Fian and I turned and marched out of the door. That was it. I’d had a brief glimpse of the Military life I could have had if the genetic dice had landed differently, if I’d been normal instead of the one in a thousand.
An odd thought occurred to me. If I’d been that other Jarra, gone to Military school and the Academy, I would never have been here. That other Jarra would still be studying at the Military Academy, still be a cadet, blissfully ignorant of the Alien Contact programme being active. Colonel Torrek had called me in precisely because of my Handicap.
Fian and I headed back to our quarters, went inside, and started changing into civilian clothes.
‘We can’t tell the class anything about the Alien Contact programme, or us being Military,’ said Fian. ‘We’ll obviously need to take the Military lookups with us, so we can get the status updates, but what about the impact suits and uniforms?’
I thought of Arrack San Domex, shook off my strange introspective mood and grinned. ‘We’d better leave the impact suits here, but we’ll take the uniforms with us. The Military won’t miss them, and I have plans!’
14
When we arrived back at our class dig site dome, everything felt oddly small. We dutifully put our palms on the portal room check-in plate to sign in, and headed for our room with our trail of hover luggage following us. The walls of the corridor seemed to close in around me.
‘Has this place shrunk in the last few weeks?’ I asked.
Fian laughed. ‘I was thinking the same thing. The domes at Zulu base were much larger.’ He opened the door to his half of our room, and looked warily inside. ‘They haven’t put the wall back yet. Zan!’
Even with our two rooms opened up into one, this was nothing like the size of our accommodation back at the base. It had no private bathroom, no food dispenser, and there’d be no cheese fluffle for breakfast now. I allowed myself a single sigh of regret for past luxuries.
‘Shall we go and say hello before unpacking?’ I asked. ‘It’s 20:00 hours here, so everyone will be in the dining hall.’
Fian nodded.
I nervously checked my reflection in the mirror, which was, of course, a mere fraction of the size of the one back in our joint officer accommodation.
‘It’s all right,’ said Fian, watching me with amusement. ‘You haven’t got the word “Major” tattooed on your forehead. Do you have any advice for me?’
I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘What about?’
‘Well, you’ve got previous experience of this sort of thing. A few months ago, you were a civilian and pretending you had a Military background. Now you’ve just swapped around to being Military and pretending you’re a civilian.’
I giggled, and the strangeness of being back suddenly vanished. Major Jarra Tell Morrath had just been a dream. I was back in the real world, the sensible world, where I was just a student on the University Asgard Pre-history Foundation course. ‘Let’s go and find everyone.’
We headed to the hall and found the old familiar evening scene. A few of the class were still sitting at tables and eating. Others were lounging on cushions, backs leaning against the grey flexiplas walls, chattering away while half listening to Dalmora singing and playing her reproduction of a twentieth-century guitar. As we entered the room, there were yells from all around, and everyone leapt up to greet us.
‘You’ve been away ages,’ complained Krath. ‘Where have you been? You couldn’t have left Earth so …’
‘No, Krath!’ said Amalie. ‘Remember what Playdon told you. No being nosy!’
She turned to me and Fian. ‘Krath kept coming up with more and more incredible theories about where you’d gone and why, until Playdon gave him a lecture on his fellow students’ right to privacy.’
I wondered if any of Krath’s theories had included aliens, and bit my lip to stop myself laughing. Fian and I had been prepared for questions from the class of course, and had agreed what to say. Fian said it.
‘I don’t really want to explain a lot of personal details about a family problem.’
Krath sighed but seemed to accept that, at least for now. ‘It hasn’t been the same without Jarra knowing absolutely everything about everything. We’ve had to answer all the difficult questions ourselves!’
At the start of the year, I’d been busily parading my knowledge at everyone, desperate to show my hated exo classmates that I was better at everything than they were. I suddenly realized that desperation had been more about proving things to myself than to them, and I’d felt it all my life, but I didn’t any longer. I’d never been good at understanding the emotional stuff inside my own head, so I wasn’t sure what had changed or why, but it felt a huge relief to be free of that pressure.