by R. E. Rowe
Nora glanced over her shoulder at him. “Once I figure out the coordinates, we’ll need to snatch a bigger ship. But I found something else.”
“What’s that?” Parker asked her.
“There are rumors about a large group of rebel kids our age from different planets.”
“Rebel kids?” Jayden couldn’t imagine why anyone would rebel against Space Command with the
consequence being death by the freaky-looking Leader dude’s BBQ light beam.
“They go by the name of the Spring Tide Masons,” Cleo added.
“I guess they were tired of being told what to do by reptile-eyed bullies,” Nora said. “Creepy too. When their jaw isn’t extended, they look like accountants to me.”
Jayden grinned. He was thinking banker, but Nuk’ana did sort of look like his dad’s bald accountant.
“Should we try to find the rebels?” Jayden asked.
Nora nodded. “I hear they have a long range transport spacecraft. That seems like the best chance of getting back to Earth.”
“Assuming we do find them, how do we know they’ll help us?” Parker asked his sister.
“Well, put it this way,” she replied. “If we don’t find them, we’re on our own. And if we’re on our own, we’re carbon dust for sure.”
“What do you want us to do?” Parker asked.
“I need some time to work on hacking the more secure parts of the Space Command communication
system,” Nora said. “Maybe I can monitor encrypted communications. That way we can figure out where to find the masons.” She paused and gave them one of her long looks. “Why don’t you guys get some rest? You all must be exhausted.”
“Can’t remember when I slept last,” BBgun said. “Or ate.”
“Downstairs there’s a crew quarters. Not much room though. The Ga are tiny. Just under four feet from what I can tell.”
“You saw one?” BBgun asked.
“Nope, but I can tell by the way Space Command and the Ga modified this flying saucer for humans.” She shot back to her feet and hugged Parker again. “Glad you’re here with me.”
Jayden saw tears in Parker's eyes.
“Go get some rest,” Nora said. “Take the stairs down. There are cots, pillows and blankets, food and drinks, and a shower. The food and drinks are seriously good. Wait until you try the food cubes.”
Nora gazed at Jayden with soft eyes. She took both of his hands in hers. “Thanks again for watching over my brother.”
Jayden smiled. “Um, he was doing pretty well on his own.”
Nora hugged Jayden again. “I mean it.” She stepped back and touched Jayden’s face with her hand. “Thank you.”
It felt as though every nerve in Jayden’s body had activated at once. “I, um—”
Nora smiled. “Go. Get a drink, something to eat. You need to keep your strength up.”
“Oh, wait. I have something to show you.” Jayden reached around to his secret shirt pocket, retrieved his dad’s tablet, and handed it to her. The display showed a new picture on it of the Milky Way Galaxy with a blue background like a screen saver. Black, bold letters “SECC” were in the middle of the Milky Way image.
“Weird, huh? Somehow it connected itself to Space Command’s network.”
Nora’s eyes went wide. She held the tablet close to her face, studying it. “Can I hang on to it for a while?
All the malware code I wrote to fix it should still be hiding in email attachments inside. It might help me access their systems deeper.”
“Sure,” Jayden said. “It’s running low on battery. It’ll need a charge soon. Can you get power to it?”
“I don’t know,” Nora replied. “I’ll figure something out.”
“I’ll stay and help you,” Cleo said to Nora.
Nora nodded but kept her eyes fixed on the tablet’s display.
The three boys lumbered down the stairs. Jayden realized Nora was right. He was exhausted.
It didn’t take long before they found the crew quarters. The space was about twice the size of Jayden’s bedroom, with smooth, black walls, three beds that looked like cots, and a separate area with a bathroom and shower combo, just barely bigger than a commercial airplane’s restroom.
After Jayden took a shower, he was too tired to eat. He curled up on a single-sized cot. For the first time since the bus ride, he yawned. They hadn’t been zapped or eaten by aliens. Nora had found them. He’d even recovered the tablet.
Maybe their luck was improving.
Chapter 13
A hand on Jayden’s shoulder shook him awake. He sat up on the cot and rubbed his eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry for waking you.” Cleo smiled at him. “You were out cold.”
“How long—?”
“A few hours,” Cleo replied.
“How’s Nora doing?” Jayden asked.
“Still playing with your freaking tablet. That girl is wicked amazing. I couldn’t keep up.” Cleo stretched.
“I’m going to grab something to eat and hit the sack for a while. You want to sit with her?”
Jayden looked over at Parker and BBgun who continued to snore. “Sure. You sleep here. I’ll go.” He rubbed his neck and shuffled out of the crew area, yawning every couple feet.
As he stepped up the spiral stairs, he noticed each step was a strip of metal that wasn’t very wide, forcing him to tiptoe all the way to the top of the stairs. He tried to imagine how small a Ga alien’s foot must be.
The second level was a smaller version of the craft that had picked them up at the Santa Cruz Observatory, with a large open center space and control panels all around its perimeter. He continued on to the third level.
The top level was nothing but a small flight control room that could fit ten kids, tops. Jayden saw Nora hunched over the control panel, her face three inches from a panel display. Even with the black hat covering Nora’s shaved head, she still made Jayden’s stomach spin. “Hey,” he said.
“Hola, Surfer Boy . . . Or should I call you Killgeek?”
Jayden smiled, and then said, “Stick with Killgeek. Have you made any progress?”
“Yeah, sure did,” she replied.
Jayden peered at the panel in front of Nora. Lights blinked around a video of a solar system survey. Sitting next to the panel was his dad’s red tablet. Wires ran from under the panel to the propped-up tablet, which was displaying the strange symbols he’d seen when it had originally crashed. The symbols on the display changed quickly, and as usual, made no sense at all to him. He pointed to the tablet. “You found power?”
Nora nodded and held up wires. “I had to improvise.”
Jayden inspected the tablet and saw what she meant. She had pulled tiny wires out of a cable and connected them to the tablet. He nodded towards the tablet’s screen. “Do you understand any of that?”
“Sort of. But it’s hard keeping up. The information repeats every twelve minutes.”
“This is a nightmare,” Jayden muttered.
“I know, right,” Nora said, then toggled four switches on the control panel and pushed a button. “We got yanked out of our fantasy world and thrown into this real one. Shocking, to say the least.”
“So what do the weird characters on the display mean?” he asked.
She gestured towards the viewport. “Well, there’s a lot going on out there.”
He peered out the window but couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black. “Doesn’t look like it from here.”
“Well, space is a big place,” Nora said. “Our side is getting pounded. From what I can tell, lots of the outposts and worlds along the edge of the Milky Way have been taken over, or destroyed, by the Attila.”
Jayden scratched at his face. “Are we headed towards home?”
“Not yet. Our first stop is a star system named Enlil99, about five light years away. It has three planets, each with an oxygen-based atmosphere, and no crazy monsters or creatures that will eat us alive.”
“Good to know.” Jayden swallowed hard. “But if we travel at light speed, isn’t it going to take five years to get there?” he asked.
“True,” she replied. “If we traveled at light speed. But the Ga technology pokes a hole into the fabric of space. We’re traveling in the ‘space between the space.’”
Jayden remembered Captain Sanders’s quickie tutoring session. “So why can’t we just travel straight back to Earth?”
“If I could figure out the coordinates, we could eventually get there. But we’d still need a bigger ship. From what I read in the manual, the spacecraft we’re in can only travel ten light years, max. Then it needs to recharge near a star for forty-eight hours and refuel with material used by the UFO’s engines to punch a hole into the space between the space. I hate to say it, but from my calculations, it’d take thousands of years to get back to Earth in this metallic flying saucer. To travel across the Milky Way, we’ll need a way bigger, faster ship.”
“Like the one we used to travel to the front line?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she replied. “They call those galactic transport ships.”
“What’s the plan when we get to Enlil99?” he asked.
“We’ll see if we can find the masons, or better yet, stow away on a transport back to Dione.” A warning light flashed red on the control panel. Nora tapped the display a few times, and the light turned off. “We'll be at Enlil99 in fifteen minutes.”
Jayden gazed out the viewport into the blackness. “We’re traveling in the space between the space?”
Nora nodded and pointed to the portal. “You can tell because there are no stars.”
“What’s out there?” Jayden asked.
“No idea. When I was going through training, some of the flight instructors called it multiverse space.”
Jayden squinted, but all he could see was black outside the viewport. “How do you know where to go?”
Nora smirked. “I don’t.”
Jayden tried hard to focus outside the viewport, but he still couldn’t see a thing. “That’s not good.”
“It’s not that bad. The Ga computer does all the navigation work. It shows me the closest coordinate options. Think of it as an alien version of an Earth car’s navigation system. I just pick a set of coordinates and tap the screen. It calculates the route and flies on autopilot.”
“Earth doesn’t show up anywhere?” he asked.
“Afraid not. Our planet must be a long way from here. Besides, there are billions of planets, and each one has unique coordinates. Like I said, I have no idea what coordinates to enter for Earth.” Nora sighed. “You better go wake everyone.”
Jayden leaned on a leather chair for a moment silently staring at Nora. She was by far the smartest person he’d ever known. “You’re amazing, Zeekmo.”
She smiled back. “Thanks, Surfer Boy . . . So are you.”
The chair gave way and Jayden nearly fell went flying, but caught himself at the last moment. He stumbled to his feet and gave the chair a look as if it was defective. Way to be cool, dork.
His face heated up. “I am?”
“Seriously, you kicked major Atilla butt back there,” Nora said. “I was watching on approach. Pretty wild, if you ask me. You guys were working the controls of those pods like crazy gamers. You did a great job leading them, Jayden. Just like you always do on-line.”
He remembered Knifetango and Zebraguts getting captured. Thinking about what might have happened to those two was more than he could handle. “But I lost two of our guys. The Atilla just snatched them.”
Before he could move, Nora stood and hugged him. “I know. But you saved my brother.”
Jayden wiped his face. “I just wish it was a game or simulation that we could end.”
Nora stepped back. “Me too. Now go get everyone up . . . They need to be ready when we punch back into normal space.”
“Right,” he replied.
Nora disconnected the tablet and handed it to Jayden. “It’s fully charged.”
“Thanks.” Jayden took off down the steep stairs, three at a time, barely gripping the handrail.
Everyone was sleeping when he burst into the crew quarters. Even Cleo was snoring. He lowered his voice.
“Time to wake up, Space Fighters. We’ll be at our next stop in a few minutes.”
BBgun groaned.
Cleo turned over and put a pillow over her head.
“Come on, let’s go,” Jayden said, and then turned to Parker. “Get up, G-striker.”
Ten minutes later, they were all standing around Nora.
Jayden noticed Parker was competing with Cleo for the biggest yawn award.
“Pick a seat and park it,” Nora said. “We’re punching back through in ten seconds. That should put us inside the star, and then we’ll do a quick hop to the second planet in the system,” Nora said, pointing at her display panel. “That planet seems to be the quietest of the three.”
Jayden sat down and buckled up in a seat on one side of Nora. Parker sat on the other side of her. Cleo and BBgun sat in seats behind them.
“What’s the plan once we get there?” Parker asked.
“We’ll search for a galactic transport to get us home,” Nora said. “Here we go. Five, four, three, two, one.”
Starlight instantly filled the portal.
Jayden felt a slight jerk before a green and white planet floated past the viewport, and then came back into sight in the middle of the portal. It looked like a green and white marble. At least a dozen moons floated above the large planet. One moon was blue and white. A few of the other moons appeared to be solid rock while others looked like round candy swirl lollypops.
“We’ll land on the dark side of moon five,” Nora said. “Seems to be the only one vacant from what I could find out when I hacked Space Command’s network.” She gripped the polished wood steering wheel, nearly identical to the one in his dad’s car, and pulled and pushed at the control panel directly in front of her. Moments later, they reached the moon, as Nora played a drum solo on the dashboard.
“Man, this beast is fast,” Parker said. “It doesn’t even feel like it’s moving.”
“There’s a spot to land,” Nora said. “I’ll set down on the surface. Then we can scan the live communication to figure out our next move.”
Jayden watched Nora work. He still couldn’t make any sense out of the displays, but the high-definition, live video feed of the landscape below looked to him like they were watching a movie.
The UFO approached the surface and slowed.
Jayden could make out small green islands jetting out of an aqua-blue ocean below. It reminded him of pictures his dad had showed him of southern Thailand. He saw white sand beaches too.
Nora stared at the display, apparently searching for a place to land.
Jayden thought the islands looked deserted. He didn’t see any structures at all. Not even a resort or a fishing boat.
Nora screamed. Warning lights lit up the control panel, and an alarm sounded. “Bad guys directly above us!” she shouted.
Jayden jumped.
“They’re blocking us,” Nora added as she slapped at the control panel with gusto.
The display showed three spherical UFOs moving above. Jayden did some quick calculations in his head to try and figure out a route to get past them. But he didn’t see one.
Parker gasped. “Where’d they come from?”
Jayden’s stomach twisted when the control panel display flashed on.
A hologram of Leader Nuk’ana’s face floated above the panel. His boney chin made his face appear abnormally long. “Gotcha!” Leader Nuk’ana said, followed by a hiss. He wore a black SECC cap with dark sunglasses secured to his face like racing goggles.
The leader took off his goggles, exposing his amber reptilian eyes with black, vertical slits. “Prepare to be boarded. We’ve been waiting for you at all the star systems in range. You and the traitors with you will be extinguished. Do not attempt to run, or
we will blow your vehicle to atoms. But that would be a waste of a good ship, now wouldn’t it, yes?”
Nuk’ana took a long, deep breath, and then his image disappeared.
“Sorry, guys,” Nora said. “Looks like game over.”
“No way,” Parker said. “We’re not giving up so easy. What if we dive into the ocean?”
Nora raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose it might work.”
A large, pointed spacecraft with sharp edges suddenly appeared above the three UFOs outside the viewport.
It looked like one of the Atilla spacecraft he remembered from Nuk’ana’s briefing, only this craft was about three times as large as each of the UFOs blocking them. “Isn’t that an Atilla ship?” he asked Nora.
Nora scowled. “Oh, snap. It’s Atilla all right.”
The spaceship fired what looked like glistening bubbles, which encompassed each one of Nuk’ana’s UFOs hovering above them. Each of the spaceships froze in place and appeared to be disabled. Bolts of lightning zapped around the surface of the bubbles as though each was made of pure energy.
Nuk’ana’s three UFOs fell slowly toward the moon’s green islands as though they were inside floating balloons. Each one landed below smoothly.
Totally nuts, Jayden thought. The Atilla ship was ignoring their UFO. He saw it as an opportunity. “There!”
Jayden pointed to a large open space to their right. “Let’s get out of here.”
Nora saw it too. She pressed down on the accelerator and pulled back the steering wheel. The ship took off, straight up. On one of the control panel displays, the Atilla ship shrunk in size as Nora accelerated away from it.
Just when Jayden thought they’d escaped, the Atilla spacecraft shot something at them. In a flash, they were trapped inside a bubble and began to drift.
Nora pressed buttons on the panel. She frantically tried to regain control. “The ship isn’t responding!” She sat back in frustration, slapping the control panel with both hands. “They’re reeling us in.”
The Atilla spacecraft moved in closer.