Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of Angelo's Son.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Darien slowly opened his eyes, and moved to turn off his alarm clock – but it wasn’t the alarm clock making that ridiculous noise. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he sat on the side of his bed, trying to—

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The front door, he realized. It must be the front door. With a sigh, he shuffled off to open it, turning on the solar lamps and waving to the pressure-sealed windows to reveal the moonscape outside the dome on his way to the front door.

His father, as always, was away to Terra on business, and since Darien never had visitors this early in the morning, his father must have forgotten to reschedule some important appointment. This never happened, Darien would have to tell the outraged businessman, as he had every time this happened, which was often.

“Damn him,” he muttered as he fumbled with the handle of the door, and finally managed to yank it open. “I’m sorry,” he began, “My fa—”

A girl was standing there on the carpeted front step. Her legs looked long and lean in her black ship-suit, and her hair was waves of black silk that rippled to just below her shoulder blades. She looked straight at him confidently, but Darien still wondered if she was lost. There was no reason – short of a miracle – that such a beautiful girl should show up on his doorstep.

He cleared his throat and tried not to stare. “Umm. Hi?” He was suddenly aware of his baggy, wrinkled sleep-suit and tousled hair. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” she said with a slightly self-conscious smile, “I was looking to talk to Mr. Martin Angelo about a job. My dad said…”

“Oh, well, my dad’s away on business at the moment, and I dunno anything about any job openings… but if you’d like to come in…” He stopped, swallowed, and tried to overcome his shock at his own daring.

She smiled, declined, and asked when his father would be back on Luna. He told her a date that he himself couldn’t consciously remember in his disappointment. As she walked away, he closed the door softly and leaned against it.

He looked around the Spartan-seeming but extremely luxuriant living room of his father’s flat, well lit underneath the solar lamps. The precise but flowing lines of the black iron and leather furniture seemed to mock him with the beauty of the girl’s waving black hair, and her precisely perfect legs. He shook his head ruefully at his own reaction, ran a hand through his hair, and made his way back to his room to get dressed before his morning astrophysics lesson.

In the dark sphere of the teach-sim Darien often lost himself in the beautiful clean simplicity of mathematics. The glowing numbers before him never lied, always had an answer that no matter how ugly looking, was precise and correct. Darien was already ahead of 99% of other boys his age in math and taking astrophysics two years ahead of schedule. Here, with the glowing numbers in front of him, his fingers danced to the tune of integrals and derivatives, dragging and drawing to illustrate his knowledge to the teach-sim. It wasn’t often that he had to re-think a problem, and the teach-sim recognized that, giving him harder and harder problems as the lesson went on. He was in the middle of a particularly knotty one when the door to his capsule burst open to reveal his little sister.

“Darien!” she yelled, running straight to him and hugging him around the middle. “I missed you!”

He blinked at the sudden light and looked down at her. “You were away for one night, Stella. Did you think I would disappear?”

“Nope! But it was my first sleepover and I missed you.” Ten-year-old Stella smiled up at him, her chocolate eyes bright with happiness and a bit of exhaustion. Darien sighed slightly, but smiled back.

“I was in the middle of a problem, Stella.”

“Oops!” she giggled. “Now I can help you with it, though, right?”

“Uh – I don’t think so. Go get some breakfast, Ok? I’ll finish this up and come on out.”

Stella smiled and giggled an ‘ok’ before leaving him again in the dark to smile after her. Their mother had died giving birth to Stella, so Darien barely remembered her, and Stella had never really had a mother. By that time their father had been away on business all the time, so the two children had grown up alone but together. Darien was the one constant in Stella’s life, and Stella was a ray of impulsive sunlight in Darien’s focused, goal driven life.

As Darien got back to work on his problem, he smiled a thin, hard smile. Every problem he got right, every second he saved was recorded on the teach-sim, and stored as his overall score in astrophysics, and his score wasn’t bad at all. In fact, with the scores he’d been getting, he was almost assured a spot in the space-fleet academy at 17. Space-fleet, where all the best minds in math and the sciences came together to use their talents to explore and police the universe… Darien sighed, and then tightened his focus. If he didn’t get this problem done, he’d never get into the Space-fleet academy. With that reminder he dove back into the problem, determined.

When he finally finished he left the sphere reluctantly, though not as reluctantly as he would have been if his father were the one waiting at the stainless steel breakfast counter. He smiled at Stella and sat down in the seat that gave the best view of the moonscape outside the window. There was a place already set for him there, with three pancakes on the plate and a bottle of blueberry syrup next to them. His smiled only deepened. Stella knew him so well.

“You didn’t set a plate for yourself,” Darien accused half heartedly.

“I,” Stella said, stressing her importance, “already had breakfast. At Erin’s. We had cinnamon rolls and these little sticky things from the Sirius sector that tasted a bit like mango and almond. They were yummy.”

“Sounds amazing, but I’m disappointed. How come I don’t get such a high-class breakfast? Geez.”

Stella still smiled. “Because you didn’t. I made you pancakes.”

“Oh,” Darien sighed in mock resignation, and began to toy with his pancakes. “I dunno, they look kinda soggy to me…”

“Da-ri-en! You don’t like my pancakes?”

“I was kidding, Stella, just kidding.”

“You’d better be.” Stella tried to summon a mock stern look onto her ten year old face, but she just ended up giggling again. Darien smiled, hugged her, and began to wolf down his pancakes.

Later, back in the teach-sim and about halfway through a history report, Darien received received a message: His father would be home the next morning. Darien sighed, and glanced at the clock, and blinked. It was nearly 14:00; he’d been going for hours. Now that he thought about it, he was hungry, and there was plenty of time for a run down to The City, especially with the hours he’d jus put in on the teach-sim. And it would be worth it too: his father frowned on visits to what he called the slums and had forbidden Darien to go to the place where most of his real friends hung out. Of course, he hadn’t realized where Darien went most days until long after Darien had made a bunch of friends down there, friends who were universes more interesting than his well-moneyed peers.

He’d first gotten down there when he was 12, four years ago, now. He’d been on his way back from a required group class held on the opposite end of the dome, and instead of walking the high-walk, the bridge that connected the high rises of the rich on opposite ends of the dome to each other, he had descended down into The City, the center part of the dome where no building was higher that three stories, and everything except the neon lights was the same dull grey-brown. This was where the working-class lived, far away from where the rich would ever need to see them.

Darien, in his grey ship-suit, was no different from any other person stepping off the elevator, though his was cleaner, and newer, though not noticeably. What shocked him most was the sheer volume of people. Up in the high-rises people came in groups of one of two, or sometimes three. There weren’t often times where a crowd of people was needed. Here, he found himself muttering ‘sorry’ every few seconds to people who pushed past him without even really seeing him. It wasn’t until he stood on a streetcorner in a momentary lull that he really got a chance to look around.

The houses were shabby and plain, with most consisting of a shop on the first floor with residences above. The signs used to advertise those shops were made of brightly colored, tacky neon. The faces going past him were unshaven, and sometimes unwashed. Few people were actually beautiful. The young Darien had viewed this newly discovered jungle and smiled. This was going to be an adventure in a life that was beginning to feel dull.

Later, his father had lectured him on how careless, how stupid it had been, for him, the son of Federico Angelo, the wealthiest man on the moon, to be wandering around in a dangerous place like The City. There were pickpockets all over, his father said, and worse, assassins. Darien didn’t care. He had continued to wander The City on his way home from class nearly every day.

One day, he had even got up the courage to enter one of the corner shops, a dinghy little place with the words “The Atomic Café” in pink neon on the storefront. He had ordered an Root Beer, something that he’d never had up in the high rises, and sat alone in a corner booth as he sipped it, enjoying both the bubbles that tickled his throat and the people walking past outside.

After a while, a group of boys a couple of years older than Darien had walked in, ordered and claimed the booth right next to his. There were four of them, and they were all arguing about some obscure theory that they had been studying in a group class. Darien couldn’t help overhearing, and it sounded – fascinating. His father had just started concentrating Darien’s education in economics and business, something that would help Darien “take up the family business” when he was older. Even though that was the case, Darien thought it was the dullest stuff anyone had ever had to learn in the history of the Universe. What these boys were talking about sounded much more interesting.

One, a red-head, said, “Avery, you know that the faster you go, the slower time goes. That’s why they’re having so much trouble with a light drive. Though I don’t know that it’s a bad ‘side effect’ that people age slower…”

Another, who looked to have Asian blood responded, “But there’s other side effects too – supposedly. No one’s proved anything yet. I dunno if a ‘light drive’ is even physically possible.”

“The tapes say it isn’t.” This one had blond hair.

“Who says the tapes are always right?” The Asian (Avery?) responded with clear disgust. “They also say that everyone here has an equal opportunity to get rich, but I don’t swallow that debris.”

“Anyway,” the fourth one interrupted, “they’re working on it, but I don’t think it’ll happen in our lifetimes…”

Darien turned around, and looked at the boys. They seemed nice enough, and he was really curious. Here it goes, he thought.

“What will?” He asked.

All four boys looked at him. “Hmm?” Avery grunted in surprise.

“You don’t think what will happen in our lifetimes?” Darien asked, feeling foolish.

“A light drive,” the fourth one, with caramel skin and black hair answered warily.

“What’s that?” Darien asked, hoping that he wasn’t going too far.

“Why do you care?” Avery the Asian retorted.

“It sounded interesting.”

There was silence for a moment in The Atomic Café. Darien took a loud slurp of root beer, breaking the silence, and the boys glanced at each other for a moment, and then smiled.

“Come sit by me,” Avery said, “And we’ll explain it to you.” Darien sat, and Avery began. “It’s simple physics, you see…”

From then on out, Darien met them at the Atomic Café almost every day on his way home from group class, and listened to them argue about physics, chemistry and other sciences. They were all focusing on science of some sort, and every single one of them was bound for Space Fleet. Before then, Darien had never considered that people actually were part of Space Fleet. The more he heard about it from them, the more interesting and viable the idea sounded. In his free time, Darien started accessing the teach-sim of his own free will and taking the science programs in half the time other students would have taken them. He devoured the subjects whole, finally deciding that physics was the most interesting one. Before long, he could hold his own in the conversations held at the Atomic Café, and though he would never say it, he quickly advanced past where his friends were, and began taking the even harder programs, like astrophysics. He was in love, addicted to physics.

When he turned 15, Darien was allowed to pick his own coursework. He dropped all subjects in economics and business, and tested out of three levels of physics. He began taking astrophysics, dreaming of the day that he would use it to help the Fleet ferret out criminals and pirates, or maybe to help them explore the unseen reaches of the galaxy. His father noticed nothing about the change in coursework, but he did notice something.

He was standing just inside the door when Darien got home one night.

“Darien, where were you?”

“Uh- just walking home from class, Dad.”

“Hmm. Right. So it takes you three hours to walk home from school?”

“Um – well… Yeah, it does. If you walk slow enough.”

“No one walks that slow, Darien. Where were you?”

“Nowhere.”

“Were you in The City?”

“No!” Darien answered, almost too emphatically.

“You’re lying to me, Darien.”

“No.”

“Darien…”

There was a silence, and then Darien muttered, “Alright, I was.” Why did his father seem pleased?

“I don’t care what you were doing down there, Darien, but I forbid it. The City is a dangerous place, swarming with all sorts of criminals. You will not go down there again, alright?”

“Alright,” Darien muttered, with no intent of obeying.

The biggest problem was coming up with reasons for his absence. He knew none of the other boy’s last names, and none of them knew his; they had no reason to know that he wasn’t from The City like they were. He told them that he was taking mini-classes in navigation whenever his dad was home, and showed up at the Atomic Café whenever his father was away. He didn’t want them to know that he was Darien Angelo. Whenever someone learned that he was the son of Federico Angelo, they either became overly friendly and eager to please, or became standoffish. Darien supposed that that was what came out of being incredibly rich, and ignored everyone but his sister and his group of friends at the Atomic Café.

Darien was now sixteen, and upon hearing that his dad would be home the next morning, he decided to make a day of it, since he wouldn’t be seeing his friends again until his dad left. He sent a message to his friends as he left the teach-sim, wondering if they wanted to meet since he was ‘off early.’ He knocked on Stella’s teach-sim unit, and told her that he was going out. She was in the middle of an English lesson but she still kissed him on the cheek, and said she’d see him later.

With that, and an affirmative response from the group, Darien was out the door and in the elevator in the blink of an eye.