The ramp dumped us onto the tarmac of the small aeroport we saw yesterday from the space elevator. Beyond the aeroport, the elevator shaft stretches up into the sky. From the space dock, we could see the entire length of the elevator, straight to the planet’s surface. But from down below, we can’t see through the atmosphere, so it looks like the elevator shaft goes on forever. It reminds me of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
It’s easy to spot our pod, because it’s easy to spot Sheek. In addition to Marco, Mira, and Lucy, he’s managed to attract a small crowd of Tunnelers to regale with his tales.
When Cole and I arrive, Sheek is telling some fantastical story—probably made up—about how he was the first aeronaut to map P-92. He talks and talks. Around us, Bounders meet with their pod leaders. Soon, cadets start to converge in the center of the aeroport where a group of Tunnelers are already assembled.
Great. We’re going to have no strategy and no energy after being bored to death by Sheek.
“He may be the world’s most annoying, narcissistic person,” Lucy whispers, “but he has a great sense of style! Do you think he’ll let me wear my new alpine coat on the tundra?”
I don’t answer. Lucy’s fashion concerns are the least of our worries right now.
Marco raises his hand. When Sheek doesn’t acknowledge him, he interrupts. “About that strategy session . . .”
At first, I think Sheek is going to flip out, but apparently, he decides to make a show of his commitment to guide us. He smiles at the crowd. “Perfect timing, cadet. I was just getting to that. Why, when I was leading an expedition on Planet Thirty-seven . . .”
All the other pods look organized and poised for competition, with some kind of symbol for pod identification and unification. Han’s pod has purple armbands. The cadets in Suarez’s pod have red stars painted on the tops of their helmets. Ridders’s cadets wear green neck warmers—easy to spot and an extra layer of warmth.
When I tune back in to Sheek’s tips, here is the kernel of wisdom that awaits me:
“. . . so my primary pointers are work as a team, take breaks, and never, ever underestimate style.” With that choice nugget, Sheek reaches into his coat and whips out a stack of decals. They’re enormous close-up photos of Sheek’s face, the head shot they use for Chic with Sheek. “Just stick these beauties on your helmets and you’ll be ready for the Trials!”
“You want us to wear those?” I ask, hoping Sheek will detect the reservation in my voice and reconsider.
“Absolutely. You must have a mark for your pod as a sign of unity.” Sheek withdraws a pen from another pocket. “I will even do you the honor of autographing them.”
As Lucy slaps Sheek’s face on our helmets and he signs, one of the Tunnelers runs over to tell us we need to join the group. The Tundra Trials are about to begin.
I can’t believe this. We won’t even get a chance to talk about our pod strategy because we’re stuck here listening to Sheek’s drivel and plastering these ridiculous stickers on our helmets.
We are in Tundra Trial trouble.
As we join the other cadets, an older Tunneler steps to the center. His grunt is deep and grizzly as he speaks into his voice box. “Good morning, cadets. I am Commander Krag.”
Neeka’s Dad! Lucy mouths to me.
“We are about to kick off the course competition,” he continues. “Here is how things will run. Each of you will receive an astrocache compass that contains downloads of topographical maps and the cache list. Your objective: travel to each location on the list in whichever order you choose; locate the Earth Force flag and retrieve the cache; scan identification for each pod member and take a token; return the flag and cache to exactly where you found them. There are one hundred caches in total.”
“Sounds kind of easy,” Marco whispers.
“This may sound easy,” Commander Krag says, like he read Marco’s mind, “but I assure you it is not. You can use anything at your disposal: bounding gloves, blast packs, intellect, deceit. There is only one rule: you must be back through the doors by sixteen hundred hours each day. No exceptions.” He gestures to the anterior gate, which now looks a lot more threatening than it did on the way through.
“One more thing,” the commander says. “There are twenty-six pods, but only twenty-five tokens at each location. The first pod to find each cache and collect every token is the winner. So use your time wisely. We expect the competition to be brutal and rigorous, and last for several weeks. If no one completes the cache course, the pod with the most tokens at the end of the tour will be declared the victor.”
Wow. That’s intense. There will be tons of strategy involved. And everyone in the pod will have to pitch in.
I glance at my pod mates. Cole hops on his toes. Lucy smiles. Mira stares across the tundra. Marco looks at me and nods. We’ve got this.
“My officers are passing out the astrocache compasses now,” Commander Krag continues. “Wait for my signal to activate them.”
Marco grabs the compass marked for our pod. It looks like a large watch. The Earth Force insignia glows orange on the screen.
Commander Krag lifts a thick metal rod from the ground near his feet. Next to him, a silver disk the size of a small table hangs from a tall metal stand. The commander raises the rod and slams it against the disk. A low gong reverberates across the land.
“Let the Tundra Trials begin!”
13
“THIS WAY!” MARCO YELLS AND runs for the other side of the tarmac while the gong still hums.
We have no choice but to chase him.
“What on earth, Marco?” Lucy says. “Why’d you run?”
He holds up his hand, telling us to wait.
“Seriously?” she spouts. “Give me that!” She grabs the compass from his hand.
“You could have broken it, Lucy!” Marco shouts.
“You’re the one who ran off with it!” she yells back.
“Yeah, so we could talk strategy without having to worry about anyone overhearing us!” Marco says, trying to snatch the compass back.
At the podium, Commander Krag beats the gong as each pod departs. At least a dozen gongs reverberate across the tundra. As each moment passes, we fall farther behind.
Lucy spins away from Marco. “Well, you could have said something!”
Cole throws his hands up. “This is a terrible way to start!”
Mira steps between Marco and Lucy. They’re so startled, they actually stop moving and yelling. Mira pries the compass from Lucy’s fingers and hands it to me.
You. Her gentle word slips into my brain.
“What do you want me to do with it?”
You. Now everyone’s staring at me.
“Yeah, you made that clear already.”
You.
“Why me? Why does it always have to be me?” I didn’t sign up to be the decision maker. We have too many volunteers for that job already.
“What is going on?” Cole says.
“I can’t believe this!” Lucy says. “Should we just give up now?”
“Seriously, Ace,” Marco says. “Are you just going to stand there?”
You.
Fine, Mira. Fine.
I dodge Marco’s run at the compass, buying a few seconds to think things through.
“Okay,” I say. “This is how it’s going to work. We all have jobs. Cole, you’re in charge of overall strategy. Lucy, there’ll be a major social dynamic to this game. That’s your area of expertise. Mira and I will partner up and cover any issues with the gloves, and we’ll work with Cole to determine the best routes and travel methods. We have a major advantage over the other pods. We know they’ll be rolling out the BPS later this tour, and we know how to use it.”
“What about me?” Marco asks.
“You’ll handle special assignments.”
“What does that mean? It sounds like you just don’t know what to do with me.”
“That’s not it at all,” I say. “There’ll definitely be some dicey moments that requir
e nerve and creativity.”
Marco grins and rubs his hands together. “My specialty.”
“Exactly,” I say. “So, to kick things off, I’m giving the compass to Cole, our strategy master.”
Cole seems a bit surprised to be handed the astrocache compass, but he quickly morphs into the Evolution of Combat expert strategist. He straps the compass on his wrist and activates the screen. “Excellent. I can plug in our routes and plot our course directly from the device. We should identify the closest cache locations and hit those first. Once Waters and Gedney arrive with the BPS, it will be easier to travel to the caches that are farther away.”
“Shouldn’t we just start with the first cache on the list?” Lucy asks.
“No,” Cole says. “I expect lots of pods will do that, so the race to that site will be crowded and competitive.”
“But what if all the tokens are snatched up?” I ask. “You heard what Commander Krag said about each cache being one token short.”
“It’s a strategic gamble,” Cole says. “We have to assume at least some of the pods will come at this from a similar strategy as us and not start with Cache 1. My biggest concern is that we have no sense of distance and travel time. Even so, the first location looks far on this map. There are much closer targets.”
“Sounds logical, Wiki. So where are we headed?”
“Here.” Cole points at the map pulled up on the astrocache compass screen. “Cache 42.”
“But that one looks closer,” I say, pointing to a different target.
“Yes, but look at the topography. I can’t tell what that is on the map, but it looks like a ravine or a mountain range.”
“Do we have time to get there and back?” Lucy asks.
“We should,” Cole says. “We’ll fly there and bound back.”
“Okay,” I say. “Your plan it is. Let’s go.”
We consult the map, get our bearings, and take off in our blast packs in the direction of Cache 42. The gong sounds as we go.
Within a few minutes, we leave behind Gulagaven and cross into the lonely, barren landscape of Gulaga. The surface of the planet looks like a never-ending sea of rocks and frozen mud. The light from their star is bright enough to guide us where we’re going, but it feels like dusk.
When we first set out, some of the other pods are visible in the distance. Lots head north in the direction of the first cache, but a few fly west like us, and some scatter in other directions.
We take breaks every twenty minutes to rest and consult the map. We’re not used to covering long distances with our blast packs, and we’re definitely not used to flying with all these extra layers. My legs hang heavy beneath me, and my shoulders are already sore from my pack straps. Not to mention my belly aches with hunger. The last bit of food I managed to keep down was the protein bar I had yesterday when we were lost in the tunnels.
“Everyone remembered to charge their packs last night, right?” Cole says during our next break. “We don’t want to run out when we’re hundreds of kilometers away from Gulagaven.”
“How do we know how much is left?” I ask.
Lucy strips off her pack and unzips the motor compartment on the back. “See this gauge? It looks like I’ve already burned through a quarter of the charge.”
I check my pack. I’ve used a quarter, too. “If our packs run out of juice and we can’t make it back by curfew, it’s game over.”
“Better add blast pack charge to our list of strategy points, Wiki,” Marco says. “Maybe we can trick Regis’s pod into flying for a cache out of charging range.”
“That’s cruel,” Lucy says.
“Hey, Neeka’s dad said deceit was fair game,” I say.
“Well, we’d better be on guard for those clowns trying to trick us,” she says.
After we travel for what seems like an eternity, but is really closer to two hours, we land near a cropping of large boulders. When my feet hit the ground, I trip, landing face-first in the mud. When I sit up, the world spins. I slip out of my pack and lean back against a boulder.
I’ll be fine. I just need to rest for a few minutes.
And maybe eat.
But I can’t eat. There’s no way I can stomach Tunneler food, not when I’m already nauseous. Plus, we’re nowhere near the cantina. We’re supposed to be gone all day, and I didn’t even think about packing something. Some leader I turned out to be. With me at the helm, we’ll starve.
“Surprise!” Lucy says, pulling a bag out of her blast pack. “Who’s hungry?”
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“From Neeka.” She hands small wrapped packages to each of us. “The kitchen prepared lunch for all the pods. Mira, you have the water, right?”
Mira opens her pack and pulls out a thermos.
No one but me seems surprised that Lucy was carrying the lunch. Were they keeping this from me after what happened at breakfast? Did they plan an intervention? A lunch ambush?
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Food is fuel, Ace,” Marco says. “We need you to be fueled up to kick it in the competition.”
Whatever the Tunnelers packed is going to be disgusting. I sit on the ground and bow my head to my knees.
Mira kneels beside me and strokes the back of my head where the hair has grown over the Youli patch.
I want to be mad, but Marco’s right. We’re in a competition. We need our strength. My picky eating shouldn’t be a factor. I’m embarrassed as it is.
I grab my lunch package, pull back the wrapper, and stare at the lump of brown in my lap. “What is it?”
“BERF,” Lucy says.
“Barf?” Oh my god. This day could not get worse.
“Not barf,” Cole says. “BERF. It stands for Bacteria-Enriched and Refined Fungus.”
“Oh, great,” I say. “That sounds so much better than barf.” Not really.
The big, brown, brick of BERF stares up at me. It looks kind of like a brownie. If I just pretend it’s a brownie, maybe I can get through this.
I lift the brown hunk to my mouth, but before I take a bite, the smell weasels its way into my nose. Moldy bread mixed with sweaty armpits.
I gag and turn my head.
Mira rests her hand at the base of my neck. You can do this.
Her touch infuses me with strength.
Mira is the strongest person I know. She’s so strong, she has strength to spare.
Think of all she’s had to deal with to be part of our pod. Last tour, she could hardly make it through lunch with us. She barely flew in the relays. She couldn’t stay in bed at night.
She had to get through all of that. And she did. She doesn’t always like it, and it’s not always easy, but she does it anyway.
And that’s what I need to do.
I need to start eating even though I don’t like it and it’s not easy.
I need to eat anyway.
I plug my nose with one hand and bring the BERF to my mouth with the other. As I chomp down, my tongue curls around the thick, chalky mush. My stomach seizes and my throat constricts, but I refuse to give up. I chew, swallow, and press my fingers to my lips to keep it down.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
I eat as fast as I can with as little thought as possible. Finally—shockingly—only one bite remains. I chew, swallow, and hold out my hand. “Mira! Water! Now!”
She hands me the thermos, and I gulp the cold water, clearing away the remains of BERF.
I feel light-headed and giddy.
“I did it,” I say, half to myself.
“We’re so proud of you!” Lucy throws her arms around me.
Cole nods.
Marco slaps me a high five. “To BERF!” he shouts.
“To BERF!” we echo back.
When everyone’s finished eating, we gather up our trash and consult the map. According to Cole, we should reach our first target in roughly an hour. I can already feel a new surge of energy coursing through me. We are going to dominate the
Tundra Trials!
Game on!
As we cruise across the barren tundra in our blast packs, the landscape below slowly changes. The plains give way to sloping hills. The ground is cut by narrow crevices. The clusters of boulders grow sharper and more frequent until we reach a steep decline littered with tall, jagged rocks.
Cole lowers down at the edge of the slope, and the rest of us follow. Now that we’re on the ground, the rocks seem gigantic.
“The map shows the cache coordinates as roughly halfway down the hill,” Cole says. “Does anyone see anything?”
We stand in a row, scanning the slope, nobody spotting anything but rocks.
“It could be anywhere,” I say. “Stuffed beneath a boulder. Shoved in a crevice. I think we’ll have to split up and cover some ground.”
“Those rocks don’t look particularly stable,” Lucy says.
“From the pattern of the debris,” Cole says, “I’m guessing there was a landslide, and not too long ago.”
“That’s comforting, Wiki,” Marco says. “Sometimes keeping your knowledge to yourself may be the best policy.”
“It’s almost fourteen hundred hours,” I say. “We’ve got to be in Gulagaven by sixteen hundred, and I don’t want to go back empty-handed.”
“Let’s get on with it, then,” Lucy says. “But be careful!”
We split up and search the slope, but it’s slow going. We don’t even know exactly what we’re looking for.
Not to mention, every time I touch down, a slew of rocks slides down the hill, threatening to take me down with them.
I check the time. We need to bound back soon.
I’m half-ready to give up when Lucy shouts that she’s found the cache.
Then she screams.
14
LUCY’S SCREAM FADES INTO THE rattle of tumbling rocks. My footing gives, and I lift off in my pack. A second later, a giant boulder rolls over the place where I’d been standing.
“Lucy!” I call. “Lucy!”
I fly higher, so I can scan the slope. Cole is far to the side, flying for the center. Marco and Mira are both beneath me. All of them are airborne, so they should be able to steer clear of the landslide.
All of them except Lucy. I still haven’t spotted her.
The Tundra Trials Page 11