Chapter 5

For something that Leo had been looking forward to and dreading for several years, he wasn’t sure which was more of air worm: Meeting Gillian’s parents or graduating.

The parental meeting was full of lots of pointed questions from the two well to do and sturdy looking spacy officers, who looked just as intimidating when they were in their dress maroons than when they were in the fresh off the tarmac orange-reds that they had first met in. What are your plans for the future young man, how did you meet Gillian, nose filters eh, why did you think those were the right idea? The idea of handling those questions before he had met Midnight – where there was a fifty fifty shot on whether or not he’d have remembered his ADHD medicine or if the meds would be calibrated properly – was rather chilling.

But with Midnight sitting by his side and Bolide’s tail around his ankle under the table, it was easy to just say the honest truth to all those questions.

“We’re not actually sure, uh, which of us thought of the nose plugs at first. It seemed really romantic at the time,” he said.

“Cause he’s a dork,” Midnight had added.

Once the groundworks were laid, Riley had then thrown himself into an impassioned, veterans speech that had been, honestly, the most important part of the entire evening for Leo.

“The Astro Navigation and Rescue Service is not a navy.” He said, holding his hands out, placing them to either side of his place, encompassing all the universe between his xel curry. “That’s something you kids need to get – and it’s something we need to keep teaching new recruits. Humanity has a real long, really toxic relationship with the military. Hell, what’s that Devonian holodrama they’re still running?” he asked.

“Star Trek?” Leo asked.

“Star Trek is Terran,” Midnight whispered in his ear.

“No it’s not,” Leo whispered back. “The big captain guy is a Devonian.”

“Whether it’s Star Trek or Laz’et,” Riley said, firmly. “The real ANRS isn’t anything like those spaceships. We don’t have weapons. We do not fight people.”

“What about-” Leo started.

“Before you even ask, those are Orbital Marines, and they’re a tiny handful of people who mostly train for emergency response and rescue, even they only have a tiny fraction of time spent practicing how to shoot people because there simply are not that many people to shoot.” Riley nodded, and his husband chuckled.

“Our job is primarily logistic,” he said. “Then scientific, then emergency response. Despite humanity having been space fairing for five centuries, give or take-”

“Can you really count the 20^th century?” Bolide asked.

“We landed on the moon!” Leo and Midnight said at the same time.

“ ... yeah, but what else did we do?” Bolide asked. “Shoot some probes at Venus-”

“She says we, like we’d even shown up,” Midnight said, angrily. “Also, how dare you, the moon landings, the Venera probe, the Voyager probes?”

Bolide shrugged. “It’s just not space travel. It’s not astros in space rockets, flying around and getting into space adventures!” she said, her ears perking up.

“Space is not an adventure,” Remdan said, quietly. “It’s hard work.”

Bolide blushed. “Adventures are hard work, aren’t they?”

“She has you there,” Riley said, poking his husband playfully. “But, as Remedan was saying, we’ve only charted a tiny fraction of the solar system, and we haven’t even managed to get more than a few missions out to the gas giants. There’s a lot of space to explore, which is what the ANRS is all about.”

Leo paused, then frowned. “Why do they call it the spacy then?” he asked.

“I don’t know, we keep trying to get people to stop!” Riley burst out, while Remedan laughed.

“Gundam,” he said. “They call it because of Gundam.”

Everyone nodded at that, while Midnight said: “Yeah, that makes sense.”

The graduation was similarly a mixture of expectations being subverted by boredom and genuine emotion. There were speeches given by the highest scoring members of the class of 2419, including a particularly funny one given by Arjun who managed to write half the thing in rhyme and using his preferential third person. Sitting in the crowd of other robes bedecked students, wearing the traditional Devonian style horn tassels (Terran students, of course, got to wear their play horns, which was half the fun of the fusion outfit), Leo caught Midnight cracking a smile at the fifth tortured rhyme and didn’t let her live it down all the way home.

The whole friend group arranged themselves on the pier, looking out at the seawall and the artificial reefs as the sun set and the standard winking array of debris started to smear its way across the sky – even two centuries later, people were knocking debris out of orbit. Most of them made tiny sparks, but a few lasted long enough to streak pleasingly through the sky. Arjun was cuddling against his bonded, while Bolide had slipped off the pier and was splashing around in blood warm water, laughing and kicking her legs around. Midnight leaned against Leo, while Gillian took his other side. Midnight’s voice was playful and husky as she tugged his sleeve.

“So, are you actually gonna do it?” she asked.

“Sign up with the spacy?” Leo asked. “ ... yeah, I think I will.”

Midnight hesitated. “You can quit any time, you know. No one’s going to be mad if you do.”

Leo grinned lopsidedly. Then he pushed himself around to his knees, hooked his foot under him, shoved himself up, then grabbed one of the beer bottles from the cooler. Half a mile down the pier, there was a much larger party and the sound of music and the flashing laser lights from it provided an almost eerie backdrop to their smaller, more intimate meeting. Leo lifted his bottle up and said: “I swear by this bottle that I will not leave the spacy unless it’s as a captain.”

Gillian, who was still leaning against his shin. “Oh fuck off,” she said, laughing.

“I believe in you, Leo!” Bolide called from the water, laughing. “Now get in here.”

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit!” Leo called down to her.

Bolide’s teeth flashed, sharp and inviting.

“And?” she asked.

Midnight let out a low churring noise, while Gillian blew a whistle between her fingers. Arjun called out from his cuddle.

“Arjun which to say, in a deeply homoerotic way, you must leap nude into yonder waters, friendo!”

Leo knocked back the beer, then handed the bottle to Midnight, before he took his shirt off, wriggled his pants down, kicked his socks off, and stood completely naked on the pier, looking out at the Atlantic and the seawall, and the glittering stars beyond. He grinned.

“CP is coming,” Midnight said, absently.

“Shit!” Leo jumped into the water, heart hammering – and then burst out, laughing and spluttering as everyone jeered and laughed at him.

In truth, a civil protection aircar was loitering near the party – teens who were just becoming true members of adult society had, for far longer than aircars and civil protection, done very silly things. But, as every civics course graduate got sick of hearing by the end of the year, CP weren’t cops and certain rules were just guidelines.

“Ah, kids are having fun down there,” the Devonian of the two CP officers said, looking up from her thermal scope. Her Terran partner tapped a in the patrol route and the aircar skimmed to the north – and let the kids be kids.

For at least a little longer.

Direction had, by now, a firm sense of Place.

First, there was the Not-Sun. Vast and terrible, the Not-Sun was too fierce, too bright and burning, even as a dull thing. The energies coursing in huge, writhing bands from her poles was far too much for its purposes.

But then Direction found the Ringed-Minor. Smaller than the Not-Sun, the Ringed-Minor was still a majesty beyond any dreams of gods, and it had a ring system of volatiles and minerals. Precisely what Direction needed.

Here, Direction began to Bud.

And the Buds became Direction. And, for the first time since the Splintering, Direction was no longer alone.

It was a part of Deep-Thought, a new Thought.

Direction was pleased.

The AR-2M Soyuz Multipurpose Capsule Craft was the Astro Navigation and Rescue Service’s oldest and most proven short ranged – well, short ranged for an atomic rocket at least – vehicle. It looked a little bit like an egg on a stick attached to a pyramid of ugly greebles, a spindly latticework of struts and wires leading from the egg and connecting to the four sides of the pyramid. The pyramid itself bloomed with a set of rocket nozzles, several smaller, several larger, all of them gimbaled save for the primary drive cone, which jutted out beyond the rest like the tail feathers on a particularly unpleasant bird.

The pyramid held the nuclear reactor. The flat sides indicated it was entirely depressurized – within those sides were half a dozen reaction mass containers, each one as elegantly rounded and pleasing as anyone could want. The liquid in them – primarily deuterium – was pumped into the reactor, heated to incredible degrees, and spat out the back of the Soyuz to send it shooting through space.

The egg?