I flinched as Copeland stuck a needle into my arm—the first of the tubes that would be my umbilical. My digestive system wouldn’t quite work the same way when I was under; the drugs would slow peristalsis to barely more than a ripple. My heart would go sluggish, my conscious brain dim. The things I needed to stay alive would come directly into my veins.
“I’m so ready,” I said, forcing bravado. In reality, I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. “Let’s do this.”
Jeong smiled, a gesture that was supposed to reassure me. “See you soon.” She closed the door with a soft, permanent click.
I was prepared for the gel filling the tube. I had done this already on Earth. What I wasn’t prepared for was the lack of gravity. The gel didn’t sit at my feet and rise; it floated up all around me—solid bubbles, shifting and changing like life-forms.
It was fascinating and strangely beautiful; the light catching, glinting, in the gel bubbles, throwing miniature rainbows that lasted milliseconds. For a few minutes it was like I wasn’t alone in the tube, but accompanied by a few members of a lovely alien species.
Aliens. That was who we were going to meet, why we were taking such risks. I could only hope they were as benevolent as Crane believed.
Eventually the gel bubbles formed conglomerates, until they filled every inch of empty space between me and the cushioned walls. The drugs began to seep into my blood, and as much as I wanted to stay awake and watch the blurry shapes of my human caretakers move about and check on me, I couldn’t fight the cocktail of psychoactives for long.
This is it, I realized, as one by one partitions of my brain signed off. This is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve worked for. I made it. It doesn’t matter what happens after this; I’ll go into eternity with the image of Earth imprinted on my soul.
I tried to call up the image of a friend, of a familiar face, to ease me into sleep. I saw my family, crowded around the phone back at quarantine, smiling with happy tears. Mitsuko, basking in the sun with those giant sunglasses. Emilio, laughing. He always seemed to be laughing.
My eyelids grew as heavy as stones, and finally I let them fall. I heard music in my head, an instinct now as I descended to the place I’d worked so hard to find. Sinking down into the dark, deep ocean. Reaching out with my mind—out to the outer reaches of my conscious self, the nerves firing across synapses and into electrodes, to find the other awareness waiting to be let in.
Sunny. The real Sunny. Full-powered intelligence embedded in the most powerful ship built by humans.
She was there waiting, just on the other side of the door, just beyond the reach of my brain.
I opened the door and let her in.
My mind blinked out like the last light in a window, and it was quiet.
But then a voice—unfamiliar, distant, stilted. Like an echo from the end of a long hallway. The sound wasn’t in my ears. There was a voice in my head that wasn’t my own.
Neural handshake initiated. Loading.
Connection established. System initialized.
Then—
Hello, Cassie.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I WAS FLOATING underwater. Bobbing, like a boneless jellyfish, in water that was clear and warm.
Sunlight filtered down from someplace above. No matter how hard I tried, the silvery boundary between my world and whatever was above did not break. But I didn’t need to surface. Water filled my lungs as easily as air.
My ears were full of seawater. I heard only the thud thud thud of my heartbeat, beating and beating like sea grass in the current. The rhythm lulled me. I fell in and out of dreamless sleep.
Always, always a pinging in my ear. It was soft and distant, a single burst of sonar at a steady, slow rhythm. Like a faraway lighthouse with its rotating beam of light.
I closed my eyes.
Cassie. Cassie.
That voice again. Something from a long time ago, from a faraway memory.
When I opened them again, something was different. There had never been anything in my sea and now there was. Something small and white like a speck of sea foam in the distance.
Curious, I swam toward it. The thing grew larger. Closer.
It was something that should not exist.
It was the size of a large dog. A white elephant’s head perched in the center of a shapeless, almost octopod body, surrounded by too many arms, which undulated gently in the waves. Ivory white, the elephant eyed me coolly, its black eyes blank and enigmatic, a peaceful expression on its face. It was like some strange amalgam of my grandmother’s Ganesh pendant and a sea creature. Something dredged from my memories and pieced back together all wrong, my mind trying to force some logic to the situation.
A word—a name—surfaced in my mind like a half-remembered dream. Sunny.
Sunny was a computer program. Inside my head, inside my dream.
Whether this was a form she’d chosen, or one my brain had projected to make sense of her, I did not know.
We stared at each other.
Maybe I could talk to her. Hello. I’m Cassie.
Hello, Cassie. The response was instant, the voice female and calm, though I could not explain how I knew either of those things.
What a strange dream this is, I thought. Then, Where are we?
We are here.
Couldn’t argue with that.
What are we doing here? I asked.
Watching, she replied.
What are we watching?
One of Sunny’s many waving arms gestured for me to follow her. I obeyed.
We swam with almost no effort past unchanging scenery; or perhaps the scenery swam past us, I could not tell. Sunny led me to the bottom of the sea, to a place I had not been able to go on my own. A sheer cliff of white rocks emerged to my right, an impenetrable wall, the first solid boundary I’d encountered in my ocean. And at the bottom of the sea was a metal Stonehenge, alien and out of place.
Four smooth silver tubes standing in a circle, like upright coffins, each half buried in white sand.
Tubes?
No—no, this wasn’t real. This was a dream.
But no, this was a piece of reality within my dream.
A shock of recognition, and the truth emerged from its murky depths in the sleeping zones of my brain.
The ship. I was aboard the ship. An image of the pale Odysseus bathed in artificial light on a launchpad filtered through my consciousness like a picture from another life. I saw myself, sleeping under the influence of drugs and floating in gel like a lab specimen, dead to the outside world aside from the regular pinging of my crewmates’ life support systems. Four steady, slow heartbeats in the dark.
The drugs in my veins kept hormones balanced and my emotions to a minimum. I was almost entirely asleep. There was no panic, no fear.
How long had we been traveling? How long had I floated in this endless ocean before remembering myself?
Were we still on course to our destination? How much longer would I be alive, floating in an endless dream?
Those thoughts drifted away like a bubble on the waves. Inconsequential, out of reach. Pop.
It did not matter. Nothing outside my ocean mattered. I was warm and I was safe, and here I would sleep while keeping watch over the others.
Sunny was staring at me, tentacle arms waving idly as though she didn’t care—she had all the time in the world. She waited. She watched. Time was nothing.
My mission was to stand guard over the other sleeping astronauts. Sunny and me, together. For as long as it took.
TWENTY-NINE
THERE WAS NOTHING behind me and nothing ahead but more of the same endless blue, the same incessant heartbeats, the same four metal tubes in the sand, and Sunny’s black shark eyes and undulating tentacles. The world behind my eyes drifted between blue sea and dreamless sleep.
I did not sleep, but sometimes I closed my eyes. And when I closed my eyes I heard a voice calling my name, as though carried by the wind from far away.
&nbs
p; Cassie. Cassie, do you hear me?
Old memories. They did not matter here. I opened my eyes.
The voice came again, but louder now. Cassie, do you hear me? You must listen.
The voice was not coming from my memories. It was coming from Sunny. But it was not the voice I had come to associate with her presence.
I looked at Sunny, but her black elephant eyes showed no recognition.
I am listening, I thought, curious.
Cassie, you must make me another promise.
Okay, I thought hesitantly.
Promise me that you will remember why you dreamed of space. And when you wake, I hope you can forgive me.
An earthquake trembled beneath the ocean floor.
I jerked out of drifting and looked to Sunny, questioning.
Her blank gaze never wavered. We have arrived.
A shiver ran through me.
No—that was impossible. My body didn’t shiver. I couldn’t be cold. My sea was warm like a tropical lagoon. Drugs kept my body in homeostasis, my body paralyzed. The gel insulated my body heat. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to be cold.
The edges of my vision turned from soft blue to sickly gray. A harsh, metallic edge formed around my world, shrinking my endless sea.
Time to wake, Sunny said.
My eyes flew open. My real, physical eyes, and it felt like my eyelids were ripping apart. My warm, safe ocean sizzled away in the harsh light of reality.
My eyes, unpracticed, unfocused, saw blurry shapes, washed out like an overexposed photo through a watery lens. At first I didn’t remember I was wearing a helmet, and what I saw made no sense. Light filtering through bubbles in gel, vague steel-colored shapes in the distance.
Gradually my brain discovered the rest of my body. Face, covered. The helmet’s weight against my shoulders. Arms and legs, dangling, numb and useless.
Small electric pulses raced into my limbs, making them twitch erratically. Pain arced up my nerves like strings of fire. Sunny, helping to stimulate my muscles. A low, guttural groan tore from my throat, and the sound was so foreign I didn’t recognize the source. My body writhed and tried to arch away from the pain, but there was nowhere to go to escape it.
A harsh sound scraped against the inside of my ears: the last of the gel being sucked out of the tube. There was a sickening tug under my skin as the tubes retracted, followed by a sound like a hair dryer, the vacuum removing the last of the gel from my suit so that it would not escape into the cabin.
The door hatch released with a hiss of air. Unable to so much as put my arms out to catch myself, I was about to slam into the floor.
Instead, I fell into a pair of arms.
I felt myself being lowered gently to the ground, which was impossible for two reasons: I was supposed to be the first to wake. And we were still supposed to be in space.
Those impossibilities would have to wait. I couldn’t lift a single muscle off the floor.
I gasped for air like a stranded fish, the muscles around my ribs straining with disuse. Everything ached, every muscle and tendon. My skin tingled with hot needle pricks as the nerve endings groaned awake.
Slowly, the more I blinked, the more the world came into focus. The pain in my muscles eased, and I was able to shift until I sat slumped against the bulkhead. My head, however, was still entirely too heavy in its helmet, and I couldn’t lift it. I had no choice but to stare at the steel floor.
The snaps on either side of my helmet were released. It was pulled gently from my shoulders. My long black braid tumbled free over my shoulder.
I was finally able to lift my head to see who had caught me. My eyes traveled slowly up from his legs, kneeling on the floor in front of me, to his torso, all clad in the same skintight black honeycomb suit I wore, and finally up to his face.
His face. The one that had been tempting my dreams.
My lips moved, but no sound came out.
“. . . Luka?”
THIRTY
HIS FACE WAS etched in concern. Hair longer than I remembered, messy and dark gold. Lines by his eyes. Looking older than I remembered.
He held a packet of water up to my lips. One of the pouches from Odysseus’s stores. The liquid soothed my parched throat.
I pushed away his hand so I could speak. “Luka?” My voice was harsh, gravelly. “What . . . how?”
“Please, save your voice.”
I tried to shake my head, but I only succeeded in losing the delicate balance I’d gained. My head slumped uncomfortably to one shoulder.
Gingerly, Luka cradled the back of my skull and held me upright.
“You’re not real,” I whispered. My voice was broken like it’d been run over by a truck, more scratch than sound.
“Do I not look real?” A ghost of a smile, one corner of his mouth perked up wryly.
“You could be . . . not you. Something else, data mining my memories. Showing me a friendly face to . . . gain my trust.” That had been too many words. I swallowed a few times to moisten my throat. “Tell me it’s you.”
The smile dropped away. “It’s me.”
“Prove it.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you something only I know. Something you couldn’t make up.”
He released the back of my head, and to my relief I managed to hold it up without his help. His gaze locked with mine, steady and grim and resolute. “I knew I was never going to be selected for this mission. My entire aim in participating in the competition was to monitor the other candidates. From the moment I saw your skill at manipulating your brain waves, I knew it was going to be you.” His voice dropped. “From the beginning, I had hoped it would be you, Cassie.”
My lungs were working extra hard to bring in oxygen. My voice was more breath than sound. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Cassie. That message that Crane’s satellites received? The blueprints for Odysseus? We sent that message. My father designed this ship. We invited you here. This is our home planet.” His jaw clenched. Then he added, with venom so unlike him it made me shiver, “What’s left of it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting him to stop. Unwilling for this to be reality. Unable to digest it.
When I opened them again, the world hadn’t even begun to make sense. I couldn’t look at his face. Instead I scanned the room, looking for some semblance of normal, something that would make this okay.
Around us stood the four silver pods, each of my crew members still fast asleep within, their heart-rate monitors beeping peacefully from the control pads. They were all still there. Still breathing. Copeland’s shorn hair had grown at least six inches, floating around her skull like a dark halo. Bolshakov’s face had a scruff of grizzly beard, where he’d been clean-shaven the last I’d seen him.
I reached a hand up to my hair. It’d been long to begin with, but now it came down nearly to my waist.
I turned my eyes back to Luka. He was waiting for me to accept it, his expression bleak. Like he expected me to take this badly.
My eyes blinked away what felt like many months’ worth of sleep, and the details of his face came into high-definition focus. The ruddiness of his cheeks. The perspiration at his hairline, hinting at some exertion. All impossible, impossible.
“How long has it been?” I whispered.
“Six months. Please forgive me for being blunt,” he said. “I know you are still recovering from the stasis. But there is much I must tell you, and we have little time. The rest of your crew will soon begin their waking sequences.”
I gaped at him.
I couldn’t understand what was happening. If it wasn’t for the fact that my muscles obviously hadn’t been used in months, and the impossible fact that Luka was sitting in front of me, on a spacecraft presumably five hundred light-years from Earth, there would have been no way for me to believe it.
The months I’d known him flashed before my eyes.
He’d never been anything but number one, ensuring he lasted until the fina
l round. He understood every concept in class better and faster than I did. He’d never been able to alter his brain waves. He’d always been a little set apart from the rest, a little awkward. I’d attributed that to him being a fish out of water—being foreign.
He took a breath and began to speak, quickly, more words than I’d ever heard him say at once. “When the rest of your crew awaken, you’ll learn that you are in an underground bunker. The planet above our heads is empty and barren and long abandoned. The surface is too irradiated for life to exist. Right now, we’re the only living things in this entire system. My people have returned here only to show you that we mean no harm, and that we are telling the truth. Cassie, we are here because we need your help.”
He was speaking fast, as though forcing himself to say everything as quickly as possible. I could only stare at his moving mouth, watching him form the words that fell like so many discordant piano notes in my ears. Noise. Random, nonsensical noise.
My brain was still stuck on the first impossible thing. “You’re not . . . Luka, you look human. You speak English!”
He sighed in frustration and ran his hand through his hair, mussing it up even more. “Yes. As ambassadors, we have chosen to appear human. We took on your form, permanently, to be recognizable and nonthreatening. We wanted to assimilate.”
“Why were you at the competition to begin with if you had set this all up? What were you even doing there?”
His face was grim, but he answered dutifully. “My job was to monitor the progress of the candidates, attempt to discern who among them would be most amenable to our proposal, and try to sway the selection in our favor.”
“You . . .” I coughed, sat back away from him, as my emotions twisted from disbelief to realization to anger. “You were trying to tip the scales in your favor.” Then, as realization fully dawned: “You were trying to get me on your side! The whole time, everything you were doing, you were trying to win me over so I could . . .” Something nagged at me. “Is this why someone tried to sabotage the mission? Could someone on Earth . . . know about you?”
Dare Mighty Things Page 27