They Called Me Defective, Until I Tamed the Interstellar Commander novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Zero
On Resonance Day the whole Concord watches Vesper score a flat zero, her fiancé and sister take each other's hands, and the lottery hands her to the Commander nobody survives. She walks to him, and his siren goes silent.
The registrar read my score into the microphone, and every colony in the Concord heard it.
"Hargreave, Vesper. Resonance reading: zero."
She waited a moment, because the law says she must.
"Defective."
The word went up into the dome of the Grand Hall and came back down on three hundred screens.
Somebody in the gallery laughed.
Then everybody did.
I stood on the white circle in my plain test gown with the sensor band still on my wrist.
I was twenty-four.
A fever had kept me from testing at twenty-one, so I was the oldest first-timer the Hall had seen in thirty years.
The commentators had said so all morning.
My sister had gone first.
"Hargreave, Odette. Resonance reading: ninety-four."
The Hall had stood up and cheered for her.
That morning Odette had made me tea and straightened the strap of my gown.
"Whatever the number is, it changes nothing," she had said. "I swapped our slots so you'd go last. You'll be calmer."
I had thanked her.
Now she stood at the foot of the dais in her pearl-white gown with her hands pressed to her mouth.
Slade came down the steps in his captain's dress blues.
He was my fiancé.
He had proposed to me on the observation deck of his first ship, and I had kept the ring on a chain under my collar every day since.
He stopped in front of me, and the cameras swung to follow him.
"Vesper," he said. "You know what this means."
"It means a machine got it wrong," I said. "Retest me."
"A retest takes a month in a defect ward." He said it gently, for the microphones. "And a Fleet captain can't marry a defective. It's regulation."
He held out his palm.
I looked at it.
Then I took the chain off over my head and put the ring in his hand, because the whole Concord was watching and I would not be seen shaking.
Odette stepped up beside him.
"Vesper, I'm so sorry," she said. Her eyes were wet. "I never wanted it to happen like this."
She slid her hand into his, and he let her.
"Odette's number is ninety-four," Slade said to me, quietly now. "I have a career."
The laughter in the gallery got louder.
I turned around so I would not have to look at them.
That was when I noticed the light.
High on the back wall of the Hall, a red lamp had been pulsing all afternoon.
I had thought it was part of the decoration.
It was the Surge siren, the one that flares when a commander's battle implant starts to climb.
Under it, in the last row, a man sat alone in a black Fleet coat with silver bars on the collar.
His chair had a card on it.
UNASSIGNED.
He had not moved the whole day.
He had not looked at the score screen once, not for my sister and not for me.
But when the registrar said my number, he stood up.
He stayed standing.
The registrar cleared her throat and unfolded a sheet of paper.
"By Concord law, a citizen scoring under ten is assigned by lottery to the Fleet commander with the greatest unmet need."
She read the next line twice before she could say it.
"Hargreave, Vesper, is assigned to Commander Caspian Roark of the Ninth Wing."
The gallery went silent in one breath.
Then somebody said, loud enough for the microphones, "That's the one who ate eleven anchors."
"Eleven in nine years," said another voice.
Slade leaned close to my ear.
"Enjoy it," he said. "He doesn't keep them."
I could refuse.
The registrar's own sheet said so, in a footnote nobody ever reads.
A refusal meant a month in the defect ward, my name in every feed, and my father's door closed to me.
It meant standing on this circle until the laughing stopped.
I looked at the long aisle that ran from the circle to the back wall.
Three hundred screens showed my face, and every one of them was waiting for me to cry.
So I walked to him.
The aisle was a hundred paces.
Nobody in that Hall stepped into it with me.
The red lamp pulsed faster the nearer I came, and the people in the last rows pulled their feet out of my way.
Up close he was bigger than he looked on the screens.
There was a pale scar through his left eyebrow, and his steel-blue eyes were fixed on a point past my shoulder.
His right hand was clamped around the back of the chair, and the knuckles were white.
"Commander Roark," I said. "I'm Vesper."
"Go back," he said.
His voice was low and rough.
"I can't," I said. "I'd have to go back past them."
Something moved in his face.
He looked at me then, and I understood he had been looking at me the whole time.
"Don't touch me," he said. "I mean it. Do you understand what I am?"
"Yes," I said, and I laid my fingers over his knuckles.
The siren stopped mid-pulse.
All over the Hall, the red lights went out.
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