“Noah, I shouldn’t have said that.”
That’s all he could come up with?
“Who’s your brother?” I wasn’t even sure what I was afraid of, but I was sure afraid of something.
“I… just meant you and I are—” Again he stopped, his gaze dropping to his hands. “Noah, there are things your mom and I have never told you.”
“Like what?”
“We really shouldn’t be having this conversation without your mom.” He still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Who’s. Your. Brother?” I bit off every word.
“Haon.”
He said it so, so softly. It didn’t matter. I knew the answer—the only answer that could make him so ashamed.
“So that makes him…my uncle?”
“No.” Dad sighed. “Haon is your biological father.”
I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest.
“Noah, I—”
I spun my chair and bolted for the door. Dad didn’t follow, or if he did, I didn’t notice.
My mind reeled. My whole life I’d been raised to believe Haon was a monster. He was a monster—and I was his son.
I flew down the corridors of the ARC, nowhere in particular, just away. Away from the man I thought was my dad, away from everything he’d just told me.
I left the gravity of the Services pod but hardly noticed when my chair switched to zero-g mode.
My whole life had been a lie—everyone I’d ever loved, liars. I dug my palms into my eyes, trying to stop the tears that wet my cheeks. I don’t know how long I wandered around but eventually I found myself in front of the door to Sam’s quarters. Did she know? Did Hamilton? Had they been duped into believing I was their brother or had they spent their whole lives lying to me? Maybe now I knew why they never took my side.
I took a deep breath. “Open,” I said. The door slid aside and I pushed in. Adina sat strapped into a chair by the window, looking out into space. I felt around in my pockets for my Triple-B and placed it in my ear.
“Adina.”
At first she didn’t seem to hear, then she turned. Tears floated off her cheeks, tiny spheres of water drifting in zero-g. She swiped at them with the back of her hand.
“I’ll make a mess of your sister’s room.”
My heart lifted, just a little. Adina hadn’t lied to me. She might just be the only friend I had.
“Did Sam tell you what’s going on?”
“No, but I can tell we’re in trouble. Your Dad wants to send me home, doesn’t he?”
I saw the fear in her eyes and lowered my gaze. She’s got enough to worry about without having to deal with my family issues.
“If Mom were here she’d let you stay.”
Would she? If Haon was my father…was Mom really my mother, or…? I shook my head. Too many questions, and I wanted answers.
“Adina, we’ve got to do something. My dad didn’t say you had to go back right now.”
A small glimmer of hope lit her eyes.
“Follow me.”
I took her to the hangar. The DUV III sat tucked in behind the Morning Star.
“I just know my mom would let you stay.” I moved to the DUV III and opened the hatch. “She’s always telling us to look out for those who aren’t as fortunate as we are.”
Adina stepped into the ship. I was about to close the door behind us when something bounded in behind us—Obadiah!
“What are you doing here, boy?” The dog skidded around on the floor and tried to jump into my lap. I looked up—I could see dad’s legs moving across the deck toward the ship’s door.
“I guess you’ll have to come along for the ride.” I closed the hatch and headed for the cockpit. Adina followed.
“I know your father is a good man. He’s just trying to do what he thinks is right.”
“But you’ll die.” I squeezed my eyes closed.
“We all die one day.”
“That’s just what he said.” How could he say that? “But chances are you’ll die before you reach my mom or dad’s age.”
I looked at the blank holoscreens.
“Besides,” I whispered, “there’s something I need to do.” I’d heard enough from my dad. Maybe Mom could tell me something—anything—that would make this better.
“Please trust me, Adina.” I waved my hand over the control systems, bringing them to life. “My dad said to take you home but he didn’t say we couldn’t make a few stops.”
I turned to the controls. “Preflight check, begin.”
Long lines of numbers and symbols scrolled on the screen as the ship’s computers ran down the checklist.
“Life support systems, nominal. Oxygen scrubbers, nominal.”
“Noah, what are you doing?”
“Just what I said—I’m taking you home.” I waved my hands at the monitor bank. The three-dimensional screens lit up and projected an image of Earth.
“Okay, but did your father—”
“He’s busy trying to rescue my mom.” I glanced at Adina for a second. She looked worried. “It’ll be better if I take you home myself.”
“All systems operating at nominal conditions.”
“Thank you. Computer, please open the hangar bay doors.” I waved my hands through the projection of Earth, and it changed to an exterior view of the ship. The hangar doors opened and the great blue Earth filled our field of vision. I gently lifted the DUV III from the deck and moved her forward.
“Noah! What do you think you’re doing?” Dad’s voice filled the cockpit.
“I’m taking Adina home.”
“Not without me you’re not!”
I was nearly clear of the bay doors.
“You stay here and get the ARC ready to rescue Mom,” I said.
“Noah—”
Waving my hand at the comm, I cut him off.
“He sounded extremely angry,” Adina said
“He’s not the only one.”
The DUV III floated free of the ARC.
“Computer? Please prepare to jump to primary beacon.”
“Jump not recommended. Warp manifold calibration incomplete.”
“Can you lock onto the primary beacon?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then make the jump.”
I glanced at Adina, who was gripping the arms of her chair.
“Where are we really going?”
“We’re going to go get my mom. She’ll be able to talk sense into my dad.”
“Primary beacon lock achieved.” A tiny red star floated in middle of a sea of stars before us.
“I don’t think this—”
“Adina, I won’t let him send you back to that icy world. My mom will know how to talk to him.” I turned back to the monitors and brought up a display of Mars, the blinking lines moving off into the reaches of time.
“Make the first jump now.”
Over the next couple of hours, the DUV III jumped dozens of times. Each jump brought us closer to Mars in the thirty-first century.
I showed Adina the ship’s quarters and even found some clothes stored in a wardrobe.
“We need to help you blend in a little. If you showed up on Mars dressed in furs and your hair like that?” I pointed at the tangled mess atop her head. “Everyone on the planet would know you weren’t from our time.”
I couldn’t help laughing as she tried to move around. Without gravity, she kept finding herself where she didn’t expect to be, like smacking against the wall when she kicked herself forward with her feet.
“It takes getting used to.” Obadiah floated along beside me. “But even Obadiah learned how to handle zero-g.” The dog scrabbled along what would normally be the ceiling. “He actually uses his tail almost like a rudder.”
She smiled. “He looks like a fish. Of course, fish make it look easy, swimming through water. If only I had fins and a tail.”
I grabbed a handrail near the door. “The trick is to not use much force when you push off.” I gently nu
dged myself in the direction of the bathroom, straightened my body as best I could, and slid through the air until I grabbed the rail on the far wall.
She tried to follow me, but this time she pushed so softly she just floated in the center of the room, moving ever so slowly toward the far side.
“Well, a little harder than that.” I laughed again, then moved over to pull her toward the bathroom.
I showed her the zero-g shower and how to strap herself in.
“We don’t have a salon-bot on board, so after you clean your hair, see what you can do so it’s a little more… presentable.”
“I can’t imagine using water just to clean myself.” Adina started to pull off her furs. I realized she wasn’t waiting for me to leave before undressing and fled. Apparently they do things differently where she comes from.
Back in the cockpit, a quick check of the displays told me we were only a few hundred years behind the primary beacon. Mars loomed large on the external screens. Somewhere down there was my father, a man who’d decided, for one reason or another, that he didn’t want me.
Was it because of my legs? Did he think I was going to hold him back? Ruin his life? Was he afraid I would be too needy? Too much work?
After I rescued my mom, he’d see what I could do—assuming I could rescue her. I shook my head. What choice did I have?
Time passed while I watched the monitor. 2786. 2814. 2901. The years ticked closer to… to what? Now that I thought about it, what was I going to say to Haon?
And what about Mom? For some reason I wasn’t as angry with her as I was with my dad, even though they’d both lied to me. It was hard to be angry at her, knowing where she was and what was happening to her.
The door to the cockpit opened and Adina stepped through. Wow! Her rich black hair floated behind her in two long braids. The jumpsuit and lavender shirt she wore made her dark eyes shine.
“Do you think I will blend in now?” She blushed as she pushed herself into her seat.
“I…You look so different.” I smiled at her.
“Different than other girls on your home world?”
“No. Different than before.” My cheeks grew warm, and I turned back to the displays. “You look nice.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her grin.
“How far do we have to go?” she said.
“About ten minutes.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out a Triple-B and handed it to her.
“Here, put this in your ear and you’ll understand what everyone’s saying when we get down there.”
“This is what you use to understand me?”
“Yes, but now you’ll be the only one speaking your language—it’ll be easier if you wear the translator. All you need to do is concentrate on my words and it’ll work. It gets easier the more you use it.”
I took the Triple-B out of my own ear.
“There, now your translator is doing the work.”
She looked at me and frowned. “Ani lo mevin otcha.”
“Keep trying, you’ll get it.”
She continued to frown. “Your words are all jumbled together in my head.”
“That’s because I’m speaking English.”
Her face brightened. “I understood that!”
“I told you it wasn’t hard,” I said. “When I first used the Triple-B, I had the most trouble when we went to your cave. I heard everyone speaking at once.”
“I don’t understand how this thing works. How can I hear you speaking and understand you, then speak and have you understand me?”
I just laughed. “No idea. My dad would know, he made the translator.” Don’t think about that. “I just use the thing and don’t worry about it.”
“Someday I’d like to learn how to talk to you without one of these things in my ear.”
I glanced at the image of Mars on the screen. “After we get my mom, I’ll help you.” I grinned. “Look how fast you’re learning to deal with everything around you. Zero-g, your hair…How’d you do that to your hair anyway?”
She laughed. “We sometimes make rope out of grasses to help bind hides together. And since everything floats here, I was able separate the strands and braid them together letting the third strand just hover while I worked with the other two.”
“Now you’re talking like Hamilton—I hear the words, but have no idea what you’re saying.”
She giggled. “I wouldn’t worry about it unless you plan to grow your hair long enough to require braids.”
“Fair enough.”
“Preparing for final jump,” the computer said.
“Here we go!”
The great red planet shimmered before us, then blue-green sparks engulfed the ship, obscuring everything on the screens. A few heartbeats later, we popped out above the planet.
“Destination reached. It is now 10:24 A.M. June 17, 3024 CST”
“Bring us into orbit over the southern hemisphere, please.”
Adina drew in her breath sharply.
“How far have we come?”
I unbuckled my harness, then flicked my fingers at the display.
“Well, at the moment, we’re about two hundred million kilometers from Earth.”
“And is that far?”
I laughed. “Extremely far.” I thought for a moment. “The moon is about three hundred eighty-thousand kilometers from Earth.”
She said, “I’m sorry, but that still doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Here.” I brought up a display of Earth, a tiny representation of the moon spinning around it. “This is how far the moon is from Earth. Now watch.”
I pulled back from Earth, further and further away until it was just a tiny blue dot. The moon was impossible to see. I then pointed to a small red dot.
“This is Mars.”
Her eyes grew wide. “That is an extremely long way away.”
“What’s even more amazing, and I’m not sure I know how to explain it, is that we’ve also moved over eleven thousand years into the future.”
She just stared at me.
“Okay, real quick. You and I are about the same age, twelve?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen twelve winters.”
“So if you’re twelve years old…” I brought up a graph that had two dots on it.
“Here’s when you were born, and here’s how old you are.” I pinched my fingers together and shrank the graph down.
“Here’s where you would be if you lived to see one hundred winters.”
“No one lives that long.”
“Not on your world, but on mine that’s almost considered young.” I zoomed out, more, then more, until the dot for one hundred years became indistinguishable from the left-hand edge of the graph.
“And here’s where we are now. The year 3024 AD.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand.” She looked out toward the red planet, which slowly spun below her. “But I know I’m a very, very long way from home.”
“Is that good or bad?”
She smiled at me. “I am extremely glad to be here.”
I started bringing up displays, which I then overlaid on the image of the Martian surface below.
“Hamilton said my mom was at a remote facility in the Gecko desert. Because we don’t have an exact location, we may need to go down and ask around before we can find her.”
I studied the screens for a while, then pointed to a small town on the edge of a mountain range that ran north to south along the eastern edge of the desert.
“New Cairo. It looks like they have a small spaceport. My guess is Haon might go there from time to time to get supplies.” I looked at Adina. “We need to come up with a story. Why we’re alone with our own ship. Twelve-year-olds don’t usually go flying around the solar system by themselves.”
“What if your mother was sick and we were looking for roots or herbs to make her well?”
I thought for a moment.
“Most of our major diseases have been eradicated, but if we w
ere on a ship on a deep space mission, and my mom came down with an unexplained illness… That might work.”
I studied Adina. Her dark, glossy braids…
“How about we make it your mother?” I pointed at my blond hair. “We’re obviously not related, so maybe I brought you to get help for your mom? And we heard that Haon had experience in deep space travel.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“Let’s go, then.” I tapped the holoscreen and initiated the landing sequence. Minutes later, we were falling through the Martian atmosphere. The red glow surrounded us when the ship was engulfed in flames.
“My mom said there was a time when Mars didn’t have much of an atmosphere. People couldn’t breathe the air at all, and even now it’s not safe to be outside for long. Over time, though, scientists were able to change that.”
Adina frowned. “Not being able to go outside would make me crazy.”
I pulled the yoke left and banked through a hazy reddish cloud. She craned her neck and looked out the window.
“The ground looks so barren—does nothing grow here?”
“There are places along the equator, up that way—” I pointed north— “where tiny plant life grows. Mostly mosses and fungus, but nothing like Earth. They say someday there’ll be plants growing everywhere, and maybe even rain or snow will fall.”
“I can’t imagine a place so dry. It doesn’t seem like a good place to live.”
Now that I thought about it, maybe it wasn’t—at least, not to some people. I didn’t mind, but then, I hadn’t really spent a lot of time on Mars.
The ruddy clouds around the DUV III cleared, and we could see the spaceport. I scouted out a place to land. New Cairo was covered in a series of clear domes, some three or four kilometers across. Two shield bubbles shimmered, indicating a landing pad. I maneuvered the DUV III through the shield with green lights flashing on each side.
Inside was a bustling port. Ships of every shape and size lined up along the landing strip. I found an empty spot to land and moved the DUV III between two much bigger ships. I set her down and powered off the engines.
“Welcome to Mars.”
“I can’t believe there are so many people,” Adina said. “I wouldn’t have thought there were this many people anywhere.”
Noah Zarc: Mammoth Trouble (Noah Zarc, #1) Page 11