The World Forgot (6 page)

“True,” I say, twirling my grandfather's security clearance card around in my hand. “But Byron does.”

“How did you get that?” Ducky asks.

“You son of a bitch!” I fake-cry as I pantomime slapping Ducky in the chest. I burst into a great big smile.

“Aren't ye the canny lass,” Marnie says, a grin spreading across her face.

“When the need arises,” I say. “Always have a plan.”

“Even if you can get the ship started up,” Cole counters, “they'll spot it and shut the outer doors down.”

My smile only broadens as I turn to Cole. “Then I guess I have some pretty extraordinary hacking to get started on.”
Hold on, Olivia. Mama's coming.
“Let's get to work.”

Chapter Five

In Which Communications Begin to Break Down

Not to brag or anything, but if they gave out medals for stealing invisible ships and piloting them away from your alien grandfather undetected, yours truly would grab the gold, easy.

“Okay,” Ducky says after we've successfully broken away from the Almiri strike force and plunged into the blackness of space. His face is green, naturally, because we are moving, and he grips the armrests of his seat tightly. “So, like,
now
what?”

To that I have absolutely no response. But at least someone else does.

“We're thirteen-point-three-thousand clicks from the Rust Belt,” Marnie tells us. The chick's been standing over my shoulder for the past fifteen minutes or so, watching me work the controls, and it's making me mildly claustrophobic. “New Moon is near the center of the densest cluster of ships. Tricky flying, but this ship's slight enough that we shouldnae have much trouble.”

“What are spies doing sitting in the middle of an orbital ghetto?” Cole asks, fiddling with the tracker. He wanted something to do so I let him hold it, but I'm getting worried he's going to break it.

“Cole!” I snap as he bangs the tracker with the heel of his hand. “Be careful with that.”

“They're na' spies,” Marnie tells him. “More as like they're untapped fonts of information.”

“How much info can you get sitting on a defunct space station with the dregs of humanity?”

“Where d'ya reckon undesirables go when they want to do business?” Marnie says. “They go where they think no folks are watching. So, what better place to watch?”

“I'm confused as to why you would need contacts like that in the first place,” Cole asks, still banging the tracker.

“We can't all be as selective about our friends as the Almiri,” Marnie says.

“Ha-ha,” Cole says. He flips another switch on the tracker, and it starts frantically beeping. “Holy shit, Elvs! I got it working!” He's waving the tracker around like a maniac. “Olivia's here! She's, like, two meters away or something!”

I roll my eyes. “Cole, any chance you switched it to frequency one again?”

He checks, then presses his lips together, all chagrinned-­like. “Um . . . ,” he says slowly. “It's possible, yeah.”

“
I'm
frequency one,” I tell Cole for, like, the four-billionth time. I grab the tracker from him to flip the switch back to stop the inane beeping. “Our daughter is frequency
two
.”

“It's hard to remember,” he says by way of defense as he takes the tracker back.

“Try to make up a mnemonic,” Ducky calls from his chair. And he doesn't even need to turn around to sense that Cole is staring at him blankly. “A memory trick,” he clarifies. “Like . . . ‘Frequency two, which rhymes with ‘coo,' which is what babies do.' So two for Olivia.”

“Or how 'bout ‘eejit,'” Marnie chimes in. “Cuz there's two
E
s in ‘eejit,' and if yer so daft ye cannae remember that, then that's what ye are.”

“I'll remember,” Cole says.

“So,” I say, turning my attention to Marnie. “To the Rust Belt, then? To find this contact of yours?” It's the best—sorry,
only
—plan any of us have had so far, and if anyone can give us information that leads to Olivia, I'm all for it. “All agreed?” I ask.

Marnie gives an emphatic “Aye!” Cole on the other hand . . .

“Guys!” he shouts. “I found her! I found our daughter! She's, like, two meters aw— Oh, wait. Frequency
two
, right?”

And that's when Ducky barfs on the floor.

Clearly, Marsden and his cronies don't stand a chance.

•    •    •

The station, designated New Moon A-1138 according to my navigational readouts, looms large in front of us as I bring the ship in closer. Did I say large? I meant
uge
, as in so huge that there isn't any room left for the
h
. I've been to New York City only twice, once on a middle school field trip to the Museum of Pretentious Art and once when Dad took me and Ducky to see
2 Fast 2 Furious
on Broadway for my eleventh birthday, so I don't have a great sense of the actual size of the island of Manhattan, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's roughly the same as the floating hunk of metal that I'm currently steering toward.

“Look at the size of that thing!” Cole whistles from behind me.

“Cut the chatter, Red Two,” Ducky says, half-snorting.

“Red what?” Cole asks.

“It's just . . . It's from . . . Forget it. Hey, but, guys, I was thinking. We're working a reconnaissance mission, right? Gathering intel?” Ducky is still green, but it's an
excited
green. I can tell he's about to nerd out on all of us. “Don't you think we should all be incognito? Like, with secret identities and stuff? I've been working on mine.” He sits up a little straighter. “Alfred Sniggle, new junior sanitation engineer. Thoughts?” He looks expectantly to the rest of us.

I am not the only person concerned with things besides Ducky's nerd fantasy, apparently.

“This thing's getting even wonkier,” Cole says. He's still messing with the tracker. “Now
both
frequencies are buzzing in and out.”

“It's the debris from all the derelict craft in this sector,” Marnie tells him. “Radiation, magnetic fields, et cetera. Chops up yer signal, makes it cockeyed.”

“You sure it's not just broken?” Cole asks, aiming the tracker at his head. No signal
there
, obviously.

“Cole, give me that thing,” I say, attempting to snatch it from him with one hand while the other operates the ship's controls.

“Best leave it aboard, act'ly,” Marnie tells me. “A precious object like tha' won't be safe where we're going. It'll get pocketed an' sold less than five minutes off the ship.”

“I'll hide it somewhere
really
safe,” I promise.

“Trust me,” Marnie says. “Ye could hide it up yer own arse—those thieves'd have it off ye 'fore you even noticed they pulled down yer drawers. Much safer here.”

“Hard to believe this isn't more of a vacation destination,” I mutter. But I know Marnie's got a better sense of this place than I do. The tracker will stay on board.

Hold on, Livvie,
I think as the station looms ever larger before us.

“I've never seen a station this big before,” Cole says.

“Or so . . . gross,” I add.

Even from this distance it's easy to tell that New Moon has seen better days. I didn't realize you could see rust from kilometers away, but if that's not what I'm looking at, then whatever it is is doing a pretty good rust impersonation. The blotchy brown patches on the hull of the station must be several hundred meters in diameter, at least, and from what I can see, they snake all over the surface. There are cracks, holes, and just plain shoddy construction running the entire length of New Moon from start to finish.

“It's amazing that thing doesn't break apart,” I muse.

“Why in the heck do they call it New Moon?” Cole asks.

“That's no moon,” Ducky begins. “It's a space—”

“Ducky, enough,” I tell him.

“Alfred,”
he insists. “I'm Alfred Sniggle now. Don't forget. You'll blow my cover.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, then. Enough,
Alfred
. Now listen to this.” And I begin reading the information from the heads-up display the console is feeding me. “According to the description here, New Moon is the largest orbital station ever constructed, and the second largest satellite of Earth after the actual moon. Built in 2043, it has been home to an ozone processing refinery, the only ever off-world supercollider, and for a brief period in the sixties served as the headquarters for the Psychedelic Tofreegan Collective before they were all committed. Now everything's gone except the refinery.”

“Well, if you ask me,” Cole says, “New Moon is the biggest hunk of crap I've ever seen.”

“Can't argue with you there,” I say.

“
That's
a first,” Cole replies with a snort.

I sigh. I'm getting more than a little fed up with Cole's attitude. Sure, he agreed to steal a stealth ship with me and go flying off into the great unknown in an attempt to rescue our daughter, disobeying a direct order from his former Almiri supervisor, and potentially endangering the entire planet in the process, but he's been such a
drag
about it.

I flip the comm to an open channel as we begin our approach.

“New Moon control, this is, um, the
U.S.
. . .
Baby Chaser
,” I say, shrugging at Ducky as he shakes his head at me. “Request permission to dock.”

I leave the channel open, awaiting a response. All that comes back over the comm is static.

“New Moon control,” I repeat, “this is—”

“Ye can save yer voice,” Marnie tells me. “There 'nt a control to give clearance.”

“Well, then how are we supposed to know where to dock?” I ask. “Not to mention avoid crashing into other incoming vessels?”

“I'll show ye where to land,” Marnie assures me. “As fer the other thing, well, ye'll jes' have to show off some fine piloting skills, won't ye?”

Marnie does indeed seem to know her way around this place. She guides me past the prow, where I would have assumed the docking bay to be, and down along the seamy underbelly of the station.

“This is a really weird approach for a landing dock,” I say. “How are you supposed to find it if you don't already know it's there?”

“Tha's the point,” Marnie says.

“Well, at least there isn't any other traffic, so we don't have to worry about—”

On cue—because the universe absolutely adores using me as its straight man—three small ships come flying out of nowhere from underneath the station, screeching by so close that I can practically feel the paint scratching off our hull. For a moment I lose control and we swerve hard enough for Ducky to lose his footing at the console behind me. There is a violent
thud!
against the side of the hull as the last ship zips past.

“What the hell was that?” I shout, scrambling to regain control of the ship. “Did one of them hit us?”

“Negative,” Marnie says, smiling a bit as she reads Ducky's display (Ducky being otherwise occupied, picking himself off the floor). “They jettisoned some rubbish out the back as they passed. It's nothin' to be afeart of. Jes' a friendly suggestion we watch ourselves.”

“We should
watch ourselves
? Who where those jackasses?”

“O
3
Cowboys,” Marnie tells us. “They take the ozone bricks from the refinery and deploy them into the atmosphere, where they break down and revert to gas.”

“They fly around in those little ships like that carrying ozone?” Ducky asks incredulously. “It's a miracle they don't blow up.”

“They do, from time to time,” Marnie says. “It's not the most stable career, to be sure.”

I grunt in reply, but I have more important things to concern myself with than a bunch of alpha-apes. “Marnie, just show me where we're landing on this heap.”

The docking hangar is long, wide, and decrepit. It seems like it might break away from the station and float off into space at any moment, which would be a real accomplishment for a structure that, technically, is just a hole in the side of the platform. It's from here that the cowboys have been disembarking, and the flow of small, possibly explosive transport crafts is steadier—but since I can see them coming now, it's far less nerve-racking. I approach at a low angle but don't waver on my course, letting these atmo-jockeys know that we belong. It wouldn't do to stick out like a sore thumb before we even land.

“Yer pretty good at the stick,” Marnie says with a whistle. I try to suppress my smile as I angle us toward the nearest free landing pad. For some reason Marnie's approval feels incredibly rewarding, but I really don't want her to know that.

“It's not my first spaceship,” is all I say. “Once I put her down, what's our first move?”

“Well, I dunnae about the rest of ye, but I could sure go fer a pint,” Marnie says.

Typical Scot.

“Um, Marnie, honey”—and, oh my God, no one has ever said the word “honey” more awkwardly than Ducky just did—“none of the rest of us are twenty-one. So if they try to card us, we're screwed.”

I can hear the smack as Marnie plants a big wet kiss on Ducky's forehead behind me.

“Ach, Donald. Yer a bonnie lad, aren't ye?” she says, and kisses him again. From the squelching noises Ducky's making, I can visualize the romantic Celtic headlock Marnie must have him in. Cole sits down next to me and gives me a look.

“You okay?” he asks me.

“I'm fine,” I say, staring straight ahead out the viewport as we make our approach.

“You look . . . superfocused,” he replies.

“Just making sure not to crash the ship and kill us all in a fiery blaze.”

The kissing noises behind me stop.

•    •    •

So it turns out that landing a spaceship in a crowded hangar is a lot trickier than piloting it through the emptiness of space. It sure doesn't help that there's no landing guidance whatsoever to tell us where to go. The first pad that seems empty is apparently already spoken for by an incoming cowboy who decides to slip underneath us to sneak into the spot just as I'm about to engage the repulsors. Luckily I avoid crushing the maniac's tiny little ship as flat as a frat boy's used beer can. (Normally it wouldn't bother me to crush the guy, because I've always been of a mind that parking infractions should be punishable by death, but we're trying to keep a low profile here. Oh, and the whole thing where the guy might still have ozone bricks on board with him, which would've ended up with all of us in smithereens. Tiny details.)