Rude Awakening

Complete and utter contentment surrounded Bethany. A smile spread between her blushing cheeks as she hugged her parents. She couldn't quite remember how she'd arrived in her parents' company, but right now, none of that mattered. Right now, she was happy. Right now, everything was perfect. Bethany felt like she was floating, unburdened by any worries. She didn't know anything outside of her embrace, and she didn't want to. She hugged them tighter, wishing the moment would never end...

A loud crash and a shake came from nowhere. A wave of consciousness overcame Bethany, tearing her mind out of the dream and back into reality. She squeaked a bit with panic a she realized she assessed her situation. She was still in the crate, her arms wrapped around one of the many blankets that had been in her makeshift hiding spot. Beth willed her panic away and listened through the side of the box and was greeted with silence. Wary of another sudden closure, she opened the lid and looked around outside the box.

The room, apparently another cargo bay or storage room, was deserted. Bethany took her opportunity and leapt out to the floor, landing on all fours. Her palms felt a light vibration. A starship engine. It was low, but they had clearly left dock. Beth had done enough traveling in her fourteen years of life to know that much.

Bethany checked her watch. She'd been unconscious for two hours. The rattle she'd felt had to be from the ships jump to lightspeed, but they'd just left, so they were probably still close enough to turn around if she was caught, and probably would be for some time. So far, no one had checked out the cargo, or at least not her box, but someone would come eventually. She couldn't stay here. She had to find a better hiding place. Bethany crept through the door, gently opened it, and casually exited, ready to begin exploring her new labyrinth.

Orientation

Marcus followed closely behind Jake, walking down the boarding ramp onto Calista. She was a clean ship, fresh from the star-docks by less than a week, and Marcus found himself staring in marvel at it's spotlessness. He had to scold himself internally, becoming so distracted he nearly bumped into Jake. Easy Marcus, it's not like this is your first time on a ship.

Jake was busy introducing the pair at the check-in desk. "Jake Thomas and Marcus..."

"Ahhh... Swain," Marcus nervously replied.

"Yeah, Marcus Swain, reporting for duty, Ma'am." Jake flashed the clerk a charming grin, as was his habit, but she was too swamped with the incoming crew to be swayed.

"Passenger relations orientation, crew lounge B." She handed the pair two security passes and pointed them down the hall.

"Where's that?" Marcus asked after walking off.

Jake walked over to a wall-mounted map and looked it over. "Hmmm... we are here," he said, pointing to the star denoting the ventral entryway. Marcus scooted closer, trying to get a better idea of how the craft was layed out. The map displayed the ship as standing nose up, engines down, the way the ship was relative to most passengers, with multiple levels of rooms on the outside and various entertainment facilities, like ballrooms, casinos, and theaters, running down the ccenter. Marcus and Jake appeared to be standing at the top level of the passenger section, a floor not unlike the lobby of a hotel room. Above them, where the lounge was, sat the "crew only" area, which was oriented at a 90 degree angle to the passenger section. Though the ship retained its smooth, rocket shape, the crew section had its gravity generated from the ships dorsal side, so that the nose was the front and the passenger section was in the back.

Marcus walked down the hall he'd been directed towards, and saw the gravity interchange ahead of him. He opened the door and found that the hallway gently curved down. The pair walked down the curve, experiencing an eerie feeling that the ship was rotating under them, and when the floor leveled again, they found them selves standing on the crew section's gravity plane.

"Oh, so that's how it works," Jake commented.

"Apparently," was all Marcus could muster.

The two wordlessly approached the orientation lounge, both fighting off the disorientation from the gravity shift. They entered the room pretty much near the end of the pack, and dropped into a pair of empty seats at an empty table. There were plenty of seats for the audience, so Jake and Marcus were able to keep the table to themselves. The lights dimmed, and a holofilm sprang to life.

"Welcome aboard the Galaxy Ship Calista. You are now part of an elite crew selected to provide the topmost service to the most discerning travelers..."

They can't even bother to introduce us in person. Marcus would have been insulted if he wasn't so bored. He was just short of drifting of to sleep when Jake gave him a sharp poke in the side. "WHA!" he started. "What is it?"

Jake pointed across the room. Marcus followed his gaze and saw a tall, tan-skinned, brunette, wearing a brown jumpsuit and sitting in the back corner of the room, all alone. "You think she's free?" Jake asked.

Marcus didn't have time to answer. While he was staring at the lone vixen, her own uninterested glare met his. He was transfixed. Marcus tried to flash her a smile of his own, one he'd always been told was 'handsome.' Unfortunately, the woman returned his glance with a trite smile of her own before returning to her stony glare and leaning back into her chair and staring at the holofilm.

Jake rested a hand on Marcus' shoulder. "Hey man, don't worry." He made the unmistakable jesture of bending his first two fingers together and flicking his tongue between them. "Besides, plenty of other fish in the sea."

Marcus tried to relax, but he couldn't help feel that, even though her eyes rested on the cartoon hologram of a sailor hippopotamus, she was still monitering him out of the corner of her eye. It gave him the creeps.

Hide And Seek

Shit, Bethany thought, how did they find me so soon? Sure, she'd expected that her forged ID might set off some kind of warning or something when she tried to get a new ticked, but she didn't think anyone would recognize her face within thirty seconds of getting off the shuttle. Without waiting to see what the rent-a-cops would do, she bolted down the terminal, trying her best to lose herself in the crowd. Great, my first trip into space and I don't even get a chance to more than peek at the view.

Beth quickly rounded a corner. Out of view for a second, she turned her jacket inside out and flipped her cap around, lowering the brim to cover her sapphire eyes. She cautiously looked around, and saw the guards continuing straight. Good, I lost them. Bethany chuckled to herself, then turned to check out the departures board. Instead she found herself face to face with an angry man in a brown uniform: security. Not even stopping to think, the girl spun around the guard and darted down the connecting hallway. Not bothering to stop, she caught a door marked "Authorized Personel Only" an engineer had emerged from, just before it closed. She slid in and locked the door behind her.

The view before her was staggering. Standing in an air-shielded cargo bay, it was as if she had nearly walked out into space. A few more meters, in fact, and she would have. Staring at the starscape provided her with an unobstructed view Earth, its Moon, and the Sun, a view so bright she had to fumble for her shades. Once she put them on, she remembered what she was doing here. Her eyes stopped focussing on the view outside and began looking around her, within the air-shielding. Literally tons of crates were framed by powerful robotic arms, some of which were actively moving the boxes to and from their designated craft.

Almost automatically Bethany picked out one box, seemingly at random, and she wasted no time dropping into it. Finding herself in a bin of folded towels, she pulled the lid down tight and pressed her ear to the side. It wasn't long before the security guards came in, and began looking around for her. She heard the a pair of voices:

"You take this side, I'll take the other."

"Gotcha."

Behtany heard the two rattling boxes. One of the guards, seemingly the one in charge, was moving slowly away from her, but the other was coming towards her. She nearly yelped when she felt a light rattle. That's the box next to me. Not long before...

"Alright, these are all locked. She must be have left."

"Right. Where to next?"

"I dunno, she could be anywhere on the station. Let's just call in to base and..."

Bethany heard the door slam behind them, and then silence. She waited a full minute before lifting the lid and peeking out. All clear. Now to figure out where to go from here. They'd probably have guards looking for her throughout the station, so she'd need to be very careful about how and where she moved.

BANG! A robotic arm slammed the lid of the box back into place, knocking it against Beth's head. As her new cage was carried to its vessel, Bethany's world faded into a murky black fog.

Beginnings

Marcus sat in the terminal, tapping away at a palmtop game while waiting for his ride to arrive. He'd only been there for ten minutes, but with his nervousness, Marcus felt like he had been there for hours.

"Attention passengers for Galaxy Cruises flight 2574", announced the loudspeaker, "the ship will be docking shortly. General boarding will begin in fifteen minutes."

At that comment, Marcus looked up from the screen and out the windows. To his right, across the corridor, spun the Earth, spinning slowly against he star-speckled background of space. Out to his left sat the moon, littered with lightly glowing colonies, and behind that, peering over the North Western hemisphere, was the Sun, slightly dimmed by the self-polarizing glass of the window. However, it was to the relative East of the Moon that the real show was starting.

A shining cloud of stardust appeared suddenly, its brilliance surprising even the polarization controls, so that a blinding flash briefly lit the terminal. When the room returned to its normal brightness, Marcus got a clear view of the starcloud. The effect that preceded every starship dropping out of lightspeed was actually created by super-heated particles that had collected on the hull being flung off during rapid deceleration. The term stardust was simply a colloquialism, most likely named by some traveling child on her first space flight who thought the display looked pretty. However, it had stuck, and the beautiful starclouds have lived up to their reputation. After a few seconds, the stardust began to dissipate, and passing through the haze, Marcus saw the starship.

My starship, he thought. The Galaxy Ship Calista. Technically, the ship wasn't his. It would be more correct to say he belonged to the cruise line. At least he would for the next few months. Great, my first year out of University and I contract to be a bellhop for a year. Marcus knew he was just being selfish. He'd wanted to get off of Earth see the galaxy, and though there were more glamorous ways to do it, at least this one paid well.

And really, there were worse ways to see the stars. The Calista was state of the art, just out of the Galaxy Cruises Shipyards. Its sleek, silver/blue rocket shaped body featured six protrusions near the back end: three engine and stabilizer wing assemblies and three dome-enclosed habitats. There were no more uncomfortable and motion-sickness inducing magnetic boots needed to walk around. The ship had multiple gravity axes, and used a system of state-of-the-art mini-grav generator on each floor to prevent disorientation. Marcus had seen the plans for the gravity junctions, and they were pretty ingenious. They used evenly spaced mini-gravs to create a feeling that...

"She's a beaut', huh?"

Marcus was snapped out of his inner musings by a rough voice coming from behind him. Shifting his vision revealed what could only be described as a roguish grin on a friendly face. Turning around, Marcus saw a man wearing a uniform similar to his own, though with a few slight alterations, looking in the same direction he had been a few minutes ago. "The ship?" he asked. "Yeah, she sure is something."

"No, not the ship, her." The man pointed just right of where the ship was beginning to dock, and Marcus saw a gorgeous flight attendant. "Her name's Brenda. She's on a college internship. And," the man made an over-exaggerated motion of relaxed contentment, "if you want to know more about her, you'll have to ask me in the morning." He made a seemingly overconfident wave in her direction, and she smiled back at him, though Marcus couldn't tell it apart from the smile all flight attendants gave their passengers. "Jake Long."

"Excuse me?"

"You're a bit out of place up here, aren't you? My name's Jake Thomas. Doctor Thomas, actually." Jake pointed to the red cross symbol adorning his shoulder. "Ship's physician, G.S. Calista. And you are..?"

"Marcus Swain," stammered the flustered boy. "I'm... I'm, uh..."

Jake gestured to the tag adorning Marcus' uniform. "Pest Control." When he noticed Marcus' confused look, Jake clarified. "That's a little joke, what we call 'Guest Comfort'. Not when anyone's looking, of course."

"Of... Of course..." Marcus was cut off by the loud speaker, announcing crew boarding.

"That's us!" Jake got up and headed towards the staff-only entrance. Marcus, somewhat nervously, followed his new friend towards what would become his new home.