Why? It wasn’t because I deserved to survive. I was the least experienced. The least trained.
I was alive because they sacrificed themselves. Like Luka’s family had. I knew all the things I’d told him to try to ease his pain, and I’d meant them. There hadn’t been anything else to do except escape. His family had chosen to stay behind to save him because they loved him.
But my crewmates? I barely knew them. They’d trained me and taught me, they’d treated me with respect, like an equal, but they hadn’t loved me. And yet they died for me.
Because I was young. And because astronauts are inherently noble.
The real astronauts were dead and I wasn’t. I was nobody. I hadn’t changed the world—I hadn’t even affected it. I was a lottery winner, that was all. I’d let them down. Let them die. And the world back home was in short supply of experienced astronauts in a time when we may have great need of them.
Was I worth the sacrifice they’d made?
And what the hell was I going to say when I got home?
Twelve
CASSIE, LUKA REQUESTS your presence on the bridge.
I jolted upright. How had I fallen asleep? Groggy, I swung my legs off the bunk and inhaled, making sure there was oxygenated blood in my brain before I stood cautiously upright.
My body had been through a lot of stress in a short amount of time. The soreness and fatigue of my muscles had become a background static, something easily ignored, but if I kept pushing it, something was bound to break.
“Sunny? Did you wake me?”
Yes, Cassie. Luka has asked that you join him on the bridge.
“How do you know that?”
He sent a message over the ship’s communication system, which I received.
Oh, freaky. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. I hadn’t instructed Sunny to do that—but then, she’d been programmed to act with a certain level of autonomy, seeing as the crew would be unconscious. “Is it urgent?”
Nonemergency.
I changed into a fresh jumpsuit and boots, not bothering to do anything with my hair, and grabbed a few packets of food as I headed out the door.
Now that we were in flight, the megobari ship had come alive. The walls were no longer blank, but a gentle kaleidoscope of color. I felt as though I walked through an aquarium as I passed down the corridor, with colors floating by like sea creatures. A deep violet current led the way back to the bridge, with small yellow darts occasionally flitting past my head. I glimpsed red bubbles that seemed to fluctuate up and down the wall, blue splatters of paint, and clusters of rainbows along the way.
I had no idea what they were for or what they could possibly mean, but as I passed I tried to guess—instrument readouts, life-support status, telemetry, speed, trajectory.
I found Luka standing at the bridge, head down. He tilted his head slightly at my entrance.
“What is it?” I asked, joining him.
His face was drawn and tired, eyes a little vacant, but he seemed recovered from before. “I’ve been trying to discern what exactly it is that we have in our cargo hold. As I said, there is nothing in the ship’s memory banks at all. And it seems completely shielded from our sensors.”
“Which is probably a good thing. But . . . you found something, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to make sure we were safe,” he explained, rubbing at his eyes. “Whatever this is, it’s locked in a containment field by one of the strongest materials my people knew to use.”
“So it’s not going to be tripped by accident?”
“Probably not. But it makes me think that whatever it contains . . . Cass, it’s got to be more powerful than anything we know.”
Concerned, I touched his shoulder lightly. “Nothing we can worry about now. Thank you for trying.” I hesitated before adding, “I went to go see it.”
“And?”
“I climbed up and I . . . touched it.” His eyes widened, but he didn’t interrupt. “I need to be more careful, I know. But I think I accidentally told it to show me what was inside. And Luka, it’s . . . I don’t even have words. It looks almost alive.”
He swallowed hard. “Nothing else happened?”
“No. But I think it responds to touch commands the same as the rest of the ship.”
He nodded, eyes going distant, thinking. “That would make sense. But it was locked down, a long time ago. It wouldn’t . . . it shouldn’t allow you to activate it from touch alone. There are levels of protections.”
“Well, that makes me feel better. I guess we’ll just have to hope that Sunny can help us figure out how to activate it when we need it. Any sign of the vrag?”
He shook his head, eyes sliding closed briefly. “No. Though it’d be difficult for us to discern them while we travel through space-time this way, it’d likewise be difficult for them to discern us.”
“So we’re safe for now.”
“For now. As much as we can be, yes.”
Biting my lip, I offered up the food pouches in my other hand. “Then we have a moment to breathe. You did good,” I said gently, “making sure we were safe. Now you can rest for a bit. Eat something?”
He straightened, sighing, and I let my hand drop. He accepted the food I’d offered without looking at it. I’d assumed he would take it and leave. I was startled when his eyes met mine with open vulnerability and he asked: “Join me?”
I followed him back to the crew quarters, where he headed to the empty space in the middle of the room and conjured a table and two simple stools by touching a fingertip to a nearby console.
“I was born on Earth,” Luka said after a moment. He tore open a package containing a granola bar and ate a bite before continuing. “It’s always been my home. I didn’t even realize we were different until I was older.”
There was something about the way he’d said it that made me tread cautiously. The sadness had crept back into his eyes. “What made you realize you were . . . different?”
“At home, my family always spoke about everyone who wasn’t family not just as though they were strangers, but as though . . . they were something separate entirely. They were careful not to use phrases like ‘the humans’ around me, because they didn’t want to give me phrases I’d repeat outside our house. But it was clear we kept to ourselves. No one had friends outside the family. Outsiders were rarely invited to our home unless necessary. I knew from television that we were odd in that way.”
He seemed to want to talk, so I let him. We were both acting as though we were the same people who’d met on Earth, like nothing else had ever happened, which was a strange subspecies of relief.
He still looked like the guy I’d known back when I thought he was just a politician’s son. But the old boy was gone, and this was someone different. I didn’t have the space to process how I felt about that yet.
This was the true Luka—the full Luka, with no secrets. And it seemed like now that there was no need to hide anything, he wanted me to know everything.
He was someone I was going to have to get to know again. And as I listened to him talk—watched his mouth and hands—I wondered if we’d ever get back to the way we used to be.
But it wasn’t something I could think about now. We only had a few days to ourselves on this ship. We needed to use them wisely. “Was it always your plan to . . . try to live with humans?”
“It was our hope, yes.”
“It must have taken years. Learning the language . . . getting people into NASA . . .” I shook my head and offered him some trail mix, but he declined.
“It did. My family was on Earth many years before I was born. By then, my father had already secured a position in New York.”
“So he really was a diplomat?” I asked cautiously, hoping not to trigger bad memories.
“Of course. He worked his way into the position quite on purpose.”
“And you’re really from Georgia?”
“I’ve only been there a couple of times, but yes, my family la
nded there and modeled themselves after the local population. When my family first landed on Earth, they wanted to do it somewhere isolated, of course. But their ultimate goal was America. New York City was a surprisingly easy place for aliens to blend in.”
Startled that he’d made a joke, I laughed. He smiled wanly. “My aunts and uncles who spoke English best were working on getting jobs with NASA. The others stayed home and raised me. I could not go to school, of course. I couldn’t be trusted not to give us away with some small mistake. Everyone else had spent years before I was born learning how to blend in. I needed to learn the major Earth languages as well as human body language. And humans rely so heavily on body language. That was difficult, to learn from those who were still students themselves.”
Now it made sense. Why he’d always kept himself apart during selection and rarely spoke, even to answer questions in class. It’d been ingrained in him not to interact. “You did stand out at selection, though,” I said quietly. “You were always in first place.”
He grimaced. “I told my father that it would be suspicious. But he’d hinted heavily to Mr. Crane that his country might be interested in a multibillion-dollar business deal with SEE.”
“And he’d happily negotiate favorable terms for the deal if his son was selected for the program?” I finished, seeing the puzzle finally complete. “And everyone would just assume it was nepotism or your father had bought your place.”
Luka shook his head as he chewed the last of his granola bar and swallowed. “Yes. Which they did, of course. But my father was determined that I remain in the program until the last possible moment.
“It was the first time I had ever been around so many humans by myself. I was terrified of ruining everything my family had been orchestrating for so long. All the pieces, so painstakingly placed, so precariously stacked.”
“Why did you have to be involved at all?”
“We could not get any of our people into the astronaut selection committee. We learned that NASA was planning to choose a fifth member from a pool of applicants specially chosen from around the world.”
“Is that why you were at Marshall that day we met? Scouting out the competition?”
“Um . . . perhaps.” He appeared suddenly sheepish. “My father was, in fact, going on a tour of the facility. It was coincidence that we met there, however.”
“I thought this was all part of your plan. Who was chosen. Why the candidates all had to be under twenty-five.”
“Our plan? No. Once I had learned more about you, I had . . . hoped the fifth would be you, but we did not influence that decision. You earned your place, Cassie.”
He let that hang in the air a moment.
“Why did you want it to be me?” I asked quietly.
“I . . . was hopeful. That perhaps you might understand us.” He glanced at me, and then away, as if he couldn’t bear to hold my gaze. “I trusted you. I thought you were fair, and smart. You were one of the few who . . . gave me a chance.”
My heart stuttered.
“Not that it matters now.” He sat back, crumpling the empty food wrappers in his fist.
“Of course it does. What are you talking about?” I leaned forward, reaching across the table to touch the back of his hand. “Earth can still be a refuge for your people. I mean . . . there’s the minor inconvenience of having to save it from aliens first, but . . .”
He shook his head dismissively and pushed away from the table, disposing of the garbage in a wall compartment. I followed him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at me. “I just can’t entertain the idea of . . . fulfilling my father’s dream of an Earth refuge for my species. Not when he’s gone, and Earth may not be a refuge long.”
“Stop it,” I said. “That’s our home. We’re not going to let them touch it. Understand me?”
His lips pressed together. “When you say it, I almost believe it.”
I made him rest—threatening him with a tranquilizer gun if he didn’t go to sleep voluntarily—and within minutes of his head hitting the bunk, he was snoring quietly.
As I was exiting the crew quarters, I had an idea—and cautiously touched the wall panel beside the door. I formed an intent and directed it. Dim the lights.
The lights dimmed, and I jumped.
Out in the hall, I whispered, “Sunny, are you responsible for me being able to communicate with the ship?”
Yes, Cassie. I can facilitate your communications with the ship’s computer.
“Okay,” I said in an unsteady voice. “You can understand Penelope? Can you translate what I’m seeing here?” I focused on a patch of wall that was pulsing orange.
Instantly, my mind was overflowing with numbers, equations, streams of numeric data that scrolled lightning-fast into my brain, overloading my senses like a room filled with a thousand songs all blasting at full volume. “Sunny, stop!”
The streams faded. “So,” I breathed, pressing my palm against my forehead and trying to re-form my own thoughts. “You can talk with the alien computer because you’re both speaking the universal language of numbers. But . . . you can’t always translate that into something I understand or process. Is that right?”
That is accurate.
“I can work with that,” I murmured. “So in order to translate, you’d need . . . what? Something external? A third party?” And as I said it, it made sense. Sunny wasn’t designed to be in my brain, she was designed to be in Odysseus, with all its external hardware and multiple sources of software to feed data into her and help her understand its meaning.
Compared to that state-of-the-art ship, I was pretty dumb. I couldn’t measure an accurate temperature or velocity, I couldn’t see X-rays or infrared, couldn’t determine what molecules made up a rock sample. She only had my five senses to work with—enhanced though they might be by human standards—a faulty memory bank, and no external hardware.
Well, that was a stumbling block, but it was more than I had before.
“Sunny, how are you doing with accessing that data you copied?”
I am still attempting to search for relevant information on subjects related to megobari plus weapon.
“How long do you think it will take you to search everything you copied?”
When she didn’t reply right away, and I sensed that estimated time was ticking upward into years, I made her stop. And then rubbed at my incision, because it had started to itch.
I filed that problem away for later. “All right, then, Sunny. Luka said we need to get to know each other a little better. Back to basics. Let’s try some meditation.”
Thirteen
THE HATCH DOOR slid open, startling me out of my attempts to re-create the gentle sea where my consciousness had first spent time getting to know Sunny.
Luka’s hair was a little mussed, eyes still blinking away sleep, but he looked marginally more alert. He proffered something toward me. “You . . . brought this with you?”
In his hand was a black piano key, half dipped in silver. Luka had given it to me, via Hanna, after he’d left the program. “Um, yeah. I did.” I’d left it out on the alcove near my bed. “But I don’t know what it’s supposed to be.”
Though he held it out, I let him keep hold of it. His hand trembled a little, letting the light dance off the gleaming surface. “You never opened it?”
“It opens?”
With a deft motion of his hand and slight pop, the black and silver halves of the rectangle opened on a hinge. Inside was a small electronic device built into the top half with a few tiny buttons. “It’s a communication device. I wanted to . . . leave you a message. Before you launched. So you wouldn’t be blindsided when you arrived.” He shook his head, rueful. “I guess I should delete that.”
I reached out to stop his hands. “No, don’t. Please? I’d like to hear it.”
His lips thinned, eyes downcast, but he nodded. “Just . . . not while I’m here. If you don’t mind.”
I had to bite back a
smile. He was embarrassed. I’d never seen that emotion in him before.
He flipped it closed and handed it to me. I tried to spring the mechanism myself, finding with surprise how easy it actually was to open. “It should only open for you or for me. I have its pair. It allows us to maintain contact over great distance, on a secure line. Not quite the same way my people do—I had to modify it, so there is some time delay, depending on how far we are from each other.”
He’d given this to me during the competition. After we’d kissed, after he’d left without telling me good-bye. I’d had it this entire time without knowing he’d left me a message to soften the blow. I let the meaning of that wash over me, feeling some of the resentment I’d held for him fade. “But you didn’t leave me any instructions on how to use it.”
“I trusted that you would learn it without too much difficulty.”
This time I smiled for real. “Lot of good that did. And you trusted Hanna to deliver it to me?”
His head tilted slightly. “Why shouldn’t I have?”
“I’m just . . . not sure that I would’ve.”
“She is more trustworthy than you presume her to be.”
I raised my eyebrows at that, but let it go. “It looks like a piano key.”
His eyes pointedly remained downcast. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Then his eyes met mine, holding my gaze for a moment longer than I’d expect. He’d meant something by it. “I had to disguise it as something.”
My mind flew back to those times I’d tried helping Luka—before I knew who he was—learn to control his brain waves. Playing piano for him in the quiet little chapel on the astronaut training campus. And then I knew why he’d chosen this disguise.
“If you choose to send me a message, there are options for video, audio, and text-only. Text-only is fastest; video takes longer, of course. Depending on how far we are from each other. If you need to reach me instantly, text is the better option.”
I reached for his hand. “This is . . . really nice. And will probably come in handy. Thank you.”
He nodded and stepped away, but not before giving my hand a gentle squeeze.
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