“Yes and yes,” he mumbled absently. He shook his head as if to clear it, coming out of his trance. “The barge is huge, like the size of two football fields, but most of it is made up of engines and radiation scrubbers, so we won’t have as much ground to cover as you think.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“There are only three main levels we need to worry about,” he continued. “There’s the hangar, where we’ll dock the Whirlwind. Then up one level is the crew’s living quarters. That whole floor is empty because the crew never had a chance to come on board, but there’s a cafeteria, a few common areas, and a rec room.” He wagged his eyebrows. “There’s even a bowling alley and a movie theater up there.”
“Nice,” I said. “I’m in the wrong line of work.”
“No joke. Anyway, the level we’re interested in is at the top.” Kyler craned his neck and pointed at the barge’s domed roof. “That’s where the towing controls and the pilothouse are, and probably where the pirates will be, too…if they’re smart.”
“That’s a big if,” I said, but a shiver passed over me. I had no idea what to expect from Corpse and Cadaver. I had basically blackmailed Cadaver into bringing me on the barge, so he wasn’t bound to be happy about it. Beyond that, I didn’t know if he would meet me in the hangar, or whether he had told Corpse I was coming on board at all. I hoped to steer clear of them, at least until I was alone. The last thing I needed was for one of them to start talking in front of Kyler and blow my cover.
“Got all the supplies?” I asked Ky. “The Mega Über Lube?”
“Check.”
“The rope?”
“Check.”
“The EZ-Doze and the homemade blow darts?”
“Check and check,” he said. “Just to recap: I’ll use the air ducts to crawl to the pilothouse ceiling. Once I see the pirates through the ceiling vent, I’ll load the blow darts with enough sleep medicine to drop a mule, then I’ll open fire from above. You’ll be waiting outside the door to bust in and take control of the barge. Then we’ll fly it away from Earth and save the day.”
“Divide and conquer,” I agreed, anxiously bouncing my leg. I couldn’t wait to get on with our plan. The sooner we split up, the less likely Kyler would find out my secret. “Let’s not waste a second. The moment we touch down in the hangar, you head for the nearest air duct, and I’ll take the elevator upstairs. We don’t want to lose the element of surprise.”
He shifted me a sideways glance. “Yeah, I know. I literally just said that. It was my idea, remember?”
“Oh, sorry.” I flashed a what-was-I-thinking? grin. “Just nervous, I guess.”
“Yeah, nervous,” he repeated, looking at me like I was a math problem to solve.
A math problem—that was fitting, considering my lies were starting to feel like arithmetic. Each time I told a lie, I not only had to remember the exact details of what I’d said, but also who I had told it to. So as the deception added up, the false details multiplied while my brainpower divided into fractions. Honestly, it was exhausting. Between remembering the lies I had already told and juggling new ones, bending the truth was becoming a full-time job. I envied people who had the luxury of being honest, who could say what they meant and who meant what they said.
I couldn’t think of a good excuse to set Kyler’s mind at ease, so I stayed quiet until the Whirlwind rose to the top of the force-field tube, and the barge’s massive hangar door inched open. That fascinated him enough to turn his attention to the dash. Our ship drifted forward through the open hangar onto a wide landing pad made of steel. The ship touched down and landed with a boom while the hangar door closed behind us. We didn’t have to turn off our engines because the barge’s wireless system did that for us.
I have to say, it was kind of creepy.
I looked for Corpse and Cadaver through the windshield and released a breath of relief when I didn’t see them. The only sign of life on the landing pad was one small shuttle parked nearby, a sporty model with an emblem of a planet-juggling octopus painted on the side. I recognized the symbol as belonging to Quasar Niatrix’s corporation.
Kyler had noticed it, too. “The pirates are flying under Quasar’s logo,” he said. “They’re basically advertising the fact that they’re working for him. Maybe they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer and this will be easy.”
“The shuttle is probably stolen, just like the barge,” I pointed out. “Don’t assume anything will be easy, even if the pirates are idiots. Smart people can be reasoned with. It’s the dumb ones you have to watch out for. Some of the most dangerous people in the galaxy are complete morons.”
“Good point,” Kyler said. He shrugged, and we finished scanning the hangar.
All around us, metal floors stretched to curved walls. I was surprised by how small the enclosure was. I had thought the landing pad would be bigger, based on the enormity of the barge. But then I remembered the hull was crazy thick to protect the crew from radiation, and I imagined the barge as one of those wooden nesting dolls—deceptively big on the outside with a small core. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. A small interior meant less ground to cover to get to the pilothouse, but it also meant fewer places to hide if the pirates turned the tables on us. Without thinking, I reached down and patted my leg for the laser I kept tucked in my boot—the one Kyler thought I had lost in the galley explosion. I relaxed when I felt it there, strapped against my lower calf. It always calmed me to know I could blow things up if I needed to.
Ky stood up and slung his rucksack of supplies over one shoulder. “Ready?”
“Born ready,” I told him.
We jogged down the stairs to the Whirlwind’s loading bay and lowered the boarding ramp, passing Cabe along the way. We had debated bringing him along with us on our mission, but he was too much of a wild card. We couldn’t have him going mental and fusing us to the walls with rope or something like that. So Ky had shut him down and wheeled him into the corner to charge. But when Ky wasn’t looking, I paused to kiss Cabe’s metal cheek before I left the ship. Quirky or not, I considered him part of our crew.
Kyler and I made it to the base of the ramp and braced ourselves for what we might find on the other side. A quick glance around the hangar showed it was still empty. I ignored the weight of suspicion tugging at my stomach and told myself we were lucky. Corpse and Cadaver clearly didn’t view me as a threat, otherwise they would have met me in the hangar with their guns drawn. Lots of people underestimated me. That was something I could use to my advantage.
I pointed at one of the air-vent screens on the opposite wall. “You go first,” I told Kyler. “I’ll stand watch and refasten the screen behind you.”
He nodded, and five minutes later I was watching him crawl up the air duct. When he was out of sight, I pulled my comm link out of my pocket and prepared to send another call to Cadaver. But before I had the chance, it beeped with an incoming message.
I tacked the device to my shirt and answered.
“It’s me,” Cadaver said. He sounded like he was in a good mood, and that made me suspicious. “I saw you shake those Guard ships. That was some halfway decent flying, ghostie.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “I manage.”
“Are you alone?”
“As promised.”
“Where’s the kid that was traveling with you? The Centaurus brat?”
I recited the lie I had prepared for this exact question. “I ditched him. It’s less complicated with him gone. He was starting to ask too many questions.”
Cadaver grunted. “Too bad you didn’t bring him with you. His parents might have paid to get him back.” I heard the rustling of a shrug. “Oh, well. A kid’s ransom is chump change compared to Quasar’s payroll. Which reminds me, we’ve got the rest of your money if you want to come and get it.”
I brightened for a split second…until I remembered overhearing Corpse say that she’d already spent my share of the credits and had no inten
tion of paying me.
Cadaver was setting a trap.
“Sweet,” I said, faking pep while my mind raced with ways to outsmart him. Luckily, he was as dumb as a bag of hammers. “Where are you? In the pilothouse?”
“Nah, the autopilot is doing all the flying. We’re in the cafeteria.” He let out a hearty belch. “It’s dinnertime—burgers, spaghetti, tamales, fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy so thick you could swim in it—we’ve got a real spread going on up here. You should join us. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
My traitorous stomach growled. I pressed a hand over it. I didn’t care if there was a chocolate river flowing through that cafeteria. I wasn’t setting foot in it. “Hungry enough to eat my boots,” I said. “Save me a drumstick. I’ll be there five minutes ago!”
As soon as the call ended, I ran to the elevator and tapped the screen for the third floor, where the pilothouse was waiting for me, nice and empty. My heartbeat raced as a sense of urgency took control. I had to hurry. Corpse and Cadaver were expecting me in the cafeteria on the second floor. If I took longer than a few minutes to get there, they would know something was wrong and come looking for me.
I tapped my booted toe and waited for the elevator doors to open. When a minute passed and nothing happened, I pressed UP again. After two more tries, I quit waiting for the elevator to respond, and I made for the stairwell.
I threw open the metal door and stopped short.
I wasn’t alone.
“Hey there, ghostie,” Cadaver said from inside a glass helmet that covered his entire head. “Want to hear some wisdom?”
“Wisdom? From you?” I asked. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
But despite my sass, I could barely force the insult past the lump in my throat. My whole body was frozen in fear. It took a moment to shake my muscles loose and step back. I didn’t make it far, though, because Corpse lurched out from her hiding place in the corner of the stairwell and snagged my arm in her anaconda grip. She wore a glass helmet, too. She didn’t say anything as she tightened her hold on my arm. Instead, she let the wicked curve of her grin do all the talking.
“Never trust a pirate,” Cadaver said.
Way to state the obvious. That was about the level of wisdom I’d expected from him. I swallowed hard and said, “Next you’ll tell me water is wet.”
Corpse squeezed my arm, making me hiss in pain. She pulled a small canister from her pocket. I had just enough time to bring the can into focus before she sprayed something cool and misty in the air near my face. It was then that I understood why she and Cadaver were wearing helmets. I held my breath to keep from inhaling the poisonous gas while I struggled to break free from Corpse’s iron fist, but it was no use. All she had to do was stand there and wait me out.
Which she did.
My lungs screamed as the moments passed. My body strained for air. It wasn’t long before nothing else mattered except for breathing, not even the knowledge that my next breath might kill me. I tried to fight my body, but I lost the battle. My chest expanded and filled my lungs to bursting. It felt exquisite for a fraction of a second, until a bitter taste crossed my tongue, and my brain felt like it was turning to goo and leaking out of my ears.
My eyes rolled back in my head as everything turned dark. The floor slid out from under my feet, and the entire galaxy seemed to dissolve and fold inward like a black hole with me at the center.
Want to hear something gross?
I hope so, because I’m about to drop some major truth bombs on you about your largest organ, the skin, otherwise known as the epidermis. Your skin will make up about twenty square feet of your surface area by the time you’re fully grown, and you probably have no idea, but it sheds a lot of cells. And I mean a lot of cells, like somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half pounds per year. Kind of mind-blowing when you consider the fact that a cell weighs next to nothing.
We shed so much skin that our cells make up a decent percentage of the dust in our homes. You know that layer of dullness on your furniture? Might as well think of it as a skin graveyard. And those tiny dust motes floating gracefully in the air like miniature snow crystals? Hate to break it to you, but you’re breathing your family’s DNA. Now here’s where it gets freaky. There are these microscopic bugs called dust mites that love nothing more than to chow down on our dead skin flakes.
Not only do dust mites nosh on your bodily leftovers, but they hang out and get frisky with each other, which leads to laying eggs and hatching another generation of literal flesh-eating monsters. Oh, and did I mention that they poop? (Everything poops; that’s the first law of biology.) Mites drop tons of microscopic deuces, and you’re breathing in those fudge nuggets even as we speak. And dust mites are everywhere—on your skin, in your socks, under your pillow.…
In your ventilation system.
Especially in your ship’s ventilation system, because the air in deep space is dry and cold, so your oxygen has to be heated and humidified before it’s safe for you to breathe it. And you’ll never guess what kinds of places dust mites love to make their homes. That’s right, in warm and humid places.
Places like the air duct I was crawling through.
My hands and knees kept skidding on the metal floor below me, which was especially fun considering the vent was on a steady incline toward the upper levels. I squinted through my night-vision glasses, barely able to see twelve inches in front of my face. The goggles were older-model hand-me-downs from Duke. There was a brighter headlamp in my backpack, but I didn’t want any light leaking from the exterior vents and giving away my position.
Even in the dark, I could tell from the greasy feel on my palms that more than humidity had created this residue. Little bits of grit and clumps of hair told me the intake vents had sucked in decades of “souvenirs” from past crew members—not just skin cells, but oil and mucus and heaven only knows what other cooties—and not one of the geniuses from Fasti had thought to clean the ductwork in all that time. Apparently, creating man-made stars was no big deal, but basic hygiene? Noooo, that was reaching too far.
“Disgusting,” I hissed, pausing to shake the slime off my palms. “When I make it out of here and save Earth, I’m going to bathe in disinfectant.”
I crawled a little farther and tried not to think about what I was wading through. I had just begun to trick myself into believing I was on an algae-covered waterslide when I noticed the smell, and all my illusions came crashing down. I alternated between breathing through my mouth, which made me gag because I was basically inhaling crew cooties, and breathing through my nose, which made me gag from the stink. Either way I couldn’t win.
After another twenty minutes—or maybe an hour, it was impossible to tell—the slope of the ductwork evened out, informing me I had reached the barge’s second level. I took a moment to orient myself before recalling the site map, then I turned left and began crawling up a new incline to the third floor. I barely made it a few more yards when I heard something strange coming from ahead of me, and I paused to cock an ear toward the sound. A noise clicked nearby, like fingernails tapping on metal. I increased the power on my night-vision glasses and peered around for the source of the clicking.
What I saw made the bottom drop out of my stomach.
Remember how I said dust mites are microscopic? I should have been more specific. The dust mites on Earth are microscopic. But dust mites in space? They’re the size of my fully splayed hand…a fact I didn’t realize until that very moment.
I froze, staring in horrified fascination at the semitranslucent arachnids happily munching on clumps of dust and grime with their sharp pincers. Crouched there, trapped in the dark, I had to remind myself that dust mites didn’t consume living flesh. (At least not the ones on Earth. I hoped the space variety hadn’t mutated too far from the original specimens.) There were three mites within view: one female and two males, judging by the slight difference in the size of their abdomens. They each swiveled a head toward me in eerie slow
motion, blinking almost lazily, as if they’d noticed me and couldn’t decide whether I was worth the effort of investigating any further. I must not have seemed impressive to them, because they turned their buggy eyes back to the dust clumps and resumed munching.
I studied them, taking in the bend of their eight legs, the coarse hairs protruding from their backs, the graceful lines of their exoskeletons. Their hard shells explained the clicking sounds I had heard. It made me think back to all my trips on the Whirlwind, and the occasional weird noises the ship had produced in the night—the ones my parents had dismissed as the products of my overactive imagination. I bet we had giant dust mites in our ventilation system. There’s an old saying that everything is bigger in Texas. That might have been true five hundred years ago, but not anymore. Now everything is bigger in space, thanks to the advanced levels of radiation.
As quietly as I could, I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my headlamp, a stretchy elastic band with supercharged lighting along the front. I wanted a closer look at the gargantuan mites. I strapped the device to my forehead and tapped the power panel to illuminate the bulbs. The area in front of me lit up so brightly I had to shield my eyes, and then something happened I couldn’t have predicted.
The dust mites lost their friggin’ minds.
They screamed. I didn’t think bugs were capable of screaming, but there was no other way to describe the earsplitting screech that emanated from their jaws. Their pointed legs clicked in a frantic dance against the metal floor, sending up a clatter I could feel more than hear…you know, because of the wailing. I was so captivated by the organs pumping inside their translucent exoskeletons that I ignored the chaos for a beat. But then they seemed to get angry, because their pincers snapped out at the air in front of them. It wasn’t until they advanced on me that I noticed their eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and I figured out what was wrong.
The headlamp. They hated it. Like deep-dwelling ocean creatures on Earth, the dust mites must have spent so much time existing in the dark that they’d lost their pigment and their ability to tolerate bright lights. As I scrambled back from their snapping pincers, I tapped the power panel on my headband. The light began to fade but not quickly enough to satisfy the arachnids.
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