Vault of Shadows (14 page)

Evangelyne started to argue, then lapsed into a brief, considering silence, but ultimately she shook her head. “Mad Queen Mab's hate and treachery are legendary. We can't risk any direct contact with her.”

“We have to do something.”

“Milo,” she said, her voice gentle and tentative, “that's why I've been so silent these past few days. I haven't been pulling away from you; it's just that I've been trying to decide what to do and the answers simply won't come. And I'm getting desperate, Milo. I'm so scared that I can't keep the Heart safe. I'm so scared that the Huntsman will find us and take it away and then all will be lost. Now I have Queen Mab to fear as well. And if either of our enemies gets the Heart, it will
be my fault, because I wasn't able to protect it.”

She looked like she was about to cry, but then she made an angry face and took a deep, steadying breath.

“You know you're not alone, right?” said Milo. “Shark and me . . . and Lizzie . . . we have your back.”

“But you're human children. What can you do?”

Milo arched an eyebrow. “First . . .
children?
Really? How old are you?”

She grunted something that might have been an apology, or she could have been clearing her throat.

“Second,” continued Milo, “I seem to remember that it was my plan that got us aboard the hive ship. I'm not just some dumb
boy.
”

Evangelyne colored. “I never said that.”

Milo laughed. “I'm just messing with you. I guess what I mean is that none of us are alone if we stick together. That's how it works. It takes five fingers.”

“It what?”

“Oh, that's something my mom sometimes says when she's talking to the soldiers about working together. It takes five fingers to make a fist.”

“Hunh,” grunted Evangelyne. “That's a wise statement.”

“That's my mom. That's why she was in charge.”

“I hope I get to meet her,” said the wolf girl.

“Yeah, me too.” Then Milo brightened.

“She—” began Evangelyne. Then she suddenly stiffened and sniffed the air. “Wait—what's that smell?”

“What smell?”
But as soon as Milo spoke, he smelled it too. “Oh no . . . something's burning.”

But Shark was already out of his seat, dropping Killer to the floor, and was running across the bridge. Thin tendrils of blue smoke had begun worming their way through a vent on the far wall. Shark dropped to his knees and began pulling away sections of the panel. Immediately thicker, darker smoke boiled out, driving him back in a coughing fit. Tiny fingers of yellow fire wriggled inside the smoke.

“What is it?” demanded Milo.

“It's the engine coolant,” croaked Shark. “I told you it was banged up.”

“Put it out, boy,” ordered Evangelyne. “Or we'll all burn!”

“I know, I know. See if you can find a fire extinguisher.”

“A what?”

“You know, for putting out fires.”

She looked confused. “There's no water. . . .”

“First,” said Shark quickly, “you don't put water on an electrical fire. Not unless you want to die. Second, we need a fire extinguisher. Probably a red cylinder with a spray nozzle.”

But Evangelyne could only shake her head. Either because she was unfamiliar with such a device or—more likely, Milo realized—because there was nothing like that anywhere here on the bridge of the alien ship.

Then Iskiel dropped unexpectedly from the air vent,
scuttled over to the smoking panel, and crawled inside the housing. Shark peered in and gaped.

“He's . . . eating the fire . . . ,” he said in an awed whisper.

“He does that,” said Evangelyne simply.

The ship suddenly bucked as if it had struck something, but there was nothing on the scanner.

“The engines are going wonky,” Milo yelled. Even with Iskiel absorbing some of the flames, the problem was getting worse. Circuits connected to the coolant system began to pop out sparks. The salamander tried to gulp them down too, but it was spreading faster than he could eat.

“Shark . . . ,” called Milo. “I'm losing control of the drive systems.”

“I know . . . ,” growled Shark, who was fanning away the smoke and trying to blow out the flames. That only made them flare brighter. The ship instantly bucked again. And again.

Milo could feel the controls becoming sluggish, and the hologram flickered like a flashlight with a damaged battery. “Do something!”

“I'm
trying.
”

“Iskiel can't control that much fire,” warned Evangelyne. It was true. The salamander was beginning to glow an angry red, as if his insides were a furnace that had been fed too much fuel. The creature squatted inside the blaze, but it continued to spread.

“Do something,” begged Milo.

Shark wore a canvas vest over his T-shirt. He pulled
it off. Then, after a slight hesitation and a nervous glance at Evangelyne, he pulled off his shirt as well. He was very plump, and suddenly there was a lot of brown skin in view. He began vigorously swatting at the flames with the shirt to try to create a vacuum that would rob the hungry fire of the oxygen it needed.

“It's working!” said Evangelyne, clapping her hands together. “Shark, you're a genius.”

Milo cut a look at Shark and saw his friend's brown skin turn the color of a ripe plum as he flushed with equal parts embarrassment and pride.

But then the ship bucked again, even harder than before.

“Is the fire out?” Milo cried.

“Yes . . . and the cooling circuits are still intact.” Powerful vents kicked in automatically and sucked the smoke out of the bridge. “I think we're good—”

Another buck, this one the hardest of all. The red ship went sideways like a soccer ball that had been kicked by a giant.

And that's when Milo realized what was happening. He pivoted in his chair to look at the holographic screens that showed the air behind the ship. Where once there had been a single glowing red dot to indicate the ship they were on, now there were four dots. One red, and three that throbbed a bright blue. They were being hunted by three alien pursuit ships, and
the Bugs were firing on them.

“Oh no!”

Like the red avatar, the blue ones were configured as scaled-down images of the pursuit craft, but Milo was sitting too far away to see exactly what kind of ships they were. Because of scavenging, he was mostly familiar with the drop-ships and some of the larger combat vessels. However, he'd seen photos of at least a dozen other types of ships. Everyone in his class—everyone in the EA—had to become familiar with the silhouettes of each enemy ship. He couldn't see these ships well enough to identify them, and it made him wonder how much better Bug eyesight was. All the screens were positioned farther away than was comfortable for ordinary human eyes. The Huntsman had been given alien eyes too, and that seemed to suggest that their eyesight was sharper. It was frustrating, though, because knowing what kinds of ships were attacking them might give him some idea about what the heck he could do.

The ships kept firing. Firing. Firing. And at that distance they could not miss.

“Oh no,” he said, this time in a tiny voice. It felt like a huge, icy fist had closed around his heart and was squeezing.

The blasts hammered at the red ship.

In his mind he could almost hear the ship scream in pain.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

This is what was written on the first page of that book I keep dreaming about . . .

Had there been two boys living in Gadfellyn Hall, everything would have been different.

So different.

With two minds churning, there would have been games and tricks and adventures. With two mouths to smile, they would have grinned back the shadows and laughed the darkness into its rightful place beneath beds and under rocks and into cellars. With two brave hearts beating, there would have been challenges met and conquered. With two sets of bright eyes, there would have always been one pair to look forward while the other watched behind. With two sets of hands, one pair could have held a candle while the other sorted out the right skeleton keys.

But there was only one lonely boy living in Gadfellyn
Hall all through that spring and summer and into that terrible winter.

Only one living boy.

Only one human boy.

And so this is a different world than it might have been.

And therefore this is an entirely different kind of story.

. . . and I don't know what in the world that means. Or if it's important. But I kind of think it is.

A
nother blast hit the ship, hard enough to jolt Milo's teeth. Killer yelped and went sliding across the floor as the ship canted to one side. The little dog's nails made a desperate skittering sound.

Another blast. Sparks burst from the coolant panels again.

“Get us out of here!” roared Shark as he began once more furiously swatting with his shirt.

But Milo was already wrestling with the controls. Even though it was a hologram, it felt real around his hand and it had started to take on weight. That made no sense to him, though, and he wondered if he was imagining it.

Another blast shook such thoughts from his mind, and from then on he focused only on trying not to kill them all.

He spent one burning second studying the map. The red dot formed the center of a triangle, with the three pursuit ships making up the points. They had closed around the red craft and were taking turns firing. He wondered why they didn't simply open up and vaporize it.

His mind provided the answer, and he knew at once that it was absolutely correct.

They can'
t risk blowing up the ship,
he thought. He could feel the weight and shape of the crystal egg in his left front pants pocket.
If they destroy the ship, they destroy the egg.

A moment later a pair of blasts told him for certain that the Bugs weren't above damaging the ship pretty badly, though.

They want to make us crash.

It terrified Milo because if the Bugs forced them down, then any survivors would be dragged before the Huntsman. Milo and his friends had defeated and humiliated the monster. The thought of what kind of revenge the Huntsman might exact was almost too much for Milo to bear. He wanted to crawl into a closet and cry.

Bang!

A control panel on the other side of the bridge exploded outward in a fresh shower of smoke and flame, and suddenly the vents and air-conditioning failed.

“We just lost life support,” bellowed Shark.

The smoke, no longer vented by the fans, began swirling inside the cabin.

“Do something!” yelled Evangelyne. “I don't want to die up here.”

“Neither do I,” growled Milo under his breath as he tried to anticipate the next blast so he could bank away from it. Then he had a dangerous little thought. “Shark, look at the scanner. See if you can figure out what model of ships they are.”

“Why?”
demanded his friend, who was still fighting a fire. “What does it matter?”

“Just do it.”

The floor of the bridge seemed to buck under them, forcing Shark to crawl on all fours from the burning coolant panel to a spot close to the screen showing the other ships. He fanned smoke out of the way and peered at the blue avatars.

“Barrel-fighters, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“I—”

“Shark, we need to be sure.”

Shark licked his lips, coughed, then nodded. “Yeah. Barrel-fighters. I'm positive.”

“Barrel-fighter” was the nickname the EA soldiers had given to a particular type of attack ship. Small, barrel-shaped, with stubby stabilizer wings and a crew of three. Less than half the size of a drop-ship, and built for speed and maneuverability. Milo ran through everything he'd been taught about the barrel-fighter, and everything he'd learned from the two times his pod had scavenged wreckage of this kind of ship. The armor was thinner than a drop-ship's, because the barrel-fighter relied on speed rather than durability. Top speed of Mach 2.3. Designed for planetary combat. Not built for escape velocity, not built for outer space. A cockpit to hold a pilot and two gunners, and everything else was engine. He remembered his mom saying that it was on a par with an F-22 Raptor.
He understood that. He knew the science because that was one of the survival skills he'd had drilled into him.

Barrel-fighters, like their Earth counterparts, were in a design class called supermaneuverable aircraft. They could turn on a dime even at high speeds. Unlike the red ship, however, they were designed to fly only in air, not in the thin upper atmosphere or in airless space. These barrel-fighters were deadly in an aerial dogfight. The red ship was more sophisticated but less maneuverable. So where was the middle ground? What was the balance between trying to outrun the pursuit ships with a craft whose engine was burning itself out, and engaging in a dogfight when no one aboard knew how to fire the cannons?

Another panel blew out, and half the lights on the bridge went dark.

“Are you going to just sit there?” shouted Evangelyne, her voice thick with anxiety. “Or are you going to do something?”

“Shut up,” he told her. His voice sounded very calm to his own ears, which he figured was probably not a good sign because inside he could feel panic exploding.

“I have the Heart of Darkness,” she reminded him. “If they destroy us, then . . .”

“Please,” he begged, “shut up.”

She did, but he could feel the heat of her glare on him.

“Shark,” Milo snapped, “get back and buckle up.”

“No, I have to put the fire out and—”

Two more blasts hit the craft, and the rest of the lights went out. Now the only light came from several small fires and the blue glow of the holograms.