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  “Okay, I’ll think about it a little more.” I paused for a minute, not sure how I wanted to ask my next question. I liked Dr. Roop, and I did not want to stop liking him. I was afraid what I would hear if I pressed him on what was on my mind. Still, I had to know. “How come you didn’t tell me the others were going to treat me like this?”

  He sighed and lowered his neck again. He appeared genuinely sad. “I didn’t know, Zeke. I certainly did not want to give them any ideas. No two species are alike, and you can never tell how things are going to go. They were resourceful enough to look up and examine past statistics, and they made their own decisions. I tried to discourage them, but I can’t demand they do as I ask. Things will be better at the station.”

  “Why?” I asked, sounding a little testier than I had intended. “What’s going to change?”

  “You’ll meet other beings with whom you have more in common.”

  It was like my mother, always telling me I’d make good friends at the next place we moved. I knew better by now. The new guy with no friends is never an attractive prospect.

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  I stepped out of the observation lounge and into the corridor. And there I almost collided with Mr. Urch, the being from the weapons station whom I’d embarrassed in front of the captain. Like an idiot.

  “It’s the weapons master,” he grunted as he passed me.

  I hurried on, frightened, not wanting to mess things up any more than I had already. Then I stopped and turned back to him. I figured I had nothing to lose. “Mr. Urch,” I called.

  He turned back to me, jutting out his snout to show his tusks and his sharp teeth. “What do you want?”

  I walked over to him, slowly, as my legs were not working at their absolute best. “You were being nice when you showed me how to work your station, and somehow I did okay and I know I looked like I was trying to show you up. It was a dumb thing to do, and I apologize.”

  He studied me for a moment and then sniffed roughly through his large nose, and I felt the heat of his exhalation on my face. “It is a mistake,” he told me, showing me his teeth and moving his wild-hog muzzle closer to my face, “to read too much into the body language of a species with which you are unfamiliar.”

  Considering it seemed like he was about to gore me with the tusks he happened to have sticking out of his face, I sure hoped he was right. “Uh, okay. Yeah, that’s probably true.”

  “I am a Vaaklir. We evolved from fierce predators. Species who evolved from herbivores and omnivores always, at first, mistake the body language of predator species. You, for example, think I am angry with you because you did well on the weapons console.”

  Perceptive and terrifying. A nice combination. “Aren’t you?”

  He grunted. “Pay attention to my words, not my teeth. No, I’m not angry. I like to see an applicant with your skill. It pleases me. And I will tell you something else. Vaaklir are new to the Confederation. Sixteen years ago, the first group of my species sent a delegation to Confederation Central, just as your species does now.”

  He seemed no less intimidating, but what he was saying made him less scary. Maybe this body-language thing was worth thinking about, especially since what he said suggested that in sixteen years, humans could be serving on a ship like this. I could be serving on a ship like this. “And now you’re here? That’s amazing.”

  “I was part of that delegation,” he said, smacking his broad chest with his clenched fist. “I was the random.”

  I stared, not sure what to say, but I was strangely moved. This creature that looked like a crazed warthog was reaching out to me.

  “So understand that rather than knock you down and use my tusks to rip the entrails from your soft flesh, as you apparently fear, I would prefer to offer you my help.”

  He said it baring his teeth and looking like the former option was the one he really had his heart set on, but I believed he meant what he said. “Thanks, Mr. Urch. Really. And I’m sorry for misreading you.”

  “No apology required,” Urch said. He opened his jaws and showed me his alarmingly sharp teeth. “I know how much there is for you to learn, and we nonherbivores have to look after one another. I’ve just gone off duty. If you wish, you can come with me to the crew mess and eat like a real spacefarer. Then I will take you to the simulation room. You can learn a few more tricks on the weapons console.”

  I broke into a grin. “That would be great.”

  “Look at that,” he said, opening his own jaws. “You bare your teeth like a Vaaklir. I like you more already.”

  • • •

  The crew mess was like the bar in the original Star Wars movie, only without the music or the attitude. A dizzying variety of creatures of various shapes and colors and morphologies stood on line or sat at tables, talking and laughing. The selection of food was also impressive, set on a long counter full of separate trays. The Formers, in all their wisdom, seemed not to have devised anything more advanced than a buffet. I stood in line with Urch and examined the overwhelming selection, not knowing what most of the dishes were, but noting that they were protected by a cosmic sneeze guard.

  “I guess I don’t get to use a food replicator,” I said.

  He burst out laughing. “Individual use of food production units! On a ship this size! You truly do know nothing.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Does that mean there are food replicators?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Do you think we have a pantry and cooks? But food production units are massive, which is why you will find restaurants and food vendors always clustered together on Confederation Central. We have one on this ship, and the mess officer is in charge of the daily offerings.”

  “Nanotechnology?” I asked.

  “How else? The same way nanites can increase your abilities or heal you or even alter your appearance, if you so desire, they can fabricate atoms out of different atoms. Thus, food. Now, let’s see what we have. Don’t be afraid to try something new,” he said as we shuffled past our options. There were piles and globs and mounds of things I could not even guess at. Other foods were more recognizable. There were noodles, though they were the color of blueberries and oily; strange kinds of oblong fruit; a tray of what were almost certainly greens, except they were bright orange. There was a lot, and I didn’t know what any of it might be. I’m not a terribly fussy eater, but I still like to know, roughly, what something is made of before I put it in my mouth.

  “Your HUD will alert you if you attempt to eat any substance toxic to your biochemistry. If there is no warning, it will be safe, though it might taste like excrement to you.” He loaded his tray with a pool of brown slop.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Excrement,” he said. “In [dried fruit] sauce.”

  I studied his face for signs he was joking, but since I had no idea what those signs would look like, I quickly gave up that project. “I thought your species were predators.”

  “Way back, sure. Excrement is a delicacy among many cultures on my world. Some suspect that we used to like to eat it directly from the bowels of our freshly caught prey, but there’s no need to read too much into it. It tastes good.”

  I picked up something that looked like a roll. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s a different kind of excrement.” When I set it down, he made a hissing noise that I soon realized was laughter. “I’m joking with you, Zeke. It is a kind of baked grain product. I know many species don’t like to eat excrement.” He picked up a glass of yellowish liquid. “But you do drink urine, I hope.”

  • • •

  After dinner we went to a kind of practice room that looked a little bit like a small, cubicle-filled office and a little bit like one of those tiny game arcades they sometimes have in hotels. There was a series of divided consoles that could be made to operate like any workstation on
the ship. Urch and I sat down at two adjacent cubicles, and he pressed a few buttons to lower the partition between us. He then called up his data-bracelet keyboard, which looked nothing like my default keyboard—his was spherical and contained hundreds of strange markings. The sphere rotated constantly to keep up with his typing.

  “You have to synch this station to your data bracelet so your HUD can coordinate the sim,” he said.

  I called up my own keyboard, and he showed me what to do. It was actually fairly intuitive given what I’d already learned about operating the data bracelet.

  “You’ll run the weapons console, and I’ll handle navigation,” he said. “We could create artificial crewmen, including a captain, if you’d like, but then you would have to follow orders. I think it is better if you learn some basics for now, so we’ll assume we’ve been given freedom, by the captain, to proceed as we think best.”

  I looked at this display monitor. “So the sim will appear on this screen here?”

  He opened his massive jaws and showed me his sharp teeth. Then he snorted a hearty laugh. “You’ll see.”

  “Is that a smile?” I asked.

  “An evil one,” he said. Then he did it again. “Now pay attention. The PPB, the phased particle beam, is your go-to weapon of choice. You know what dark matter is?”

  “Yeah, it’s the mysterious stuff we can’t perceive that makes up most of the universe.”

  “Good. You know more than I did. Just like there is dark matter, there is dark energy—extremely powerful energy we cannot see or measure. The Formers understood its secrets, and we use their technology to harness dark energy and deploy it for weapons and shielding. The dark energy causes the particle beam to phase in and out of the universe, generating power as it bursts into existence and nonexistence. The PPB is fast and flexible, and there will be more or less a limitless supply while the engines are running. Most battles will be fought without reaching for anything beyond the PPB.”

  “Have you been in a lot of battles?”

  “No.” Then he grunted in a way I could not interpret. “We’re not a warship, but there are incidents.”

  “What sort of incidents?”

  “You’ll learn about it when you get to the station. Now you are learning about the weapons console. Here is the dark-matter missile, which is used much less frequently. It is a physical object that employs both dark energy and negative energy to disrupt the enemy’s hull at the quantum level. This allows for maximum damage from the dark-matter detonations. The standard arsenal for a ship this size is twenty missiles, so there is a limited supply, and, depending on distance, they can take anywhere from one to four seconds from deployment until they reach the target. They’re easier to avoid than the PPB, but if they hit, they tend to be battle enders. Keep in mind that these missiles are expensive and dangerous to produce, so in real-world situations, they are not deployed lightly. After you launch, regulations require that you confirm contact and assess damage before you choose to launch another.”

  “Okay.” I nodded.

  “Finally, there’s the plasma lance. Unless an enemy’s shielding is configured to avoid solid matter—which would make a ship vulnerable to PPB attack—this can penetrate shields and not only latch onto a hull, but become part of the hull. You use it when you are trying to capture and tow a vessel.”

  “Like a tractor beam?” I asked.

  He made his hissing laugh noise. “Those are just in stories. In real life you lance a vessel and tow it with a cable that the plasma energy constructs out of ambient matter in space. It is generally used only on already-disabled vessels. Now, are you ready for a sim?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Hold on to something,” he told me, flashing another boarlike grin. Then he called up a menu on the console and used the tips of his claws to click on a few options. My data bracelet chirped and asked me if I wished to proceed with the simulation. I agreed, and almost instantly there was a bright flash of light.

  Then we were on the bridge. The main screen showed a ship coming toward us, firing weapons. Lights flashed. Alarms sounded. I may have screamed.

  • • •

  “Let me pause this a moment,” Urch said, and we were no longer on the bridge and we were no longer being pounded by enemy fire. He hissed out a laugh. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, your HUD is messing with your vision and hearing to produce a full illusion in the sim. It seems pretty realistic, doesn’t it?”

  My heart was hammering. “Yeah, you might have warned me.”

  “That would not have been as much fun. I had hoped to make you urinate with surprise, but I see your clothing is dry.”

  “Sorry to let you down.”

  “Another time,” he promised. “Now, are you ready to earn some experience points?”

  • • •

  It wasn’t quite like being on the Star Trek holodeck. I couldn’t get up and walk around, and I couldn’t interact with anything but the terminal in front of me, but it was still pretty vivid. I felt the ship vibrate when we were hit; I heard the distant boom of explosive decompression and decks collapsing. I made tactical decisions that got my ship destroyed, and later, after a few attempts, I made some tactical decisions that saved my ship. Win or lose, I got to experience an actual, realistic battle sim, and I was getting advice and feedback from a trained weapons officer. It was my idea of a good time.

  After we finished and stepped into the hall, we saw Charles, Nayana, and Mi Sun walking toward us, laughing. I noticed the two girls had now also reached level five, and Charles had reached six. I felt a tightness in my gut just looking at them. They were going to be constant reminders that I didn’t really belong here.

  They fell silent when they saw us. Charles looked away guiltily.

  Urch stepped out in front of them. “Halt!”

  They stopped and glanced at one another nervously.

  “This corridor is off-limits to guests not accompanied by an officer. You are aware of that, yes?”

  “No, sir,” said Charles, worry creeping across his face. “No one told us. I thought our data bracelets would warn us—”

  “Unless you tampered with them!” Urch shouted. “If you have altered the security protocols of this ship, the captain will send you back to Earth. And that is if you’re lucky. If I find out, I will send you out an airlock. You may check my record if you think I am speaking metaphorically. I have been reprimanded in the past for such actions.”

  Charles and Nayana cringed. Mi Sun, to her credit, stood her ground, though she looked worried. “We didn’t tamper with anything. And we had no idea we were breaking any rules.”

  “That is unlikely,” Urch snapped. “Return to your quarters at once, and know that one thousand experience points will be deducted from each of you for this outrageous violation of ship policy. Out of my sight, omnivore scum!”

  They scattered at once.

  I stared at Urch. “Is that true?”

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it?”

  “No. None of it. Of course they can be here. Their data bracelets would have warned them if they had ventured anywhere inappropriate. And you can’t take someone’s points away. But they don’t know that.”

  “And throwing people out the airlock?”

  “That I do all the time,” he said with his hissing laugh.

  As we proceeded down the corridor, Urch explained that he did not enjoy games like Approximate Results from Endeavors, which he found insufficiently violent, but he walked me over to the officers’ lounge and watched while Ystip and I played for about an hour using the colorful tiles, which were a little bit smaller than playing cards, and made a satisfying slap when I set them down on the table. Urch then called it a night, and Ystip and I kept going for another few rounds. I won about as often as I lost, which I thought was not too bad, and Ystip seemed i
mpressed.

  “It takes most beings much longer to understand the mechanics,” she told me as we cleaned up and put away the tiles.

  “We have similar games on my planet,” I told her.

  “It must be a very advanced world,” she said wistfully.

  “It has its moments.” I thanked her and headed back to my cabin, now exhausted and ready for sleep. It had been a great night, maybe one of the best nights ever, and for a little while I’d forgotten just how ostracized I had become. And then I remembered, and I thought about how, despite all the friends I was making on the Dependable, in a few days I’d be at Confederation Central, and everyone who had made this experience enjoyable would be gone, and I’d be alone once again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  I came onto the bridge the next morning about fifteen minutes before we were scheduled to pop back into the universe. On TV shows, the captain tells the crew to drop out of warp or exit hyperspace, and there you go. In real life, there seemed to be a lot of planning and plotting and computing to be done as they readied to enter the Ganari system. Everyone had things to do. The various aliens were calling out numbers and coordinates, punching in information, double-checking readings.

  The captain spared a moment to greet me, however. “Good morning, Mr. Reynolds. I see from the logs you’ve been doing some weapons training.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, feeling more than a little pleased she’d bothered to find out what I’d been up to.

  “In a few years you could be serving on a ship like this one,” she said.

  “I’m not quite ready for that,” I told her, “but I think I would love it.”