Former Champion (Vanderbrook Champions Book 5)

by Edmund Hughes

  They slept in separate sleeping bags, though they drifted close by each other. It was the most restful sleep Malcolm had experienced in months.

  Tapestry announced to him the next morning that the ship was nearing position for the Europa landing. She told him that ground control had decided that only one of them should take the lander down, even though the mission had originally planned for two to be inside the small moon craft.

  “I’ll do it,” said Malcolm. “I’ve already experienced being inside a spacesuit once. It just makes more sense.”

  He expected Tapestry to protest, but instead, she nodded in agreement.

  “I think so too.” She frowned, looking worried. “Just… be careful. The last time you went outside the ship…”

  I came back as a demon.

  “Yeah, I think that can only happen once,” he said, with a smile. “Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve burned through my supply of bad luck for the mission.”

  The only thing they had left to wait on was for the tiny orbital probes Tapestry had released at ground control’s behest to find Savior’s exact location. The moon was large, but small enough for the task to not be quite as daunting as it had originally sounded. Within a couple of hours, Tapestry informed him that they’d found what appeared to be Savior near one of Europa’s equatorial regions.

  “And he’s still alive?” asked Malcolm, voicing the fear that he was sure Tapestry also shared.

  “There’s no way to tell,” said Tapestry. “He’s just a dot on the sensors to the orbital probes.”

  “Well, we can at least hope,” said Malcolm. “This is Savior we’re talking about.”

  He thought back to the time he’d spent with the leader of the Champion Authority. Savior had been immune to essentially everything. Malcolm smiled a little as he thought about how that immunity had also seemed to extend to Savior’s public persona, his social and political gaffes never doing more than entertaining anyone who witnessed them.

  Another hour went by before the orbital probes returned with confirmation of Savior’s location, and then it took another two for the ship to orbit around into position. Tapestry busied herself in the cockpit, poring over ground control’s instructions. When it was time, Malcolm heard her voice over the intercom.

  “We have to do it now, Malcolm,” she said. “Get a space suit on and get yourself into the lander.”

  Still as bossy as ever.

  He picked a different suit than the damaged one he’d worn during his spacewalk. Tapestry came into the back of the ship to help him put it on, which he appreciated. Pulling the helmet in place triggered a sudden anxiety in him, fear leftover from what he’d felt while floating aimlessly through the void.

  “You can do this,” said Tapestry. “I’ll still be within quick radio contact. All you need to do is ride the lander down, find Savior, and ride it back up. He should be within sight of wherever you touch down.”

  “Got it.”

  He climbed into the lander, which was attached to the side of the airlock. Tapestry sealed the door behind him using the controls in the cockpit. It was a cramped vessel, with a battery of controls that Malcolm didn’t know the function of and a small, circular viewport that looked out over Europa and Jupiter.

  The view was breath taking, but not just for its beauty. The blackness of space meant something new to him after what he’d been though in his spacewalk. His palms began to sweat, and his heart fluttered with panic. It was the opposite of claustrophobia, a deep, not so irrational fear of being lost to the immensity of open space.

  “Malcolm?” asked Tapestry. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he lied. “Can you see my heart rate?”

  “I can see all your vitals,” she said. “I’m closing the door to the airlock and depressurizing it, as launch procedure dictates. You’ll be detaching shortly.”

  Malcolm nodded, though of course, Tapestry couldn’t see the movement. He barely listened as she went through several other protocols, too distracted by what he could see outside the viewport. It felt as though he was preparing to face his own death.

  Nothing will go wrong this time. I won’t even be in space, just on Europa and in the lander.

  “Are you ready Malcolm?” asked Tapestry, over the speaker in his helmet.

  “More than ready,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Alright. Good luck.”

  There was the noise of a lock releasing, and then the lander was moving freely, falling away from the main ship. Messages streamed across one of the screens on the control console to his side. Tapestry had explained to him that most of the landing was automated, so there was very little for him to do when it came to “flying” the lander.

  It fell toward Europa at a swift rate, the moon growing brighter and bigger as he approached its grand visage from space. He hadn’t been on the ship during its launch from Earth, so he’d never gotten a chance to see his own planet like this, a chance to really appreciate the scale of it.

  Europa was huge, a moon, but also a world. The idea of finding a single man on its surface suddenly seemed like a ludicrous task. Malcolm tried to push the thought away, knowing that it was the worst possible time for him to be having such doubts.

  Tiny rockets in the feet of the lander ignited as it began to pick up real speed, slowing his descent. The gravity was less than Earth’s, less than Luna, even, but still enough to make gliding down necessary.

  More details of Europa’s surface began to come into view. It was a massive sheet of ice, with cracks in places, and thermal vents releasing vapor in others. Though the lander was descending toward a flat, open plain, Malcolm still felt fear prickle his neck as he imagined what would happen if he accidentally landed in one of the cracks.

  Scientists had long theorized that underneath Europa’s ice could exist an entire ocean of life. Malcolm was looking for life on top of it, for a single living organism to bring back to Earth. And he desperately hoped that he’d be able to find him.

  CHAPTER 27

  The lander bounced on the ice as it touched down. Malcolm could hear Tapestry’s voice in his ear, though she was muttering to herself more than speaking to him. She read from a checklist, asking him for info on a dozen different stats from the command display before sounding satisfied that the landing had gone off without a hitch.

  “Malcolm?” she called, over the speaker. “Are you ready?”

  “About as ready as I’ll ever be,” he said.

  “Once the lander depressurizes and opens its door, it stays open until you come back with Savior,” she said. “There’s no point in pressurizing it with nobody inside. This will make it easier when it comes time for you to leave, but it also means that the oxygen in your suit is all you have to breathe for the entire search.”

  Malcolm took a calming breath, trying and failing to keep his thoughts away from the last time he’d been in his suit, reliant on a tiny supply of oxygen.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” he said. “This is what needs to be done. I’ll go out there and do it.”

  “Good,” said Tapestry. “Good luck. And… please come back alive. The spaceship is lonely without you.”

  She said the last sentence in a flirtatious tone, and Malcolm had to admit, it helped cheer him up.

  “I will,” he said.

  Tapestry depressurized the lander’s compartment and opened the door leading outside. Malcolm made his way to the edge, where a small, metal staircase had unfolded to make it easier for him to climb down.

  “I feel like I should say something,” said Malcolm. “And I need to make these words count, don’t I? First man on Europa…”

  “Savior was the first man on Europa,” said Tapestry. “Don’t waste time.”

  “You are the queen of wet blankets.”

  He hopped down from the lander, not feeling the need to take the stairs. His stomach lurched as he slowly descended. The sensation was strange, and the light tug of gravity was noticeable, but
nowhere near the strength of Earth’s. When he landed, he felt the slick ice beneath his feet.

  “Alright,” said Malcolm. “Where am I headed?”

  “He should be to the northeast,” said Tapestry. “There is a compass built into the heads up display in your helmet.”

  Malcolm grunted his acknowledgement and set off. It made more sense for him to take wide, leaping steps. He briefly pushed his awareness out to see if there was enough of an atmosphere on Europa for him to use his wind manipulation, but the air was just too thin for it to work.

  He was on the side of the moon facing the sun, and there was plenty of light to see by. Still, Malcolm didn’t see Savior right away, as the cracks in the ice made visibility difficult. He moved slowly, checking in with Tapestry and the compass to make sure he was still on course. He was beginning to think that the probes had been wrong when he finally spotted him.

  The body of a man in his mid-fifties, with salt and pepper hair and a clean-shaven face, lay prone on the ice. Malcolm’s heart sank as he drew closer and noticed the bluish tone to the man’s skin. Savior was dead, and the disappointment Malcolm felt made him question every decision he’d made over the past few days.

  “I found him, Tapestry.” The tone of his voice as he spoke the words said more than the actual words. Tapestry let out a discouraged sigh and said nothing.

  Malcolm drew closer to Savior’s body, part of him denying the truth of what he was seeing. With his powers, Savior should technically have been able to survive Europa’s harsh cold and thin atmosphere indefinitely. Of course, he’d have to use them constantly in order to do it. Malcolm wondered if the strain of attempting such a feat for months on end had grown to be too much for him.

  He frowned, noticing that there were scratches on the ice next to Savior’s body. Scratches that formed letters, and sentences. Some of it had been covered by a thin layer of windblown ice shards, but Malcolm brushed it aside, revealing Savior’s last message to the world.

  “Worst. Vacation. Ever. Send me to a tropical planet next time, preferably one with those tasty drinks with the tiny umbrellas. I did try to hold on, for what it’s worth. It wasn’t the strain that got to me, but the boredom. In the end, the one-person Savior couldn’t save was himself. How ironic.

  Please don’t let the people give up without me. I die in peace only because I have hope that the world is strong enough to go on.

  Dennis “Savior” Mathers”

  The words contained enough of Savior’s quirky sense of humor to make the reality of his death all the more real. Malcolm let out a slow, shaky sigh, wishing that he’d held on for just a little longer. He wondered if maybe Savior deserved some rest, even if he only found it in death.

  “Worst vacation ever,” he muttered. “Tapestry, Savior scratched his last words into the ice. I don’t want them to be lost after we leave. Can you take a photo of my visual feed from the ship?”

  He waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t respond.

  “Tapestry?”

  Still no response. Malcolm felt panic slowly spreading through his body.

  “Malcolm!” she suddenly shouted. “She opened the portal again! Multi came through, and–”

  The connection cut off as quickly as it had opened. It felt as though the cold of Europa’s atmosphere was seeping in through his suit as icy dread gripped Malcolm’s heart. He turned and started sprinting, as much as he could in the light gravity, back toward the lander.

  It took off without him before he’d made it a dozen steps. Malcolm stared at it in shock as the rockets accelerated the tiny craft hundreds of feet into the air, out of his reach, and then out of the moon’s atmosphere.

  “Tapestry!” he shouted. “The lander! I… I’m stuck here.”

  Again, there was no response. Malcolm felt familiar emotions of despair and hopelessness crashing over him. He’d been in this situation before and made it out alive. He could do it again.

  He put all his willpower into gathering what little air Europa had into a stream that he could control with his wind manipulation. It felt like trying to drink water from the air on a humid day. There just wasn’t enough of an atmosphere on the moon for him to make it work.

  He reached out toward Jupiter, but it wasn’t in sight, and Malcolm suspected that if he waited for Europa to rotate around far enough for it to be visible, it would already be too late. And that was assuming that he could pull off the herculean feat of coopting a planet’s wind from a massive distance a second time.

  None of the other moons of Jupiter with atmospheres were in sight, either. Europa was the furthest out of Jupiter’s primary moons, meaning they were all on its night side, along with the planet itself.

  Malcolm’s frustration manifested itself in the form of a headache and a tirade of obscenities. He swore into the inside of his helmet, hoping the communications line was still open, given that most of his vulgarity was in the form of threats directed at Multi.

  Slowly, Malcolm made his way back over to Savior’s body. The dead man had his eyes open, and there was a slight smile on his face. It comforted Malcolm a little to know that he’d been at peace when he died. He sensed that he wouldn’t be afforded the same privilege.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “What would you do, Savior?”

  He reached out and took Savior’s hand into his glove. It was like taking hold of an ice statue, and it was cold enough to penetrate Malcolm’s suit. He felt an odd prickling sensation and jerked his hand back, wondering if frostbite could set in so rapidly.

  Wait a second… I know that feeling. Did I just… absorb his powers?

  CHAPTER 28

  Malcolm searched his awareness, hope burgeoning in him and then deflating in the span of a second. He had absorbed Savior’s powers once before, back when he’d first met the leader of the Champion Authority. And now, as had happened then, he couldn’t figure out how to make Savior’s abilities work.

  And though he’d never attempted it before, Malcolm was reasonably certain that absorbing powers from dead bodies wasn’t something he was capable of, let alone doing it through his gloves. Or was it? How much had becoming a monster enhanced his abilities?

  He examined Savior more closely, going so far as to push a finger out against his face. He was definitely dead, and frozen all the way through.

  It didn’t matter. He was familiar enough with the sensation to know that he had, in fact, absorbed the man’s powers. Perhaps his mimicry had grown stronger since he’d become a demon. That had been the case with Second Wind, and the cause behind him losing his powers six months earlier, during their last confrontation.

  The only thing that matters now is whether I can get back to the ship.

  Malcolm took a deep breath. The only thing he knew for certain about Savior’s powers was that he’d only been able to use one at a time. He had five in total: flight, invulnerability, super strength, energy blasts, and offensive illusions. Malcolm lingered as he considered each of them, trying to find the mental switch to trigger each one, and failing.

  “I need to fly!” he muttered. “God damn it! I need to get back to the ship!”

  He tensed his muscles and squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating harder than he ever had before in his life. For an instant, he felt it. Not the full arsenal of Savior’s powers, but the potential for flight. He was aware of it for long enough to know that it would work. Savior’s flight utilized a different mechanism than his own wind manipulation. He could use it to leave Europa, and with his space suit, it wouldn’t matter that Malcolm could only use a single power at a time.

  Focus. Don’t think about Tapestry. Don’t think about Rose, back on Earth. Focus.

  It was a process of concentration, like trying to do advanced math in his head, except more abstract, and more of a full body process. Drops of sweat beaded on Malcolm’s forehead. His fingers cramped up, followed by the muscles in his jaw.

  In that moment, Malcolm understood Savior better than he ever had before. Savior’s d
istracted nature and odd sense of humor had both been a result of the intense focus he needed to maintain in order to use his powers as freely as he had.

  Malcolm was grunting with the exertion of it. His vision wavered, and he accidentally bit the tip of his tongue. The diaper that he’d been forced to wear underneath his spacesuit, blessedly, remained unsoiled. Malcolm was reeling from the exertion, on the verge of giving up, when he finally lifted into the air.

  He gasped as he rose up a few feet above the surface of Europa and the floodgates opened. Much like pushing a snowball down a hill, the act of concentrating became easier once he’d gotten over that first hurdle. It still wasn’t easy, by any means, but Malcolm had enough momentum to push himself upward, escaping Europa’s light gravity and hurtling upward after his ship.

  He wished he could feel the wind through his hair, but of course, the moon had no wind, and Malcolm was in a spacesuit. He focused his thoughts on what he needed to do, noting that the euphoric pull of overusing his powers was still as present as ever.

  The lights of the spaceship were visible in the sky even on the dayside of Europa. Malcolm flew toward the vessel as fast as he could, determined to recapture it. He was tense, fearing that Multi might have already harmed Tapestry, but forced himself to maintain focused on the task at hand.

  Flying through space, outside of Europa’s gravity, felt much the same as flying anywhere else. Malcolm was relieved by that, but it also made Savior’s death that much more tragic. It was clear to Malcolm why he couldn’t use more than one of his powers at once, given how much concentration they took to activate. But if he’d been able to, he would have made it back to Earth without trouble.

  The ship grew larger in the distance. Malcolm flew faster, not willing to allow Tapestry to be in danger for even a second longer than necessary. He slowed his pace in time to draw even with the orbiting craft, and then on a hunch, made his way around to the viewing port in the cockpit.