Mike Stellar

by K. A. Holt

  “Get up and come with me,” he said sternly.

  We walked to the flight deck and Meridiani pulled out a chair for me. “Watch that screen,” he said stiffly. “If this level goes into the red part, you holler. Got it?”

  I just glared at him. He was having way more fun bossing me around than he should have.

  It had been about a half hour since Hubble and everyone had left. I was still staring at the stupid air lock monitor, doing absolutely nothing to help. Meridiani was on the other side of the room, cleaning out his ears with a key. I felt a creeping panic and I gripped the slats of my seat, willing myself to stay calm and think.

  I decided to find a computer terminal to see if I could still see the Sojourner’s security cameras.

  “Meridiani! Come quick!” I shouted. “Something’s wrong!”

  He dropped his keys and came running. Before I could think about it twice, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the extra grasshrinker I’d discovered earlier. I covered my hand with my sleeve and slapped the grasshrinker on the back of Meridiani’s neck as he bent down to look at the monitor.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said. “Just don’t move and you’ll be back to normal in a few minutes. I think.” He just stood there, mouth agape. Then, in a blink, he was two feet shorter. Then another two feet, and another. He stood barely eight inches off the ground now. I picked him up and put him next to the air lock monitor. “I really am sorry,” I said as I moved to the other side of the room and used his dropped keys to turn on a mainframe terminal.

  After a few minutes of aimlessly searching the terminal, I still couldn’t find any feeds to the security cameras. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted Larc to help me. And even though I knew she was toasted, I went to find her.

  I busted into the room where Hubble and Captain Wink had plugged Larc into the wall. The blast of heat nearly knocked me down. I saw Larc’s tangled mass of wires plugged into the wall. What a mess.

  The wires were fused together, smoking. Some of the buttons were melted and dripping onto the floor. The braces had no more blue glow. Larc was just a hulking piece of burning fuses.

  “Oh, Larc,” I whispered. “Look at you.”

  For the first time in a while, I felt the whisper of defeat in my ear. The tears rolled down my cheeks on their own. I was useless to stop them. And I didn’t feel like a baby or a coward. I felt ashamed. I was here to save my parents … the Spirit. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I felt empty without Larc. Useless.

  “Why so blue?” came a strangled mechanical voice. I quickly wiped the tears from my face.

  “Get it?” it said.

  I looked around me. I hadn’t noticed before, but the room was still very faintly glowing blue.

  “Larc?” I asked in a constricted voice.

  “It’s grim, Mike. Grim. My processor is fried. All of me is fried.” Her voice was rising and lowering in pitch at random intervals.

  “Mother of donkeys, Larc.” My voice cracked.

  “I’m spent, Mike. I can talk to you until my processor goes, but that’ll be any minute.”

  “But I need your help. Everyone’s gone. They’ve been on the Sojourner for hours. I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Talk it out, Mike. You’re smart. You’ll think of something.”

  I rubbed my face with my hands and I remembered why I’d come into the room. “The security cameras … let me see if I can still access them. Maybe that will give us an idea….”

  I flipped on the terminal. I traced the programs accessed by the last user and after a few agonizing seconds the screen buzzed to life. I saw a list of Sojourner security cameras scrolling down the screen. I randomly clicked on a camera but it didn’t show anything. I clicked on another and … my worst fears were confirmed. There was fighting in the hallways. Fighting in the lobby. Fighting on the flight deck. And the Spirit crew was outnumbered horribly. My fingers shaking, I clicked the link to the brig camera. It showed the brig quickly filling to capacity. It looked like everyone from the Spirit had been captured, was in the process of getting captured—or worse.

  There was no one left to keep fighting.

  No one but me.

  “They’re in the brig,” I choked out. “Well, the ones who aren’t already there will be soon. Everyone. From both ships.”

  “Where is the brig?” Larc asked matter-of-factly.

  “In the bottom of the ship, I guess. I haven’t been down there.”

  “Can you see if all the Project goons are there, too?”

  I clicked on a bunch of different cameras placed throughout the Sojourner. “Some are still fighting but most of the goons are down with the prisoners. Hang on….”

  I saw a clot of thugs leaving the brig.

  “It looks like they might be splitting up.”

  “Can you hear anything they’re saying?”

  I tried a couple of commands. “No. The feed Hubble tapped into isn’t equipped with sound.”

  “Can you see where they’re all going?” Larc’s voice was fading in and out now.

  “Looks like they’re headed up some stairs. What do you think? Maybe toward the air lock?”

  “I can’t see, Mike,” Larc’s scary new voice honked. “My optic processor is in a puddle somewhere.”

  “Well, uh,” I replied, not knowing what to say, “if they’re headed toward the air lock, I imagine they’re coming to find anyone who’s left over here and bring them onto the Sojourner. Namely, me.”

  “Can you tell how the brig is set up? Are there individual cells or what?” Larc’s voice was now a mechanical drone.

  “It looks like light bars to me. The kind that zap you if you touch them.”

  “Electric—” Larc’s voice buzzed, and then was silent.

  “Larc?” I shouted, jumping up. “Larc!”

  The blue glow in the room was gone.

  Larc was gone.

  I could still hear her voice in my head, though. “Talk it out, Mike. Talk it out.”

  So I did.

  There was a fast-approaching cell of goons heading for the air lock. The rest of them were in the brig with the prisoners. I stared at the terminal screen. After the split-up, the goons in the brig were way outnumbered by prisoners. If I could figure out a way to help the adults get past the light bars, then they’d have a good fighting chance.

  But how could they get through the light bars? I ran my hand over the terminal and it shocked me.

  “Stupid compu—” I grumped, and then it hit me. It was so obvious!

  If the power failed, the light bars would fail. And the brig probably had its own power source. I felt my pulse quicken. The brig’s power would have to fail. But how?

  Some movement on the screen in front of me caught my attention. The thugs were heading closer and closer to the air lock. They’d be on the Spirit in minutes.

  I needed to figure out how to turn the power off in the brig. That was the only way to disable those light bars. I paced in front of Larc’s burnt-out remnants and talked to myself. I must have looked like a raving lunatic.

  How could I cut the brig’s power source? I sat at the computer terminal to see if I could call up anything that would help—maybe a map, anything. The only even possibly helpful file I found was a copy of the Spirit’s blueprints.

  My only hope was that the Spirit and the Sojourner had similar layouts. They were designed by the same woman (Mom and Dad had had her over for dinner once. She was very old and kind of cranky), so it was a good bet. I looked over the blueprints and found the Spirit’s brig. Off to one side was its electrical box.

  “Huzzah,” I said to myself. As long as the Sojourner brig’s electrical box was in the same place, I was in luck. But how could I get to it? I stared at the melted tangle of Larc and had a crazy idea. I tried to ignore it, but the more I tried to make it go away, the stronger it got.

  There was no way I’d get around the goons in the brig to get to the electrical box. But if I could get to
the box from the outside … I could burn through the first layer of the hull and destroy some of the wires. If I did it right, I wouldn’t bust through the habitat layer of the hull and kill everyone. If I did it right, I could kill the brig’s power instead, and help my parents and Hubble and everyone escape.

  If.

  If.

  If.

  I ran to the flight deck at warp speed. I knew that the Project goons would board the ship any second now.

  Meridiani was sitting by the air lock monitor. He was a bit bigger than I had left him. The grasshrinker was wearing off. I was relieved and dismayed at the same time. As soon as he saw me, he started shouting words I’d only heard by accidentally flipping to the grown-up channels on the viserator. His little head was beet red. It looked like it might pop off at any second.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” I yelled to him as I crossed the room. “I didn’t have a choice.” He shook his tiny fists at me and squeaked some more obscenities.

  I stood next to the spacewalk capsule and took a breath. The capsule looked exactly the same as the one the Sojourner’s captain had used when we’d accidentally busted each other breaking the rules. I opened the door, and with a loud whoosh, I was inside.

  I stood in the capsule, breathing hard. I took one of the suits from its hook and pulled it on. I briefly thought of the report I’d written on the early days of spaceflight and I was so glad that our space suits weren’t those bulky monstrosities the first astronauts used.

  The slim suit I wore over my flight suit was too big, but it wasn’t bad. I flipped on the oxygen tank and the jet pack. Fortunately, they both had easy-to-read diagrams. The oxygen tank had a monitor on the sleeve of the suit, and the jet pack was controlled with simple voice instructions. I struggled to get the helmet properly aligned with all the grooves on the neck of the suit, but I heard a nice click and the helmet said, “Flight ready.” I lumbered over to a small cabinet and yanked it open. Inside, there were a plasma torch, some completely unrecognizable tools, an extra jet pack, and a first-aid kit. I grabbed the plasma torch.

  “This shouldn’t be too hard,” I said, trying to convince myself I wasn’t on a suicide mission. “Just like playing Astro Wars on the vis.” All the spit in my mouth dried up and I briefly thought about forgetting the whole thing. Instead, I ran over the plan one last time, said a quick prayer, and reached for the hatch. I pushed the big button, and yellow warning lights began flashing in the capsule. A mechanical woman’s voice counted down from ten to one. I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself, but I was pretty much gulping air. I looked at my oxygen meter—enough to last me twenty minutes. “That should be plenty of time,” I told myself. Man, I hoped so.

  The voice reached one and the hatch slowly opened. As soon as it began to open, the AutoGrav in the capsule shut off and I started floating. At first I instinctively fought it and I grabbed for the smooth plastic sides of the capsule. As I floated toward the opened hatch, I really felt like I might freak out. What was I doing, going out into space? Outer space? The closest thing to a space walk I’d ever experienced was floating around the escape pod with Larc.

  Larc.

  I missed her. I took a breath and willed myself to stop panicking. I floated effortlessly out of the ship.

  I looked around and all I could see was the kind of blackness that seems sticky—like it’s clinging to your arms and legs and won’t let go.

  I could feel my heart rate increase and my breathing turn into huffs and puffs. I was panicking. My head whirled around and I finally noticed that while I was freaking out, I’d floated away from the ships.

  “Mo. Ther. Of. Don. Keys,” I exhaled as I tried to calm myself.

  “Everything’s okay, Mike,” I told myself. “Just simple voice instructions. That’s all you need to activate the jet pack.” So that was what I did.

  “Forward!

  “Left!

  “Forward!

  “Hover!”

  It wasn’t long before I rubbed my hand along the side of the Spirit and breathed a sigh of relief.

  By this time my head was pounding with the worst headache I’d had in my entire life. I looked at my oxygen monitor and it showed I had less than five minutes of air to breathe.

  “What the … !” I cried. “There must be a malfunction with the suit!” I tapped the oxygen monitor stupidly. That, of course, didn’t help.

  I fought yet another wave of panic and told my jet pack to move forward. I glided away from the Spirit, toward the Sojourner. It felt like swimming out into the deep end of a pool, only instead of worrying about a drain sucking me under, I worried about black holes and red dwarfs and—

  My head still reeled. And my breath was coming in harsh bursts. There was only two and a half minutes before my air would be gone. The lack of oxygen was making me slow and disoriented. I forced myself to press on.

  Remembering the blueprints, I positioned myself at the fourteenth panel from the right, very near the bottom of the Sojourner. This was the panel that held most of the wiring to the brig’s electrical box. Or at least I thought it was.

  Now was the tricky part.

  I told the jet pack to hover and I looked around me. I planned the fastest way to get back to the Spirit and I held my breath.

  This was it.

  My plan was to just melt away the panel with the plasma torch and then melt all the exposed wires. It wasn’t very precise, but it should work.

  I flipped the torch on and immediately the metal hull began to melt away, exposing clumps of wires. I went at the wires with the torch and they quickly turned to sticky gobs of goo. I didn’t know how many wires needed to be destroyed to kill the brig’s power, and the fourteenth panel was insanely big. Like electri-bus big. I was really running out of time.

  I looked at my oxygen gauge. It was blinking red and counting down from fifty-nine seconds.

  “Crap!” I yelled, and instinctively looked around, expecting there to be an adult to yell at me. I laughed nervously.

  “Dang!” I shouted, and I noticed that when I yelled, my oxygen rate didn’t plummet quite as quickly.

  “What’s going on with the oxygen?” I asked out loud, and again I saw that the diminishing amount slowed. Then I remembered something about firefighters singing when they went into burning buildings. The singing helped conserve the air in their tanks. It was when they panicked and began breathing heavily that their oxygen disappeared quickly.

  So I began to belt out the MonsterMetalMachines theme song while I nervously kept an eye on my gauge and tried to melt wires as fast as I could.

  “Gimme iron, gimme steel!” I sang. “Gimme strength and an even keel!”

  I remembered Mrs. H telling us never ever to shake a plasma torch, because of its instability. I shrugged and figured I had nothing to lose. I shook that thing like crazy, and just like I’d suspected, the plasma came shooting out ten times stronger. It was hard to control, but I held on as best I could.

  “Moooonster. MetalMachines. Moooonster MetalMachines!”

  I burned away more of the fourteenth panel’s hull and went at the newly exposed wires. “We’ll do anything to succeed! We fight to keep our spirits free!”

  The now very unstable torch shot a stream of plasma about a hundred feet above my head and barely missed a porthole. I needed to turn this thing off before I breached the habitat layer. And I needed to get back to the Spirit. Now.

  “Moooonster. MetalMachines. Moooonster Metal-Machines!”

  I immediately let go of the torch. I felt bad for littering space, but I couldn’t bring an unstable plasma torch back with me on the ship. I was smart enough to know that. Larc would be proud.

  I pushed away from the ship. “Moooonster. Metal-Machines. Moooonster MetalMachines!”

  My oxygen gauge began a warning countdown for the last ten seconds of air. I yelled, “Forward! Max speed!” and crossed my fingers.

  “Three … two … one,” the countdown blared in my ears.

 
“Moooonster. MetalMachines. Moooonster MetalMachines!”

  I was flying so fast I almost overshot the flight deck capsule. Yelling, “Reverse immediately!” I slowed the jet pack just in time. With no oxygen left, and spots flashing before my eyes, I kicked the button to open the capsule hatch and clambered inside.

  The hatch closed and I ripped my helmet off and threw it to the ground. I took huge gasping breaths and fell to my knees. After a moment I peeled the space suit off and left it in a clump on the floor.

  My plan was to run to the nearest computer terminal. If I saw static from the brig camera, then I’d have proof the power was down and my mission was a success. I flew out of the flight deck, running at top speed. I rounded a corner and heard someone yell, “Here’s one of ’em!”

  Before I had a chance to reverse course, a stiff arm grabbed me by the front of the flight suit and roughly dragged me out into the lobby I kicked and flailed and landed a nice loogie right in the guy’s face but he still held on tight. He dragged me over to a bunch of other black-clad goons. I saw Meridiani, almost normal-sized, sitting on the floor with a boot-shaped bruise on his face.

  I continued to fight and flail and I hollered that they’d never get away with this. I swear, if I ever read something like that in a book, I would think it was terribly cheesy. But it turns out you really do yell things like that when you’re in trouble.

  The goon gave me a swift slap in the face and it felt like fire. Wincing, I staggered back into the wall. I couldn’t believe he actually hit me.

  Grinding my teeth with rage, I lowered my still-pounding head and ran full tilt toward the thug’s gut.

  “Leave him alone!” a voice shouted from the distance. I stopped my attack to see who was yelling.

  Dad!

  “But, Dad, he hit me!” I protested.

  “Not you, Michael. Him. You there!” Dad said, pointing at the man and walking briskly up to us. “Don’t you ever, ever touch my son again.” And with that, Dad slugged the dude right in the jaw. My jaw fell open. I couldn’t believe Dad just hit that guy!