Flight of the Outcast

by Brad Strickland

  Dai ignored his hand. "No, they won't," he said. "I did it without orders. I stole the ship."

  "Get to stations!" an officer yelled, and they split up.

  In the engine control room, Asteria learned that the engine crew had not lost anyone. "We were working overtime, though," Skarne said. "The weapons had a high energy demand."

  "What happens on Theron now that the designated governor is dead?" Asteria asked him.

  "Don't know. I expect that the planet will be placed under military rule. It's the first Tetra engagement in this sector, so everything will be on high alert. There will probably be a military governor."

  "Who?" Asteria asked.

  Skarne shrugged. "Admiral Vodros is the ranking officer in this sector. Why are you so curious?"

  "It used to be my home," Asteria told him.

  eighteen

  It took Empyrean Marines a day to recapture the High

  Docks. The survivors on the Docks told what they knew:

  A Raider group based on one of the moons of Cyclad, the first gas giant in the system, had encountered the faceted orb that was in fact a Tetra command ship. Its method still was not clear, but it had enslaved them, used them to pilot a collection of human fighter craft that the Tetras had accumulated. And under the direction of the Tetra command ship, the humans had captured all of the orbital stations around Theron.

  And waited…for an Empyrean warship.

  "This is a new phase of war," Captain Talan announced to the crew. "Reinforcements will be here soon. In the meantime, Theron is under military government. Admiral Vodros will be here in a few days to take command. Until then, we're on guard duty. Before the admiral arrives, we have to make sure that the Tetra influence did not reach the surface."

  * * *

  That afternoon, Talan sent for Asteria, and she reported to the bridge. The captain told her to stand at ease and said, "I understand you attacked and destroyed the Tetra command craft," she said.

  "Aye, Captain."

  Talan shook her head. "A capture would have been much better. It would have given us a chance to analyze and understand their technology."

  Asteria felt a pulse of anger. "It was a battle, Captain. I was doing my best."

  "A Fleet pilot has to think fast, Cadet."

  Kayser was looking at them. Asteria thought of her suspicions— that Kayser had sabotaged communications, that his uncle had somehow set up the attack—but she had no proof, no proof at all.

  And she was a Commoner.

  "I will try to remember that in the future, Captain," she said, quivering inside with frustration and fury.

  Talan gazed at her for a long moment. "Very well. As you said, you had little time. And then we did defeat the Tetra force. I will note in the official battle report that you served as an emergency fighter pilot and that you lost your craft in the battle, but will also note that you fought well. Do you have anything to say?"

  Yes! The Fleet is in danger from one of its own officers!

  Asteria bit back the words. Aloud, she said, "No, Captain."

  "Dismissed."

  * * *

  Who should she trust? Who could she trust?

  It came down to Dai.

  On the day when two more cruisers dropped into orbit, she told him what she knew.

  "There must be some way of proving this," Dai said.

  "None. But someone reprogrammed a bot to try to kill me. Someone destroyed the main comm circuitry just as the enemy fighters broke out of the High Docks."

  "Kayser."

  "I don't know. I think so, but—I don't know."

  "And now his uncle is in control of the whole sector. We have to tell someone."

  "Who?"

  Dai shook his head. "I don't know…"

  "We have to wait," Asteria said. "It's going to be hard, but we're going to have to find people we can trust, let them in on the secret. Make sure more people know so if something happens to us—"

  "But it's crazy. Who would ally with the Tetras? For what?"

  "Control of the Empyrion, maybe," Asteria said.

  Dai gave her a sick look. "They're Aristos," he said in a whisper. "But they're human!"

  Asteria said, "I—I don't know what to call it—I plugged in to the Tetra mind somehow. I think it was the belt. But, Dai, I saw how they feel about us. They don't even know we're alive! Not in the same way they are. And I think they ran into an Aristo who feels that way too. We don't matter. People don't matter. Just—just power and control."

  "He has to be stopped," Dai said.

  "But we can't do it alone," Asteria said. "Not yet. So we have to stick it out. We have to go back to the Academy, make our way up through the ranks, and one day—one day we'll have our chance."

  "If we live," Dai said with a grin.

  Asteria took a long, deep breath. The belt felt strangely heavy, a burden almost too great to bear.

  "Yes," she said. "If we live."

  The adventure continues in the next book of

  the academy series

  * * *

  Even the underpowered practice weapons had to be

  handled carefully. As quartermaster for the team, Asteria had the responsibility of checking in the side arms and storing them following every practice session. It was a routine task, but she had to be attentive. Each cadet in the section had to turn over his or her weapon, stunners or disruptors or missile guns, to Asteria. In turn, she had to deactivate each, log it in, and see that it was properly stored. It usually took her half an hour to get everything done, and then she would have to dash to Tactics—each time a cadet was late, the teacher handed out five demerits.

  On the seventh day of the week, just before End Break, Asteria had depowered all twenty-five stunners. As usual, that did not take very long, even though not all cadets were as enthusiastic as Kayser—his weapons always came back drained, needing only a quick check and deactivation. Most had to be powered down, which could take a few seconds.

  Asteria checked the time and saw she was cutting it close. The last thing she needed this week was five more demerits. Last stunner done. Good. She placed it on the cart with the others and then pushed the hovercart to the weapons storage vault, opened the shield door—it had to be blast-resistant so it was a heavy five-layered durosteel and flexal construction—and then took a deep breath. Her claustrophobia always bothered her when she first stepped into the vault. She shoved the hovercart ahead of her, pushed it to the set of drawers that her class used for storage, and unlocked tray 11. The drawer slipped smoothly out of the back wall. Then each stunner had to be fitted into the correct recessed holder, from 11–1 to 11–25. Only when that had been done and the AI had scanned them to make sure they were deactivated would the drawer slide closed and the tray lock re-engage.

  Because the narrow vault made her feel so uneasy, Asteria was hurrying, maybe concentrating a little too hard on the task. Behind her the door slammed, taking her completely by surprise. The light went out. Nothing is as dark as the inside of an unlighted vault.

  Her first wild thought was that the door had simply swung closed on its own. It was heavy but delicately balanced on its hinges, and sometimes it would swing a little if you hadn't opened it all the way. She held up her arm and commanded, "Light," and her wrist communicator gave her a pale blue beam. She touched the storage drawer; it slipped back into place, and the red "locked" light glowed briefly to confirm that the weapons were secure and accounted for.

  Then Asteria, breathing a little too fast, tried to turn the release wheel to open the vault door.

  It stuck.

  Someone had locked the vault door from outside.

  Kayser? Or—someone else?

  Now Asteria was gasping for air. She knew that it was just a panic reaction. There was plenty of oxygen in the vault, enough for hours. But this was like her nightmares, like being stranded in the darkness inside the disabled fighter ship back at Theron. Her heart was thudding fast. Being closed in was the one thing she
could not stand.

  Her voice shaky, she keyed the comm line to Emergency and said, "Cadet A. F. Locke here. I'm locked inside the side arms vault in the Quartermaster Unit. I need immediate help. Any Academy personnel respond. I need help."

  No response. Gasping, beginning to sweat, Asteria realized that someone had not only locked her in but had also turned on the vault's electromagnetic shielding. It was designed to prevent AI scans of the facility, just in case some bright student wanted to borrow a weapon and needed the combinations, but it also damped out communications.

  They'll come looking for me, Asteria told herself. Dai and the others knew her routine. It might take a few hours, but they would come to check on her. If she didn't go crazy from claustrophobia first. She tried to take deep breaths, to calm herself—

  Without warning, she felt the belt begin to flow over her skin. "No!"

  But she couldn't stop it or control it. The quicksilver metal encased her in moments, and the humming, maddening Tetra voices whispered just below the threshold of comprehension. Cold and inhuman voices. And she couldn't understand a syllable, though she had a paranoid sense that they were aware of her, were seeking her.

  But with the silver mask completely covering her face, at least she could see. The armor converted infrared and ultraviolet to visible shapes. She could make out the vault, a wide room six meters from side to side but only a meter and a half deep, in cold blues and purples. The pulsing dull red lines of shielding crept and writhed over the walls and doors. A humming crackle of electromagnetic energy muttered in her ears, overpowering the voices. She felt an urgent tug at her attention.

  Off to the left in the back wall, one whole drawer glowed a brilliant yellow.

  Power. The weapons in the drawer are fully powered.

  Asteria felt a jolt of adrenaline. Something was very wrong.

  She stepped to the wall of storage compartments and entered the code, and the glowing drawer slid noiselessly open just below chest level. On the tray lay twenty-five Keeler stunners, used by the senior classes and quite a bit more powerful than the ones her classmates were allowed. They shimmered with orange white power, looking like metal heated to the melting point.

  With a shock, Asteria saw that the energy cells were looping, their power circuits resonating and thrumming. They were ready to—

  Explode.

  And even though the silver armor gave her some protection, if twenty-five stunners blew up in this contained space, she would be dead.

  Moving faster than she would have thought possible, Asteria snatched one of the stunners from its recess and keyed it down, dropped it, reached for a second one, switched it off before the first had hit the deck, reached for a third—

  Even moving at incredible speed she wouldn't be able to turn them all off.

  Someone had trapped her.

  Someone wanted her dead.

  about the author

  Brad Strickland is the author of more than fifty novels for teenagers and young readers, including the popular John Bellairs mystery series and the critically acclaimed Mars: Year One series. Several of his books have been honored by the New York Public Library's Best Books for the Teen Age list, and he is a past Georgia Author of the Year and an honoree of the Junior Library Guild. His books have been translated into eighteen foreign languages. When he's not dreaming up stories, Brad teaches English at Gainesville State College in Georgia. He and his wife, Barbara, (who sometimes co-writes with him) have two grown children, Jonathan and Amy, and three cats and two dogs—a full house.