Me. With Sebastian. While something deep inside me approved, I died a little each time they joked about us. I'd worked so hard to encourage people to respect my achievements, and here I was out of my element again. It felt like being back in school, the first day of fourth grade wearing old, ripped jeans, or college orientation when everyone else's parents went with them while I was alone, or now, when I had a bachelor's degree in computer science instead of a doctorate in astrophysics.
I skulked back to my room to change my shirt and add some stain remover. This was my nicest white shirt, and I didn't want to ruin it. Yes, I could afford another shirt now, but part of me would always be the hand-me-down kid who had to keep his threadbare clothes together as long as possible because there was no guarantee anyone would buy him more.
I made it to my cabin while the spot was still wet, at least. After blotting it with a wet paper towel, I tossed it in the bathroom sink under the cool faucet. The stubborn outline of the brown stain remained. I looked it up on my phone while I let it soak. Though I didn't have dish soap in my cabin, the ship provided a small bottle of rubbing alcohol in the tiny medicine cabinet. I cracked it open, poured some onto a white washcloth,and dabbed at the edges. It looked better by the time I finished, but I couldn't tell if it was completely gone.
I would add the shirt to things Sebastian had ruined, including this cruise line when he took over. The environmental impact of his cruise ships alone was a reason to hate the guy. Paskal Entertainment had been one of the least polluting before Sebastian had taken over. Now, they were one of the worst, with Sebastian paying large carbon offset companies to balance the damage.
It did me no good to sit around my cabin, where everything in the tiny room reminded me of the sorry state of the world. A walk would do me good.
Twenty minutes later, after a complete circuit of the third deck, where the sounds of the party drifted to me from above, I made my way up. Too many people were still partying on the main deck, so I climbed to the top. Sebastian's VIP cabin was dark. Before I could stop myself, I banged my fist on the door.
I heard someone muttering inside, and my brain finally kicked in. What if Sebastian wasn't alone? And if he was, what was I looking for, a sad explanation of his polluting cruise line's daily affairs?
Any conversation was more likely to give me a black eye to go with the stained shirt back in my cabin. He was out of my league in every way, including arm reach and muscle.
Pulling off my flip-flops, I turned and ran. Thankfully, I was fast enough to make it to the walkway between the front-facing and rear-facing cabins. I dashed down it, feet slapping against the reinforced glass. I turned another corner before stopping to catchmy breath. After five minutes with no sound of pursuit, I stood up, shook out the wrinkles the humid night air had set into my t-shirt and shorts, and walked back to my cabin.
The adrenaline drop made me sleepy, at least. By the end of my usual nighttime routine, my eyelids drooped. I slept like a log on my cabin's firm mattress.
When the alarm went off at 4 a.m., another jolt of adrenaline reminded me this was no ordinary day. In just under two hours, we would be blasting off into space.
CHAPTER 3
SEBASTIAN
I didn't knowwhich of my father's programmers was out to get me, but it wasn't Gunnar. Even he wasn't foolish enough to shit where he ate. The two-person shuttle launch went according to my meticulous plans, but midway to the space station, everything jagged sideways, changing our trajectory.
It almost seemed like the shuttle had been programmed to skip the space station and launch us at the moon. The hurricane had changed some of our plans, but we'd had time to switch our programming to match. Instead of a three-day moonshot mission, we were now stopping at the international space station for a day before returning to the shuttle, swinging around the moon, and reentering the earth's atmosphere.
"This isn't right." Gunnar pointed to the shuttle's dashboard. "We should still be at 236 degrees, not 239. We'll miss our rendezvous with the space station."
While I was still trying to access the program on myconsole, Gunnar cracked open the front panel of his. He unzipped his flight suit and dug around in a zippered pocket my suit didn’t have. Then, he removed a flash drive and plugged it into the motherboard before it could float away.
"What the fuck?"
"Back door," he said. "I thought things were screwy as fuck yesterday, so I made a backup drive, just in case."
"Sebastian?" My dad's voice sounded tinny and far away. "You're turning away from the space station. We're figuring the new coordinates now." We were still too close to earth, where our signal was jammed by the satellites orbiting beneath us. We could hear the folks at Paskal Space Command, but they couldn't hear us, not even if we were screaming for our lives.
"You caught it before they did," I whispered. "Nice job."
Gunnar scoffed as he continued to type coordinates on his console. "Like you aren't in on it." He pointed at his screen, where the original coordinates had been three degrees off, just as he said. "They knew the moment we took off. I should have, too, but I trusted them." The glare he gave me said he didn't trust me, not one bit.
He refreshed our coordinates, and all I could do was double-check his math. He'd accounted for the earth's gravity, the speed of the space station in orbit, and our misaligned trajectory.
"You're fast," I said. "Faster than I am."
"The simulation's built into the hard drive," he said. "I'm not the math whiz here, genius. I'm the guy whonobody will mourn if I blow up in space, so I'm doing my best to stay in one piece."
"Well, I appreciate it," I said. "I'd like to stay in one piece, too."
He looked like he wanted to argue, but another crackle came over the comm.
"Nice job, son." Dad's smile sounded forced, the way it always did when he expected me to fail and I succeeded instead. "You've only missed a half-hour at the space station."
"Thank you," I told my copilot, not caring if I got another scoff.
His chin bobbed, but his gaze never left his monitor as the simulation played out. When it finished with a green checkmark, he pocketed the flash drive again. "Thank me when we dock without incident."
