Stars

Part II - The Journey (continued)

Melinda woke with a start. The sunlight was blinding. She might have said brilliant, but it was just too painful. She pulled the covers up over her eyes and tried to get back to sleep. She couldn't quite remember why, but she was sure she didn't want to get up just yet. The sunlight was too bright. The sunlight. What was it about the sunlight? She dosed lightly in this state for a while. 

Sunlight! There shouldn't be any sunlight! Sitting up quickly, she noticed two things right away. First, the window was on and broadcasting a stunning sunrise and , two, she had a splitting headache. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she unwillingly reviewed the events of the prior evening. It only took a few moments for the tears to start again.

"This crap has got to stop." Why, in trying times do we feel the need talk to ourselves?  The conversation was continuing quietly now.
"Damn, stop it!" If this keeps up she's going to wake Aaron. Coffee. That's what she needed. She walked decisively to the kitchen and took out a packet of coffee. Making the brew turned out to be too little a distraction, so she began breakfast.
The manual had said something about a shipboard radio station. While the bacon was frying, she began to search the kitchen for some sign of speakers or controls. It took a couple of minutes for her to admit to herself that she wasn't getting anywhere. She went out to the living room to get the book. When she reached the table she stopped.
Twelve hundred and fifty years. A glazed look came over her as she stood looking at the volume. Twelve hundred and fifty years. She reached out to take it, but stopped before she actually touched it. Pick it up, stupid! She picked it up but she never looked at it as she made her way back to the kitchen.
She placed the book on the kitchen table and went over to the range to turn the bacon.
Satisfied that all was well with breakfast, she sat at the table and slid the manual in front of her. She opened the book to the Residential Suites and began looking for the proper section. Success. IN-HOUSE ENTERTAINMENT. A quick review revealed the topic she was looking for. ONBOARD BROADCASTING gave a detailed account of the audio and video options available. There were several musical formats, a news center (eventually there may be news to broadcast, after all we have 1250 fucking years!), a public access channel, and an official/emergency channel (which would override anything else, indeed, would even turn the units on all over the ship in the event of a ship-wide emergency). Melinda took the book with her to the audio unit, which had been carefully hidden behind a decorative panel near the kitchen door.
Reviewing the instructions again, she opened the panel and examined the controls. Amazing, they looked just like the ones in the book. She quickly found the power switch and reached to turn it on. As her index finger made contact, a loud electronic alarm sounded, much too near her ears.
"WHAT DID I DO?" Shouting didn't help, the alarm sounded again. "WHAT?" No lights indicated that she had done anything, let alone anything wrong. Frantically, she grabbed the book and started looking for warnings. Again the thing scolded her. Nothing. The damned book didn't say anything about this.
"STOP IT!" The alarm responded, but not the way she wanted. 
"Mom." Aaron stood in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. "What's burning?"
"Burning?" The question took her totally off guard. "Nothing's burning Honey."
"Then what's that smell?" He was right. Something was burning, something that smelled like... BACON! "Damn!" She rushed over to the range and put a cover over the black, smoking mess. Carefully, she carried the pan over to the sink and placed it gently in basin. Meanwhile, Aaron had made his way across the room to a flashing light on the wall.
"Can I turn this off Mom?"
"Of course you can Hon." Leave it to the six year old figure it out. 
"What's for breakfast?" Entirely too unruffled.
"How 'bout some nice crispy bacon?" Melinda lifted the cover and revealed the slightly over done contents.
"Just off the fire." Aaron's face indicated that the brittle, blackened tidbits were not to his liking. Melinda swept the mess into the disposal, cleaned the pan and keyed in a fresh order on the processor. She went back to the range and in a few minutes the pair were enjoying a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs. 
During clean-up another alarm sounded. Not being as loud as the previous one, Melinda didn't get too worried this time. However, it still took several rings before she realized it was the phone. It was Karen Williams. After a brief catching up, it was decided that her and Jimmy would meet Melinda and Aaron at the Viewport Lounge, a combination restaurant, bar, arcade, with a huge viewport as a center piece. Seeing Karen and Jimmy again would go a long way towards making them feel a little more normal after recent events. Aaron was informed of the lunch date and Melinda went about straightening up the apartment. There really wasn't much to do, after all, they hadn't actually unpacked much yet, but keeping busy seemed particularly important lately.
Around 11:00AM they decided it was time to try and find the lounge. Aaron was equipped with his trusty laser (We're in deep space now Mom, you never know what we'll run into). Opening the apartment door, Aaron slipped out into the hall. Holding his hand up to stop his mom, he glanced down the hall.
"All clear hear, I'll take point." Carefully he made his way down the corridor, watching for marauding aliens. 
Negotiating the tubes wasn't as difficult as Melinda had thought it would be. It was a little disquieting, though, when a junction changed not only direction, but also gravitational attitude. At one point she turned a corner and saw Aaron proceeding down the next corridor on the ceiling. He hadn't spotted any dangerous aliens, but, he was having a grand time 'climbing the walls'. It took nearly half an hour to get to the Viewport Lounge. As they entered, a small boy (also 'armed'), came sprinting across the room, definitely on a collision course.
"Aaron, you gotta see this!" Jimmy grabbed his friend by the arm and proceeded to drag him off to the right, toward a room that, by the sound of it, was populated by a large number of small children. "They got games here I never even heard of."
As the boys disappeared into the game room. Melinda looked back to where Jimmy had come from and spotted Karen waving to her from a small table.
"How are you two doing?" The women embraced at the table before being seated.
"When is Allen due back?"
"A couple of days. What about Jim?" Allen and Jim had been serving together before the Evacuation began, but had since been reassigned.
"Day after tomorrow. He gets a week off before Departure, then he'll get his permanent assignment." Now that boarding was complete, the IGS officers who had been handling embarkation would have operational duties assigned to them.
"Yeah, Allen's got that too. Does Jim have any ideas about what he'll be doing after we depart?"
"No. It's being kept pretty quiet. But he says that none of the assignments are really permanent. Once we're under way everyone will be able to apply for jobs. They can even go civilian if they want to."
"What's there to do? I thought these things were all automated."
"They'll be sending out brochures with job listings I guess. These 'Residential Suites' are going to have to be set up just like small towns. There ought to be plenty to do once we start getting settled."
Somehow, talking about everything that was going on seemed to bring it all into a more realistic perspective. The anxiety that Melinda had been building with her private ramblings seemed to melt away in the company of a good friend. The women went on talking for a couple of hours, relating the experiences they encountered during the evacuation. The entire episode had been interesting, but quite uneventful, if you ignored the reason the whole thing was necessary in the first place. 
After a rather pleasant (if long) luncheon, the four made their way to the Williams' apartment. Jimmy was dying to show off his new room, Aaron was equally eager to show off how much he had learned about the window.
On the trip to the Suite Halls, the boys took the lead to protect the women from invading aliens, several of which fell to the skilled marksmanship of the young defenders (interestingly, the invaders seemed to be disguised as fellow evacuees). As expected, the trip through the tubes plagued the women while the boys were elevated to levels of bliss previously unimagined by mere Terrians.
"Her we are." Karen indicated a door a few meters down the isle. "I think I've got this hand thing figured out." As she stepped up to the door, she placed her right hand, fingers splayed, against a nearly invisible screen to the right of the frame. She didn't think she'd ever get used to that fine, tingling sensation as the scanner examined her magnetic field and identified her as a resident of the apartment. The door slid open and instantly the two boys burst into the living room, lasers blazing. Certainly nothing could have survived the conflagration.
"OK you two. Off to Jimmy's room. And don't trash the place."
"You got it, Mom."
"And keep the noise down!"
"We will Mrs. Williams." The boys disappeared down the hall with all due haste and Melinda and Karen were left alone. In the quiet of the Williams kitchen the conversation took a more serious turn.
"Karen, have you taken a good look at that Orientation Manual yet?"
"Twelve hundred and fifty years?" Karen had read the look on her friend's face very accurately. "Yeah, I read it. Looks like we're gonna be here a while."
"A long while if you ask me. Why do you think they didn't tell us?"
"I suppose it's like the book said, they didn't want to start a panic. Anyway, would you have come this far if you knew you'd never get out of this tin can?" 
"I guess you're right. But why can't we jump to the colony? I thought S-Jumps were pretty common place back in the Eighteen Thousands. Weren't there thousands of jumps made back when they thought they could find life out there?"
"You mean out here don't you? The Life Search projects. Yeah, They were jumping all over the place for centuries back then. There must have been millions of ships jumping around the galaxy."
"DLS. Let's look it up." The two women headed toward the terminal.