Empress of a Thousand Skies(8)
It wasn’t exactly the life of a soldier. It was better. Sure, maybe Aly wasn’t a natural in front of the camera. Not like Vincent, who was game to smile for the daisies whenever and wherever; those little cameras brought out the best in him—the one-liners, the perfectly timed expressions, the mouthful of perfectly white teeth. But it was sure as hell better than being stuck in some Wray Town, coughing up dust.
Plus, there were benefits to the The Revolutionary Boys attention. Like the girls. Rubbing elbows with celebrities (rubbing something, Vin had joked) at the occasional fund-raiser. All the fan messages that made him feel like he mattered.
Of course, there were bad things too. There’d been a few signs at the last season-premiere party, on all the fan holoforums, pasted over the show’s advertisements: GO HOME, DUSTIES. It didn’t matter that Aly was always on his best behavior—he wanted to rep his planet right—but to a certain kind of person he’d always be the enemy. A lot of folks couldn’t get over the memories they had of the Wraetan uprisings, and the way Wraeta had sided with Fontis against Kalu during the Great War. That was why Aly had originally lied about having Wraetan blood. He’d heard stories about how Wraetans were treated in the UniForce, since there was still bad blood and the whole refugee situation—so he’d checked a different box and told a little white lie. No one would’ve known if it weren’t for the show, which sent a bunch of journalists digging into his past.
At least the show had Aly’s back, so long as the ratings were good. When it was finally revealed that Aly had Wraetan blood, the producers ignored the protesters—the loud contingent of Kalusians who ran around calling Wraetans animals and savages, or worse: dusties.
The Revolutionary angled left again. Vin cursed into his cube. “Aly! Target is taking evasive measures. Hurry up on the grav beam already.”
“I’ll finish what I started—don’t worry about me. You focus on flying and try not to get us killed.”
“Deal. You have six minutes now. Out.” It was probably the longest conversation they’d ever had over their cubes. Vin never kept his cube on when he didn’t have to. His parents were funny like that. Vin was forced to meditate and use visualizations and mnemonics, which kind of cracked Aly up, since a whole chunk of the universe had to do all that anyway. No fancy names required—it was just called being born poor. Only certain governments could afford to subsidize cube installations for their citizens.
Aly wasn’t a native cube user, and he’d gotten his installed pretty late in the game. He knew there were all kinds of folks in the wider galaxy addicted to their memories. There were public campaigns to “stay healthy and in the moment,” which mostly meant not to waste away like those sad sacks who kept on revisiting their glory days when they had a full head of hair and a girl on their arm.
Aly didn’t get that—why you’d want to live inside the past. He liked recording his new life. Maybe eventually he’d accumulate enough good memories to crowd out the bad ones, so that they never showed up again in his feed.
A DroneVision camera zoomed into his line of vision, and Aly swatted it away. “At least do something useful if you’re gonna get up in my face,” he told the daisy. That’s what they called the DroneVision cameras—a linguistic evolution that started with the casual term day-sees, based on the cameras’ ability to provide bright lighting, and quickly became daisies—even though they looked more like giant spiders than any flower he’d ever seen, on any planet. “Light.”
A light from its underside flicked on, illuminating the small room. The daisy was compact, the size of his palm, and it fluttered up to the low ceiling. Aly got on his hands and knees, staying close to the ground as the ship veered wildly from left to right. What the hell was going on up there?
Finally, he spotted the wrench in the far dark corner, wedged in the middle of a network of pipes and wires. Two years ago he could’ve crawled over to it easily enough. But at seventeen, he was just shy of twenty hands tall and still going. His growth spurt had come late and with a vengeance—even his bones hurt, like he’d been strapped to an old-school torture device and stretched every which way. He wondered, now, how much taller than his dad he was.
He knew for damn sure he was too big to fit through anything constructed by a Kalusian. They had leaner builds, and everything they made was, like, 25 percent too small for Aly to ever use comfortably—but their engineering was top-notch.
His arms were long, too, which meant that: one, he could take Vin down in a slap-boxing match, and two, he could just brush the metal wrench with the tips of his fingers.
He eased it into his palm, sprang up, and went to work on the grav beam core—ratcheting, tightening, realigning. His hands moved carefully; the trick was to focus on all the things he could control. Vin’s insane flying, the rusty ship two seconds away from falling apart, the cameras that crept up on him everywhere he went—all of that fell squarely into the realm of the things he couldn’t control.
The Revolutionary jerked left again. Steadying himself, Aly planted his feet and worked quickly, ignoring the daisy that lowered to get a look at his face. It was always waiting to zoom in on “thoughtful” moments that the producers could use as B-roll and insert anywhere. Aly almost swatted it away again, but he caught his reflection in the lens—and the nick in his eyebrow that girls were always asking about on the holoforums. Even into the second season, he was still not used to the fame. He’d been the kind of kid who studied physics diagrams for hours, not the guy pulling pretty girls. It didn’t help that Aly was so dark. But now, for some reason, folks seemed to think he looked all right—describing his skin like it was kape or chocolate or an expensive type of wood. If he was being honest, it annoyed Aly—you never heard Kalusians compared to food. But it was better than catching taejis about it.