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  “Something to do with hacking,” Steve said. “Before you arrived on the station, we got to talking, and she told me that she was in jail for unauthorized computer manipulation, or something like that, when her number got picked for the delegation, and that got her sprung.” He rubbed at the back of his head. “What about you, mate? You ever been nabbed?”

  I shook my head. “No way. I’m squeaky clean.”

  “We’ll fix that,” he said, but he looked worried. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Well, it’s rather long odds that two of us would be dicey, yeah? So it makes me wonder if maybe we’re not so random as they say.”

  I couldn’t imagine why the selection committee would have deliberately chosen criminals, but it seemed like the deck had been stacked, and in ways that made no sense. I was starting to get uncomfortable.

  I shook my head, not knowing how to process this new information. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Tamret about all this, okay?”

  “About the two of us being dicey? She already knows.”

  “No, about me talking to Hluh to protect you two.”

  He cocked his head, and this time tasted the air with his tongue. “Why not tell her?”

  “I don’t want her to feel like she owes me a favor or anything.”

  “But you want me to feel like I owe you a favor?”

  “I didn’t do it so you would owe me a favor. I did it because we’re friends.”

  “Then why tell me and not her?” he asked. “I know you just insulted her and called her hairy, and she looked like she’d never forgive you, but I thought you two were friends.”

  “We are, but I don’t want you to tell her,” I said, feeling exasperated. “It’s a mammal thing, okay? Can we leave it at that?”

  • • •

  Later that day, Dr. Roop took us to the computer lab to learn how to write and replicate Former code. Needless to say, this was another task at which I failed miserably. Tamret gained a level, moving up to a nine, and when I noticed that, I should have gone to speak to her. It would have been the perfect time to try to patch things up, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. How do you apologize to someone for calling her hairy when she is, in fact, covered with hair? The challenges faced by those who live among the stars are many and various.

  When we were done, Dr. Roop asked me to follow him back to his office, and sitting there, waiting for us, was my green friend Hluh.

  “Hi, Zeke,” she said, like we were old pals.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  Dr. Roop closed the door and sat behind his desk, gesturing for me to sit beside Hluh. “This is your mess, Zeke. I’m just trying to clean it up.”

  I sat down next to Hluh.

  “Did you like what I posted?” she asked me.

  I didn’t answer. She was too clueless to hate properly, but that didn’t mean I had to be friendly with her.

  “I’ve made an offer to Ms. Lahhluh Hlahluh Luh,” Dr. Roop explained. “She will continue to speak to you and follow your course through the initiation year. I can’t give her unfettered access to the training facilities, but she can talk to me and to you, Zeke. In exchange, she has promised to post nothing about what she learns until after your year is completed.”

  This was actually a pretty good deal. “Is this agreement legally binding?” I asked. “Will she get in trouble if she violates it?”

  “Citizens of the Confederation don’t violate their agreements,” Dr. Roop said.

  “Never?”

  “It is so rare, it is not worth discussing,” he said. “But yes, if, unfathomably, she were to renege on her agreement and post in a way not specified by our terms, she would face serious legal charges.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I agree.”

  “I’m so pleased,” Dr. Roop said, “but I was not asking you. I was letting you know.”

  Hluh and I left Dr. Roop’s office a few minutes later, and I stopped her in the hall. “You really won’t go public with anything I say?” I asked her.

  “I can’t. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Just double-checking. Can I ask you to investigate some things for me?”

  “Things to do with your attack on the Phandic ship?”

  “No, with the delegates.”

  She shrugged. “I guess, if it’s interesting to me. What do you have in mind?”

  • • •

  That night I was lying on my bed, kicking myself for not having talked to Tamret earlier. She hadn’t met me and Steve for dinner, and I hated the idea of her sitting alone by herself eating who-knows-where. That was what my loudest internal voice said, but the quieter voices said I was really afraid she was getting pushed around by Ardov, and putting up with it for reasons I couldn’t guess.

  I waited until right after curfew, and then I got up—still in my jeans and T-shirt—and went and knocked on her door. Her roommate, Thiel, answered, holding the door open only a crack. “What could you possibly want?” she asked.

  “Hey, Thiel. What’s new?” When the casual thing only produced a blank stare, I asked, “Is Tamret around?”

  She let out a low growl, then walked into the room. “It’s your [monkey] boy,” I heard her say in a sneering voice.

  Tamret stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind her. She was wearing a heavy nightgown that made her look sort of like a Victorian cat. It was powder blue, with puffy shoulders and a hem that reached down to her ankles.

  “What?” she said, leaning against the wall and folding her arms against her chest.

  I took a deep breath and launched into my more-or-less prepared speech. “I shouldn’t have lit into you this morning. I’m under a ton of stress, and I snapped, and maybe I needed to snap, but I shouldn’t have snapped at you. You were kind of asking for it, but we can leave that for now.” Realizing this was all a bit incoherent, I finished with, “I’m sorry.”

  “Hmm,” she said, her ears rotating a little more in my direction. I could tell she was softening but didn’t want to let on just yet. “I guess you have to apologize when you insult one of the only two friends you’ve got.”

  I nodded. “I don’t have a lot of friends on the station, but if I had a thousand friends, I’d still be here right now, saying the exact same thing.”

  “Yeah?” she asked. “Are you sure it’s not just about your limited options?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because if you don’t really like me, you can just say so.”

  “Tamret, give me a break. You know I like you.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I see the way you are always mooning after the kids in your delegation. Are you ashamed of having me as a friend?”

  “What?” I shouted. “Tamret, how can you even ask me that?”

  “Because that’s what it looks like.”

  I don’t know why it’s sometimes so hard to be honest. Telling the truth can feel like walking against the wind in a hurricane, and right then I almost backed down, I almost allowed the gust to blow me in the other direction. I knew that if I let her go back into that room not knowing at least some of how I felt, I would regret it. I had a chance to mend the rift in our friendship forever, and as scared as I was to take it, I decided I couldn’t give into the fear. Fortune favors the bold.

  “I don’t know why you would ever think I’m ashamed of you,” I said. “Maybe there’s some cross-species static, because spending time with you makes me feel, I don’t know, lucky, I guess. I feel lucky to be your friend. Also a little bit afraid, but mostly lucky.”

  She was trying not to smile, but her lavender eyes were wide and suddenly looked a lot less tired. “That’s a pretty good answer. But are you sure I’m not too hairy for you?”

  “That was a poor choice of words,” I conceded. �
�Please don’t be insulted. You don’t see me getting upset that your roommate called me a monkey boy.”

  “You heard that?” she asked. Her tone made me think mentioning monkeys was a more serious problem than you would normally suppose.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I came here to apologize to you, remember? I don’t care what your roommate calls me.”

  There was that smile again. She opened the door to her room. “I’m glad you came by. I hated being angry with you and wanting to slash your face with my claws and all that.”

  Thus the multiple revenge deities. “Yeah, I don’t want you feeling that way. Ever again.”

  “Good night, Zeke.” She slowly closed the door, watching me until the last sliver of light in her room vanished and a soft click left me alone in the hall.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  As you know from last night’s reading assignment,” Dr. Roop said, “the ability to operate a ship—be it a short-range freighter, a mining vessel that never leaves a solar system, or a starship that tunnels across light years—is a vital skill in any interstellar culture. The shipboard simulation room is the most challenging of all your options for gaining experience points. It is difficult to learn the different functions, but if you apply yourself to this task, you will level up faster here than anywhere else.”

  The initiates, Dr. Roop, and Ms. Price stood in the lower level of our building. The lights were medium bright, and the halls were wide, like you might find in an underground facility that required its workers to drive trams and wear hard hats. We stood outside a set of double doors, and Dr. Roop gestured toward them dramatically. I wanted him to open them up so we could get to business. Besides the games, this was the one area in which I hoped I might do well.

  Or maybe I’d do miserably. Best to prepare myself for humiliation.

  The flight simulators on the Dependable had been in an open area with multiple stations. Here there were a series of private suites, which Dr. Roop told us we would have to reserve in order to guarantee getting time. He brought us into one of the suites, which could accommodate up to six beings, though he said teams of four were most common. He then talked everyone through the process of running a sim, explaining the most vital posts of a starship and how to assign each workstation to a particular post. Once we all had the basic hang of the operation, he told us we were going to proceed.

  “We have a tradition of pitting the different initiate species against one another for the first sim, though usually there are four groups,” he said, and I had the feeling he was working hard to keep his voice neutral. “It will be less of a challenge with only three, but the basic rules will be the same.”

  “You are all certainly competent,” Ms. Price said, “but I have faith in my home planet.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Roop continued. “Now, you’ll have fifteen minutes to assign tasks and prepare yourselves. You’ll go to your separate suites, which the system will synch so you are all in the same sim. You’ll then be dropped at random positions within an eight-hundred-thousand-square-mile battlefield. All three ships will be identical, so there is no tactical advantage to anyone. It’s a free-for-all, sentients, and, per Ms. Price’s suggestion, it is a winner-take-all scenario.”

  “I think you’ll find human beings do well under pressure,” she said.

  “Let me explain what this means,” Dr. Roop continued. “Sims involving ship operations are the one area in which you can agree to assign the experience points earned by all participants to the winning being or team. So you’ll be playing for the whole pool. Only the team that destroys its last remaining enemy will gain experience.”

  He waited to see if there were any questions. When no one asked anything, he said, “Lest anyone be tempted to indulge in a dark-matter-missile frenzy, we are running the sim as though you can only have a single missile loaded into your bays. Once you launch it, you can order your virtual crew to load another, but it will be approximately four minutes between launches. This sim is meant to test your tactical thinking, not who is the quickest to fire.”

  So saying, he left the Ish-hi where they were and led our team and the Rarel team to our own suites. Tamret and I had been back to normal since my apology the previous night, but I was still not happy to see Ardov talking quietly to her as they walked into their suite.

  I followed the other humans into ours, Ms. Price glaring at us as we entered. She evidently had some personal investment in our winning. “I’ll be monitoring the battle in spectator mode on my data bracelet,” she told us. “Make me proud.”

  I was a little embarrassed to admit, even to myself, that I liked having the chance to prove my worth to her—to all of them. I hated how they had been treating me, and I didn’t need to be friends with any of them, but on some basic level I wanted them to acknowledge that I brought something to our delegation. Maybe I wanted to believe that too. Maybe it was just the basic human need to belong to a group of similar beings. If I did well in the sim, I hoped it might turn things around. I wasn’t about to blow it.

  The first thing we had to do when we settled in our suite was determine who would take which tasks. Right now there were a bunch of generic-looking consoles with chairs in front of them, but I knew that once the sim activated, we wouldn’t be able to switch posts.

  “Of course I’ll be captain,” Nayana said. “I have the best tactical mind. And we certainly want Zeke on weapons.” She offered me a pale imitation of her best smile. “Mi Sun will handle both navigation and communications, and Charles, you take the helm. Any questions?”

  Mine was about who’d died and made her Mon Mothma, but the others seemed to accept her leadership, so I guessed she had established some kind of authority within the trio. Nayana probably did have the best tactical mind, and she was giving me my props on weapons, so I kept my mouth shut.

  We took our positions, and when it was time, we logged into the system and our HUDs kicked in. Then we were on the ship.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Nayana shouted. “This is amazing!”

  Our HUDs created the illusion that we were spread out across the bridge. Charles and Mi Sun were up front at helm and navigation. I was offset by about five feet at weapons. Nayana was a good ten feet behind us in her chair. When she spoke, she even sounded like she was ten feet away.“I am very impressed with this technology,” said Charles from his helm position, holding out his arms and moving them around, seeing how they looked in the illusory environment.

  “That’s enough chatter,” snapped Nayana from the captain’s chair, as though she were a seasoned veteran and had not, herself, been squealing in wonder seconds before. “Mi Sun, please scan for enemy vessels.”

  Mi Sun worked the console for a while. Then she grinned. “I see them, Nayana.”

  “That’s Captain or ma’am for the duration of the sim,” Nayana said.

  Mi Sun sighed. “I have them, Captain.” It came out sounding like an insult.

  “On-screen!” Nayana cried with a little too much enthusiasm.

  Nothing happened.

  “That’s you,” I told Mi Sun, keeping my voice quiet.

  She made a face like she’d eaten rotten cheese and then found the correct sequence on her console.

  The forward screen switched perspectives, and we saw the Ish-hi and Rarel ships more or less circling each other just out of range. Nayana told Charles to advance by twenty thousand miles, and we then joined in the dance. It was the thrill of battle: three armed predators, poised to strike, coiled with deadly tension.

  Except nobody did anything. We moved around one another for half an hour. None of us wanted to commit to firing, since whichever two ships were in a firefight first would be handing a tactical advantage to the third.

  “We’re going to be here forever,” Mi Sun groaned. “This is so boring.”

  “Ms. Park, have you somewhere more impor
tant to be?” Nayana snapped.

  “As a matter of fact I do, Captain Bligh,” Mi Sun said. “I could be earning points doing math or physics right now. Even the stupid game room would be better than moving in circles all day.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Nayana agreed, tapping the arm of her virtual captain’s chair. “Can we tunnel out of normal space and pop in behind one of them, taking them by surprise?”

  Apparently, she had not done last night’s reading. “When a ship first emerges from tunnel,” I explained, “the shields are unstable for several seconds. They would have plenty of time to get a weapons lock and destroy us.”

  “Right.” She turned away, but then looked back, smiling. “Mi Sun, contact the Ish-hi vessel. Propose a temporary alliance. If they attack the Rarel ship, we will join in.”

  Mi Sun sent a text message, but we received a response over audio. “Oi, primates!” the Ish-hi captain called to us cheerily. “Steve here. Done with all this mucking about, are we?”

  “How did a random become captain?” Nayana demanded.

  “We drew lots for it, didn’t we? It’s the Ish-hi way. And we like your proposal. Lead on! We’ll back you up.”

  Once we broke off communication, Nayana had Mi Sun contact the Rarel ship and make the same proposal. No surprise, Ardov was captaining, and his response was much like Steve’s. Lead and they would follow.

  “If we can get them to start firing at each other and turn their backs on us, we might be able to take them both out at once.”

  It was an okay plan, I thought, though it depended on the other teams both being kind of dense. Neither of them was going to go willingly into a trap.

  “We need to show good faith,” I said. “Otherwise they’ll never make themselves vulnerable to us.”

  Nayana rubbed her chin in a performance of deep thought. “Helm, bring us in closer to the Ish-hi ship. As soon as we are in weapons range, Zeke, open fire, but only a few shots, and don’t let too many of them hit. Once the Rarels engage, we’ll move to a position behind the Rarel vessel, catching it in the middle. As soon as the Rarel ship is beyond saving, we’ll fire our dark-matter missile. No doubt your friend Steve will think we mean to finish the Rarels, but that missile will be for his ship. With a little luck, we’ll take them both out at once.”