Mike Stellar (19 page)

“I thought you’d be happy that I helped get you out of trouble.” Larc pouted.

I gestured around the pod.
“This
is getting me out of trouble? I’m surprised a hundred of these pods aren’t out trying to rein us back in.”

Larc snorted dismissively. “Oh, I’m sure the ship’s under lockdown by now. The Project thugs are probably rounding people up for questioning. I bet no one even knows we’re gone except for Sugar Bear and the other guys we escaped from—and who are they going to want to brag about
that
to?”

I felt a little panicky, but I did my best to stifle it. “So what’s our plan? Where are we going?”

Larc grinned. “I already told you, Mike. The course is set.”

“What course?”

“We’re continuing the mission. We’re going to find the
Spirit.”

That’s when I
turned a little green again.

Larc smiled as my face returned to its regular color. “Oh, yeah … that ‘stomach-settling’ vitamin serum your dad kept giving you? That was really a trace amount of radium. Nothing to hurt you; it was just a marker. That way your parents would be able to track your movements and always know where you were. Every member of the sabotage crew was marked.”

“That
was the blinky-dot map we saw in your apartment,” I said breathlessly.

She reached over and patted my back. “Yep. So no help with nervous queasiness, I’m afraid. The vitamin stuff never actually had any vitamins in it at all.”

“Great,” I said. “Next you’ll tell me that you’re really
an alien sent from another galaxy to help prevent the destruction of your home planet.”

Larc looked at me very calmly and then broke into a huge smile. She cocked her head to the side and said, “Weeeeeelllll … now that you mention it …”

My mouth fell open. I
knew
her white hair was abnormal! I started to say something when she let out a guffaw and slapped me on the back.

“I’m not an
alien!”
She was laughing pretty hard now. “But I had you going, didn’t I?”

“Ha-ha,” I said, not laughing.

Larc’s white hair brushed my face as she roughly pushed past me and stared out the window.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch ou—”

But Larc cut me off. Her voice was frantic. “Shut up, stupid. Can’t you see? It’s the Fold. Already! We’re coming up on it too fast.” She pushed past me again, this time moving the other way, and she tried furiously pounding controls at the front of the pod.

“Let me help,” I said, awkwardly pushing off my seat to float toward her.

“You don’t know how to pilot this ship!” she said frantically as she continued to whack at buttons.

“Neither do you!” I retorted. “I’ve at least had a few years playing ship simulators.”

“No, Mike. You don’t understand … it’s on autopilot. Oh, man, it’s going to get bumpy in here.”

I harrumphed angrily and pulled myself down into my seat. “Belt,” I muttered. Who was she to get all bossy all of a sudden?
I
was the bossy one. As soon as my belt clicked, though, the pod rolled violently upside down and I was glad to have my seat belt on. Larc banged her head on the controls hard enough to make me wince just from the sound of it.

“Are you okay?” I shouted over the alarms coming from the controls. “Your head,” I said, pointing to the gash on her forehead.

She made a face and reached up and felt along the jagged edges of the cut. It wasn’t bleeding but it really looked like it should be.

“I’m fine!” she shouted back. “Hold on!”

The pod righted itself and started to dive backward. It was gaining speed so quickly that we could hear the metal of the hull groaning and creaking.

“The Fold is sucking us in, isn’t it?” I shouted over the noise.

“It’s a strong one, all right. The plasma-propulsion cells still need to finish powering up!”

Larc didn’t seem panicked, but she was very brisk with her words. She still wasn’t buckled in and was fruitlessly pushing and flipping and twisting controls right and left with her feet sticking straight out behind her.

“If I could just …,” she said, grasping a thin
joystick-like thing that was sticking up from the floor in front of the controls. She fought with the stick, grunting and pulling.

“Let me help you,” I hollered over the twisting metallic noise that was growing louder and louder. I unbuckled my seat belt and propelled myself to her side. We both heaved and pulled. Larc gave one last grunt and I gave a sharp kick and the stick jammed into the floor of the pod, sinking out of view. The pod immediately slowed down and stopped spinning. We could see the outer edges of the Fold approaching, but at a much slower, much safer pace.

Wiping her hair from her forehead, Larc said, “There. Manual override.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You must play simulators, too.”

She shrugged. “It’s kind of intuitive.”

Larc finally pulled herself down into her seat and said, “Belt.” She didn’t look tired, but she did look anxious.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You’re not still below the weather, are you?”

I smiled sheepishly.
“Under
the weather? No. I think I’m okay now.”

“Good,” she said. “Because it’s about to get pretty crazy in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have a—Hey, look!”

The ship was entering the Fold now and streaks of color flew by. One particular streak was light blue and moving almost parallel to our pod.

“It’s the heat signature of the
Spirit,”
I said in awe. “At least, I think it is. I’ve read that when ships fly through Folds, they leave a wake of—”

“You’re right,” Larc said. “It’s pretty faint after two years, but it’s there. We’re definitely on the right track.”

I barely heard her. I had never seen anything like it. The colors were so vibrant, almost three-dimensional. It was like being inside the brightest rainbow I’d ever seen. I found myself thinking of Mom and how much she would love to see this. I wondered what was happening to her and Dad.

“They’ll be fine,” Larc said, floating up behind me and looking out the window with me. “As long as we get back in time, everything will be fine.”

“Get back? I thought you said we weren’t going back.”

“Well,
eventually
we’re going back, Mike. But we need David Hazelwood and Hubble and the rest of the
Spirit
crew first.”

“I don’t think they’re going to fit in this pod,” I said, trying a joke to lighten my mood.

“Probably not,” Larc replied with a grin. “But I bet we can work something out.”

The colors were flying by and it suddenly started to sink in that we were really on our way to the
Spirit …
or what was left of it.

“You’re going to really want to hold on to the seat of your pants, Mike,” Larc said, interrupting my thoughts.

I watched her curiously as she flexed the fingers of her right hand and then held her palm out like she was going to grab my face. I could see the ugly bluish star-shaped scar. The vein in the middle of it was throbbing.

She smiled and said, “Buckled in tight?”

I chewed my lip and answered, “Yeah, but what are you doing?” And she came at me with her palm sticking straight out in front of her.

“Not that crazy finger thing again!” I said, and dodged my head out of her way, but she wasn’t really coming at me. She floated past me to a small indentation on the wall. I had guessed it was just another control or light switch or something, but now, as I looked at it, I saw that it had the same shape as the scar on her hand.

“Hold on to your britches, Mike,” she said. “This is going to be wild.” And she pressed her palm onto the indentation.

Nothing happened. She took her hand away from the wall, shook it fiercely, and then matched her scar back up with the groove. Still nothing. She squinched up her face in frustration and then her eyes widened.

“It’s shorted out,” she said almost imperceptibly. “From you!” She jabbed the air at me.

“What’s shorted out?” I asked, confused. “I didn’t touch anything!”

“My hand!” she shouted. “Your sweat from holding it! The Wormer is toast!”

“Mother of donkeys, Larc, what are you
talking about?”

Then it was almost as if I could actually hear a
ding!
announcing that she had an idea.

“Come here,” she commanded.

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “What are you doing?”

“Just
come here
or we’re going to
miss it!”
she shouted.

I floated over to her and she grabbed my shoulder. Hard. “Turn your head to the side,” she ordered. Then, when I was too slow, she grabbed my head with her free hand and twisted it so that my ear was facing her instead of my face. “Don’t move.”

“What are you …?
Ow!”
I felt a white-hot shot of pain in my ear, and then a millisecond later it was gone.

“Thanks,” Larc said. “Now hold on for your life.”

Before I even
had a chance to try to figure out why the scar on Larc’s hand matched the indentation on the wall of the pod, or what she had done to my ear, or why she had been yelling at me, we were engulfed in light. I scrambled to my seat and yelled, “Belt!” I pulled it extra tight.

The pod flew upward like we were in a plasma-charged elevator. Then it went down. Then to the left and to the right and to the left again. The only thing I could see was a brightness that swallowed everything. Yet something about the brightness curved in, like we were shooting through an insane waterslide.

I could hear Larc shouting, “Hold on! Just a few more minutes!”

Those few minutes felt like dog years, but eventually
the brightness dimmed and the pod stopped lurching. Larc’s arm fell from the wall and she gave me a tired smile.

“Wormhole,” she said. “What a ride.”

I stammered, “That was a … We just went through a …”

“A wormhole, Mike,” she said, floating past me, her arm flopping limply at her side. “A shortcut through space … just like a worm taking a shortcut from one side of an apple to another. It’s
way
faster than going all the way around the apple. Though maybe a little bumpier.” She smiled and then pointed at me. “You almost ruined it, you know. But then, thankfully … well, you didn’t.”

I didn’t know what to say, except “Your hand is smoking.”

Sure enough, little wisps of smoke were rising from her palm. Larc didn’t say anything; she just rubbed her hand on her jumpsuit and the smoking stopped.

Looking out the window, I noticed we weren’t in the Fold anymore. In fact, there was no Fold to be seen anywhere. There were millions of stars and, in the distance, a small red planet.

Larc said, “Aries. Once we get a little closer, we should see the
Spirit
in a high orbit.”

“But I thought the
Spirit
was going to Mars,” I said, confused.

“They were, Mike, but Aurora hijacked their course and sent them out here to no-man’s-land, where she thought they’d never be discovered.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I could.

Larc pulled herself down into her chair and smiled. She was being suspiciously quiet. I floated up behind her and watched out the front window. Slowly, the planet Aries began to grow larger and larger as we moved closer to it. It looked similar to Mars, but there were patches of green—and black—among the different colors of red.

As our pod gracefully propelled toward the planet, I saw a silver shimmer. As its orbit brought it closer to us, we could just barely make out the
Spirit.
It had an eerie resemblance to the
Sojourner.

“That’s it,” I whispered. “The
Spirit.
Man, it looks beat up.” There were pockmarks all along the side, and there were areas that had been blackened by something.

“Shouldn’t we hail them?” I asked, reaching for the buttons on the control panel.

“I’m already on it,” Larc said with a sparkle in her eye.

After a few seconds there was a loud buzz from the controls.

“That should be them,” Larc said, pressing a green button.
“Spirit
, this is the
Liberator.
Do you copy?”