“Eric...” Yalena said, raising her gaze to meet his eyes. He seemed to be locked in an intense internal battle about what to do. As soon as she opened her mouth to continue, he stopped her abruptly.
“Don’t, please!” There was a stern and commanding note in Eric’s voice, making him seem a lot more like his father than he usually did. “He can’t know any more.”
Alec swelled up with irritation. “Cut the crap, O’Donnell. I already know something’s up!”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Eric sharpened his voice. “And it’s none of your business.”
“I think it may well be my business.”
Seeing Alec’s fervor drained Eric’s face of blood. “This has nothing to do with you. We don’t owe you an explanation. Walk away before it’s too late!”
“It’s already too late. And don’t you dare talk down to me. You may be an O’Donnell, but you’re sure as hell not my commander!” Alec spat back, getting a step closer to Eric. The words seemed to have struck a nerve, because Eric was too taken aback to respond.
Yalena had to take advantage of the opening. “Calm down, both of you! Listen, Eric,” she said, lowering her voice. “There’s a way to test it, but we’re going to need a pilot.” She glanced to Alec, then back to Eric, assuming he’d get her not-so-subtle hint.
It was hard to tell whether Eric or Alec was more stunned by the bomb she’d dropped in their laps. Eric opened his mouth and then closed it without managing a sound. A muscle on Alec’s jaw twitched, and he barely blinked as the bell rang, announcing the end of the class.
Alec turned to Yalena. “Hurry. We have to take you to the medical ward.”
“I told you, I’m fine,” she insisted, patience running thin.
He took her hand in his and flattened her palm to remove a piece of glass she hadn’t realized was stuck there. “You’re bleeding. Plus, if you want to keep whatever this is a secret, you have to go now. You called too much attention to this already.”
“It would look suspicious,” Eric added in a quick whisper, even though it must have pained him to agree with Alec.
They took Yalena to the medical ward, where Dana cleaned and plastered up her wound before she put her to bed and attached a heart rate monitor. The weird vibe still hung in the air with Alec and Eric quietly standing there, avoiding each other’s looks, while Dana fussed around the room.
As it was the last class before lunch, Jen, Nico, and Heidi burst into the medical ward a few minutes later to check on her.
“Hey, are you all right?” Yalena was a little surprised to see Heidi so worried. It left her feeling like a drama queen for falling in class.
“I’m fine. It was just something to do with blood pressure. Nothing to worry about,” Yalena hurried to emphasize. “Actually, Doctor Lannely, can I go now?”
“I’m afraid not, Yalena. I need to monitor you for a few hours. Your friends can stay till their next class if they’d like, but you need to rest,” Dana replied.
“Yes,” sounded from five places, and Yalena was touched by their reaction, even though they were not supposed to be there for what she had to say to Eric.
“All right, then. Get some rest,” Dana said and left.
Alec stood up, peeked down the corridor in front of the room, then returned to his seat by Yalena’s bed.
“It’s all clear. The whole corridor is empty. Now, can you please explain what sort of thing you figured out that was so important, you suddenly jumped a meter up in your seat and then pretended to faint, all so you could run out of class and tell O’Donnell about it?” Alec’s hazel eyes were fixated on Yalena. Jen and Heidi exchanged bewildered looks, while Nico observed Yalena and Eric with some interest. How The Woodpecker must be enjoying this.
“Wait! What do you mean she pretended to faint?” Heidi scowled at Yalena.
“They’ve been working on something, or so it seems,” Alec said, disregarding the groan from Eric’s side.
Heidi clapped her hands victoriously. “I knew it! You never dated O’Donnell, did you?” she asked Yalena. “I never bought that story, somehow. You guys have never even held hands!” Then she turned to Jen. “Told you.”
Jen peeked at Eric, and her sides flushed pink when he looked back at her, caught between blinks. Yalena almost slapped a hand against her forehead. How had she missed that?
“I never said we were dating,” she said. “Everyone just assumed and wouldn’t hear otherwise.”
An unexpected, small laugh came from Alec’s side.
“What’s wrong with you?” Heidi gawked at Yalena and Eric with growing confusion. “If you haven’t been hiding a secret romance, then what has been going on with you two?”
“I don’t know, but I’m curious to find out,” Alec said, calm now that he had the others on his side.
“Well, I’m not,” Jen said, recovering from her blush attack and straightening her shoulders into perfect posture. Ceremonially, she proceeded to gather her things. “Whatever big secret you have going on here, you’re breaking rules and hiding and lying to everyone. It’s not the kind of thing I want to be a part of.” With a statement that reminded Yalena too much of something she’d said to Eric on New Years Eve, Jen headed for the door. Eric rushed after her, catching her elbow to make her turn back.
“Please, don’t leave.” It was the last thing Yalena had expected to hear him say. “We’re not diabolical, I promise, but the issue requires discretion.” His hand slid down from her elbow to her hand. “I need you to understand.”
“Maybe...” Jen said, her voice a little weak, her decisiveness draining away. “I’ll stay, but you have to promise to tell us the whole truth, no matter how sensitive.”
Eric threw a quick glance back to Yalena, but then took a step closer to Jen. “I promise.”
Happy with that conclusion, Jen assumed her previous position, sitting on the edge of Yalena’s bed. It was odd to see her, the quiet one, putting pressure on Eric, and even more surprising to see Eric bend under it.
“I assume this has something to do with the silicone patch you asked me for?”
“They used it to break into the commander’s profile and copy a file,” Nico said, his tone casual.
The others turned on him like he was suddenly in on a big conspiracy.
Nico threw his hands in the air. “Don’t look at me. That’s as much as I know. They wouldn’t tell me anything else either.”
“Was it a sound file of some sort?” Alec asked, turning back to Yalena. “Because you just mentioned a signal.”
Yalena had to take a beat here. Between the four of them, her friends had more pieces of the truth than she’d dared to imagine.
Eric seemed more determined to remain in control of the conversation. “I know this makes no sense to you yet, but please just let us speak for a minute,” he said, louder this time, perhaps feeling the need to assert himself to the others. “I need to understand what Yalena’s discovered.”
He must have inherited the ability to command silence and respect from his father, for Heidi quieted down while Alec just said, “That’s exactly what I want, too.”
Then they all waited. Arms crossed, Jen looked as comfortable as she would be in a fancy theater. Nico was downright amused, leaning against the wall as if to let the others argue if they must. That was how The Woodpecker flourished—always there, at the edges, overseeing what went on in every corner of the space station. Still, knowing he was with them made it hard to believe Yalena had once found him so intimidating. Heidi and Alec looked over at Yalena and then back at Eric, as if they were following a fast-paced tennis game. There was no fooling either of them now.
“Fine,” Eric said, and each word that followed was measured, as if uttering it was an arduous task. “I showed something to Yalena before Christmas. It’s a signal picked up on the radio channel left open for the lost Migration ships. But what we got wasn’t a voice or text message. It’s a jumbled sound. No one knew what it meant,
and Yalena couldn’t decipher it, either—not until now, it appears.” He stopped there, and she knew that he was, against all odds, hoping he wouldn’t have to tell them more.
“If you tell anyone about this, we’re getting expelled,” Yalena added, and her lower lip trembled.
“Don’t I know it.” Nico was still upbeat.
“It’s offensive how little credit you give me,” Alec said evenly.
“All of us,” Heidi protested as well.
Eric shot Alec an unpleasant look. “Yalena’s right. We’re telling you this in strictest confidence.”
“The truth is that we’ve been sneaking around to get to this information, and...we’re not supposed to know it,” Yalena said. She was starting to realize that her and Eric’s attempts to keep this all under wraps had looked more than a little suspicious to their classmates. It was time to tell the truth, but even so, the others needed to know how much trouble this all was.
“So, where does the signal come from?” Heidi asked.
“Its source has been confirmed as a manmade satellite in exoplanet radius. It was part of the Migration ships’ equipment,” Eric said, pausing after every word, as if hearing the statement slowly would make the others ignore what it implied.
“Do we know if the satellite belonged to Farsight or Demonfrost?”
“No,” Eric said. “They must have left damaged goods behind on the way out of our solar system, around Pluto’s orbit. Or it could have been taken from them by someone else, who is now using our tech to try and communicate with us.”
Jen cuddled into her sweater, her chin almost disappearing in its high turtleneck. “By someone else, you mean...” she stuttered. Her usual composure didn’t hold so well against the prospect of finding aliens.
“Yes,” Eric said. “Someone not human.”
“I’m not sure we need to go there anymore,” Yalena said, thinking out loud. “Does anybody have my tablet?”
Heidi fished it out of her backpack. “Here.”
The screen lit up, showing Yalena’s latest doodles. “We were trying to decipher it as a language, but we never got anywhere, because it isn’t that sort of message. Check this out. I couldn’t help drawing this doodle as I listened to the signal.”
Alec’s bushy eyebrows drew so close together they appeared as one, while Heidi scratched her freckled cheek.
“Now watch this.” Yalena split the tablet screen between her doodles and the generic notes from their latest space travel class. She browsed through until she found what she was looking for. “Look at the coordinates Professor Howards showed us today.”
“This is brilliant,” Nico said, coming closer. His nonchalant attitude was left somewhere far behind, and his eyes were wide with awe. There was something exciting in seeing the first person get the point she was trying to make. Yalena’s hand scribbled with the stylus again, writing the translation, like a legend on a map.
Tiny circle. One.
Huge circle. Nine.
Tiny circle. One.
Tiny circle. One.
“I always draw them in that exact sequence and in those exact sizes, like they belong to a scale. It’s a line of digits—coordinates,” she said, showing them her translation matching one-to-one with the coordinates they had discussed in class. “When you put it all together, it’s 19-11-13.4 and 21-54-37.9, meaning RA 19h 11m 13.4s and Dec -21° 54' 37.9". It’s the last known location of Farsight.”
“So...” Nico trailed off. “Your doodles somehow spell out coordinates?”
“I can’t explain it.” Yalena’s stomach tightened as her mind threw the latest conversation she had had with the commander in her face. “No one will take me seriously without solid proof, that much I know, but regardless of how this signal got me to draw the circles, I swear that it did. And it makes sense now, doesn’t it?”
“The signal wants us to follow Farsight,” Eric said to himself as much as to the others.
“It must be one of Farsight’s satellites,” Yalena confirmed, but she shivered at the thought. “I don’t think the aliens the First Contact mission is taking so long to prepare for are out there, messing with our tech. I think Cooper is right—it’s a distress call from Farsight, and they need us to go get them.”
“The question is, how long ago was it sent? And whether there’s anyone left to help now,” Eric said quietly.
His eyes met Yalena’s, and she nodded, her expression solemn. Despite the scary thought, Eric had a glimmer of determination in his eyes. Yalena could see the idea of going after those coordinates shape in his mind as quickly and as suddenly as it had in her own.
“Yalena’s right,” he said, turning to Alec for the first time since their argument. “We need to get proof, and for that, we’re going to need a pilot.”
Chapter 18. The Weak Link
IT TOOK YALENA AGES to fall asleep that night. She and Heidi talked about the signal until late—or rather, Heidi kept popping new questions in her effort to understand everything she and the others had been told a few hours ago. Yalena excused herself with the headache she’d had all afternoon and tried to lure herself to sleep, but an uneasy feeling had settled in her again.
It wasn’t over. Far from it. And it was her insisting on keeping things quiet this time. After all, how could she ask the commander to believe her doodles? He already said he’d only trust his eyes, so she vowed to bring him something worth looking at.
Having shown little improvement in the flight simulator, Yalena had come to dread the Saturday morning flight lesson where Adam supervised her, Nico, and Jen with less enthusiasm than someone sent to push stones up a hill. However, after her visit to the ward, she more than welcomed the distraction.
“You’re like a blind donkey crossing the street,” Adam concluded at the end of the day’s simulation.
“That sounds...specific,” Eric commented with a grin. He and the others had come out to pick up their tablets from the control room.
Yalena grimaced. “You just can’t tolerate beginners, Adam. I didn’t even forget to pull that other brake this time.”
“Yes, it would have been great progress if you hadn’t smashed the hard-surface landing wheel,” Adam said, exasperated.
“Sounds like you could use some extra practice,” Eric said. Yalena knew him well enough to be certain that something more was on his mind. “I wouldn’t mind staying an hour late to help Yalena practice landings in the simulator.”
“Be my guest. And while you’re at it, find someone to babysit the other two beginners as well. They could use it.” Adam nodded at Jen and Nico.
“I’m sure Alec and Heidi wouldn’t mind staying here late,” Eric added, his tone very helpful and businesslike.
Yalena had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. Who would have known her clumsy way of operating machinery would give them exactly what they needed—time alone to plot again. As the rest of the class made their way out of the control room, she elbowed Eric.
He eyed her with a smirk. “Well, we do need to talk, and you do need to practice.”
Alec looked around as the six of them gathered in a close circle. “Are we alone?”
“Think so,” Heidi said. “So, are we really going hurdling through space after these random coordinates?”
“Not random,” Jen corrected.
“So far, the coordinates have been seen as nothing else than Farsight’s acceleration launch point. We even have commander Fia Jones’ confirmation of this on tape. After that, the ship accelerated so fast that, for our radars, it seemed like it disappeared.”
“And any signal they sent back to us would take years to come back.”
“Exactly.” Eric nodded. “The problem is that more than a hundred years passed. Any message they sent back to us after accelerating should have come back already, but we had nothing until now, until this signal. The board always believed Farsight must have run into technical difficulties. To have Yalena’s signal work match with the acceleration launch poin
t is the first reason we’ve had to look closer at those coordinates. The wait for Farsight to send us a message is over. This is their message. They want us to follow them,” Eric said. “This can’t be a coincidence.”
Yalena wasn’t sure her scribbles qualified as “work,” but she let that slide.
“So, if you’re sure of that, then why not tell the commander?” Jen asked. Despite the brave face she put forward, Yalena could sense she would still prefer to walk away from the conundrum.
“I’m sure of it,” Eric said, “but I doubt others will be confident enough in Yalena’s hunch.” He shot her a sideways glance. “No offense.”
“None taken,” she said, frowning. It was tearing her up inside—the battle between her intuition, screaming that she was right, and her logic, begging her to be realistic.
“They’ll never take us seriously, and with their fear of there being Others out there, snatching spaceships, they wouldn’t push up the First Contact mission.” Eric’s lips thinned as he mulled over this. “I know it’s mad, but if we want answers, we’ll have to go after Farsight ourselves.”
“Where do we start?” Jen asked.
“First, we’ll need a ship and enough antimatter fuel to get us there,” Nico said.
“That’s not even the tricky part,” Eric said. “We’ll need an excuse to be on a mission out there for a few days, unsupervised.”
“We’ve got the ship,” Alec said, casually scratching his chin.
“Come again?” Nico looked away from Alec and pointed to the welcome screen in the simulation room. It showed about a dozen different spacecraft models. “Do you happen to have one of these lying around?”
Alec rubbed his hands together, as if he’d been waiting for this moment all his life. “Not yet, but I plan to be piloting one soon.”
Heidi sulked at Alec. “Not so fast. I’m getting pretty decent scores these days. Who is to say it shouldn’t be me piloting?”
“We can decide that later, but it isn’t what I meant,” he answered. The calm smile, dimples and all, startled them.
The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1) Page 15