“Let’s dock at the depot,” he said. “A few umbilicals have opened up. Let’s go inside and stretch our legs. We’ll take a holopad and read the feeds in there for a while.”
“They’re charging ridiculous docking prices,” said Imala. “They bill you by the hour. We don’t have that kind of money.”
“I do,” said Victor.
“Yeah, money for your education.”
“Which I’m not likely to get. Please, Imala, let me buy you lunch. We could both use a breather.”
They docked and floated down the umbilical to the café. There were few people inside. Victor launched toward a table near the back, away from everyone else, and strapped himself in. Imala followed, and soon a waitress floated over.
Victor looked at the menu, but then returned it to the waitress. “Would you do a specialty order?”
“Depends,” said the waitress.
“White rice, black beans, shredded beef, fried platanos, and an arepa with butter.”
The waitress looked up from her wrist pad. “I don’t know what platanos and arepas are, so we probably don’t have those.”
Victor wasn’t sure what the English word was, so he looked it up on the holo. “Platanos are plantains. You know, like giant bananas, only starchier?”
The waitress looked annoyed. “I know what a plantain is.”
“Do you have any?”
“I’ll have to check. What’s an arepa?”
He had been looking it up. It wasn’t in the dictionary, which meant it was unique to Venezuela and had no English equivalent. “It’s a round corn patty, maybe four to five inches across. Really thick, not thin like a tortilla. They’re not hard to make.”
“They are if you’ve never made one before. I’ll have to check.” She turned to Imala. “Let’s hope you’re easier.”
“I’ll have the same as him,” said Imala.
The waitress sighed. “Of course you will.”
She floated back toward the kitchen.
“A family dish?” asked Imala.
“The unofficial plate of Venezuela, where my family’s from. We ate it all the time on the ship, although truth be told, we usually ate it without the shredded beef and plantains. Both were practically nonexistent in the Kuiper Belt. Our diet was more about quantity than quality. We ate whatever was cheapest and would last the longest. Sometimes we’d eat nothing but rice and beans for weeks on end. Even your sweat starts smelling like beans after a while.”
Imala scrunched up her nose.
“Sorry,” said Victor. “Not good table conversation.”
She smiled. “You miss your family.”
Victor was folding his napkin into odd little shapes just to keep his hands busy. “Yes. I do. Very much.”
“We’ll find them, Vico. We’ll get you back to them.”
Victor sighed and looked up at her. “I’m not sure that we should now.”
“That’s why we came out here, isn’t it?”
“I’m saying everything is different now, Imala. Everything we hoped and prayed wouldn’t happen is happening. I never thought it would come this far. I thought I’d give the world the evidence, and they would respond, they would do something to prevent it from getting this bad.”
“That’s not your fault, Victor. You gave the evidence. The world didn’t listen. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Well I do, Imala. If I had done more, if I had—”
“What else could you have done? You were hurt, barely alive. Your body had wasted away to nothing. You were under arrest. You couldn’t go anywhere. All things considered, I’d say you did a bang-up job.”
“If it had been someone else, the world would’ve listened. If my father had come—”
“Your father wouldn’t have survived the trip. No one would have found the data cube. Or if they did, they would’ve thrown it away. The world would’ve been caught totally unawares.”
“Their current situation isn’t any better.”
“Yes, it is,” said Imala. “We don’t know all the ways people have been preparing, Vico. We can’t see everything. I can assure you. There are armies out there that have been training for this because of you.”
“Yes, and I want to join them.”
She looked surprised. “You want to join the military?”
He felt stung by her obvious disbelief again. “I’m eighteen, Imala. I’m old enough to enlist.”
“Yes, but with what army? You’re not a citizen of any country, Vico. You’re space born. No one will take you.”
“This is a fight against the human race, Imala. Last time I checked I was human.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that black and white, Vico. Earth doesn’t work that way.”
“Well why not? Why does everything have to be so constricted by regulations? It drives me insane. If there’s a problem, you fix it. You don’t set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it. Maybe that requires a little bit of ingenuity and doing it a way that’s never been done before, but so what. If the problem’s solved, why does it matter how it’s done?”