by David Liss
Fleshy abominations never cease to amaze me with their stupidity, Smelly said. Tell that dimwit that in order to override a comm lock, it needs to access the tertiary command subroutine.
I passed Smelly’s advice along, minus the insults.
“Give us a minute!” the being on the other end shouted.
“I’ve got the ion-trail coordinates locked in,” Charles said. “The second they cancel that lock, we’re going to vanish from their sensors.”
“Not over yet,” I muttered. I checked the distance on the missile. Now it was almost six hundred feet away. That’s good, I thought as I looped around the ship. We’re gaining. We’re going to beat them. It took almost all my concentration to hug the hull of the ship without crashing into it, but after another twenty seconds I looked back to see where the missile was, and it was nowhere.
“Missile’s gone,” I said.
“It can’t have vanished,” Charles told me.
Then there was a bright light, and once more the shuttle was spinning wildly as we were tossed against a wall and pinned by the force of the propulsion. We were being hurled away by the blast wave. Pain and nausea and panic all jostled for my brain’s attention. And the light. The light of the ship exploding burned my eyes from the viewscreen. The missile had struck while trying to circle the ship and lock onto us.
The Kind Disposition had been destroyed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
* * *
Director Ghli Wixxix. Captain Hyi. Urch. Nayana. They had all been on that ship, and now the ship had been reduced to scrap and atoms. I felt myself spiraling into despair, but I knew I had to put my feelings on hold, because I was also spiraling in a more literal sense: The blast of the Kind Disposition had us spinning like a barrel rolling downhill.
In the chaos of there being no up or down, I tried to claw my way back to the helm console, smashing into bits of ship and people every few seconds. By the time I finally grabbed on to the console, digging in hard enough to bruise my fingers, the spin had seemed to slow. I managed to place myself in my chair, and then, still gripping it with one hand, I used the other to key in the commands to stabilize the shuttle. In a few seconds we righted ourselves, and the artificial gravity properly calibrated up and down.
I looked around the interior of our little vessel. Equipment was scattered everywhere. Mi Sun, Charles, Alice, and Colonel Rage were attempting to move around, getting into their seats and, belatedly, strapping themselves in.
“Does anyone need medical care?” I asked.
They all shook their heads no. I think they were still trying to piece together what had happened. I was busy checking the readouts, trying to find out how damaged the shuttle was and how we were going to get to wherever we were going. I’d thought the worst had just happened, but then I saw a reading on the navigation console next to me that made me think I’d been a little too optimistic.
Suddenly I heard a sound that nearly broke my heart. Mi Sun was sobbing. “Nayana,” she said, her voice between a cough and a whisper.
“I know,” I said. “But we can’t mourn now. Not now. We just lost a lot of friends, but we need to get out of here.”
The colonel came to sit next to me by the control console. There was a cut just above his eye, and it must have been obscuring his vision because he kept blinking. “What’s the rush? The ship trying to destroy us is gone.”
I gestured toward the readout on the navigation console. “Yeah, but now there’s a tunnel aperture forming a quarter of a light year away from here.”
“Rescue?”
“I don’t know, but it seems an awfully big coincidence that someone would show up at this place, at this exact moment.” Without giving it another thought, I killed the ship’s main power. Everything except some basic computer functions went dead. Keeping even those minimal systems operational was a risk, but I needed to be able to see who was out there. Now we were without gravity, without life support, and without lights except the ambient glow of the viewscreen and the consoles.
“Is this necessary?” the colonel asked. “Maybe whoever is coming in was just passing by and saw the explosion.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but space is pretty big. Nothing ever just passes by anything else. Anyhow, it doesn’t hurt to be safe. If they’re friendly, we can ask for help. If not, we’ll look like just another piece of junk.”
Alice was now unstrapped and moving her way toward the front of the shuttle, hand over hand, grabbing a chair or a bulkhead or whatever would allow her to move in the zero-gravity environment. When you imagine floating in space, you think it will be like swimming without the water. In fact it’s uncomfortable and awkward, more like falling than flying, and it makes you feel like you want to barf. Alice, however, was ignoring all that as she made her way forward.
She grabbed on to the back of my chair and floated, letting her legs drift out behind her. Her face was smeared with a little blood, maybe from a cut on the back of her hand. Her hair floated out around her like she was a cartoon character zapped with an electric wire.
“How long can we go without power?” she asked.
I studied her for a second in the dim light of the consoles. She was out of her element. We all were, of course, but Charles and Mi Sun had a couple of space battles under their belts, and I had no doubt the colonel had done and seen all kinds of dangerous and traumatizing things. Alice had had a difficult family life, but she’d never had to face anything like this. Even so, her expression was stony—her eyes narrowed and her jaw set. She was angry, not terrified, and she was all business.
“An hour, maybe,” I told her. I didn’t say it, but we were all thinking it: I hoped it would be enough.
“So what do we do if this ship is bad news?” she asked.
“One step at a time,” I said quietly. It was the best I could come up with.
We stared at the viewscreen, which I’d set to cover the area near where the tunnel aperture was forming. There was a flash of light, like a laser scalpel cutting lengthwise across the fabric of space, and then something dark emerged. It was just a shadow at first, and then it began to take shape. It was long and dark and rounded. The lack of gravity was bad enough, but now my stomach did an extra flip. The massive ship suddenly loomed across our viewscreen. It was black as space, with only a few dim lights making it stand out from the void around it. There was no mistaking that sleek shape.
It was a saucer, a Phandic cruiser.
We all stared, knowing what this meant. We were trapped in deep space, away from any help, hopelessly outmatched against an enemy vessel.
A chime indicated that a message was coming through, and I put it on the screen. The rectangular face of a Phand appeared now. Like all of his kind that I had seen, he had a boxy head and gray skin and dark, menacing eyes that all combined made it look like a space orc. His chin was jutted out, to give us a better look at his tusks. I’d seen lots of strange-looking aliens on Confederation Central, and I’d quickly learned not to mistake appearance for intent. With this Phand, nothing about its looks was as frightening as the merciless expression in its eyes. “I am Captain Thimvium-zi of the Phandic cruiser Viceroy’s Repressed Memory. If there are any survivors, we are prepared to offer assistance.”
Colonel Rage looked at me. “Can we tunnel out of here without them knowing or before they can stop us?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll need to plot a course, which will take at least five minutes, but we won’t be able to go anywhere without powering up the engines, and they’ll be able to spot us if we do that.”
“If you find a way around that, can you get us back to Earth?” he asked.
“Earth?” I asked. In spite of what had just happened, or maybe because of it, going back had never occurred to me.
“Zeke, the crew of a Confederation ship just tried to assassinate us. Maybe there are more good guys than bad over there, but it seems to me that right now they’re having a serious dustup about the future of their society, and we
don’t want to be in the middle of it. I think it’s time to head home.”
Maybe he was right, but I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to give up on Confederation membership, and I didn’t want to give up on seeing Tamret again. If I returned to Earth now, would they revoke her asylum? I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain, after all. On the other hand, it wasn’t right to drag Charles and Mi Sun along on what was obviously a dangerous journey.
I turned around. “What do you guys want to do?” I asked.
“We should go home,” Charles said, and for the first time, he sounded like a little kid. He’d been though an awful lot, and I knew he’d had enough. I couldn’t much blame him.
I was about to object, to try to talk them out of it, but I had no grounds. I’d never bullied them into helping me before, and I wasn’t going to start now. Instead I would take them back to Earth and then return to the Confederation myself. I’d face what Junup and his followers threw at me if that was what it took to protect Tamret. As far as I could tell, that was my only option.
We had to get there first, however, and to do that we had to deal with the little problem of the Phandic cruiser.
Now another face came onto the viewscreen, and this time I gasped. I had not expected to see a human face up there, but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Our sensors suggest there’s a shuttle out there, lying low,” said Nora Price. “And we first detected your ship tunneling out of Earth’s system. So I’m thinking that the only being in this galaxy who could manage to make his own ship explode and somehow survive is Zeke Reynolds. Zeke, if you’re out there, I’m offering you asylum and full immunity. We just want to make sure you and any other survivors are safe.”
“Nora Price, I presume,” Colonel Rage said.
I had told him all about Ms. Price when I’d been debriefed after returning to Earth. He must have read her file, so he’d probably seen her picture. Even if he hadn’t, there weren’t a whole lot of human women who might be flying around on Phandic ships—at least, not that I knew of. The last I’d seen of her, she had been on her way to a Confederation prison, so I had no idea what she was doing running loose. Figuring it out could wait for later, though.
“Yeah,” I told him. “There she is.”
“You kids have more experience with her than I do, but I’m not inclined to believe a word she says,” the colonel said. “So let’s ignore her. With all the training you had when you were on Confederation Central, did you learn enough to get this shuttle home safe?”
“We can plot the course using just the computers,” I said. “The plotting won’t require enough energy for them to get a read on us, but if we heat up the engines, they’ll be able to pinpoint our location.”
“Let’s do what we can,” the colonel said, “and worry about the next part when we come to it.”
Rather than try to move in a weightless environment, I switched my console from helm to navigation and began scrolling through the planetary database. There were a lot of planets in there, but not the one I was looking for. “That’s going to be a problem. I guess the location of non-Confederation worlds is classified, and I don’t have the clearance to access those files. I can’t set a course for Earth, because I don’t know where Earth is.”
“What do you mean you don’t know where it is?” Mi Sun demanded.
“I mean,” I said pointedly, trying to get a certain AI’s attention, “it’s not like a simple biological organism like myself can figure out where Earth is without it being marked on a map.”
Are you talking to me? Smelly asked. I am remarkable, I agree, but you will recall I came to your world while still dormant. I don’t know the location of your star, which means you’re on your own.
Okay, that was worth a try. Now everyone was looking at me like I was a big weirdo. Normal people don’t usually need to remind one another that they are biological organisms. “I’m just saying we don’t have the navigational tools to get home.”
“You just . . . go to our star,” Charles insisted, his voice breaking a little.
“How are we going to find it?” I asked. “It’s not like I have any idea where our star is in relation to any of these other stars. And even if I did know that it was ten light years to the left of something else, that still wouldn’t help me figure out the tunnel coordinates. There are, literally, millions of stars just like our sun in this part of the galaxy. I don’t think we have any choice but to go to Confederation Central.”
“You’re just saying that because you want to see Tamret,” Mi Sun snapped. Then she lowered her eyes. “No, I know that’s not true. I’m sorry.”
“Look, everyone here is hurt and grieving and scared,” Colonel Rage said, “but I think we can all agree that Zeke is in command, and we can trust him to do what is best for all of us. Isn’t that right, Zeke?”
“I’m trying. I swear, I’d take you guys home if I could find it.”
“And not stay yourself?” Alice asked.
I met her gaze. She knew me better than I’d realized. “Doesn’t much matter what I would do, since I can’t find Earth,” I said. “I don’t even know how we’re going to get away from those Phands.”
My panel chimed, letting me know there was another incoming message. I accepted it and Ms. Price appeared on screen again.
“I’m going to give you one last chance to surrender willingly. We don’t want to risk damaging your shuttle. But if we don’t hear from you within two minutes, we’re going to start firing PPB bursts at suspicious chunks of debris. Maybe one of them is you.”
It would be better to surrender than be destroyed, Smelly observed.
“No way,” I muttered under my breath. The Phands hated me. I didn’t care what Ms. Price said; they had no interest in shaking hands and making nice. If I was taken on board that Phandic ship, I was as good as dead.
If you are taken prisoner, you will find a way to survive and perhaps escape. These options will be unavailable if you have already exploded.
Wisdom from the voice in my head. We could make his slogans into T-shirts, but first we’d have to get out of this alive. I plugged in the coordinates for Confederation Central and then checked on the tunneling engines. We still needed four minutes, which, if Ms. Price was being punctual, we did not have.
“Not enough time,” I mumbled.
“Can you send a distress signal?” the colonel asked.
“Yeah, but if the good guys answer and say they can’t be here for a day, we’ll have given our exact location away for nothing.” The trick, I realized, was to make sure that whatever answer we got back was going to make them hightail it. Last time I’d been in space, any Phandic ship had been able to beat any equivalent Confederation ship, but now things had changed. The Phands were getting their evil behinds kicked all over the galaxy by the Confederation, which meant they wouldn’t stick around if they thought there was a chance of a battle.
I turned to Charles. “Record a message on your data bracelet, something from Confederation Command. Say anything that the Phands won’t want to hear.”
“Like what?” His voice was shrill. He was still in panic mode, and I couldn’t much blame him.
“Keep it together, Charles. What would Han Solo do? Come up with something that will scare them into retreating.”
In the meantime I composed a message to transmit by photon beacon. I explained exactly what had happened and included the shuttle’s logs, which I hoped would back up everything I was saying.
“You ready?” I asked Charles.
He nodded. “I just sent it to your bracelet.”
“Here goes,” I told everyone. “Let’s hope this works.”
I sent out two photon beacons at once, hoping the Phands would be too excited about locating us to notice the second beacon. I watched as a few seconds later the saucer pivoted and began to approach. Ms. Price came over the viewscreen again.
“You just gave yourself away, Zeke. Very sloppy.”
/> Then came Charles’s voice off the second beacon, which I’d bounced off the Phandic ship. I hoped they wouldn’t examine it too closely, because it wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Charles voice, disguised and deep, came over the comm network. “This is Admiral Ackbar.” I turned and looked at him, and he shrugged. “We have received your distress call and have already dispatched six destroyer-class ships, which were fortunately conducting operations near you. They should arrive within ten minutes.”
Such an outcome was too good to be true, but I had to hope that with the drubbing the Phands had been taking recently, they couldn’t tell real danger from our wishful thinking. That turned out to be how it went. The ship began to retreat at maximum sublight speed. They’d be tunneling as soon as they could plot a course.
“Good work, Admiral,” I said to him. I then began setting in the coordinates for Confederation Central.
Very clever, Smelly said.
It was moderately clever, I thought. Clever enough to work, at least, but not brilliant beyond what a moderately resourceful seventh grader could reasonably devise. All of which meant that Smelly should have been able to come up with an idea like that itself. Yet Smelly had only suggested surrender, an outcome it ought to have feared, but clearly didn’t.
I wasn’t sure what all of this meant, but I had the distinct feeling that Smelly was not telling me everything.
• • •
It was going to take a little more than a day to reach Confederation Central, and once we’d patched up our wounds and repaired what we could on the shuttle, there wasn’t much to do but think about what we had lost, and what we had yet to face. This was not what I’d expected my return to the Confederation to feel like.
With our survival and freedom no longer in danger, Mi Sun and Charles both retreated to the back of the shuttle to deal with their fear and their grief. I couldn’t blame them—I was having a hard time with losing Nayana and Urch, too—but someone had to work the shuttle. I sat up front with Colonel Rage and Alice, trying to show them as much of the ropes as possible. There wasn’t a whole lot to do when we were in tunnel, but having a couple of other people who could handle the basics couldn’t hurt.