“If it’s your own firewall, can’t you disable it?”
Nico rolled his eyes. “That’s not how it works,” he said. “The firewall can only be disabled by the profile that created it, following very specific protective steps. I showed Unifier IT the concept when they asked me to optimize their systems. I built it, so...”
“So, you would always have access to everything.” Yalena let out a deep breath. There was nothing she wanted more than to be able to talk to Eric throughout the trip, but her despair seemed nothing compared to Nico’s.
“Now, they’ve created their own firewall. They’ve turned it around. I’ve been left out in the dark, blind and deaf,” he murmured, as if still trying to comprehend this.
“Now, you know how the rest of us usually feel.” Even though the obstacle raised questions in Yalena’s mind, she couldn’t resist a smile. This mission would be healthy for The Woodpecker—or a reality check, at the very least.
Not that Nico gave up without a fight. While the rest of the team ran projections on the trip, took high-resolution images, checked on all the Eagle’s systems, or even napped in 6-hour shifts on the pull-out beds in the back, Nico kept typing. He lashed out at his harmless workstation every time his own algorithm threw him out of the edges of the framework he was trying to access.
“Listen.” Yalena had to jump back into action after leaving him to his own devices for a few hours. His latest outburst had woken her up after just an hour of light sleep, so she decided not to let him dwell on it any longer. “If that firewall is your best effort, I don’t think anyone can crack it. Not even you.”
“That was the point behind its design,” he murmured. “But I promised you we’d have contact between the Eagles. I can’t let this go.”
“Hey, hey.” She tugged at his shoulder, making him do a half-spin in his seat, facing her. “I wish we could talk to Eric and his team, trust me, but this doesn’t change much. We each have our mission—us to check out the Farsight coordinates, and them to retrieve the satellite. We’ll have to go ahead with that plan and talk when we all get back to Unifier. I don’t want you distracted during the entire trip because of this. You can’t let it throw you off.”
Nico rubbed his bloodshot eyes. It was impossible to think how cocky Yalena had found him that first day they met. Like a mad genius obsessed with his creation, he came off strong, but losing control seemed to have drained his confidence.
“I just,” he stuttered. “I never expected they would use my code against me.”
“Not everything will go according to plan on this mission. Take it in stride.” She squeezed his shoulder. “We’ll be lucky if that’s the only thing we mess up.”
The remainder of the trip wasn’t as tedious as initially anticipated. With Natalia busy running tests on a mock-up fuel generator that attempted to create antimatter while a spacecraft was in flight and Nico still typing away in futile efforts to reinstate the comms to Artemis, Yalena mostly talked to the pilots. The sheer speed of Apollo left her dizzy at times, though, and she buckled up back in her seat when they had to cross the asteroid belt on their way to Jupiter.
“Hang on tight, everyone. This probably won’t be too cozy.” Alec’s voice was surprisingly calm, and if Yalena hadn’t been so engulfed by the situation, she may have even laughed at his remark. Her central seat was perfectly situated to take in the countless asteroids that seemed bigger and more ubiquitous with every second that they closed in on the asteroid belt. To Yalena’s senses, the Eagle moved too fast, prohibitively fast, speeding to a point when she doubted Alec would be able to brake in time to avoid a crash with a nearby asteroid.
Grasping the armrests of her chair and probably leaving nail marks there, Yalena prepared for the wild ride, but nothing she had expected came close to the reality. Rocks of all sizes and colorful dust clouds tangled up into one hazy blur. Apollo turned sharply, sped up, slowed down, lunged forward, and made full rotations, during which Yalena could feel her heart beating wildly. She had to shut her eyes and purse her lips to keep from screaming or, quite possibly, throwing up. It was much worse than that time Adeline had taken her to the high-speed amusement park and let her go on all the rides.
Reminding herself that she needed to step up and lead with confidence, Yalena managed to force her eyes open. Alec and Dave’s faces were sweaty from the effort, but no one could deny they worked together brilliantly. Alec focused on making precise and swift movements to avoid the asteroids, and Dave monitored the objects farther away to warn Alec about asteroids outside of his field of vision. Working at such a high speed required an extreme concentration from them both.
Before Yalena could ask if they were in the clear, something shook the Eagle hard and it lunged down, making Yalena experience an unpleasant pull around her navel.
“We’ve been hit,” Sebastian shouted.
“Good job, Rado. The point was to get us through alive!” Natalia screamed from the back of the Eagle.
“Shut up, Natalia!” Panic rang in Yalena’s ears like a siren, but her task was to keep the pilots from getting distracted. Snappy judgments would have to wait. “Sebastian, give me a security report.”
“The outer corpus has been breached, but the inner core is intact. Still, it won’t take more than nine days for radiation to start decomposing the inner core. We need to make it back to Unifier before then.” He may have tried to mask the worry in his voice, but it still seeped through.
“We will.” Yalena did her best to sound certain. “But as soon as we are out of the asteroid belt, I want you to prepare breathing dispensers for everyone and start a countdown, factoring in for the progress of the radiation.”
“Copy that.”
“Alec, three o’clock!” Dave urged, and Yalena braced herself for what she thought may be that fatal blow that would breach the corpus this time.
Instead, the Eagle adjusted its position swiftly and lunged downward. Yalena was faintly aware that she had been holding her eyes shut again, and it was Dave’s clapping that broke her out of it.
“We did it!” Alec high-fived Dave and then turned back to the rest of the crew, wiping his wet forehead with the sleeve of his uniform. “Welcome to the wild side.”
“Arrival at destination in eight hours,” Dave said. He was on the line with the Academy for the hourly report.
“Careful, team Apollo. You’re too close to your destination to still be accelerating,” a warning voice came from the transmitter. Yalena froze. It was Cooper.
Apparently, not only professors evaluated the yearly missions. Her chest tightened again. It could be a problem if he remembered Yalena and Heidi asking questions about the team selection process at the Gala. It took all the restraint Yalena was capable of not to ask Nico to interrupt the radio connection at once. Like a predator watching its prey, she had to delay her move so as not to screw it all up. When Cooper repeated his warning, though, she had no choice.
“Now!”
Nico’s fingers hit the keyboard with a speed and ferocity that made everyone hold their breath in anticipation. Alec sped up instead of slowing down, and before the howl of worried and protesting voices over the transmitter could take full force, Nico lifted his hands from the keyboard.
“It’s done,” he said. “We’re alone.”
Yalena wanted to recharge for a second, but every moment counted. Relaxing would have to wait—quite a while, possibly.
“Alec,” she said. “Take a moment if you need it, but then we have to disappear.” The interruption of their connection to the Academy pushed more guilt onto her than she had anticipated. Only one solution was in sight—get to the coordinates and get back as fast as their Eagle could carry them.
“Acceleration up,” Alec said, as the Eagle lunged into a crazy maneuver—a slingshot around Jupiter that would shoot them out in the right direction. “We’re estimated to arrive at the Farsight coordinates in 36 hours.”
The engineering and security officers, Michael and Seb
astian, had begun to reinforce the potential breach point with insulation foam. On Yalena’s request, they brought breathing dispensers out of the storage compartment.
Then Dave took over piloting, letting Alec roam around the main corpus to shake off the stress. That little tremble in his muscular arm gave Yalena flashbacks of the Gala. She sure hoped it wasn’t his tic before punching someone. Seeing him walk if off, though, she realized it must be nerves, something she hadn’t seen him too preoccupied with before, and it made her heart sink a little. Every step of this trip felt more daring than the one before, escalating to what she blindly hoped would be success.
“Where is Artemis?” Yalena felt the need to at least keep tabs on them if they couldn’t communicate.
Nico pulled out a radar view. “They’re in position—far behind us, though.”
The illusionary protective glass lid Eric had metaphorically placed over her lay shattered in tiny pieces now. Without it, Yalena felt oddly exposed. What had she expected, though? That they’d ride side-by-side, bumping into or waving at each other like children did at the go-karts?
“It must be our acceleration,” Nico said after a moment of investigation.
Yalena took her seat, and even though the cabin was quiet, everyone seemed to attend to their assigned tasks with the utmost care. This was their time to shine. Rule-breakers or not, all the work they did—from images of the planets, moons, or asteroids they managed to capture, to what they found in the end—would be the subject of incessant investigation upon their return. It had to sparkle with quality.
Yalena tried to relax and even nap a little, but chatter and the constant feeling of expectation didn’t let her. She just played with the little strap keeping her attached to the bed and stared, wide awake, at the ceiling. Her heart beat hard against her chest, and she felt the blood flow through her veins as fast as it ever had. If they pulled this off, she would prove once and for all that she belonged in space and at STAR Academy. If those parents of hers knew, if they only knew she was destined for greatness, they would never have let her go. They would have been proud.
Yalena buried her face in the pillow, praying to chase away that random thought and embarrassed to have let it slip in. Those parents, they didn’t deserve a single thought from her. Pulling herself up, she gave up on that last attempt to sleep or gather her strength. They were too close for that now, and unease crawled under her skin.
“Give me an ETA?” Yalena asked to distract herself.
“We’re here,” Nico answered with a strange note of quiet anticipation in his voice.
“Holy stars.”
The Martian accent stretched out those vowels even more than Yalena had grown accustomed to hearing. With a few steps, she walked over to her seat, but what she saw front of the Eagle stopped her dead. Alec and Dave stared speechless through the humongous glass shield of Apollo’s piloting cabin. The Eagle slowed down, on Alec’s instinctive command.
“I don’t believe this,” Yalena’s words got caught in her throat.
She didn’t need verification to know that the swirl of purple-hued strings, which seemed to get swallowed into a black core, would correspond to the exact coordinates from the signal—the last known location of the Farsight Migration ship. And for a good reason.
Yalena’s lips trembled. “This is why Farsight lost contact with Earth. They never entered the planned acceleration phase to leave our solar system. They fell through a wormhole.”
Chapter 23. The Wormhole
THE STUFFY AIR IN THE Eagle pulsed with breathless silence.
“And landed where?” Alec returned his ability to speak before the rest.
“This is seriously messed up,” Natalia whispered, more to herself than to the rest. For the first time ever, she really sounded thrown off.
Nico stared, dazed, at the corpus screen. “Un-freaking-believable!”
“Nico, is there any way at all to get us in touch with Eric?” It was unfair of Yalena to ask, especially after seeing him battle his own work unsuccessfully and reassuring him that it was all right. It was not all right anymore.
“We’re cut off. I’m sorry.” Nico sounded more disappointed than worried.
“Damn it!” Yalena swore.
“So, what do we do?” Nico asked, making Yalena feel a slight sting of insecurity. It was true she would ask Eric for confirmation if she could, but that was because they always worked on problems together, because he had been a part of solving this mystery from the start. She was just as capable of making decisions on her own, without anyone’s help.
With the sensation that she’d swallowed her heart and could feel it stuck in her throat, pulsing, Yalena looked from one panicked face to the other. Yet, underneath the shock, her mind was racing, evaluating. How much time had humanity wasted, blaming their own technology for the lost connection to Farsight, rather than allowing themselves to think bigger, to imagine the unimaginable? Even when they found the signal, their bureaucracy and that extensive worst-case-scenario planning hadn’t let them see farther than their noses. They’d rather spend years preparing for an alien threat that wasn’t out there. Well, no more. It was Yalena calling the shots now, and she vowed not to hold back, not to theorize a thousand different courses of action, questioning each step before she took it. No. It was time to act.
“We can’t go back now,” she reasoned out loud. She could almost hear the sharp intake of air by nine pairs of lungs at once. “We have the answer right in front of us. We don’t need to wait for a First Contact mission. What we need to do is figure out where Farsight is.”
“I’m afraid we can’t know that unless we dive right into the center of that thing,” Alec said.
“If we don’t do it, they’ll spend years drafting a mission, bidding for funding and running risk analysis before anything remotely practical happens.” The memory of the New Year’s Eve dinner made her all but certain of that. If the board members weren’t ready to approve a landing on a geyser moon in Earth’s backyard, why would they say yes to testing a wormhole that could lead them light-years away?
“You can’t be serious,” Natalia said.
The mere prospect gave Yalena butterflies in her stomach. She knew she had no right to ask them to do something like this. Still, she couldn’t tell by the silence enveloping her if the others thought she was crazy, or if they were waiting for precise instructions.
“Do we even know it’s stable?” Theo asked, and when Yalena turned back, she saw the question was directed at Nico.
“’No’ would be a safe bet here,” Nico said, shooting a bewildered look her way. “We’ve never seen a real wormhole before. Everything we know is theoretical. We don’t know what would happen to anyone who dares to cross it, and we can’t make sure it’s stable.”
“So, we jump in and hope our Eagle doesn’t just disintegrate?” Dave watched the glimmering swirl of colors, mesmerized. “I’m not sure you’re selling it.”
“It must be stable,” Yalena said, realizing that she was basing her case on nothing but a crazy assumption, like the kind that brought them here. But if she’d been right about the signal, she could be right again. “Think about it. It’s been here this entire time—for over a hundred years. Farsight must have realized that this would cut their trip to a new solar system short by forty light-years at least. If I were them, I would have taken a chance, too.”
“But if it’s stable, why did they never come back?” Natalia said. Her black eyes dug into Yalena, pressing.
“Maybe they were wrong.” It was Nico who came up with a reason the fastest. “A wormhole is just like a tunnel connecting two places, but what if the other side is the middle of nowhere? There’s no guarantee that they emerged into a new solar system like they probably hoped they would.”
“And if that’s true, it would make perfect sense that they only sent back a satellite to give us the coordinates. What if they had to travel light-years to the closest solar system?”
“Hold on
.” Dave turned in his seat to face her, breaking eye contact with the gaping wormhole for the first time. “You’re not suggesting we travel light-years after them, are you?”
“Of course not,” Yalena said. “I’m only suggesting that we peek at the other side, so we can stop hypothesizing and get some real proof of what happened to them.” It was hard to mask the temptation and curiosity, but if she really knew what made her classmates tick, she wouldn’t need to.
“Assuming the wormhole is stable, and we can come back like that satellite, what about time dilation?” Nico said, brainstorming with Michael and Theo by his side.
“It would depend on how the wormhole came to exist,” Theo said, reddening a little from the pressure of all eyes on him. “If it appeared naturally around a black hole, we’d experience time dilation in each direction, proportional to the distance of the space-time shortcut we’re taking.”
“I’ve seen models with time dilation at zero for hypothetical wormhole transit,” Alec said. Yalena had to still herself from showing how grateful she was to hear from him. If the pilot was in, wouldn’t the others agree with them?
“Yes, the math allows it,” Theo said. “That would be the case if the wormhole was created consciously with specific parameters in mind.”
“Do you think they had the tech to do this during the Migration?” Alec asked, and Yalena was surprised to see him look to her for an answer.
“Maybe,” she said. “They hid the Demonfrost project and cryo technology during the Quakes, only revealing they had it after shipping off all those people. Who knows what other tech they had at their disposal?”
“It would be nice to know right about now,” Dave said, returning to the smeared color crush in front of them.
“I’m afraid finding out would require experimentation,” Yalena said. “But think about it. If we assume they had the tech to create a wormhole, it would explain why commander Fia Jones confirmed that Farsight was starting the acceleration phase of their flight at these coordinates. She was trying to mask over the fact that they went through a wormhole.”
The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1) Page 20