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“Fine,” I mumbled.
“I’m glad we have an understanding.” Neptune pushed a large red button on the wall, and the light beams disappeared. “Have a nice night, Styker.” He returned to the computer at the far end of the corridor.
Well, this was just great. I’d dreamed of this opportunity my whole life and I hadn’t even been on the ship a full day before being found out.
I’d been so close. The change in temperature upstairs had indicated that we were well on our way to the moon. Captain Swift could choose to drop me off at one of the space stations along the way, but I doubted he would. An unscheduled stop would signify trouble, the last thing the publicity department would want. Discovering me must have been Neptune’s worst nightmare.
That thought cheered me up a bit. At least until I remembered that the moon trek was a seven-day long excursion and that if I wasn’t going to be dropped off on the way to or from the moon, I was going to spend the next seven days either locked up or ratting on the people I’d hoped would become my friends.
I activated the elevator and returned to my quarters. I’d pictured a lot of potential scenarios for my first day on Moon Unit 5. Being arrested and placed in the temporary holding cell, even if only for a few minutes, was not one of them.
My room was small but perfect. The walls were glossy white with matte white circles on top. The doors were orange, as was the bed covering and the chair. I sat on the edge of my bed and removed my boots. The first thing I’d done after boarding the ship had been to unpack and get settled. I wanted to feel like this was my space in space. I spun around and stretched out on the bed, and then put my hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling, studying the silver paint.
I read in the history books that it used to take four light years to go from Earth to its closest star. Thanks to technology, Moon Unit 5 could get us from Plunia to the moons of Saturn in a week—the perfect length of time for those in need of a vacation.
Space travel had originally been targeted toward the rich, but it turned out the rich didn’t quite know what to make of space pirates and all too soon, the novelty of being held up in ungoverned territories lost its luster. The second wave of entrepreneurs to tackle space travel made things interesting. They went with a price-it-low, sell-a-lot model, attracting the attention of the booming new generation. Now you’d be hard pressed to find someone over sixty on a spaceship. Traveling the galaxy had become the thing to do. At least that’s what I’d thought before today.
I’d taken a huge risk to get here, left my mom alone with the ice mines, and for what? Ever since stepping foot onto the spaceship, things had gone from bad to worse. And it all started when I’d found Lt. Dakkar, the second navigator’s body.
My reaction to it had been all wrong. Sure, I’d followed procedure, but almost to a fault. A man had died, and I’d reacted like a programmed robot, not like a person who discovered that a colleague had died. But here I was, with all the time in the world to think about what his death meant. And it did mean something. For the first time in a decade, a Moon Unit was in orbit with a ship full of passengers, and before the ship had even left the docking station, something tragic had happened.
I wondered what the second navigation officer had been doing in the uniform ward. How had he gotten inside? And when? I’d been so eager for today to come that I’d been one of the first crew members on the ship. The only people who had been allowed to board before the general crew were the senior officers: captain, navigation, communications, engineering, medical, and security. The head of individual divisions, too, although I hadn’t been able to get my hands on that list ahead of time. But if I operated with the knowledge I had, I could assume the second navigation officer had already been on the ship before the rest of the crew boarded.
Ship regulations stated that crew members were to arrive in uniform, so there shouldn’t have been any reason for him, or anyone, to be where he was.
The questions swirling through my mind gave me anxious energy and I couldn’t lay still. When my mind raced like this, I had to find a way to calm down. I sat up and pulled my boots back on, and then left my quarters.
I walked down the hall toward the observation deck and stared out a porthole at the vastness of space. The sky was a deep purply-black, dotted with gleaming stars and shifting meteors. The occasional spaceship passed us, far enough away that the only thing I could see were their lights. For a moment, I wondered about the crews on those other ships. Was there another person out there enjoying her first job on a spaceship? Was she flying through the galaxy peacefully or did she have her own set of problems?
That’s what I had. Problems. I could solve problems. I needed to focus on one and solve it.
Just one. I could do that.
When I’d turned fourteen, I took a series of standardized tests like every other eight grader in the Plunian school system. But unlike every other eighth grader, I’d scored off the charts for math, science, and deductive reasoning. Fourteen marked the year when I went from being a nobody to a somebody.
The change in my academic status didn’t help with my desire to fit in with others my age. If my family hadn’t owned and operated one of the more successful dry ice mines on Plunia, I might not have had any friends at all. But when space pirates hijack the deliveries of dry ice to neighboring planets and your family is the only one who can step in and correct a mass oxygen shortage, you get a pass on being a little weird. Between that and the way I learned to fry Plunian potatoes with a tweaked thermostat wired to a refurbished radio coil and bucket of oil from the last olive crop, I avoided becoming a total social pariah.
It turned out I had a natural skill set for science. It’s a strange feeling to learn that you’re really, really good at something other people don’t understand. I couldn’t explain it, but when I looked at a mechanical device, I could almost immediately map out the inner mechanisms and understand how it worked. I could take anything apart and put it back together. I knew how to make modifications so things would work better than they did before. I could fix things and change things and alter things to make life easier.
I would have been okay with that. I think. But one of my teachers took a special interest in me and arranged for me to take classes at the space academy. Twice a week, instead of English, I studied alongside students who were hoping to get into Federation Council. My parents took over the majority of the work in the mines and made it clear that my only focus was on my grades. And after a couple of classes, I felt like I fit in. Before long, I wanted to work at Federation Council too.
And then my dad was arrested, and everything changed.
I lost my scholarship and the very galactic government body I’d hoped to work for took temporary control of the family mines. They kept my mom working in a barely paid role while they investigated my dad. I dropped out of school and helped her survive the humiliation.
For the past ten years, I’d worked with her, secretly hating my Plunian dad and how his actions had destroyed us. I wasn’t ever going to let greed make me do something that would hurt the people I loved.
After the investigation, ownership of the ice mines reverted to my mom. Being from Earth, she lacked the upper respiratory tolerance to work in the mines. I took over during the day and spent my nights working on gadgets to make her job easier. One day last year, the news reported that the council had approved the relaunch of the Moon Unit program. I hadn’t even bothered to apply.
Turns out, it didn’t matter. My mom had applied for me.
I’ll never forget the day the confirmation packet arrived. “You’re going to change the world, Sylvia, and you’re not going to do it from Plunia.”
“I’m not going to leave you alone to mine the ice,” I’d said.
“I haven’t mined the ice in ten years. I’m too old to be out there. The statute of limitations on punishing us for what your father did is over. This is your opportunity to get off this planet and make a life of your own.”
A good daughter would have said she didn’t want a life of her own, or that her life was right there, taking over the family business. But I hadn’t been able to say those words. The truth was, I’d thought of nothing but getting out of Plunia since the day they took my dad to space jail on Colony 13.
The Moon Unit staff called me for entrance exams. I passed them and aced my interview too. I’d started to believe that it was going to happen when the results of my physical came back.
Low tolerance of Nitrogen molecule limits physical endurance required of security personnel.
I’d never known there was a different chemical makeup to the air earthlings breathed. Plunia’s air was 95% oxygen. It was part of what made us a healthy race that outlived the earthlings who had moved to our planet. But the Moon Unit wasn’t designed for Plunians. It was staffed almost entirely of nomadic earthlings who were looking for adventure. Which meant the air was 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. That much nitrogen for an extended period of time would cause me to become lightheaded and ultimately to pass out. My job performance couldn’t be trusted in case of emergency.
I knew I could do it. I knew I could overcome my physical shortcomings and do the job if given the chance. But the council didn’t give me the chance to retake their tests or appeal their decision.
I didn’t want to believe the results, so I did my own research. Had I spent my life in a mixed-gaseous environment, odds were high that I’d have adjusted to the atmosphere and this wouldn’t have been an issue. But the amount of time I’d spent in the ice mines had made me more dependent on oxygen than I otherwise would have been. There were cases of this all over the universe. Coal miners on Earth who, instead of dying from pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, had learned to breathe the air deep inside the caves where they spent their days. Their illnesses came from deprivation of the air they’d developed a tolerance to, not from the air itself. It seemed that no matter what, I was destined to live out my life on Plunia.
Until I heard on the news that the uniform lieutenant had broken her leg while skiing on Mars and that the ship was looking for a last-minute substitute. I hacked into Federation Council’s mainframe computer and copied my information on top of the name of the candidate they were about to confirm. I retrofitted a mining helmet with an air filter that cleaned seventy percent of the impurities out and blended what was left with a slow leak of oxygen that I fed from a tank I wore under my uniform. The Moon Unit boasted pure oxygen as one of the offerings at The Space Bar, their restaurant and entertainment quarters, so once on the ship, it was just a matter of balancing my time in their air with time in my own. The way I saw it, getting onto the ship was ninety percent of the battle.
Until that darn navigation officer turned up in my closet. I’d checked, double-checked, and triple-checked every single thing that could have gone wrong. I’d never expected a murder.
Wait a minute. Why’d I think that? Why did my mind go to murder?
Of course. Of course! And if I could expose his killer, that had to prove to Neptune that I wasn’t a threat. The captain would have to keep me on the ship. He’d probably give me a medal.
Emergency protocols on the ship stated that accidents, illnesses, and deaths were to be dealt with efficiently so as not to interrupt the vacation experience of the paying passengers. But if I was right—if the second navigation officer had been murdered—he deserved more than quick and quiet treatment. He was my coworker—or he would have been if he hadn’t died. If it had been me, I’d want someone to care.
I had been the one to find the body, and that meant I knew things nobody else knew. I’d reported it as a Code Blue, but it wasn’t just any Code Blue. It was a Code Navy Blue. If the officer had been sick and died, he might have fallen to the ground. I might have found him behind a fixture or along the wall. I would not have found him in the closet on top of the folded uniforms. The placement of the body was intentional.
Nobody else knew exactly how he’d been hidden inside the closet before I opened the door. Except maybe Pika, who had vanished as quickly as she’d appeared the moment Yeoman D’Nar stepped into the uniform ward. Pika, who had seemed playful and bursting with childlike innocence. Pika, who had admitted that she wasn’t supposed to be on the ship. Had that all been part of her Gremlon act? Was it possible that she’d committed murder on a whim and not realized the seriousness of her crime?
I looked away from the observation window, excited about my conclusions, until the sobering reality overwhelmed me.
A man had been killed. A stowaway had been present. Ship security was busy with an engineering problem and probably wouldn’t even listen to me. But as long as the killer wandered the ship, none of us were safe.
Pika’s desire to keep her presence on the ship secret would have given her motivation to silence him if he’d discovered her. I’d wanted to figure out one thing, and already I had two. What else did I know?
The BOP may have dictated that the second navigation officer’s identity was defined by his position on the ship, but like I’d told Dr. Edison, I knew his position and rank because I recognized his uniform. He had two stripes on his cuff, which designated him as the second in charge, not the head of his division. If he’d found Pika in the uniform ward, he would have had a chance to turn her in before departure, but the bigger question was why was he there? If I was among the first regular crew members to board, how did he get there before me?
He had to have boarded the ship before I did. And the only people who were allowed on the ship before the general crew were security. Which meant the second navigation officer hadn’t been there because he was excited about the departure like I was. He had something else in mind.
Something like sabotage. In engineering. The second navigation officer had been the threat Neptune was trying to discover.