Waypoint Magellan Page 5

  “Seems like your dad didn’t care about your mom’s needs at all, just about family,” Dek suggested.

  “Oh, now Dek, I’ve gone and said too much, to a stranger, too.” Amberly protested.

  “Amberly, out here, no one can afford to be strangers.”

  “What I mean is that I want people to remember my parents’ relationship for the good things it brought. You know, like Kora … and me. Mom had a conch shell that Dad have given her —”

  “A what?”

  “A conch shell. It’s a seashell from Earth that they say if you listen to, you can hear the ocean. It sounds like waves, at least as far as I could tell. I don’t know, something about the air pressure and acoustics. Anyway, mom loved it. She would always hold it up to her ear and close her eyes and pretend she was on some shore in Arara. It’s a beautiful shell, pearl-colored with a nice round pattern. I have no idea how dad got it. Getting Earth stuff that isn’t science or military is rare out here. Must have been from some of the traders he would hang out with in the pilot’s lounge.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “I wish I did. It was lost with mom. Mom always took it with her when she and dad went on their expeditions. She would say that if for some reason they couldn’t make it back, she wanted the sound of the ocean to be the last thing that she heard when she died. So when my parents were lost, the conch was gone, too.”

  “Do you ever want —?”

  “Enough questions, transient,” Amberly put up her hand in a stop gesture and gave Dek a warm smile. “I’m tired. Mr. Tigona, would it be too traditional for me to ask you to walk me home?”

  “As I’ve always said, a progressive embraces traditional roles when it is desired by the individuals involved …” Dek smiled back.

  “… but not forced on them by society,” Amberly finished his sentence.

  Dek popped open the Jeffries tube from the top, and the pair slipped back down on the quiet lower decks – it was the middle of the night, so most of the waypoint residents were sleeping. Although there were no real solar days on Magellan, the people living there still found it useful to structure their lives according to days that were approximately 28 hours. On Earth, a day was 24 hours; on Arara, the planet revolved on its axis every 32 hours. Originally, Magellan had been on a 24-hour cycle that matched Earth, but as more people of Magellan’s population were Arara-born, the local government started making the days on Magellan longer. Eventually, settling on a 28-hour day was a sort of a compromise between those who liked the shorter earth days and those who liked the longer Araran days. Ultimately, even on Arara, time was always measured relative to Earth years, especially for legal purposes, like a person’s age.

  To match the Earth year, there were only 312 28-hour days in the Magellan year; on Arara, they counted a year completed when only 274 32-hour Araran days had passed.

  Amberly and Dek walked quietly back to her apartment in the rim of the State Quadrant. They walked quietly, but the silence was not awkward.

  At the tube station, Amberly noticed in her peripheral vision, a man reading an infopad wearing a black jumpsuit similar to those worn by the pilots who lived on Magellan.

  When they got off the tube, Amberly noticed the same man got off the car behind them, apparently trying to seem like he was unaware of the couple, though at this time of night, they were the only other people in the vicinity of the tube station.

  As they walked out towards the State Quadrant rim, Amberly whispered to Dek.

  “That guy is following us. Did you see him?”

  “What guy?” Dek asked, spinning around. The man was gone. “Are you sure there wasn’t something recreational in your tea?”

  “Very funny,” Amberly said, because it wasn’t. “Seriously, I’ve never seen that guy around here before.”

  “Seriously, what guy? I didn’t see anyone.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Besides, Amberly, I’m here, and I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you.”

  “That’s the sort of thing my dad would say to my mom. He meant it, but it still pissed her off.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  Amberly thought about it. “No, maybe I kind of like it. I don’t know,” she admitted out loud, and was surprised she did.

  “Hmm.”

  Amberly and Dek rounded the corner to face the main portal to the Macready home, and were surprised to find Kora giving a light kiss to a police officer in the partially open door. Amberly immediately knew it wasn’t a real kiss. She had seen this act before. Dek on the other hand, was convinced, and it put all sorts of wrong ideas in his head.

  Kora pushed the officer back and closed the door, the police officer turned to leave and was taken aback to find Amberly and Dek standing there. He was flush, perhaps wondering what they saw, but played it cool as he walked by the couple.

  “Be safe, citizens and good night,” he said as he rounded the corner.

  When the officer was out of earshot, Dek and Amberly burst out laughing. Dek’s grey-blue eyes were intense, and Amberly suspected that Dek wanted to play out the scene they just saw.

  But she would have none of it; she knew better. She would sleep off this man-induced intoxication, and she would feel more sensible and in control in the morning, once the endorphins or hormones or whatever had worn off, and she would think nothing more of Dek. She stepped away before Dek could even make a second attempt at kissing her, so she wouldn’t have to plainly reject him.

  “Thanks for the … um … adventurous walk,” Amberly said. “I can’t think of another person I would rather avoid the law with.”

  “Meeting you was glorious, Amberly Macready. May we cross paths again soon.”

  “We’ll see,” Amberly said as she closed the door.

  Amberly turned and faced her sister.

  “Look at you, my little sister, bringing the man home,” Kora teased.

  Amberly scowled. “That’s not true.”

  “What? You’re not my sister?” Kora smiled.

  “No. I didn’t bring a man home.”

  “Looked like a man to me.” Kora shrugged, then continued to poke sarcasm at Amberly. “I am so proud of you, running off with that transient to do God-knows-what. So, is he a good kisser?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Amberly, not amused at Kora’s teasing. “Unlike you, I don’t kiss on the first date.”

  “So it was a date? And that wasn’t a kiss. More like a gentle peck.”

  Amberly let out a resigned sigh. “Change the subject. So, what happened at Rick’s?”

  “Well, the police took about a half dozen of us to the brig too cool off. Trot Wilder was the police officer who was booking us miscreants, and you know how he fancies me — he let me off the hook.”

  “Kora!” Amberly disapproved.

  “Believe me, I wasn’t trying to take advantage of him,” Kora joked. “But would you really turn down a get-out-of-jail free token when offered?”

  Amberly sat down on the bench seat opposite the front door in the living room in their apartment. The living room had an area of three square meters and included an in-wall bench on two adjacent walls. The worn grey polyester cushions on the benches opened to reveal storage units, mostly filled with kitchen items and foodstuff. The walls without in-wall benches each had a portal – one that opened to the exterior corridor outside their apartment, the other that opened into the bedrooms and bathroom. In the middle of the living room was a square table, metallic and supported by one center leg that was welded to the floor. Three similarly fashioned chairs, with slight curvatures in the backrest, were pushed in under the table. The table was covered with a blue cloth. The most common apartments on Magellan had only one bedroom and a combined living room and kitchen area – this one had two bedrooms. When the Macready’s were younger, they shared one room and their parents, the other. Both rooms were connected to a shared small bathroom. After the Macready parents were lost in space, Amberly moved into her pare
nts’ room. Both the bedrooms were located on the extreme rim of Magellan, making the apartment desirable because of the oversized viewports. From the bedrooms, occupants could quietly and privately look out into the maddening vastness of space.

  “Still, it was only a kiss. I mean it was hardly a kiss,” Kora debated, now feeling slightly guilty about leading Trot Wilder on. “That’s all. Meant nothing.”

  “I knew that. But Trot didn’t. But whatever. What happened to North? Is he still in the brig?”

  “Why should you care?” Kora said as she walked into her bedroom and began to disrobe. “Looked like you were having plenty of fun all night with Dek.”

  “I’m not in the mood for your … ,” Amberly said, not completing the sentence, grumpy with tiredness. She walked into her room and opened her wardrobe and pulled out a red nightgown and dressed for bed.

  Kora put on worn black sweatpants and a loose fitting white undershirt. “I don’t know about North. I think they took all the Marines involved in the brawl down to the military brig.”

  “I hope he’s not in any real trouble,” Amberly said.

  “Oh, North will be fine.”

  The dark-haired woman crawled into her bed. The head and port side of the bed butted up against the cold steel wall, taking up most of the floor space in the room. “Good night, Amberly.”

  “Good night, sister,” Amberly, emotionally and physically exhausted from the day’s unusual events, crawled into bed and looked out her window. She grew up looking out into the various star clusters that surrounded her waypoint. She knew one of the millions of points of light that glowed in the darkness was Viapos, orbited by Arara. Mom looked out this same window, looking back for her home, Amberly thought, as she drifted to sleep.

  In the place between awake and asleep, she thought perhaps she was floating out in space, flying in an epic streak like a meteor towards Arara. She was almost entirely unconscious when she saw a light blink on Verne. She reached over and saw there was a text-only message from North.

  “Hey, Red. Heck of a ship day. I wanted to make sure you were okay. Don’t worry about me. I just got out of the brig. Commander Anderson is letting us all slide with a warning. Lucky break. Hey, I wanted to ask you something, but I didn’t get the chance on account of all those flying fists at Rick’s. Let’s meet for breakfast tomorrow at the Church commons.”

  What in the waypoint does North want to ask me? Amberly thought as she drifted into the sweet oblivion of sleep. She had strange dreams that night of floating in space with Dek and North, but when she woke the next morning, she couldn’t remember any of the details, just the feelings.

  They unsettled her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sitting across from North at the Church commons cafeteria, Amberly poked at the yellow blob of protein that was a poor facsimile of scrambled eggs.

  Anybody who had actually eaten fresh scrambled eggs would have probably passed, but since chickens only existed back on Earth, most people had no idea what the real thing tasted like. Only a few people who lived on the Magellan came from Earth, and there was no one who had ever left Magellan for Earth and then lived to return to Magellan. The round trip certainly was possible, but it could be a 40-year proposition. Someone who left Magellan when they were 20 could make it to Earth and back by the time they were 60. Since the average lifespan of any human, whether they lived on waypoint, interstellar transport, or planet was 97 years, they might have about a third of their life left.

  Thor Rillio, governor of Magellan, was Earth-born, and could remember what real scrambled eggs tasted like. His family, traders, left Earth when he was 18 years old, and he was nearly 40 when they arrived at Magellan. By the time his family had arrived on Magellan, they were relatively wealthy, having made a fortune bringing goods from Earth to the 16 waypoints (and then from waypoint to waypoint) before arriving at Magellan. Thor fell in love with the daughter of an asteroid miner, and settled on Magellan, while the rest of his family headed on to Waypoint Cortes. The Rillio family had planned on retiring on Arara, after over two decades of space travel and fortune making.

  Unfortunately, the Rillio’s transport, S.S. Silverstreak, had an antimatter failure six months out from Magellan, which blew out the ship’s entire power system and primary batteries. Many died from the catastrophic explosion. The rest of Thor’s family died from suffocation and extreme temperatures as the ship’s life support system consumed the remaining power in the secondary batteries over the course of two months. No ship was close enough to reach the Silverstreak; and by the time the distress signal had reached the Magellan, the crew of the Silverstreak had been dead for months.

  During the last two months of their lives, the crew of the Silverstreak – Thor’s parents, paternal grandparents, aunt and uncle, brother and sister, three cousins, and a half-dozen “hired hands” – broadcast daily reports on their condition. Four months after each signal was sent, Thor would read the daily update, as the consecutive signals reached Magellan in turn. Day by day, Thor had no way of knowing if rescue had come, but he knew, as the days passed, that the daily messages were probably the voices of ghosts. If he had not stayed behind with his new bride, he would be dead, too.

  Two years later, the mammoth cruiser H.M.S. Victoria arrived at Magellan with the remains of S.S. Silverstreak in tow. Thor inherited the wealth of his family, and he used those resources over the next 20 years to build a political empire on Magellan. He was currently in his second four-year term as the waypoint’s civilian governor. Thor vowed never to travel in space again, and he never left Magellan, not even to go on one of the waypoint’s short-range runabouts or corvettes.

  As usual, North had a healthy appetite, owed to the intense physical regimen of waypoint Marines. He quickly ingested his “eggs” and washed them down with a vitamin-C rich glass of synthetic orange juice.

  “So the brig, huh?” Amberly offered.

  “Yeah, I want to try to avoid ending up there in the future. Not exactly the best place to pass the evening. Especially when you are sore from being bashed across the back with an aluminum chair,” North said, absentmindedly rubbing his left shoulder with his right hand.

  “I don’t know why you stick up for Skip,” Amberly smiled. “No, I do know why. Because, North, you are a good friend to many.”

  “Well, I …”

  Amberly lifted her glass and spoke with a faux-aristocratic accent. “Here’s to North, protector of the weak, and good friend to Lydia, Skip, Kora and …,” Amberly dropped the accent, “… to me.”

  “Cheers,” North chuckled at Amberly’s display.

  “So, thanks for breakfast and all, but what did you want to ask me that couldn’t wait until you had some time to sleep off jail?” Amberly prodded.

  “Oh, did I say it couldn’t wait?” North asked. “Mostly I was just … worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Well, I saw you running off with that transient, what was his name –”

  “Dek.”

  “Right. Dek. The one who bought you the drink.”

  “The one who bought Kora and I the drinks.”

  “Yeah, that guy.”

  “Well, he actually ended up being pretty good at evading the police,” Amberly said. “Dek’s a neat guy. Brilliant scientist. Still, there’s something about him …”

  “Something about him?”

  “I can’t quite put my finger on it. I really enjoyed our romp last night.”

  “Romp?”

  “Yeah, we snuck up into the topside farms.”

  “Wait. Romp?”

  “There was something thrilling and dangerous about him – yet calm and in control at the same time,” Amberly said, looking away as if fixed on an imaginary image of Dek.

  “Hey, I’m right here,” North said, waving a hand in front of her face. “I don’t think you should see this Dek character. I don’t trust him.”

  North’s unsolicited advice offended Amberly. She felt her strong, indepen
dent mother coming out. “Wait. Wait. Wait. Who are you to say whom I should be seeing or not? I am a good judge of character.”

  “I am just worried about you, Red, that’s all.”

  “Do you think I can’t take care of myself? You’re not my father. What place do you think you — ” Amberly’s face was flush. She felt disrespected.

  “No, no, kid … it’s just that you’re – ”

  “It’s just that what?” Amberly said, slightly annoyed. “If you have something to say, open up. What am I – ”

  But Amberly caught herself and didn’t finish her sentence. She would never admit it to anyone, and she certainly didn’t want to admit it to herself, but what she wanted to know was undeniable.

  She didn’t know how she felt about North – outside of being a friend. But she wanted to know how he felt about her.

  Out here, on Magellan, light years of loneliness separated the pioneers of this waypoint from other human life. Amberly wasn’t given to existential thought that often, but occasionally she thought about the millions of people on Arara and the billions of people on Earth and the life-sucking vacuum that separated her and her ten thousand waypoint keepers from where human life started. From home.

  This desolate isolation burned places deep inside her. She wondered if this yearning for connection, this heavy, lonely feeling could be tamed if she bonded with someone solid, someone real, and close. Someone like North. She wished her mother were here, someone she could ask, is it better to suffer the void together – or is this just a precursor to later suffering an even more painful separation?

  She suddenly felt vulnerable. What if North said he was nothing to her, nothing romantic anyway — and then she found out that she wanted to be with him?

  She pushed that silly idea out of her head, and then decided for a tactical retreat.

  “What am I going to do with you, old friend?” she asked rhetorically, transforming her annoyance into more of an exhausted smile.