I point. “His stamp is one of those eight keyhole symbols.”

  My father peers closer. “You’re right. I wonder…” He wiggles the stamp’s handle.

  “Be very careful,” Mom warns.

  With a skin-crawling screech the stamp slides free.

  My father brandishes it about like a flag and hops around in circles. “It’s part of the key!”

  My mother and I exchange a do-you-want-to-tell-him-or-should-I glance. He’s your husband, I mouth.

  “Spencer, that may be so, but we only have scribes from Pits 2, 3, and 4. If we need all eight, it’s going to be a few years before the other pits are uncovered on Yulin.”

  He stops dancing. “You’re always being so practical. Well, guess what. We have an entire research base filled with talented scientists and I’m sure we can duplicate those other five keys. What’s the sense of being in charge if you can’t hijack a few people for our project?”

  “Way to go, Dad!”