The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1) Read online

  “Do you think this can really happen?” It was difficult to try and mask the excitement from the dinner conversation and smear indifference over it. For the first time since she’d received the invite, she allowed herself to dream, to believe it wasn’t a mistake.

  “Of course, it can,” he said. A mixture of guilt and caution crossed his face. “What we’re working on isn’t the only option for you. It’s simply the most urgent and most meaningful right now.”

  The detour back to the signal made her look away. She was on a roundabout, going in circles. Perhaps it was time to get off now.

  “You know I’d like to help, right?” Even the gentle words she chose made his face fall.

  “And you are helping,” he said. “There must be something in those scribbles you made.”

  His words of encouragement were crushing her soul, the way the truth was going to crush him.

  “I’m not helping, Eric,” she said. “So what if I can hear something other people can’t in the signal? So what if it made me doodle? You would, too, if you had that stupid sound drilled into your brain. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m nowhere closer to understanding what it means, if anything at all.”

  Guilt gnawed at her insides, but she kept her eyes on his, even if they’d started to sting a little.

  “Eric,” she said, “we need to be open to the idea that it means nothing at all.”

  He cast a glance to the side.

  “Isn’t this good news?” Yalena asked. “It should mean that the signal is nonsense, and the mission can proceed without worrying about there being aliens out there.”

  “That wouldn’t be enough for the board to dismiss their concerns. I can’t give up yet,” he said. “Not until I’m sure.”

  “I respect that, but there is nothing else I can do to help.”

  His neck snapped, looking back to her at once. “You’ve been out with one foot from the start. Why won’t you commit?”

  Yalena’s thoughts swirled into a hurricane. “Are you kidding me? I’m a rookie in space still, yet I’m already sneaking around, breaking into personal profiles, stealing data, and lying to my friends. This isn’t what I signed up for.”

  She hated admitting it, especially since Nico had used his talents to keep tabs on her, but she had needed that confrontation with The Woodpecker. It had helped her shift perspective. She couldn’t let herself get lost in Eric’s web of flexible rules and diluted lines between right and wrong.

  “I owed it to the both of us to give this a try, to see if I could help, but I can’t. So, perhaps I should focus on another way to be useful here—a legal way.” Ignoring a flashback of the circles she’d doodled while listening to the signal, she exhaled a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

  Eric shook his head, then walked away, leaving her with the solid understanding that this wasn’t something he agreed to. Hearing the hum of a painfully tiring sound pick up in her head again, Yalena walked to a quiet corner and pulled out her Berry, relaxing only when she heard Adeline’s “hello.”

  “Can you talk?” Yalena said, her voice suddenly sounding muffled, like she was coming down with a cold.

  “Just for a bit,” Ade said. “What’s wrong?”

  “What if I told you that I give up?” Ade was going to misunderstand the question, but Yalena needed to ask it of someone. Even though her legal guardian didn’t know about the signal, she was the only one that would somehow still get her.

  “On what?”

  “On searching for more, for meaning.”

  “I never thought the promise you gave me would be enough to keep you from trying. Have you been digging into it?”

  “Into something,” Yalena said. If she blinked, she’d let a tear fall. “But you were right. I can’t make sense of it. There’s nothing to find.”

  Chapter 14. The Return

  “IT’S GREAT TO SEE ALL of you back on Unifier after the holidays,” Professor Howards started the first Space Travel class after the break. He wandered around the room, studying them with pride.

  Yalena hoped he would glance over her and not look any closer. She gathered that compared to her well-rested classmates, who’d been pampered by their parents for the past three weeks, she looked like a bug-eyed zombie. Giving up on the signal hadn’t had the intended effect. She was still waking up sweaty and tense each night, plagued by that droning sound in her head.

  “Now that we’ve spent the first semester studying space travel before, during, and after the Migration, leading up to the most recent technologies, it is time to look into the future,” Professor Howards said.

  Many mouthed silent “wow”s around the room, and Yalena could swear she caught Alec and Dave bump fists out of the corner of her eye.

  “For those of you relatively new to space, the shift of mindset might take a little getting used to.” Professor Howards left ample pauses between his sentences, but it was never clear if he did that to invite comments or simply because he operated at one speed only: slow. “We are now venturing into the realm of the probable, even if it hasn’t been proven possible for humankind yet.”

  “Are we talking speed of light travel?” Heidi’s voice jingled in the silence that was ripe with excitement. Yalena almost snickered. Heidi had that rare ability to stay cucumber-fresh even if she’d just gotten off the shuttle from Earth. She hadn’t even stopped by the room; her black suitcase was parked in the corner of the classroom, far enough from people at the not-so-unlikely chance that it would burst open and drown them in clothes.

  “Speed of light travel—or rather, the prospect of it—will be one topic we cover, yes,” the professor answered. “I strongly urge all of you to brush up on your physics.”

  “Cool,” Nico couldn’t hold the excitement in, while Jen and Yalena exchanged glum looks. The crazy space world never failed to turn weirder. By the calm and proper way Jen conducted herself, Yalena couldn’t tell if her friend felt that way, too, but she didn’t do well with the abstract physics of things she hadn’t experienced and probably never would.

  “If you deem it cool, Flynn, could you then please remind the class the main effect anyone traveling at a speed close to the speed of light would experience?”

  “Time dilation,” Nico answered, while Yalena purposefully avoided glimpsing at him. The Woodpecker kept her on edge, even though he hadn’t contacted her since that last chat and despite Eric’s conviction that he would keep quiet. Because of it, she remained unsure whether the conversation at the lunch table the four of them usually shared would feel as casual as it had before.

  “Exactly,” the professor went on. “Anyone on such a spacecraft would experience time going much slower than, let’s say, people who remain in a fixed position on Earth. Hundreds of years could pass for those people, whereas the passengers moving almost as fast as the speed of light won’t have aged more than a few weeks.”

  “That makes speed of light travel impractical,” Eric said. “There may be volunteers to leave their world behind, but hardly anyone would leave their time behind.”

  “Recruitment will definitely prove to be a challenge,” the professor agreed.

  “It’s still our best chance of ever leaving our solar system, though,” Alec said. Natalia perked up at the sound of his voice and batted her eyelashes at him.

  Heidi elbowed the Moonie, teasing. “You’re going to be a grandma when he comes back.”

  A few surprising giggles around the table made Yalena ease up. She and Eric weren’t the only ones relentlessly followed by such comments and insinuations. Heidi and Dave, as well as Natalia and Alec, also seemed to have gone through their fair share of it. With any luck, Eric would come to agree with Yalena’s conclusion on the signal, and they would be let free from the assumed relationship. If she had any say in it, this was already happening.

  “And since we’re talking hypothetically,” Professor Howards’ voice drew everyone’s attention back to the topic, “what else, apart from traveling close to the speed
of light, could cause us to experience the effects of time dilation?”

  “If we were to fly through a wormhole,” Michael said, and a few people laughed. Yalena and Jen shared a clueless look, wondering when they’d get to that alluring place of not having to ask for space jokes to be explained.

  “This is an open plenum for discussing the improbable,” the professor reminded the class, silencing the laughs. “Let us all keep an open mind. In fact, the equation for the construction of a wormhole has a function for gravitational time dilation that would be experienced. Its value could be high, low, or even zero under the right circumstances.”

  A complicated formula projected as a hologram in the center of the table, spinning. Yalena downloaded it as an attachment on her Berry from the mainframe, even if she had no idea where to begin to understand it.

  “Any other ideas?” the professor said.

  “Black holes, of course,” Heidi said. “Their gravitational pull is so strong that they’d have the power to slow down time for anybody in close proximity to them.”

  “And where might we find a black hole?” Professor Howards asked.

  “At the center of our galaxy, for one,” Eric said, then fell silent, contemplating. “One at the center of each galaxy, probably.”

  The electronic buzz announcing the end of the class coincided with a growl in Yalena’s empty stomach.

  “For tomorrow, please prepare a model of time dilation in one of the three scenarios: speed of light travel, wormholes, or black holes. Bear in mind that while we’ve been able to do some empirical studies on black holes, speed of light travel and wormholes are purely theoretical concepts and will, as such, present a bigger challenge for you. You’d have to imagine a plausible way for these phenomena to exist, where none has been proven.”

  Yalena threw a sideways glance at Jen just in time to see her friend’s lips twitch. This was a crucial first decision for the new semester.

  “Let the overachievers argue over impossibilities,” Yalena said, zapping Jen out of her thoughts. “We might be the only ones going the other way. Less competition.”

  Jen seemed to evaluate the hectic way their classmates paired up and argued one topic over another. “Black holes it is.”

  THE FIRST WEEK OF CLASSES passed in a chaotic swirl of catching up and school work, making sure that all freshmen crashed in their beds, exhausted, on Friday night. Thus, the doorbell ringing early on Saturday morning woke Yalena, as if sounding from another universe. Only half-conscious, she could still hear the signal echoing in her mind, while the doodled circles zoomed in and out before lining up in a familiar string. Sleepy and annoyed, Yalena pressed the OPEN button and found herself face-to-face with Chris. He looked fresh as a daisy, but a sulky expression flashed across his face when he saw her.

  “Boy, you don’t look your best in the morning.” Perhaps this was his way to overcompensate for any compliments he may have given her in the past. Once he’d scanned Yalena’s face and flowery PJs, he added quickly, to save himself the awkward pause, “You might want to hit the shower. It’s time to fly.”

  “What?” The news couldn’t have caught Yalena more off guard.

  “What?” Heidi shouted from the upper bunk. In contrast to Yalena’s voice, hers was filled with excitement, and she quickly jumped down, clapping her hands and giggling like she was five years old.

  “We meet in thirty minutes on the arrival pitch. Don’t be late,” Chris remarked dryly, and, without casting a second glance at Yalena’s horror-struck expression, he rang the doorbell of Jen and Natalia’s room next.

  Yalena dressed quickly, her mind juggling all the scenarios that had her crashing a brand-new V-flier on her first day. Couldn’t the happiness from having survived the exams have lasted just a little while longer?

  Despite it being a quarter to six in the morning, the common excitement taking place on the freshmen’s floor was equivalent to an explosion. And the only ones out of sync with the jubilation were Yalena and Jen, who walked to the flight pitch at the back of the screaming crowd as if headed to their own executions.

  Chris welcomed the freshmen, glowing with pride, and even his blond hair seemed brighter. He was standing up front, surrounded by six other second-years, among whom were Adam and Katarzyna.

  “Morning, everyone,” Chris said. He scanned the crowd, tactfully avoiding the far-left side, where Yalena stood between Jen and Heidi. “Yes, you guessed it—it’s the first day of actual flight practice. You will, of course, keep working on the group simulator game, as well as one-on-one against the computer. But these practical flight lessons will test how well you do in real life and will be crucial for your pilot ranking.”

  A happy howl and a round of applause welcomed the news.

  “Here is how today is going to work out. There are three groups in training. You’ll rotate between the Control Room, the small V-fliers, and the ten-crew craft models.”

  “Who appointed him the king of flight lessons?” Yalena whispered to Jen, who only shushed her into paying attention.

  Natalia looked over her shoulder at them. “It’s STAR Academy tradition—the number one pilot is in charge of the freshmen’s flight training. Why else would Queen Katya agree to stand in the background?” She cackled, then sneered at Katarzyna.

  “I thought you two were friends.” The remark fell flat as Natalia rolled her eyes.

  Yalena was used to seeing the second-year class leader standing proud in front of them on any occasion that allowed it. Sitting in the background not only didn’t suit Katya, but also meant Yalena would have to put up with Chris and his snarky comments—as if there wasn’t enough to make her feel awkward during flight lessons.

  “Now, the top eight performers from the simulator, please come with me,” Chris continued and then read the names from his tablet. “Alec Rado, David Whitehorse, Eric O’Donnell, Jasper Wijtes, Heidi Valance, Reid Foster, Michael Galluci, and Sebastian D’Arezzo, please follow me.” He signaled to the V-fliers behind him and the changing rooms in the back.

  Heidi squeaked one last time before she let go of Yalena’s hand, which she’d nervously grabbed onto as soon as Chris had started naming names. Being chosen to go in the first group had probably made her day.

  The group of elite pilots headed to the changing rooms as quickly as possible, and it showed none of the freshmen there wanted to waste another second on firm ground. Yalena let out a sigh of relief. Of course, they would adjust the difficulty level for each group, and of course, Chris wouldn’t waste his time on the beginners. Things were looking up.

  “Now, it also seems we have some absolute beginners here—for the first time in three years, I might add.” An amused Martian voice attracted the freshmen’s attention again. Adam was already having fun, eying Nico, Jen, and Yalena. “Jennevier Reynolds, Nico Flynn, and Yalena Russo, please come with me,” Adam trailed off, signaling the three of them to follow him to the Control Room. It was one of those busy places tracking and coordinating take-offs and landings at a space port. Completely automated, it gave them a quiet spot to begin the introduction to flying.

  After showing them how the Control Room functioned and what the main messages between it and the pilots looked like, Adam clapped his hands, as if trying to keep the energy up.

  “Today, we’ll start by learning a bit about the physics of the V-fliers and the way they function.” A holographic model of a V-flier appeared in the center of the room after Adam clicked on the display table they had gathered around.

  While they took notes and listened to Adam’s explanations of the life-support and landing systems, blueprints, pictures, and maps were loaded onto their tablets. Yalena’s head felt heavier, and even Adam’s energy was running low after a few hours.

  “How come you’re prepping the beginners?” she asked when they were sipping on some strong coffee—a well-deserved break after covering all the step-by-step take-off procedures. “Did you draw the short straw?”

  “I may have s
crewed up slightly and sent an emergency landing capsule to the wrong side of the Moon. It’s supposed to be a save-your-teammate exercise, but man, did that capsule crash-land. Thank the stars we’re using dummies for teammates.” He waved her off with an absentminded smile. “How O’Donnell likes to choose our punishments himself!”

  Yalena chuckled. It must be torture for Adam to sit down and explain the mere basics to her, Jen, and Nico for hours on end.

  The time until lunchtime dragged out, and Yalena couldn’t believe it when Adam finally announced they were done for the day. He sped out of the room, threatening, “Don’t make me repeat any of this tomorrow. I’ll be moving straight on to using the auto-pilot and navigation systems.”

  “Do we have to be back here tomorrow?” Jen called out after him, horrified, but Adam had already left. “I’m not sure how many days like this I can take,” she complained.

  This flight lesson had been exactly the distracting gift Yalena needed to get back to normal with both Jen and Nico. No more signal. No more sneaking around. No reason to stare down at her feet when they used their excellent deductive skills to find holes in her Swiss cheese of a facade. And with that positive thought, Yalena took a deep breath, shook the remains of that signal’s hum from her head, and turned to them, upbeat enough to kill any attempts to poke and prod with questions.

  “Who’s been missing those tuna-flavored protein steaks? Anyone?” she teased as they walked off to dinner.

  Chapter 15. The Hidden Room

  “YALENA, YOUR BERRY’S buzzing,” Heidi announced from the other side of the bathroom door while Yalena was brushing her teeth that evening. She jumped on the spot and hurried to get to the Berry under Heidi’s curious look. Having her roommate back now that the break was over had a lot of benefits, but the added set of curious eyes watching her now wasn’t one of them.