Untitled 6619

by Penguin Random House

  Rig looked at me, wide-eyed. “I don’t have a problem with you.”

  “Really? Because you obviously don’t want me to be here. You barely talk to me, even when we’re supposed to be working together. You seem to like Jorgen just fine, but you won’t even speak to me. What did I do to make you dislike me so much?”

  Rig pushed a hand through his hair, closing his eyes. “I don’t dislike you, FM.”

  “Then what?” I demanded. I probably should have been more reasonable, but the last person I’d tried to be reasonable with had disappeared into thin air, probably fleeing across the universe to get away. And while I knew she wasn’t fleeing from me personally, it still didn’t feel good.

  At least Rig couldn’t hyperjump away.

  “No,” Rig said quietly. “I…scud, Spensa didn’t tell you?” He looked at me plaintively, like he was begging me to have any idea what he was talking about. I was starting to have the creeping sensation that I was missing something enormous.

  Rig sighed. “I guess she didn’t. I didn’t mean for you to think that I didn’t like you, when the truth is I—”

  Oh scud.

  Oh SCUD.

  I was missing something, something so obvious I clearly should have seen it.

  Rig wasn’t afraid of me. He—

  “—kind of, um, like you,” he mumbled.

  “That— Oh.” My face went hot. I was being as bad as Nedd right now. I did not see this coming. I’d known Nedd was interested in me, of course, and about Jorgen and Spensa, but none of them had acted like this. I normally thought I was pretty good at reading people, but—

  “Why would Spensa have told me that?” I asked.

  “I asked Spensa to ask you if you were interested,” Rig mumbled. “I thought probably she did, and you weren’t, and neither of you ever wanted to tell me, which was probably for the best. But I guess she never mentioned it at all? She must have been distracted by saving the world and everything. I get it.”

  He didn’t sound like he got it. He sounded hurt. “No,” I said. “She never said anything. I had no idea. But…aren’t you interested in Spensa?”

  Rig choked. “Spensa? Do I seem like I want to torture myself?”

  I would have laughed if I weren’t in a state of shock. Rig and I stared at each other, the longest he’d ever made eye contact with me at one time.

  Rig grimaced. “I’m sorry I made you feel like I disliked you. I was embarrassed, that’s all. We don’t ever have to talk about this again, and I’ll try to act less like I hate you and not die of embarrassment, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. My face was still flaming, and Rig was bright red, and I probably should have done us both the favor of preserving what was left of our dignity by walking away. I felt like a complete idiot for confronting him when he’d obviously been trying so hard to avoid it. Nedd had done the same thing to me, and that had become all kinds of awkward the minute it was out in the open.

  Except I didn’t want to go. I’d wanted to get to know Rig, and I still did, even if it was awkward. Rig was worth wading through the awkwardness for. “Are you sure I can’t stay and help?” I asked again.

  Rig looked at me like I had lost my mind, and maybe I had. “You really want to help?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I want to help you figure out how to answer that message.”

  “Of course.” Rig somehow managed to look even more dejected. Obviously that wasn’t the answer he wanted. I wasn’t even sure it was the answer I’d meant to give him.

  Between this and my experience with Alanik, I was clearly much worse at dealing with people than I thought I was. “And I’d like to talk to you some more,” I said quickly. “Do you think we can manage to act like human beings while we do that?”

  Rig looked a little horrified, but then he smiled tentatively. “Maybe? I mean, if this conversation is any indication, I’d say it’s unlikely.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, okay. Do you think we could act like freaks, but not freaks who hate each other?”

  “That sounds a little more achievable.” He squinted at the next panel. “If the schematic I looked at is correct—not that I completely understood it, mind you—I think the hypercomm should be somewhere in this block. Want to help me lift this off?”

  “Sure,” I said. I stepped around some of the mechanical bits he’d already removed. “I have no idea what any of this is.”

  “And I have only vague ideas,” Rig said. “To be honest, it will probably take a lifetime to sort through all the things that make this platform run. Don’t get me wrong—it’s fascinating work. I just wish we were doing it under better circumstances.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said. Rig unplugged a couple of cables, and then he lifted half of the panel and I hoisted the other half. Together we lowered it to the ground.

  Rig brushed some grease off his hands onto his jumpsuit. “That was really unmanly of me, wasn’t it? Asking you to help me lift that thing. Nedd would have done it one-handed just to show off.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not interested in Nedd,” I said.

  Rig looked at me, and there was something so sweet and vulnerable about him that it made me want to reach out and touch him.

  I stood frozen to the spot. I’d tried not to think about guys since I’d joined the DDF. Something about all the fighting and dying made dating seem ridiculous, like it had about as much place in flight school as the fancy dresses people wore to parties back home.

  But I was thinking about one now, and I didn’t really want to stop.

  “Is there someone you are interested in?” Rig asked quietly.

  He looked like he was bracing for bad news. I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t want to give him false hope. I liked him, yeah. But could it really go anywhere? What future did any of us have with things the way they were?

  Not one we could bank on, that was for certain. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Rig said. “No problem.”

  He’d taken that as a rejection, but I wasn’t sure it was.

  Rig cleared his throat and turned to look at the machinery behind the panel we’d just removed.

  “Oh,” Rig said.

  There, amid the wires and circuits and foreign devices, was a box identical to the one Rig had built based on M-Bot’s design.

  “That’s how they did it,” Rig said, and I nodded.

  We had an FTL communicator.

  But it required a taynix to make it work.

  Eight

  “So you’re sure,” Jorgen said. “The FTL communicator is designed to house one of these slugs?” He was sitting on one of the metal chairs in the engineering bay with Fine, the purple taynix, stretched across his lap. Jorgen had fewer bandages on his face now, the remaining little white pieces of medical tape standing out in stark contrast to his dark skin.

  Jorgen ran his fingers absently through Fine’s orange spines, and it shimmied slightly, like it was happy about it.

  “Pretty sure,” Rig said. “FM discovered that the slugs do bring the box with them when they hyperjump. If the box in M-Bot’s ship was built to house a slug, the box in the FTL communicator probably has the same purpose.”

  “But you wouldn’t want the slug jumping away with the communicator,” Jorgen pointed out.

  “Our theory,” I said, “is that the different kinds of slugs have different cytonic abilities. The purple slugs and the red slugs don’t escape the way the yellow ones do, so the yellow slugs are the teleporters.”

  “Right,” Rig said. “And the red one did that…exploding thing. It’s possible that the purple ones have a third power.”

  “A communication power,” Jorgen said. “Like the way Spensa communicated with Gran-Gran from light-years away.”

  Rig smiled. “Exactly.” He turned and l
ooked at me—which he seemed able to do a lot more after our conversation. This time I had to resist looking away. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way I felt when he paid attention to me—like my heart was skipping beats. It made me nervous and worry about hurting him, which was stupid, because I already had, hadn’t I? He seemed to think I’d let him down easy, and maybe I had. Now I just needed to leave well enough alone.

  But I still felt unsettled, and more than a little disappointed.

  “But why would you build the same box in the ship and the communicator?” Jorgen asked. “If you’re not going to teleport the communicator around, and the purple slugs can’t escape, you don’t need the same sort of device in the communicator as you do in the ship. Not if the purpose of the box is to make sure the ship hyperjumps with the slug.”

  “That’s true,” Rig said, “if the only purpose of the box is to send the ship with the slug.” He pointed to a piece he’d pulled out of the device before we found the box. “But I think the inside of the box might have a second function. This is a holographic projector. It’s not as advanced as the one on M-Bot, but it’s more advanced than the ones we use. I think it might have been used to project an image on the inside of the box.”

  “Shouldn’t M-Bot’s box have one of those too, then?” Jorgen asked.

  “M-Bot’s technology allows him to project holograms on almost any surface,” Rig said. “So he would have been able to project onto the inside of the box without a dedicated holoprojector.”

  “And the purpose of the projector is to tell the slugs what to do,” I said.

  Rig smiled at me. His cheeks dimpled, and my heart did that skippy thing again. I definitely needed to figure out how to get that under control. “That’s the idea,” he said.

  Jorgen nodded. “And if we have the slugs, the box, and the projector—”

  “Then we should be able to do the same thing.”

  “Okay,” Jorgen said. “That’s good work. I don’t suppose getting the communicator to work is as easy as putting a purple slug in it?”

  “I tried that,” Rig said. “The slug sits there, and maybe if we waited long enough it might send a communication somewhere…”

  “But we need to be able to direct what it says,” Jorgen said. “How do we do that? Do we even know where to send the message?”

  “I think so,” Rig said. “There’s some metadata that came with the communication from Minister Cuna. I think we might be able to use it to respond. The communicator has some hardware similar to Alanik’s translation pin, and I think that might send a specific message through the taynix even if the taynix doesn’t actually understand the message. What I haven’t figured out is how to get the slug to participate in the communication.”

  “It probably has something to do with cytonics,” Jorgen said. “Boomslug exploded while I was trying to talk to it with my mind. So maybe I have to”—he gave me a side-eye—“ask it to send the message?”

  “Or induce it to somehow?” Rig asked.

  “What were you thinking about when Boomslug exploded?” I asked. “You said you were trying to talk to it. What were you saying?”

  Jorgen rubbed the back of his neck. “Nothing much. You said I should befriend it, so I was trying to…empathize with it, I guess.”

  “Empathize with it,” Rig said.

  Jorgen groaned. “Yes, okay? FM said I should bond with it—”

  “And you told me that was stupid—”

  “Because I thought it was stupid. But nothing else was working, so I thought it would be worth a try. I told it I was sorry that I ripped it out of its home and was now invading its mind and talking to it through that creepy place with all the eyes. Okay?”

  “Wait,” I said. “The eyes?”

  “Yeah…” He trailed off, and looked at the slug.

  “The eyes,” Rig said. “You said they’re creepy, right? And you’re afraid of them?”

  “I’m not afraid of them,” Jorgen said. “But yeah, the times I’ve seen them, they’re…unnerving. It’s uncomfortable, all of them staring at me. It makes me self-conscious.”

  “Self-conscious,” I said. “Otherworldly, all-powerful beings that could snuff your life out in an instant—along with the rest of the lives on our planet—stare at you, and that makes you self-conscious.”

  “Yes, okay?” Jorgen said. “It’s not like I choose how I feel about them. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never experienced it.”

  “But the slugs have,” Rig said. “And when you thought about those things, Boomslug was frightened.”

  “Maybe,” Jorgen said. “So when I thought of the eyes, the slug used its cytonic abilities. I suppose we could try again, to confirm…” He felt at the bandages on his face. “Maybe we should try one of the other varieties, like the teleporting ones. Perhaps I could…scare the slug into hyperjumping.”

  “It seems like a good thing to try,” Rig said.

  They both looked at me, like they wanted my opinion.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t love the idea of terrifying the slugs, but since it’s the only lead we have, it seems worth trying.”

  “Right,” Jorgen said. He gingerly lifted Fine off his lap and put him in the crate. “Maybe we could use one of the slugs in the metal box. You said they already moved it once, right?”

  “Right,” I said. I turned around to grab the box from where we’d left it next to the slug crate.

  The box was gone.

  “Well, we’ve proven they hyperjump with the box then, right?” Jorgen asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Where they took the box is another question.” I glanced out in the hall, but the thing wasn’t there.

  “We can use a different slug,” Rig said, “and find the box later.”

  I retrieved Gill from the crate.

  Jorgen took Gill in his hands and looked him in the face. “Do you think I should try to…bond with it first?”

  “I’m not sure how that will help you scare it,” Rig said. He looked at me like he expected me to argue.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think bonding it is necessary here.” I didn’t want the slugs to be miserable, but befriending them might actively make them more comfortable and less likely to move.

  “Okay,” Jorgen said. “I’m not going to hum this time.”

  “That seems like it would be to everyone’s benefit,” Rig said.

  “I don’t know,” I added. “If our goal is to terrify the slug, your humming might help.”

  More dimples.

  Scud, I was in so much trouble.

  “Here goes,” Jorgen said. He closed his eyes, and nothing happened.

  Rig and I looked at each other. The trouble with experimenting with cytonics was that the majority of the time we had no idea what was happening.

  Then, without warning, Gill disappeared.

  “Oh!” Jorgen said. “Hey! It worked.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Um…where did Gill go?”

  We all looked around, but he wasn’t in the immediate vicinity.

  “It’s occurring to me now,” I said, “that if you’re successful at this, you create more work for me.”

  “Hey,” Jorgen said. “You volunteered for this job.”

  I did. I headed out into the hall, searching the surrounding rooms for Gill. I found the box with the other two yellow taynix in it in an adjoining room, and brought it back and set it inside the door. There was no sign of Gill in the surrounding halls though, or the corridors beyond that.

  I was about to give up when one of the aides from Command came up the hallway holding a canvas bag that emitted a fluting sound. “Admiral Cobb sent this for you,” he said. “Apparently it materialized in the middle of his holoprojection.”

  “Thanks,” I said, lifting Gill out of the bag. “You can keep the b
ag in case you see any more of them.”

  “Okay,” the aide said, looking at the taynix warily.

  Gill shuddered a little, trembling under my touch, and I reached into my pocket, pulling out a little tin of caviar and offering a bite to Gill. Even my parents would have to approve of this if they knew the slugs were the secret to saving the lives of everyone on Detritus.

  “Okay,” Rig said when I returned. “We have an idea for another experiment. Is Gill ready?”

  “Hasn’t he been through enough?” I asked.

  “We know he’s frightened of the eyes,” Jorgen said. “And we want to see if we can get him to move the box.”

  Rig had already removed the slugs who had been hanging out in the metal box. I went over to the crate and gave the slugs a couple of mushrooms. If we weren’t relying on starvation to motivate them to teleport, there was no need for the poor things to go hungry.

  “Okay,” Rig said, handing Jorgen the box with Gill loaded into it. “Hold on to the box, and we’ll see if we can get it to take you and the box with it wherever it goes.”

  “Wherever it goes?” Jorgen said. “We have no idea where it’s going to go, and we want it to take me with it?”

  “That tactic could have its uses,” I said, “like for getting fighters out of trouble when they’re being tailed by Krell. But it’s not useful for going to meet with Cuna.” I was still nervous about trying that—what if Alanik was right, and Cuna was merely another tool of the Superiority looking to control us?

  Without Alanik though, Cuna was our only option. If Alanik’s people didn’t want to be our allies, we were still going to need help if we expected to escape from the Superiority.

  “I don’t think it’s going to take you far,” Rig said. “None of the taynix have left the immediate vicinity. You’re not going to get carried off the platform.”

  “So getting them to travel across the universe is its own problem,” I said.

  “Right,” Rig said. “But one thing at a time.”

  “Fine,” Jorgen said.

  “Fine!” Fine piped up from over in the crate.

  Jorgen drew a deep breath, holding the metal box in his hands.