Chapter One: Back to the Academy

My name is Rex Carter, and I am—or rather, was—from Earth.

I don’t blame you for not believing me. If I hadn’t experienced firsthand the events of my own life, I would be skeptical as well. But I assure you, my story is true. The legends of humanity’s lost homeworld are, for the most part, based in fact. Sol was indeed the cradle of the human race, not Sirius or Aldebaran or any of the nearby stars. The xenologists’ main criticism of Sol, that it lacks a habitable-zone planet, are moot because the world they are looking for—Earth—no longer exists in our plane of reality.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Rex Carter, and I was born on Earth only a few years after humanity made contact with the galactics. As a young man, I played a key role in…

[SPOILERS REDACTED]

…so I enrolled at Earthfleet Academy a year earlier than most of my peers. If I had to attend school, I was determined to get it over with as quickly as possible so as to get back to the business of having adventures.

Little did I know, adventure would soon find me.

Earth had a single large moon, which we called Luna. It was gray and rocky, with one-sixth the gravity of Earth, and no atmosphere. It was also the location of Earthfleet Academy. After a week-long break to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with my parents down on Earth, I grudgingly returned to my studies at the Academy.

“Hey, Rex,” my roommate Frank greeted me as I entered our dorm room.

I dropped my duffel bag at the foot of my bed and flung myself onto the mattress. Earthfleet Academy had its own artificial gravity to compensate for Luna’s, so it felt very much as if I’d never left Earth. The fact that I’d taken a teleporter back contributed greatly to the illusion.

None of which improved my mood.

The dorm room was clean and Spartanly decorated, as you would expect from a military academy. Frank lay back against his pillow with his laptop on his chest, playing some game or chatting online with some friends back on Earth. Quite possibly both.

“Did you miss me?” he asked, giving me a lopsided grin.

I rolled my eyes. “More than I missed this place, that’s for sure.”

“Oh come on. The academy’s not so bad. Besides,” he said, giving me a knowing look, “you-know-who is back from Antarctica.”

Blood rushed to my cheeks. He was talking about Charlotte Bujold, the girl I’d been crushing on since my first semester. I regretted having ever confided that to him.

“She is?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “Came back just yesterdayshift. I was going to tell her that you were coming back early too, but—”

“Dammit, Frank. Please tell me you didn’t say that.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, my friend. I’m just teasing.”

I groaned and rolled over, burying my face in my pillow. I’d navigated my brother-in-law’s starship through space battles and war zones, and traveled far beyond the Gliese colonies of Earthspace, but girls like Charlotte still made my knees go weak and my tongue stammer. What can I say? I was still young.

“To be honest,” Frank continued, “I think Antarctica may have actually thawed the cockles of her cold little heart. She gave me a smile as we passed in the hall this morning. Didn’t say anything, but she smiled. I don’t think she has anything planned before classes start on Monday. If you’re going to ask her out—”

“Shut up.”

“No, I’m serious. Now’s as good a time as any. What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing,” I said sullenly, burying my face even deeper. Of course, that was a lie.

“Dude,” said Frank. He set his laptop aside and turned to face me. “If you like this girl, man up and ask her out. Nothing’s going to happen unless you take the first step.”

I said nothing. This dissuaded him not at all.

“Seriously. You’re not going to get a better chance than now. Once classes start up again, we’ll all be swamped from now until Christmas. She’s sure to leave Sol for the holidays, and—”

“I get the picture,” I said, cutting him off. “What do you suggest?”

Frank sat up, his grin as lopsided as ever, and rubbed his hands together as if he were starting a project. My heart both sank and skipped a beat at the same time.

---

About half an hour later, not quite sure how I got there, I found myself on a tram to the Earthfleet Academy library. Charlotte’s roommates had told me she was probably there when I’d checked at her dorm. They’d asked if I wanted to leave a message, but I’d blushed, mumbled something incomprehensible, and gotten out of there as fast as if one of them had thrown a live grenade.

The main campus of Earthfleet Academy sprawled out leisurely across the mare, or lunar plain. Since it was cheaper to maintain a lot of small but interconnected artificial gravity fields than to put everything under one giant dome, all of the various buildings were connected by trams. The library was on the other side of campus from the dorms, not far from the spaceport and Earthfleet headquarters itself.

It was currently night on the moon, and the Earth hung like a brilliant blue-green marble in an otherwise dark sky. Swirls and streaks of bright white clouds covered its surface. The tram was mostly empty, so I had the view almost entirely to myself.

“Phoenix Tanner from Earthfleet News,” the announcer on the radio stated, briefly interrupting my nervous thoughts. “Tensions remain high at New Australia as the Earthfleet task force headed by Field Admiral Cox refused to lift the military quarantine of the system. The two civilian ships detained by the task force remain under Earthfleet control, and repeated requests by the colonial authorities to release the crew have been denied. For the last several months, the president of New Australia has defied the Grand Council of Earth’s ban on the immortality serum to treat children suffering from chronic illnesses, while medical authorities on Earth insist that there are safe, legal ways to address the colony’s medical needs. In other news…”

My mind drifted as the news droned on. The only reason I’d picked up that first story was because Charlotte was from New Australia. A little less than half of the students at the academy were from the colonies. Sam Kletchka, my brother-in-law, had attended for a year before dropping out. If he hadn’t insisted that I finish my studies first, I would have already dropped out and joined his crew.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I probably would have stayed on a couple more months, just to see how things worked out with Charlotte. But the moment she rejected me, as I inwardly dreaded she would, I would have been out of there.

The tram came to a stop, and the doors slid open. I walked out on watery legs. The library was a big place, even for Luna’s standards, but I had a pretty good idea where to find her. Sure enough, she was studying at a cubby on the library’s top floor. I’d seen her in the same general vicinity several times in the previous semester—not that I was stalking her, of course. Her attention was focused on her tablet, with headphones in her ears in a way that said “do not disturb.”

Allow me to take a moment to describe just how gorgeous Charlotte is. Thin and petite, with hourglass proportions and a narrow waist, her eyes are a piercing blue and her hair is as black as midnight. It was cut just above her shoulders, so it bobbed and swung with every move of her head. Her face was long, her lips red and moist, her nose small and slightly upturned. It was the fire in her eyes, though, that really got to me. She may have been small, but she was full of energy and passion, and a hell of a lot stronger than she looked.

With all that said, you can understand why I was intimidated. The moment I saw her, I ducked behind a nearby bookshelf and spent the next few minutes working up the nerve to talk to her. Heart pounding and legs weak, I eventually decided to hell with it and walked over.

“H-hi Charlotte.”

She glanced up at me with a look of contempt normally reserved for strangers. Seeing that I wanted to talk, she reluctantly pulled the headphones out of her ears.

“What do you want, Rex?”

“I, uh, I heard you just came back from b-break,” I stammered. “Your roommates said I might find you here.”

She stared at me evenly, betraying no reaction. I inwardly flagellated myself.

“So, uh, we have a few days before classes start, and I was wondering, uh, if maybe, uh, you wanted to get lunch or something?”

She blinked. “Lunch?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Food court, student center, tomorrow at noon. What do you say?”

From the expression on her face, it looked like my attempt at asking her out had just crashed and burned. My heart sank. If falling through the floor was an option, I probably would have taken it.

“I’ll let you know,” she said, slipping her headphones back over her ears as she turned back to her tablet.

“Uh, thanks,” I stammered.

She glanced up one last time, as if to ask why I was still there. I beat a hasty retreat, tail tucked firmly between my legs, and silently cursed myself with every bad word in my vocabulary.

I felt six inches shorter. I felt like I’d forgotten to put on pants this morning.

I felt like a fool.

Our encounter had lasted mere seconds, and yet as I walked in a daze back to the tram, I couldn’t help but dissect and analyze every moment of it. Charlotte’s icy gaze. My own nervous stammering. Her utterly unreadable face. The longer I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I’d made an utter fool of myself. Frank was wrong: asking her out in person had been a collossal mistake. Any hope I had of dating her was over.

As the empty tram took off again, I stared up at Earth, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. I didn’t care about Earthfleet. I didn’t care about my studies. I did care about Charlotte, but that was all in the toilet now, thanks to the fool I’d made of myself.

That was when my phone buzzed.

I frowned and pulled it out of my pocket. It was a text—from Charlotte. My heart skipped a beat, and for a very brief moment I hesitated, fearing to read it. But curiosity soon got the better of me.

Food court tomorrow at noon. I’ll be there.

A boyish grin spread across my face as I pocketed my phone, and with no one else on the tram I pumped my fist and shouted “yes!”

Maybe it hadn’t gone as badly as I’d thought back in the library. Maybe she didn’t think I was a fool. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance things could work out with Charlotte and me.

As I was soon about to learn, I had no idea what I was in for.