Randoms (6 page)

“I can't believe this!” I shouted. “It's like I'm living in a video game! I am going to level up. And so you're, like, a level-thirty-four diplomat?”

“There is no class system, if that is what you are implying, but there are specialization tracks. When we get to the ship, you'll have time to inspect the skill tree, and you can decide how you want to proceed. It's an important choice, because all augmentations are final.”

“How do I gain experience? And what kind of skills are we talking about exactly?”

“There will be numerous opportunities on the station to advance. You'll quickly learn how to pursue tasks that accumulate experience points. And that is how your delegation will be rated. At the end of your time with us, if your team has amassed a total of eighty levels, then you will move on to phase-one integration into the Confederation.”

“So, twenty levels apiece.”

“It doesn't matter how they're distributed as long as the total is eighty. Keep in mind, the more you advance, the harder it is to obtain each successive milestone. The first few levels can be achieved in days, or even hours, but the number of required points increases with each level. It can take some beings a decade to move from level thirty to level thirty-one.”

Whatever fear I felt vanished as I considered the prospect of leveling, of gaining nanotech-augmented skills.

Then the shuttle began to move, and the fear came back. There was a thrumming noise and a series of vibrations, and then the sense of levitating, and then the feeling that we were going a zillion miles an hour, and that my stomach hadn't come along for the ride.

•   •   •

Through the front viewscreen, I watched as we hurtled toward the sky. Then I turned around and understood just how quickly
we were moving. We were pulling out of the hangar and heading upward, and then the Earth fell behind us like a pebble fired from a slingshot. Literally seconds after we began to ascend, we were in space, by which I mean outer space. I was now a spaceman. An astronaut. At the very least a kid hitching a ride with aliens.

I was not, however, floating. It really felt no different from being in an airplane. Artificial gravity? It sure seemed like it.

And the stars! Imagine the clearest, most vivid night sky you have ever seen—the kind you can only find far away from city lights. Now imagine it a hundred times more vivid, with a thousand times more stars—stars almost as thick as the black behind them. Stars of every color, from pinpricks to big, glowing globs. Behind them hung the viscous soup of the Milky Way, bright and brilliant and real.

Dr. Roop interrupted my awe to hand me a black, shiny rectangular thing about eight inches long and five inches wide. “What's this?”

“Your data bracelet,” he said. “It wraps around the wrist of your nondominant hand.” He tapped at his own bracelet, and a viewscreen hovered before us, showing an exterior image of our shuttle's departure. He tapped at a few icons, and a keyboard appeared out of thin air, hovering just before him, in an ergonomically perfect position. It was translucent, made out of what appeared to be blue energy, but it was also real. I reached out and touched it, and it was solid. Not hard, but somehow physical. It responded to my touch, and I could feel a rubbery resistance with the tips of my fingers. Each stroke made a tapping sound, like it was a real keyboard.

He tapped a few more keys and sped up the image, slowed
it down, stopped the frame. Then he tapped some keys and another screen came up, listing a queue of messages. He sent that away and called up another menu, this one of a series of documents. “This device links you to the wider sphere of Confederation knowledge, and will enable you to communicate, conduct research, keep up with current events, access entertainments, whatever you wish.”

He then tapped at an icon, and the keyboard and screen simply vanished. “You'll discover its many properties and uses over the next year.” He gently set my bracelet on my wrist, and the two ends banded together, tightly and seamlessly but in no way uncomfortably. He then walked me through the meaning of the most basic icons on it, showing me how to remove it, activate communications, search for data, and so on.

“In the upper right-hand corner of your heads-up display,” he said, “you'll find a menu that includes a few tutorials. I suggest you run through the instructions for the data bracelet when you have some quiet time. Generally, we frown on direct cognitive data integration, since we value the learning process, but we make an exception for the data bracelet, since it's the key to navigating Confederation culture.”

I checked my HUD and found I could pull down menus just by looking at them. And then, when I wasn't using the HUD, it vanished.

There were so many more questions I wanted to ask, but then the shuttle banked sharply, and when I looked at the viewscreen, I was filled with a sense of wonder. There, before us, against the backdrop of black and stars was an actual interstellar spaceship.

It was really just the shuttle on a larger scale—a huge rect
angle, though rounded at the corners, with a pair of massive engines affixed to each side, one at the end and another toward the middle. There were no windows, but the outer hull was made of dark metal, the same near black as the nanite injector. Only the lights, affixed at various intervals, and the yellow glow of the engines made it stand out against space.

“Wow,” I said. “That's it. That's our starship!” I sounded like a total dork, but I was beyond caring. I was in space, looking at a starship that would take me light years from Earth. I wished my dad could see this.

“That is the
Dependable
,” Dr. Roop said.

“What a ridiculous name!” I blurted out.

“Zeke,” Ms. Price cautioned me from the back.

“He may speak if he wishes,” Dr. Roop said. “However, I must admit I don't understand your grievance. Do you not think dependability a worthwhile trait?”

“Sure,” I said. “For a washing machine, not a spaceship.”

“Then what, in your opinion, is a good ship name?”

I was about to say
Enterprise
, but then I thought about it and I realized that it was, in fact, a pretty boring name. You don't notice how boring it is because it's always been the name of the most awesome starship ever. So what else? The
Normandy
? That's just a place in France. The
Millennium Falcon
? It sounds cool, but what exactly does it mean? Do you really want to name your ship after a thousand-year-old bird?

I rooted around in my memory and dug something up from the larger
Star Trek
universe: Captain Sisko's ship. “The
Defiant
,” I said. “That's a good name.”

“I can understand that, under certain circumstances, defiance is an honorable trait, but under others, isn't it undesirable?”

“I guess.”

“And isn't dependability always good?”

“Yeah, but that's not the point. What about”—and now I was just making things up—“the
Victorious
. Something like that?”

“That suggests belligerence.” Dr. Roop said. “It's better never to have to fight than to name your ships in anticipation of winning.”

“Maybe it's a translation issue,” I conceded. “It might sound better in your language.” What I was really thinking about was Ms. Price's little lecture outside the library. The Confederation was made up largely of nonaggressive species. Giving ships names that celebrated victories might sound horribly unpleasant to them. Maybe I should be glad it wasn't the
Cud Chewer
.

I looked at the ship again as we approached. I saw doors opening on the side—a shuttle bay—encased by a blue energy field. My heart hammered and my stomach flipped. It was a beautiful ship, full of aliens who traveled across the stars, and I was about to go on board.

“You know what,” I said. “I changed my mind. I think
Dependable
is a great name.”

•   •   •

It looked to me like the Confederation of United Planets took its new recruits seriously, because the captain of the
Dependable
was waiting in the shuttle bay to greet us, along with several members of her crew. They all wore black uniforms with maroon trim, each with a gas-giant symbol on one sleeve. These six creatures who lined up to greet us represented a wide variety of forms, from one that looked like a giant stick insect to another that was sort of like an otter with a beak. One was almost human in appearance, but with bright orange skin and—this was even
more surprising than the rest of it—weird cranial ridges along his head, like they have on science-fiction shows that want to create aliens on a budget. Go figure.

Captain Qwlessl's appearance at first struck me as a little silly. She was about as tall as I was, but about half again as wide as a human of her height. She had yellowish-brown hide that looked pachyderm tough, and her hands were huge and meaty. Her eyes stuck out on protuberances almost as extreme as a hammerhead shark's. Then there was the short elephant-like trunk that served not as a nose, but as a mouth. She raised it and spoke to me, and I saw that it contained a series of broad teeth, flat and short. “Welcome aboard.” The translator made her voice sound slightly high, but confident and also strangely soothing. I knew at once that she was of middle years, confident, and probably generally cheerful. The number 43 hovering above her head told me that she had been around for a while and done some impressive things.

Though the captain might have looked like a cross between Admiral Ackbar and Garindan, the informant in Mos Eisley who squeaks Luke's location to the imperial forces, there was a seriousness to her that belied her strange appearance. Her eyes had a sadness in them, as though she had seen things in her travels she wished she could forget. Or, alternatively, she could have just been an alien with gigantic eyes. I had no way of knowing.

“Thank you for having me on your ship,” I said cautiously, not knowing if I should look at her trunk or her eyes or what. I ended up just looking away.

She raised her trunk slightly. “This is the third time I've done the recruit run,” she told me. “I know some members of the Confederation can look strange to those unfamiliar
with galactic diversity. You don't have to pretend that it's easy or comfortable, and I promise you no one on my ship will be offended if you stare a couple of seconds too long. During this voyage, you should take advantage of the opportunity to acclimate yourself to life within the Confederation. Besides, your appearance is rather odd in my view.”

“Everyone says that about me,” I ventured.

She laughed or made a noise the translator told me was laughing. The captain then walked over to Dr. Roop and pressed her trunk to his cheek. She was kissing him!

“Klhkkkloplkkkuiv,” she said softly. “Always a treat.”

He kissed her on the cheek in return. “Yes, it is.”

You'd think a giraffe guy flirting with a hammerheaded and betrunked alien would be gross, but there was actually something very sweet about them. It was somehow comforting to know these two liked each other.

Dr. Roop introduced the captain to Ms. Price. He then offered to show our chaperone to her quarters.

“I'll show Mr. Reynolds to his,” the captain said.

I followed her somewhat slow and lumbering steps out to a bland metallic corridor lit by what looked shockingly like fluorescent lights. The spaces weren't as big and airy and bright as on the
Enterprise
, but they weren't as cramped and dim as in a submarine, either. Everything was unadorned and functional without being bleak.

“I presume Dr. Roop told you we are making a stop on the way to Confederation Central,” the captain said. “We're picking up the members of the Ganari delegation.”

“He told me,” I said, though the words came out sounding mechanical. My brain simply could not process everything.

“It's nice to have different groups of initiates on board,” the captain was saying. “You get to know each other. I prefer when I can deliver all four species, but unfortunately, the applying planets are too far apart this time.”

“It must be a pain for you to chauffeur around a bunch of primitive species,” I managed.

“Making contact with new species is exciting. The Ganari, whom we'll be meeting in about two days, are an avian species, which is unusual in the Confederation. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to talk with them.”

We now went through a door that led to a stairwell, and we went down two levels to emerge in a nearly identical hall. I decided I needed to stop flipping out. I was here. I had decided to go, and now I was going. I might as well enjoy it. “If the trip takes two days, would it be possible to get a tour of the ship en route?” I asked.

She studied me with her hammerhead eyes. “Are you interested in air or water ships on your own world?”

“Not really, but I am interested in spaceships.”

“I would be delighted to show you around,” she said. “Just promise that if I go into too much detail, you'll stop me.”

“That won't be a problem,” I said. “I'd love to see how things work, what your crew does, and how you travel through space. As much as you or your crew have time to show me.”

She jabbed in my direction with her trunk. “You I'm going to like. I can see that already. After your breakfast tomorrow morning, come up to the bridge, and we'll start your tour there. We operate on a Confederation-standard twenty-six-hour day here, so meet me at about 0800. You can check the time on your data bracelet.”

“I'll be there!” I said, maybe a little too enthusiastically, but I decided I deserved an honest nerd-out. I was going to see the real functioning bridge of an alien spaceship.

She stopped in front of a door. Unlike on science-fiction shows, this wasn't an electric door that opened with a satisfying and futuristic hiss. It had a grip handle and folded open like an airplane bathroom door. “These are your quarters, room four-twenty-one. The door has already been biometrically matched to you, so only you can gain access.”