I worked on a plan to get myself kicked out of school. Steal a motorbike and take it off campus. Sabotage the plumbing in the dorm. Refuse to do any more PE. Punch Tenzig in the face during astrophysics. That would probably break my hand. It would be worth it.
Or maybe I could stick it out until the end of the year and convince Mom that I wasn’t cut out for Galileo and could I please come home. Maybe that would work. I could already see the look on her face, how disappointed she’d be, and I could hear her explain how I was giving up. Failing. Pilot-training programs didn’t accept failures. If I had known that going to Galileo would set me up for a failure that would not only not help me get into a good piloting program but actively prevent me from getting into any program … I felt like I’d been robbed. This was all a big con, and I was the biggest sucker in the universe.
But maybe I could take myself out of the game, as Charles kept calling it. Don’t compete. Let go of the need to be the best. Not be bothered at all when Tenzig tried to show me up. Maybe I could just get myself kicked off the next field trip, so at least I wouldn’t have to deal with any more wild expectations and crazy accidents. Stanton would probably be happy to leave me behind, seeing how much trouble I kept causing.
Maybe I could get sick. I researched diseases that we hadn’t been vaccinated against for something mild but annoying that I could catch so I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. But all I found were diseases so horrible they’d been eradicated and existed only in petri dishes in labs. And they wouldn’t just make me sick; they’d cripple me for life or kill me outright. Polio, smallpox … Maybe I could invent a disease. I could develop a severe allergy—to Earth.
Then I found out where our next field trip was going, the big secret Harald and Franteska wouldn’t tell us: we were going offworld. To the Moon. A lunar expedition. That meant an orbital shuttle, time on a station in low gravity, and a trip on a real M-drive ship to lunar orbit. The closest thing to home I could get without going interplanetary. And then a week on not-Earth. I really wanted to go. I didn’t want Stanton to know how much I wanted to go because then she’d put me on restrictions for sure. Grounded, really grounded. I hated that word.
I tried to stay very, very quiet for the next two weeks. I showed up with my uniform pressed and neat, my attitude adjusted, and my lips firmly closed. I wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. I wouldn’t even complain about PE.
“Are you okay?” Ladhi asked on day three of Operation Don’t Piss Off Anyone. We were getting ready for bed, ten minutes before lights-out. Even Marie watched me, glancing out of the corner of her eye while she hung up her uniform.
“Fine. Why?” I said.
“You just seem kind of … tense.”
“I’m fine.” I slammed a closet door and yanked back the covers of my bed.
Ladhi said, “If you’re trying to stay out of trouble, you might want to rethink. You look like you’re about to explode.”
Wouldn’t that be fun? “I’m just … I can’t … I don’t want to…” I sat down on the bed and sighed. “It’s that obvious?”
Both Ladhi and Marie nodded. Ladhi came and sat next to me.
“If Stanton wants to boot you from the field trip, she’ll figure out a reason and there’s nothing you can do about it. If she wants you to go, because Charles is right and she’s putting us through some kind of stress and disaster test, you could burn down the school and she’ll still let you on the trip. So you might as well just … well, get back to normal.
”
“I don’t know what normal is anymore. I haven’t felt normal in weeks. Months.”
“Just hold out another week,” Ladhi said. “At least on the Moon we’ll be able to breathe without thinking about it. Boris can show us the sights. He’ll be so excited, you know?”
“And we can finally show up the Earth kids,” Marie added.
I didn’t even care about that anymore. Charles was right. Better to not play the game. But I was looking forward to the low gravity.
* * *
The schedule for the lunar expedition involved a lot of homework. Well, it looked like homework on paper, but I already knew a lot of it. All of us from offworld did. Finally, the Earth kids were going to be at a disadvantage. Hard not to feel smug about it.
We’d take a shuttle to Cochrane Station, where we’d have a tour, emergency-procedure training, and then go for low-g and zero-g training, which I was really looking forward to. From there we’d take a short-hop M-drive ship to lunar orbit, then another shuttle to Collins City, where we’d stay for three days of classwork, including planetary geology and colony-systems engineering. Then we’d take a shuttle to a research station at the Sea of Tranquillity to collect our own geology samples, which we’d then take back to the lab and analyze. It wasn’t like we’d be discovering anything new, but it was still exciting. At least I thought so. It was real work. On top of that we had to calculate orbital trajectories for the entire trip, which wasn’t hard because we could use our handhelds, and if you didn’t enter in the right variables, you’d come up with a mess. And if I asked nicely, maybe I could get onto the bridge of the M-drive ship. The possibilities were wide-open. Not to mention it felt a little like going home.
After a sudden paranoid notion that Stanton would see how excited I was about the trip and ground me out of spite, I settled down and took Ladhi’s advice. Just act normal. Just play it cool.
At study hall a couple of days before we were due to leave, I asked Charles if he was looking forward to the trip.
“Can’t say I am, particularly,” he said.
I looked at him like he was crazy. “We’ll finally be back in low g. We’ll finally be in our element and we’ll get to watch the others flail around like newbies. Tell me you’re not looking forward to that at least a little.”
He set aside his handheld and looked at me. “It’s my hypothesis that on each field trip, Stanton has rigged some kind of event to test our responses to emergencies, and that in both cases we’ve exceeded her expectations with our proactive responses. So what do you think she has planned for us on this trip? Think about worst-case scenarios possible on a lunar field trip for a minute, then ask me again if I’m looking forward to it.”
Charles really had an interesting way of looking at the world.
“We’ll just have to keep a lookout, that’s all,” I said, trying to be blasé.
“Yes, we will.”