Game of Flames

by Robin Wasserman

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  Gabriel turned to Dash for backup. Dash shrugged. “Worth a try,” he said.

  “Well?” Piper prompted them. “It’s okay, TULIP. We’re friends.”

  They waited. None of the sloggers moved.

  “They’re just machines,” Gabriel said. “They only do what they’re told. That’s the beauty of machines. Come on, let’s go find our girl.”

  They wove through the throne room, examining the sloggers one by one. Many of them had symbols emblazoned across their torsos. Some looked like the ruins of a complex ancient language, while others were silhouettes of familiar items—a fish, a star shape, two pumpkins. But no tulip shape anywhere.

  “All these things look the same,” Gabriel complained. “Hey, Garquin, what’s so special about this TULIP? Can’t we use any of them?”

  “The sloggers are controlled by a signal sent out by the central processing unit—they’re part of a hive mind, not one of them able to act on its own. You can’t reprogram them, because there’s not enough there to reprogram,” Garquin explained. “But I built TULIP to be special. She’s designed to act on her own, even make her own decisions about how to fulfill her overall mission. So with my instruction, you should be able to reprogram her to serve your purposes. No others, only her.”

  So they kept searching.

  “This is taking a long time—do you think the Omega team already has the element?” Piper asked worriedly.

  “It’s not a race,” Dash said. But he didn’t really mean it. If Anna Turner was involved, it was definitely a race. And he intended to win. He started to move through the sloggers faster, skimming the symbols written across their metal casing. And then, finally, at the center of a small group of sloggers on the far side of the dome—

  “Found her!” Dash cried. He patted Garquin’s spy slogger on the head. She had a very clear picture of a tulip flower on her middle. Then he realized what this cluster of sloggers had been working on when the signal died. He swallowed hard. “Uh, guys,” Dash said, his mouth dry. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I found something else too.”

  Piper and Gabriel scurried across the throne room to join him.

  “Whoa,” Piper breathed.

  Gabriel blinked quickly. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

  The sloggers had been building something, a strange, jagged sculpture made of scrap metal. It was a sculpture of a giant face, half-covered by scaffolding, its features stretching nearly twenty feet high.

  Gabriel didn’t understand. “I mean, is it just me, or does that look kind of like…”

  Piper told herself it must be some weird coincidence, but you didn’t have to be a statistics whiz to know the chances of that were a zillion to one. “Exactly like,” she confirmed.

  “It’s definitely him,” Dash said, looking back and forth between the sculpture, the sloggers, and the empty throne. He felt like he sometimes did when struggling over a particularly tough math problem. There was some missing variable here, some key that would make everything fall into place. He just couldn’t figure out what it was. “It’s Chris.”

  —

  Carly was going stir-crazy. She’d tried everything she could think of to boost the strength of the communications signal. Nothing had helped.

  With no way to contact her team, she’d scoured the library archives looking for something that would answer her questions about the Light Blade. Who could have built it? What was its purpose? How did Anna manage to chase them halfway across the universe? But there were no answers. Even if there were, Carly wasn’t sure she could concentrate enough to notice them. She’d even tried taking a break and playing her guitar, which usually calmed her down. But she had to stop when the music started reminding her too much of home.

  She couldn’t think about that now—she had to focus on her crew, down on the planet. Part of her was a little jealous. After all, they were down there exploring, seeing amazing sights, completing an important mission. While she was up here, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for something to happen.

  Not that she had anyone to blame for that but herself.

  She sighed and forced herself to turn back to the ship schematics one last time—and gasped. There, buried in the exact same diagrams she’d studied a thousand times before, was the answer she’d been looking for. A way to divert power from the navigational system to double the signal output.

  Carly leapt up from the chair and dove into the tube portal. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Chris’s face when he heard that she’d found their answer!

  “Wooo!” Carly cried, whooshing toward the bridge. When the others were around, she tried hard to be as mature as she could. After all, she was a crew member on the world’s most advanced spaceship, on a life-or-death mission to the stars. It was a grown-up kind of job, and as she was the youngest on board, she always tried to seem especially grown up. But on her own, speeding down roller-coaster hills and around hairpin turns so quickly that her stomach soared into her throat, she let down her guard.

  She leapt out into the navigation deck feeling better than she had all day. Her mood plummeted when she realized the bridge was empty. Chris had promised to stay there and monitor communications with the planet, in case they came back online. Where could he have gone—and why? Chris was always disappearing off to hidden corners of the ship, which was usually fine. But these weren’t usual circumstances.

  Fuming, and just a little freaked out, Carly opened a comm line to Chris’s quarters. She was planning to tell him the good news; she wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. But he must have accidentally left the line with the bridge open on his end, because Carly could hear everything going on in his quarters. And he was talking to someone.

  “Pay no attention to the statue!” Chris ordered. “I am Lord Garquin, and I command you to focus on the issue at hand.”

  Now Carly was totally freaked out. The ship was empty…wasn’t it? So what was he doing? “Um, Chris?” she said into the comm. “Who are you talking to?”

  There was a long silence. “Carly?”

  “Yeah. Carly. The only other person on board. Right?”

  “Give me a second, Carly,” he said. Then he sighed, like he was giving in to something. “I’m coming up.”

  It only took a minute or two for him to make his way to the navigation deck, but the wait was endless.

  Finally, Chris stepped onto the bridge. He looked utterly calm. But then, he always looked calm. It drove Carly nuts.

  “How much did you hear?” he asked.

  “I heard you talking to someone, which is weird. I heard you call yourself Lord Garfunkel or something like that. Which is weirder.”

  Chris started to interrupt, but Carly talked over him. It wasn’t like her—but then, it wasn’t like her to suddenly feel this angry. The words poured out. She couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d wanted to. “I know you were lying before about the Light Blade—I know you know more about that lookalike on the ship than you’re letting on. So don’t lie to me again. Just tell me, Chris. What’s going on? The truth.”

  Chris wasn’t looking so calm anymore—he looked more like an animal caught in a trap. “Now’s not a good time for that, Carly.”

  Something in her wilted. She realized she had been hoping he would deny it. Would say, “Are you joking, Carly? It’s me, Chris, maybe not the most forthcoming guy you’ve ever met, but there’s no way I’d straight up lie to you.” She’d always known there were things Chris wasn’t telling them. It was obvious to everyone that he had his secrets. But she’d thought she could trust him. She’d thought he had the mission’s best interests at heart.

  Now she wasn’t so sure.

  And she was getting less sure by the second.

  “It’s always a good time for the truth, Chris.”

  He didn’t have to tell her. She couldn’t make him. She couldn’t make him do anything, she suddenly realized. He knew much more about this ship than
she did, than any of them. Knowledge was power, and he had all of it.

  It was crazy to be afraid of Chris.

  But one tiny, shivering part of her really was.

  Maybe he saw it in her eyes. Maybe that’s what convinced him.

  “Spill it, Garquin,” Dash insisted. Twenty minutes later, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off the sculpture of Chris. Or was it the Chris lookalike from the Light Blade? It didn’t make any sense that Lord Cain would direct the sloggers to build a giant metallic replica of either of them. Not unless there was something very big that Dash didn’t know. “Why is there a sculpture of our crew member glaring down at Lord Cain’s throne room? What’s going on?”

  “This is going to take a bit of time…,” Lord Garquin began.

  “You said yourself, we’re totally safe in here,” Dash pointed out. “As long as we don’t flip that main switch, Lord Cain can’t do anything to us. Or was that a lie?”

  “No…that was true,” Garquin said. The way he said it made it clear that many other things he’d said were not.

  “So just tell us already,” Gabriel insisted. “And if you don’t, maybe we’ll just turn that switch back on and get the story from Lord Cain.”

  “You really don’t want to do that,” Lord Garquin said.

  “How do you know what we want to do?” Piper asked. “You don’t know anything about us.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” Lord Garquin said. “And I suppose that’s the first thing I have to admit to you. I’m not Lord Garquin. At least, not exactly.”

  “Then who are you?”

  That’s when Carly’s voice piped in. “Go on, tell them.”

  Dash started in surprise. “Carly? But I thought the atmospheric interference—”

  “Yeah,” she said. “So did I. Turns out we thought wrong. About a lot of things. Starting with…”

  “It’s me,” Lord Garquin said. And then his strange voice transformed into something much stranger. At the same time, much more familiar. “Chris.”

  There was a moment of silence as the shock of it descended on them.

  Gabriel found his voice first. “Er, could you maybe be a little more specific? Chris who?”

  “Chris who do you think?” Carly said.

  “Well, I know it couldn’t be Chris, the guy on my crew who swore he wouldn’t keep any more secrets from me,” Gabriel said. “And it’s definitely not Chris, the guy with no sense of humor, because this would be a pretty elaborate practical joke.”

  “Come on, Gabe,” Piper said. “Let’s give him a chance to explain himself.”

  “Nothing that comes out of his mouth is the truth,” Gabriel said. “And you want him to say more?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Dash said, firmly enough that Gabriel finally let up. “I’m sure Chris has a good explanation for all this…right?”

  “I have an explanation,” Chris said. “Whether or not it’s a good one—that will be for you to decide.” He paused, as if trying to figure out where to begin. “I told you I was Lord Garquin because, in a way, it was true. Everything you see on this planet, every machine, every slogger, everything—I built it. I first came to this planet nearly a century ago. As you are now, I was searching for Magnus 7 and trying to develop a way to synthesize it into the fuel I needed. In the meantime, to amuse myself, I designed a game. Much like your video games, except this one was the size of a planet. I created Lord Garquin, and Lord Cain too. I set them at war with each other.”

  “And you didn’t think you should mention this a little sooner?” Gabriel said.

  “If I’d told you the truth about Meta Prime, it would have raised any number of questions. So I spoke to you with Lord Garquin’s voice—but only because you needed me to help you navigate the world.”

  “Wait, did you say you were here a hundred years ago?” Piper said, confused. “That’s impossible! You can’t be much older than fifteen.”

  “To the contrary, I can be much, much older than fifteen,” Chris said. “Centuries older. And I am.”

  “But how is that possible?” Gabriel asked.

  Dash’s mind was racing. This was it, the missing variable. This was the thing that made everything else make sense: the super-advanced technology on the Cloud Leopard, which only Chris knew how to use. That he’d supposedly helped invent, even though he was a teenager. The reason Commander Phillips trusted him so much in the first place. The fact that he’d been on this planet—on any planet—before, all those years ago. And had built a game elaborate enough to look like an alien civilization at war.

  The fact that he’d lied about it, over and over again.

  “He’s an alien,” Dash said. There was a long silence. Dash could tell from the look on Piper’s and Gabriel’s faces that they thought it was the craziest idea they’d ever heard…and the only one that made sense. “What do you say, Chris? Am I right?”

  “You are,” Chris admitted. “I’m from another planet, in a far corner of another galaxy. I look human—but I am very much not.”

  At those words, four minds shared a single thought.

  Whoa.

  Dash was the one who’d figured it out—but even he couldn’t believe it was true.

  All this time, there’d been an alien in their midst? A creature from another planet, who looked human and pretended to be their crewmate, their friend?

  An alien, from outer space.

  Dash thought he’d wrapped his head around the whole alien thing when Lord Garquin started speaking to them—but a voice in your ear was one thing. Chris, an extraterrestrial? That was another thing altogether. That was like a cosmic practical joke, and Dash was afraid if he opened his mouth, he’d start laughing and never be able to stop.

  Gabriel was shaking his head hard, as if to shake the thought out of his head, to say no, not possible, not in a million years, not an alien, not Chris.

  Finally, Piper spoke. “Carly?” she said in a strangled voice. “You okay up there?”

  Piper was the first to think of it, but very quickly they all started to worry. Carly was up there on the Cloud Leopard, alone with an alien. An alien they apparently knew nothing about, who’d been lying to them for months. An alien who had control of every part of the ship and could do whatever he wanted.

  None of them knew Chris, not really. They couldn’t know what he wanted.

  They certainly couldn’t stop him from getting it.

  “I’m…uh…I’m okay” came the answer. Dash had never heard Carly sound so uncertain.

  “So, you’re an alien,” Dash said, trying to sound casual. Like his mind wasn’t blown to bits by the idea. “An alien. Does Commander Phillips know?”

  “He does,” Chris said. “He’s known almost all his life.”

  “So how come he didn’t tell us?” Gabriel said.

  “He thought it would be better for you not to know,” Chris said. “At least not until you needed to.”

  “I’ll bet he did,” Gabriel muttered. There seemed to be a lot of stuff Phillips didn’t think the Cloud Leopard crew “needed” to know. It was amazing how even when you were picked to go on a mission across the universe to save the planet, most grown-ups still thought of you as just a kid.

  “I don’t get it,” Gabriel continued, just warming up. “If you’re an alien, what were you doing on Earth? Where’s your home planet? Are there more of you? What are you doing on this mission in the first place? And how come you’ve known Phillips for so long? What were you doing on Earth? Did I ask that already? Is this one of those Superman things, where your world blew up and you’re the only survivor?”

  Dash was used to the fact that talking made Gabriel feel better. Still, he wished Gabriel hadn’t asked that last question. Or at least that he’d phrased it more tactfully. After all, if Earth blew up and Dash was the only survivor, he’d probably be a little touchy about it.

  But Chris only laughed. “That’s a lot of questions, Gabe,” he said. “I’m going to have to start from the beginning
.”

  Piper caught Dash’s eye and tapped the TULIP slogger’s head. Dash knew what she was trying to say. They were kind of in the middle of something—did they have time to sit around and listen to a long story? Dash wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything.

  “My planet is called Flora,” Chris said, his voice gone soft at the thought of it. “Located in the galaxy you refer to as the Large Magellanic Cloud, one hundred and sixty thousand light-years away from Earth, it is a planet with an atmosphere and planetary crust very similar to your own.”

  “It makes sense, then, that your people would evolve along the same lines we did,” Piper said.

  “Exactly. But we’ve had much longer to evolve, and since the invention of Gamma Speed—”

  “Wait a second,” Gabriel interrupted. “You guys invented Gamma Speed?”

  “Of course,” Chris said. There wasn’t a hint of boasting in his voice. He spoke matter-of-factly, like it should have been obvious. “Surely you didn’t believe that humanity could leap so far ahead in such a short time, not without a little help?”

  “It’s happened plenty of times before,” Carly said defensively. She suddenly felt like she—and the whole human race—had something to prove. “Atomic power. Computers.”

  “The internal combustion engine,” Gabriel added. “The wheel.”

  “We built ships that got us across oceans,” Dash pointed out. “Planes that got us into the sky. Shuttles that got us to the moon. And we did all that without anyone’s help.”

  “I don’t know why you’d assume such a thing,” Chris said. Then quickly added, “You may disregard that. It was simply my attempt at a joke, to lighten the mood.”

  But once the words were out there, Dash couldn’t help wondering: Was it a joke? Or was Chris not the first secret alien visitor to Earth? Not the first to inject a little extraterrestrial technology into the veins of humanity? Did Einstein get a nudge from some little green men? Did Darwin? Copernicus? Newton? The possibilities boggled Dash’s mind. He couldn’t decide whether it was depressing to imagine that the human race couldn’t get anywhere without alien help—or astounding.