East Coast Gazette

But obviously and most importantly, Holland:

“Do you think I missed out on anything by not going to normal school?” Holland asked, two weeks later.  He was hanging upside down in an underground hanger holding a laser saw and something that looked like an instrument of torture.

Laila tilted her head as far back as it would go, studying Holland’s long, dark red bangs where they hung down from his head.  He was a skinny kid, with gray eyes that always looked too big on his face and shined at her imploringly for as long as she could remember, always hungry for more candy or hours of television.  He was obnoxious and had a smart mouth and annoyed the living crap out of her, which was probably something that could have been bullied out of him (or—God forbid—amplified) during secondary school, if only he’d gone.

“I don’t think any amount of normal school could have fixed all the wrong in you.”  Holland threw a bolt at her, muttering, and Laila stepped neatly out of the way as it slapped against a lab table, adding, “Anyway, I guess the answer is more what you think you missed out on than what I think.”

Her voice echoed up in the cavernous room, bouncing off the gunmetal gray walls and off of the smooth, unmarked flanks of the Ganymede I and II.  Laila leaned against Junior, letting her fingers slide along the rivets and reading them like Braille.  She’d lived so long with the Ganymede ships, they’d always existed in three dimensions in her head—the mutt of warships of years past and cruisers from science fiction books and out of her imagination.  It’d taken her fifteen years to build the first one and another three to build the second; along the way, she’d lost friends to the war and her parents to age and Holland’s youth to time, but the ships had been her witnesses.

Overhead, Holland was quiet for long moments before he reached back into the guts of the Ganymede II and started rooting around for the frayed wire.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, embarrassed.  “I just saw all the graduation announcements in the news today and felt kind of weird about it.”

After the war, after everything that had been put on hold for so long, the Nibbana Treaty had triggered a sort of frenetic joyfulness in the people of the four galaxies.  Every weekend and every evening, everywhere in an ocean of stars and network of more than four dozen planets, people held small celebrations.  Anything could spark a party: weddings, anniversaries, memorials, holidays from every corner of the Alliance—graduations.  The ads had been scrolling, all week, down the gleaming lengths of buildings in the business district, hovering over the city on the liquid crystal screens, cut in between the weather alerts and the chatter about the most recent council elections and appointments, the ongoing debate over who owed what portion of the staggering debt accumulated by the war.

“Ignore me,” Holland decided.  “I’m just being dumb.”

But before he could get back to work, the pulley system holding him up to the ship dropped him—fast—down twenty feet until he was face to face with a right side up Laila, his heart more or less trying to rip its way through his rib cage.

“Don’t do that!” he shrieked, clutching the laser saw close.  “I nearly shit myself!”

“Holland,” she said, ignoring him in favor of being solemn, “You know I love you.”

All the blood drained from his face, so horrified by the conversation it was fighting gravity.  “Oh, God,” Holland said.  “Forget I ever started this—please.”

Laila went on, “And if I ever make you feel like you’re unimportant—”

“I swear I will never watch porn on the living room couch again if we stop talking about this,” Holland offered, hopeful until her affection melted away and Laila screeched:

“You do what on the living room couch?”

Holland flailed away from her, sending himself swinging pendulously out of her reach as he shouted, “Uh!  It was only the once! I totally used the fabric cleaner after!” which didn’t help but just made Laila moan, “Oh, gross!” and reach for something to use as a weapon. Whatever else she might have said was drowned out by the sound of Colonel Helion shouting down from one of the upper walkways:

“Am I interrupting?”

Laila looked up, cheeks still bright red.  “Only a homicide.”

Argent smiled down at them, and Holland felt something flutter in his chest that wasn’t just the mounting motion sickness.  Laila had been pretty clear about which of his body parts she’d remove if he pulled a stunt like breaking into Colonel Helion’s rooms and arranging himself attractively—and nakedly—on the officer’s bed, but what the hell did she know about true love, anyway?  The last date she’d been on had ended in a year of physical therapy.

“Good to know,” Argent said, and jogged down the long metal stair to the floor, his boots clattering against the riveted steel plate floor tiles.  “I’d hate for you to be short an assistant on our upcoming trip.”

“I would somehow survive just to make the journey with you,” Holland promised.

Laila rolled her eyes, shaking her head, and said, “Here, hold this,” to Argent, handing him her wrench-slash-murder weapon before hitting the pulley button and rocketing Holland back into the rafters, his scream of shock a long, high-pitched echo in the hangar.  “And stay up there!” she yelled up at him.

“You’re seeing this, right, Colonel?” Holland called down, voice tinny from a great distance, waving his laser saw.  “You’ll be a witness for me when she kills me, right?”

“You keep this up, I’m having you neutered!” Laila warned, and Holland fell silent.

Argent didn’t even try to hide the smile that stretched across his face.

“You two should really take your comedy act on the road,” he said, hopping up onto a metal lab table heaped with spare parts and dangerous-looking machinery.  He held up the wrench.  “What do I do with this?”

Laila took it out of his hands and tossed it in a perfect arc across the room, landing inside a square—marked off on the metal floor with blue painters tape—and stopping, three inches short of the ground without a sound.

“Ta da!” she said, beaming.

“That,” Argent said, frowning at the wrench, hanging midair, “is weird.”

“It’s magnetized,” Laila explained.  “It’s only in beta stage right now but it’s infinitely customizeable, and the theory is that if we can make it an efficient enough technology, we could remove the need for packing materials altogether on trade ships and transports.”

“Very cool,” he said, and noted the way there was a line of blue tape framing out the ground underneath Holland’s dark shadow.  “So admit it: you have one of those things set up in case he falls, don’t you?”

Laila smirked, reaching around his left side for a tablet calculator.  “Don’t tell him I care,” she admonished him.  “My only comfort is that one day, they’ll apprentice him his own horny teenaged prodigy.”

“Well,” he said, “I remember being seventeen.  It passes.”

“Not fast enough,” Laila sighed.  “Anyway, what brings you down?”

The labyrinth of halls and elevators and escalators and security checkpoints it required to reach the lab was so maddening Argent wasn’t even certain where he was, geographically speaking, and he was sure that was the point.  He always ended up making a few wrong turns whenever he made the trek out, and although Laila reminded him over and over again he could just raise her on her comm., there was no way he was giving up an opportunity to hang out in the coolest lab in the four galaxies.

Holland had taken Argent on his first tour of the lab almost a week ago, and he’d been almost every day since.  It never got old to be there, so dwarfed by the twin Ganymedes in a hangar the size of four football fields underneath the fringes of the city and whatever else Laila and Holland worked on each day. Sometimes he visited to find it deserted, and other times there were dozens of scientists hanging around shouting at one another and waving particle boards, like Laila’s workspace was the neighborhood dweeb bar or something.

“Final preparations,” he said.  He dug an xdrive out of his pocket.  “That’s the total passenger manifest and payload, itemized.  Everybody’s been vetted and everything for the trip has been triple-checked.  Last chance to add, subtract, or reorder.”

Laila set the drive on top of the reader and considered the display when it called up, hovering and translucent over her worktable.

“No chance I could convince them to let me leave Holland behind?” she asked.

Argent shook his head.  “It’s a goodwill mission, a gesture,” he reminded her gently.  “Not bringing your protégé would appear distrustful.”

“I am distrustful,” Laila murmured, reaching up to flip through the pages of the manifest.  She had bandages on half of the fingers of her left hand, and Argent wondered what the hell they did down here half the time.  “This is still a dangerous trip.”

“I’m there to mitigate that risk,” Argent said, and thought that from the side, she looked like a Baroque portrait he’d seen once, gauzy with an overlay of light.  “Everything’s going to be fine, Laila.  We’re taking every possible precaution and so are our Vorian ambassadors.”

“He’s only seventeen,” she said, catching his gaze.  Argent had noted Laila Noreen looked down for no one very early on, and he couldn’t help but think that his mother would have liked her for it—her unschooled sense of assurance.  “You wouldn’t let any other seventeen year old make this trip.”

Above them, Holland sent a rainbow of sparks flying, elbow-deep in the most terrifying warship ever created, and let out a string of curses that would make a soldier blush.

“Holland’s not exactly any seventeen year old,” Argent said wryly.

Laila stuck out her chin.  “He’s my seventeen year old.”

Argent raised his eyebrows at her.  “You’ve strung him up from the ceiling.”

“That’s totally different and you know it,” she argued, coloring.

At that exact moment, the laser saw—still engaged—arced down, slicing with a ‘zing’ noise through a nearby table and dumping its contents onto the floor in a heap, where it clattered with a thunderous voice without the benefit of Laila and her magnetic cushion.

“At least it didn’t hit anybody?” Holland whimpered from overhead.

Laila took a long, calming breath and said quietly, “I’ll kill him.”

The trip, Argent was sure, was still going to be a disaster, but at least it’d be a fun one.

*

The Telemachus was the flagship in a fleet two thousand strong that ranged from full scale warships to cruisers to fighters to jets and stealth flyers—all named after Greek and Roman myths and Gods.  It’d been officially handed into Argent’s care almost six years ago, and between the war, the training, and the inability to form social relationships outside of the military, it was official: Argent’s entire crew of four hundred and change were now freaks.

When he’d been recalled from peacekeeping maneuvers to Nibbana to oversee—and then join—Laila’s military escort, he’d given his people a week’s liberty.  He’d expected to come back and find the place kind of deserted and everybody quiet as they worked through their hangovers.  Instead, the ship was bustling, every crewmember, officer, and staffmember accounted for; even the cafeteria was fully operational, churning out perfectly awful meals breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“Did you go home at all?” he asked a passing sailor.

“I went and visited my aunt for a day,” she said.  “But I wanted to get back and make sure the Telemachus was in ship shape.”

Argent scowled at her.  “You guys are really sick, you know that?”

“Yes, sir,” she agreed, and then her eyes went starry.  “Is it true though?  Are we leading the escort for the Laila Noreen?”

“She’s not that cool,” Argent lied.  The hero worship was sort of cute now that he knew Laila enough to know how utterly disconnected she was to her reputation—it probably helped she spent at least twelve hours of her day thirty-four stories underground with an insubordinate, uncowed assistant and technology that rebelled against her.

The sailor just kept beaming.  “Do you think she’ll like our ship?”

“How could anybody not like the Telemachus?” Argent asked reasonably, and sent her along back to whatever she’d been scrubbing or tightening.

“Man, I just met up with the captain of the Pan,” his lieutenant said, falling into step alongside Argent, “that ship’s moral fucking sucks.”

“They’re at the helm of a cruiser named after a goatherd with a musical soul, Roy,” Argent replied, snatching a tablet away from his chief systems engineer to take a look at the engines—they were at peak performance, of course, but after two weeks watching Laila overclock the Ganymedes, he wouldn’t lie, the Telemachus’ output felt lame in comparison. “It doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of many.”

Argent held a moment of silent sympathy for the Aphrodite—a tiny, sleek, and killer-sharp stealth cruiser with a pilot who probably ate living animals for breakfast.  The Allied Guard had a sick sense of humor.

Roy blew his dark bangs out of his face.  “Remind me why we can’t rename them?”

“Something about history and symbolism,” Argent said.  “Hey, do you think we can overclock these engines?  Dr. Noreen did it with a test cruiser and it was incredible.”

The chief systems engineer, a tiny woman named Veenya with champagne-colored hair choked out a distressed noise and stole her tablet computer back, giving Argent a deeply suspicious look.  She said something to him in her native language that sounded foul even to Argent’s ears and pointed meaningfully toward the mess hall.

“Go away,” she instructed him.

“I was just asking,” Argent muttered.