course.’
I pulled a face. ‘That hardly matters in my case, sir. I’m Handicapped and can’t have an active Military career.’
‘I understand Hospital Earth Research are working on a cure.’
I felt instant anger, the way I always did when people mentioned the research that would never do anything but torment me with false hopes, but I kept my reply calm and polite. ‘They won’t find one, sir. People have been researching this for centuries and getting nowhere.’
‘Well, we’ll discuss this properly at a later date. Good luck to both of you.’
Fian and I turned and marched out of the door. That was it. I’d had a brief glimpse of the Military life I could have had if the genetic dice had landed differently, if I’d been normal instead of the one in a thousand.
An odd thought occurred to me. If I’d been that other Jarra, gone to Military school and the Academy, I would never have been here. That other Jarra would still be studying at the Military Academy, still be a cadet, blissfully ignorant of the Alien Contact programme being active. Colonel Torrek had called me in precisely because of my Handicap.
Fian and I headed back to our quarters, went inside, and started changing into civilian clothes.
‘We can’t tell the class anything about the Alien Contact programme, or us being Military,’ said Fian. ‘We’ll obviously need to take the Military lookups with us, so we can get the status updates, but what about the impact suits and uniforms?’
I thought of Arrack San Domex, shook off my strange introspective mood and grinned. ‘We’d better leave the impact suits here, but we’ll take the uniforms with us. The Military won’t miss them, and I have plans!’
14
When we arrived back at our class dig site dome, everything felt oddly small. We dutifully put our palms on the portal room check-in plate to sign in, and headed for our room with our trail of hover luggage following us. The walls of the corridor seemed to close in around me.
‘Has this place shrunk in the last few weeks?’ I asked.
Fian laughed. ‘I was thinking the same thing. The domes at Zulu base were much larger.’ He opened the door to his half of our room, and looked warily inside. ‘They haven’t put the wall back yet. Zan!’
Even with our two rooms opened up into one, this was nothing like the size of our accommodation back at the base. It had no private bathroom, no food dispenser, and there’d be no cheese fluffle for breakfast now. I allowed myself a single sigh of regret for past luxuries.
‘Shall we go and say hello before unpacking?’ I asked. ‘It’s 20:00 hours here, so everyone will be in the dining hall.’
Fian nodded.
I nervously checked my reflection in the mirror, which was, of course, a mere fraction of the size of the one back in our joint officer accommodation.
‘It’s all right,’ said Fian, watching me with amusement. ‘You haven’t got the word “Major” tattooed on your forehead. Do you have any advice for me?’
I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘What about?’
‘Well, you’ve got previous experience of this sort of thing. A few months ago, you were a civilian and pretending you had a Military background. Now you’ve just swapped around to being Military and pretending you’re a civilian.’
I giggled, and the strangeness of being back suddenly vanished. Major Jarra Tell Morrath had just been a dream. I was back in the real world, the sensible world, where I was just a student on the University Asgard Pre- history Foundation course. ‘Let’s go and find everyone.’
We headed to the hall and found the old familiar evening scene. A few of the class were still sitting at tables and eating. Others were lounging on cushions, backs leaning against the grey flexiplas walls, chattering away while half listening to Dalmora singing and playing her reproduction of a twentieth-century guitar. As we entered the room, there were yells from all around, and everyone leapt up to greet us.
‘You’ve been away ages,’ complained Krath. ‘Where have you been? You couldn’t have left Earth so …’
‘No, Krath!’ said Amalie. ‘Remember what Playdon told you. No being nosy!’
She turned to me and Fian. ‘Krath kept coming up with more and more incredible theories about where you’d gone and why, until Playdon gave him a lecture on his fellow students’ right to privacy.’
I wondered if any of Krath’s theories had included aliens, and bit my lip to stop myself laughing. Fian and I had been prepared for questions from the class of course, and had agreed what to say. Fian said it.
‘I don’t really want to explain a lot of personal details about a family problem.’
Krath sighed but seemed to accept that, at least for now. ‘It hasn’t been the same without Jarra knowing absolutely everything about everything. We’ve had to answer all the difficult questions ourselves!’
At the start of the year, I’d been busily parading my knowledge at everyone, desperate to show my hated exo classmates that I was better at everything than they were. I suddenly realized that desperation had been more about proving things to myself than to them, and I’d felt it all my life, but I didn’t any longer. I’d never been good at understanding the emotional stuff inside my own head, so I wasn’t sure what had changed or why, but it felt a huge relief to be free of that pressure.
‘I knew a lot about New York and excavation work because of all the trips with my school history club,’ I said. ‘You’ll know more about Eden than I do, because you’ve been working on the ruins for the last few weeks. My history club never came here because it’s too dangerous for school parties and amateurs, and I only had a couple of lessons about Eden at school as part of the preparations for when we went to visit Ark.’
‘If you’ve already been to Ark, Jarra, you’ll be able to tell us what it’s like there,’ said Dalmora. ‘Will Fian be coming to Ark with us as well?’
‘Of course I’m going to Ark,’ said Fian, ‘but you aren’t. You’ll all be going home for a few days.’
Lecturer Playdon appeared and the class made way to let him through. ‘I was expecting Lolia and Lolmack to evacuate to Ark to be with their daughter, but I was surprised to find the whole of team 1 is coming as well.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘I’ve been unable to talk them out of it.’
I was confused. ‘But why?’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ said Krath. ‘My dumb dad did a programme for his nardle conspiracy vid channel,
He waved his arms in frustration. ‘How could he do that? I was there myself! Well, nearly there. I was there soon afterwards anyway, and I saw the crash site and know it was genuine. I told him how you nearly got killed, Jarra, and he actually said we could do with a few less apes to feed. Well, when he said that, I told him he could …’
He glanced at Playdon and decided not to risk the next few words. I think we could all fill them in for ourselves.
‘So, anyway,’ he continued more calmly. ‘I’m going to Ark instead.’
I was strongly in favour of Krath thinking for himself and standing up to his idiot father, but I wished he wasn’t doing it by going to Ark. I thought of that sphere in geostationary orbit, somewhere uncomfortably close to being right over our heads, and turned to look at Amalie and Dalmora.
‘But what about you two? You surely aren’t serious about staying? The portal system will shut down, the way it always does during a solar storm.’
They exchanged glances, and Dalmora spoke up for the pair of them.
‘I know you’re remembering what happened back on the New York Dig Site, Jarra. When we heard there was going to be a big solar storm, with the portals out for at least three days, we panicked and couldn’t get off world fast enough. It had just snowed as well, and other worlds don’t have solar storms, or snow, so it was frightening for us.’
I nodded. ‘Planet First carefully select new colony worlds to avoid the frequent solar storms we have on Earth. It was perfectly natural for you to be worried. I just don’t understand why you’d want to stay this time.’
