“I know.”
“I’ll find a way to get you back from them.”
His voice was rueful. “I expected as much.”
I craned my neck to see his face. “Luka . . . what should I do about the weapon?”
He sighed deeply. “Learn more about it. What it does. How to use it.”
“I won’t use it. Not while you’re on board.”
His eyes hardened. “If you have the chance, and you have no choice, then yes—you will. My life is a small price to pay for all of Earth. My father knew this truth, and so do I.”
He held my face in his hands.
And then he told me where he’d hidden Skyfall.
Twenty-Seven
I WENT BACK to the living room. I didn’t tell Emilio or Mitsuko what had happened. Numb on the outside, panicked on the inside, I let them show me what they’d come up with for a secure uplink. Meanwhile, I was playing out strategies for how to maneuver this, how to win, and scrapping them, one after another. Not even Sunny could help me. We were both coming to the same conclusion.
All that was left was the one plan that I never wanted to consider.
They were both oblivious, luckily. “So we’ve rigged it all up—nobody will know where the upload originated from, but it will look like it came from NASA,” Mitsuko said.
“How did you manage that?” I asked.
Emilio gave me a grin. “I hijacked Colonel Pierce’s computer. It’ll seem like it’s coming from him directly.”
“Will this get him into trouble?” I asked, concerned. We didn’t need any fire coming down on him, too. “What if we just asked him to share it himself, and that way he can vouch for the veracity of the recordings?”
“Pierce is a worldwide hero. They can’t do anything to him officially—he’s the first man on Mars! People love him. Every word out of his mouth makes headline news. But asking him directly to vouch for us will take too much time, and what if he says no or starts asking questions?” Emilio typed frantically on the keyboard. “I’ve got it all queued up. As soon as I hit this button, the raw, unedited mission records—everyone’s helmet cams all the way through to when we lost the footage—will hit the internet through Pierce’s computer. I wrote up an intro and closed-captioned it all so people know what they’re viewing, but otherwise, everything will be out there.”
I let out a slow breath. Everything. People would doubt it, of course. Claim it was fake. But maybe enough of them would see. Enough scientists and government officials with backbones would come out in support, especially if they thought Pierce was behind releasing it. They would see the vrag for what they were.
What would happen next? Open war?
“That’s awesome, guys. Well done. There’s just . . . one more thing I need you to do.” I took a shaky breath. Steeled myself. And I gave them the coordinates to find Skyfall.
Maybe they’d try to find another way. But we were out of time.
This time there’d be no plan B.
When I returned to Luka’s room, I found him missing.
He’d slipped out of the house when no one was looking, through an exit only he must’ve known about.
I caught up to him a few hundred yards away. He was hard to miss—there wasn’t anywhere to hide out here.
All he did when he heard my steps was shake his head ruefully and offer me a sip from his canteen. “I knew you had let me go too easy.”
He hadn’t brought anything else. He didn’t think it necessary.
A heavy sickness in my gut grew denser the longer we walked, reality settling in over me. I didn’t want to be doing this. I didn’t want to leave my friends without saying good-bye, or leave my family wondering what had happened to me. But I also didn’t want Luka facing his worst enemy alone. Or leave others to clean up a mess I had a hand in creating.
We’d left the house far behind, and the heat was dragging my steps even more than dread, when I asked him: “Are we going to make it in time?”
“I hijacked a satellite to send them a message. They know we’re coming.”
He was making a beeline for a massive rock, almost a hill in and of itself, half buried in the sand with scrub brush clinging to its bare edges. “Hey, uh . . .”
But I didn’t get a chance to finish my question, because the rock suddenly shimmered and became . . . not a rock.
“Nice disguise,” I said as I followed him to Penelope’s hatch. “You even had me fooled, and I was looking for it.”
He touched its pale blue surface, and the ship let us in.
Twenty-Eight
THE COMPUTER’S 3-D printer scanned our bodies and formed us new space suits, skintight black with veins of shifting iridescent blue, like an abalone shell, with helmets to match.
Hopefully we’d have time to get good use out of them.
Luka and I stood on the bridge in silence as he began the lift-off procedures. Not wanting to distract him but not wanting to be alone, I turned inward to Sunny. What do you calculate our odds of survival to be, Sunny?
Her response was cryptic and immediate. Given the outcomes of your last two encounters with the vrag, and the damage done to the hull of Penelope at the last skirmish, it is statistically unlikely you will survive another encounter.
Great. How about you just play some upbeat music for me, Sunny?
Sunny chose a piece out of my memory, a piece I’d once played for competition. And so, with Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” filling my senses, we lifted off from the ground in a spray of fine sand, upward through the thin veil of Earth, and into the deep black to meet our destiny.
The vrag ship appeared on our view screen just as the final triumphant notes of the overture were fading from my mind, banishing the last fleeting moments of joy from my heart.
Shaking, I placed my hand over Luka’s. He turned over his palm and enveloped my hand in his.
Sunny, can you use my suit to interface with the ship and translate what’s happening? I asked. I lightly rested my other hand on the console.
Yes, Cassie, came her response. We are on a collision course with the vrag ship. T-minus seven minutes to impact.
“Luka,” I whispered. “Can you do that thing that your dad did once before? So we can see?”
He gave me the barest sideways glance; our helmets prevented much peripheral vision. Then he coded the order into the console and the entire bridge became transparent.
I turned my eyes to the endless universe spread out around us. The breath stopped in my body. It was a sea of death, yes; it would kill me in an instant and without a thought; it contained glittering wonders and gnawing horrors, unimaginable heat and deathly cold, things so large I could hardly even conceive of them. It cared nothing for me, for my beating heart or my dreams or what I loved. It contained everything in existence and yet it was defined by its vast emptiness. Humans could pick a direction and travel it for their entire race’s existence and see nothing else but blackness ever again.
But out of the corner of my eye I could just see a sliver of brilliant, shining blue. The only color in the vast darkness. Our lush island marooned in this sea of death.
It was no wonder we now had interstellar refugees paddling up to our shores, ready to fight for a chance to cling to our lifeboat.
My jaw set, I turned from Earth and set my eyes forward.
Traveling a thousand miles an hour, with the behemoth of Earth spinning with deceptive slowness beneath us, the shadowed ship that was like a blot of ink came upon us much too quickly.
“Any change in the vrag ship, Sunny?” I said the words aloud, but softly.
Sunny didn’t respond right away, which sent panic pushing against me like a tidal wave, trying to get in.
She was a computer. Anything that took longer than a nanosecond to calculate was a much bigger problem than I was going to be able to handle.
I held my breath until Sunny’s ever-calm voice filtered through my mind. Cassie, the vrag ship is powering up.
My le
gs shook and I squeezed Luka’s hand. A lizard-brain instinct, knowing I was doomed, still readied my body to fight.
But there was nothing to do. The vrag ship was a planet and we were an asteroid. Our ship was a limping, injured bird compared to the beautiful, terrible monstrosity of a raptor looming ever larger. Its edges bled into the blackness of dark space behind it.
This was where I was going to die. “Powering up what?” I asked. Luka glanced at me.
Unknown.
“We should brace ourselves,” Luka said quietly.
I closed my eyes and tried to bring up the picture of Earth as it was, glittering and calm behind me, unaffected by what would happen here. Only my heart seemed unable to accept reality; it was leaping and galloping like a stampeding stallion, driven by adrenaline and some base need to believe I could do something to survive this.
Nothing happened. Nothing stretched out in a long, long moment, for which I kept my eyes screwed tight, assuming time was simply expanding by some strange rule of relativity for my last seconds, giving me the illusion that I had more time than I did.
When it had been too long and I didn’t feel dead yet, I opened my eyes. Death didn’t appear to be on a collision course with me. In fact, we didn’t seem to be on a collision course with anything. The vrag ship was still growing in the distance, but it didn’t appear to be as fast.
“Sunny, why aren’t we dead?” I whispered, not loud enough to tempt fate. I still wasn’t sure death wasn’t about to take my next breath.
Cassie, the vrag ship seems to be influencing our course.
“They’re pulling us toward them,” I murmured in amazement. “They’re not firing.” I had to suppress a hysterical laugh. I was living all my childhood science-fiction TV show dreams. A tractor beam. Of course.
Luka squeezed my hand. “Not yet.”
I felt like a fish being reeled in on a line, pulled inevitably toward an uncertain fate.
All the times in my life where I had been bored, restless, annoyed, angry, dismissive—I regretted them. All the times I should have realized what I’d had, enjoying the fact that I lived in a paradise of blue sky and green grass and limitless air, and that I was loved.
I regretted all that lost time.
The closer we edged to the vrag ship, our path steady, the more I realized how truly vast it was. I was staring at a giant floating skyscraper. No, it was so much larger than that—so much larger, I didn’t have words. It filled our view screen and went on and on. Luka was right—if this fell to Earth, even in pieces, it would cause massive destruction.
We were matching pace with the vrag ship, aligning orbits, a complex and delicate dance that was being masterfully controlled.
I wondered if even Bolshakov could have done as good a job.
And then I remembered that this ship had murdered Bolshakov.
As we approached, a pod door slid open, revealing a pitch-blackness in which you could have lost my city. My heartbeat took over every movement in my body, trembling in time.
Even though she wasn’t a real person, I was glad Sunny was with me. Sunny couldn’t feel fear. Her logical, unemotional programming was almost like bravery, and it steadied me.
And then it was happening. Our ship passed from darkness into darkness, to a space within space.
The pod door closed and there was a jolt as something—I assumed—attached to our ship, locking our orbits, sealing us to the vrag mother ship.
Well, we weren’t dead. That was a good start.
I took a few steadying breaths, and then a few more, not quite believing I’d survived this far.
The darkness beyond the window was inscrutable.
They welcomed us in. Are they stupid? Or am I the stupid one?
The second one felt truer.
“Should we . . . wait? Or should we go out there?” We’d run off the edge of the map, and I had no idea what path to take now.
“No air in this chamber,” Luka murmured.
I took in a steadying breath. Each one that passed seemed worth marking, savoring. I had a sinking feeling that my remaining breaths were short in number.
No use sitting around in the dark wasting them.
We exited the hatch and eased down the gangplank, my legs shaking even more than I’d feared. Our helmets’ exterior lights came to life in the dark chamber surrounding us, piercing the darkness in thin white beams, illuminating a whole lot of nothing. Our beams of light scattered before they hit any edges.
Cautiously, we moved beyond Penelope, sweeping our flashlights across the floor. “What should we do?” I whispered.
“Find a door?” he whispered back. “Let’s—”
Whatever he was about to say turned into a shout as Luka was swept away from me, flipped upside down and pulled upward as if by some invisible hand from above.
“Luka!” I screamed, aiming my light upward frantically. The echo of his scream had already faded, and there was no trace of him. My light couldn’t find the top of the chamber. It was so far above me, it might as well have been the sky.
My heart pounded a violent rhythm against my ribs as I ran in circles, calling his name, searching for him in the dark. Minutes buzzed by before I realized it was fruitless. They’d taken him, snatched him right from my side. I was powerless. Stupid. Small.
Alone.
Heart refusing to give up, I choked back sobs and edged my way carefully forward, picking a direction at random. Had they not wanted me at all? Would I be doomed to wander here until I ran out of oxygen, alone in the dark, waiting for invisible hands to grab me?
It was a long time before my heart started to slow. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a direction, but I couldn’t stop. Maybe Luka was dead already, or maybe not. But I had to go after him.
Sunny’s robotic presence in my head was not so much a tangible thing as a suggestion of company, but it was a comfort nonetheless. She couldn’t help me as much as she could when tethered to a ship loaded with sensors, but she could help. Alone, but not alone.
I ventured farther into the darkness, afraid I was doomed to tread water in an inky sea until I drowned.
I let loose a scream of horror and frustration and fear. “If you want me here, you have to give me some indication of where to go!”
And then without warning, lights blazed to life, blinding me like a supernova had exploded before my eyes. As I blinked back stars, the room began to take shape around me in fits and starts, sharp lines glowing in polarized colors.
WELCOME, HUMAN CASSANDRA GUPTA.
The voice was so loud, so everywhere-at-once, like a roar of solid bass, I clutched at my head and folded into myself, falling to my knees. It wasn’t for a few seconds that I realized my ears weren’t ringing because I hadn’t heard the voice.
It had been inside my head.
It had taken over every space in my brain. So much louder than Sunny’s voice, who had only ever spoken calmly and quietly like a friend in my ear. This voice had no intonation, no inflection, more robotic even than Sunny, who had been programmed to be lifelike.
I wasn’t sure I had even differentiated the words correctly. But it was so unlike Sunny that I knew it must be something different, speaking through her and directly into me somehow. Taking over her programming.
Had the vrag mother ship just welcomed me by name? It had to be a mistake. Some automatic computer function that had read my biosignatures. Luka had said this used to be a megobari ship, after all.
“What was that, Sunny? Did something just—”
WE WILL BRING YOU TO US.
What the hell was going on?
My bewilderment was premature, because at that moment, gravity inverted, and the world flipped upside down.
And then I was flying.
Twenty-Nine
FLYING, OR FALLING? Really, one needed gravity to differentiate between the two, and I didn’t have that luxury at the moment.
I was also screaming too loud for any logical thought to make itse
lf known.
My stomach was ricocheting around my abdominal cavity, my muscles clenching reflexively against the pressure. Gray metal flew by me and I had the impression I was falling down hundreds of stories’ worth of empty skyscraper.
Vaguely, in the back of my mind, some logic tried to tell me I couldn’t be falling because we were in orbit—in space where there was no gravity—and whatever this was, was in opposition to the gravitylike force of earlier—but it was a little too hard, and pointless, to piece it together when I was speeding along the length of an alien mother ship like a girl-shaped bullet train.
I had the vague sense of passing through something pale blue and insubstantial, a barrier like the thin skin of a bubble, and wondered if my brain was just shutting down.
The flying/falling lasted only long enough for me to worry what might happen if I actually did puke, which way would it go—and then the strange jolt as gravity—or my body, or the environment—flipped on its head again.
My feet found purchase, but I fell hard to my knees, unable to keep my body upright with quivering muscles and a stomach that was dangerously close to reversing gravity itself.
Cassie, your perspiration and heart rate indicate stress. Attempt to slow your breathing.
Sunny, in my head. Her calm and unaffected voice was so unlike the turned-to-eleven boom of the Other. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask for her help before.
I found I couldn’t exactly form words, but she read my intentions. Your suit is equipped with first-aid modules. Should I administer antiemetic neurotransmitters?
“Do it.”
Within seconds, the knots in my stomach eased, and I felt a steadiness seep into my quads, replacing the instability of my muscles. I climbed to my feet, unsteady as a newborn deer. “Thanks, Sunny. How did you—”
I stopped. Had to. Words left my brain.
I was surrounded by dozens—hundreds—of floating . . . things. Creatures, or plants, or something in between—some as small as fireflies, some as large as pickup trucks, clinging to pillars of pale stone that rose like redwoods all around me.
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