Waypoint Magellan Read online

  Kora turned and slapped the woman. North righted himself, saw that Skip was on the floor, and assumed the two Marines flanking Croix had floored his friend. He picked up a chair and slammed it into the closest to him.

  All hell broke loose.

  Amberly dropped to the floor defensively as various projectiles and limbs were being swung throughout Rick’s. She curled up and covered her head next to a booth and tried to spot Kora in the chaos. Her sister was nowhere to be seen.

  Then, in a flash, she saw a metallic chair flying right at her, and she flinched, closing her eyes tight, preparing for the pain of impact.

  And nothing.

  She opened her eyes, and saw that Dek had intercepted the aluminum stool, catching it and tossing it aside.

  The police had stormed the front door and were starting to cuff anyone who looked remotely guilty of throwing anything. The short-a-few-teeth Croix and Kora were both being apprehended.

  Amberly started to panic. She didn’t do anything wrong, but she was overcome with an irrational fear of the law all the same.

  Dek slid beside her on the floor, behind an overturned table as the police were trying to subdue the still violent crowd.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “You don’t want to get pinched. I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me. We don’t want to get in any trouble — at least not this sort of trouble. Come on, let’s go,” Dek stretched out his hand to Amberly. She hesitated for a moment, then considered his grey-blue eyes. She took his hand. His grip was firm, but gentle. She felt a jolt of … something.

  Dek hoisted her up. He was much stronger than he appeared.

  “This way,” Dek half crouched toward an exit on the opposite side of the club from where police were pouring in.

  Just as they were about to step out into the corridor, one of the police officers called after them.

  “Hey, you two. Citizen. Girl with the red hair. Stop!”

  “Run!” Dek prompted.

  “But …”

  Amberly didn’t really have a choice. Amberly tugged off her heels as Dek pulled her out the door with a good amount of force. They were sprinting down the hall, away from the Beltway and toward the rim. Two teenage boys conducting some sort of mischief looked up from a wall panel they were removing as Amberly and Dek flew by. A man wearing a pilot’s jumpsuit was across the corridor, several meters down, reading from a data pad, seeming to not notice the pair in flight.

  A couple that Amberly knew, Nars Dino, a miner, and his new wife, Maria, were headed toward the Hoover Hotel to attend a welcome reception hosted by one of the mining companies. The hall at this point was barely wide enough for two people to pass each other comfortably.

  Dek barreled through the couple, Amberly in tow. The Dinos were a bit stunned.

  “Sorry Maria!” Amberly called out, as she and Dek rounded a corner out of the commerce district where Rick’s was, and into an even tighter hallway that ran between a wall of apartments, not unlike the one Amberly lived in.

  “What is going on?” Amberly heard Nars say from around the corner to the officer who was chasing them.

  “Where did they go, citizen?” the officer said.

  “Cut the citizen crap, Franco,” Nars said. “You know good and well who I am. Just because you’re a police officer now –”

  “Fine, Nars,” Franco said. “Just tell me where they went.”

  “I don’t know,” Nars fibbed. “I guess they must have slipped into one of the halls past here.” Nars indicated down the corridor behind him, which had at least a dozen tighter halls branching behind him.

  Franco growled and pushed Nars aside.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” Nars smiled, and took Maria’s hand as they continued their walk.

  Amberly heard Franco closing in. “Why don’t we just turn ourselves in?”

  “What’s the fun in that?” Dek asked.

  “Who are you, really?” Amberly said.

  “I told you, I’m a researcher. Now where can we hide?”

  Amberly pointed to a small Jeffries tube opening in the ceiling a few meters ahead with a ladder leading up. “Quick.”

  Amberly hopped up and grabbed the ladder, and pulled herself up, quickly ascending. Dek followed, pulling himself up as well. At the top of the tube was a door that locked with passcode access. The tube had barely enough depth to conceal the pair from the hallway below. Dek climbed up into the skinny tube so his body was pressed against Amberly. They were both out of breath from the sprinting. Her heart was beating hard. Dek was sweating, and Amberly could smell him. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, but it was definitely a man smell, mixed with a bit of alcohol, more than likely something that was spilled on them during the bar fight.

  Below them, they heard footsteps. Amberly glanced down and saw Franco, although he was looking ahead and not up. Amberly and Dek held their breath.

  Franco’s police communicator crackled. “Unit three, where are you? We need you to help book some of these people.”

  “On my way back, sir.” Franco looked around, but not up, and convinced he had lost the trail, he headed back towards Rick’s.

  Amberly and Dek both exhaled loudly, and their torsos brushed in the tight confines of the Jeffries tube.

  “This is awkward,” Amberly said.

  “Not really,” Dek said, with a more silly-than-charming grin on his face. “I sort of like it.”

  Amberly started to climb down.

  “No, let’s go up. Where does this go?”

  “Into the topside gardens,” Amberly said. “But I don’t have the code for this door.”

  “Here. Allow me,” Dek said, pulling a small metallic box from his pocket. He swiped it in proximity of the lock, and the small portal began to run the standard pressure check to assure there was atmosphere on the other side. It blinked green and slid open.

  The pair climbed up. “Where did you get that little gizmo?”

  “Let’s just say I have some friends on the station.”

  “Friends? What sort of friends? Have you been on this waypoint before?”

  The tube extended a half-meter above the floor of the next level. Amberly climbed over and out and stepped into a powdery substance that would best be described as dirt. The soft ground almost surprised her, compared to the metal surfaces she was used to walking on. She hadn’t been to the topside gardens on Magellan in years.

  Dek followed her out and resealed the door beneath them.

  Standing up and taking in the scene, Dek gasped in reaction to the magnitude of the garden, and the encompassing beauty of the clear station exterior, which spanned for at least a half kilometer, like a never-ending window into the galaxy. This huge window allowed stellar light to help naturally grow the lush green plant life in the garden. Amberly paused to look up at the millions and millions of stars. This was the only “big sky” country on Magellan. Amberly had a vertigo-like sensation staring out into the vastness of space, like at any second, she would fall off Magellan and out into the eternity of loneliness that waited outside.

  The topside gardens were not like the botanical garden in the station. The botonical garden was a park for recreation and relaxation for the residents and guests of Magellan. The topside gardens were essentially an ultra-efficient farm for food production. Much of the food on Magellan was synthesized, using energy to matter conversion techniques, requiring enormous amounts of power. This was not a problem when the antimatter reactors were online. However, if they were ever offline, the station could survive for the short term off food that grew in the topside gardens. The gardens also created oxygen naturally, helping to support the air scrubbers and other systems tasked with the same job.

  Amberly and Dek were the only humans on the farm that night, the work crew having long since gone home for the day. The air smelled sweet, of cantaloupe and strawberries. A slight breeze, created by the circulation of the air purifying systems, mixed the sc
ents of the various flora. Being alone with Dek beneath the stars pulled some romantic strings Amberly didn’t know she had. Her guard was down.

  The pair made their way toward a horizontal irrigation pipe, and they sat down, taking in the peaceful, open view – the opposite of the chaos ensuing at Rick’s. Dek took Amberly’s hand like it was a natural thing to do. At first, Amberly felt as if she should withdraw, but didn’t. I like this, she thought. She didn’t know this man, but he had protected her, and showed interest in her, and had taken initiative. Am I wrong to like his masculine assertiveness? Mom wouldn’t have approved. She studied Dek’s face for a few seconds then turned and considered the plant life in front of her.

  After a few moments of lovely silence, she turned back to Dek.

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I’m Dek. Dek Tigona.”

  “No, I mean what are you doing here?”

  “Running from the police.”

  “No, I mean on the Magellan.”

  “I came on the American Spirit,” he said in a humorous tone.

  “Tell me more, then,” Amberly said as she did something totally unexpected and out of character: She rested her head on his shoulder.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In the warm breeze of the garden dome, Dek and Amberly conversed for hours. They talked about Dek being part of one of the first “cohort” generations from Arara. To increase the population rapidly, thousands of children were created by artificial insemination of donated eggs and grown in artificial wombs. These children were wards of the state, grew up in boarding school environments and encouraged on vocation paths in careers that desperately needed more manpower. Many of the traditionalists on Arara strongly objected to this parentless caste, but the social scientists believed this would help ensure the colony's survival. The progressives, who saw the traditional family as something of an anachronism anyway, welcomed the cohort technology that would let society abandon the inefficient traditional family altogether at some point.

  Amberly wasn’t fascinated with the cohort technology as much as wondering what it would be like to grow up with so many siblings.

  “The woman I saw you with in the American Spirit portal, the one with strawberry blonde hair,” Amberly asked, “she’s your sister?”

  “You mean Sparks? I call her a sister, but she technically … I mean genetically, she’s not exactly my sister,” Dek replied. “We were raised as siblings, part of the same cohort. So brother-sister is probably the best way to describe our relationship.”

  “So just friends,” Amberly half asked, half suggested.

  “We were close when we were teenagers in preparatory school,” Dek explained. “But she became a spaceship navigator and I went on to study physics and stellar radiation.”

  “So where did you study stellar radiation?”

  “I did my undergraduate and graduate work at North Plate … it’s not the largest school on the southern continent —”

  “North Plate!” Amberly echoed with a little excitement. “I took several virtual classes from North Plate. My favorites were ones with Professor Alpine. He really shaped my understanding of the nature of light and energy.”

  “Really? Alpine was a mentor of mine. Xander died a few years ago, just shortly after I left on the American Spirit.”

  “I can’t get over that you took classes from Professor Alpine in person! That must have been something.”

  The pair talked late into the night, enjoying the sweet greenery of the topside garden. They talked about stellar radiation research, and what sorts of strange energies Amberly had found emanating from not-too-distant star clusters. They talked about Dek’s cohort mentors, politicians on Arara who were now out of power, but still trying to influence the progressive movement behind the scenes. They talked about Amberly’s parents, a scientist and a pilot, lost in space almost six years ago.

  “Your mother sounds like she was a wonderful person,” Dek said, as he played with a young cornstalk with one hand and slipped his other hand around Amberly. “Smart, attractive, proudly progressive, a great woman of science.”

  “I adored mom,” Amberly said, staring through the plexiglass ceiling into the eternity of stars. “I miss her. I wish I were more like her.”

  The air circulators kicked on and a “wind” started to blow across the Magellan’s topside farm, rustling and whistling through the various densely packed but tightly organized plant life on the farm.

  “I love the sound of the airflow up here,” Amberly said, briefly closing her eyes. “I imagine this is what it might feel like to sit in a field of grass on a planet.”

  She looked purposefully at Dek. “How does it feel to walk in a place with no end? To run through a grassy field? Like this?”

  “Well, sort of, but not really,” Dek said. “I’ve been on the American Spirit for almost three years now, so I’ve almost forgotten the feeling. On Arara, the grasses have taken over the planet — tall and wild and everywhere. The wind is always blowing, and the tall grass flows in waves, brilliant yellows and greens, as far as the eye can see. And then there are the oceans. They say the oceans back on Earth are not nearly as beautiful as the clear, blue waters on Arara. The water is warm. The waves are hypnotic.”

  “I can’t even imagine what it would be like to stand next to an ocean, to bathe in an ocean,” Amberly said. “I mean, I’ve seen videos and all. But it makes me sad thinking about the ocean.”

  “Sad? Why?”

  “I always pictured mom playing in the ocean when she was growing up,” Amberly said. “You know, she was born and grew up on Arara. And she told me stories of how she’d loved swimming in the ocean. But she also always dreamed of joining the stars. She would tell me how as a little girl the star-filled sky teased her – how the stars would call to her, that someday she would explore space.”

  Amberly absentmindedly pulled off a green blade from a corn stalk and then immediately winced. Destroying a growing thing planet side might be commonplace, but it was a bad idea on a waypoint.

  She dropped the leaf to the ground and sheepishly looked around even though she knew no one else was on the farm.

  “Ooops.”

  Dek and Amberly both burst out laughing. They both stopped laughing; stared at each other, snickered and then starting laughing again. Amberly had a case of the giggles. She could not remember the last time she had laughed so much and it felt good. Everything about Dek felt good to her. He was kind, and funny, a listener, adventurous, and mysterious, and even though his appearance was unconventional, he had a roguish handsomeness about him that was growing on her.

  Dek, apparently taking advantage of the moment leaned in and pressed his forehead and nose against Amberly’s. She hesitated, then turned her head away.

  Amberly felt awkward. She was unprepared for Dek’s advance, so she retreated into conversation. “I don’t know why the people from Arara — and even the few people from Earth that I met – why they think space is a vast open place. I mean, here we are supposedly out in the wide open, but you can walk from one side of this waypoint to the other in an hour. Seems to me the real freedom is on Arara or Earth, planetside, where you can run in one direction for hours, or maybe even days, and you’ll never reach the other side.”

  “Eventually, you’d come back around to where you started, silly.”

  “Mom really missed being planetside,” Amberly said. “I think she always fought a deep depression because she missed Arara so much. The stars let her down. I think she only married my dad to escape.”

  “Escape what?” asked Dek. The way he asked made Amberly think his question was more than idle curiosity. Amberly’s guard went up, and she put some space between them.

  “Escape the fact that she hated living in space, that she should have never left Arara, that the romanticized view of living on a waypoint was dashed when she realized how cold and empty and lonely living is space could be.”

  “So she married your dad to try to shake thing
s up?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Amberly said. “I mean, she loved my dad, but she was a progressive and didn’t want marriage. Dad convinced her to marry him anyway — he was very persuasive. She always felt like she betrayed her principles by marrying him. Whenever she and dad fought, she would always try to hurt him by saying so.”

  “What did you think?” Dek asked again, in a way that seemed too innocent to Amberly.

  “I didn’t think about it. I stayed out of it. Now, if you pinned me down, I suppose you can call me a progressive. But back then, all I knew was I hated politics. Dad never pushed, but they were so different. I was only 13 when we lost them.”

  “Why didn’t she leave him and go back to Arara?” Dek asked again.

  The question hit a sensitive area, and for the first time since their evening adventure began, Amberly was beginning to feel the good feelings escape like air out of a punctured vacuum suit. “Why all the prying questions?”

  “I’m sorry, Amberly,” Dek stood up. “I didn’t mean to offend. So much of who people become is because of who our parents are. I guess I am curious because I didn’t have parents. Well, I guess I had a donor mother and father, but it’s not the same.”

  Amberly took Dek’s apology as sincere, grabbed Dek’s hand and pulled him back down into a seated position.

  “What did they see in each other?” Dek said.

  “Hmm… Dad always called mom a ‘dish.’”

  “So that’s where you get it from …”

  “Stop it. Dad was handsome enough. They were both passionate adventurers, always exploring some gaseous cloud or asteroid in one of the Magellan’s corvettes dad piloted. They had their differences, but they both lived life to the fullest.”

  Dek smiled at the thought. Amberly continued.

  “Dad wanted mom to go back to Arara. He wanted us all to go there together, because he thought mom would be happier there and maybe our family would be stronger. But when he suggested it, the idea just made mom angrier. She said her work in the labs was really important and she could not leave it and he should know that, and always scolded dad harshly whenever he brought it up.”