Frontier: Book One - The Space Cadets by Laurence Moroney Read Free Book Online

This
way, even though they were in a gigantic wheel, it felt like they
were walking on a flat surface. With their eyes being fooled, their
brains were too. It was one small thing that made life in space
that little bit easier.
    “ Right now there are ten
sections,” said Seamus. “Six of them rotate at a speed that
emulates Earth ’ s gravity. One emulates the
moon, one emulates Mars.”
    “ What about the other
two?”
    “ Nobody is telling.”
    Soo-Kyung stopped, and looked him
in the eye. “Other planets?”
    “ We think so.”
    “ We?”
    “ It ’ s
something I didn ’ t want to talk about in
the apartment,” said Smith. “But yes, we are keeping an eye
on what ’ s going on around here.
What ’ s really going on.”
    “ But we just got here.”
    “ I know,” interjected Seamus,
before she could finish. “And many of our group worried that you
might be on their side.”
    “ Their?”
    “ Those who run this place. The
ones keeping the truth from the rest of us.”
    “ I have no idea what
you ’ re talking about.”
    “ I know,” said Seamus. “When we
heard about the whole open-enrollment thing, some of our suspicions
were confirmed. So we gained access to their records, and
researched most of the new kids coming aboard. You two are
different.”
    Aisha stopped.
“Different?”
    “ Because we ’ re celebrities,” said Soo-Kyung,
matter-of-factly.
    “ Not because you are, but why you are,” said Smith.
    They walked on in silence for a
while. The girls not knowing what to say, the guys not knowing if
they should discuss it further.
    Finally, Seamus broke the silence,
addressing Soo-Kyung directly. “My country and yours are very
similar in many ways,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Divided
north and south, primarily because of foreign powers. Lots of
violence and lots of death, but nothing changes.”
    She stopped in her tracks, looking
at him directly with a ‘ you ’ re not serious ’ expression
on her face.
    “ So,” he continued. “When I heard
they were doing open enrollment, I started looking into who they
were going to bring in, and why. You jumped to the top of my
list.”
    She turned away, coolly. “I know
who you are,” he continued. “And I know how you survived the
wars.”
    She stopped again in her tracks,
and turned back towards Aisha.
    “ We ’ re
leaving,” she said. “Now.”

Chapter
8
Mysteries
    I remember the night I had my
epiphany. I was sitting in a trench, afraid to put my head up in
case it was shot off. It was like the previous century and a
quarter had never happened. Then, there was a blinding flash of
light, brighter than a thousand suns, and I knew civilization had
begun its grind to a slow and painful halt…
     
    “ Interstellar
travel, ” said the teacher, Miss Abby, who seemed
impossibly tall and blonde, “isn ’ t just
possible, but it ’ s in the here-and-now. We
have it!”
    Her legs were so long that Aisha
wondered if she was born in microgravity. But then her words sunk
in. Interstellar Travel. No longer the realm of science
fiction. It was real.
    “ However,” continued the teacher,
“to understand the nature of it, you ’ ll
understand why it is we can ’ t do it
easily. Not yet, anyway.”
    She called up a graphic, showing
the solar system, with the sun at the center, and the planets
orbiting along the plane of the ecliptic.
    “ Every solar system,” she said,
“has a sphere of icy debris surrounding it. It ’ s called the Oort Cloud. In our case, it ’ s about fifty thousand A-U ’ s
from the sun. That is, fifty thousand times’ the distance of the
Earth to the sun. It ’ s really far
away.”
    “ But studying it gave us some
clues about the nature of gravity, and in particular the force
properties of gravity. It has a wave like nature, like any other
force. But what happens when waves interfere with each
other?”
    A French boy, Jacques, answered.
“You can have constructive and