One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  His father watched a few more moments to ensure his order had been carried out to completion before responding. “The most important thing is to keep the weapon out of the hands of the vrag. Luka, they will not stop now that they have found us. They have no mercy, do you understand? We are not equipped to fight them here.”

  “We can’t use the weapon?”

  “I do not have time to explain now, but no—it cannot simply be aimed and fired.”

  Another hit, and a small explosion on the lower bridge. One of the megobari gunners fell to the floor.

  Before Luka could reach it, Bolshakov had jumped ahead and took up the gun himself. Copeland ran to the aid of the fallen gunner.

  Did that mean Shaw was okay, or that he was dead?

  Otor suddenly seemed to notice me. He motioned me forward with his good arm and planted it on my shoulder. “I am sorry.”

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  “Evade them,” Luka said, just as another explosion knocked us into the support wall. The vrag must be right on us now. “Get back to base. We can’t outfight them on this ship.”

  “No, my son. We cannot show them the entrance. They will discover the last secrets we have left.”

  The screams of the wounded echoed the blaring alarms. Jeong and Copeland and one or two megobari were scrambling to keep up, but there weren’t enough able-bodied crew to care for all of them, and the megobari that were standing needed to control the ship. I wanted to help them, not stand here talking. I started toward the chaos on the lower deck, and Otor grabbed my arm with his good hand to stop me.

  “No,” he said sharply. “We are lost.”

  Just then, an explosion that rocked the entire ship tossed all of us on the upper deck against the back wall. I slammed into the bulkhead and slid to the floor, dazed. It took a few seconds for my vision to come back, and then I mentally checked myself. Everything still there, still functional.

  I struggled to right myself, but my brain had lost track of what was up and what was down. Patchy holes in the bulkhead, sparking and burning.

  My eyes scanned frantically for the others and caught on Luka and Otor. I struggled on my hands and knees, the ship listing wildly, making it impossible to stand.

  Otor was slumped, eyes struggling to stay open. I crawled on my elbows and knees, but Luka hadn’t been hurt and beat me to his father.

  But his father was pushing him away. “Go!” I heard him shout. “Luka, GO! Get the humans off this ship!”

  What humans were left? Bolshakov was slumped over his station on the lower deck. Shaw might already be dead. Copeland was crawling along the floor one-handed, trying to give some kind of aid to an injured or dead megobari. Where was Jeong?

  I used the half wall to pull myself up, and tried to find them in the chaos and death.

  Luka’s hand closed on my wrist. “We have to go.”

  I wrested it back from him as the ship shuddered, knocking us both to our knees. “Not without them!”

  What I could see was terrible. Jeong lay beside a fallen megobari, lips blue, eyes blinking too slowly. There was a dime-sized hole in her helmet. My instincts roared to go get her, but what could I do?

  I met eyes with Copeland, now on her feet, her suit splattered with red. She yelled to me, but I couldn’t hear her. She was using her external comm, and sound didn’t travel in a vacuum.

  Another blast knocked us all to our backs, but Copeland was up and running and had her hands on me before I could get to my feet. “You get out of here!” she shouted, and suddenly my internal comm picked up her voice. She bodily pulled me up and shoved me into Luka, who was pulling me away. “Abandon ship! Gupta, you’re our record keeper. Go! I’m the ranking officer now and that’s a goddamn order!”

  Suddenly Luka grabbed me around the waist, picking me up and dragging me backward from the bridge.

  I struggled. Shouted. But he was like a machine, his arm immovable. “There’s nothing for you to do here now.”

  Back on the bridge, I saw Otor still on the upper deck, struggling to stand on his own. There were not many left for him to command. He watched us go and I finally realized what was happening. Otor had ejected all the shuttles so they wouldn’t know which one contained the weapon. There weren’t enough for us all to escape.

  Copeland, Otor . . . they were saving us because we were the youngest.

  Luka pulled me down the hall at the far end of the bridge, past the alcove where I’d tried to hide from responsibility, and threw us both into a metal capsule with its door wide open.

  The door slid closed as soon as we were inside. The capsule was crowded, not meant for two people. Chaos and death were on the other side of the glass now, and we were leaving them behind.

  Luka wrapped his arms tight around me, tucked my head against his shoulder, and punched the release button with his elbow to free the capsule.

  We shot away from the dying ship just as fire exploded out of the hatch, chasing us into the black as it consumed the bridge.

  Seven

  I SCREAMED ALL the way down.

  Down and down and down, spinning like the inside of a washing machine on hyperdrive. My stomach flew against my heart and lodged in the back of my throat.

  I was entangled in Luka’s arms, crammed into a pod smaller than a broom closet, zooming like a rocket toward the jagged rocks of the moon below.

  A terrible jerk knocked the wind out of me, and then our fall began to stabilize. For a few long, drawn-out seconds, I heard nothing but my own shattered breathing.

  We slammed into the rocky surface of the moon. Though a little gentler than I expected, the impact jarred the two of us apart. I banged my elbows and my knees, and my helmet ricocheted off the interior of the pod, leaving me shell-shocked and dazed.

  The capsule slid downhill through a shower of dirt, and then everything went quiet. At least, everything on the outside. My body still felt like it was spinning for several more minutes. I lay very still and struggled to keep from throwing up.

  Still crushed into the small space beside me, Luka kicked at the door, grunting with the effort, until it gave way.

  The surface of the moon was dark, almost pitch, but for the distinct twinkle of stars. A scattering of steady points of light might have been the other moons, or perhaps the inner planets of the system. Nothing but vast, airless desert in every direction.

  Magnificent desolation, Buzz Aldrin had once said of the moon. We weren’t meant to be here, in this lifeless astronomical graveyard.

  Monstrous rocks that could’ve crushed an SUV broke up the landscape. We wouldn’t get very far on foot.

  Maybe the vrag couldn’t see us in the dark. Our suits were black and insulated, concealing our heat signatures. Maybe it was the only reason we were still alive.

  Luka worked himself up and out of the pod with some difficulty. It took him a few tries, even though the gravity was light. When he’d tumbled out and righted himself, he reached back in for me.

  My muscles were jelly. My bones were bruised and battered, but Luka held me up like he was made of stone.

  Luka was watching the sky, anxiously searching.

  “Can you see them?” I asked. The sky was black with a scattering of silver glitter, beautiful even in its coldness. Sunrise was a threatening glint of white haze on the horizon.

  And then I saw it. The megobari ship, racing low across the sky like a white comet, trailing debris and fire. It was far on the dark horizon, and speeding steadily away.

  And then the other—a massive shadow in the night sky. Only visible for the way it blotted out the stars. It was a hundred times larger than the megobari ship, and Exodus hadn’t been small.

  The vrag ship was going to run them down.

  My arms were draped across Luka, trying to keep myself up, hands gripping hard on to his hip and his shoulder. My wasted muscles had endured too much, and even standing was now too much to ask of them.

  The white ship, though it looked disabled, slowly
circled back. Limping toward its pursuer.

  “No, no, no,” Luka whispered. “You don’t have weapons that can hurt them!”

  The black vrag ship didn’t change course, but it descended into the atmosphere to follow its quarry.

  “They’re headed straight for it. They’re going to hit.” I couldn’t breathe. “Oh my God, Luka, they’re doing it on purpose. They’re trying to ram the ship.”

  There was someone still alive on that bridge.

  I felt his body clench, like a spring tightening, as if he could reach out and physically stop the ship with his hands.

  “No,” Luka shouted into the sky. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare!”

  The vrag ship opened fire.

  Exodus broke apart. Explosions lit the night sky in red and orange and grayscale, but there was little left to destroy and no oxygen to fuel the flames. The pieces drifted slowly down, twinkling like falling glass.

  The vrag ship hovered momentarily, as if making sure its quarry was truly dead. And then it disappeared into the darkness, my eyes unable to follow the shadow any longer.

  A few seconds later, the shock wave rippled over us, blowing chunks of rock against my helmet and nearly knocking me down.

  Luka stood with his back to me. His shaking hand reached up to his helmet, to his ear, and for a horrifying second I thought he was going to take it off.

  But no. He was listening to the radio, over which I could hear nothing but static.

  I waited, shaking, as burning debris fell away far over Luka’s head like a halo of hell.

  His eyes met mine. His lips parted, mouth fell open. He shook his head.

  His arms hung loose by his sides, palms turned up, helpless. I fell into him and we held each other as the last of the false sunlight that had been his entire family fell across the fractured landscape and the last of the debris had fallen from the sky.

  But we couldn’t stay here forever. I slipped my arms from around him, numb and disbelieving, with only logic pushing me to act. “Luka, we have to go. We aren’t going to last long out here. Luka. Look at me. Focus. Please. Tell me what we have to do.”

  He looked down at me as though he was startled to find me beside him. The lights in his helmet scattered deep shadows across the planes of his face. “The vrag will still be out there searching for survivors among the escape pods. We have to find the droneship that held the weapon. We must . . . get back to base.”

  I nodded through tears. “Okay. That’s a start. Lead the way.”

  Luka had the location of the downed shuttle linked to his suitboard computer. We trudged in darkness over boulders and stones and dust that was never meant to be traversed by foot, two lone life-forms in a place we never should have been, that was never meant for us. I had to force my shaking legs to go beyond their endurance. The odds were so impossible I didn’t dare think of them.

  By rights, we should never have found what we were looking for. We never should have been able to cross the distance on foot to find the shuttle intact.

  But we did. The shuttle drone, having landed itself with perfect control, was utterly undamaged and still functional.

  Luka was able to open it with only a few deft touches, allowing us to crawl inside. The interior was possibly even more alien than the surface of the moon, but I was too tired to examine it. We were safe, for the moment.

  There was only enough space for the two of us in our suits to sit facing each other with our legs crossed. Luka was able to turn on life support, giving us some warmth and light and air, but we kept our helmets on in case of accidental depressurization.

  After a few false starts, Luka got the drone moving again, hovering only a handful of feet above the surface of the moon. He downloaded the location of the base into the shuttle, and it took off toward the light side of the moon.

  Only once that task was done did Luka let himself sink to the floor, eyes glazing over and staring blankly at the wall.

  I sat in front of him and tried to keep him going somehow. “Luka. Look at me. You just saved our lives.” I touched his gloved hand with mine, but he didn’t respond. “Luka, I would’ve died here without you. At least now we have a fighting chance. We’ll take this weapon thing back to the base, and . . .” And what? Take it back to Earth, alone? Six months later?

  But what the hell would two teenage kids be able to do against that ship? Against something that could destroy the megobari ship with such apparent ease? Without even a warning shot or a hail?

  How could anything humans have compete? It’d be like flinging sticks at a tank.

  No. Can’t think like that. My rational brain shut down all extraneous thought. Survive this now. Save future problems for Future Cassie to deal with. Current Cassie had plenty of problems of her own. Like the mysterious apparent mega-weapon we were now toting through utter darkness on a barren alien moon. Like the vrag ship that could still be hovering invisibly in the space above our heads. Like the fact that we were now the sole living things on this moon, and it was up to us to deal with these problems.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe.

  “We will handle this shit because we have to,” I muttered to myself.

  Luka’s eyes flicked down to me. “What did you just say?”

  “I said, we have to handle this shit because it’s up to us now. Just the two of us. We have to survive. We have to get through this part, because we’re not safe yet. Luka, do you know what this weapon does?”

  Still blank-faced, he shook his head, helmet rocking against the bulkhead. His head tilted upward and he closed his eyes.

  I felt a tingle of fear at realizing that Luka might be out of commission, and he was the only one now who knew the things that could get us home.

  But maybe that wasn’t entirely true.

  Sunny? I ventured.

  I’d closed the door on her while we fell, too focused externally to exchange information with her. I cautiously opened the door again and found her waiting.

  Yes, Cassie.

  Almost sighing in relief, I turned off my external comm and spoke aloud so that Luka couldn’t hear. “What resources do you have access to right now?”

  I can store information and video recordings from your helmet cam. I can do calculations, process information, give production models and probabilities. I can monitor your health status. I can give limited data retrieval based on what I have stored in your suitboard memory. I require the tools on board Odysseus for anything further.

  “Are you in communication with Odysseus? Can you tell how far away we are?”

  The low-frequency radio signals on board are not strong enough to send or receive communications at this distance.

  “Let me know when the signal gets any stronger or weaker.” We could follow it like bread crumbs if necessary.

  Yes, Cassie.

  “Do you, uh . . . do you know what just happened?”

  I have access to your memories, helmet cam footage, and vital signs.

  Okay, creepy. “So you . . . you know that the other members of Odysseus are . . . gone. They were killed.”

  I have marked them as deceased in the mission log. Your suitboard record logs will be automatically uploaded to Odysseus when we are within range.

  “Thanks, Sunny. Can you . . . can you sense where we are right now? Can you sense . . . the weapon we’re carrying?”

  There was a short pause. I am reading unfamiliar energy signatures in the hold of this shuttle, but I do not have the capacity to decipher their meaning.

  Right. At the moment, Sunny was little more than my helmet, my suit, and my brain. While each of those three things had some pretty impressive capabilities, it didn’t make her magical.

  I settled back against the bulkhead across from Luka. Eyes still closed, he was in his own world.

  “Sunny? Can you . . .” I didn’t know what I was asking. I wanted . . . company. Consolation. The world outside was bleak and full of danger and we were small and alone and vulnerable. And I was so fa
r from home. All I had was a computer hooked to my brain. How could she compensate? I felt dumb saying it out loud, so I posed my question in my head only: Sunny, can you . . . make me feel better?

  In response, Sunny began playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in my memory.

  It was so sudden and unexpected and beautiful. An ode and a dirge.

  I closed my eyes and, since no one else could see me, let the tears fall freely.

  Eight

  I DIDN’T ROUSE again until the shuttle came to a stop. Luka climbed silently to his feet, deftly moving his hands over the smooth control panel. He must have activated some remote entry system, as a panel beneath a boulder twice the size of the shuttle slid open, and the shuttle trundled inside. We descended into the cool dark far below, the shuttle’s exterior lights illuminating our path.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “What’s our next step?”

  He didn’t speak to me for a few seconds. Just stared into space with his hand resting listless on the shuttle’s control panel.

  “Luka, what are we going to do?” I said again, louder.

  I grabbed his arm and he blinked at me slowly, like he couldn’t understand what I was doing. Someone had to take charge of keeping us alive, and I needed his knowledge. “Luka. We have to get back and warn Earth. No one knows those things are coming. Can we communicate from here? How do we get back? We need to plan.”

  “We have to . . .” Luka paused, looked around. His face was shell-shocked. He swallowed hard. “We have to find another ship. No message will reach Earth faster than we can ourselves. The vrag may already be on their way there. We need a megobari ship that can take us back to Earth quickly. Load it with food, supplies from Odysseus. And . . . and the weapon.”

  “Okay, good,” I said, nodding to encourage him, holding back tears. Once I let the floodgates open, it would be hard to regain control.

  Copeland, Jeong, Shaw, Bolshakov.

  Gone.

  Their last moments kept playing over in my mind, like a nightmare I couldn’t escape, my brain trying to decipher where everything had gone wrong and what I could have done differently.