“Shut up, Nedd,” Arturo said, probably because Jorgen was way too reserved to tell Nedd to shove it in front of Cobb, though Cobb didn’t blink an eye.
“The slugs are actually pretty intelligent,” I said. Doomslug mostly parroted sounds, but one time I taught her how to say “please” before I gave her each bite of caviar. It was adorable. “They’re definitely not things.”
“Things!” one of the slugs said from the crate.
“You are not helping yourself,” I told it.
“I don’t care if they’re geniuses,” Cobb said. “We need to figure out how to use them to get off this planet before the Superiority comes back with a force we can’t handle. They already did that once. If they hadn’t turned around and left on their own, that might have been our end. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Jorgen said, and the rest of us echoed him. The truth was, it wasn’t my decision. Like with my friends, there was very little I could do to protect these slugs.
“Rigmarole and Jorgen, I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”
“Sir?” Jorgen said. “I don’t know anything about animals—”
“The Assembly wants us to put our focus on defending ourselves, and I can’t blame them for that. So, the Engineering Corps is busy working on the platform defenses. They’re lending us Rig because he has the most experience with this technology through his work with M-Bot. And you’re a cytonic, and the slugs are a cytonic…thing.” Cobb waved his arm in the direction of the slugs, somehow managing to sound authoritative even though he didn’t know the right term. I wasn’t sure there was a right term. This was entirely new territory for all of us.
“Sir, I’d like to help,” I said.
Cobb looked me over. “Fine. FM will also help. I want a report on your progress in twenty-four hours.”
Rig paled. “I’m not sure we’ll have results in—”
“Just a report of what you’ve learned. I know you and your pals in engineering would like a month to poke around and design experiments, but we don’t have that kind of time. Do I make myself understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Rig said.
“First, we need to figure out how to prevent them from escaping,” Jorgen said. “They keep getting out of the crate.”
“I hope you’ll have something more for me by tomorrow than whether you were able to keep an animal in a cage,” Cobb said.
“You don’t have experience with these animals, sir.”
It was weird how they kept escaping. The crate looked pretty secure, and I didn’t think the slugs were strong enough to lift the lid. Certainly not with Nedd sitting on it. Even Nedd would have noticed that.
“Do you think they’re hyperjumping?” I asked.
Jorgen and Cobb blinked at me, and then we all looked down at the slugs. One of the purple and orange ones climbed on the back of one of its friends, its bulbous face crinkling at us speculatively.
“Doomslug used to escape from Spensa’s bunk all the time,” I added. “And has anyone ever seen these things travel around? They just seem to…appear places.”
“Yeah, that would explain it,” Jorgen said. “The one FM found sure got away fast.”
“If that’s the case,” Rig said, “maybe we don’t try to contain them, and see what we can observe.”
Cobb clapped Rig and Jorgen on their shoulders. “I’ll leave that to you.”
“Sir?” One of Cobb’s aides stood in the hallway, peering into the room. “You have guests waiting for you in the command center.”
“What guests?” Cobb asked.
The aide looked around at the rest of us, as if she wasn’t sure she should say. “The National Assembly sent some representatives to talk to you about the defense effort, sir. Jeshua Weight is with them.”
We all looked at Jorgen. His mother was a famous pilot who’d fought in the Battle of Alta alongside Cobb. She was a legend, even among pilots. Now she mostly worked with her husband, Jorgen’s father, who was a leader of the National Assembly.
“Did you know your mom was here?” Nedd asked.
“No,” Jorgen said. “I’ve been with you for days, remember?”
“I dunno,” Nedd said. “Didn’t Spensa’s grandmother say she could, like, read people’s minds?”
“I can’t do that,” Jorgen snapped. He sounded more upset with himself than irritated with Nedd, as if being a cytonic should have come with a manual.
This was Jorgen. He probably did think being a cytonic should have come with a manual.
“I’m not going to keep her waiting,” Cobb said. “I expect that report by tomorrow.” And he strode out of the room, leaving us all standing around the crate full of slugs.
“All right,” Jorgen said, nodding purposefully. “Rig wants to observe the slugs to see what happens when they escape. Nedd, Arturo, and I will get these crates to the engineering bay, and then Rig can set up his equipment.”
“What am I going to do?” I asked. I wasn’t going to complain if I wasn’t asked to carry boxes, but I definitely wasn’t going to let Jorgen leave me out.
“You can be in charge of keeping the slugs in the crate,” Jorgen said. “Finding them if they escape, maybe tagging them all somehow so we can keep track of them.”
He looked at Rig. I assumed he was making things up when he talked about Rig setting up “equipment,” but I didn’t know much about what they did in engineering, so I wasn’t going to point that out and reveal my own ignorance.
Rig looked suddenly uncomfortable. “That sounds great.”
He didn’t seem like he thought it was great. He seemed like he thought I might be too incompetent to babysit the taynix. But Jorgen nodded as if nothing was amiss.
“All right. You heard Cobb. Let’s get moving.” Jorgen counted the slugs in the crate. “Scud, we’re missing one again.”
They all looked at me. It might have been easier to be assigned to carry the boxes. “I’ll go look for it, I guess.”
“We’ll probably want to have her put a marker wherever she finds the slugs,” Rig said. “So we can get a reading on their habitual distances.”
“She is standing right here,” I said. “And if you give me a marker, I’ll leave it when I find one.”
“Oh—okay,” Rig said. He looked abashed, but still refused to meet my eyes.
Apparently my interest in getting to know him wasn’t returned. That was a shame—there was a serious dearth of cute nerdy guys my age to hang out with up here on Platform Prime. Especially ones I hadn’t spent the last few months watching have contests to see how many callsigns they could utter in one belch.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I had work to do, so I spun around and stalked out, off to find myself a taynix.
Four
Over the next few hours, I became certain that the slugs were teleporting out of the box. The yellow and blue ones would periodically disappear, regardless of whether the lid was on or off. Sometimes I’d find them slithering around some other part of the engineering bay. Sometimes I’d find them out in the hall, or down the corridor. A few times I had to venture all the way up to the command center or out to the landing bay to find the slugs chilling on someone’s chair or on the wing of a ship.
There didn’t seem to be any way to stop them from doing this, but only the yellow and blue ones had a penchant for wandering. The others remained in their crate, crawling over one another. The teleporting slugs seemed to leave less often when I played them music from my transmitter, so I left it looping a slow melodic song next to the crate. The slugs trilled along, echoing the notes. If the music bothered the engineers, they seemed to accept it as a necessary part of the scientific process, because they didn’t ask me to turn it off.
I returned to the engineering bay with my most frequent traveler, the slug with the blue gill-like markings. The slug
shivered slightly—a lot of them did that after I found them, especially if I did it quickly. They’d startle when I approached, like they were frightened of something.
Retrieving them from all over the platform wasn’t my favorite pastime, but it kept my mind off of Lizard, so I was grateful for it.
“Well,” I said to Rig, “at least you’ve got a lot of data about how far they go.”
Rig sat at his desk, looking over what I assumed was an array of said data, though it could have been something else for all I knew. He didn’t even glance up. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”
I scowled at the back of his head. Since Jorgen had gotten called away to talk to his mother shortly after we arrived in engineering, Rig was back to talking in single-syllable sentences.
Maybe I wasn’t the most scintillating person around, but it still stung that he seemed to barely notice I was here. Or worse, he did notice and wasn’t happy about it.
I scritched my most recent escapee—who I had named Gill for obvious reasons—on the head, and then counted the slugs. I had all of them again—or at least all that had been there when I took over responsibility for them. They’d been disappearing with greater frequency over time, and I thought I knew why.
“I think it’s time to feed them,” I said to Rig, not taking my eyes off the slugs. I was still waiting to catch one of them teleporting away, which they never seemed to do while I was looking. “Do you know how we do that?”
Rig did look at me then, but only to give me a wide-eyed look of terror, similar to Jorgen’s when Cobb asked why the slugs were different colors.
“Do you know how to feed them?” I asked again. “I think they’re wandering away faster because they’re hungry, and I don’t have enough caviar for all of them.”
“Caviar?” Rig asked. “Why would you—”
“There’re mushrooms in one of the crates,” Jorgen said, and I turned around to find him standing in the doorway. “We assumed that’s what they eat because there were a ton of them in the cavern where we found them. They seem to like them well enough.” He walked over to one of the other boxes and pulled off the lid. Sure enough, it was filled with wide-capped mushrooms in various shades of cream and brown.
Gill trilled eagerly. I gave him the first taste and then dropped several more mushrooms into one of the slug crates. The slugs migrated toward the mushrooms, all clustering together. Hopefully that would motivate them to stay put for a while.
“How was the thing with your mom?” I asked Jorgen.
“Complicated. Apparently the National Assembly was frightened by the appearance of the delver, and now they want to have more say in what the DDF is doing. Cobb doesn’t like it.”
I understood why—it wasn’t like the National Assembly had any practical experience with the Superiority, let alone a delver.
Then again, neither did the rest of us.
“There’s more,” Jorgen said. “The assembly has been able to monitor some of the information on the Superiority datanets. They say Spensa was the one who turned the delver away from Detritus. Then she apparently turned it on them.”
Rig and I both gaped at him. “Do you think that’s true?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Jorgen said. “If anyone could figure out how to wrangle a space monster, it would be her.”
That was fair. Spensa was a little mythic in the things she pulled off. If I didn’t know her well, I would have thought she was something better than human.
“If so,” Jorgen said, “we need her back. The Superiority doesn’t seem to know where she went. They do seem to know she’s not here. They’re reaching out to all their people, telling them they need to mobilize and destroy us while our cytonic is gone.”
“They don’t know we have you,” I said.
A shadow passed over Jorgen’s face. “And I’m no good to us unless I figure out how to use my powers. Or we learn how to use these.”
“Is that what your mother wants?” I asked. “To oversee the development of the hyperdrives?”
“She wants to oversee everything,” Jorgen said. “Or the Assembly does. I think they decided since my mom was in the DDF for so long, she’d be a good liaison as they begin negotiations.”
“And you don’t agree?”
“I think it makes sense,” Jorgen said. “But she’s…less happy I admitted to Cobb that I have the defect. It’s supposed to be a family secret.”
I understood why they’d kept the secret this long. After all, the Superiority had taken advantage of Spensa’s father, using his powers to turn him against his allies. That…couldn’t happen to Jorgen…could it? “But you can’t keep it a secret now, can you? You’re basically our only hope.”
“Spensa was a better hope,” Jorgen said. “I think my mom’s worried about what’s going to happen to me if I start experimenting with my powers.”
That also made sense. I wondered if Jorgen’s parents were behind the move to keep the engineers focused on defense and away from hyperdrives, which would put Jorgen in more danger.
“Spensa will find her way home,” I said. “She did it before, and she’ll do it again.”
Jorgen gave me a suspicious look, like he wondered why I was trying to comfort him about Spensa. If Rig hadn’t been sitting right there, I might have told him I knew how he felt about her. Rig was watching us curiously from his desk—I think this was the longest he’d ever bothered to look at me at one time.
“Of course she’ll be fine,” Jorgen said. “And Cobb and the National Assembly will figure out what to do. We just need to learn how to turn these slugs into hyperdrives.”
“No pressure,” I said. We both looked down at the slugs, which had finished their mushrooms and were slithering around the large crate, looking for more. I tossed a few more in the box, and they set about devouring them while I fed the other crate of slugs as well.
Jorgen sighed and turned to Rig. “What do we know so far?”
“Not a lot,” Rig said. “I’ve gathered the data FM generated with the trackers. The slugs don’t tend to go far, the farthest distance being about two hundred meters, but most went less than twenty.”
“But we think they’re hyperjumping,” Jorgen said.
“I don’t know how else to explain it,” I said. “Unless they suddenly move really fast when we aren’t looking. And probably invisibly. And can open crates and close them again.”
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So if they already hyperjump, we probably aren’t going to need to cut them up. We just need to figure out how to get them to do it over bigger distances and to go where we want them to.”
“And to take you with them,” Rig said.
“Right.”
“How would you get it to go where you want?” I asked. “It’s not like you can give it directions.” The slugs were smart enough to mimic basic words and get themselves out of small spaces, but I wouldn’t exactly want to give one a map and then sit back and trust it to send me across the universe.
“When Spensa left for Starsight, the alien girl Alanik put some coordinates into her mind,” Jorgen said. “She did it cytonically, I guess. The way that Spensa’s grandmother said she could hear Spensa talking to her all the way from Starsight. I don’t know how to do that—but if we could give them to the slugs…”
“Too bad we can’t ask the alien girl,” Rig said, and Jorgen nodded.
Alanik had been shot down by the gun platforms upon arrival, and was still in the medical bay, unconscious. I think the medtechs were hoping she would heal on her own, since they didn’t know enough about her anatomy to do much besides keep her medically sedated and wait.
The slugs finished their second round of mushrooms and snuffled around for more. We would clearly have to send a team to harvest more. Hopefully there were a lot of these to be had somewhere in the caverns. The slugs seemed to have been
surviving down there okay.
I grabbed a few more mushrooms out of the crate and saw the layer of mushroom below it…moving. When I lifted it up, I found two more yellow and blue slugs, looking fat and happy and lying on an extra-large half-eaten cap.
“Well, aren’t you clever,” I said. If the slugs were going off looking for food, at least some of them had found it. I pulled out the two slugs—one of which had an especially long blue comb down its back, which flopped over to one side as it snoozed—and placed them back in a slug crate.
“So,” Rig said. “I’ve constructed a box out of the same metal used in the one M-Bot indicated was his hyperdrive.”
Jorgen looked the thing over intently. “What does it do?”
“Nothing,” Rig said. “It’s just a box.”
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So what was its purpose in M-Bot’s design?”
“My guess,” Rig said, “is that it’s supposed to contain the slug so it doesn’t zip all over the ship, or teleport outside the hull and die in space. Even if they can survive without atmosphere, a pilot could get stranded if his slug wandered away from him mid-flight.”
Rig was all chatty again, now that Jorgen was here. Had I done something to offend him? I had no idea what that could be.
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So the slugs can’t hyperjump out of the box.”
“That’s the theory,” Rig said. “We’ll have to put some in it to make sure. I also think the box may cause the slug to take the ship with it when it hyperjumps, but I’m not sure how.”
“So we don’t know how to make it move,” Jorgen said, “but if it decided to, it might teleport the whole box?”
“Possibly,” Rig said. “We’ll have to try it and find out.”
“Great,” Jorgen said. “FM, grab a couple slugs and put them into Rig’s box.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. It came out more sarcastic than I intended. I had volunteered to be the slug handler, after all. Jorgen gave me a sharp look, but I ignored him and lifted two more blue and yellow slugs out of the crate. These two were less skittish than some of the others, and let me stroke them for a few moments before I placed them into Rig’s box and fastened the dark metal lid.
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