“Take the first pilot seat,” she ordered Dave. “Michael, get in as second pilot.”
They both obeyed quickly, while Yalena’s mind raced. She had to get her crew out alive. She simply had to.
“Dave, this is on you now. Get us out safely. I know you can.” Yalena’s voice trembled because of the tears threatening to spill from her eyes any second.
“Are you crazy? We can’t leave without Nico!” Alec shouted from his seat, where Theo was trying to fix him up with a cooling cast.
“Yalena, they’re aiming at us!” Dave urged. “Do I stand by?”
The next moment felt like eternity before Yalena’s trembling lips whispered, “Take off.”
She told herself she was choosing between the life of one and the lives of nine, but there was no choice to make. It was her job. Shocked and frightened, none of her crew dared to move.
“I said take off! Now!” she screamed in deranged desperation, eyes flashing over to Alec and seeing all the emotions she felt spelled out across his face.
When the engine started, air flowed inside Yalena’s lungs in rasping, sharp breaths, while tears ran down her face like rivers.
Chapter 27. The Shattered Reality
YALENA DRAGGED HER nails down her cheeks. Dread was choking her, and this time, it wasn’t because of an unexplainable feeling inside her. This, she couldn’t blame on the Fians. It was the most human sensation of all—pain. Something was ripping her heart apart and still, miraculously, it kept on beating.
“Hey, hey, look at me,” Alec’s words reached Yalena.
It cost her a great deal to gaze back at him. Yalena breathed in and out, like Eric had been reminding her to do. Something in Alec’s pained stare was forcing her to think and to keep searching for a way out, even if all seemed lost.
The Eagle soared through the maze of tree branches, and Yalena assumed the Fians had been taken by surprise by the sudden movement. It would be the only explanation as to why they were still refraining from shooting. And then it hit her. The Fians were focused on them. What if they had only seen Apollo? A long shot, but worth the try, worth the hope.
Yalena wiped away the tears from her face with a hand still shaking. “Dave, listen to me. We have to lead them away from here.”
“What do you mean?” Dave asked, his forehead already showing tiny beads of sweat. “I’m about to extract. We’ll be out of here and in space before they can find their way out of the highest tree branches.”
It would be the safest way to get out immediately. It was the obvious choice. Still, Yalena’s mind had turned from desperate to stubborn and rebellious. She owed it to Nico to help him as much as she could. If he were anywhere near Artemis still, there was hope. All Yalena had to do was distract the Fians to give Eric’s crew a clear way out.
“We need to occupy them a little while longer and lead them away from here. Nico and the entire Artemis crew are out there. We need to be a distraction.”
She looked back to Alec again, and he nodded at her with some relief.
“Carmen, keep trying Nico until he picks up,” Yalena said. “Dave, do what you have to do, but stay on this planet as long as possible and lead them as far away from here as you can. We need to give the others a fighting chance.”
“All right, everyone,” Dave said. “Buckle up tightly. This isn’t for the faint of heart.”
A second later, the Eagle lunged forward at full speed, and the acceleration didn’t diminish in the multiple swirls and turns that Dave took. As if they had been waiting for the students to make their first move, the Fians on the two-person vehicles started shooting purple laser beams from all sides. Yalena wasn’t sure what they were, but she prayed none would hit Apollo. Would they even be able to fix the damage a weapon of unknown origin could leave behind?
Apollo flew along the lines of the highest jungle trees, sometimes submerging back among the branches for cover. Michael was scanning the landscape and shouting possible getaways to Dave, while the rest of the crew clenched the armrests of their seats. Yalena faintly realized the crazy twirls didn’t make her as nauseated as they had before. All she could think about was Nico and how to get him out.
The tree branches turned to dust whenever the purple laser beams hit them. The instantaneous destruction stung Yalena’s frightened heart, but she also became aware that Dave was using the black ash clouds to cover their trails, and it gave her the strength to keep hoping they wouldn’t go down.
“I can’t hold them off much longer!” Dave shouted back to Yalena.
“How far away from the landing spot are we?” She had to make sure.
“Not too far,” Michael said, “but if we get inside the rock formation up east, we could get them off our trail.”
“Do it.”
“I’ll have no cover for a while,” Dave warned Michael.
The Eagle made a loop to the side as Dave tried to confuse the Fians.
“Now!” Michael shouted, and a hologram screen appeared to his side, showing a view of the Fian vehicles chasing them and the purple laser beams flying around. Dave left the cover of the jungle trees and accelerated toward the massive rock formation ahead. The stalagmite reached higher than anything else around. As the red-brown colors got closer, Yalena could see that they formed narrow tunnels.
She feared how exposed they were, but if they could only reach the tunnels, there would be a cover. Michael warned them every time the Fians fired, and it sent chills down her spine. When the first purple beam hit the Eagle, Yalena couldn’t help the scream that escaped her throat.
“They hit the reverse monitoring screen!”
A second hit shook Apollo, and Yalena prayed it was not their life-support system.
“They tried for the engine, but we’re still good,” Sebastian said.
Yalena watched the rocks become bigger and breathed out with some relief when Dave dove into the tunnels. Due to the high speed and irregular turns, it was hard for the Fians to hit anything with the purple beams anymore.
“I got Nico on the line!” Carmen said somewhere behind Yalena.
“Put him on speaker,” she said with a quaking voice.
“What’s going on? I can’t get through to Yalena, her Berry is undetectable,” Nico’s British accent sounded from Carmen’s Berry.
Yalena’s stomach tightened with guilt. “Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m on my way back to Apollo. I spoke to Eric about the Fians and...” he started, but Alec interrupted him at once.
“You have to go back to Artemis.”
“What? Why?”
“Nico, listen to me,” Yalena felt her chest tighten. “We were surrounded by Fians. We had to go.”
The next moment was silent and painful.
“Nico, it’s Alec. We had no choice, but you can still make it.”
“We’re leading them away from Artemis,” Yalena added, hoping it made a difference.
“Run back, Nico. Warn them and fly out with the Artemis crew as soon as you can.”
“Nico?” Yalena whispered, fearing the continued silence on his part.
“Yalena, they’re gone.”
Air felt trapped in Yalena’s lungs. They couldn’t be gone.
“What do you mean? Artemis is still by the science center. I’m looking at the radar,” Alec said.
“No, not Artemis. Eric and Jen. They went inside the science center to get proof. They’re gone.” His reply dissolved into anxious muttering.
“What?” Yalena’s voice came out strangled, and she punched the armrest of her chair.
Eric had the propensity to go off the map and off the plan, but dragging Jen into it was too much. Sweet Jen couldn’t face the Fians. She was supposed to have the safest task ever, to only work if someone got hurt. How come Eric, of all people, hadn’t seen that?
“They’ll be back,” Alec said, trying to sound confident. “It doesn’t matter, Nico. Just get to Artemis. That Eagle is your only way out now. Do you understand?”
“I’ll...I’m running back,” Nico panted before he hung up.
“Yalena, I’m in the clear!” Dave shouted back to her.
“Extract!”
And a lunge, which would have normally caused her to feel a rather unpleasant pull around her naval, brought peace to Yalena this time as she felt the distance between her and the Fians magnify by miles by the second.
WATCHING THE WORMHOLE come into focus, Yalena interlaced her fingers behind her neck. Fatigue, shock, guilt, and fear blended into confusion and she stared at it, mouth agape. She had a hard time imagining facing the commander and retelling everything that had happened. The lack of any records from the day would make things that much harder for her.
“Alec, the first thing we’ll do is to give your voice recordings to the commander,” Yalena said, trying to make herself feel like she still had a plan.
He pointed to the right-hand side of his uniform, where the monitor was supposed to be fixed. “No can do. That Fian bodyguard tore it out when he punched me.”
“So, my Berry with all the recordings is gone, and you have no monitor. Great. When did you last back up to your Berry?”
“Right before we entered the center. It’s useless now. I have no recording of us meeting the Fians.”
The whole corpus fell silent again. Yalena’s brain kept switching between thinking of the entire Artemis crew still on Nova Fia, the anticipated anger of the commander, and the mutated Fians. It was like being taken out of one nightmare and put into another on a loop.
At the entrance to the wormhole, Dave paused and turned back to Yalena. With twitching fingers, she smoothed her hair out of the way, playing for time until the swarm of thoughts could calm down inside her.
“Where are they?” she asked Carmen.
“Still down there.”
“We’ll have to go,” Yalena rambled, all hopes pegged on Nico’s ability to get back to Artemis fast. “The extraction won’t take them long. They should be right behind us.” It was difficult to remove her eyes from the radar screen, where the dot notifying them of Artemis’ location still blinked on Nova Fia. “The good news is the wormhole has no time dilation.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Sebastian asked.
“One of the Fians, Sibel, said she sent the signal. That means she’s been through to the other side and back without Felix noticing. We can go home.” She didn’t have to say it, but by “home,” she didn’t just mean their solar system. She meant the year 2208.
“They’re moving,” Carmen said, and Yalena’s eyes flashed toward the radar in time to see Artemis extracting out of Nova Fia.
“Thank the stars,” she whispered. “Dave, get us out of here.”
The Martian followed Yalena’s orders without hesitation. Much like Alec had done before, Dave plunged the Eagle into the center of the swirling colors. Once the wormhole spat their spacecraft out into the blackness of space again, Yalena let out the breath she’d been holding in. Even though it only took a few moments to cross over to the other solar system, she felt much safer on this side.
“Can we estimate how much time has passed since we left?” Just in case.
“Running a comparative analysis using the orbits of all nine planets,” Carmen said. Yalena made a mental note to thank her for stepping in for both Nico and Natalia so quickly. “It seems we’re...” she stared at the hologram model in front of her. “Theo, come look at this.”
He jumped up from his station, and they discussed the model of the solar system, pulling the holo image in front of them with their fingers to zoom in.
“You’re right,” he said. “We’re back to our time.”
Yalena let her head fall back as she almost cried from hearing the good news. She told Dave to use every last drop of antimatter fuel if he had to, but to get them back to the space station as soon as possible.
“Open our communication channel to STAR Academy,” she ordered, unclear to whom, as Nico wasn’t there.
Sebastian took action after a few seconds of hesitation, and Cooper’s voice filled the control room.
“Apollo, do you copy? Return back to Unifier at once.”
“Copy that,” Yalena answered with a shaky voice.
“What happened?” It was the commander, and the way his voice cracked stilled Yalena’s heart. “Where’s Artemis?” He meant “where’s Eric,” she was sure.
“Behind us.” Come on, Heidi, she thought, her mind desperate to see that red blinking dot on the radar.
“We received Artemis’ black box message explaining that you went after the satellite and the last known Farsight coordinates. It says you found a wormhole.”
The commander’s matter-of-fact tone didn’t fool Yalena. She could imagine deep lines settling on his wide forehead as he tried to make sense of these phenomena. She mentally blessed Eric for sending him at least some account of what they’d been up to. The commander and the rest of STAR Academy surely needed time to process all that. But in her mind, the wormhole already felt like old news compared to the solar system on the other side and the Fian mutation.
“Eric said in his message that they tried to open their communication channel to Unifier after finding the satellite and realizing that it hadn’t malfunctioned. Apparently, that didn’t work.”
Yalena flinched. If Nico had been on Artemis before they crossed the wormhole, she was sure he could have restored the connection, the same way he’d made sure to leave a back door for Apollo to open it again. She hoped he might be able to do that now that he was on Artemis. If he’d gotten back to them in time.
“Commander,” Yalena croaked, “we only went through to find out what happened to Farsight.”
“And did you?”
“They’ve settled on an Earth-like planet in a two-sun system on the other side, but the environment...” her mind struggled to find the words. “It must have changed them. They’ve mutated.”
“In what sense?” It was Dana’s voice joining the conversation. “A visible mutation or...?”
“Very visible,” she said, shuddering. “They still appear humanoid, but alien at the same time.”
“It must be why they never came back,” the commander said. “Did you catch that in a recording?”
“No.” Yalena felt color burning the sides of her face. “They made sure of that.”
Silence followed on the line, but Yalena felt grateful for the commander’s investigatory focus. In the back of her mind, she waited for the other shoe to drop, for their punishment, but at least no one would be able to deny her hunch had been right. They might condemn the teams for going rogue, but that daring action had propelled humanity leaps ahead in their understanding of the cosmos.
“That’s them!” Carmen squealed, and Yalena’s eyes darted to the screen, finding the red dot signifying Artemis blinking.
“Artemis, do you copy?” Cooper said.
“Eric?” Yalena’s hands folded into tight fists as she waited to hear his voice, but nothing came through.
“If Stefanie didn’t leave a back door when she interrupted the connection to Unifier, even Nico wouldn’t be able to fix it,” Michael said.
“The important thing is that they’re here,” Yalena breathed out, almost collapsing in her seat with relief.
“Get back to Unifier, both of you,” the commander said.
“And what do we tell the media?” Cooper asked. “They know the first-year missions haven’t returned yet. They know something unexpected happened.”
“We’ll need to address that,” O’Donnell said, “after they get back. After we figure out exactly how to begin to tell the world of all this.”
After Dave’s confirmation that it would still take them over fifty-five hours to get back, Yalena spent most of the trip helping Theo as he tried to treat Alec’s wounds without much success. They also brought Natalia back into consciousness and kept her on mild tranquilizers. She swore more than usual, but the good news that they’d avoided time d
ilation was enough to get her to cooperate. After they crossed the asteroid belt, there was only one thing left for Yalena to do—face the music.
Simply standing up made her wobble, what with just a few nighmare-ridden doze-offs to try and regain her strength over the course of the trip back. But when Apollo had reached the parking position and they had to make their way out of the Eagle, she finally felt safe again. A new storm was about to roll in—one where she’d have to explain herself to the commander and watch their entire society choke on the new discovery. The signal was like a crack in the window of their world, a crack that deepened when they went after it until it completely shattered their reality.
A crowd of people accompanied the nine students to the Academy floor in almost complete silence. Seeing Yalena and Alec’s appearance, as well as Natalia, who was brought in on a stretcher, they signaled for Dana and the medical staff, but no one asked the freshmen anything yet. This right was surely reserved for the commander.
The students entered the big, oval auditorium one after the other, squinting at the bright lights. It felt surreal to be back in the place where they had spent so many normal and quiet days. Everything felt out of place and too white after the colors of Nova Fia. The commander sat at the teacher’s desk, a stone-cold expression on his face and an electric spark in his blue eyes.
“I need to know what happened,” he squeezed through his teeth as the door behind the students slid shut and left the nine alone with Cooper, Dana, and O’Donnell.
It wasn’t clear to Yalena whether he would scream at her or evaluate what she had to say. Perhaps it would be both. With a voice more timid and exhausted than she had ever heard it, Yalena dove into a complete recollection of everything that happened. At times, she had to pause, feeling her throat give in and lose its power to produce words.
He didn’t even blink, and Yalena got the feeling that he was internally torn between finding out everything and yelling at them for being so careless. She decided she had to be blunt, quick, and open. There was no time for regrets, not with the Fian aggressors out there. That discovery felt way more important than the tale of Yalena and Eric breaking rules and hijacking Eagles.
The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1) Page 24