Blue Star Enterprises

DATE: 2399

"Are you sure you can’t stay?" Yulia asked Alex nervously.

He kneeled beside her and spoke quietly. "If I stayed, I would just be a distraction for you and the other children."

She knew he was right, she had seen how the kids back on the station avoided Alex and even the ones here cried and ran off the first time they saw him. But she still fidgeted nervously.

"What if nobody likes me?" she spoke in barely a whisper.

"I don’t see how that could possibly happen. Just be yourself, and you’ll make friends eventually. Now I need to go, so head on in."

She gave Alex’s arm a hug before reluctantly walking into the room where they taught kids. She wasn’t sure why they needed a separate room for something like that until she entered the space. There had to be close – well, she didn’t actually know, but there were a lot of kids. More than she had ever seen in one place before.

The older ones sat at a table off to one side, watching something on a holo with bored looks. The holo intrigued her, but she doubted they would let her join them. Teenagers could be prickly like that. She glanced over to the opposite end of the room where the younger kids were making a racket as they played with whatever toys were available. Someone had strung up blankets between that section to muffle the noise, but it wasn’t doing much from where she stood.

The center of the room hosted the largest group of kids. Most of them were a few years younger than her to a few years older. She wasn’t sure how old the oldest kids were in that group, but they looked to be around Markus’ height, so maybe around twelve. That put her right in the middle at nine years old.

She glanced back toward the hallway, wondering how mad Alex would get if she ran out of there and back to his new workshop instead of staying. The choice was decided for her as an adult approached.

"Yulia?" the smiling woman said in a strangely accented voice. It wasn’t at all how Alex talked. His way of talking when she first met him was so strange and almost hard to understand. He did get better with time though. Feeling defeated, Yulia gave a slight nod.

"Good, welcome. We teach you to understand, yes?"

She nodded again and accepted the outstretched hand that the woman offered. She seemed nice enough, even if she seemed to barely speak properly. Yulia hoped she didn’t end up speaking like that when she learned this English, Alex had told her about.

Her first day of learning was mostly just being introduced to a group of kids around her age. She had no hope of remembering all the names though. The next day started with the alphabet. She felt stupid when she was grouped with the younger portion of the children in her group and they were better at saying the letters than her.

She persevered though, getting through all twenty-six letters before the day was up.

The next day was basic math. Yulia knew the teachers were testing for aptitude. Alex had explained that back when he introduced his puzzles. The math was easy, she completed all of the questions, even surpassing the ones the older kids in her group were given.

The teacher smiled at her and gave her a strange gesture with a thumb pointing up. Seeing how happy the woman was, Yulia returned the gesture.

After that day, Yulia was paired with two slightly older girls who introduced themselves as Sarah and Claire. They were really nice and liked to laugh a lot. Like a whole lot. Yulia didn’t quite get it, but she found herself laughing along with them, despite not understanding a word they spoke.

The two girls were showing her pictures on a tablet with the word for it listed underneath the object. Then they would say the word out loud.

When Yulia didn’t reply the first time, that’s when the girls started giggling. It was Claire who tapped her on the arm. "I say, you say," she said in Yulia’s language. Her cheeks flushed red in embarrassment and she nodded.

The girls were really nice and patient with her. She thought their laughing and giggling might have been directed at her, but it wasn’t. They just found teaching an outsider to be extremely entertaining.

They didn’t tell this to her with words, Yulia had tried talking in her language, but the girls just shook their heads. Claire only understood a handful of words to communicate with her. It was more how they acted and encouraged her that got the point across.

Yulia really liked the two girls and when she got to the word for friend, she said it and pointed to them. There was another round of giggling that Yulia couldn’t help going along with before the girls both said the same word and pointed to each other, and then to her.

A bit of her anxiety faded away with that declaration and the next days flew by while she learned more and more. Alex even brought another lady to teach her when she got home. She would have preferred to spend more time with Alex, she missed working on the puzzles or just wandering around like she used to do back home. But she knew he was extremely busy. Anytime she went to his workshop, he was speaking with someone or working on something.

He would hang out with her if she asked, but she could see how important the work he was doing was and didn’t want to distract him.

After the tutoring sessions, Alex would come home, they would eat together, and she would tell him about her day before falling asleep. It was the weekends she looked most forward to during those weeks.

She didn’t mind the school, but the only thing she was learning was the local language, which was not called English, they called it Solarian. Alex was surprised to hear that when she told him. He had muttered something about hundreds of years of drift that she didn’t quite understand before letting her explore with her new friends.

The station, no that wasn’t right, stations were in space and they were on a planet. That meant this was a building. She still found that hard to understand. How could you build something that wasn’t in space? She shook her head at the thought, people did silly things.

The building was huge. They weren’t allowed to go everywhere, but the places that Sarah and Claire showed her were way more than she had ever got to see on the second ring.

In their wandering, and the two girls’ incessant talking, they did find one spot that none of the scary mercenaries were guarding. Yes, she knew how strange it was to accuse someone else of talking incessantly, and she now knew how the kids at the orphanage felt.

Seeing an opportunity to explore this new area, she tried to get Claire and Sarah to show her what was beyond that point, but they were hesitant. They were trying to tell her something but she couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Some gestures and Solarian words of encouragement she had learned over the last few weeks finally convinced the pair to follow her down this new path.

They didn’t get very far before a lady mercenary popped out from behind a corner and glared at the trio. "You three wouldn’t be up to trouble, would you?"

Yulia stiffened when she realized the woman spoke in her native language and not the other two’s.

"No," she responded meekly, not meeting the woman’s piercing gaze.

She said something to the other two girls and they shook their heads.

"Run along then, and stay out of the restricted areas." She repeated more words in Solarian, likely giving the other two girls the same warning.

A few more weeks went by and the trio explored more of the areas available to them. When they came across another area clearly marked as ’Restricted Entry’ – she had learned those words after her last encounter with the scary lady – she hesitated a moment, along with her friends. There was no corner for the woman to hide around, she looked. Seeing the coast was clear, she gave a conspiratorial nod to her friends who looked at each other before sighing and following her through the tunnel.

They didn’t make it far before a harsh shout from behind them stopped them in their tracks. The three girls turned around to see the same woman striding purposely down the hallway toward them, looking annoyed. The woman, who Yulia had learned was called Zorina, seemed to have a sixth sense when someone was about to do something they shouldn’t be doing. Yulia had no other explanation for how the woman kept popping up at the most inopportune times.

She tried to explain to Zorina that she didn’t mean to ignore the rules, she was just curious. She wanted to see what made this place work, like how she had enjoyed the tour back on Petrov Station. That didn’t sway the woman one bit. She reminded her a bit of Headmaster Wong in that respect.

She looked up as Zorina escorted her and the other two girls back to their camp. "I said I was sorry," she pleaded with the woman.

"Sorry is for the first time, not repeated times," the woman stated. "Now you get to see the consequences of your actions."

She hung her head, while the other two girls looked terrified of what might happen.

The three were led to the Hawks’ camp and stuck in a room to wait. A short time later, a man and woman arrived, looking peeved. Sarah started crying and ran over to her parents, who quickly escorted the girl out of the camp.

Not too long after, Claire’s mom stopped by, giving Yulia a disapproving look. Yulia looked away but waved back to Claire as she left with her mom.

Shortly after that, Alex stepped into the room.

"This is not something I expected to be doing today," he stated in his normal voice. She found it hard to tell if he was angry, upset, or annoyed. His avatar face was not showing what he was feeling.

Yulia was worried he was so upset that he had forgotten to use his face to show how he felt and tears threatened her eyes. She forced herself to keep from crying. If she had just listened, this wouldn’t be happening.

She heard Alexander let out a soft sigh, and he sat on the floor next to the chair she was in. "I apologized to your friends’ parents and assured them this would not happen again…"

"It won’t," she managed to choke out, utterly failing at her attempts to keep herself from crying or sobbing. She felt his warm arm wrap her into a hug and she knew he wasn’t angry with her.