PANDORA

Chapter 6

I watched every second of takeoff. There were small round windows in Mr. Spock's spherical sides, and I sat by one, my nose practically pressed to the glass. As Mr. Spock's powerful thrusters engaged, pushing us away from the planet's surface, my heart sped up. My pulse pounded a drumbeat, a chant: freedom, freedom, freedom. I'd longed for the freedom of space most of my life, and now it was right before me.

Up we went, powering through the atmosphere and then out again, out among the stars. I bit back a laugh. Wraith dwindled beneath us, quickly changing from planet to small, bluish ball, smothered in heavy, swirling clouds. Those clouds had earned it the name Wraith, for it seemed almost ghostly against the black backdrop of the universe. If it weren't for this solar system's bright, young sun, Wraith might well be unlivable.

"I hate getting off this planet," Aki grumbled. "All these damn grav-tracks."

"It's the commerce and tourism," I said quietly. "Wraith has to import a lot, and we have all sorts of rich and famous people living here. People don't like the idea of only one grav-track for all that traffic."

Aki snorted. "It's perfectly safe. It's an entire planet, after all."

"What the rich want, the rich get," I murmured, leaning my head against the frame of the window.

A moment of silence followed my words. Then Aki and Captain Chui began speaking in low voices, discussing star maps and nav-routes. I reached down, trailing my fingertips over the bars of Marbles' and Cake's cages. We're finally free, guys. Finally.

I don't know how long I sat there, wrapped in the wonder of all those stars spreading out around us. I couldn't believe I was here, sitting in this beautiful, gleaming starship. If I wanted, I could look over and study the star charts, displayed on a screen to Aki's right. I could explore the interior, smallish though it was, study instruments and controls I had only seen before in simulation.

"...should take that one," I heard Captain Chui said. "The queue isn't bad, it shouldn't be more than fifteen or twenty minutes until sling."

At that I turned, my excitement skyrocketing again. Slingspace! Yet another thing I'd only experienced via sims.

I'd heard stories once, that a very long time ago, when the people of Ancient Earth were still colonizing their own solar system, they believed FTL travel was impossible. The brightest physicists of the age had declared FTL in contravention to the laws of physics, and in a sense, they weren't wrong. Slingspace was transdimensional travel, not faster than light, but the end result was still that it got you from point A to point B faster than the speed of light, and that was what mattered in the end. Suffice it to say, there'd been some egg on some faces when the Starsystems Alliance had shown up.

Of course, slingspace had its quirks. Unlike realspace, slingspace had drag, which tended to up the danger quotient a bit. Though I had a feeling Aki could handle it just fine.

"Um..." I began, hoping I wouldn't sound like I was interfering. "You could go with Delta 5. There usually isn't a queue. A lot of people don't like to use it because it's so small and requires a lot of skill to get a powerful enough sling."

"Hmm." Captain Chui studied the star chart. "We could do that. We'd still be able to get onto our chosen course from there."

"Works for me," Aki said. "All right, little pup, you strap yourself in good. First sling is always a bit of a surprise."

I wasn't about to argue; the sims had given me enough of a taste of the sensation to have an idea what I was in for. As Aki headed for Delta 5, following in the wake of one other starship, I secured Cake's and Marbles' cages, then checked that they were safely tucked into their small, specially made sling harnesses. Only when I was satisfied that they would be safe did I settle in the seat next to them and start strapping myself in.

By the time I finished, Aki was maneuvering Mr. Spock in close to the star's gravitational pull. The starship's engines powered us around Delta 5's circumference, and Aki kept a keen eye on the monitors, until-

"Grapples away," she declared in her gruff voice.

As the sling grapples hooked in to the star's gravity, the small starship sped up, whipping through the orbital trajectory. In a ship this small, I was able to hear the hum of the sling engines coming online; they made a soft pulsing sound that seemed to thrum in time with the blood in my veins. This was it. In a moment we would launch, and slingspace would carry me far from the planet I had called home all my life.

"Retracting grapples...now!"

It was the last part of the spin that I really felt, as Mr. Spock shifted from high speed in one dimension to high speed in another. My stomach somersaulted, and I pressed my lips together tight, stifling a sound born of both terror and triumph. Then the ship evened out, pressing me back against my seat for a second, and after that everything felt pretty normal, as if we were still in realspace.

"Okay back there?" Aki called. "I don't like having to clean someone's breakfast off the walls of my ship."

"I'm fine. Besides, I didn't actually um...have breakfast." The last two words came out in a squeak as I noticed Captain Chui frowning at me.

"Here," Captain Chui said, holding up something small and silvery, "catch this."

I managed, barely. Hand-eye coordination had been quite lost on me as a child, and though I'd made improvements over the years, I still had a tendency to fumble things I was supposed to catch.

"What is it?" I asked, eyeing the silvery wrapping.

"A nutrient-bar. Eat it."

She was still watching me. Not a single muscle twitched, and yet she radiated such disapproval that I quickly unwrapped the nutrient-bar and took a large bite, chewing exaggeratedly in the hopes that she'd stop looking at me like that. Just as quickly, I regretted it.

"Ugh!" I forced the mouthful down my throat, wincing. "What is this made of, peanut butter and rotten eggs?"

Aki let out a chuffing sound but Captain Chui continued to watch me without expression. "I suggest you get used to it," she said. "You'll be eating three of these a day alongside your regular meals until I'm satisfied that you've reached a healthy body weight."

I stared at the nutrient-bar in dismay, wishing I had some good argument for why I shouldn't have to do that. But I was badly malnourished, and if I was going to be traveling all over the galaxy, visiting new planets, experiencing all kinds of environments and adjusting to different levels of gravity, I needed my strength. And now that slingspace was rapidly carrying me towards a new life, I couldn't risk anything tearing this existence away from me.

Captain Chui watched me take a few more bites, then gave a small nod of approval and turned to examine the nav equipment. I peered at the nutrient bar-I still had more than half left-and briefly wondered if I could get away with feeding some to Cake and Marbles so I wouldn't have to eat it all myself. Pretty sure that would count as animal abuse, Xan, I told myself with a sigh. I'd just have to eat every last bite and pray it wouldn't take long to reach Captain Chui's idea of a healthy weight.

**

I learned the hard way that Mr. Spock didn't come equipped with the means to serve coffee. Not that there's an easy way to learn that the nectar of the gods is being denied you, but when I kicked my way out of my bunk and grumbled a barely intelligible request for coffee, only to be told there was none, I seriously considered sleeping through the entire trip.

Captain Chui wrangled me out of bed with a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and really, a ship that could make scrambled eggs and bacon-good scrambled eggs and bacon-ought to have coffee. Instead I got orange juice, which was pretty good, and didn't have any of that nasty pulp swirling at the bottom. Why some people liked to chew on their juice I would never understand.

I finished my breakfast quickly, then went to check on Cake and Marbles. They were handling slingspace well. The re-slings-the slings necessary to reenter a full slingspace state and keep drag from pulling a ship fully back into realspace-felt smoother than the entry sling, and my birds hadn't needed to be harnessed for them. I took them out of their cages, let them stretch their wings a little while I retrieved food from my bag: a special seed mix, and two stalks of millet.

"Millet," Marbles crowed, her wings fluttering.

"Yes, yes, you spoiled feather-brain," I teased. "But you have to eat your regular food, too. It's good for you."

"Millet."

I sighed. Normally I was careful how much millet I gave them, as it could be quite fattening. But for the moment I was letting them both have plenty, hoping that it would act like a comfort food and offset the stress of travel.

"She seems like a smart bird," Captain Chui remarked.

I jumped a little; I hadn't heard her approach. "Too smart. Her species has always been clever, and they've only gotten more so over the millennia, but Marbles is exceptional even for her kind."

"Smart birdie," Marbles agreed, lifting one clawed foot and extending it towards me. "Millet now for smart birdie."

"Huh. That's a new one." I handed over Marbles' millet, then grabbed a small notebook from my bag and jotted down the new phrase along with all the rest. "That brings her vocabulary to...eleven-hundred and twenty-eight."

"Is that all Alliance Trade Common?" Captain Chui asked, even as she stuck a nutrient-bar under my nose.

"Mostly, though uh...I know some words in a couple other languages." I took the nutrient-bar, biting my lip against a protest.

"So do most of my soldiers. Here." She handed me a holo-slate next, and the thought of the nasty-tasting nutrient-bar was nearly wiped from my mind. "This contains all of the information we have on the new species and their planet, and as much as I'm allowed to give you on everything else."

I reached out to take it gingerly, slightly in awe. "I can really look at all this?"

"I want you to have what you need to get the job done."

Flabbergasted, I dropped onto the seat next to Marbles' and Cake's cages and stared at the holo-slate. In order to get changes put into place, I needed good reasoning and, if at all possible, precedents. With any luck, I'd find most, if not all, of what I needed in here. Guess there are some advantages to having a lawyer for a father. You couldn't eat family meals with a lawyer and not absorb a fair bit of legalese. At least, I sure couldn't.

"Xandri."

I glanced up. "Yes, uh, ma'am? Captain?"

"Eat that nutrient-bar."

"Oh. Right." I sighed.

"And one more thing?"

"Yes?" I braced myself.

"My soldiers know enough swears in alien languages. Try not to teach them too many more. I like to limit who they offend."

**

I could remember few times in my life that I enjoyed more than that week aboard Mr. Spock. The only happier moments I could think of were when I'd brought first Cake, and then Marbles, home.

Neither Captain Chui nor Akcharrch cared much for small talk. Coming from the Ongkoarrat this was unsurprising, but I was used to my fellow humans engaging in all manner of chitchat that served no purpose I had ever been able to discern. Not Captain Chui, though. Sure, she occasionally checked up on how I was doing, but mostly she spoke to me only when she had a reason, and otherwise left me to my own devices. I could spend as much time as I wanted soaking in the data on the holo-slate, and she would only interrupt when it was time to eat or sleep.

The amount of information at my fingertips thrilled me, and I drank it down with a need too voracious to simply call it thirst. After the first day, I had Captain Chui show me how to make extra holo-screens on the slate, and used them to take notes. Each little detail added up. I collected every instance of an exception to Alliance rules, no matter how tiny, compiling them into a list that would eventually support my argument. I tracked dates, making lines from one holo-screen to another, connections that would prove that a species became more open to joining the Alliance when flexibility was introduced. And mostly important, I learned.

I learned why I always got myself in trouble with Kowari when I tried to smile at them; apparently smiles were a component of Kowari language and came in a wide variety of types, plenty of them negative. I saw pictures illustrating the difference between a juvenile Sanavila and an adult, and realized I'd never met an adult before. I learned that the Alliance database was sadly lacking in good information on species such as the Won Tak and the Nafta; to my shock, they didn't even seem to understand Nafta syntax.

I considered all of it valuable.

Of course, I also spent time watching the footage of this new species, what little Captain Chui's team had managed to capture. They lived in the trees of a jungle unlike any I'd seen before. They made their homes on platforms open to the canopy, though several buildings had roofs; one was, as far as I could tell, a forge. I watched a small clip of video of one running agilely along a tree branch, over and over, and sighed.

"Well, I'll be damned." Akcharrch's rough voice rumbled near my ear. "That'll teach me to doubt the captain."

I started a little and turned my head to glance at her. "Sorry?"

"This." She gestured toward my setup with her muzzle.

I turned back to it and winced, feeling my cheeks heat. In a lot of cases I didn't take notes; I just remembered things I read and heard for some reason. With the sheer size of what I had to do, I'd been noting things furiously, and my holo-screens-five in total-were a spider's web of crisscrossing lines, thin threads of holo linking together pieces of information. It must've looked a mess.

"She's thorough," Aki remarked, as Captain Chui approached. "Looks like her end result will be good."

"I've little doubt," Captain Chui said, holding out a hand with a nutrient-bar in it.

I took it, blushing deeper and grumbling a bit at the same time. Damn bars. Which one is this? I glanced at the time display on my holo-slate and saw it was around lunchtime. Slowly I unwrapped the nutrient-bar, trying not to think about the peanut butter and rotten eggs taste of it. My gaze flitted along the work displayed on my screens, and I couldn't help but come back to something that had been bothering me.

"Captain?"

"Yes, Xandri?"

"The database...it said that xenoanthropologists have been unable to decode Nafta syntax in Alliance Trade Common but...how can that be?"

"It's easy to be unable to understand something if you refuse to learn more about it," Captain Chui said.

I frowned. It was true that the Nafta's sapience appeared fairly basic, but they were sapient. Aside from the capability to speak, they were devilishly clever and tended to get in everywhere people didn't want them; they could be found in large groups at spaceports and on space stations, sneaking into docked ships or shuttles. Under most cases it was illegal to use lethal means to deal with them, because they'd been ruled sufficiently sapient by parliament, thus people grew even more annoyed with them because it was so hard to get them off ships. Because heaven forefend anyone try to talk to them.

"I'm sure if someone were to propose an understanding of their syntax," Captain Chui went on, "it would raise interest in studying the Nafta further. Nothing piques a scientist's curiosity so much as the chance to prove another scientist wrong."

It took me a moment to realize she meant me, since I didn't consider myself a scientist. I opened my mouth to protest-then closed it slowly under her steady, serious gaze. I got the distinct sensation that she really believed I could do things like that, could get people to take notice and change their ideas. A mixture of pleased warmth and cold dread coiled in my stomach, because I'd known her barely a week, and already I could think of few things as upsetting as letting down Captain Chui Shan Fung.