Voyagers: Escape the Vortex (Book 5)

by Jeanne DuPrau

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by PC Studios Inc.

  Full-color interior art, puzzles, and codes copyright © Animal Repair Shop Voyagers digital and gaming experience by Animal Repair Shop

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-385-38670-8 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-385-38672-2 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-385-386871-5 (ebook)

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  eBook ISBN 9780385386715

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Voyagers

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Insert

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Excerpt from Voyagers: The Seventh Element

  About the Author

  Piper Williams hovered in her air chair up by the ceiling of her prison—the Light Blade’s training room. She’d been locked in here for weeks now, with only the robot SUMI for company. It was way too long. She was bored, she was furious, and—she had to admit it—she was desperate. If she was ever going to see her own team or her own ship again, she had to take action.

  She and SUMI were playing hide-and-seek.

  For SUMI, hide-and-seek was nothing more than a game.

  For Piper, it was deadly serious.

  She leaned out over the edge of her air chair and whispered, “I’m here!” Down below, she saw SUMI’s head tilt upward, and she heard the creak and bump of the little robot’s springy legs.

  “Where, where, where?” called SUMI. When she was excited, her voice was like a stream of hiccups.

  Piper swooped down behind a cabinet full of weight-lifting equipment. “Here,” she whispered again.

  SUMI changed direction, moving in short jumps and grunting. Piper stayed still and watched.

  SUMI rounded the corner. “Ha-ha-ha-ha!” she cried, hiccuping like mad. “Found you!”

  Piper smiled and shook her head as if she were disappointed. “You win this time.” But not next time, she thought. Out loud she said, “Another game! You found me too fast. I’ll hide again.”

  SUMI nodded her oversized head—Piper thought she looked a little like a football held up by a frame of K’nex. “Just one more time,” SUMI said. “Then quantum theory lesson 71.” She shut down her sight screen and began to count. “One, two, three, four…”

  Piper took off, heading for a high metal cabinet behind the stationary bikes. Her air chair hummed so softly that she was sure SUMI couldn’t hear it while she was counting. With some careful maneuvering, she got behind the cabinet and hovered there. Good air chair, she thought, and gave it a silent pat with her finger. It was like a pair of legs to her (her own didn’t work at all) and, even better, like a pair of wings.

  Piper had already explored every inch of the training room, looking for a way out. Every pipe, every vent, every drain, every seam or crack or dent in the wall—she’d probed each one, and at first, she’d been sure she’d find a way because the Light Blade wasn’t very well constructed. Piper was surprised at that. She had thought it would be just like her own ship, the Cloud Leopard, but it was more like a rough copy, as if it had been banged together in a hurry. Still, there was nothing she could pry apart or pound on to make an opening.

  The main door was the only possibility. It was equipped with a complex lock that only SUMI could release. At mealtimes, SUMI would enter the lock’s code and open the door, and Niko would be there with a tray of food. Piper had thought of trying to fly out over SUMI’s head, but the problem was Niko. There wasn’t room for her hovercraft between his head and the top of the door.

  “One hundred!” shouted SUMI. “Here I come!”

  Bounce-bounce-bounce.

  Piper waited until SUMI was near enough and then said, “I see you,” in a loud whisper.

  SUMI’s head jerked upward, and she let out a stream of little hiccups. “Where? Where?”

  “Right here,” whispered Piper, then silently flew upward and banked left. “Here,” she whispered again.

  SUMI spun around, and her springy legs contracted. She bounded toward Piper’s voice. “Can’t find you!” she cried. When she was distressed, her stern machine voice became a squeak, like a rusted joint.

  Piper zoomed to the upper level of the training room, looping behind SUMI. “I’m here!” she called, and at the same time, she pulled out the spoon she’d pinched from her breakfast and dropped it. It clattered to the floor, clanging off the pull-up bars on the way down.

  “Gotcha now!” squeaked SUMI. She bounced like a small, top-heavy rabbit toward the sound as Piper swept down toward the locked door and hovered just above it. She tilted her air chair a bit and knocked on the door: rap-rappa-rap-rap—the way Niko knocked when he came with the food tray. Then she did a fast vertical lift, halted far up toward the ceiling, and watched as SUMI turned and came toward the door in quick leaps.

  It’s going to work, Piper thought. Just five seconds more, and that door will be open, and I’ll swoop down and fly through. She’d be free, then—at least, free in the Light Blade. Once she was free, she would…well, she wasn’t sure what. But somehow she would get back to the Cloud Leopard.

  She’d left her home ship on what she thought was an errand of mercy. The call had come through the intership communication line: Anna, the Omega team leader, was badly hurt. She needed help. Would Piper please come?

  She’d gone, and instantly they’d grabbed her and locked her up.

  Luckily, the Light Blade training room was immense—as big as her elementary school gym. There were a hundred places to hide in this cluttered room, especially for someone who could fly. Piper, of course, was an expert flier—and now she was about to escape.

  SUMI reached up for the door handle.

  Piper leaned forward, ready.

  At that moment, someone knocked on the door from the outside: rap-rappa-rap-rap.

  “Heard you the first time!” SUMI said. She pulled the door open, and Piper’s heart sank like a stone. There stood Niko with the lunch tray. No way Piper could fly over his head.

  She forced a cheerful look onto her face. “Hi, Niko,” she said, swooping down to the floor. “Hey, you’re looking better.” When he returned from Infinity, he’d been near death from after collecting Stinger spores, and she’d had to use all her medical training to save him.
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  “I am better,” Niko said. “Looks like I’m going to live. Thanks to you.” He smiled.

  “I’m really glad,” said Piper. She felt a moment of hope. Niko was grateful. Maybe he’d help her! But the next moment, Anna and Siena came up behind him, and though Niko shot her a look of sympathy, he said nothing. The three of them blocked the door like a wall.

  Piper almost lost it. She had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out in despair. How was she ever going to get out of this room? She didn’t approve of the word hopeless. But right then it was almost the way she felt.

  Still, she managed a grin. “Hi, everyone,” she said. “Are we having a meeting?”

  “We are,” said Anna coldly. “Not you.”

  Niko set the lunch tray on a counter. “The ZRKs tried something new today,” he said. “It’s—”

  Anna interrupted him. “Let’s go,” she said briskly. She turned and left the room, and the others followed her. Siena sent her a backward glance. What did it mean? Piper couldn’t tell.

  On the Cloud Leopard’s navigation deck, the Alpha team gathered to hear from Chris about their next destination.

  Dash Conroy leaned against a console, staring out the wraparound window at the view of the star streaks that crossed the sky when the ship was in Gamma Speed. He was feeling a little tired but wasn’t going to show it. As the Alpha team leader, he couldn’t afford to be tired. Next to him was Chris, the crew member who looked like a normal teenager but was actually an alien with some kind of super-brain. Chris was cool, but always a little stiff and formal.

  “Tomorrow,” Chris said in his usual official tone, “we will be landing on the planet Tundra. It’s covered with ice and snow and is extremely cold. As far as we know, it has only two life-forms: ice crawlers and snow locusts. The ice crawlers are our target. The element we need, which is called zero crystals, is the coldest known substance in the universe and comes from inside an ice crawler.”

  “If Tundra is covered with ice, what do ice crawlers eat?” Carly Diamond, the team’s second-in-command, wanted to know. Getting the facts straight—that was her specialty.

  “They eat the snow locusts,” Chris said. “When the locusts swarm, the ice crawler creeps inside the swarm and then curls itself up like a pill bug and rolls down a slope, becoming a ball of snow and insects. Then it eats its way out.”

  “Kind of a boring diet,” said Gabriel Parker, expert navigator and wisecracker. “Bugs washed down with snow water.”

  “Boring but complete,” said Chris. “An ice crawler gets both protein and liquid that way. After it’s eaten, it falls into a deep sleep. That’s your moment. That’s when you go for the zero crystals.”

  “How do we get the crystals out of the creature?” Dash asked.

  “You’ll have a special extraction instrument,” said Chris. “I call it the Talon—you’ll know why when you see it. It pierces the skin and draws out the zero crystals. The crystals flow through the crawler’s body the way blood flows through ours. They run through a system of capillaries just below an ice crawler’s skin. They’re what create a balance between the crawler and the temperature outside so the crawler can survive in Tundra’s climate.”

  “So we stab the ice crawler?” Dash asked. “Do we need to kill it?”

  “No, no,” Chris answered. “Not necessary at all. In any case, we don’t have the tools to kill it. It’s a massive creature. You won’t have to go deep to find the crystals. What you want to do is to scratch the skin just deeply enough to reach them. It’s a delicate task, not a violent one.”

  Carly made a face. “Does an ice crawler mind being scratched?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” said Chris. “We’re not sure how much of a nervous system an ice crawler has. It is a very primitive animal.”

  “Like a dinosaur?” said Gabriel hopefully. “We’re good at dinosaurs.”

  “No, not at all like that. Not nearly as fast-moving.”

  Good, thought Dash. A big, slow animal should be easy to deal with.

  “Your first step will be to locate your weapon, the Talon,” Chris said. “I stashed two of them on my original voyage, just in case. Once you’ve retrieved the Talon, you’ll go in search of an ice crawler. I’ll give you coordinates for a likely location. If you’re quick and careful, all should go smoothly.”

  Dash thought it didn’t sound so bad. The planet would be freezing cold, but no Raptogons, no warlords fighting over molten metal, no pirates, no Stingers—that sounded pretty good. They’d get this one done fast, and there would be only one more to go. Maybe they’d even make up some of the time they’d lost on the Aqua Gen planet so he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of his antiaging serum. This mission should be no problem. He was going to be just fine.

  “One last thing,” said Chris. “Don’t underestimate the cold on Tundra. One second of exposure is all it takes to freeze your skin.”

  Was Chris reading his mind? Dash thought that sounded like a warning meant just for him.

  After Chris’s briefing, Gabe left the navigation deck feeling a little disappointed that he wasn’t on the extraction team this time; Tundra sounded cool—really cool. He’d be waving good-bye as Dash and Carly got into the transport ship, and after that, he’d be pretty much alone on the Cloud Leopard. There’d be Chris, but he had been disappearing a lot recently. He kept saying he had something important to check on, but he never said what the important thing was.

  And really, that was perfect. Without Chris, it would be easier to put his top-secret plan into action. The Cloud Leopard would be exiting Gamma Speed soon, and Gabriel would be the one to guide the ship in its descent into orbit around Tundra. So step one of his plan would have to happen right now.

  He ducked into a portal to the tubes, and after a few fast curves and swoops, he popped out in the training room. “STEAM!” he called. “Where are you?”

  The little training robot came out from behind a simulation machine and shuffled toward Gabriel, swiveling his head. “Yes sir,” said STEAM, “coming, yes sir!”

  “I have to check something,” Gabriel said. “I’m going to put you on standby for a minute.” Gabriel went to the computer screen at the side of the room, which held the program that was STEAM’s “brain.” Quickly, Gabriel brought up some code on the display and tweaked a few lines of it. “Remote access request,” he muttered to himself. “Cut line three hundred twenty-nine Z, reconnect alternative route eleven-fourteen, clear the under channel…” His fingers darted over the touch screen. He sat back. “That should help,” he said. “Okay, STEAM, bringing you up again.”

  STEAM’s blue eyes flashed, and he made a sort of humming sound. “Yes sir,” he said.

  Gabriel grinned at him and patted his metal robot head. “At ease, soldier!” Gabriel said, and then strolled out of the training room as if he’d just been in there doing a few pull-ups.

  It was time to exit Gamma Speed. Gabriel headed for the nearest portal. It was true, he thought: he was brilliant. He sent a mental message to Piper: Help is on the way!

  —

  The Alpha team took their seats on the navigation deck and checked their seat belts. Gabriel put on his flight glasses in case manual control became necessary.

  “Ready?” said Dash.

  “Ready,” said the rest of the crew, all together.

  “Exiting Gamma Speed.” Dash said it calmly. Gabe had brought the Cloud Leopard down into a planetary orbit three times before by now. Strange to think that such an extraordinary thing could become almost routine.

  But routine or not, it was always a rough few minutes, as if a gigantic fist had grabbed the ship and was shaking it like a toy. Everyone’s teeth rattled. Their bodies were pressed backward, hard, by g-forces. Stomachs churned, hands gripped chair arms, bones jumped and jolted—and then they were through. The ship’s normal gravity setting returned. The roar of the engines ceased, and they were in smooth and quiet orbit around the planet Tundra.

&nb
sp; “That’s a planet?” said Gabriel, staring out the great front window. “It looks like a scoop of vanilla ice cream.”

  “It does.” Dash had to agree. “Only not as inviting as ice cream.”

  “All right already,” said Carly, who wasn’t much for fantasy. “It’s ice. Every square inch of that planet is below the freezing point—way, way below.”

  “I feel sorry for the creatures that live there,” said Gabriel. “I hope they have fireplaces or hot tubs where they can go to warm up.”

  Carly rolled her eyes. “Whatever lives there would hate heat. They’re adapted to live in the cold.”

  Of course, thought Dash. Heat would be an enemy for the creatures of Tundra, just as for him, a boy who’d grown up in Florida, cold was an enemy.

  STEAM rolled in and beeped. “Ice, ice, baby!” he said, and the Alpha team laughed.

  Dash unclicked his seat belt, and the others followed. “Time to go bundle up.”

  The Light Blade had exited Gamma Speed, and like the Alpha team, the Omega team gazed in awe at the strange white planet.

  For Anna, the first order of business was to check in with Earth. She turned to Colin, who sat at the controls. “Get us the connection,” she said.

  Colin gave a curt nod. He flicked some switches and turned some dials. He spoke into the transmitter, and his voice crossed light-years between the ship and Earth: “Light Blade here,” he said. “Come in, Commander Ike Phillips.”

  A thin squeal was the response.

  Colin frowned and shoved his glasses farther up on his nose. He gave a dial another twist. “Come in, Sir,” he said again, and this time a distant voice answered—surprisingly clear.

  “Phillips here. What’s the report?”

  “I’ll take over,” said Anna. She took Colin’s place at the transmitter. Briskly, she told Ike about the Infinity mission—where they’d ridden winged horses through underground tunnels and battled giant eels to bring back an element called Stinger spores. She paused briefly in case Ike wanted to say Great job or something like it. Ike was the genius behind their voyage, the visionary who’d known that she and her team were the ones who should fly these missions. Even if he wasn’t always easy to like, Anna wanted to make him proud.