During the night, the staff disappeared. It was quick, and nobody saw – or even heard – a thing, but every single member of staff was gone before any of the recruits knew it.
There were those who did find out soon afterwards, though. Archie woke Kravitz with a quick shake of the shoulders.
“They’ve gone!” he whispered, not wishing to wake any of the other boys in the dormitory.
“What?” There was not much light, but Kravitz could just about make out Archie’s silhouette against the glow from the corridor that came through the half-open dormitory door. He knew instantly it was Archie from the half-cynical, half-mischievous voice he’d grown up with over the past five years at the Academy.
“Who’s gone?” Kravvy asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“The matron’s gone, the officer on the watch is gone – all of the staff have gone!” Archie clarified.
“Gone?”
“Yeah – vanished.”
“They can’t’ve,” Kravvy said, but the unrefined excitement in his friend’s voice was highly contagious. He could feel a little mischief coming – he always seemed to be dragged along when Archie got itchy feet. And usually it led to trouble.
“They have,” Archie’s voice pierced the silent darkness, and almost in anticipation of his next suggestion, Kravvy’s heartbeat had already quickened. “Come on,” Archie said, “let’s go take a look!”
2
Tip-toeing out of the room, they slipped through the door, closing it behind them to keep their discovery to themselves. Out in the corridor, there was no matron. Usually, there was a matron on duty, all through the night. Either The Witch or the Wolf or the Hyena. Sometimes Kravvy felt sorry for them – after all, every three nights they had to work when everyone else slept. But out here it wasn’t such a hardship for them, the night shift. What was the difference between night and day, after all? Most of the lights in the school were on in the day and most of the children were around. There could be no ‘unsociable’ hours out here – matrons had no social lives anyway. Besides, when they roared orders at the young recruits, they lost all possible sympathy, at least that was what Kravvy thought.
But there was no one here now. The matrons were gone.
The dull lights were also a signal that all wasn’t right. Looking ahead, he could make out Archie’s silhouette – his characteristic sprawl of curly hair that flouted all the regulations unlike Kravvy’s own close-cut hair – but all details were cut out by the lack of light. Archie gestured for him to follow him out. The air conditioning was slightly chilling against Kravitz’ bare top as he tiptoed after his curly-haired friend to the next ‘safe’ vantage point at the end of their dormitory’s corridor.
“I was just up to get a drink of water,” Archie whispered, a little louder here now that they were away from prying ears. “And there was no matron.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s no one around,” Kravitz said, his heart beating like a bass drum at a rock concert as he felt suddenly very vulnerable out there dressed in nothing but a pair of PJ bottoms.
Archie smiled an all-knowing smile, the edges of his face just picking up the dull grey light. He was a brainy one, Archie; and over the years they’d been to the Academy together, Kravitz had quickly learned to trust both his word and his judgement. Just that smile set him at ease considerably. “I had a quick explore on my own,” he told Kravitz. “A bit of research to test my hypothesis, you might say.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t see any matrons outside the other dorms, either. And no officers wandering between.”
“No one at all?”
“Nope. And the lights around our wing are all turned down like this.”
Kravitz felt a shiver shoot down his spine, a mixture of excitement, nerves and the cold air. “What do we do?” he asked, making himself feel like the stupid one, but he wasn’t. You couldn’t help feeling a little unintelligent around Archie. That was why he wasn’t very popular.
“Don’t you want to find out what’s happened?” Archie’s face was alive, his eyes full of the thrill of the unauthorised. “Don’t you want to know?”
“Well… kinda…” the taller, more athletic Kravitz replied nervously, his muscles trembling slightly from the adrenaline flooding through his system.
“I thought you wanted to be a colonist some day?”
“I never said I was certain… it’s my parents who said I should…”
“Come on, it’ll be an adventure,” the curly-haired boy said, poking his head around the corner into the larger hallway outside. “We can explore, see how far we get – just like being a colonist.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if we get caught?”
“Come on, Kravvy! Where’s your sense of adventure? If we get caught then so be it – we’ll just have to be careful. But I tell you, there’s nobody to catch us.”
“They could be trying out some new kind of surveillance system…”
“When have they ever tried any ‘new system’? Everything’s been the same for five years! We haven’t even seen the outside world – it’s time for a little exploring. It’s like a prison in here, not a damn military school.”
“Mmm…”
“Look,” he put his hands on Kravitz’ shoulders, “trust me, okay? Have I ever got you in trouble before?”
“Plenty of times,” the taller boy smiled back, his white teeth visible in the low light.
“Great,” Archie grinned back and patted his companion on the arms briefly. “Never know, we might get as far as the girls’ end.”
3
It was true: they hadn’t seen the outside world in five years. Kravitz, like the rest of them, was a poor little rich boy whose parents had sent him to the most highly rated military academy in the solar system. A poor little rich boy from a family so large, his parents didn’t know what to do with him. He hadn’t seen them for five years, either.
As one of seven brothers, he’d long had the feeling he was superfluous to his parents’ needs. A drain on resources. He felt even more so here at Aurelius, one of the better-known military academies on Mars. It wasn’t even as though his brothers had been through the same as him: none of them had gone to Aurelius, they’d all gone to Charlemagne – the premier college on Earth.
“But you’re special,” his mother had said to the tearful thirteen-year-old. “You want to be a colonist, don’t you? You want to see beyond the Solar System. None of the others do. Being a colonist is the greatest adventure anyone could have! You’ll be a real hero, pushing back the boundaries of colonised space, travelling close to the speed of light to discover whole new solar systems!”
But did he want to be a colonist? Did anyone really want to be a colonist past the age of twelve? It was a fine pipe dream for children brought up on exciting science fiction movies and games, but the Federation had advertised lavishly for years after the perfection of the near-light ships, and only a trickle of men and women signed up to stretch the boundaries of human existence. The government was offering massive incentives to families sending their children to the stars now, and even then it was a fairly unpopular thing to do.
His parents had always encouraged his childhood pipe dreams, which had been little more than his puerile attempt to stand out from his siblings, but right now, Kravvy wasn’t so sure he wanted to be a colonist. This military school was supposed to help him make his mind up, though – everyone knew being a colonist was an extremely tough thing to be, but this school was supposed to provide the lessons to make them see that they could do it if they were good enough and worked hard and maintained discipline.
“It’ll be a tremendous honour for the family if you’re a colonist – you want that, don’t you?” his mother had said to him. “Imagine how incredible it would be to see alien landscapes, to lay your eyes on places that no one has ever laid eyes on!”
And even if he didn’t want to be a colonist, she’d said, the fact that he’d been to this school meant that he’d have a huge advantage over others in the job market. That’s what her parents had said, anyway. But Kravvy wasn’t sure what he wanted to do any more. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be so far away from other people. What if something dangerous happened, and there was no army to protect them?
“Come on!” Archie said, snapping his mind back to reality.
“You’re sure we’re not being watched?”
“Positive – I’m all right, aren’t I? I’ve been sneaking around for half-an-hour or more.”
Archie had never wanted to be a colonist – it was just that his wealthy parents didn’t like him. Worse than Kravvy’s situation, Archie was the illegitimate son of two prominent politicians on separate sides of the Martian Senate. Archie wasn’t just unwanted: he was an embarrassment to his parents. He’d taken a keen sense of self-reliance from that, though, which was why he sometimes got in trouble.
“Girls’ wing’s that way,” Archie said, “but the entrance is down on floor two, so we should go this way.” He pointed down the large spiral staircase made of polished-wood and covered by a rich red carpet - was one of the many remnants of the building’s past as an enormous Martian mansion house for a multi-trillionaire eccentric.
“There’s a back entrance on floor nine – might be safer,” Kravvy said. But the whole place seemed so different in the darkness – Kravvy had been there for five years, knew the whole place like the back of his hand except the Girls’ end, and he was finding it difficult to orientate himself even though they were just round the corner from their own dorm corridor.
“The NCOs’ dorms are on floor eight – I’m not going through there, whether the staff have gone or not,” Archie said. “Come on, floor two.”
He followed Archie. Archie had always been one to take risks – whenever they played dares after lights-out, it was always Archie that went furthest, did the most daring thing and left the game un-playable for any who wanted to compete. He’d been inside some of the Non-Commissioned Officers’ dorms – Kravvy had only twice dared even go on the same floor.
But now was different – Archie had said he’d been wandering around for half an hour without seeing a trace of the teachers. As they all knew, you could get halfway across school in half an hour – every now and then they had dare time trials, to see how far each person could go in a set time, or the variation: to see how long it took to get to certain places. Archie was always best at that sort of thing. He took risks.
So he had to have strayed quite far without seeing anyone.
