“Lucy!”
Finally I spy a hint of indigo in the middle of a cluster of boulders. There’s no way those rocks will stay stable for long.
I zoom in that direction. “Lucy!”
She’s crouched beneath a boulder, tugging at a piece of orange cloth.
“Get out of there!” I shout.
“I can’t! It’s the cache.”
The boulder she’s under looks pretty well planted, but the ones beside her are starting to slide. If she doesn’t get out of there now, the boulder will shift, and she’ll be crushed.
I zip around to the other side and hover next to her. “Let me try!” I lower myself to the slope.
As soon as my feet touch, the ground gives way and the boulder pitches forward. “Lucy!” I reach out with my gloves to hold the boulder in place, but other rocks are coming fast. Lucy ducks out of the way. I release my hold on the boulder, and it slams the ground where she was seconds before.
“Follow the cache!” Lucy shouts, lifting off in her pack. “Don’t lose sight of it!”
The indigo box with the orange flag tumbles down the slope. Lucy and I fly just above the landslide, tracing the path of the cache. It picks up speed and more rocks with every turn. I try to grab control of its atoms, but it’s no use—there’s too much in the way.
Finally the cache reaches the bottom of the slope in a pile of rocks and debris. Hundreds more rocks pile on top. When the air is still and the landslide has passed, we wave our pod mates to the bottom of the slope.
“Everyone okay?” I ask. When they nod, I say, “Let’s start digging.”
It takes twenty minutes for us to dig out the cache, even while using our gloves to move the heavier rocks. Thank goodness Lucy and I saw more or less where it landed, or we would be leaving without a token.
“Got it!” She uncovers the orange flag and casts off another layer of rocks to reach what it’s anchored to: an indigo box with the orange Earth Force insignia stamped on the front.
Lucy examines the box. She runs her hands along the outside. “How do we open it?”
I take the cache from Lucy. It’s about the size of a lunch box. It weighs about as much as the houseplant mom makes me carry to the sink to be watered. I shake it. There’s definitely something inside. I turn the box over. The Earth Force logo is stamped on every side, but there’s no sign of a latch or a button or anything else that might open it.
Marco grabs the box and inspects it. He’s just as clueless as I am. “Maybe if we throw it on the ground.” He raises his hands over head.
Just as he starts to bring them down, Mira frantically waves her arms in his trajectory. She gestures for him to hand it to her.
Mira sits the box down gently on the top of the rock pile. She places a gloved hand on either side. Her fingers swell with light, and then the box pops open.
“You need your gloves to open the box,” I say. “Genius!”
“It’s a good thing we have you, Mira,” Lucy says.
“Seriously,” Cole says. “That’s a huge strategic advantage. How long do you think it will take the other pods to get their boxes open?”
“Yeah, yeah, yay for Mira,” Marco says. “What’s in the box?”
I pick up the cache and pull out a tablet. When I turn it on, a message flashes on the screen:
Congratulations!
You have found Cache 42 of 100.
Every pod member must provide a retina scan.
The screen advances, and indicates I should lean in for an eye scan. Once completed, the words Jasper Adams, Waters Pod appear on the screen.
“Easy so far,” Lucy says, looking over my shoulder.
We pass the tablet around until everyone’s been logged. Once the tablet acknowledges that our pod has completed the scans, these words appear: If a token remains, scan it and take it with you.
“Fair enough,” I say, pulling a token—a small coin with the Earth Force insignia on one side and the number 42 on the other—from the cache box. Once I scan it, the screen reads Token 1 of 25, Waters Pod.
I almost slip the token in my pocket. Bad idea. “Who wants to be the token keeper? That is not part of my skill set.”
Lucy grabs the token from my palm and zips it into her pack. “What next?” she asks.
Replace the cache exactly where you found it.
We look at each other, then up the hill. That’s a bit easier said than done. Touching down on that slope is guaranteed to start a second landslide.
“We’ve got to follow directions, right?” Marco asks. “Leave it to me.” He extends his hand, and I give him the cache box, all closed up and ready for the next pod. He wedges it under his arm.
We take off in our packs and fly for the top of the hill. Midway to the peak, Marco drops the cache. It flutters to the ground with its orange flag waving.
On top of the slope, we open our ports and bound back to Gulagaven with a full half hour to spare before curfew.
As soon as I’m sure we all made it, I jog for the gates. Day one, our work is done. And I’m freezing!
The rest of the week flies by—literally, because we spend most of it flying across the barren landscape of Gulaga finding caches and collecting tokens. Everything is going pretty well, really. Our pod is working together. The food, while still as unbelievably horrible as day one, is no longer my nemesis. I’m able to force down (and keep down) enough to keep me fueled for the long days. We spend the evenings catching up with the other Bounders, chatting with Neeka and her friends, and sometimes even playing Evolution—the beta version, of course. Fortunately, Earth Force didn’t wipe the game from our tablets in between tours.
Even the bunk situation has been okay. We’re usually so tired by the time bed rolls around, that we don’t have the energy to get into it with Regis. And it seems the feeling is mutual. Still, Marco spends many a flight across the rocky plains of Gulaga scheming how we’ll get them back for their prank on me the first night. Lucy usually tells him to shut his Tofu Face and focus on the Tundra Trials.
There hasn’t been a chance to focus on much else, really. Our grand Earth Force reconnaissance mission has gone absolutely nowhere, but there are still four weeks left of the tour. And, selfishly, the less we focus on Earth Force’s secrets, the less guilt I feel about my own.
The strategy is starting to kick into high gear. Now we don’t just fly to targets. We use a combination of flying and bounding. Often we can cut our travel time in half by leapfrogging between locations we’ve already visited. Every time we travel, Cole makes us stop strategically along the way and mark the spot in our mind so that we can bound there in the future. It’s like creating a network of stepping-stones across the tundra.
Of course, what our pod knows and most of the Bounders don’t is that soon we won’t need to have been physically present in a location to bound there in the future. Soon, Waters and Gedney will arrive with the BPS, and we’ll be able to bound anywhere as long as we have the coordinates. Knowing about the BPS in advance is an advantage, maybe even an unfair advantage, but we’re keeping quiet.
When we secure a token from Cache 8, it’s a bit of a shock. More than half of the tokens are gone. That means getting closed out of a token is becoming a real risk.
“Where to, Captain?” Marco asks Cole.
“Cache 12.”
“But Cache 4 is much closer,” Marco says.
“It’s not,” Cole says. “Look how close Cache 12 is to where we had lunch today.”
“Okay. So we bound?” I ask.
“Let’s do it,” Marco says.
Mira seals the cache, and Lucy returns it to its hiding place. Once we’re all assembled, Mira opens her port and bounds.
I tap into the brain connection, open a port to where we had lunch, and—Bam. My landing is awful. I hit the ground at a funny angle and twist my ankle on a rock.
“Graceful, Ace,” Marco says. He must have arrived seconds before me.
There’s a brief moment of panic wh
en Cole doesn’t show up, but he eventually bounds in. We’re about to take off in the direction of Cache 12 when Mira points. Others.
“Look!” Lucy shouts. “There’s another pod!”
“From their route, I’d say they just left Cache 12,” Cole says. “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” I say. “We should just go. Give them a high-five in the air as we pass if you want.”
“Not so fast,” Lucy says. “Remember Commander Krag said we could use anything at our disposal so long as we get in by curfew? I’m thinking an information exchange could be useful, especially if they just claimed a token at Cache 12.”
“What do you mean?” Cole asks.
“Depending on who it is, we give them a heads-up about the landslide at Cache 42 and the dwindling token supply at Cache 8, and they give us some info on the caches they’ve hit.”
“Maybe,” I say. “It really depends on who it is.”
“Leave it to me,” she says. “You put me in charge of the social game, remember?”
We take off flying straight for the incoming cadets. Before long, Ryan’s red hair is easy to spot through the clear face mask. “It’s Ridders’s pod.”
“Perfect,” Lucy says.
As we close in, Lucy zooms to the front of our group and then touches down. She waves her hands over head, signaling the other cadets to stop.
At first, it looks like they’re going to cut wide and avoid us, but then Ryan changes course and heads in our direction. The rest of his pod follows, and soon we’re standing face-to-face, pod to pod, in the middle of the Gulagan tundra.
“How are you guys?” Lucy asks in a voice that practically bubbles.
“This is a race,” Annette says. “We’re losing time. Why did we stop?”
“Now, that’s not particularly friendly,” Marco says. He turns to Meggi and flashes a smile. “Which cache are you coming from?”
“Don’t tell him that!” Annette says.
“Oh, please,” Lucy says, “since when are you such a secret keeper, Annette? We know you’re heading back from Cache 12. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? We’ll tell you the scoop about the caches we’ve hit, if you spill the beans about yours.”
Annette and her pod mates exchange glances. Eventually she nods. Ryan spills the details on Cache 12, including the peculiar markings on the stones where they found the cache. True to her word, Lucy warns them about the rock slide at Cache 42 and the limited tokens at Cache 8.
“There are even fewer tokens at Cache 3,” Meggi says. “We were there yesterday morning.”
“Thanks for the scoop,” Lucy says to the other pod. “Let’s touch base tonight after dinner. We may be willing to consider an alliance.” She smiles and takes off in her blast pack, leaving us to chase after her.
15
MARCO AND I CATCH LUCY in the air after ten minutes of hard flying. “An alliance? Where did that come from? You should have checked with us first!” I shout.
“Oh, please,” she says as we drop to the ground. “I didn’t say we’d make an alliance. I said we’d consider one. That means we can say no. I can’t be expected to run everything by you in advance. This was a good play.”
“Fair enough,” Marco says. “It was a gutsy move, Madam Diplomat, but you pulled it off.”
“Oh, thank you so much, Marco,” Lucy says in a mocking tone. “Anyway, you left me no choice. I had to rescue you from your pathetic attempts at flirting.”
“Why don’t you ask your friend Meggi how pathetic my flirting is?”
“Trust me, she’ll be hearing from me for sure.”
“Shut up and fly,” I say as Cole and Mira zoom past us.
We pick up a token at Cache 12 without any trouble and bound back to Gulagaven. There are no other Bounders in sight, and we have a whole hour to spare.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t make a run for another target?” Lucy asks.
“Not today,” Cole says. “We’d cut it too close to curfew. Plus, there’s no cache we could collect without using our blast packs. I’m pretty low on charge.”
The star dips on the horizon, and it’s much harder to see than when we started out this morning. And as the light fades, the temperature drops.
“I’m freezing my butt off,” Marco says.
“Me, too!” Lucy says.
“Well, there’s no sense standing around out here,” I say. “Let’s go inside and warm up. We have two hours before dinner. Maybe we can find Neeka and hit the market.”
“And map out our strategy for tomorrow,” Cole says.
“Sounds like a plan,” Lucy says.
Mira leads us down the ramp into the antechambers. As we move from one room to the next, we shed our layers. By the time we reach the last anteroom, we’ve stripped off our face masks and unzipped our heavy parkas.
“There you are, sweetie,” Lucy says, giving Mira’s braid a tug. “We spend so much time under cover of all this gear, it’s nice to see your pretty face.”
Mira smiles and shrugs off her coat.
We’re about to enter the outfitter center when we hear voices beyond the door.
“. . . just don’t understand why I can’t be present. I’m the face of Earth Force, after all.”
Sheek. He’s the last person I want to see right now. If we run into him, he may feel like he needs to grace us with another strategy session, and then our free time will be lost forever. I wave to the others to take a seat on the benches along the wall.
“Let’s give it a minute,” I whisper. “Maybe he’ll leave.”
Marco gives the thumbs-up sign, and the others nod their agreement. They don’t want to run into Sheek any more than I do.
“With all due respect, Max, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Ridders,” Lucy whispers.
“Call me Sheek. You may be a captain now, but I’m senior to you in every way but rank.”
“What I was trying to say . . .” There’s no hiding the irritation in Ridders’s voice. “Is that the admiral wants to assure our guests that this exchange will be kept in the utmost confidence. If you were to attend the meeting—you being the face of Earth Force, as you say—they may get the wrong idea. They may think the cameras will start rolling at any second.”
Guests?
Exchange?
Utmost confidence?
“Much as I hate to admit it, Ridders, you are talking sense. When people see me, they see a web star. And that means they’re thinking publicity on a mega scale. I’ll agree to keep my distance, but I expect to be kept informed. I need to know the second a military engagement is under way.”
Military engagement?
“Of course, Captain. I’m sure the admiral will keep you abreast of all war operations. After all, you’ll need to prepare the cadets.”
My eyes almost bug out of my head. Lucy gasps, and then presses her hands to her lips to stop from making more noise. Mira shakes her wrists and backs away from the door.
“Do you think that means . . . ,” Cole starts at full volume.
“Shhh!” Marco, Lucy, and I hush him together.
“Did you hear that?” Ridders says from the other side of the door.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Sheek says. “When is the summit?”
“We’re not sure,” Ridders says tentatively. “Sometime in the next few weeks. Now we must be cautious. There are eyes and ears everywhere. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion . . .”
“He hears us!” Lucy whispers.
“We need to hide!” I say.
“Quick! In here!” Marco says, holding open a side door.
Without a second thought, we duck inside. The door latches shut at the same moment the sliding panels to the outfitter center swish open. Ridders must be checking the anteroom for eavesdroppers.
“That was close,” Cole whispers. “Did you hear him? He was talking about the summit!”
I lift a finger to my lips. We still need to be super quiet, or Ridders is su
re to hear us.
A minute passes. Then, we hear new sounds. The intercom announcing the second anteroom doors blares, followed by scuffling footsteps just outside our hiding place.
“Welcome back, cadets!” Ridders says. “Was it a successful day?”
“No offense, sir, but you lead another pod now,” says one of the Bounders. I think it’s Amari, this guy from Africa who is in Suarez’s pod and a total wiz at Evolution. Sometimes I think he might be as good as Cole. “We’re not going to tell you anything.”
“Understood,” Ridders says.
“What should we do now?” Lucy asks. “We can’t just open the door. Ridders will know we were hiding.”
“I guess we have to wait it out,” I say.
The intercom sounds again, and another pod enters the anteroom.
“There goes our hour,” Cole says.
“Over here,” Marco calls. He stands between a row of laundry carts piled high with discarded cold-weather gear and what looks like a hole in the wall. The hole is about waist high and the size of a door tipped on its side.
We push aside the laundry carts and crowd next to Marco.
“What’s with the hole?” I ask.
“Our way out,” he says. “I think it’s a laundry chute.”
“You think it’s a laundry chute?” Lucy asks. “What if it’s not a laundry chute? Or what if it is and it dumps us directly into a giant Tunneler washing machine?”
“It doesn’t,” Marco says. “Look!” He shines his tablet down the chute, illuminating a huge pile of laundry at the bottom. “See? Soft landing.”
“What do we do once we get down there?” I ask.
Marco shrugs. “We’ll figure it out. The Tunnelers have to do the laundry, which means there has to be another way out. We’ll find it. Remember, you put me in charge of special assignments, handling the unexpected. I’d say this qualifies.”
“I’m not doing it,” Cole says. “We’ve already been lost once. And we’ve been warned not to go off on our own again.”
“Count me out, too,” Lucy says. “In fact, I’m leaving. If Ridders has words about us being in the laundry closet, I’ll just have to sweet-talk him.”
The Tundra Trials Page 12