by Adam Holt
Janice dropped her head. It felt great to vent, but then I saw teardrops on her glasses. Then on the carpet. Wow, I’m a jerk.
“I—it wasn’t all about me,” she said. “I asked to be your partner. Did you know that? I just wanted to help you guys–like Tabitha always got to. So jealous of her, you guys–never mind–I’m dire stupid...the world is ending anyway.”
Until that moment, Janice was just a type of person to me. The know-it-all, Stanford-bound, geniuses-in-the-family type that hold their big brains over your head like a cartoon anvil. Suddenly she was a real person though—the sniffling, stare-at-the-ground, sure-I’ll-help-my-classmate-any-way-I-can type. If anyone should understand that by now, it’s me.
If it had been any other time, I would have tried to make it right with Janice. I felt terrible—but like I have any more room for terrible feelings about girls, I thought. Sunjay took a step toward Janice, who turned her back to us and sniffled, but I pointed to the suitcases. He looked about like I felt–guilty—but we grabbed our suitcases and headed downstairs.
When I returned for the final suitcase, my window was still open. Janice was nowhere to be seen. One day I will make this right, Janice, I thought. I owe you that. I lugged the final suitcase downstairs, chucked it into the corner of the ship, and pulled up the starmap.
“That was a lot longer than two minutes,” my dad said.
Our third pit stop was nearby. A few miles and security guards, gates, fences, and cameras stood between us, but we could avoid those if we followed the creek that ran from our house to our destination, Space Alliance Headquarters.
We made the trip undetected and into Dr. Chakravorty’s lab. Wearing his white lab coat and flapping his arms like a spastic traffic cop, Dr. C flagged us through an enormous bay door, slammed the door behind us, hopped aboard, and greeted Sunjay and me as he usually did.
“You let them fly this, after what they did to my brand new hovercar in Florida?” he said to my dad.
I didn’t blame him for being skeptical of our driving. We sunk his new car in a swamp. I wanted to remind him that we did so on purpose, but this wasn’t the time. Dr. C had an important job to do. He circled the Mini-Mane inside and out, taking notes and frowning all the while.
“Mike, here’s the communications array. This is the propulsion source. It looks nuclear or plasma, not electroplasma, but not sure how they achieve this hover-effect. I just don’t have enough time. Get these bags out of here! And these boys!”
So Sunjay and I plopped down on our luggage while Dr. C scrambled around the inside of the Mini-Mane, muttering to himself about advanced propulsion systems.
“Too bad about Janice,” Sunjay said. “I guess we made life hard for her. She was just trying to be nice.”
I didn’t want to think about it and was happy when Buckshot joined us.
“I’m surprised we made it this far,” Buckshot said, propping his heels on a bag. “Everyone at Space Alliance Headquarters had their panties in a bunch. You know, Tabitha’s message was the worst case scenario.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “What would be a better case?”
“That the Ascendant would want to make a deal. Instead, they addressed the entire world. That ain’t no good.”
We both must have looked confused.
“Boys, it’s like this. You negotiate with equals. Like if I wanted to borrow your Upthruster, I’d ask for it or maybe give you something for it. But what if I didn’t consider you my equal? What if I didn’t think you deserved that Upthruster? Well, then I might just take it. So that’s what the Ascendant just told the leaders of the world. We don’t need to negotiate with you. We’re coming and we’ll take what we want.”
“But Commander Harper almost destroyed the Lion’s Mane by himself,” Sunjay said. “They’re not invincible.”
“Says who? What if they have a million of those ships? And what other weapons? The Ascendant might be able to destroy us from a thousand miles away.”
“That sounds more invincible,” said Sunjay.
“We’re fixin’ to find out,” said Buckshot. “If your dad can disable the tracking mechanism on this ship, we can get this thing into space undetected.”
The ship hovered in front of us as Dr. C continued his work. We heard a strange whirring sound, and suddenly the red tentacle around the Mini-Mane sprang to life. The three of us dove for cover as it swung above our heads. The tentacle grabbed a chair, tossed it over our heads, and then fell to the floor like a limp electric spaghetti noodle—or something. My dad and Dr. C emerged from the Mini-Mane and surveyed the damage.
“Careful with that tentacle, Doc,” said Buckshot.
“Tentacle? That’s a fiber optic laser whip!” exclaimed Dr. C.
“Fiber optic laser whip? That’s a way better name,” I said.
“It’s the right name, Tully! Commander Harper described it, but to see it in action! Give me two weeks to study this craft and we could start building such weapons. A fleet of them! We could fight the Ascendant in space on their own terms.”
“We have to know our enemy before we can fight him,” my dad said.
Dr. C exited the Mini-Mane with a small black box in his hand. A purple light on the box blinked, then began to blink more rapidly. Dr. C frowned at the sensor, like it was a dog about to pee on his favorite rug. He walked across the room and pushed a button on the wall. The blinking increased, and so did my heart rate. The hole in the floor opened, into which Dr. C dropped the box. That muffled the beep, but it became one long tone. The box wasn’t happy about going into the hole.
“Hmmmm.” Dr. C frowned and went to inspect.
The beep stopped.
Click, click, bang.
“Fire in the hole!” Dr. C yelled suddenly. Before he could turn around, whoosh! A fireball sprung from the hole and hit the ceiling. I managed to scramble behind the luggage but not Sunjay. His shirt caught fire. Buckshot used his cowboy hat to smother the flames.
“Geeeyawww!” yelled Buckshot. “Niles, there’s a reason I never drop by to say howdy to you. I dunno how you survive.”
Dr. C calmly snuffed out the fire on his lab coat—and his eyebrows. One of them was completely gone.
“Well,” Dr. C said calmly, “that was the tracking device. I believe it was also a self-destruct mechanism.”
“Oh, you think so?” replied Buckshot.
“Most assuredly.” He winked at Buckshot with his no-eyebrow eye. “It’s good that I removed it. This will throw the Ascendant ‘off your trail’ for a while, if I said that correctly.”
“They have spies inside the Alliance,” my dad said, “so you can expect visitors, Niles. They’ll want to know where the ship is.”
“And that’s why you haven’t told me any specifics,” said Dr. C. “Fair enough. You were never here. I’ll call for added security when you’re gone. Now keep yourself safe, my friends.”
Dr. C blew the rest of the ashes from his lab coat and threw his arm around Sunjay, who looked worried and uncomfortable. I understood why.
“Uh, Niles,” my dad said, “I was hoping to take Sunjay along.”
Silence. Dr. C tightened his grip on Sunjay, and for the next ten minutes we debated the situation.
“He’s safer in space than on Earth,” explained my dad. “There’s a manhunt on for all of us now.”
“So you believe he is safer with you, wandering off to an unknown world, fighting an alien race?”
“Yes,” my dad said. “Consider the other option: staying here and being quarantined by the Space Alliance. That’s much worse, Niles. Gallant Trackman infiltrated our organization. They sent an assassin to kill Tully. What’s next?”
Dr. C shrugged.
“I’m counting on you to find out,” my dad continued. My dad walked over and put his arm around me. I could feel his firm grip on my shoulder. “You know that I have counted the cost of this mission, but whether we like it or not, all our lives are at risk.”
Dr. C
looked at Sunjay, who nodded toward his dad. “No risk, no reward, Daddy. That’s what Commander Harper always says.”
“Yes, he does, son,” said Niles Chakravorty, shaking his head at my dad. He was used to controlling experiments in his lab, but life doesn’t always work like that. He held Sunjay’s face in his hands. “You are my only son. Make me proud.” –and then to my dad – “I only have one son, Mike. He is my pride and joy.”
“As is mine,” he told Dr. C. My dad does not throw out compliments often, and that one made me feel like a zillion bitcoins.
After a few final words we repacked the luggage. It felt heavy in my hands, like I hadn’t slept or eaten much in the last twenty hours.
“Stars, we should stop at a convenience store before we leave,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I could use a TurboFizz.” That’s when I felt a tug on my pant leg. Looking down I noticed that a pocket on my bag had unzipped itself, and leaning out of the pocket was a familiar character.
“TurboFizz is a carbonated beverage,” said a mechanical voice, “with twice the caffeine of coffee. Simply turn a dial on the can to select the desired temperature. The drink comes out blue if it’s cold or brown if it’s hot. TurboFizz causes cancer and hair loss in laboratory animals. Try a bottle today.”
“Little Bacon!” I said, holding him in the palm of my hand. He straightened his floppy hat and bowed. “I thought we forgot you.”
“You did. I was face down in a shoe box in your room for thirty-three days, ten hours, and five minutes,” he said. “However, I am sure to be of some use on this journey.”
U-F-OH, NO
There was no time for Turbofizz.
“You’re going to feel some G-force, boys. Hold on.” My dad planted his feet on the control pads and maneuvered us away from Alliance Headquarters and out into the Gulf of Mexico. We heard a whooshing sound that made Sunjay jump.
“It sounds like the air tanks are filling,” my dad said. “Niles pointed them out. The ship senses that we are headed into space, so it’s taking care of its passengers.”
The lights on board the Mini-Mane softened to black light. A soft voice began to speak in a foreign language. It felt like that moment before a movie starts in a theater, right before the credits, when all the anticipation builds for something awesome.
Then the starmap flickered on, not as broad as before. A dozen or so glowing spheres circled a monstrous yellow ball. The third sphere glowed brightest. It was our location—Earth. Our entire solar system glowed before us. My eyes danced between Mercury, Venus, Mars, on past Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way to Pluto. I looked across more than three billion miles in an instant. Yes! Our destination is in our solar system after all. Goosebumps covered my arms.
But something went wrong. The Mini-Mane shuddered. The air intake stopped. The fantastic map disappeared and the soft lights turned red; warning sirens sounded; the ship strapped us to our seats. We were trapped except for my dad.
“I think Dr. C tripped the alien car alarm!” I yelled, struggling with the straps.
“Stay calm,” my dad said. “The ship senses danger.”
More warning lights popped up. The ship spoke to us in the Ascendant language. Really helpful. But a new map popped up. Six red dots on a gridded map. All were approaching one big purple blip. Us.
“We are under attack,” my dad said. “Remain calm.”
Then another voice cut in. “Unidentified flying object, you are in United States airspace.”
“They think we are a UFO,” yelled Sunjay.
“We are a UFO!” I yelled back.
“Unidentified object, I repeat, land your craft and prepare to be boarded.” My dad shook his head. We couldn’t do that, but they repeated the request. We heard another high-pitched alarm.
“Mike, I think they’ve got missile lock,” yelled Buckshot. “They won’t hesitate. Not now.”
My dad wrapped his hand around the controller, but he couldn’t move it. We were stuck.
We watched on the map. Six smaller blips headed toward us. Missiles. That would have been bad news if my dad had been in a fighter jet that he knew how to fly. But it was worse. We were in the Mini-Mane, which none of us really understood. If those missiles make contact, we’re toast, I thought. My dad yanked desperately on the crystal controller, but it would not budge an inch. The missiles buzzed across the water at fantastic speeds, then arced toward us. I could picture them impacting the side of the ship, a slow fall to our deaths in the ocean.
“FOOT BUTTON THING!” Sunjay yelled so loud that I hit my head against the wall. He pointed at the floor. Sure enough, a third footpad had appeared. With the missiles bearing down and nothing left to do, my dad stomped the footpad as hard as he could. The second his foot contacted the pad, the Mini-Mane responded. Two stringy, red tentacles—no, fiber optic laser whips—launched out of its shell. They grabbed two of the missiles and somehow slung them back in the direction of the other four missiles, which exploded near the ship, rocking us back and forth.
There was no time to celebrate. We weren’t safe. The three jets were bearing down on us.
“Mike, now or never!”
My dad seized the crystal with both hands and pressed upward. This time the ship responded, pushing into the clear night sky. The ascent pinned us to our seats. My spine compressed. The blood rushed out of my head and stars appeared—the fainting kind, not the burning in space kind.
Finally the Mini-Mane gave us a clear view of the action outside. The three fighters followed us straight up into the sky. They fired everything they had left—guns, missiles, laser cannons—but instead of dodging or speeding up, the Mini-Mane slowed down again. Okay, now we are going to die.
“Keep going, dad!” I yelled.
“It’s not me, son. Not me. Oh, no.” He said it like he was worried about something terrible happening. But not to us.
The Mini-Mane came to a full stop on the edge of the atmosphere. We heard the bullets impact the shell of our ship, but they plinked like hail on a tin roof. The laser cannons had no effect at all: the ship didn’t heat up or melt in the slightest. Those weapons don’t work, I thought. It’s almost like the Mini-Mane lured the jets this high.
Oh, no. I understood.
The Mini-Mane launched three tentacles out of its shell this time. One latched onto the first jet as it sped toward us and pulled its wings off like a cruel child would to an angry fly. The fuselage of the jet spun right past us before it plummeted back to earth. The other two jets were still out of reach of the tentacles. They broke off their attack. They understood, too. There would be no victory against this UFO. We were safe, but our thoughts turned to the third jet plummeting back to Earth.
“Come on, come on, kid. Get your head right. Eject, eject,” Buckshot said. Then he cursed under his breath.
What’s wrong with this world? I thought. Why didn’t they just leave us alone? I wanted to run and hide from the terrible scene. Where could I go? I closed my eyes, but the image of the falling pilot filled my head—trying not to black out, bitter cold air on my face, spinning in the remains of a jet, struggling to reach the eject button. Was that someone’s mom or dad? How many kids would be left behind? When would they find out?
They wouldn’t hear about the death immediately. Two officers would pull up to their driveway to tell them in person. Today you lost a parent, lost a hero, lost a love. Sometimes people feel that loss before they hear about it. That happened to me when my mom died. I was in daycare at the time. Someone told my father that I started crying suddenly at the moment of her death. I did not stop until I saw my dad.
Watching the plane plummet, I started to cry those same tears.
Then everything went red. Red, red, red, red, red. I clenched my fists and felt an old power warming my fingertips. I could not just picture but see the pilot in his jet now. Yes, it was a Sacred Vision. I was in the cockpit with him. He flopped back and forth, unconscious but alive. Through the red haze I saw the eject button. He would
never be able to reach it, but something told me that I could. As I reached for the button, it disappeared into a red haze. A familiar power tingled in my fingertips, and then the vision ended, the scene disappeared.
I opened my eyes and saw on the map a terrible thing: a plane in its death spiral. Above it I saw something beautiful: a parachute open.
“Thank you, God,” my dad said. He shook his head and looked at the glowing footpad on the floor. Pushing it had saved us, but it had turned the Mini-Mane into a weapon. My dad’s actions had almost killed a fellow human, the ones we were fighting for.
But something much wilder and more dangerous had saved the fighter pilot—the Sacred’s power.
The pilot was safe, but I worried. Is it awake? What if the Ascendant can see it now, wherever my dad has it hidden? What if they can see me? I may have saved one life but put our entire mission at risk. These thoughts troubled me, but the danger seemed to be fading away. Everything on board looked okay… with one exception. The scars on my hands glowed faintly, so I tucked them under my legs. No one seemed to have noticed or understood what really happened, and nobody needed to at that moment. My dad strapped down the duffel bags and his precious box of dynamite. I watched the parachute drift lazily back to Earth as we continued our ascent into space.
Space. The thought brought peace to my mind. I remembered those first few moments of liftoff on my first journey: trapped in an orangutan spacesuit with only Little Bacon and a sketch pad to keep me company—and the strange red glow of the Harper Device. On that day the Adversity lifted off like a plane. The Mini-Mane yanked itself out of Earth’s gravity, but as soon as we reached the upper atmosphere, a familiar feeling returned: my stomach felt a little queasy; my arms floated up from my sides; my head felt lighter, like my chin was floating up, telling me to look up into the sky. A blanket of stars and a bright full moon. Somewhere out there was our destination.
FINDING CHAOS
“If it ain’t in English or Texan, I can’t read it. Just pick one, Mike, and let’s get this show on the road.”