Infinity Riders

by Kekla Magoon

  The Cloud Cat zipped toward the Cloud Leopard, gaining altitude. Carly gazed down at the lonely gray surface. The landscape hadn’t changed, but it looked so different to her now. The plain, stony surface masked so much—the darkness, the vibrancy, the thousands of living beings that teemed within the caves. They had been inside, and that changed everything.

  Aboveground now, they had communication back. They radioed ahead to the Cloud Leopard, letting them know the landing craft was on approach.

  “Mission: success. We’re coming home,” Gabriel reported.

  “Great. I’m opening the landing bay doors.” Dash’s voice sounded strange and tight. Especially for a guy on the receiving end of such good news.

  Gabriel felt a tiny clutch in his belly, but he pushed it aside.

  Everything was fine.

  Great, in fact.

  His body still hummed with the adrenaline of dodging Stingers and fighting off Saws. It was probably just an overreaction.

  Dash met them in the landing bay.

  “Hey, man,” Gabriel said, leaping out of the Cloud Cat. “We got them.”

  Chris held up the jar full of Stinger spores.

  It should have been a moment of leaping and high fives. But Dash didn’t even crack a smile. His serious expression brought the others up short.

  Gabriel swallowed hard. The bad feeling in his stomach returned. “What is it?”

  The first words out of Dash’s mouth were “Piper’s been kidnapped.”

  “What?” Carly gasped. “What are you talking about?”

  “We got an SOS from the Light Blade.” Dash explained what had happened. He sighed heavily. “They tricked us. They’re holding her hostage for the Gamma jump.”

  Gabriel’s face clouded over. “No way. We’ll go over there and get her back.” He moved as if to get back in the Cloud Cat.

  “We can’t start fighting with the Omega crew,” Dash said, grabbing Gabriel’s arm.

  Gabriel shook him off. “We already have a problem with them taking our stuff,” he said angrily, thinking of the Weavers down in the tunnels.

  “They started it, the minute they messed with Piper.” Carly agreed with Gabriel. “We have no choice.”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Dash said, keeping his voice level. He’d been doing nothing but thinking about Piper all day. The others were coming into the situation fresh and hot. Of course they would be fighting mad and ready to get Piper back by storm.

  They didn’t know what Dash knew. They didn’t have the full perspective.

  Dash glanced at Chris, who had been notably silent during the discussion thus far. His expression appeared almost totally blank.

  On the flight deck, the argument continued.

  “So we refuse to leave, until they give us Piper,” Carly said. “And then we promise not to ditch them at Gamma Speed.”

  “They won’t give her up. It’ll turn into a standoff. We don’t have that kind of time,” Dash said. He alone knew his clock was running out. He glanced at Chris, who stared straight back at him, almost as if unseeing.

  “They have to get back to Earth just as fast as we do,” Carly argued. “And they can’t get home without us. If we refuse to leave, they won’t know we’re bluffing.”

  “We can’t afford to lose those days,” Dash insisted.

  The others glared at him, puzzled.

  Carly was more than puzzled—she was furious. Was the mission really all Dash cared about? After all his big talk about teamwork? She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest. No man gets left behind. They would always do what was necessary to save a friend in trouble. Hadn’t they just proved that with Colonel Ramos in the Sawtooth den? And he wasn’t even a member of their crew. But Dash was right about one thing—it would turn into a standoff.

  “We’ll have to do more than promise,” Gabriel admitted. “I don’t think they can believe we’d never ditch them in space. Because they would do it to us. They just proved that in the tunnels.”

  Chris finally spoke. “We haven’t lost Piper. She’s safe. It’s not like we’re leaving her behind.”

  “You would just take off and leave her with them?” Carly said. “For the whole next Gamma jump?” Her eyes blurred over, but she blinked the tears away. “That could be weeks.”

  Weeks that Dash didn’t have. “I’m the mission commander,” Dash said tightly. “And Chris is our guide. Our votes get extra weight.”

  “Not fair,” Gabriel protested. “We need the fifth vote for a tiebreaker.”

  “Piper’s vote,” Carly whispered.

  The crew stood in silence for a long moment. Carly stared at the screen that showed the Light Blade trailing them through orbit. For a moment on Infinity, she had thought there was hope for Siena and Niko. Fighting off that Saw together had felt good. It was right to join forces. Eight against the universe would be much better than four. Being frenemies really was not working out. For anyone. Why couldn’t the Omega crew see that?

  The truth had to be spoken, so Carly said it. “Piper would vote to put the mission first,” she told the others. “You know she would.”

  Niko, Ravi, and Siena returned to the Light Blade after the harrowing adventure. Their sacks full of Stingers had gone limp in the lack of moist air. They didn’t get enough to make a thousand, unless the Stingers could be revived to produce more spores each.

  “We’ll have to humidify them somehow,” Siena said.

  “Put ’em in a little sauna?” Ravi suggested.

  “Something like that,” Niko agreed. “But who knows if they’ll even make more spores in captivity.”

  “We should go back and release them into the caves,” Siena argued. “If we bring them with us, they’ll die.”

  “The ZRKs can build them an enclosure,” Niko suggested. “We’ll pump some steam in. They’ll be okay.”

  The three tubed their way to the rec room. They tied the Stinger bags together there—better to work with them after the Gamma jump. As soon as the Cloud Leopard was ready to go, the Light Blade had to follow within a short time or they’d lose the Gamma trail completely.

  Anna was alone up on the Light Blade bridge when the Cloud Leopard’s message came through.

  “We’re jumping to Gamma Speed,” Dash said. “Get ready to stick with us.”

  Anna smiled at him. “We’re ready. See how nice it is when we can all get along?”

  “Don’t push it,” Dash said. “We’ll expect to see and talk to Piper first thing when we get to Tundra.”

  “We’ll take good care of her,” Anna promised. “She’s our insurance policy, remember?”

  Dash’s jaw tightened. “Going to Gamma in five.” He punched out and the screen went dark.

  “Catch you on the flip side,” Anna murmured to the empty screen.

  The rest of the Omega crew made their way to the flight deck and strapped in for the Gamma jump. Down in the utility room, Colin released Piper’s wrist restraints in order to strap her air chair securely to the ship.

  Clearly, he didn’t want her going anywhere.

  “You could let me come up on the flight deck,” she told him. “I’m not going to mess with anything.”

  “You’re still a hostage,” he answered. “You stay here.”

  The door slid shut behind him, leaving Piper alone with the clicking and clunking sounds of the ship’s machinery. She looked around the small space. It was barely more than a utility closet. Pipes and tubes lined the walls. The door was a thick sheet of metal.

  Worst of all, there was only one reason she could think of for them to tie her to the ship. They were going to Gamma Speed.

  Piper fought against the sudden sting behind her eyes. A Gamma jump would last weeks, or even months. Would she be a prisoner the entire time?

  She hated this small room. Through the walls she could hear the engine noises…plus a hissing, rattling sound that didn’t seem entirely normal. Then again, nothing wa
s normal about this situation.

  Once they were in Gamma Speed, she would convince them to untie her. There would be no reason not to. They couldn’t very well keep her tied up for the next few weeks. At least she hoped not.

  Piper’s mind tripped toward her bigger worry. Would they release her on the next planet? Would she get to participate in any more retrievals, or was she going to be a captive for the remainder of the journey? On the one hand, she hoped Dash and the Alpha team would stage some sort of daring rescue, but on the other hand, she really did believe the mission should come first. The most important thing was getting the elements back to Earth in time.

  She wanted to kick herself for her gullibility, though. Her role in the Voyagers mission may have come to a halt, all because she’d gone out of her way to help someone in need. Next time, she promised herself, she wouldn’t be so foolish.

  —

  After the Gamma jump, everyone on the Light Blade relaxed. They could spend the next several weeks or more free from worry about getting lost in space or dodging strange creatures in unfamiliar terrain. Training for the challenges of Tundra would begin now.

  “All right!” Ravi cheered. “Four planets down, two to go.”

  Siena also grinned. It felt good to shed the concerns that came with each planet adventure. She looked toward Niko, expecting to meet a smile in response.

  Niko’s face was pale. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the flight deck. He wasn’t looking at the screen or at the crew. He stared straight ahead, as if unseeing.

  “Niko?” Siena asked. A different kind of concern flashed through her. “Are you okay?”

  He blinked several times. “Yeah, I…well, I…” He made a choking, gargling sound.

  “Whoa, man,” Ravi blurted out. “You don’t look so good.”

  Niko stumbled forward, bracing himself against the back of a chair. Ravi and Siena leapt to his sides and caught him as he fell to the floor. Niko’s eyes rolled back into his head, and his arms and shoulders twitched.

  “Niko! Oh no,” Siena cried. “What’s happening?” She cradled Niko’s head as Ravi tried to hold his flailing arms in place.

  Anna leaned over them. “Is it a seizure?”

  “Hurts,” Niko groaned.

  “Where?” Siena asked. “Where does it hurt?”

  Niko pushed his chin toward his right shoulder. Ravi grasped the collar of Niko’s uniform shirt and pulled it down over his arm.

  Siena gasped. A red welt the size of a fingertip dug into the skin over Niko’s shoulder socket. A Stinger spore had gotten through!

  “Oh my God,” Siena breathed. She exchanged a frightened glance with Ravi. This was bad. Really bad.

  Tiny red lines radiated from the center of the wound as the poison leached further into Niko’s system. “What do we do?” Ravi asked. “Dig out the spore? Try some kind of medicine?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna snapped from above. “All they told us was that Stinger spore poison is fatal.”

  Siena felt the words like a fist around her heart. Ravi lowered his eyes.

  Anna paced the room. “How could this happen?”

  Colin, ever practical, said, “The mission was dangerous. We all knew that.”

  Niko passed out in Siena’s arms. His body went limp.

  “We can’t just let him die!” Siena cried. “We have to try something.”

  “But Niko’s our medic,” Ravi said. “We’d kind of need him in order to help him.”

  “Well,” Anna said, trying to keep the unsettledness out of her voice. She glanced at Colin. “Actually…we do have another medic on board.”

  Siena and Ravi turned to her. “What are you talking about?”

  Anna cleared her throat. “We have a guest belowdecks.” She punched a button, and the screen showed Piper strapped in place in the utility closet. “A little insurance policy so the Cloud Leopard crew doesn’t try anything tricky.”

  Siena was horrified. “You kidnapped Piper?”

  The flight deck fell into silence as the crew processed this information.

  Ravi shrugged. “Makes sense. They definitely won’t ditch us now.”

  Siena glanced from the incriminating image on the screen to Niko’s limp body sprawled across her lap.

  On the screen, Piper’s eyes searched the room as if looking for an escape option. Siena grew angry looking at Piper’s distressed face. “That’s horrible. I can’t believe it. Where is she?” It was hard to determine the room from the close-up image.

  Anna and Siena stared at each other for a long moment. Not exactly a battle of wills, since Anna was in charge, but the flight deck fell silent as the girls faced off.

  Siena remained crouched beside the collapsed Niko, holding him in her arms. Anna stood over her.

  “Where is she?” Siena shouted. “I’ll go get her!”

  “The Stinger serum is fatal,” Ravi said. “There’s really no point.”

  “We have to try,” Siena said. If Piper could give them any chance of saving Niko’s life, then maybe, maybe Siena could live with what Anna and Colin had done. If some good could come of it…

  “Please.” The word was already on Siena’s lips as Anna turned away, rushing from the flight deck.

  Anna raced through the ship’s corridors toward the utility closet. This is stupid, she thought. It’s only prolonging the inevitable. And yet she found herself running as fast as she could.

  It hurt to hope for the impossible. But everything about the Omega crew’s mission was already on the edge of impossible.

  She threw open the utility closet door. The blond girl strapped motionlessly into her seat looked startled as the mission commander burst into her small would-be prison cell.

  “Piper,” Anna said breathlessly. “We need your help.”

  Find the Source. Save the World.

  Follow the Voyagers to the next planet!

  Excerpt copyright © 2016 by PC Studios Inc. Published by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Carly and Dash sat still for a moment, gazing out at the Tundra landscape. Wind whistled around them and blew spirals of snow into the air. Carly spoke into her transmitter, and Dash heard her voice as if she were speaking right next to his ear. “First on the agenda,” she said. “The cave.”

  “Right,” said Dash. He checked his MTB and read out the coordinates that Chris had provided.

  Carly pressed a button, and the motor roared. The Streak leaned and turned. Dash could see nothing but white, white, and more white as they sped along, until suddenly a strip of black rock would rear up and be gone, or they’d pass a snowdrift shaped by the wind into peaks with blue shadows. Ridges of jagged ice, cliffs that seemed to rise out of nowhere—it was a rugged landscape, where fast travel was perilous.

  And yet Carly kept the racer moving at incredible speed. “I love this!” she cried. She ran the Streak up a slope and over the top, and for a few seconds, they were airborne. “Wheee!”

  When they’d been speeding along for five or six minutes, Dash noticed that they were picking up a heat signal. “Slow down for a minute,” he said. “Something’s out there.”

  Carly braked. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Look at this reading.” He held out his wrist.

  “Maybe an ice crawler?”

  “I don’t think so. This thing is moving faster than any animal would.”

  Carly changed course, and they headed toward the signal. It wasn’t long before they saw a dark dot speeding across the landscape. It could be only one thing.

  “The Light Blade team,” Dash said. “They got here before us.”

  Carly’s voice sounded grim in Dash’s ear. “All right,” she said, “they’re here, but they haven’t found the cave. They’re in the wrong place. We’ll get there before them.”

  She stepped on the accelerator. The engine roared and screamed as Carly swung around a sharp curve.

  Dash’s heart was rac
ing—full of adrenaline. This is awesome, he thought, but the next moment, when he glanced down at the map, a shock ran through him. “Carly, look out! Straight ahead—a crevasse! Slow down!”

  Carly veered sharp right. The brakes squealed, and the racer stopped in a cloud of snow. They turned to look at each other, wide-eyed. Carly moved the Streak forward an inch at a time, until they were right at the edge of the great crack in the ice—sheer walls of deep blue plunged to an invisible bottom.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “We can do it easily,” Carly said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure. I’ve jumped wider ones a hundred times on the simulator. We just have to get up speed. Come on.”

  She turned the Streak and drove it back the way they’d come for half a mile, then turned again in the direction of the crevasse. Dash watched the speedometer—sixty miles per hour, sixty-five, seventy—and then looked through the windshield to see the lip of the yawning crack straight ahead, and suddenly, there was air beneath them, deep blue fathoms of it. But before he knew it, the white ground was below them again, the landing so smooth and soft he hardly felt it.

  Carly grinned and kept going. Dash gave her a quick, happy punch in the arm.

  For a while, they sped across the snow easily, like expert skiers, riding the curves, catching air on the high dunes, never slackening their speed. Dash sat back; his tension drained away.

  They crested a hill, and Dash looked out toward the horizon and saw pale, cloudlike columns rising against the sky, dipping and twirling and bending like mile-high dancers. They moved together, in an unruly crowd, maybe fifty of them, maybe more, sweeping across the snowy land toward a region of low hills.

  “Uh-oh,” said Carly. “Look.” She pointed to the west, where a line of darkness showed above the mountains.

  “A storm,” said Dash. “Do you think we’re headed for it?”

  “I think it’s headed for us,” Carly answered, and immediately, Dash could see that it was. The dark line was rising, covering more and more of the sky.