by K. A. Holt
“Yeah,” I said gruffly. “I remember.”
“Well, our monitor turned on again this evening and it showed you guys being dragged out of your apartment. Your parents must have pushed an emergency transceiver.
“And when I told Ji—Dad—about Sugar Bear and how it seemed like he was a spy, and how you accused him of being one right to his face, well, Dad was going to warn your father. He actually made an emergency appointment so their meeting wouldn’t seem suspicious.”
I squinched my eyes. “So Sugar Bear must have called up the goons as soon as I opened my big mouth. He must have had our apartment under surveillance the whole time.” I shivered.
“Something like that. At least, that’s what my dad thought when he saw the arrests.”
I thought about everything for a minute. My puzzle was finally almost complete.
“I thought you’d be happy that I helped get you out of trouble.” Larc pouted.
I gestured around the pod. “This is getting me out of trouble? I’m surprised a hundred of these pods aren’t out trying to rein us back in.”
Larc snorted dismissively. “Oh, I’m sure the ship’s under lockdown by now. The Project thugs are probably rounding people up for questioning. I bet no one even knows we’re gone except for Sugar Bear and the other guys we escaped from—and who are they going to want to brag about that to?”
I felt a little panicky, but I did my best to stifle it. “So what’s our plan? Where are we going?”
Larc grinned. “I already told you, Mike. The course is set.”
“What course?”
“We’re continuing the mission. We’re going to find the Spirit.”
That’s when I turned a little green again.
Larc smiled as my face returned to its regular color. “Oh, yeah … that ‘stomach-settling’ vitamin serum your dad kept giving you? That was really a trace amount of radium. Nothing to hurt you; it was just a marker. That way your parents would be able to track your movements and always know where you were. Every member of the sabotage crew was marked.”
“That was the blinky-dot map we saw in your apartment,” I said breathlessly.
She reached over and patted my back. “Yep. So no help with nervous queasiness, I’m afraid. The vitamin stuff never actually had any vitamins in it at all.”
“Great,” I said. “Next you’ll tell me that you’re really an alien sent from another galaxy to help prevent the destruction of your home planet.”
Larc looked at me very calmly and then broke into a huge smile. She cocked her head to the side and said, “Weeeeeelllll … now that you mention it …”
My mouth fell open. I knew her white hair was abnormal! I started to say something when she let out a guffaw and slapped me on the back.
“I’m not an alien!” She was laughing pretty hard now. “But I had you going, didn’t I?”
“Ha-ha,” I said, not laughing.
Larc’s white hair brushed my face as she roughly pushed past me and stared out the window.
“Hey,” I said. “Watch ou—”
But Larc cut me off. Her voice was frantic. “Shut up, stupid. Can’t you see? It’s the Fold. Already! We’re coming up on it too fast.” She pushed past me again, this time moving the other way, and she tried furiously pounding controls at the front of the pod.
“Let me help,” I said, awkwardly pushing off my seat to float toward her.
“You don’t know how to pilot this ship!” she said frantically as she continued to whack at buttons.
“Neither do you!” I retorted. “I’ve at least had a few years playing ship simulators.”
“No, Mike. You don’t understand … it’s on autopilot. Oh, man, it’s going to get bumpy in here.”
I harrumphed angrily and pulled myself down into my seat. “Belt,” I muttered. Who was she to get all bossy all of a sudden? I was the bossy one. As soon as my belt clicked, though, the pod rolled violently upside down and I was glad to have my seat belt on. Larc banged her head on the controls hard enough to make me wince just from the sound of it.
“Are you okay?” I shouted over the alarms coming from the controls. “Your head,” I said, pointing to the gash on her forehead.
She made a face and reached up and felt along the jagged edges of the cut. It wasn’t bleeding but it really looked like it should be.
“I’m fine!” she shouted back. “Hold on!”
The pod righted itself and started to dive backward. It was gaining speed so quickly that we could hear the metal of the hull groaning and creaking.
“The Fold is sucking us in, isn’t it?” I shouted over the noise.
“It’s a strong one, all right. The plasma-propulsion cells still need to finish powering up!”
Larc didn’t seem panicked, but she was very brisk with her words. She still wasn’t buckled in and was fruitlessly pushing and flipping and twisting controls right and left with her feet sticking straight out behind her.
“If I could just …,” she said, grasping a thin joystick-like thing that was sticking up from the floor in front of the controls. She fought with the stick, grunting and pulling.
“Let me help you,” I hollered over the twisting metallic noise that was growing louder and louder. I unbuckled my seat belt and propelled myself to her side. We both heaved and pulled. Larc gave one last grunt and I gave a sharp kick and the stick jammed into the floor of the pod, sinking out of view. The pod immediately slowed down and stopped spinning. We could see the outer edges of the Fold approaching, but at a much slower, much safer pace.
Wiping her hair from her forehead, Larc said, “There. Manual override.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You must play simulators, too.”
She shrugged. “It’s kind of intuitive.”
Larc finally pulled herself down into her seat and said, “Belt.” She didn’t look tired, but she did look anxious.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You’re not still below the weather, are you?”
I smiled sheepishly. “Under the weather? No. I think I’m okay now.”
“Good,” she said. “Because it’s about to get pretty crazy in here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have a—Hey, look!”
The ship was entering the Fold now and streaks of color flew by. One particular streak was light blue and moving almost parallel to our pod.
“It’s the heat signature of the Spirit,” I said in awe. “At least, I think it is. I’ve read that when ships fly through Folds, they leave a wake of—”
“You’re right,” Larc said. “It’s pretty faint after two years, but it’s there. We’re definitely on the right track.”
I barely heard her. I had never seen anything like it. The colors were so vibrant, almost three-dimensional. It was like being inside the brightest rainbow I’d ever seen. I found myself thinking of Mom and how much she would love to see this. I wondered what was happening to her and Dad.
“They’ll be fine,” Larc said, floating up behind me and looking out the window with me. “As long as we get back in time, everything will be fine.”
“Get back? I thought you said we weren’t going back.”
“Well, eventually we’re going back, Mike. But we need David Hazelwood and Hubble and the rest of the Spirit crew first.”
“I don’t think they’re going to fit in this pod,” I said, trying a joke to lighten my mood.
“Probably not,” Larc replied with a grin. “But I bet we can work something out.”
The colors were flying by and it suddenly started to sink in that we were really on our way to the Spirit … or what was left of it.
“You’re going to really want to hold on to the seat of your pants, Mike,” Larc said, interrupting my thoughts.
I watched her curiously as she flexed the fingers of her right hand and then held her palm out like she was going to grab my face. I could see the ugly bluish star-shaped scar. The vein in the middle of it was throbbing.
She smiled and said, “Buckled in tight?”
I chewed my lip and answered, “Yeah, but what are you doing?” And she came at me with her palm sticking straight out in front of her.
“Not that crazy finger thing again!” I said, and dodged my head out of her way, but she wasn’t really coming at me. She floated past me to a small indentation on the wall. I had guessed it was just another control or light switch or something, but now, as I looked at it, I saw that it had the same shape as the scar on her hand.
“Hold on to your britches, Mike,” she said. “This is going to be wild.” And she pressed her palm onto the indentation.
Nothing happened. She took her hand away from the wall, shook it fiercely, and then matched her scar back up with the groove. Still nothing. She squinched up her face in frustration and then her eyes widened.
“It’s shorted out,” she said almost imperceptibly. “From you!” She jabbed the air at me.
“What’s shorted out?” I asked, confused. “I didn’t touch anything!”
“My hand!” she shouted. “Your sweat from holding it! The Wormer is toast!”
“Mother of donkeys, Larc, what are you talking about?”
Then it was almost as if I could actually hear a ding! announcing that she had an idea.
“Come here,” she commanded.
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “What are you doing?”
“Just come here or we’re going to miss it!” she shouted.
I floated over to her and she grabbed my shoulder. Hard. “Turn your head to the side,” she ordered. Then, when I was too slow, she grabbed my head with her free hand and twisted it so that my ear was facing her instead of my face. “Don’t move.”
“What are you …? Ow!” I felt a white-hot shot of pain in my ear, and then a millisecond later it was gone.
“Thanks,” Larc said. “Now hold on for your life.”
Before I even had a chance to try to figure out why the scar on Larc’s hand matched the indentation on the wall of the pod, or what she had done to my ear, or why she had been yelling at me, we were engulfed in light. I scrambled to my seat and yelled, “Belt!” I pulled it extra tight.
The pod flew upward like we were in a plasma-charged elevator. Then it went down. Then to the left and to the right and to the left again. The only thing I could see was a brightness that swallowed everything. Yet something about the brightness curved in, like we were shooting through an insane waterslide.
I could hear Larc shouting, “Hold on! Just a few more minutes!”
Those few minutes felt like dog years, but eventually the brightness dimmed and the pod stopped lurching. Larc’s arm fell from the wall and she gave me a tired smile.
“Wormhole,” she said. “What a ride.”
I stammered, “That was a … We just went through a …”
“A wormhole, Mike,” she said, floating past me, her arm flopping limply at her side. “A shortcut through space … just like a worm taking a shortcut from one side of an apple to another. It’s way faster than going all the way around the apple. Though maybe a little bumpier.” She smiled and then pointed at me. “You almost ruined it, you know. But then, thankfully … well, you didn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say, except “Your hand is smoking.”
Sure enough, little wisps of smoke were rising from her palm. Larc didn’t say anything; she just rubbed her hand on her jumpsuit and the smoking stopped.
Looking out the window, I noticed we weren’t in the Fold anymore. In fact, there was no Fold to be seen anywhere. There were millions of stars and, in the distance, a small red planet.
Larc said, “Aries. Once we get a little closer, we should see the Spirit in a high orbit.”
“But I thought the Spirit was going to Mars,” I said, confused.
“They were, Mike, but Aurora hijacked their course and sent them out here to no-man’s-land, where she thought they’d never be discovered.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I could.
Larc pulled herself down into her chair and smiled. She was being suspiciously quiet. I floated up behind her and watched out the front window. Slowly, the planet Aries began to grow larger and larger as we moved closer to it. It looked similar to Mars, but there were patches of green—and black—among the different colors of red.
As our pod gracefully propelled toward the planet, I saw a silver shimmer. As its orbit brought it closer to us, we could just barely make out the Spirit. It had an eerie resemblance to the Sojourner.
“That’s it,” I whispered. “The Spirit. Man, it looks beat up.” There were pockmarks all along the side, and there were areas that had been blackened by something.
“Shouldn’t we hail them?” I asked, reaching for the buttons on the control panel.
“I’m already on it,” Larc said with a sparkle in her eye.
After a few seconds there was a loud buzz from the controls.
“That should be them,” Larc said, pressing a green button. “Spirit, this is the Liberator. Do you copy?”
A crackly voice filled the cabin. “Over, Liberator. We hear you loud and clear.” Larc beamed at me, and I pulled myself down into my chair, stunned. Over and over in my head, I kept hearing “This is really happening…. This is really happening.”
“We’re coming in at delta speed, Spirit, right up on your portside flap.”
“Perfect,” the crackly voice said. “We’ll dust off the extractor and bring you in.”
Then I had a thought: the Spirit didn’t seem overly surprised to hear from us, and I would think they’d be freaking out to hear the voices of another ship after two years. It was as if they’d known we were coming.
“If you haven’t figured it out by now,” Larc said, turning around in her chair and facing me, “the Spirit already knew we were coming.”
I gave a weak smile.
“Our parents have been communicating with the Spirit for months now, planning this rescue.”
I blinked a few times and looked at Larc. “They must have been communicating in secret, though. ’Cause nothing in my dad’s books—the codes—there was nothing about public communication.”
“Well, people know they’ve been trying to communicate with the Spirit, but no one knows the Spirit has actually been answering.”
“How could they not know? Wouldn’t they hear or read the transmissions?”
“Oh, Mike, our parents are smarter than that! The Spirit has been sending encoded messages to the sabotage team. The code sounds and looks like—”
I snapped my fingers. “Static! It has to be static, right? Low-tech trumps high-tech.”
“Spot on, Sherlock,” Larc said, making an A-OK sign with her hand.
That totally explained why all our electrical appliances at home had seemed like they were on the fritz. I knew there was something crazy about the viserator shooting whorls of static for so long!
The pod lurched forward and we were bathed in a faint golden light while the grappling ray moved us steadily toward the Spirit. I was excited but 100 percent freaked out at the same time. The moment I’d wished for for two years was actually happening and I was sick with apprehension.
The pod bumped into the massive hull of the Spirit and an opening appeared. We clattered through a narrow tube and came to rest in a small circular alcove. The golden light disappeared and was replaced by the blue glow of our ship. A rushing sound filtered through the pod and I felt a sickly sensation in my stomach. My butt sunk into my seat and my hair fell around my ears. I felt the stuff in my pocket settle against my leg. We were back in AutoGrav territory again.
The ship automatically powered down with a kind of roar-sigh that sounded tired. A door at the far end of the alcove slid open and a man walked toward our pod. He had outstretched arms and a broad smile.
“There he is,” Larc said, whipping her hair back into a ponytail and smoothing her jumpsuit. “It’s Captain Herschel Winkley.”
I watched as she threw herself into the man’s arms and hugged him as if he was her long-lost grandfather.
Hesitantly, I climbed out of the pod and walked toward the two of them. They were already immersed in deep conversation and barely noticed when I got there.
After a few seconds Larc said, “Captain Wink, this is my friend Mike Stellar. You know his parents and he knows Hubble. Mike, this is Captain Wink—commander of the Spirit.”
“Ah, yes,” the man said, and I could see now that he was very old. “Michael Stellar. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You have?” I asked, not knowing how to respond. “I—I’ve never heard anything about you. Well, except for all the stuff in the news when the Spirit disappeared.”
“Mi-ike!” Larc said, laughing.
The old man laughed and patted my shoulder. “Come along now.” He swept me and Larc along with his outstretched arms. “We have a lot to accomplish and not a lot of time to accomplish it in.”
Before we took another step, though, the door to the alcove opened again and a man stood there wearing possibly the biggest smile I’d ever seen. Even though he was skinny and wore a beard, I recognized Hubble immediately.
He swept me up in a whirling hug. Then he plopped me down and grabbed my arms. Roughly he pulled me to him and kissed my forehead with a loud smack.
“Holy mother of donkeys, kid, you’re huge! Immense! I mean”—he was turning me around now and laughing—“you look like a gen-u-ine grown-up teenaged kid.” He ruffled my hair, then took a step back and looked at me some more.
I was beaming. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t believe it was really him. Hubble. Right in front of me. Talking to me. Alive. Breathing. Hairy.
“Say something, kiddo. Talk to me. How’s Yeager? Is he as big as you?”
“Stinky’s fine,” I said. “He’s great—or he will be when he finds out you’re okay. He’s bigger than me now, can you believe it?”
“How’s your sister?” Hubble asked, his face clouding over.
“She’s fine, Hubble. She’s never given up looking for you, even when everyone said it was no use.”