Beside Strange Waters
an excerpt

Kaden's hands were shaping disbelief; he knew his voice was echoing it. "You're saying they send us out here to be spies?" he asked.

Miah shook her head at him. It wasn't a negation; it was disbelief that he didn't already know. "You mean you thought we weren't?" she asked. Whatever she saw in his face made her shake her head and sigh. "Look, I'll explain after the meeting, all right? We can't be late. The intelligence officer really hates playing catch-up, and you really don't want to get on his bad side. Catch me when we break and I'll tell you everything. I promise." She grabbed him by the wrist and tugged; none of them bothered with small details of personal space. "Just keep your mouth shut in the meeting. And for God's sake, don't sign. He hates that."

Kaden followed along behind her, feeling like he'd just slammed chest-first into a buoy and had the wind knocked out of him. This hadn't been part of any of the contract negotiations when Galactic had come calling. Not at all. And maybe it was naivete and maybe it was idealism, but the idea had never occurred to him, not once.

As far back as he could remember, before he could even walk, he'd watched all the coverage. He'd seen footage of M'Reshi players touring a hundred cultural points of interest, pictures of Mandarri bowing respect before the Earth Cultural Commissoner, a recording of an Arravian seated patiently on the floor of a kindergarden classroom with a fascinated child creeping ever nearer. Gravball was the game, Kaden's first obsession and his dearest love, and its players were the cultural goodwill ambassadors-at-large for their entire people. Earth had been at war with the M'Resh for so long, for instance, that even diplomatic ties were so strained that the M'Reshi had pulled their consul home when Kaden had still been in diapers. But the M'Reshi gravball team still came to play.

The game was sacred. Everyone still hoped, Kaden knew, that a hand extended in friendship over a gravball sphere would turn into an understanding of culture that might, someday, lead to a treaty. His mother had kissed him goodbye when he shipped off with the Galactic team for the five-year tour; his father had hugged him, solemnly, and told him to go do his family and his planet proud. The initial briefings, once they'd shipped out, had been full of lectures about how they were the face of Earth out among the stars. Nobody had once mentioned anything that even hinted at what Miah was saying now.

He could still taste the sphere-fluid in the back of his nose and throat, reaching all the way down to his lungs. It tasted to him like cinnamon and nutmeg and some alien spice he'd never been able to identify. They all spoke, sometimes -- over team dinners, in the locker room after practice, in their quarters when the ship was winding down for the evening -- about how their senses interpreted the world of the sphere. To Kaden, the sphere tasted like his momma's kitchen, lingering on the back of his tongue, lifting him up and cradling him in its blood-warm embrace.

He was one of the lucky ones, he knew: to him, the sphere was home.

To Cassie it was the tang of metal, like licking a knife or drinking motor oil. Steve always complained, once out of the sphere, that he felt like ragweed was shoved up his nose; he'd sneeze and snort and blow, bitching the whole damn time, until everyone on the team had just learned to carry tissues in their kit and shove them over the minute Steve started to squinch up his eyes. Miah said it was like drinking champagne, the expensive kind where the flavor went right up into your sinuses, and she alone out of all of them would never touch alcohol, after a game or otherwise; she said it didn't compare, never would. Jonas was the only one of them who wouldn't ever say what the sphere reminded him of, but Kaden had seen him, right before a practice, floating right before the airlock's membrane with his lips moving like he was trying to talk himself into going back in. Kaden thought Jonas might be one of the ones who'd never made the adaptation, one of the ones for whom the love of the game overrode the fear of drowning.

Every piece of literature Kaden had ever seen said the sphere fluid was colorless. Odorless. Neutral viscosity, neutral buoyancy, like floating back in the womb: as natural as breathing, breathing as naturally as possible, nothing to it. Nothing to be scared of.

Every piece of literature Kaden had ever seen was dead flat wrong. Breathing in the sphere was nothing like breathing air. So many people couldn't handle it; their lungs would seize, their conscious and rational mind dragged down under by the primitive warning signs and danger signals. Most people couldn't learn to override that atavistic fear. Most people couldn't overcome the panic long enough to think clearly: you are not dying; you are not drowning. Breathe.

Kaden knew how lucky he was. As far back as he could remember, gravball had been his sport; he'd watched every televised match, memorized every statistic, begged his parents ceaselessly and fruitlessly for a trip up to High Orbit so he could see a game in person in the zero-G the players played in and everyone said lent an added dimension to the observer's understanding of the game. He'd learned to swim for gravball, played water polo and water volleyball all throughout high school, knowing that none of them came even close to approximating the elegant shift and dance of the sport itself. Pale imitations all of them, but they were the closest he could get, and he'd taken them gladly.

When he'd gotten to college, the third thing he'd done -- after claiming his dorm room keys and registering for classes -- had been to sign up for the NorthAm Collegiate gravball trials. If pressed, he'd confess that his only interest in attending college at all had been for that moment. He'd made it through all the ground tests, one by one, on that strength of will alone. He'd aced the strength trials, passed the swimming test with flying colors, sailed through all the spatial perception drills. They lost a tenth of the field of hopefuls after every one, the people who couldn't hack it, the people just like him who'd grown up dreaming of the sphere and the game and found out too late that their bodies refused to cooperate. He had gone in absolutely determined that he wouldn't be one of them.

And finally, finally, they'd taken him to the regional training camp and let him strip down and step into the tank that was the closest thing to the sphere that terrestrial gravity could produce.