by Adam Holt
“Five, four, three, two, one.”
The three of us looked out the window, floating close to the glass to get a good look at the comet.
Nothing appeared.
“Redshirt, are those calculations—“
“Completely accurate, Commander. It’s simple math.”
“Well, there’s no use waiting. It appears that our rogue comet has gone missing on the far side of the Moon,” my dad said. “Mr. Trackman, any other information you can give us to help with this? Does LG Alpha have a defense system? Could it have destroyed or captured a comet?”
Trackman shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
My dad twirled his pen and looked out the window. “Well, I guess we discovered Scenario Three. So the fact that the comet disappeared doesn’t change what we need to do, does it? We might explain the rogue comet later, but it’s not important for now. We’ll proceed on our rescue mission. Crew, back to your regular duties. You three, please stay in your quarters the rest of the day. That is all. We’ll see you at lunch.”
BURDENS
Back to the orangutan cage. Back to square one. I hoped the comet would give me some idea of what to do next. Everything was “as clear as mud,” as my dad liked to say. I worked my way through the ship and was on the magnetic walkway when I heard a portal open behind me. It was Trackman.
“Ah, Tully Harper. Our stowaway. I don’t think we’ve ever properly met. I’m Gallant Trackman. I am on board as an observer and consultant to your father. This mission was my proposal, as was bringing the Device.”
“That was my dad’s idea,” I said.
He sucked air through his teeth and got this ferocious look in his eyes for just a moment. Then he relaxed his face into some sort of smile. “Hmm, so you say, but how would you know whose ideas it was? At any rate, you’ve seen some strange things in space already. I wish I could explain them all, but one thing I can explain: our Android. I’m training him, you see, to interact with people well. He’s learning to earn people’s trust. He must have seen his opportunity with you on board the ship. I know this would be awkward to report this to your father right now—all his babblings about The Conspiracy Game.”
“And what about Operation Close Encounter?” I asked. “He talked about that, too.” The fury returned to his eyes and disappeared in a flash. That got his attention and hit a nerve! Sawyer never said anything about Operation Close Encounter to me, but I thought that might get Trackman talking. If he was making the rules for the Android, I had to figure him out. Trackman regained his composure and smiled his shark-like smile.
“Ah, he mentioned that as well? It’s nothing. Don’t bother your father with all that. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Sawyer appreciates history, and I’ve always been a big fan of spies, double agents, Benedict Arnolds. I find them enthralling. Conspirators treat life like it’s a game that you can win or lose. Don’t you like games?”
“How do I know it’s just a game, Trackman? Why shouldn’t I tell my dad?”
His eyes narrowed. “Get a grip, boy. It’s ludicrous. Why would I plot to take over this ship with the Android as a sidekick? What am I going to do—fly us all to the moons of Jupiter? What’s out there but empty space? And where are my supplies for such a trip? Insanity. You want to pester your dad with this after all the trouble you’ve caused? I’m sure you feel guilty, like a burden to him. Children can be such a burden. I’m glad I never had any.”
He picked at his big teeth with a fingernail. My heart sunk as I thought about his words. I had burdened my dad. Still, something didn’t sit right with me about his explanations.
“Ah, sorry, that was inconsiderate of me. I didn’t mean to be so harsh. Your father speaks highly of you. So does Sawyer. He says you like martial arts, and I saw you battle your friend. You’re quite good with that bo staff. How are you with your mind? I’m not interested in hand-to-hand combat, but we should play chess sometime. I’ll stop by your cage when things settle down. Hopefully that will be sooner than later.”
He exited the space lab. I went back to my cage and set up the chessboard. Trackman seemed to love games, and I felt the urge to practice if he ever wanted to play me. With no one to play against, I got bored pretty quickly. My stomach growled. It was still an hour to lunch. On the other side of the room the Harper Device softly glowed.
“Hey,” I said, “you in the other cage, what’s the deal with the Visions? You could have at least told me something useful, like ‘There’s a rogue comet out there and it’s going to disappear.’ Or what about Sawyer and Trackman? Are they telling me the truth? Instead you gave me weird visions and glowing hands. Thanks. Really useful stuff.”
The Harper Device must have been listening because that night I had another Red Vision. This one started the same as the first, with everything turning red, and then out of that red haze appeared images. My mind seemed to detach from my body and floated through the ship. I floated through the cargo hold and onto the magnetic walkway. Someone was there again. This time it looked less like a human being and more like a body, swaying lifelessly in zero gravity. Sawyer was nowhere to be seen.
Then, a new scene. I hovered above an ocean for a moment. A storm was raging above the water. Waves crashed everywhere. They didn’t faze me at all. I felt like a god. I decided to dive beneath the waves. The ocean was dark but not deep. A reef full of coral glowed at the bottom. As I approached the reef, I saw it again—the jellyfish. It swam deliberately toward the reef. There again was the fish, gasping for air. I swam to help, but the current pushed me away. Just as the jellyfish reached its victim, an enormous white whale cut off my view. By the time the whale passed, the jellyfish had its tentacles wrapped around its prey. The fish struggled to survive. If the current wasn’t so strong, if the white whale hadn’t cut me off, and I would have arrived just a little earlier, I thought. It was a perfect storm. A perfect storm! I heard that phrase just hours earlier, and now my dream made sense.
I jolted back to the present and found myself floating in the middle of the dark, orangutan cage. Maybe it was part of the Red Vision, but the lightning flowers on my hands seemed to glow for a moment before they looked like scars again. I looked through the bars toward the Device.
“I get it now,” I whispered. “These are dreams with hidden meanings. I said ’Show me something’ and you did. The white whale is the Moon. The fish must be LG Alpha. The jellyfish is the comet? I want to understand.” Still, I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone, especially not my dad. Like Trackman said, I was a burden. I sat there until morning, rerunning the images in my mind.
PHASE TWO
“Lunch served. Report to Observation Deck,” the voice of DORIS announced.
I cheered up at the thought of food. Everyone was there for lunch on the Observation Deck except for Buckshot who was piloting us past the Moon. It was an amazing view. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, the craters were clearly visible from hundreds of miles away. Moon Base Tranquility was just visible from space, too. No one felt like talking about the beautiful view though. The weight of the rescue mission was on us. What would we find on the far side of the Moon? Deadly scenes of exploding space stations and jellyfish kept popping up in my mind.
We sat on the magnetic chairs. The middle of the table opened, and covered platters of food appeared. The meal was “breakfast for lunch.” The food—bacon, eggs, orange juice, and oatmeal—was kept in steamy glass containers so it wouldn’t float away. If any food did float off, a mechanical arm grabbed the larger particles and a small vacuum grabbed the leftover bits. All the drinks had straws, and they filled from the bottom up if you placed them in the right spot on the table. It was all a bit tricky at first, especially keeping everything on the metal sporks—you know, those spoon/fork things. I never liked sporks and Tabitha felt the same. She tried to lighten the mood.
“They aren’t good spoons and they’re not good forks either. What’s the point?” she said.
“A spork doesn’t have a p
oint,” said Sunjay. “You’re thinking of a knife.”
“Oh, haha, Sunjay. Seriously, they should make one that has a spoon on one side and a fork on the other,” she said.
I watched Tabitha. She, like me, had to snatch her eggs out of midair several times so they didn’t float to the ceiling. It took my mind off our problems for a moment, even though the beady-eyed Trackman sat next to me. A spork looked dangerous in his hand. It slowed my appetite down, but not much.
Sunjay was even hungrier than I was. We passed dish after dish down the table toward him. “Could you pass this? Pass that?” he said, with a mouth full of fluffy eggs that would occasionally float out of his mouth toward one of us.
Finally, Redshirt looked at Sunjay across the wide table and said, “Hmmm, please open your mouth wide just like you would at a dentist office. Just don’t say ‘ah.’”
Sunjay obeyed. Redshirt pinched a piece of bacon, aimed it like a dart, and launched the projectile toward Sunjay. We all watched the slice of bacon float through the air toward its target. The bacon dart reached Sunjay’s mouth and went right in. A perfect shot! Everyone applauded, and Redshirt grinned.
“You ought to see Redshirt shoot free throws,” dad said.
Yes, we had seen that.
“That mouth is an easy target,” Redshirt replied.
“Commander, how long until we can see the base?” asked Sunjay.
“We’ll be there in about 48 hours,” my dad said. “But remember, the base has a cloaking device. It will be hard to detect, and we won’t see it until we are very close. If the cloaking device is damaged, we should see it much sooner.”
“Is there a Scenario Four,” I asked, “where something else happened to the rogue comet?”
“I seriously doubt it, Tully,” he said. Once again, my questions always seemed to be wrong. Dad didn’t seem interested in answering me, just Sunjay.
After lunch the three of us disembarked for the Hamster Wheel and left the crew to do their jobs. For once the Wheel was ours. We played more games: basketball, volleyball, and just jumping around in 1/2 G. Volleyball was amazing. At 1/2 G, I could jump over the net. For a short guy, that was heaven. I felt like an Olympian, flying through the air and hitting the ball straight down, watching it bounce back to the ceiling. So Sunjay and I hit volleyballs at each other for a while. Tabitha set us and laughed when we hit each other, which wasn’t that often. Our aim wasn’t very Olympian.
Sunjay and I also battled with bo staffs again. This time, like the last, went in his favor until he hit my hand. I actually put my hand into harm’s way on purpose. At that point the pain brought back the red haze. Then I felt untouchable, unstoppable. My hands and head throbbed with power and pain, but I easily knocked him down again. My hands glowed, but I shoved them in my pockets to avoid any strange conversations. Tabitha frowned at me, like I was holding something back from them both, but we had bigger problems to solve. In 48 hours, we would arrive at LG Alpha.
“Guys, we need to figure out if there’s anything to this Conspiracy Game.” I looked at Tabitha. She looked out the window, but I knew her now. She wasn’t distracted. She was deep in thought—probably deeper than Sunjay and me. “Any ideas?”
“Divide and conquer,” she said. “Here’s what we do. Sunjay follows Trackman. Tully, you follow Sawyer—because I don’t want to. I’m going to have some girl time with Queen Envy.”
“Girl time? What’s the point of that? Why don’t I get to have girl time with Queen Envy?” said Sunjay.
“It’s not worth explaining, Sunjay. I’m going to ‘pull a Tully’ and not tell you right now.”
“Haha,” I said. “Let’s figured this out. It’s the one thing we might be able to do for my dad.”
I didn’t learn much though. Sawyer stayed on the Flight Deck most of the day, the one place I could not stay for long. Observing him I didn’t learn much, other than he did not eat or sleep, so his days never really ended or began. He left the deck occasionally to check something else on the ship or to check my vital signs, if he noticed me with my sketchbook.
“How’s The Conspiracy Game?” I asked, sketching the Observation Deck. “Are you winning?”
“Oh, Tully, I wish I could tell you, but since you have been discovered, I have to keep my secrets. By the way, are you still keeping mine?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Then I have something for you.”
“What?”
“Follow me.”
I felt tense as we made our way through the ship. When we reached the magnetic walkway near the escape pods, my mind raced. The vision of the body returned.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
Every muscle tensed up and I clenched my fists. I prepared for the worst—maybe I was the body in the magnetic walkway. I let Sawyer walked ahead. I wished that Sunjay or Tabitha were there with me. But he didn’t stay on the walkway. He opened the infirmary door. I slowly made my way down the empty walkway and turned into the infirmary. There was a camera on the wall. Maybe Redshirt was watching. I would be safer there than on the walkway. Once there, he retrieved a box from a drawer and held it out to me.
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
“A token of our friendship,” he said. “You should be more gentle with him in the future.”
I opened the box and expected something to pop out at me—a scorpion, maybe? Instead, Little Bacon stared up at me.
“Bacon! I thought I lost you!” I patted Little Bacon on the head.
“You did lose me. Actually, you kicked me,” he said.
“He was a bit damaged. I repaired him,” Sawyer said, “just like I repaired his owner.”
Little Bacon was back in my shirt pocket when I met Sunjay and Tabitha later. They were happy to see him, but I had nothing to show for my afternoon with Sawyer. Tabitha had more.
Queen Envy sent the new song, “Space Boy,” back to Earth. It was an immediate hit.
“She’s in dire love with your dad, Tully, and the world knows by now,” Tabitha said, smiling. “Queen Harper sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?”
“About as good as Tabitha Trackman,” I said. The whole thing creeped me out. I couldn’t imagine Queen Envy with my dad. He loved his job more than anything else, except, hopefully, me.
“I wish I was her Space Boy,’” Sunjay said.
“That makes two of us,” I said. “So is that all?”
Tabitha twirled her lucky scarf. Clearly she had more.
“Oh, it’s dire crazy. Crazy question of a comet hurling through space. And it just veered off course. Boom, you know?”
We both looked at her. She took a deep breath.
“Okay, here’s the thing: Queen Envy and I kind of bonded this afternoon. We talked about music and fashion, but there’s more to her than that. Did you know that she knew about the mission before we left? The Alliance told her it was dangerous, and they needed a cover story. She agreed to be the cover, as long as they kept her posted on what was happening. She’s cooler than I thought,” said Tabitha. “Well, maybe not her music or the glowing eyelashes, but she’s got guts.”
“So now you like her! Finally. What more about the mission?” asked Sunjay.
“It’s about the comet,” said Tabitha, quietly. “The crew reviewed the recording of the comet. Before we lost track of it, the comet turned.”
“Comets don’t turn,” I said. “Comets might orbit or get pulled by gravity—“
“—Right, comets don’t do that. But what does?” She let that question hang there. I pictured the jellyfish.
“A comet with a mind of its own?” said Sunjay. I wouldn’t have believed it a few days before, but ever since the Harper Device drew me in, anything seemed possible. It was just another piece in a growing puzzle. We asked Sunjay about his day.
“Oh, Trackman? He just hung out in his room and on the Observation Deck. He looked out the window at the Moon and muttered to himself, like m
y dad does when he’s trying to fix something in the garage.”
“Could you hear him?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Could you see his lips?” asked Tabitha.
“Uh, no.”
We hadn’t made much progress. We had Little Bacon, and we knew more about the strange comet. “Guys, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Let’s meet again as soon as we can. We need to get ready.”
“For what?” said Sunjay.
“I don’t know.” I floated back to my cage, determined to find out but having no idea how to find out. That changed when I touched the hatch to the space lab. A shot of fear and excitement shot through me. The lightning flower on the back of my hand glowed. Someone was in the lab, I could feel it. I didn’t even need to peek through the window to see who. I picked Little Bacon out of my pocket.
“Hey, LB, I have another adventure for you. I promise, no kicking. Just sneaking. Go hide in the garden and listen. No talking.”
I slid open the door ever so slightly for him to enter the space lab. Two figures were talking in front of the Harper Device. You know who. More games, I thought. Sawyer and Trackman had not noticed the door.
Little Bacon scooted down the corridor just inches off the floor, trying to catch their conversation.
“I returned the Handroid to the boy. His trust seems to be growing.”
“Well, bravo, you walking piece of hardware,” said Trackman. “Finally you do something right. But how could you tell the boy the access code to his cage?”
Apparently Trackman had found out about my earlier conversations with Sawyer and he wasn’t happy.
“Who knows what he thinks?” Trackman continued. “Telling him some story about ‘Conspiracy Games’? Is that really what you called this? What a fool! Better to have done away with him while you had the chance. And you had your chances…”
“That would have made quite a mess, sir. Someone would soon notice the missing pod…”