***

Outside the shuttle bay, a kid waited in a green and gold shipsuit like mine. I thought he might be older than I was, but his baby face made him look younger. He grinned when he saw me and held out his hand. “You must be Wang. I’m Philip Carstairs. Everybody calls me Pip.” His green eyes had a laugh in them and I found myself grinning back.

“Hi,” I replied. “Call me Ishmael.”

He blinked a couple of times then looked at a note on his tablet before guffawing. “Oh my gods and garters—that’s really your name?”

The familiar reaction usually grated on my nerves, but somehow coming from this guy it didn’t seem so bad. “Yeah,” I admitted a bit sheepishly. “My mother had a strange sense of humor.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and motioned down the passage. “The first mate sent me over to collect you. Let’s get you settled aboard and you can tell me all about it. By the way, you don’t snore, do you?”

It seemed like a strange question and it caught me off guard. “Snore?”

“Yeah, Gilly, the guy whose berth you’re getting, gods, but he made a racket. I don’t think I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep since we left Albert.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I never noticed.”

He laughed, again. “Well, then we’ll let ya know.”

Pip led me through the utility corridors halfway around the orbital. We left the shuttle bays and moved into the commercial docks. The decor didn’t seem quite so spartan, or perhaps, I was growing used to the blatant utility exhibited at every turn. It somehow already began to feel right.

As we threaded our way through the station toward the ship’s lock, I was conscious of my old life spooling out behind me. Each step took me further into an unknown world and I began to get a bit, not scared, exactly, but anxious. The what-have-I-done feeling had just settled around my lungs when my escort stopped at a lock. On the display above it read: Lois McKendrick 51-09-07 16:00. Pip swiped his ID card and tapped a quick code on his tablet. The status light flipped to green and the lock cycled open. We stepped in and the lock cycled closed behind us. The inner lock revealed a crew member who looked up from her screen at a station just inside the hull.

“Hey, Pip. This the greenie?”

They butted knuckles and he answered, “Yup. Meet Ishmael Wang. Ish, Sandy Belterson.”

Her dark brown hair and ice blue eyes were an odd combination. Added to the distinctly olive skin tones, she was an anomaly on two legs. She nodded with a friendly smile and said, “Welcome aboard, Ish.”

I nodded a greeting and answered something I don’t remember but it must have been adequate.

She turned to my escort. “Mr. Maxwell wants to meet with him in the office. He’s there now.”

“Yeah. He messaged me, too. Thanks.”

Sandy waved and settled back to her reading. As I passed I noticed it was a lesson of some kind, charts rotated in simulated 3D while text scrolled rapidly across the bottom of the screen.

Seeing my glance Pip said, “She’s studying for Spec II in Astrogation. Let’s go see Mr. Maxwell before settling you in. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Aboard ship, the corridors—passages, I corrected myself—were barely wide enough for two people to pass. I followed Pip as he led me confidently through the maze. Every so often he’d comment on a space, “environmental section down there” or “officer country that way” but little of it meant anything to me. I hoped there wouldn’t be a test later. He halted outside a door simply labeled: Office and knocked.

A rumbling voice behind the door said, “Come.”

We reached a door, a real one with a knob and hinges and all, not like the airtight hatched we had pass along our way. Pip stepped into a cramped room, and announced, “Attendant Carstairs reporting with Attendant Ishmael Wang, Mr. Maxwell, sar.”

The man behind the desk didn’t look up from his screen but just waved us in and wordlessly indicated we should wait. He was built like a knife with razor edges outlining his face and hardened steel in his bearing. A solid gray buzz-cut covered his scalp, not the white-gray the faculty members on Neris had, but a hard, dark gray. I didn’t know if that reflected his age or just some genetic variation I hadn’t seen before. Whatever the cause, it suited him. He wore the green and gold with collar pips and some discrete hashmarks around the sleeves that were pushed up to his elbows. He tapped a few keys and the document on his screen vanished.

“Mr. Wang.” His head didn’t just turn—it swiveled. His eyes tracked like the twin barrels of some odd gun, precise, mechanical, dead. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “The captain sent me your file and I’ve assigned you to the open quarter share berth in the ship’s mess. Mr. Carstairs will show you to the berthing area and introduce you to the rest of the mess crew.”

It was as much instruction to Pip as it was a command to me and he responded with an, “Aye, sar.”

Maxwell continued, “It should come as no surprise to you that you’re taking the place of a crewman who failed to perform to our satisfaction, Mr. Wang. Please see to it that we don’t have to provide the same courtesy to you in our next port of call.”

“Aye, sar. I’ll do my best,” I replied in what I’d hoped was a steady voice.

“Dismissed, gentlemen.” He swiveled back to his screen, bringing up the next document.

Pip stepped back into the passage and I followed as quickly as I could without making it seem like I was running. After we closed the door I started to speak, but a shake of Pip’s head stopped me and we headed down the passage the way we’d come.

After we’d taken a couple of turns, Pip took a deep breath and said, “That went well.”

I blinked at him. “Is he always like that?”

Pip shook his head. “Naw, he’s usually not so friendly. You must have got him on a good day.”

“Friendly? Are you crazy? That guy scared the crap out of me. Are all the officers like him?” I didn’t remember being afraid of the captain—awed, maybe, but not afraid.

Pip chuckled. “No. Actually, Mr. Maxwell is pretty decent. With him, you never need to wonder where you stand.”

“He was like some kind of robot,” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, most people say that when they first meet him. But after you get to know him, you’ll realize a robot is actually much warmer than he is.” He lowered his voice. “Rumor is that he’s ex-Spec Force. He moves like that because he doesn’t want to kill anybody.”

I gaped at him.

“Close your mouth, greenie,” he snickered. “It may or may not be true, but either way he’s the best first mate I’ve ever served under. He really knows how to keep the ship running efficiently.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“You bet. The more efficiently we run, the larger our shares,” Pip said as he headed down the corridor.

I started to wonder if I’d done the wrong thing by signing up, but I pushed that aside as soon as it entered—it was too late for second thoughts. I hurried down the hallway to catch up with Pip.