Stowaway

by John David Anderson

  Leo fell in behind a still-grinning Kat, who thankfully hadn’t had to rip out anyone’s heart. She certainly seemed like she was about to. Beside him the Queleti snorted. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” he muttered. “I’ve been told I’m a very good kisser.”

  Leo reached up and touched Boo’s shoulder. It was the first time he’d actually touched the Queleti’s fur, he realized.

  It was even softer than it looked.

  They had to wait for Dev to go gargle something—like alcohol, he said, or maybe acid—before they could begin. But when he came back into the chamber off the main room he was carrying a can of soda.

  Real fizzy soda. Leo could hear it crackling. It made his mouth water.

  “Is that . . .” Leo started.

  “Coca-Cola, yes. The original. Full-on sugar. You think Bowie’s rare, try finding one of these that isn’t flat.” Dev took an exaggerated gulp, followed by a satisfied if slightly exaggerated “aah.” Leo licked his lips. It had been years since he’d had any kind of soda. Beverage choices on board the Beagle consisted of reclaimed water, weak coffee, and powdered milk substitute, sometimes flavored with cocoa when he could get it. He raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was an obvious hint.

  “Sorry. I’d give you a sip, but I need it all to get the taste of this guy’s hairy lips out of my mouth,” Dev said, shooting an eye at the Queleti. He took another sip and sighed. “So refreshing.”

  “Good luck getting Dev to share anything,” Mac said. “He’s incredibly possessive of the classics. Coke. Super Mario Bros. Motown. If it was invented before the year 2000, he’s all over it. Despite the fact that you were born, what, twenty-six years ago?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Dev corrected. “And I appreciate things from all ages, from Beethoven to Cardi B. to my Robot Concubine. I am a true connoisseur of human culture.”

  “Is that why you have all this stuff?” Leo asked.

  “We have all that stuff so we don’t forget how cool we used to be. Before the Aykari showed up and basically told us we were obsolete. I mean, it’s not like everything humans ever did is suddenly crap because some aliens came down and showed us how to make spaceships and laser guns.”

  “Though laser guns are pretty awesome,” Mac said. “Provided that they aren’t pointed at you.”

  Leo felt the same way. More so recently.

  “Though if we’re being perfectly honest,” Mac continued, “you have to admit that a lot of what we came up with is junk. . . . Like boy bands.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dev protested. “Boy bands were a necessary step in human evolution. Without them we would never have Justin Timberlake.”

  “Exactly,” Mac replied. “Back me up here, Black.”

  “Boy bands were totally uncalled for,” Baz said matter-of-factly.

  Leo waited for Boo to ask him what a boy band was, but perhaps the name was self-explanatory.

  Dev stuck to his guns. “Whatever. You love what you love, and you hang on to it no matter what. Am I right, Leo?”

  Leo shrugged. His father wouldn’t have appreciated the shrine these two had built in the other room; of all of them Dad’d been the most willing to leave all their Earthly stuff behind. There’s so much out there. So much we haven’t even discovered yet, he told Leo once. We’ll make a new home, he insisted, though he never explained when or where or how. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered is that this new world that was promised would be better than the old one.

  Obviously not everybody felt the same.

  “Time to plug in,” Mac said, settling into the chair in the center of the room. The chamber they stood in was much smaller than the one with the cozy carpet and shelves full of relics. The floor here was metal again, as were the walls, though most of them were lined with vid screens and humming machines. The chair—one of only two places to sit in the room—reminded Leo a little of when he used to visit the dentist as a kid, except it had almost as many buttons and switches as the cockpit of the Icarus. Leo never liked going to the dentist. For all the advances in technology the Aykari had brought with them, they had done little to improve dental hygiene. Leo supposed he couldn’t blame them: the Aykari didn’t even have teeth.

  “This is Cerebro,” Mac’s voice box said. “The best network infiltration system money can buy. Please don’t touch a single thing.” Mac undid the top two buttons of his shirt, revealing the intersection where metal met flesh, where the contraption that held his brain and kept it steady on his shoulders narrowed to a V between his collarbones, ending in a round circle just above where his heart would be, a hole the size of a marble in its center. Leo tried not to stare at the scars where the steel had been grafted to skin, but Kat, it seemed, couldn’t help herself, reaching with her right hand and rubbing her left arm above the elbow.

  The crew of the Icarus circled around as Dev attached a thick yellow cord with a metal adapter directly into the jack in his partner’s chest. Mac was now literally plugged in.

  The giant center screen in front of them flashed to life.

  “My partner here was actually named after a computer, don’t you know,” Dev said. “Maybe that’s why he thinks like one.”

  “Self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mac said.

  Leo had never hacked into anything before. Computers weren’t his thing. He was pretty good with his hands—he could help fix a gas leak or steer the hydraulic forklift that his brother and he used to do doughnuts in the Beagle’s hangar—but anything more complicated than his watch or his datapad eluded him. “How does this whole thing even work?”

  “It’s basically a big game of leapfrog,” Dev said. “We use the high-powered transmitter stationed in this tower to get access to any com systems it can reach. Then we pirate those coms to jump out to others until we find one with a Djarik signature. The Djarik don’t have a huge presence in this part of the galaxy, thank god, so that could take a while, but we will get there. And that’s when the fun begins.”

  “What’s the fun part?” Boo asked.

  “The best part of stealing any treasure,” Mac said. “Not waking up the dragon.”

  Leo watched as a stream of code marched across the giant screen in front of them, all in symbols he couldn’t decipher. His implant was terrific at translating alien speech, but it was no help when it came to reading another language—especially not an encrypted one.

  “Once you’re inside the Djarik network, how long will it take you to find what they’ve done with Leo’s father?” Baz asked.

  “Hopefully not more than a couple of minutes,” Dev said. “Anything longer than that and we will be toast.”

  In the chair, Mac’s fingers danced wildly along the controls. Leo half expected to see blossoms of color exploding on the surface of his brain, like when doctors used to do those scans that showed neural activity, but Mac’s cerebral cortex just floated there peacefully. Dev caught Leo staring.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it? The way it just bobs around. It’s just so strangely beautiful and hideous at the same time. I mean seriously, sometimes I can just sit and watch it for hours.”

  “You’re making me self-conscious,” Mac admitted.

  Leo looked away.

  “In case you’re wondering, and I’m sure you are—it happened a long time ago,” Dev said. “When he was just a kid. Tragic ceiling fan accident. Too much elevation while jumping on the bed. Isn’t that right, Mac?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Mac said. “I got sucked into a turbine on board a cruiser. Took it clean off. Thankfully there was an Aykarian surgeon on board. Saved my noodle, just not my pretty face.”

  That was the Aykari for you: no advances in dentistry, but they could reattach your brain to your body.

  “Trust me,” Dev said. “It’s for the better. I’ve seen pictures of this guy as a kid. He was no JT, I’ll tell you that.”

  Suddenly the code disappeared. The center screen above went black, then flashed green briefly before it showed an image of a pix
elated figure running down a corridor filled with hundreds of branching hallways. “We’re in,” Mac said.

  “In? In where?” Leo asked.

  “The Djarik data cluster,” Dev answered, tapping on another screen beside him. “That didn’t take long. They must have a ship not too far from here.”

  “Hope it’s not a warship,” Kat said. Though Leo had never seen a single Djarik ship that wasn’t built for waging war.

  “This is a low-level entry point,” Mac said, his fingers tapping even more frenetically. “The Aykari have much stronger frontline security protocols and are harder to hack into initially, but the Djarik aren’t pushovers. The security will increase exponentially the deeper we get. They keep the good stuff locked up tight.”

  On the screen Mac’s avatar darted down one corner and then another, making turns seemingly at random. It reminded Leo of one of those retro video games—the kind that you had to use an actual handheld controller to play. “Is that what it really looks like inside?”

  “Hardly,” Dev said. “Mac and Cerebro are basically churning through strings of data, sifting through code. We just translate it into an image so he doesn’t have to tell me what’s happening every second. Besides, it’s more fun this way.”

  “For you,” Mac said. On-screen, the figure encountered a series of doors that opened the moment Mac’s fingers typed a sequence into the console on his chair. “Easy as the square root of pi . . . hold up . . . security spikes. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Leo looked back at the screen to see that the corridors had narrowed and the walls, ceiling, and floor were covered in pointy barbs.

  “Like running through a cactus farm in your underwear,” Dev said, taking another giant slurp of his soda, though Leo was too entranced by what was happening to feel thirsty.

  “What do the spikes do?” Kat asked.

  “They’re like little code land mines. Mac touches one and it echoes back and destroys our own security walls, allowing the Djarik to trace our signal, find our location, hack back into our system. From there they can shoot a virus back across the galaxy, straight into Cerebro, and through it into the processor in Mac’s chest, causing it to overload and explode. Pretty amazing, actually.”

  Into his chest?

  “Wait, you mean they actually can blow him up?” Leo shouted.

  “It’s all right. Mac’s an expert. This is pretty much all he does in his free time. That and watch Lost over and over again.”

  “Hurley’s the bomb,” Mac decreed.

  Leo felt like he was about to hurl. He knew this would be risky—Dev had been abundantly clear about it—but it hadn’t really sunk in until now. He’d been too absorbed with the possibility of finding his father to think about what it might cost. Now, seeing Mac plugged in, risking his life for some kid that he’d just met, Leo felt his stomach sour.

  The on-screen avatar continued to leap and dodge as the tunnels grew narrower, the spikes more plentiful.

  “Speaking of Lost,” Mac continued, his voice strangely serene given that he was one spike away from possibly exploding in his chair, “did you know that of the hundreds of free-thinking, sentient life-forms we’ve encountered in the universe, human beings are the only ones to have invented scripted television? It’s true. I mean, most alien races have some form of storytelling, naturally, but they don’t have, like, soap operas and NCIS. We invented those. Those are ours.”

  “And fast-food restaurants,” Dev added. “A uniquely human invention. Oh the glory of it all.”

  “Soap opera?” Boo repeated, no doubt trying to figure out how his own translations of those two words could possibly go together. Leo was no help; he had no idea what they were either.

  “Bingo,” Mac said, his body suddenly stiffening as his digital projection came to the end of a corridor. On the screen Leo could see a podium with a massive book sitting on top, an old-fashioned lamp illuminating the pages. “This is it. The Djarik military network.”

  “It’s a book?” Baz asked.

  “No. That’s just the graphic we use to represent it,” Dev explained. “It’s actually a giant data mine, near endless strings of information. But if your father is a Djarik prisoner, he’ll probably be in there somewhere.”

  On-screen, the book opened, revealing more alien code, the pages flipping fast as a hummingbird’s wings. There had been a hummingbird feeder in the front garden when Leo was little. His mother used to let him fill it with nectar, and then the two of them would sit on the porch and wait for the birds to arrive. One year they just didn’t show up—something in Earth’s rapidly changing ecosystem caused them to slowly die out, like the sea lions and spider monkeys before them. Too much change, all too fast—even the hummingbirds couldn’t keep up.

  “Scanning files,” Mac said. “Naval logs. Military communications. Prisoner data files. What did you say the name was again?”

  “Fender,” Leo said. “Calvin Fender.” And Gareth, Leo thought, clinging to the possibility that he’d been taken as well, but one step at a time.

  “Fender,” Mac repeated. For the first time the room was silent, everyone watching the screen above them, the pages flipping. “Fender. Fender. Hang on. I think I’ve got something.”

  Leo jumped. Kat put her flesh-and-blood hand on his shoulder.

  “Calvin Fender. Human. Coalition scientist. Captured during a boarding of the research vessel Beagle.”

  Leo tasted blood on his bottom lip and realized he’d bit down hard enough to split it. “That’s him! What does it say? Where is he? Is he alive?”

  Mac paused for a moment—long enough that Leo’s own heart, already beating a thousand times per minute it seemed, threatened to explode.

  “Yeah. He’s alive,” Mac continued at last. “Says he was taken to a top secret mining and research base somewhere in the Quar sector where he is currently being held prisoner.”

  Leo felt his legs quiver, about to fold underneath him. His father was alive. In Djarik hands, but alive. Mac’s fingers dashed across the console even faster. “I’m accessing the exact coordinates of the facility now. These security walls are really hard to crack. They do not want this place to be found.”

  “What about my brother?” Leo asked. “Gareth. Gareth Fender. Does it say anything about him?”

  “Wait? We need to find your brother too?” Dev said. “Did they take your whole freking family?”

  Leo didn’t answer. He held his breath. The hand resting on his shoulder squeezed gently.

  The pages of the book started to ruffle again, Mac frantically scanning the Djarik database. “Give me a sec,” he said. “There are some files here attached, substreams, but they’re way more heavily encrypted. I’ve never seen security like this before.”

  Leo shut his eyes. Please let it be Gareth. Please let him be there too. Please let him be okay.

  “Wow. This isn’t just prisoner details. Your father must be important because this is some serious Mission Impossible stuff. Just let me try one thing . . . see if I can unlock this portal . . .”

  Mac’s fingers danced.

  Kat’s finger pointed. “What is that?”

  Dev dropped his can of Coke, the last of the precious soda splashing his feet. “Oh crap,” he said. The screen suddenly started flashing red. A jarring series of beeps emanated from the banks of computers.

  “What’s going on?” Leo looked to the screen to see what appeared to be a giant white spider skittering toward Mac’s avatar. It came out of nowhere. And it was moving fast.

  “Time’s up,” Dev said. “Big nasty bug headed straight for you.”

  “Yeah. I see it,” Mac fired back, his voice sounding panicked for the first time.

  “If you see it, then what the hell are you still doing there?”

  “Just give me three more seconds!” Mac’s fingers continued to fly over the controls of Cerebro as the spider scrambled closer. Leo felt as if a hundred little white spiders were crawling over his own bare skin, digging underneath, burrowing
inside him.

  “You don’t have three more seconds,” Dev said.

  “Hang on!”

  “Mac . . .”

  “I think I’ve got it!”

  “Mac, get out of there! Now!”

  On-screen, the spider lunged, driving its fangs into the avatar’s chest, wrapping its long legs around the digital projection. Mac’s real body suddenly began to convulse, his arms and legs jerking violently, hands flying off the controls, his brain knocking against the side of its container. He yelled. Sparks flew.

  Dev dove for the cord snaking out of his partner’s chest, pulling hard.

  Leo screamed as the screen above them turned black.

  The Aykari notion of love, as we humans have come to define it, doesn’t exist, at least not in the romantic sense. Marriage as an institution does not exist. There are no core family units. Procreation is simply a matter of survival and necessity and is handled with an almost clinical aspect. Their society, their entire civilization, is based upon a communal ideal wherein every Aykarian is essentially your life partner—a bond that is expected, immutable, and lifelong, and which serves as the foundation for their social contract.

  In this sense, the Aykari’s sense of devotion is much stronger than that of humans, who are often fickle and self-serving in forming relationships, making and breaking bonds based on individual whim rather than the needs of the collective. A single Aykari will always refer to itself in the first person plural; with them it is always we and never I. Perhaps that is one reason why they are the more advanced civilization, and we are the toddlers just now learning to walk.

  —Hans Zupter, The Aykari Way, 2047

  The Battle at the Bridge

  LEO’S FATHER WAS ALIVE.

  It wasn’t all that mattered, but it was all Leo could think.

  He’d never allowed himself to truly believe otherwise, but the doubt had been there, lurking, all the same. Now finally he could see the island in the distance. Possibility had turned to hope, and he clung to it just as desperately. His father was out there, and Leo knew where. He was being held prisoner, but he was alive.