Fugitive From Asteron (15 page)

“Let him go, Alex,” said Mykroni.
He tried to release my grip on Chuck, but I resisted.

“Make your apology, Chuck, and I
will let you go.” I twisted the arm tighter. A lifetime spent primed for
violence gave me the edge over Chuck.

“Okay . . . 
okay!
”
He shouted.

I finally released him.

He moaned, rubbing his arm. “Who
the hell are you?” He scanned me with bitter eyes.

I made a move to grab him again,
but he stepped back and held up his hands to stop me.

“Enough!” he said. The boldness he
had shown in attacking his father was tempered now that he was facing a male
his own age—and one who cared nothing about his well-being.

As Chuck’s glance moved from me to
Mykroni, his face looked cunning, as though he was surveying the situation and
calculating his next move. He then dropped his head and put his hands over his
face.

“Dad, I’m in trouble, and it’s all
my own fault. I have no one to turn to except
you
.” He looked up at
Mykroni. “It’s not because this guy butted in”—he glanced disapprovingly at me—“but
actually, I
am
sorry for the way I
acted . . . really sorry.”

Chuck’s sudden change of mood
calmed Mykroni down. He turned to me and smiled. “Get back to work, Alex. I
don’t need any rescuing.”

As I was about to return to my seat,
Chuck offered me his hand for a shake. “No hard feelings,” he said, as if it
were
my
behavior that needed excusing.

I shook his hand warily. He smiled
at me, but there were no crinkle lines around his eyes. Chuck was the first
Earthling to shake my hand whose smile did not extend to his eyes. Was his
apology sincere? I glanced at Mykroni, who seemed taken in by the gesture.

The two men stepped outside. I
could still hear muffled voices through the closed door, but they were calmer
now.

“What do you say, Dad?”

“Why do I always give in?”

“I’ll come by the house for it
later.”

“Come with a
payment
schedule, one you can stick to this time.”

“Of course. Say, I really
appreciate this!”

“A day will come when you push me
too far.”

From a window on the flight deck, I
watched Chuck leaving. I noticed that Mykroni did not call him
son
.

On my first day at MAS, after my
job interview, I had asked Kristin why Mykroni addressed me by that word. “It’s
a term of
fondness
,” she explained, then added: “Mykroni has a real
son who works at MAS. You’re bound to bump into him.”

Indeed I had.

I was invited to join a meeting
later that day. When I arrived at the conference room, Kristin’s flight
instructor, Jeff, greeted me at the door. Jeff was also a pilot at MAS and
captain of the flying team Kristin belonged to, called the Gold Streaks. The
team’s name reflected the curved gold stripe on the graphite body of their
planes, which ran from the tapered nose, across the fuselage, to the tip of the
tail.

“Thanks for coming, Alex,” Jeff
said. “Come in.”

I sat at an oval table with Jeff,
Kristin, and the other five MAS pilots performing in the upcoming air show. On
the wall was a large, high-resolution photograph of six sleek planes flying in
a triangular formation with the sun glistening off their fuselage and their
wing tips almost touching.

During the past two weeks I had
flown with each of these pilots in a similar configuration. On Asteron I had
learned the high-performance, high-speed flying in tight formation that they
were trained to do. The superb technical advancement of their crafts made it
possible for me to learn their flying patterns in a short time.

After we all exchanged greetings,
Jeff told me why they had asked me to come: “Alex, we’ve been looking for an
eighth pilot to join the Gold Streaks. We fly in air shows around the area, and
our biggest event is the show that Rising Tide has every year on Reckoning Day.
Our team is completely voluntary. None of us has to fly in this show to be a pilot
at MAS, although the company helps our team out. It gives us time off from work
to practice and lets us use its planes—and it likes the publicity it gets from
our performances.

“Anyone who joins the Gold Streaks
must be approved by every one of the other fliers. Since the nature of the work
is inherently unforgiving of any mistakes, every pilot on the team has to have
the highest trust in all the others. We had a meeting in which your name was
nominated as the eighth flier. We voted, and it was unanimous. We all want to
have you on the team. No one so new to MAS has ever been offered a place in the
formation before. So this is a compliment to your flying, Alex. It’s the
highest compliment we can pay, because we trust you with our lives.” Jeff
paused while the others nodded in agreement. “So what do you think, Alex? Would
you like to join the Gold Streaks?”

I looked at Jeff, Kristin, and the
others as they smiled at me. For the first time, I was being rewarded for the
thing that made me unequal, made me stand out, made me different from others. I
felt a bond with the people before me that went beyond flying and embraced life
itself.

“I indeed would like to be on the
Gold Streaks.
Thank you.
I accept!”

Then the most amazing thing
happened. The pilots raised their hands to me and
clapped
. I thought
of the other Alexander when he hit his home run. I remembered how his face had
looked when the crowd cheered. I did not have a name for the high lift of his
head, the contentment in his eyes, the glow on his face. I knew only that he
acted the opposite of how I had been taught, which was to look down when others
addressed me. At that moment, with the pilots clapping, I raised my head high
like the nose of a plane on a climb.

When the meeting ended, I
approached Kristin. “What is it called,” I asked, “when a person is pleased
with the things he can do, with his . . . abilities?”

Her big eyes swept across the
ceiling as they did when they reached for answers to my questions. Then she
smiled. “It’s called
pride
. It’s what you felt just now at the
meeting. I know because it was all over your face, Alex. You looked so proud—of
your flying and of yourself. And you deserve to be.”

I thought of all the things
Earthlings cared about—their food, their clothing, their gardens, their work. I
realized that these things were important because the Earthlings prized
something else above all. This something was not what I had been taught to
appreciate. At the top of the mountain of an Earthling’s cares was his own
person, not as a small stone in a massive mound but as a separate peak of its
own.

“Alex, do you realize you
smiled
at the meeting? That’s the
first time
I ever saw you smile. And
your eyes crinkled too, the way you say Earthlings’ eyes do. For a minute, I
thought you might even laugh. You looked as though you really could, you know.”

Earth’s only moon was a sliver in
the sky that night, protecting me with darkness as I entered my spacecraft in
the empty field. I glanced at my watch: It was midnight. There were no lights
on along the winding lane of dwellings folded into the hillside, including
Kristin’s house, across the road. Lifting myself up to the craft, I thought of
Kristin, my job, the Gold Streaks—all the things I now had to live for. Feran
and his world were fading fast, like a nightmare exposed to the light of day. I
was eager to get back to my apartment, sleep for a few hours, then wake up
early to prepare for my classes on the solar system and my exercises in
navigation. Later, there were rehearsals for the air show. I had so much to do
in the rich new existence that was my life. I sat by the radio’s serene blue
monitor on the flight deck. It had remained dormant for two weeks. Perhaps
Feran had returned to Asteron and found another amusement. I checked for messages,
but I expected none. Suddenly, jagged vertical lines slashed the monitor,
forming the rising and falling inflections of Feran’s malevolent voice.

“Animal!” he raged, gashing the
screen with sharp peaks of violent colors. “Did you expect me to drain the entire
Gulf of California on your behalf? I have recovered enough sections of the
camper to realize your vile traitor bones were not in it. I found the
parachute, and it was
still stowed
.”

The camper had a parachute that
could be deployed so that the vehicle would have a good chance of landing
intact and staying afloat for a while to enable a rescue.

“If you were inside the camper, you
would have deployed the chute. Even
you
would not be so stupid as to
fail in that task.”

I could have released the chute from
the mother ship, but a parachute landing in which the camper remained intact
would have made it easier to locate—and easier to discover I was not aboard. So
instead I took my chances with the chute stowed. What were the odds that Feran
would find that particular piece of equipment in the miles of sea and know for
certain that I had not deployed it? Did his luck mark my doom?

“There was not a fragment in the
water to suggest the spacecraft had hit, and no reports of any ship crashing
over land either. Where are you, pig? You have no fuel and no password for
navigation. You are trapped where you are.”

The new blue shirt, which Kristin
said matched the color of my eyes, was now stained with dark patches of sweat.

“You are an alien on a hostile
planet. Do you think you can hide from the supreme ruler of Asteron? Oh, and by
the way,” he added mockingly, “Coquet has learned of your little trick, and she
is quite displeased with you.”

I listened in dismay.

“No doubt you are hiding somewhere,
like a rat in a sewer.” He laughed viciously. “So I am going to help you, traitor.
You give me the metal box in the ship’s bay, which is of no value to you, and I
will give you your rotten life, which is of no value to me. You get rid of
something you have no need for, and I will do the same. Call me.”

He gave me his phone number.

“Call and tell me where the cargo
is. That is all you have to do, and I will pick it up and have no further
dealings with you.”

I stared at the screen, waiting for
him to finish.

“You have twenty-four hours to get
me the cargo in exchange for your life. Of course, if you do not comply, Coquet
will want to know. She will demand that I find you. She will want to play with
you until she has her fill. Then, swine, you will die exquisitely.”

The waves of Feran’s voice
disappeared into stillness. The monitor returned to a peaceful blue. And I
dropped my head with a thud against the flight deck.

Chapter 12

After I had heard Feran’s message on Friday, my sixteenth day
on Earth, his threats pounded my mind like a headache I could not shake.

How long?
I wondered, as I
sat in a meeting room on the MAS airfield. I gazed at one of our team’s planes
parked outside. The exquisite flying machine looked like a painting framed
within the large window.
How long?
I wondered the entire weekend,
while I flew one of those awesome machines in rehearsals for the air show and
met with the other Gold Streaks after each run to correct any near errors in a routine
intolerant of any mistakes. Despite the safety I felt in the air, how long
could I remain alive while on the ground?

This question continued to worry me
when I returned to work on Monday morning to perform underwater maneuvers in a
spacesuit, mimicking the buoyancy of space. Two divers were on duty for the
sole purpose of rescuing me should a failure of my life-support system trap me
underwater in the suit. Why the painstaking effort to protect my life? For the
pleasure of Coquet?

How long would it take Feran to
find me? There were almost a million people in the city of Rising Tide. What
group would Feran be stalking—young males, pilots, aliens, or alien pilots? I
shuddered at the thought of how small that last group might be.

And why was Feran holding a flexite
suit that belonged to Merrett Aerospace Systems, a suit used solely for a
secret project? How was Feran linked to Project Z? Did he have a spy at MAS?
Because Feran nurtured a cadre of spies on Asteron as meticulously as the
Earthlings tended their gardens, I figured he must have had someone gathering
information for him on the now-canceled secret project. But with the security
measures in place for MAS grounds and buildings, it would be difficult for
someone from the outside to break in. Indeed, I had learned from Kristin that
MAS had experienced no break-ins, or even attempted break-ins, for the duration
of Project Z. Without evidence of any breach of security from the outside, I
figured Feran’s spy might more likely be someone
inside
MAS.

After completing my work in the tank
that Monday, I joined Kristin for a soft drink during our break. Too worried to
sit, I stood over her as she relaxed on a bench in a grassy area outside our
building, with the soaring MAS rocket sculpture behind her in the distance.

At the risk of raising her
suspicions, I leaned toward her, my foot on the bench near her legs, and once
again I asked why she hated Asteron.

Her hand stopped with her cup
midway to her mouth, as if she had lost her desire to drink. She placed the cup
on the bench and paused a long while before answering. “They do things to us.
Then they disappear like ghosts without a trace.”

“What did they do to you, Kristin?”

Her mouth drew tight and her eyes
became hard with hatred, an unyielding hatred that surprised me. Although she
flew only unarmed craft, Kristin had the skill to be a military pilot. When I
saw her face at that moment, I felt certain that she could drop a deadly
payload without flinching. I knew how the name of my vile homeland could drive
me
to kill, but I had no idea why it seemed to evoke the same response in Kristin.

“Others say we can’t prove a thing,
but I think they come here and try to hurt us!” She stared fixedly into space
at a disturbing vision of her own.

I raised her hands to my chest and
squeezed them. “How did they hurt you, Kristin?”

“Why do you insist, Alex? And why
do you stare so intensely?” She pulled her hands away and drew back from me.
She did not seem to notice hitting the drink by her side, which spilled onto
the grass. “How can this concern you?”

I righted the cup and leaned in
closer. “Did Asteron have anything to do with Project Z?”

“No, not with Project Z.”

“Are you sure?”

“Asteron had nothing at all to do
with Project Z.”

“Are you positive?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you look so troubled at the
mention of that planet, Kristin?”

“It’s something I want to forget, something that happened
before
Project Z started, so, Alex, please don’t pester me!
And don’t get crazy
again over dangers that are only in your mind. You have this thing about
Project Z, you know.”

I continued to ponder this matter
as I walked to my workplace after our break. The only direct link I had to both
Asteron and MAS was Mykroni. But he had been here for twenty-five years and
acted just like the Earthlings. Besides, after a lifetime of suspecting
everyone around me of being an agent—and many were agents—I could not bring
myself to doubt the man who called me son and who presided over my training as
though I were a rare gem he was cutting. I would have to find another link.

Kristin was troubled by Asteronians
who seemed to sneak around like ghosts, upsetting her contentment. I too was
haunted by those ghosts, especially the bristly presence inside the black cape that
I could not escape. It seemed to accompany me when I arrived at my workspace, a
narrow room containing the essentials of my new life: a desk at the end under a
window, a computer, several monitors, and rows of shelves rapidly filling with
notebooks and manuals from my studies. I sat at my desk and reviewed the things
I knew about Project Z.

According to Kristin, the people
involved with that secret project were a small group of accomplished scientists
and engineers whom her father had worked with closely in the past. Others who
performed more limited tasks on the project were, she said, handpicked veteran
employees who had been with the company for many years. It seemed unlikely that
a spy from Asteron could infiltrate such a carefully selected project team.
Perhaps the spy was someone
inside
MAS but
outside
Project Z.
How, then, could the spy learn about this secretive undertaking? To know about
Project Z, I figured, was to read its computer files.

As a pilot in the Space Travel Division,
I could access some of the MAS databases with security codes. Would not the
Project Z team, including Dr. Merrett, use a similar protocol to access its
databases? I pulled my keyboard toward me to conduct a small test. When I tried
to search for entries containing the term
Project Z
, only one item
came up. It was a memo that Charles Merrett had sent to his employees
announcing the cancelation of the project. That memo, available to the entire
staff at MAS, contained no information about the nature of the project. I
continued searching, but I found no other documents on the project. As I
suspected from common security protocols, the files from the secret project
appeared to be unavailable on the company’s general computer system. The
records from the secret project were probably accessible only via specific
computers in protected workspaces with their own separate systems.

I figured it would be difficult for
someone outside the project to gain access to these restricted files. I restlessly
tapped my fingers on the keyboard. Was there a simpler way?

Pondering the matter, I leaned back
in my chair and gazed out the window. Outside my building was the executive
parking lot, and across from it was the executive office building, where Dr.
Merrett had an office. I had an idea. Could a spy somehow have read privileged
information from Dr. Merrett’s computer monitor? Could a spy have seen Dr. Merrett’s
screen with a telescope from a window in our building? Because Dr. Merrett
managed the project personally, he would have been the one with access to
all
of its files—the perfect person to spy on. Surely a computer in his office
would have access to those files.

Earthlings did not expect danger. Instead,
they were
relaxed
. There had been no wars on the planet for a century
and no break-ins at MAS for years. Despite the secret nature of Project Z,
could Charles Merrett have been
relaxed
? I wondered if he could have
overlooked a way in which a sinister mind might steal information from him. I
decided to look for an opportunity to examine his office.

My chance came that afternoon. From
my window I noticed Kristin’s slim form as she walked toward the executive
office building with flowers in her arms. Guessing what she was going to do
with them, I raced out to meet her. Just as I thought, she was about to bring
the flowers to her father’s office. I asked if I could accompany her. At first
she hesitated. “He’s been so grouchy lately. I really don’t want you to meet
him until he’s back to his cheerful self again.” But when I prodded, she
relented. “Well, okay. Come with me.”

Dr. Merrett was not in when we
arrived. However, his assistant, a nicely groomed older female, introduced to
me as Margaret, looked up from her desk to greet us with a smile. She extended
her hand to me for the handshake that I found typical of Earthlings. Eyeing
Kristin’s flowers, Margaret approached an electronic keypad by the closed door
of Dr. Merrett’s office in what seemed like a routine procedure for them. While
Kristin and Margaret exchanged a few pleasant words, I positioned myself in a
spot where I could see the numbers the assistant pressed. With neither of the
females paying attention to me or showing the slightest suspicion, I committed
the code to memory.

The door opened, and Kristin
entered. She picked up a vase sitting on her father’s desk, then proceeded down
the hallway to a kitchen to prepare her arrangement.

With Margaret resuming work at her
desk and Kristin occupied with the flowers, I had an opportunity to observe the
inner office of my employer from a spot in the outer reception area. Located in
a corner of the third and top floor of the building, Dr. Merrett’s office
contained a pleasing arrangement of bookcases, leather chairs, and large-leafed
plants, with a desk and table for his work area. Included in the office
arrangement was a small adjoining conference room, which could be entered
either from his workspace or from the hallway. His desk area contained two
large windows, one facing the side of the building and another facing the
front. The window on the side looked out onto the parking lot and the
five-story building of the Space Travel Division across the way, which housed
many of our group’s facilities, along with the offices of other departments in
the company that rented space from our division. The window in the front faced
the building entrance and gardens, as well as the mountains in the distance.
Typical of Earthlings, Dr. Merrett had his desk arranged so that it faced the
entrance and the mountains rather than the parking lot. To Earthlings life
meant pleasure, as I was learning, so I was not surprised that Dr. Merrett preferred
looking out at the more scenic sight. The table on which he kept his computer
screen, at a right angle to his desk, was set so that his back would be toward
the parking lot. This meant that his monitor was visible from the window facing
the Space Travel Division.

Apparently liking the natural
light, Dr. Merrett kept his desk and worktable close to the windows. It seemed
that from a window directly across on the third floor, Dr. Merrett’s head would
block the screen. However, a window one flight of stairs up, on the fourth
floor of our building, seemed to be positioned at a good angle for looking down
on Dr. Merrett’s screen. Could a telescopic camera positioned there pick up and
record the contents of Dr. Merrett’s monitor?

Afterward, I learned who occupied
the fourth-floor office in our building that seemed to be at a perfect vantage
point. To my surprise, it was someone I had met from another department who was
interested in transferring to our division. He liked the Gold Streaks and had
come to watch us practice for the air show. I had an idea. With Mykroni’s
permission, I invited him for a ride with me in one of our aerobatic planes. We
arranged to meet at dawn the following morning, Tuesday, before our shifts
began. I suggested meeting him in his workplace so that I could see how Dr.
Merrett’s office looked from that location.

A break from my worries came later
that afternoon when two gold-striped planes left the runway, their graceful
lift forming a sharp contrast to the roar of their engines. Kristin and I rose
high in the sky to practice our two-plane demonstration for the air show.
Climbing steeply, our sleek crafts pierced the blue sky like two gray-black
rockets. From her plane, Kristin called commands to me on the radio, which I
had to execute with flawless precision because of our high speed and close
proximity. Although our planes were equipped with automatic flight systems, the
pilots in the show flew them manually, which gave us the greatest
maneuverability and a thrill beyond imagining.

Kristin and I began miles apart,
flying upright directly toward each other at a combined speed of over one
thousand miles an hour. Within moments her plane grew from a speck to a ball to
a large presence in my windshield. I held my path head-on toward her as the
distance between us rapidly closed, because I would not change direction
without her command. Finally it came: “Break now,” said the soft voice through
the receiver in my ear. On the
n
in
now
, as we had planned
previously, I tugged at the stick, rolling exactly ninety degrees right, with
my wing tip up before Kristin could pronounce the rest of the word. Kristin, I
knew, had made the same rotation in her plane. I felt the thump of the sudden
change in air flow and the blast of her engines as our planes passed belly to belly
within a couple of feet of each other.

We flew out, turned, and then
headed straight toward each other again. At scant seconds before impact, I
again had not received Kristin’s command. She seemed to be waiting as long as
she dared, testing me to see if I would flinch first. I held my speed on a
blinding course toward her, the distance between us shrinking rapidly, until
there were no more miles—only yards—separating us. “Pull now,” her voice
finally whispered in my ear. Before she completed the second word, I pulled the
nose of my craft directly vertical. She did the same with hers. Our planes rose
together, their bodies almost touching, like a couple joined for a dance. With
our planes forming mirror images, we looped away from each other and nose-dived
in spirals toward the ground.