Adrift Read online

  There are four tour ships visible through the glass, brightly lit against the inky black. Hannah’s been on plenty of tours, and she still can’t help thinking that every ship she’s ever been on is ugly as hell. She’s seen these ones before: they look like flattened, upside-down elephant droppings, a bulbous protrusion sticking out over each of the cockpits.

  Hannah jams her hand in her jeans pocket for the tab. She wrote the ship’s name for the shift in tiny capitals next to the start time: RED PANDA. Her gaze flicks between the four ships, but it takes her a second to find the right one. The name is printed on the side in big, stencilled letters, with a numbered designation in smaller script underneath.

  She looks from the Panda to its gangway. Another guide is making his way onto it. He’s wearing the same red shirt as her, and he has the most fantastic hair: a spiked purple mohawk at least a foot high.

  Her tab still in hand, she springs onto the gangway. “Hey!” she says, forcing a confidence she doesn’t feel into her voice. “I’m on for this one. Anything I need to know?”

  Mohawk guy glances over his shoulder, an expression of bored contempt on his face. He keeps walking, his thick black boots booming on the metal plating.

  “Um. Hi?” Hannah catches up to him. “I think this one’s mine?”

  She tries to slip past him, but he puts up a meaty hand, blocking her path. “Nice try, rook,” he says, that bored look still on his face. “You’re late. Shift’s mine.”

  “What are you talking about?” She swipes a finger across her tab, hunting for the little clock.

  “Don’t you have a lens?”

  This time it takes Hannah a lot more effort to stay calm. “There,” she says, pointing at her schedule. “I’m not late. I’m supposed to be on at eleven, and it’s …” she finds the clock in the corner of her tab. “Eleven-o-two.”

  “My lens says eleven-o-six. Anyway, you’re still late. I get the shift.”

  “What? No. Are you serious?”

  He ignores her, resuming his walk towards the airlock. As he does, Hannah remembers the words from the handbook the company sent her before she left Titan: Guides who are late for their shift will lose it. Please try not to be late!!!

  He can’t do this. He can’t. But who are the crew chiefs going to believe? The new girl? She’ll lose a shift on her first day, which means she’s already in the red, which means that maybe they don’t keep her past her probation. A free shuttle ride back to Titan, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

  Anger replaces panic. This might not be her dream job, but it’s work, and at the very least it means she’s going somewhere with her life. She can already see the faces of her parents when she tells them she lost her job, and that is not going to happen. Not ever.

  “Is that hair growing out of your ears, too?” she says, more furious than she’s been in a long time. “I said I’m here. It’s my shift.”

  He turns to look at her, dumbfounded. “What did you just say?”

  Hannah opens her mouth to return fire, but nothing comes out.

  Her mom and dad would know. Callista definitely would. Her older sister would understand exactly how to smooth things over, make this asshole see things her way. Then again, there’s no way either her parents or Callie would ever have taken a job like this, so they wouldn’t be in this situation. They’re not here now, and they can’t help her.

  “It’s all right, Donnie,” says a voice.

  Hannah and Mohawk guy – Donnie – turn to see the supervisor walking up. She’s a young woman, barely older than Hannah, with a neat bob of black hair and a pristine red shirt. Hannah remembers meeting her last night, for about two seconds, but she’s totally blanking on her name. Her gaze automatically goes to the woman’s breast pocket, and she’s relieved to see a badge: Atsuke.

  “Come on, boss,” Donnie says. “She was late.” He glances at Hannah, and the expression on his face clearly says that he’s just getting started.

  “I seem to remember you being late on your first day.” Atsuke’s voice is pleasant and even, like a newsreader’s.

  “And,” Donnie says, as if Atsuke hadn’t spoken. “She was talking bakwas about my hawk. Mad disrespectful. I’ve been here a lot longer than she has, and I don’t see why—”

  “Well, to be fair, Donnie, your hair is pretty stupid. Not to mention against regs. I’ve told you that, like, ten times.”

  Donnie stares at her, shoulders tight. In response, Atsuke raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow.

  He lets out a disgusted sigh, then shoves past them. “You got lucky, rook,” he mutters, as he passes Hannah.

  Her chest is tight, like she’s just run a marathon, and she exhales hard. “Thank you so much,” she says to Atsuke. “I’m really sorry I was late – I thought I had enough time to—”

  “Hey.” Atsuke puts a hand on her shoulder. “Take a breath. It’s fine.”

  Hannah manages a weak smile. Later, she is going to buy Atsuke a drink. Multiple drinks.

  “It’s an easy one today,” Atsuke says. “Eight passengers. Barely a third of capacity. Little bit about the station, talk about the war, the treaty, what we got, what the Colonies got, the role Sigma played in everything, get them gawking at the Neb … twenty minutes, in and out. Square?”

  She looks down at Hannah’s tab, then glances up with a raised eyebrow.

  “My lens is glitching,” Hannah says.

  “Right.” This time, Atsuke looks a little less sure. She reaches in her shirt pocket, and hands Hannah a tiny clip-on mic. “Here. Links to the ship automatically. You can pretty much just start talking. And listen: just be cool. Go do this one, and then there’ll be a coffee waiting for you when you get back.”

  Forget the drink. She should take out another loan, buy Atsuke shares in the touring company. “I will. I mean, yeah. You got it.”

  Atsuke gestures to the airlock at the far end of the gangway. “Get going. And if Volkova gives you any shit, just ignore her. Have fun.”

  Hannah wants to ask who Volkova is, but Atsuke is already heading back, and Hannah doesn’t dare follow. She turns, and marches as fast she can towards the Red Panda’s airlock.

  Chapter 2

  “Mom, check out that star!”

  Corey Livingstone leans way back, pointing straight up through the tour ship’s viewing dome. The star is the lone red one in a black void filled with thousands of dim, white pinpricks. It’s just beyond the other ships cruising above their docking station. He can see himself there, too, reflected in the glass, the Apex Space logo on his white T-shirt just visible. And he can see the top of his mom’s head, which means she either didn’t hear him, or is pretending not to.

  “It’s not a star.” Malik sounds bored, his eyes fixed on his hologram in front of him. “Just a mining ship.”

  “How do you know? You didn’t even look.”

  Malik shrugs. Like always, he has the movie editor open on the holo – Corey can see footage of their dad on the diving board of the hotel pool, running on a silent, three-second loop. No sooner do his feet leave the board than he’s back on the edge, right foot forward, making the jump, over and over again.

  Corey wrinkles his nose. Malik is fifteen, only five years older than him, but sometimes he acts like he’s thirty. And, of course, he thinks he’s so bàng because he uses outdated tech like the hand-held holocam, a stick of black plastic with a big hologram display floating above it. He claims it’s because it has better image quality than his lens, which isn’t true. Malik is only doing it because Shanti Evans at school did it first.

  He looks back up through the dome. “Mom, you see it?”

  “In a second, honey,” Anita Livingstone says, not looking at him. She and his dad, Everett, are arguing about the return tickets. Again. They’re doing that weird thing where they both speak quietly without looking at each other. Their index fingers are touching, linking their lenses, which they wouldn’t even have to do if they’d just let them all get neuro
chips like everyone else. His mom had the thirty-day trial shot last year, which she claimed gave her a headache, and that was the end of that discussion.

  “No, seriously, check it out,” Corey says. “Is that Phobos-B? I think it might be, but I don’t know if—”

  “Dad.” Malik doesn’t look up. “Could you tell him to go bother someone else please?”

  “But, Dad, look, it’s—”

  “Very nice, Corey,” his dad says, glancing up towards the dome for perhaps a third of a second. As always, he’s wearing an old denim shirt and faded jeans, although at least he didn’t bring his nasty work shoes on this trip, with their spatters of reactor sealant. He squints, frowning at something on his lens. “They’re supposed to be here,” he says. “The station cloud should have them.”

  “Well, it obviously doesn’t.” His mom drops her finger from his. She’s wearing a green shirt, unbuttoned, over a tank top and slim pants.

  “But they were there when we checked in. I even said …”

  Corey’s finger wavers, then drops. He slouches in the bucket seat, one of about two dozen on the tour ship’s main deck.

  His gaze drifts to the ships crossing above them. Antares D6 cruiser, cold fusion drive, three hundred crew capacity. AI-controlled, minimal range. A big cargo carrier slides into view, and Corey blanks for a second before the answer comes – of course it does, it’s on the big poster on his wall at home showing all the main Frontier ships, upper left corner. Vector Leviathan. Got a hold big enough to take an entire squadron of Scorpion fighters.

  His imagination lights up with scenes of a quiet cargo hold, the fighters stacked like toys, flight-suit-clad pilots waiting silently for their go signal. Fat chance. These days, it’s probably just hauling asteroid slag or something. That’s what a lot of the old combat carriers are doing – getting rented out to the big companies as freighters. It’s kind of sad, even though it’s still pretty crash seeing one up close.

  At the edge of the dome, he can just see the tip of the Horsehead Nebula, a tight cluster of stars that glow like a fistful of diamonds. Corey lingers on them for a second, then looks back at the cargo carrier.

  The Neb is amazing, but once you’d been looking at it for a week solid, you kind of got over it. And it was just getting to that point of the trip where they’d run out of stuff to do, which was why they were on this lame tour in the first place.

  Man, he’s looking forward to going back to Earth.

  Sigma was pretty cool – at first, anyway. It was the only place in the whole Frontier that you could actually get a good look at the Neb, and getting here had felt like an actual adventure. There’s only one jump gate – the other one got blown up in the war – and it cost a lot to get this far out. It’s weird how people can invent something as amazing as a jump gate network, and then spend almost thirty years fighting over it and blowing it up, but whatever.

  They’d gone swimming, and eaten in some OK restaurants, and – of course – spent hours looking at the Neb from every angle they could. The only time he’d been really bored was when Mom and Dad had sent them to some dumb kids evening, where a bunch of the staff did this really embarrassing play with audience participation.

  They’d almost called on Corey, but if there was one advantage of the growth spurt that had propelled Malik to nearly six feet, it was that Corey could hide behind him when he had to. He still couldn’t wait until he got his own spurt – he hated his body, hated his pudgy five-foot frame and his stupid hair that his mom wouldn’t let him get cornrows in, like Malik had.

  He hadn’t wanted to go to the kids’ thing – he doesn’t even like thinking of himself as a kid – but Mom and Dad said they wanted some alone time. That meant s-e-x, but when they got back to the room it didn’t smell like s-e-x. It didn’t smell like anything.

  What if the Vector did have a fighter or two in the hold? One they hadn’t decommissioned yet? Maybe if he was nice to Mom and Dad, they’d let him go ask. Maybe whoever owned the Vector would let him sit in a Scorpion fighter cockpit – he’d done that once, in the Frontier War Museum on Europa, and it was awesome. Totally zhen.

  Besides, what if aliens attacked the station or something? They’d need somebody to fight them off, and he could definitely fly one of the Scorpions, if he had to. Well, they wouldn’t let him, not at first, but if all the other pilots got blown up, and there was one ship left … He smirks as he imagines his brother filming him doing it, swooping back and forth. Much better than their dad on a stupid diving board.

  He’ll have to time it right. No point asking while Mom and Dad are like this. Maybe later, when they’re back in the room …

  The ship rumbles, jerking him out of his thoughts. He shifts on the uncomfortable seat, folding his arms, his gaze tracking back to the red star. Malik was right (not that he’d ever admit it – he’d rather get called on at the kids’ evening). It is a ship, the shape starting to form as it closes on the station. Probably just another Antares.

  The tour ship they’re on is old. Really old. They came in through the airlock in the bar on the lower level, and most of the lights were off, which meant his mom nearly lost her balance on the stairs. Corey doesn’t know why. They’ve been on a bunch of these ships before, and they’re all identical. Same bar, same stairs leading to a big main deck on the upper level, same grimy walls. Same rows of scratched and dented plastic bucket seats, bolted to the floor. Each of the rows has seats back-to-back, which is annoying, because you’re always bumping someone’s head when you tilt yours up. There aren’t any safety straps on the seats, although Corey can see the brackets for them. Either they took them out, or never bothered to put them in in the first place.

  Without even trying, Corey can picture the layout of the rest of the ship in his head. Cockpit in front of the main deck, with a small passage leading to it. Bathroom under the stairs in the bar. The rest of the lower level taken up by astronautics and the fusion engine – you can’t get there through the bar, but there’s a trapdoor on the floor of the main deck, just off to his right.

  There’s an escape pod at the back of the main deck, the door covered with red warning signs. A super-dense, curved gravity well covers the entire bottom of the ship, cradling it like a hand. It’s your standard Maverick tour vessel: twenty-four-passenger capacity, plus a three-person crew.

  There’s hardly anyone around, though. A young couple at the front. Both of them are wearing leather jackets, and the woman’s long brown hair hangs down her back in a swooping ponytail. The man is enormous – six-six, easy, with shoulders like steel beams, tight against the leather. His left hand and arm are metal, which is kind of strange, because most people with switched-out limbs get them covered in skin-type material so they look real. Not this guy.

  Does it make a noise when he turns over in bed? Or during s-e-x? Either way, Corey’s a little bit jealous. Only a little bit – losing an arm just to find out the answers wouldn’t be fun – but he’s seen that series about people with prosthetics going one-on-one against droids in the ring, which wasn’t bad, even though the droids usually won.

  Maybe that’s why the guy got his arm switched out. Even droid fighters need vacations now and then.

  There’s an old woman to their left in a thick grey tracksuit, with a giant, unclipped fanny pack on her lap. She sees Corey looking, and smiles, the dark skin around her eyes wrinkling. Corey flashes her a smile back.

  The last person is a man in a green polo shirt and suit jacket. He looks a little like Terio Smith, the point guard for the Austin Djinns back home in Texas – same shaped face, same big shoulders. He’s staring at nothing, absently twisting the hem of his shirt in his fingers.

  How awesome would it be if the man actually was Terio Smith?

  The man glances at Corey, then away, his mouth turned down. Corey looks at his shoes, annoyed with himself. The man’s a lot older than Terio, late thirties. Plus, he’s going bald on top, his hairline crawling back. And if Terio Smith was here, there’s no
way he’d be on a crappy tour like this one.

  Maybe the man is related to Terio Smith – they do kind of look alike, after all. He could tell everybody he met Terio’s cousin, get a photo or …

  He sighs. Kicks his feet against the chair supports.

  One more day. Then they’d head to the gate, and jump back home through the wormhole. He’d have a whole week to mess around with Jamie and Allie before school started. Maybe Jamie’d finally managed to finish that new engine model – it’d be useful when they finally started building their own ships.

  Jamie would design them, Allie would do all the business stuff and Corey would fly them, all the way out of Sigma Station and beyond, further than anyone had ever gone. They’d already picked out a name for their company: 866 Industries, after the first three digits of the Universal Location Coordinates for Austin.

  Of course, he’d have to join the Navy first. He wasn’t wild on the whole boot camp thing, but being Frontier Navy meant that he’d really get to learn to fly, even if they weren’t doing too much fighting any more. But who knows what kind of secret tech they had? Stuff they only showed the top pilots?

  There’s a soft click, and a man’s voice issues from a nearby speaker: a recording, loud and perky. “Thank you for choosing Sigma Destination Tours. We value your business. This comfortable, spacious vessel will provide all the amenities you need on your adventure. We hope that—”

  The recording is cut off abruptly by another voice, this one not pre-recorded. It’s a woman this time, deeply bored, with one of the thickest Russian accents Corey has ever heard.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the Red Panda. I am Captain Jana Volkova and I will be your pilot today on our tour of Sigma Station. The tour guide is running very late but will be here soon so in the meantime I will tell you about this ship. Restrooms can be found at—”

  There’s a long pause, as if the mic has cut out, before the captain’s voice comes back, “—under the stairs near the bar. After your tour starts, our staff member Barrington will be happy to serve you a range of bev … oh, sorry, I just looked at the staff roster and he didn’t come in for work today, and we are short-staffed, so no bar service, sorry again. Safety reminders, should the gravity well fail, you will find handholds located along the struts across the main viewing area …”