| |
There was no way to check the locks on a spaceship. If Neptune was giving me time to change, then I was going to take it. I unhooked my collar at the back of my neck and shimmied out of my modified (torn) uniform. It fell to the floor in a metallic magenta pile. I kicked it off with the toe of my boot and then grabbed the aqua blue dress from the closet and pulled it over my head. I piled my dark hair on top of my head and secured it with a silver conical clip, letting the curly ends spill down over my crown. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed what I’d suspected, that the pale aqua made my lavender skin, in contrast, look radioactive. Here’s hoping the passengers were open-minded.
The lack of quality oxygen all day had left me tired and short of breath. I reached into my luggage on top of the closet and pulled out a spare canister of O2. There wasn’t a ton of time, so I inhaled and exhaled two deep breaths of it, hid it in the closet, and left my room. Neptune waited for me in the hallway.
In the short amount of time that it had taken me to transition from ship prisoner to crew member date at First Dinner, Neptune had undergone his own transformation. Gone were his coveralls, and in their place was a white dress uniform that consisted of a military-inspired jacket and trousers. The white fabric made his tawny skin stand out in contrast. The ship insignia was stitched onto the collar, but the garment was otherwise clear of bands to indicate rank or privilege. I assumed the lack of accoutrements had to do with his desire not to draw attention to himself.
My door swished shut behind me. The fabric of my dress caught in the door. Neptune held his hand up and the door open. I stepped away and smoothed the fabric down. The doors swished shut again. Neptune stepped closer to me and clamped a weighted metal bracelet around my left wrist. The same magnetic pull that I’d felt between my boots and the walls of the cell in the subbasement pulled my wrist toward the railing embedded to the ship’s walls.
“What’s this?”
“Cuff bracelet. You seemed under-accessorized.” He smiled that annoying joke-at-my-expense smile. “So you don’t get any ideas.”
I balled my fist and shook my arm a few times to see if I could make it fall off. (I could not.) “It doesn’t go with this dress.”
“Need I remind you that you’re still in my custody?”
“No, you needn’t,” I said with a trace of annoyance.
Neptune stared at my outfit. “The dress looks...different than I expected.”
“Is something wrong with it?”
“No. Let’s go,” he said. He didn’t make eye contact.
I balled my fists up and held my arms in front of me. How was I supposed to know what was right for First Dinner? Neptune should have known, and he was the one who told me which dress to wear. And now that my arm was weighted down with a giant carbon security cuff, everybody would know I was in custody. If I looked bad, it was all his fault. The knowledge didn’t particularly help me overcome my self-consciousness.
We arrived at the quarterdeck. The Space Bar was the ship’s top-notch restaurant and entertainment hub. Sunken down three steps, the interior of the restaurant and lounge was carpeted in turquoise and fitted with aluminum tables and chairs. The ceiling was the darkest purple I’d ever seen. Filament lights hung from overhead, tiny luminous threads that exploded in light at the ends like clusters of stars in a manufactured nebula.
Ever since space travel became a thing, the world had changed. Well, not the world, but the whole universe. Somewhere in the late twenty-first century, earthlings had taken what they’d learned from decades of space exploration and colonized Mars. Shortly after, they’d branched out to Venus, Saturn, and beyond. There had been so many medical advances that the lifespan of earthlings had created an overpopulation that led many to relocate even outside of their solar system. It wasn’t unusual to find interracial populations on any of the planets.
Inside The Space Bar, colorful couples and families sat in groups, some with officers of the ship and some alone. A kitchen staff member who looked like he was afraid of being seen maneuvered a handcart filled with a crate of aluminum tanks marked NO. I’d heard the Moon Unit leaked a mixture of nitrous oxide with oxygen during Happy Hour but until now hadn’t believed it. The crew member pushed the cart behind a sparkling white floor-to-ceiling curtain, vanishing from my sight.
A hostess in a short white uniform and white gravity boots led Neptune and me to a table for two. The uniform guide indicated that employees in the passenger-facing aspects of the service industry were to wear white, and those who worked in the back wore black. The stark color coding might have seemed extreme, except that behind-the-scenes jobs lent themselves to stains. Even in space, practicality took precedence. My position as lieutenant of uniforms wasn’t important enough for me to dine at The Space Bar. The only way I’d ever be seated in this room was as someone’s date.
I waited until we’d both been served Saturnian wine before attempting small talk. “You’re with ship security. How’d you get started in that field?”
Neptune looked up from his drink. “You don’t have to make conversation.”
“Just because you have no table manners doesn’t mean I don’t. My mother raised me right.”
“And your father? What influence did Jack Stryker have on the way you turned out?”
“Fine. We can eat in silence.”
The day after I’d hacked into the ship’s computer, I worried about being caught. Had the Moon Unit been a government ship and not an entertainment vessel, the sentence would have been the placement of a tracking chip in my head, jail time on Colony 13, and a permanent mark on my record. Punishment for tampering with a cruise ship was a little murkier. The owners of the ship would have final say, and after the troubles with Moon Units 1 through 4, most likely they’d want to avoid a scandal. That’s what I told myself when I couldn’t sleep at night.
When the orientation packet arrived with a welcome letter signed by Captain Swift, it finally dawned on me that no one knew what I’d done. The computer said I was the replacement uniform lieutenant, and the computer was always right. From that point on, I filled out every document truthfully and submitted them by the deadline. My credentials arrived shortly after that, including my day one uniform, EZ guide of best practices for the ship, and a copy of the information I’d submitted. Nowhere on that application had I mentioned my dad’s name. And Neptune had brought him up twice.
“If you have something to say to me about my father, then just come on out and say it.”
“I’m not the one who expunged him from my personal history.”
“There was no expungement. My dad wasn’t relevant to my application. My mother raised me. She’s my reference. She’s the one who filled out and submitted my initial application.”
“I know.”
“See, I don’t get that. How do you know? That information was not made public. It’s bound by Federation Council’s Secrecy Act.”
Unlike when we’d first arrived, Neptune appeared to enjoy the turn of the conversation. “I know more about you than you think, Stryker. Don’t forget it.”
I wadded my napkin in my lap and then clawed at the magnetic cuff around my left wrist. My efforts were useless.
The employee handbook had specified that senior officers were to remain in uniform at all times, and they’d been provided with standard issue garments to ensure compliance. To anybody who looked our way, I was Neptune’s date.
He wished.
Around the rest of The Space Bar, sets of guests celebrated their first night on Moon Unit 5. It didn’t take much effort on my part to mentally record the details. In spite of the fact that I was dining with a Neanderthal security officer who was blackmailing me, I was enjoying myself.
Mostly.
It took only a moment to realize my unexpected invitation to First Dinner came with the perfect opportunity to look for suspicious behavior. I sipped my wine and studied the other attendees.
Thanks to the Moon Unit policy of requiring officers to wear dress whites to dinner, I couldn’t identify crew by the color of their uniforms. Not a problem, I thought to myself, but an opportunity. An opportunity to practice my powers of observation.
At the table to my left sat two green Martians. They wore dress whites, but the spectrometers dangling from the belts indicated they were part of the communication crew. Two tables past them Yeoman D’Nar sat with Purser Frank.
D’Nar looked at us and then looked away as if our table was still empty. The Yeoman’s blond hair was in a pile on top of her head, and her dress and lipstick matched her pearlescent blue nail polish. Blue lipstick made me look cold. On her, it looked ethereal. I’d never been ethereal a day in my life.
Purser Frank, a friendly looking man with black hair and white glasses, was in charge of Moon Unit entertainment. He downed two glasses of wine before D’Nar had finished her first. Nerves, I assumed. Or the prospect of dining with Yeoman D’Nar required a little something extra to take the edge off. I snuck a glance at my dining companion. Guess I knew how Purser Frank felt.
The captain’s table sat directly in front of the stage. Captain Swift, a tall, thin man with fiery red hair and black glasses, looked at ease with the guests at his table. They so perfectly exemplified the target demographic of the newly revived Moon Units that they might as well have stepped off the pages of the promotional materials. Would the Moon Unit Corporation have hired stand-ins to play the part of cruise ship passengers to maintain their image? It was one way to ensure the standards on the ship. Captain Swift made a point of acknowledging Neptune’s presence with a gesture to his own uniform and feigned applause to show he took note of Neptune’s adherence to the dress code.
A woman in a long white dress approached our table. “Neptune.” She squinted her eyes at me for a moment. “Who is your date?”
“Lt. Stryker,” I said, smiling graciously. “Uniform ward.”
“Ah, general crew.” She turned to Neptune. “Still haven’t learned, have you?” She leaned down closer to him. “You can act however you like in your quarters, but while you’re in here, you are to keep your voice down and pretend to be civilized. The passengers don’t know you’re ship security and I don’t want them to find out tonight. Guests of the captain have already commented on your intimidating presence. If you want to be invited to The Space Bar again, I suggest you act like a guest, not like a bull in a china shop.”
I closed my eyes and mentally flipped through the pictures I’d seen of Moon Unit’s crew until I connected a name to the woman in front of us. “Uma?” I asked. Quick, Sylvia, what else do you know about her? “Uma Tolst. You’re The Space Bar hostess. You trained under Captain Murray on the USS Charles.”
“That’s right,” she said, surprised.
“You’ve done an impressive job with the dinner tonight.” I raised my glass of Saturnian wine. “This is a particularly refreshing vintage. What will you be pairing it with?”
Uma stood up straighter. “Tonight is a special menu. Protein mix with a side of grains. Oxygen-infused dry ice cream for dessert.”
“From Plunia?”
“Of course.” She smiled and tapped the table by my plate. “Make sure Neptune uses his table manners. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the captain at our First Dinner.”
I smiled back. Uma left the table, and I looked at Neptune. “She seems to like you about as much as I do. What did you accuse her of?”
He glared at me and downed his glass of water. His wine went untouched.
We spent the balance of the dinner in silence, not that I minded. I finished my glass of Saturnian wine and Neptune’s too (he’d offered after a wee bit of prompting from me). His reprimand hung over my head, but the short conversation with the hostess had left my spirits high. I’d come across as refined compared to Neptune. Score one. And she served a mean bowl of ice cream. The oxygen charge in the dessert perked me up considerably.
By the time the plates were cleared, I was ready to sit back and enjoy the floor show. The general lights of the dining area dimmed, and a ring of pink bulbs glowed in a circle around the base of the stage. I was so engaged in what was happening that I didn’t notice Captain Swift standing next to our table.
“Neptune,” he said. “A word.”
Neptune stood, and the two men conversed. The captain glanced at me and then returned to his table. Neptune pulled me out of my chair by my upper arm.
“Don’t grab me,” I said.
“Sabotage in engineering.”
“That can’t be. I tried to tell you, Lt. Dakkar was the saboteur and he’s dead.”
He glared at me. “We have to leave.”
I moved his beefy paw from my arm to my hand. “Better make it look good,” I said. He pulled me past the guests just as the opening act, a shimmery gold woman draped in transfugitive silks, started to sing.