Compete (51 page)

Once again, the hologram Start/Finish Line projections from the ark-ships in formation flash by us, in the optical illusion of stripes, as we hurtle through the channel, this time
ripping
against the Stream toward the end of the Fleet.

“How much time?” Hugo mutters without taking his eyes off his Red Grid.

“Ten-seventeen on the Clock,” I reply, glancing up fast.

He cusses.

We still have to make one hard turn before we can get to the Finish Line and our own ark-ship. And with less than four minutes left to make the 15-minute Average, our time is not good at all.

“Go faster!” I yell.

Hugo growls and swipes the Thrust to increase speed. The way seems relatively clear up ahead, so at last we have a brief opportunity to make up some time we lost while slowing down and making the turn.

I admit, we’re really moving scary-
fast
now, passing a bunch of shuttles. Hugo seems to have found his rhythm. The Clock shows we have just over two minutes to go before the 15-minute Average.

“
Shuttle #72, prepare to turn left ahead. . . . Fleet termination, ten second warning.”

Okay, now we’re nearing the anchor ship, ICS-4, and the end of the Fleet.

“Doing good, get ready to Brake, Hugo!” I say, watching the Yellow Grid notches.

“Okay, got it!” he shouts back, then engages the Green Brake.

We coast smoothly up to the cross-channel just before the anchor ship ICS-4.

Hugo circle-swipes, as we maneuver the turn, and I circle-swipe to micro-adjust.

Just as we’re coming out of the turn, ready to merge into the racing lane and the home stretch, there are three shuttles that come hard on our tail, and two of them spin out.

They hurtle
directly at us
. . . .

Hugo cusses, freezes momentarily.

“
Go!”
I scream.

And then Hugo flips to Red and starts to maneuver us wildly out of the way of the oncoming disaster.

We spin out also, as we merge crookedly into the racing lane, coming at a super-wide angle.

“
No!
Don’t hit that ark-ship!” I scream, as my fingers fly on the Blue Grid.

Hugo reacts by swinging us even more out of alignment, until we are drifting out of the racing lane completely and starting to spin in a circle, completely losing our sense of direction.

“Brake! Brake! Just Brake!” I yell, as the violet plasma-coated hull of a nearby ark-ship starts to loom closer and closer. We’ve swung out of the racing lane completely and are about to slam into the column #3 formation space on the other side.

“Turn back! Turn! Move right!”

Hugo is circle-swiping uselessly, still on the Red Grid when he should be switching to Green to Brake.

Finally he flips to Green and swipes to slow down.

Our shuttle starts to slow and coast, and the angle of our drift widens even more, as though in slow motion.

We are now
past
the column #3 formation and still moving . . . slipping out of control and spinning farther out into the muddled off-black abyss that stretches only a single kilometer beyond the edge of the formation.

We come to it softly. . . .

As we pass the Quantum Stream Boundary, it feels gentle, a mild prickling, like a static curtain moving all around us. The shuttle lights flicker, as though a charge is being drained.

And then the view outside the window changes. It’s no longer homogeneous ugly grey but rich living
black
.

The Fleet is gone.

But oh, the stars! There are stars all around us once again! Billions of them! They are sharp and in focus . . . and we are drifting alone among the mauve and rose and gold radiance of a glorious, unknown giant nebula.

Stunningly beautiful.

Not a bad place to die.

Chapter Thirty

P
anic hits me with a surge of adrenaline. It blasts through my moment of stark, cold, debilitating, idiot
paralysis
.

“The Emergency Protocol . . .” I whimper, while I stare at the glorious colored stars and giant nebula . . . and at Hugo, turned to stone next to me.

“Oh my God . . .” he whimpers also. He is still in paralysis mode.

It seems, both of us have lost our voices from the terror.

I regain mine quickly. “Hugo! Wake up! Get a goddamn grip!”

I breathe heavily, wildly, panting with frantic panic. My pulse hammers in my temples, as I turn to the
QSBEP-1 Emergency Instructions
list that’s lit up in red text on the wall panel before me.

There’s not a second to lose, I recall. We have to hurry, because the Quantum Stream field trace dissipates almost instantly.

“Okay, what! What do we do?” Hugo mutters, looking like he’s about to weep.

We both stare at the Emergency Protocol.

“Okay,” I speak in a crazed hurry. “We listen to the space around us in all directions for any QS signal trace. Which means—turn the resonance scanners on!”

“Okay, yes,” Hugo responds. “Right! We use Global Scan Mode!”

We activate the resonance scanners and listen.

The ship’s acoustic grid crackles to life all around us, as we start hearing the eerie
silence
of space from the hull itself, with occasional pulsar bursts of unknown radio frequency, interpreted by the ship as dull bursts of faint static.

“How long do we listen?” Hugo exclaims after a while.

“I don’t know!” I am starting to hyperventilate at this point, and a lump is rising in the back of my throat.

“So, we keep listening!” Hugo looks at me, then looks out at the glorious space vista outside, fidgets in his seat.

“Yeah . . .” I say. “We kind of have to. This is the first step in the Emergency Protocol and we can’t proceed past it.”

“Oh, God . . . oh, God. . . .”

A
bout five minutes later, as the shuttle resonance scanners cycle on all frequencies, we’re still picking up only faint crackle echoes of distant radio waves from the stars. None of them are even close to being the Quantum Stream field traces.

Our only chances and our luck have come and gone, many, many long minutes ago.

It’s time to face it, but neither one of us—Hugo or myself—can.

We’re cut off.

We’re going to
die here
.

I listen with intense focused attention to the resonance scan going on around us. Empty eerie crackle, punctuated by silence.

My eyes are brimming with moisture now, and the lump in the back of my throat is choking me.

Gracie. . . . I’m never going to see my sister again.

Nor my little brother Gordie. Or George. My entire family back on Earth—I won’t be able to help them, or even stupidly die in the Games of the Atlantis Grail while trying to help them.

And I will never see
him
again.

Aeson Kassiopei.

“Hey! What was that?” Hugo reacts desperately at a small blip noise, followed by a hollow reverb echo.

I tense up and listen fiercely.

But it’s all nothing.

“Okay, is there anything in these damn instructions we can do?
Anything?
” Hugo says after another few minutes.

I frown, and stare at the red text, my mouth moving over the lines silently, reading the items over and over. Willing them to have a hidden magic solution.

“Instructor Okoi said our shuttle would lose the
acoustic resonance charge
that connects it to the Stream.”

Hugo stares. “Yeah? So? What does that mean, what can we do?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know, I guess—thinking out loud.”

How long does it take to die in space? Will it be oxygen depletion? Dehydration? Starvation?
Sickening thoughts start intruding.

The worst part is, I have no real idea of how well Atlantean shuttles handle life support. We never got around to studying it in detail, but from what I vaguely recall, the small personal flyer shuttle’s system gives us about a month of resources, if we conserve everything.

Great
, I think,
I get to die slowly, over a month, with Hugo Moreno going crazy next to me
.

More minutes pass. Hugo cusses constantly, both in English and Spanish—I think it helps him to relieve tension, and to be honest I don’t really blame him.

“Okay,” he mutters, partly to himself. “What, what, what? What does this next instruction say? What does it mean, ‘Sing the exact frequency to match quantum resonance until shuttle acknowledges the match and is keyed. Synch the shuttle to the QS field.’ What the hell is that? Maybe we can start singing some random crap?”

I frown. “I guess we could.”

So for the next minute Hugo sets the resonance scanners to “Record” mode and tries keying the shuttle with various note sequences. His voice is shaky and breathless, so mostly the resonance scanners just respond with: “Sequence unrecognized. Repeat sequence.”

“Why don’t you try it?” he says at last.

And I do. I sing a few sequences in a much better tone and on pitch. However all I get is this from the scanners: “Sequence recorded.”

“Now what?” Hugo glances from me to the Emergency Protocol list.

“I have no idea!” I exclaim. “I don’t even know what we’re
doing
now, this is bull!”

“Yeah, well,” he yells back at me. “Why didn’t the Goldilocks idiots just keep an audio recording of the Quantum Stream frequency
on file
, here in their goddamn shuttle computers? So that we wouldn’t have to go hunting for it on the sonar?”

My mouth drops. “Because, idiot,” I say, “it doesn’t
exist
in
real time!
Hello! Weren’t you listening in class all these weeks? It’s not a real frequency, it’s a
quantum
one, and it’s in constant flux and in a state of probability! The Quantum Stream is a probability field, not a discrete thing you can record, and if we could just bottle it up so easily, there wouldn’t be a problem now, would there be?”

Hugo frowns like a thundercloud at me.

“The reason we have to go chasing the field trace out
there
is because the QS frequency is modulating! It
changes
every damn moment! We can only hope to capture it quickly enough in real time and synch to it before it changes again!”

“Yeah, well, that’s crazy and impossible!”

“Exactly!” I yell. “That’s why the QSBEP-1 Emergency Protocol almost never works! It’s more luck than anything!”

“Well, screw this—this—” And again Hugo goes off into curses.

I put my head down and bump it against my console. I rub my temples, pull at my ponytail, yank it hard, and look up again periodically.

There has to be something
, I think.
Maybe I can beat it into my stupid brain.

Something
.

Minutes turn into half an hour.

Think, Gwen, think!

Out of nothing else to do, I sit up again, and make the resonance scanners play back the last known recorded QS field frequency before we Breached the Stream and lost the acoustic resonance charge on the shuttle. A series of five tones sound in a chord progression.

Hugo turns to me and watches dully. “What is it? What are you doing?”

“Playing back the last known QS field frequency before we Breached.”

“Can we use it?”

“No. It’s useless. It’s no longer the real time frequency of the Stream.”

Hugo slams his fist on his console.

“You know what?” I say. “Let’s just go ahead and pretend this is the correct frequency. So I am going to key the shuttle to it. Why not, right?”

“Whatever,” he mumbles in despair. “Yeah, do it. . . .”

So I sing the sequence, and the resonance scanners pick it up, and the shuttle hull responds, coming alive with golden lights along the etchings.

“Hey,” I say with false bravado. “At least we’re not dead in the water. We can pretend we’re going somewhere! Yay!”

And then I muse. “Okay, what are the next steps in the Emergency Protocol?”

Hugo reads out loud: “
Plot the signal coordinates onto the Navigation Grid. . . . Set new course and pursue the QS field immediately.
”

Why the hell not?
I think. And I call up the Yellow Grid, then the Fleet sub-menu, and scroll down to find ICS-2.

I tap it, and the Destination circle appears on the Navigation Grid next to our shuttle. Since at present it’s not to be found anywhere in
real space
, the circle designating the ark-ship just floats there, bumping our shuttle circle—adjacent to us, as though the Grid doesn’t know what to do with it or where to plot it.