Space Case (6 page)

“What are we fighting here?” I asked. “Angry pudding?”

Roddy frowned. “Don't be fooled by the appearance of the Gogolaks,” he warned. “What they lack in agility they make up for in cunning and guile. Plus, one bite from them makes your brain dissolve into sludge.” With that he blasted three into smithereens. Their defense didn't seem particularly cunning to me. After the first got blown away, the other two simply froze and gibbered in terror, allowing Roddy to pick them off effortlessly.

“We're not supposed to be using the ComLinks,” I warned.

“Don't tell me you bought that ‘we have to leave them
open for emergencies' garbage. Want to know what the real story is?”

Before I could answer, Roddy told me anyhow. Roddy is prone to rants. He's a smart kid; unfortunately, he likes everyone else to
know
how smart he is. “NASA is freaking out about Holtz kicking the bucket. They've told everyone back on earth that this place is safe as can be—and suddenly our doctor's dead on the surface of the moon. The media will go nuts with that story, so NASA's trying to control it.
That's
why they want us off the Links. They don't want us blabbing the truth to our friends before they can put out a press release with a nice, sanitized version of what happened. They'll say Holtz croaked because of a heart attack or something, not 'cause he went out on the surface solo like a moron.”

I frowned, annoyed at how Roddy was talking about Dr. Holtz, then glanced at the avatars of the other players blasting Gogolaks close by. “You're saying all this on an open Link. Any one of these people could be listening.”

“They're not paying any attention to us. And they don't have any idea what our real identities are. For all they know, we're two yahoos from Podunk.”

“Still, we should watch what we say. If you're right—”

“Of course I'm right.”

“—and if we spill the beans, Nina will want our heads.”

“I'm not forcing you to stay on here. If you're so worried about breaking the rules, why'd you even jack in?”

“Your father said I should come check on you.”

Roddy laughed spitefully. “Of course he did. Rather than come check on me himself.” He spun around and blasted four more aliens into oblivion. “Tell him I'm totally fine.”

“You sure?” I asked. I tried to pick my words carefully, wary of saying anything classified. Thankfully, the other players all appeared distracted with blasting the enemy into pink smithereens. “You're not upset about Dr. Holtz?”

Roddy's avatar shrugged, unmoved, which meant that real Roddy had just done the same thing. “I didn't really know him all that well.”

I stared at Roddy, trying to read his expression, but in the virtual world this was almost impossible. The avatars don't mimic the subtle movements of their players' faces. Instead, everyone always looks like they're posing for a magazine cover. I had no idea if Roddy was telling the truth or not.

“Well,
I'm
upset,” I said. “I think the whole thing's kind of weird.”

Roddy laid down a carpet of gunfire and took out a dozen Gogolaks in one sweep. “Why's that?”

I decided not to repeat the story of overhearing Dr. Holtz's conversation the night before his death. Knowing
Roddy, he'd be far more interested in my breaking the space toilet—and he'd never let me hear the end of it. Instead I brought up something else that had occurred to me. “Living up here was Dr. Holtz's dream come true,” I said. “He worked his whole life to be on this mission. And then, only six months in, he does a solo outside without authorization? I can't believe he'd take a risk like that.”

Roddy shrugged again. “He was kind of old. Maybe he was losing his mind. My great-grandpa's nuttier than a granola bar. He wanders away from home all the time. Once, they found him at the zoo in his pajamas. Maybe Holtz was losing it too.”

I shook my head. “No way. NASA screened all of us for any kind of mental issues. Especially Dr. Holtz. They wouldn't have sent him up here if they'd found he was getting senile.”

No Gogolaks had attacked for a while. They appeared to have retreated.

Roddy's avatar scanned the horizon carefully anyhow. “Maybe Holtz developed something while he was here. Some kind of space madness.”

“Space madness?” I repeated, failing to hide my skepticism.

“Yeah,” Roddy said. “Like where you go bonkers from being cooped up here for too long.”

“I could imagine
me
getting that,” I said. “But not Dr. Holtz.”

“On your left!” Roddy screamed.

I spun around to find a horde of gelatinous aliens mounting a sneak attack. They hadn't retreated; they'd flanked us. I whipped my gun toward them and blasted away. However, since I wasn't very adept at shooter games, I missed most of them and took out two of my fellow players by accident. They both stared at me as they winked out of existence.

“Smooth move,” Roddy groused.

The Gogolaks closed the gap on me with surprising speed for creatures made out of instant dessert. Apparently, they were faster—and craftier—than I'd realized. The closest one leaped at me, opening its mouth wide enough to swallow me whole. Right before I could be plunged into its digestive tract, however, Roddy blew it away. Then he obliterated the rest, whooping with delight as he blasted them to bits. I even managed to get one myself. All around us the aliens burst apart, coating us with droplets of pink goo.

The moment Roddy vaporized the last one, a heavenly chorus swelled. Words appeared in the crystal sky over the mountains:
LEVEL ONE CLEARED. PREPARE FOR LEVEL TWO.

“You're gonna have to be way better to survive the next round,” Roddy warned me.

“I don't think Dr. Holtz had space madness,” I told him. “If he did, your dad would have noticed, right?”

“Maybe my dad
did.
He wouldn't have told
us
. He would have told Nina. And she would have probably kept it quieter than a Bosnakkian Snork.”

“A what?”

“A Bosnakkian Snork,” Roddy repeated curtly, as though this were something everyone had heard of before. “An alien species from the Andromeda Galaxy renowned for not making any sound at all. Haven't you ever played Warp War?”

“Uh . . . no.”

“Really? Well, point is, if the word got out that Holtz—the guy who's supposed to be the world expert on human health in space—had gone psycho up here, it'd be an even bigger story than him dying. A massive black eye for the whole space program. I mean, the only reason they let all us kids come up here was because Holtz said it was safe—and suddenly
he
turns out to be loony? Before you know it, Congress will want to shut this place down.”

I had to admit, that was a pretty good argument. While the next level of the game loaded, I thought back to all the times I'd seen Dr. Holtz recently. He'd seemed perfectly fine to me. In fact, the night in the bathroom before he'd died, he'd sounded sane as could be—although he
had
laughed pretty maniacally while walking out. Had that
been craziness? Or had he just been really excited?

The landscape around me suddenly vanished and a new one appeared. Now I found myself standing next to Roddy inside the Sistine Chapel. Words flashed across Michelangelo's famous painting on the ceiling:
PREPARE FOR INVASION
.

I turned to Roddy, stunned. “We're fighting aliens inside the Vatican?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “Malicious Freeps. Flesh-eating slugs from Neptune. This is gonna be awesome!”

The slurping sound of something large and viscous came from the galleries ahead. Three eyeballs on turquoise stalks poked around the corner, then narrowed angrily upon spotting us.

Even though the enemy was fake, I felt a very real wave of fear. My fingers tensed on the virtual triggers.

Before the attack could come, however, the image froze. I thought it was a glitch at first, the whole game locking up, but then noticed that Roddy was still moving beside me.

“What the . . . ?” he asked.

“Dashiell and Rodrigo!” Nina's voice boomed throughout the chapel, echoing off the walls. “I thought I'd made it clear that all ComLinks were to remain open.”

Roddy gulped, far more frightened by Nina than by the entire army of flesh-eating Freeps. “I didn't hear about that,”
he lied. “Sorry. Logging off now.” His avatar vanished a second later.

“Logging off,” I echoed.

“Wait one second, Dashiell,” Nina told me. “I want you to come see me. Right now.”

“Where?”

“I'm in my quarters. Don't dillydally. This is urgent.”

“Okay,” I said, then logged out of the game. The Sistine Chapel vanished and all I could see was black.

I pried the hologoggles off my face and blinked in the fluorescent light of the rec room. I always find switching from the virtual world to the real one a little disorienting. The virtual world is so overstimulating that sometimes real life feels strangely unnatural afterward. Veeyars refer to this readjustment as “the letdown.”

Roddy was still sitting on the cube next to me, frowning at his goggles. “That's just great,” he muttered. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“I have some books you could borrow.”

“Books?” Roddy snorted with disgust. “Big whoop.”

I started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Roddy asked.

“Nina wants to see me.”

“Oooh,” Roddy taunted, “you're in trouuuuuble! What'd you do wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“C'mon,” Roddy told me. “Holtz just bit the big one. It's a major crisis—and Nina wants to see you smack in the middle of it? She's not inviting you over for tea. You're definitely up a creek.”

“I'm not,” I said, though the truth was, I didn't believe that myself. As I headed out the door, I had the disturbing feeling that Roddy was right. I
was
in trouble. I just didn't know why yet.

Lunar day 188

Midmorning

Even though the moon base
isn't big, there are still a lot of places I'm not allowed inside. Many areas are restricted for security or maintenance reasons, while others are merely off-limits to kids. I'm not even supposed to enter the science pod or the greenhouse without an adult (although I do, on occasion, because that's a stupid rule). And, of course, I'd never been to the solar arrays or the lunar rover garage, because you have to go outside to get there, and for a kid, that's simply out of the question.

Nina's quarters were another place I'd never been, even though she lives right next door to me. My route there took
me right back through the air lock staging area, then up the metal stairs to the catwalk.

Nina answered the door the moment I knocked on it. She ushered me inside, locked the door, then glanced at her smartwatch. “I thought I told you to get here quickly.”

It had been maybe two minutes since I'd talked to her. “I came as fast as I could. I had to log out of the ComLink.”

Nina gave an annoyed sigh, then pointed to an InflatiCube for me to sit on. It might as well have been an order, so I sat. As usual, the cube made a loud, embarrassing sound beneath my bottom.

“What was so urgent that you had to disobey my order about using the Link?” Nina demanded.

“Roddy's dad asked me to check on him. But Roddy was already jacked in and wouldn't log off, so I had to log in myself.”