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  Gradin was starting another story when he was interrupted by a chiming sound. He glanced at the curved lookup that he wore, Military pilot style, attached to the forearm of his impact suit, and gave a weary groan before answering the call.

  “No, no, no, no, no. Leave me alone. I’m giving a flying lesson.”

  The woman’s voice that answered him was instantly recognizable as Valeska, who’d run the Air Control channel when we were in Athens. “Are you teaching Jarra again?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Gradin. “She’s nearly as annoying as you.”

  Valeska laughed. “If Jarra is flying the aircraft for you, then we can have a nice long chat about the battle re-enactment.”

  “I’m not going to any silly battle re-enactments,” snapped Gradin. “I’ve told you that before. The answer is no. Absolutely no. Positively no. Finally no.”

  “You’d have a wonderful time, George,” said Valeska.

  “No, I wouldn’t!”

  She laughed again. “There’s no need to keep shouting at me.”

  “I’ll stop shouting as soon as you accept my refusal.”

  “How can I accept your refusal? I’ll never forget how breathtakingly handsome you looked the last time you dressed up in a uniform.”

  I blinked. I daren’t say a word, but I didn’t need to. Gradin said exactly what I was thinking.

  “I didn’t look handsome when you forced me to wear that uniform, Valeska. In fact, I’ve never looked handsome in my life. I’m heroic, I’m a brilliant pilot, but I’ve always been horribly plain-faced. Now leave me alone.”

  “You could play the part of Brigadier General McCulloch if you want,” said Valeska. “Just think how much you’d enjoy shouting orders at everyone.”

  “I don’t want to be Brigadier General McWhatsit. Go away!”

  Valeska sighed. “You’d be perfect in the part, George. Think it over, and I’ll call you again this evening to chat about it.”

  “There’s no point in you calling me again. However many times you call me, I’m not going to ...” Gradin broke off his sentence and grunted his displeasure. “Valeska’s ended the call. Didn’t even say goodbye. Appallingly rude of her.”

  I felt that was extremely hypocritical given Gradin had a bad habit of abruptly ending calls himself, but saying that would probably send him to at least DEFCON 2. I settled for making a safer comment. “My history teacher is taking part in the battle re-enactment, and he’s taking our whole history club along to cheer.”

  “I hope his side loses,” said Gradin.

  “Why is Valeska so eager to get you to join in this re-enactment?”

  “I think she’s plotting something,” said Gradin, in a grimly suspicious tone of voice. “I don’t know what it is, but I do know that I’m not getting involved.”

  He shrugged. “Forget Valeska. We’ll stop flying survey legs now, and let you spend the rest of the morning practising take-offs and landings. Try not to crash my plane this time.”

  I groaned. I was going to suffer a miserable morning doing take-offs and landings, followed by a miserable afternoon giving basic training to the new club members.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, I was woken up at 06:00 hours by a call from my best friend, Issette. I frantically sat up and grabbed my lookup to answer it, worried that there was some terrible emergency, only to see her staring at me in bewilderment from the lookup screen.

  “Why does your room look so strange, Jarra, and why are you still wearing a sleep suit in the afternoon?”

  “This is a strange looking room because I’m sleeping in the dome store room, and it’s not the afternoon here in New York.”

  Issette frowned. “It has to be the afternoon in New York. It’s 11:00 hours here, and there’s a five hour time difference between Europe and America, so that makes it 16:00 hours where you are.”

  I yawned. “You’ve got the five hour time difference the wrong way round. It’s 06:00 here.”

  “Oh chaos,” said Issette. “I’ll try calling you again later then.”

  “No, don’t do that. I’m awake now, so we might as well talk.” I set my lookup to display Issette’s image as a holo floating in midair, and saw she was sitting on the front lawn of our Next Step. “I’m surprised at you getting the time difference wrong though. It’s usually me that gets muddled with time zones, not you.”

  “Yes, but it’s hard to think clearly when you’re starving hungry,” said Issette, in tragic tones. “We’ve been waiting three hours for breakfast. If there isn’t some food soon, I’m going to start eating the grass.”

  I blinked. Hospital Earth residences worked on rigid schedules, serving breakfast at precisely 08:00 every morning. “How can Next Step breakfast be three hours late? Is the universe ending?”

  “There’s something wrong with the power supply,” said Issette. “It seems to have cut out during the night, so we’ve got no lights, no hot water, and the kitchen isn’t working.”

  “Back in the days of pre-history, people prepared food using ...”

  “No!” Issette interrupted me, and gave me a deeply reproachful look. “Bad, bad, Jarra! This situation is bad enough without you trying to turn it into a history lesson as ...”

  Her words were drowned out by wild screams of excitement. Issette glanced across at something I couldn’t see, and gave a joyful yelp herself. “Keon says the power is back, and there’ll be food in five minutes. I’ve got to go.”

  Her image cut out, and I lay back on my sleep sack and laughed. Since I was awake so early, I spent a while going through my messages on my lookup. There were another six from Cathan which I ignored. There was a general message from the Principal of my Next Step warning everyone about a fire alarm test tomorrow. There was a message from my psychologist asking what times he could call me for my sessions during the summer.

  I hated the compulsory sessions with a psychologist that Hospital Earth inflicted on me, so I wrinkled my nose, and did a few time zone calculations. After making very sure that I’d got the time difference between America and Europe the right way round, I replied to my psychologist’s message saying that my dig site commitments meant I would only be available in the evenings between 19:00 and 21:00 America time. My psychologist was annoyingly dedicated to his work, but even he wouldn’t want to stay up until midnight Europe time to persecute me.

  The next message was from my ProMum, Candace. She wanted to know what times she could call me as well, and I replied saying that she could either call me during my midday break or I could get up early to talk to her. I wasn’t going to let time zone differences rob me of my precious two hours a week chatting to Candace.

  Hospital Earth appointed two ProParents for each of its wards, so I had a ProDad as well, but there wasn’t a message from him. I hadn’t been expecting one. My ProDad had never cared for me the way that Candace did, and what relationship we did have ended years ago in a major fight over me going on history club trips. It wasn’t possible for me to change my ProDad – Hospital Earth took the view that ProParents were substitutes for real parents so this had to be a lifelong relationship – but we carefully avoided each other.

  Once I’d dealt with all my messages, I indulged myself by having an extra long shower, but I still arrived in the hall for breakfast so early that only Dezi was there ahead of me. She was leaning some of her paintings against the wall. I wandered over to take a look at them, and instantly regretted it.

  I thought the painting depicting skeletons strolling across rubble was unpleasant, and the one showing bodies slowly dissolving in a pool of chemical waste was worse, but the third one was even more revolting, showing the collapsing figures of weirdly distorted people.

  Dezi smiled at me. “My paintings and art supplies just arrived, Jarra. These paintings aren’t quite finished yet, I’ll be adding some finishing touches to them during the summer, but I think this one is the best I’ve ever done. Don’t you agree?”

  She proudl
y gestured at the painting of distorted people. The truly ghastly thing about them was that they were dissolving into something resembling jellyfish that had been stranded on a beach, but they were obviously still alive and screaming in agony.

  “They’re inspired by images of the melting people,” she said. “You remember the victims of the twenty-second century radiation weapons? The radiation made ...”

  “Yes, I remember,” I swiftly interrupted her.

  I loved to study the days of pre-history, when humanity only lived on Earth, but there were a lot of wars over land and resources back then, and people invented some very sick ways to harm each other. The twenty-second century tactical radiation weapons were an especially evil example. They were cold-bloodedly designed to kill the human population of an area without damaging buildings, so enemy forces could move in later. The weapons worked by sending out blasts of radiation that affected the structure of their victims’ bones, making them gradually disintegrate so that their entire body structure collapsed.

  You didn’t need to be a historian to know about those weapons or the melting people. Everyone was taught about them in the compulsory school science lessons on pollution hazards. Our cruel science teacher had taken a ghoulish delight in telling my class how it had taken days for the victims’ bones to fragment into individual cells, and describing exactly how long some of the victims had survived as shapeless lumps of flesh before finally drowning from their body fluids building up in their lungs.

  We’d only been 11 years old at the time. My friend, Issette, had been sick afterwards, and I’d had nightmares for weeks. The melting people were one of the few parts of history that I’d rather forget. I hated looking at Dezi’s painting of them, but somehow I couldn’t tear myself away from it.

  Radley and Milo arrived to join us, with Radley waving a parcel in triumph. “My clothes came! They were sent to New York Main Dig Site by mistake, but ...” He broke off his sentence as he saw the paintings. “Ugh.”

  A succession of gasps came from behind me, as more people entered the hall and were faced with the horror show. Meiling, Owen, and Sunesh came to join us.

  Meiling raised her eyebrows at the paintings. “Dezi, those paintings are very clever, but ...”

  She was interrupted by a high-pitched squeak of alarm. I turned round and saw it had come from Wren.

  Landon was standing nearby, and stabbed a finger at Wren. “Baby Wren is scared of the paintings.”

  Wren gave him an indignant look, and opened her mouth to say something, but I hastily intervened. “Landon, do you remember what I said to you during our training session yesterday afternoon?”

  Landon pulled a sulky face. “Yes. I know it’s your job as club captain to make sure that no one gets bullied on school trips, but I told you this doesn’t count as bullying. I may be rude to Wren sometimes, but she’s far ruder to me.”

  “I know she is,” I said pointedly, “but I’ve also noticed that you’re always the one who starts the fights.”

  Meiling started her sentence again. “Dezi, those paintings are very clever, but they’re also disturbing.”

  “They aren’t clever or disturbing,” said Owen. “They’re just repellent. Dezi should have stuck with the stunning landscapes that she was painting at the beginning of the year.”

  “The landscapes are part of the same series of paintings,” said Dezi. “They are intended as a visual tribute to Sean Donnelly’s Anthem to Earth, depicting the Earth that he sang about in Exodus century, with the contrast between its beauties and its appalling pollution.”

  “Well, I think your visual tributes are untalented, revolting daubs.” Owen didn’t wait for a reply, just stalked off towards the food processors.

  “I think your paintings are incredible, Dezi,” said Sunesh. “The melting people one reminds me of an ancient painting by Salvador Dali.”

  Dezi turned eagerly to him. “The Persistence of Memory.”

  “That’s right.” Sunesh paused for a moment, before speaking in a rush of words. “When Owen said that I’d been saying things about you, it was a lie. At least, what he implied by it was a lie. All I said was that I’d admired the paintings you did on the autumn history club trip, and he said that I shouldn’t get ideas about you because you were his girlfriend and ...”

  Sunesh abruptly stopped talking and looked at the doorway. I saw that Crozier had arrived and was frowning at the paintings.

  “Please take your paintings to your room, Dezi.”

  “I brought them in here because there isn’t space for them all in my room.”

  “Then Jarra can help you take the paintings to the store room,” said Crozier. “Do that at once, please. You’re a very gifted painter, Dezi, but I don’t want to look at paintings of dead people when I’m eating breakfast.”

  I could see his point. Dezi, Meiling, and I collected the paintings and carried them down to the store room. I carefully stacked them in a corner, making sure the relatively innocuous one of skeletons was at the front, and then hurried back to the hall.

  I’d somehow gone from being ludicrously early for breakfast to being in danger of arriving too late for my flying lesson with Gradin. I gobbled down a breakfast of Karanth jelly on toasted wafers, changed into my impact suit, and portalled to the New York Fringe Command Centre. I jogged across to the landing area, arriving exhausted and sweating because moving fast in an impact suit was killingly hard work, and then looked around in frustration. The survey plane was in position outside the aircraft storage dome, but there was no sign of Gradin.

  I sighed, put on my hover tunic, climbed into the co-pilot’s seat of the survey plane, and entered my pilot code into the control panel so I could start running the pre-flight system checks. Those completed successfully, but there was still no sign of Gradin.

  I waited another ten minutes, and was wondering whether I dared to try calling him to see what was wrong, when he strode up, his impact suit hood down, and his face screaming his annoyance at something.

  “You should be running the pre-flight system checks,” he snapped at me.

  “I’ve already run them.”

  He grunted, pulled on his hover tunic, and got into the pilot’s seat. “Why is the Dig Site Federation so obsessed with annual inventory procedures?”

  He didn’t seem to expect an answer, so I kept quiet.

  “If one of my aircraft was missing, I’d notice it, and do something right away. I wouldn’t wait until the annual inventory check to send the Dig Site Federation a report.” Gradin pulled up his hood and sealed his suit. “Why are you sitting there doing nothing? This plane isn’t going to fly itself.”

  Apparently, I was supposed to be flying the plane. I spoke on broadcast channel. “This is New York survey plane co-pilot, Jarra Reeath. Requesting clearance to launch.”

  Gradin was totally silent during the take-off. Nervously aware of his bad mood, I took off in a sedate manner, rather than with my usual exuberant use of the thrusters. The silence continued until I’d started flying the first of our survey legs for the day, when he suddenly started grumbling again.

  “I’m a pilot. My job is flying planes not counting things. If they want every insignificant piece of equipment counted, then they should give the job to someone like Felipe.”

  “You must mean the Felipe I met two days ago,” I said, trying to change the subject. “My class were checking in at the New York Fringe Command Centre, and he was authorizing our genetic codes for dig site access.”

  “How exciting for you,” said Gradin sourly.

  “Felipe said that he’d finished his Pre-history degree and was helping out here at New York Fringe before joining the Earth 28 research team.”

  “That’s right,” said Gradin. “Felipe has been infesting the place since last Year Day. We sent him off to Jaipur Fringe Dig Site at one point, and I hoped we’d got rid of him, but he sneaked his way back a few weeks later.”

  Gradin clearly wasn’t as impressed by Felipe as I was
, but Gradin was never impressed by anyone. His attitude reminded me of something.

  “A strange thing happened yesterday,” I said. “Felipe came to our dome before breakfast to fix a problem with the food dispensers. He told my history club all about how he took part in a rescue on Paris Coeur Main Dig Site.”

  “I’m sure it was thrilling.” The sarcastic tone of Gradin’s voice told me that he’d just escalated from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3. Gradin enjoyed telling people stories about his own heroism, but didn’t want to hear about the exploits of other people. I hurried on to the point of my story.

  “My history teacher behaved really oddly about it. He practically threw Felipe out of our dome.”

  Gradin seemed to like the idea of Felipe being thrown out of a dome. His tone of voice changed from DEFCON 3 back to DEFCON 4. “I don’t like Felipe. I expect your teacher doesn’t like him either.”

  “You don’t like anyone,” I said. “Including me.”

  “Of course I don’t like you, Jarra,” said Gradin. “You’re an appallingly pushy girl who nagged me into agreeing to teach you to fly. You promised that you’d listen to all my stories and make endless glowing comments about me, but all I can get out of you is that I’m probably the best pilot the Dig Site Federation has.”

  “All right, you’re the best pilot on Earth. In fact, the best pilot in the whole of humanity.”

  “Now you’re just being sarcastic.” Gradin paused for a moment. “It still sounded good though. Can you try saying that again with a bit more conviction?”

  “You’re the best pilot in the whole of humanity,” I said. “Why don’t you like Felipe?”

  Gradin groaned. “Remember when you first asked me to help you get your pilot’s licence? I said that I’d stopped taking passengers in my plane because someone had got air sick and thrown up in my cockpit.”

  “I vaguely remember.”

  “That was Felipe,” said Gradin. “I’d landed the plane. I’d opened the cockpit. There was absolutely nothing preventing him from getting out, but did he do that? No, he stayed in his seat, pulled down his impact suit hood, and vomited all over my instrument panel.”