I giggled. For a norm, Fian wasn’t bad. ‘What vid do we watch?’
‘What’s your favourite series?’
‘Defenders,’ I admitted.
‘I don’t know it.’
‘What’s yours then?’
‘Stalea of the Jungle.’ Fian definitely blushed.
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Well,’ said Fian. ‘You show me an episode of Defenders. I’ll show you an episode of Stalea of the Jungle. We both promise not to laugh too much. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
We headed off, remembering to take our pillows and a couple of empty glasses with us. Fian’s room was just as tiny as mine of course. I sat on the bed. Since there wasn’t a chair, Fian tactfully settled himself on the floor. I set up the vid to play one of my favourite episodes of Defenders, while Fian poured out wine and passed me a glass.
I sipped at the wine. It’s just about impossible to get alcohol when you live on Earth and in a Next Step, so this was my first try at it. I’d had all the school lectures about using alcohol sensibly of course, and I wasn’t going to do anything silly. I’d turned down the offer of getting drunk and going to bed with Cathan, and it would be even more stupid to do it with Fian. For a norm, Fian wasn’t bad, but he was a norm and I was an ape. Even if I hadn’t told him a pack of lies about being Military, the complications didn’t bear thinking about.
‘So, what do I need to know about Defenders?’ asked Fian.
The opening credits were rolling. ‘Well, the story is that humanity has met hostile aliens. Defenders is set on a Military base in the forefront of the war.’
Fian laughed. ‘You’re Military and you like watching this? Doesn’t it all seem a bit unrealistic to you?’
‘It’s fun,’ I defended myself.
‘You don’t get irritated by them getting facts wrong?’
I shook my head. ‘You aren’t supposed to take it seriously.’ I pointed at the screen. ‘This is the hero, played by Arrack San Domex.’
Fian went quiet and we watched the vid for a bit. It was the usual sort of plot for a Defenders episode. The base received an alert about an attack on a nearby planet and sent out a team to assist. As always, it was the same team that went out, led by the hero.
I glanced furtively between the hero and Fian. There was a definite resemblance. Fian had similar long straight blond hair, slim build, and fine features. Issette said she preferred men to have a rugged type of face. I couldn’t see how Keon fitted into that. He definitely wasn’t rugged, and I didn’t think he was particularly handsome, but I knew him too well to be objective. When I looked at Keon, I just saw Keon.
The hero was now wrestling a green alien with tentacles. Fian made a choking noise. ‘Is taking on aliens bare handed a standard Military tactic? Don’t you normally wear impact suits and carry guns?’
I grinned. ‘There’s something silly in the plot to explain it, but really it’s just an excuse for the hero to get his clothes shredded. Look!’
On screen, our hero’s jacket was in tatters from the green tentacles. He threw the remains aside.
‘His top goes next,’ I grinned, unashamedly drooling.
Fian laughed as the hero’s top was wrecked and thrown aside, and the hero continued to fight bare-chested. ‘Don’t the aliens shred his skin now?’
‘Ah well,’ I giggled. ‘The touch of human skin wounds aliens.’
Fian blinked. ‘How much more clothing does the hero lose? Logically, his best tactic fighting them would be …’
I grinned. ‘It’s not a Beta sector vid. The aliens only attack him above the waist.’
‘How considerate of them. It’s good the way they attack in such small numbers as well.’
I nodded. The hero slew the last alien, rescued his team member who had been about to be dissected, and the team went back to base.
‘Best bit comes now,’ I said.
‘It does? I thought they’d won and it was over.’
‘They always do a last scene of the hero back at his quarters in the evening,’ I said.
‘Aliens only attack in the daytime on this Military base so they can sleep nights?’
‘Of course. All the planets are conveniently in the same time zone.’ I grinned. ‘Now we get the scene where the hero goes out on his balcony, dressed in a really skimpy sleep suit, and gazes soulfully at the stars.’
On the screen, Arrack San Domex gazed soulfully at the stars and the vid ended.
Fian laughed. ‘Do Military bases have balconies?’
‘No,’ I said, happily, ‘but that’s not the point.’
‘Well this has given me a whole new view of Military life,’ said Fian. ‘It also means I’m going to be much less embarrassed while you watch Stalea of the Jungle. Would you like another glass of wine?’
‘I’d better not. I’ve never had it before, and I don’t want to get totally powered. You go ahead though.’
Fian shook his head. ‘My parents don’t like alcohol, so I’m not used to it either. The first thing I did when I was 18 at Year End was to go out and buy a bottle of wine. It’s a traditional thing on Hercules, but I was so busy getting ready to come to my course I never had time to actually drink it.’
I remembered something and went pink.
Fian looked at me suspiciously. ‘What was the first thing you did when you were 18?’
I went pinker.
He shook his head. ‘You didn’t? You’re a nice contract girl!’
‘No!’ I giggled. ‘Cathan wanted to, but I threw him across the room. I just watched a Beta vid. I was curious …’
‘Cathan and you are?’
‘Not are, were. Definitely past tense. And we weren’t very much to start with.’
‘Good.’ Fian set up the vid. ‘Now the plot of this is that a world got into Colony Ten phase. The colonists did their ten years but the portal failed, people had forgotten about them, and they were just stuck there.’
‘Yes.’ I giggled. ‘The Military forget planets all the time. I suppose they also forgot the mandatory daily contact with the colonists, and to give them a backup portal.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fian. ‘The colony survived as best they could, cut off from civilization. It’s now two hundred years later, and Stalea is a heroic girl who defends her village from the hostile beasts in the jungle.’
‘These are the hostile beasts that the incompetent Planet First team didn’t notice before they cleared the planet for Colony Ten?’
‘You’ve got the idea.’
‘And Stalea fights them off single handed? That’s a big job isn’t it?’
‘Stalea is quite a girl,’ said Fian. ‘You remind me of her a bit. She has a male friend who helps her out. They’re sort of Twoing, but they argue a lot. Ready?’
‘I can’t wait.’
Stalea of the Jungle started. Stalea had a limited wardrobe of strategically placed fake animal skins. I examined her closely, trying to see why I reminded Fian of her. I was fairly tall, but not as tall as Stalea. Our hair was a different colour. I didn’t wear animal skins. I really couldn’t see it.
Stalea and her lover beat off a couple of savage creatures that had been threatening their village. The lover also favoured the minimal animal skin sort of wardrobe. Nice legs, but not really my type.
Stalea and her lover now had an argument. I didn’t quite follow what it was about.
‘There’s this other girl in the village that keeps being friendly to him, and Stalea is possessive,’ Fian helpfully explained. ‘He’s not interested in the other girl, but Stalea keeps thinking he is.’
‘I see.’ I watched as they had another fight with a beast and then another argument with each other. The row seemed to be building up to something.
‘This is the good bit,’ said Fian, leaning forward and watching eagerly. ‘It happens just about every episode.’
Stalea appeared to lose patience totally, grabbed her lover, threw him across the jungle clearing and pinned
him to the ground.
I blinked and realized something. ‘I remind you of her because of the throwing him around!’
Fian nodded.
‘I don’t do it very often,’ I defended myself.
‘Stalea does,’ said Fian, ‘and I’m a nice contract boy from Delta who gets a bit powered at the thought of a beautiful girl throwing him across the room, pinning him down and …’
I watched Stalea and her lover demonstrating the unfinished ‘and’ part of the sentence. The credits rolled and the vid ended just as things were getting really interesting.
I looked at Fian, and burst out laughing. ‘Throwing men across the room …’
He grinned back at me. ‘Aliens ripping off the hero’s clothes …’
‘True.’ I stood up and collected my pillow. ‘I’d better say good night. We’ll be working the site again tomorrow.’
‘Yes, you may have more lives to save so you’d better get your sleep.’ Fian opened the door. ‘I enjoyed Defenders, so thank you.’
‘Stalea wasn’t that bad either, so thank you too.’
As I went out, I could see Fian was watching for me to pause and give him the opening for a kiss, or maybe he was hoping I’d throw him across the room and leap on him. Either way, he was out of luck. I walked down the corridor to my own room and I didn’t look back.
Fian was great. He loved history. He could laugh at himself instead of sulk the way Cathan had always done. He even looked a bit like Arrack San Domex. Fian was the man of my dreams, but he was a norm and I was only an ape. He liked JMK, not me, and JMK didn’t even exist. When he found out the truth, he was going to hate me.
11
Team 1 sat together at breakfast the next morning, and Fian suggested that he and I could spend another evening sharing the rest of the wine and watching history vids together. It sounded nice, but I remembered the norm and ape thing, and just shrugged my shoulders. I then ignored Fian completely and made myself smile and look interested while a delighted Krath took his chance to babble idiocies at me and suggest that I watch vids with him instead. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Fian’s face change expression from disappointment to confusion, and on through annoyance into grim resignation. He’d got the message.
Dalmora wasn’t her usual calm and confident self that morning. Krath finally paused for breath long enough for me to ask her what was wrong. I discovered she’d stayed up specially to see the dome portal go into lockdown mode as the solar storm hit. Half the other norms had done the same. They sat around in the dining room for the following three hours, having panicky chats about the fact they were totally cut off from the rest of the universe, until the portal was back on.
Amaz! Totally amaz! Why would anyone deliberately stay awake for hours so they could panic about not being able to use a portal? If they hadn’t got the solar storm warning, they’d have been fast asleep and never have known the portal was out of action.
Dalmora could tell I was completely grazzed. ‘It must seem silly to you, but most of us just aren’t able to cope with things the way you do. We don’t have your confidence, and when the portal wasn’t working we felt so isolated. I’ve never been anywhere without a working portal before.’
That grazzed me too. Dalmora Rostha, daughter of Ventrak Rostha, felt she didn’t have as much self confidence as me.
‘If we really got cut off in a place like this, if the portal was damaged by the solar storm and didn’t start working again, what could we do?’ she asked.
She was genuinely scared, so I tried to be reassuring without showing I thought she was an idiot. ‘Portals automatically lock down during a storm to prevent damage to themselves or anyone trying to travel. Even if there was some freak damage to the portal, we could still call for help. The comms system is totally separate from the portal network.’
‘I don’t know that sort of thing,’ Dalmora said shakily. ‘We don’t get solar storms back home on Danae.’
I tried to explain. ‘Well, comms portals are tiny, low power things. They stay open all the time, even in solar storms. The odd bit of interference on a mail message doesn’t matter. When a proper portal sends out a signal to transmit a person, that’s very different. It’s far more complicated and it has to be perfect or what arrives the other end is … unpleasant.
‘So,’ I continued, ‘if our portal didn’t work, we’d just call for help. Someone would bring a new portal to us, or we could go to another portal ourselves. There are several dozen other domes round the New York Dig Site, all with their own portals. We’ve plenty of hover sleds, they aren’t fast but we could get to another dome easily. It would probably only take half an hour or so. We could even get across country to the nearest settlement, though that would take hours. There’s really nothing to worry about.’
I discovered my audience wasn’t just Dalmora. Most of the class were listening to me with anxious faces. They seemed to gradually relax as the sense of my words sunk in.
We spent a frustrating morning on the dig site, where we dug out two underground cavities that might have contained stasis boxes but didn’t, and ended up covered in some weird reddish brown dust that clung lovingly to our impact suits. Playdon spent at least fifteen minutes running sensor tests on the stuff, before announcing that it didn’t seem in any way hazardous but he was still putting the lot of us through decontamination before letting us enter the dome or open our suits.
‘But isn’t this a waste of time?’ Joth asked, as we all queued up outside our dome.
‘No,’ I chorused in unison with Playdon, Fian, and what sounded like Krath. My head snapped round to check, and I saw Playdon looking in Krath’s direction as well. Yes, it really had been him.
Playdon had been attaching a decontamination hose to a bulky gray tank set against our dome wall, but now he stopped. ‘I really have to ask … Fian, why did you say that?’
‘The dust is metallic and attracted to our impact suits,’ said Fian. ‘You gave us all the safety lectures about magnetic hazards being dangerous because they mess up the low level magnetic field in the impact suit material. My guess is the dust is being attracted to that low level magnetic field, and if it gets inside the suit then it could damage it, make the material trigger unpredictably, or fail to trigger at all.’
‘Very good,’ said Playdon. ‘Even if the metallic dust didn’t actually damage the suit, it would be hard to remove and make it hideously uncomfortable to wear. I don’t want to have to send all our suits off for reconditioning. Krath, what was your reason?’
‘I’ve seen ordinary rubbish heaps with dangerous stuff in them. Those ruins are extra big rubbish heaps, so there could be extra dangerous stuff.’
‘I’d never thought of it quite that way before,’ said Playdon, ‘but your conclusion is correct.’ He turned to me. ‘Jarra?’
‘Dig site rule 1. If you don’t understand what’s happening, be extra careful,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Playdon.
He finished attaching the hose and sprayed everyone, and we all trooped into the dome. The disinfectant smell of the decontaminant haunted us all through lunch and the afternoon lectures, so we picked strongly flavoured food at dinner and drowned out the disinfectant with the odours of spices from five different sectors. I didn’t recognise half of them, including the bright blue sauce that Krath was eagerly shovelling down his throat, but I didn’t risk advertising my ignorance by asking about them.
After dinner, I saw Fian approaching me, so I headed for my room on the pretext of getting a cushion. When I got back to the hall, I saw him sitting by one wall with another Deltan boy, so I went to sit by the opposite wall and chat to Amalie.
‘Dalmora’s amaz,’ she said, nodding at where the Alphan was sitting and softly strumming her guitar.
‘She’s really good,’ I said. ‘Someone tried to teach me to play once. We were on London Fringe, and it rained for three solid days. By the end of it, everyone made me promise never to try and learn to play the guitar
ever again. I’m not even remotely musical.’
‘You seem to have spent a lot of time on dig sites,’ said Amalie.
I realized I’d opened my big mouth again, and hastily tried to divert the conversation away from my past. ‘Guitar playing is a tradition on dig sites, like light bulb jokes.’
‘What’s a light bulb joke?’ asked Amalie.
‘A light bulb was part of ancient glows used back in the twentieth century. I think they were some sort of primitive power cell. Anyway, a dig team found an ancient book of jokes about changing light bulbs, and ever since then people on dig sites have made light bulb jokes. Changing a light bulb was apparently very easy to do, and the jokes … Well, it’s easiest to explain by giving an example.’
I paused and thought for a moment. ‘How many Military does it take to change a light bulb? This is where you say that you don’t know, and repeat the question.’
Amalie looked confused. ‘I don’t know. How many Military does it take to change a light bulb?’
‘Under Military regulations section 39, subsection 8.1, one officer, or two cadets in training, should be an adequate personnel allocation to change a light bulb.’
She thought about it for a moment, and then started laughing. Fian had been watching us thoughtfully and now stood up and wandered over.
‘What’s the joke?’ he asked.
I explained the light bulb thing, and repeated the joke. After that, the whole class got interested, and I had to say the whole thing a third time in a louder voice.
‘How many Alphans does it take to change a light bulb?’ asked Dalmora.
We all told her that we didn’t know.
‘Alphans don’t change light bulbs,’ she said. ‘Light bulbs are irreplaceable relics of our cultural history, and Alpha sector is honoured to care for them on behalf of humanity.’
Everyone laughed.
‘How many Betans does it take to change a light bulb?’ asked Lolmack.
We warily admitted that we didn’t know.
‘One to change the light bulb, two to have sex with it, and three to make the vid,’ said Lolmack.
I hadn’t even realized that Playdon was in the room, so I was startled to hear his voice from behind me.