Chance Holland grips the armrest of his seat and watches out the front as Franklin pilots the small ship through a maze of rock spires. They cut by one so close the proximity alarm blares and Franklin jerks the controls.
“Careful!”
“I’ve got this, Holland.”
“No, Green, you’re definitely losing control.”
The ship spins, and jolts as it contacts the face of the cliff.
“You were going too fast,” Chance says.
Franklin huffs and unbuckles as the spaceship slams into boulders at the base of the cliff. The words simulation failed flash on the screen. They climb out of the simulator and the instructor gives Franklin a glare.
“That was reckless, cadet. Being a pilot is not about speed, it’s about total control. You will remain after class and try again.”
“I told you,” Chance whispers.
Franklin pokes him in the ribs. “You’re next.”
“Watch me.”
The simulation turns out more difficult than he anticipated, but he makes it through the course without incident. His time is nearly the slowest in the class, but the instructor gives him a small nod of approval.
A few more cadets take their turns and then flight class is over for most of them. Chance returns to his dorm room and does some mathematics homework until Franklin arrives and flops down beside him.
“I’ve flown simulators before,” he says, “and that one was a lot harder.”
“Probably more realistic.”
“You just wait, I’ll be the best pilot you know.”
“That won’t be hard. The only pilot I’ve met is the one who flew the shuttle that brought me here. He wasn’t very good, I almost threw up at takeoff."
“Perfect! I’m already the greatest pilot Chance Holland has ever known!”
“I don’t know, you almost made me throw up in a simulation.”
“Oh, well…”
Franklin goes back to his room and quickly returns with a small guitar that appears to be older than the Martian government. “Perhaps I can impress you with my musical prowess instead,” he says.
The guitar whispers a dissonant sound as he pulls the strap over his shoulder. He plucks the strings and adjusts the tuning knobs for a moment, then begins playing a flowing melody, picking out the notes with no hesitation. It’s the same tune he often hums, which feels so melancholy and incomplete, like a heavy conversation left mid-sentence.
“That’s beautiful,” Chance says when he stops.
“Really? I always feel like it’s missing something. I’ve tried adding to it, but nothing fits.”
“I think that’s why it’s beautiful. Is it yours?”
“Entirely mine. I woke up one morning a few years ago with the tune in my head, and it never left. I’m glad you like it. My mother always said musical skill would make me popular with the ladies.” He laughs. “I never did keep practicing. Not enough motivation when I had the option to play with other boys in the dirt and fresh air all day instead.”
Franklin sits down and continues picking softly on the instrument, making disconnected but pleasant musical phrases. “Hey Chance, what did you do as a kid?”
“I mostly read books. I wrote some, too.”
“You wrote books? Isn’t that really difficult?”
“They aren’t good books. They’ll probably collect dust in my dad’s basement forever.”
“But still, most people don’t even try to write a book, let alone finish one. Or several. What did you write about?”
“Just silly childish things. In my teens I had a dark phase and created an angsty immortal character who hated everyone. I think I might have burned that book.”
“I always like seeing what people create, and how it reflects who they are.”
Chance nods. His literary creations certainly reflect…at least some parts of himself. They are mostly parts he wants to destroy and bury and forget about.
“What about friends? You have many of those back home? A girlfriend?”
“I was always a loner.”
“Never been with a girl?”
“I sat next to one at school.”
“I think you know what I mean.” Franklin grins so wide the corners of his eyes crinkle.
“What, like…in bed?”
“Yeah, you know, sex, or whatever kids call it these days. Never?”
“I never really thought about it.”
Franklin leans forward and sets aside his guitar. “Not interested?”
“No.” Chance frowns. Was he supposed to be interested? It wasn’t something his dad ever talked about, beyond the usual your body will change and you’ll feel your lower parts becoming magically attracted to girls. The attraction never came and he didn’t give it much thought.
“So what’s your opinion on love, then?”
“Like, a parent loving their child?”
“Or any person loving another person. Love in general.”
“Sometimes it seems like a myth, and then other times I see a flash of something, and I almost believe. But what’s the use of believing in something you can’t explain?”
“What’s the use of only believing things you can explain? I can’t explain how gravity works but I believe it’s there.”
“That’s different though.”
“Is it? You see the effects of it every day, so you know it’s real. But you also see the effects of love every day. You, and me, and every other person alive, we’re, well, mostly the effects of love.”
“I don’t get your point.”
“You exist because of love—whatever sort of love brought together your mom and your dad. You’re as real a proof of love as my sticking to the floor is proof of gravity.”
“My dad was never really there for me, though.”
“People can’t always love as much as they want to, or should. There’s a lot more to life than just love, but it’s still there.”
“Where?”
Franklin lays a hand on Chance’s shoulder. “Here,” he says, and he leans forward with a kiss.
Chance Holland thinks many things in a short moment, and then he tries to figure out what he’s feeling, but it escapes him. So he lets his friend kiss him, and he returns the kiss, until the moment ends and Franklin leans back.
“This is okay, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Chance…”
“No.” He stares at the curl of Franklin’s ear. “No, it’s really okay. I’m just not sure…”
“About what?”
“How I feel.”
The sound of heavy boots in the corridor precedes the arrival of a tall gray-haired man. His well-groomed and austere presence looms over them, and Franklin slowly removes his arm from Chance’s shoulders.
“Cadets,” the man says with a bit of a twist in his lips. “Come with me.”
They obey at once, and Chance whispers in Franklin’s ear, “Who’s he?”
“He’s the director. This is…uh…very bad.”
“What did we do wrong? Are there rules against kissing? How did they catch us so fast?”
The director speaks without turning his head. “That’s enough whispering, cadets.”
Franklin makes an obscene gesture at the man’s back.
When the director opens the door to his office, they see Franklin’s dad, Dr. Andrew Green, waiting in an armchair. The boys sit in hard plastic chairs opposite the adults. The room is so silent for a moment that Chance is distinctly aware of Franklin’s breath, calm and steady beside him.
“You know,” the director says at last, “that any romantic entanglements are completely prohibited in training.”
“Don’t know what you’re alluding to, sir,” Franklin says. “I know the rules and there are no girls here.”
“You know exactly what this is about,” his dad says, leaning forward. “You can’t play us for fools. I know what you are.”
Chance becomes tremendously interested in the abstract pattern of the carpet and hopes one of the black shapes in it will turn into a hole where he can hide.
“What am I, dad? Your son? A monster? What have I ever been to you?”
“It was a mistake to enroll you here,” Dr. Green says. His hand shakes as he points at his son. “You are a disgrace, not worthy of the honor of military service. I had hope you would change and leave behind your foolishness, but it was in vain.”
“I’ve worked hard and I’m doing well in my classes! There is nothing wrong with my service.” The young man stands up. “You just can’t accept that I’m different from you.”
“Sit down,” the director says, in a calm but forceful tone. “Save it for home. Due to your blatant disrespect for the rules, Mr. Green, you and your friend Mr. Holland will be dishonorably expelled and serve for one year in the uranium mines. Now leave my office.”
The cadets leave without another word.
“To hell with this school,” Franklin spits when they’re back in the dorm corridor. “And to hell with the uranium mines.”
“What do you mean?” Chance asks. He feels as if his body is a furnace of shame and fear, and he wishes he could collapse in on himself to become a tiny black hole that would evaporate instantly.
Franklin pauses at the doorway to his room. “You’re right, that doesn’t make much sense. The mines are hell itself.” He grabs his belongings from under his bunk and shoves them into a couple bags. “You coming with me, comrade?”
“Where?” Chance hasn’t considered that going somewhere else could be an option.
“Away, on an adventure. I intend to steal a long-range shuttle and be ten million kilometers away before they know what’s happened.”
“Have you always been an impulsive criminal?”
Franklin pushes past him and slings one of his bags over his shoulder. “You heard them. We’re no better than criminals, just because they have some stupid rules about kissing.” He pauses. “Fuck the military. Oh, that feels good. You know how long I’ve pretended to be the perfect son? I’m sick of trying to please my dad! So fuck him! In an extremely figurative sense, though…he can fuck himself!”
Chance didn’t quite expect this new side of his friend.
Franklin turns around and spreads his arms. “Dude, you’re coming, right?”
“What will happen if they catch us?”
“Probably an extra year in the mines. You’ll be plotting how to escape after just a few days, so that doesn’t really matter.”
“They won’t kill us?”
Franklin scoffed. “Some people would love to. But no, we aren’t anywhere near a priority for that. If things go as I think they will, everyone is gonna be tied up with a pointless interplanetary war and we’ll be forgotten as they all destroy each other. I always intended to steal a ship and travel the universe when the time came, and this is the time.”
As much as Chance wants a quiet home with books and fresh food, he has to admit that the idea of seeing more of the universe than a small dusty planet does have some appeal. A very deep piece of him longs for an adventure. He feels as if he’s been living his entire life in an empty box, forced to escape into his own imagination to cope with the lack of belonging.
“Come on, we need to get out of here.”
Chance grabs his things and they hurry out of the dormitory, taking the lesser-used hallways toward the back of the academy. They put on their pressure suits and come out in the tunnel at the cliff. Chance passes the spot where he panicked with a tightness in his chest and cold sweat on his forehead.
Franklin leads the way down the narrow ledge, explaining that there’s a ladder in the cliff face that climbs from the ledge to the top of the cliff, where the hangers and landing pads are. Chance doubts his own ability to climb such a ladder.
The ledge narrows even further, to the point that Chance is edging along sideways with his back to the cliff. He can’t help but look down. The huge distances and clear atmosphere play tricks on his mind, warping the landscape. He freezes in place.
Franklin grabs his arm. “Don’t think, just move.”
“I think all the time.”
“Look at me.”
He looks. Franklin’s face holds some sort of emotion, but Chance doesn’t feel much like trying to guess what it is. His stomach hurts.
“Hey, you need to focus. I won’t let you fall. Look, the ladder’s right here. We just need to climb a little way up.”
Chance nods and follows. The exertion of the climb forces him to focus and helps drive away the obsessive thoughts of falling. By the time they reach the top and roll over the edge onto the bare rock surface, his mind has mostly cleared.
“Don’t they have security up here?” Chance asks. They are behind a large angular building, the hangar where long-range shuttles are stored.
“Yeah, but I know a back door. I used to sneak up here for self-guided tours of the ships.”
They walk along the wall, and Franklin sticks his fingers in every crack, blemish, or hole. Eventually he stops and pushes with both hands. A door opens and they slip into a dark metal corridor barely high enough for them to stand up.
“What is this?”
“The door is actually a vent. It’s supposed to only open outward, but one of the other cadets discovered that the latch is broken and if you push it just right, you can get in. We’re in a ventilation shaft.”
“Of course we are. Ventilation is always how people break into buildings.”
“Stereotypes are based in truth. This way…”
They walk down the shaft and around a sharp corner, until they come to a loose metal grate. Through it, about three meters below, is the smooth concrete of the hangar floor. Chance looks out at the huge open space, where shuttles and other ships of all sizes and shapes sit in neat rows. They can’t see anyone else in the building.
“That’s the one we want,” Franklin says, pointing. “Fifth shuttle in the first row.”
“You know how to fly it?”
“I sure do. It belongs to my dad. He gave me several lessons.”
“I’m not actually confident that ‘several lessons’ qualifies you to fly it.”
“There’s practically nothing to run into out there, that’s why we call it space.”
“I’m more concerned about landing.”
“Would you rather die a prisoner in the uranium mines or flying free in a spaceship?”
Chance isn’t sure about that; he’d rather not die at all. But he does know that taking a chance on the spaceship sounds a little better in this moment than taking a chance on the mines. Which probably means he’s being peer-pressured and it’s working.
“Here, I’ll hold this for you while you jump down.” Franklin pushes the bottom of the grate out. It’s only attached at the top, and moves just far enough for a person to fit through.
After the cliff, this jump will be easy. Chance sits on the edge with his legs through the gap, and then turns around and lets himself down until his feet dangle about a meter above the floor. Then he lets go and lands with a solid thwack of boots on concrete. Franklin quickly follows.
“Dad keeps the shuttle stocked with several years’ worth of preserved food, plus it has a purification system that takes excess humidity and biological waste and turns it into pure drinkable water.”
“So you drink your own pee?”
Franklin laughs. “It’s a nearly perfect enclosed system that loses no more than a gram of water every month. If you need to refill, comets and moons are full of water ice, plus all the raw materials for fuel. The only limits to how long you can stay out are food and your own sanity. And we’ve made some exciting progress in compact algae-based nutrient production systems, so in a real emergency you can technically survive on an endless supply of tasteless pellets!”
Movement at the far end of the hangar catches their attention and they see a maintenance tech walking toward them. His voice comes through their suit’s communicators. “You aren’t supposed to be in here, cadets.”
“Oops, better hurry,” Franklin says. “Hit that big yellow button on the wall next to the red one and meet me in the ship.”
The maintenance tech breaks into a run and Franklin darts up the open boarding ramp into his dad’s ship. Chance hits the button and yellow lights flash. The huge hangar doors start opening.
The ship’s engines fire up just as Chance gets to the ramp. “I’m on board!” he yells.
“Ok, get over here and buckle up.”
Chance does so as the ship rises off the ground. The hangar doors are nearly open far enough. Through the side window, he sees the maintenance man going for the red button.
“I think he’s going to stop the doors.”
“Too late!”
Franklin accelerates and the shuttle slips between the doors and into the open sky. He shouts in excitement and aims for the stars.
Chance clings to his seat as they rocket into space. His head feels unbearably heavy and all he wants now is to go home. The interior of the shuttle grows hot from the engine running at full capacity. Then, at last, they leave the atmosphere and the violent shaking eases. The radar shows nobody in pursuit.
Vents pump cool air into the cabin and they remove their pressure suit helmets. Chance’s ears are plugged and everything sounds far away.
“Looks like the planetary defense force weren’t suspicious of our launch, there’s nothing on the radar,” Franklin says. “We’ve got the fastest acceleration humans have devised and infinite space at our disposal. They’ll never catch up.”
“I want to go home,” Chance says. He stretches his jaw and sound snaps back to normal.
“Of all the places we could go, you choose home? What will your dad say when he learns you got kicked out?”
He has a point there. “I suppose avoiding my dad would be a good idea given the desertion, piracy, and…other offenses.”
“Huh, that’s weird.” Franklin is staring intently at a communications panel.
“What?”
“I was just scanning the quantum encoded frequencies that smugglers use…decoding them was one of my dad’s pet projects…and I picked up an emergency signal.” He quickly alters course. “Gonna check it out.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Couldn’t it be a trap?”
“This is weird technology, unfamiliar to anyone on Mars or Earth, and so far it only turns up in the hands of drug dealers and terrorists. My dad was the first to bring it to the attention of the Martian Senate. I’ve overheard him and his colleagues talking about separatist forces establishing a more organized presence beyond the asteroid belt. Something called the Outer Planet Syndicate.”
“So, don’t you think showing up in a Martian military shuttle might be a bad idea?”
“How about showing up in a stolen military shuttle packed with the latest Martian technology, including a prototype antimatter bomb that could destroy an entire planet?”
The back of Chance’s neck prickles. “What the fuck?”
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