Blastaway

by Melissa Landers

  “There’s no such thing as free money,” Fig said. “If he’s offering to pay you, it’s because he’s getting something out of it. Besides, I’ve heard he already has a bunch of Galaxy Guards in his pocket. He pays them on the down-low, and they do shady stuff for him like make up charges against mutants to get them convicted and sent to his work camps. That’s why mutants don’t trust the Guard.”

  “You sound like my dad,” I told her. “He thinks Quasar controls the media, too. He says the news outlets don’t tell the whole truth about Niatrix Industries because a bunch of reporters are paid to ‘spin’ the stories in Quasar’s favor.”

  “Your dad sounds smart. I think he’s right.”

  I sniffed a humorless laugh.

  “Seriously,” she said. “How would you feel if people looked down on you because of your DNA, or because of where you were born? As if you could control either of those things, even if you wanted to.”

  “I know,” I assured her. My parents had talked to me about human-Wanderer equality since I was old enough to listen to the news and ask what ghost meant. (Side note: Ghost was the ultimate dirty word in our house. When I’d said it, my dad’s eyeballs had almost exploded.) “I get it.”

  “No, I don’t think you do.”

  “Then explain what I’m missing,” I said. “Because I’m doing my best here. I think mutants are super cool. I’m on your side.”

  “I believe you. But being on my side doesn’t mean you understand what life is like for me.” She puckered her lips in thought for a moment. “You’ve gone on vacations to other planets, right?”

  “Yeah. We just got back from my nana’s place a few days ago.”

  “Okay, so tell me what happened when you landed on Earth.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. I didn’t understand the question. Nothing had happened when we’d landed. We had just…landed.

  “Let me guess,” she offered. “Your ship entered the atmosphere, and your parents flew to your house and parked on your landing pad. Then everyone got out of the ship and went inside the house to unpack their bags or grab a snack or whatever. Easy peasy, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That’s because your ship is registered to a human family. The satellite scanners above Earth’s atmosphere know this, and they let you pass. But that’s not how it would happen for me. If I wanted to visit Earth, I would have to buy a travel visa first. Then I’d have to show that visa to the flight crew before I was even allowed on the ship. When we landed on Earth, I wouldn’t be able to get off at a travel depot with the humans. I would have to wait for a second stop, to a special Galaxy Guard station where I would have to show my visa again, then have my picture taken, get my fingerprints scanned, and explain the reason for my visit. After that, they would insert a chip behind my ear to let me know when my time was up—and do you know how the chip would tell me?”

  I shook my head.

  “It would start beeping,” she said. “Constantly. And it wouldn’t stop until I left Earth’s atmosphere. Now let’s talk about what my day would look like on the ground. The minute I walked out of the Galaxy Guard station, a dozen people would stop and stare at me, or throw themselves out of my way on the sidewalk because they think I’m going to give them radiation poisoning or something stupid like that. Forget about shopping. If I went inside a store, the owner would give me the side-eye and assume I don’t have money to spend. Just to buy a hot dog from a street vendor, I’d have to pay first, to prove that I can pay.”

  My gaze dropped to my lap. I had always known that Wanderers were treated unfairly, but until now, I hadn’t thought much about it. I wanted to say something meaningful, but when I spoke, all that came out was “You can’t buy a hot dog from a street vendor anymore. Hot dogs were outlawed a long time ago because the ingredients caused—”

  “That’s not the point,” she cut in. “The point is you can’t understand what it’s like to be a mutant if you haven’t been in my shoes. You say you’re on my side, but are you, really?”

  “Of course I am,” I argued.

  “A few minutes ago, I told you that Quasar Niatrix uses mutants for slave labor. But when you talked about the vote on Earth, you seemed pretty impressed by the ‘free money’ you stand to get out of it. Anyone who was truly on my side would have nothing to do with that man, no matter how much money he promised them. Anyone on my side would do the right thing and wouldn’t care about the cost.”

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, but I closed it again. I didn’t know what to say. The shame burning in my chest told me Fig was right—that I hadn’t understood what life was really like for her—but something inside me wouldn’t let me admit it. So I just sat there, feeling like a jerk.…

  Until she flapped a hand and said, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  I glanced at Fig to find her staring into her own lap, chewing the inside of her cheek as if she’d done something wrong. She seemed to feel as guilty as I did. That didn’t add up, but it gave me a perfect chance to change the subject.

  “I’d better call home and ask for some credits so we can get out of this sector,” I said. “I hope the bank unfroze my parents’ money.”

  “Yeah,” Fig agreed with an eager nod. Clearly she was glad to put the old topic behind us, too. She pointed to a beacon on the navigation screen. “We’re right on top of a planet.” She leaned closer to the screen and read aloud, “It’s called New Dakota. Should be plenty of service stations facing this side of the world. Tell your folks to transfer money to us there.”

  I set the autopilot to land on New Dakota. Then as the Whirlwind motored toward our new destination, I took a deep breath and prepared to face my mom and dad. But no sooner had I entered their transmission code than the overhead lights flickered once, then twice, and the next thing I knew, we were sitting in the dark. We’re talking full dark. No backlit screens. No flashing buttons. No emergency power.

  No operational equipment at all.

  “Full system failure,” I muttered as my stomach clenched.

  Without our engines, we were going down for sure. But this wasn’t the kind of landing I wanted to make.

  Here’s the thing about engine failure in space: As long as you’re well outside a planet’s atmospheric pull, the lack of gravity will keep you from free-falling. So you just drift. Which is all fine and good…unless you gathered a bunch of momentum before your engines failed, and now you’re drifting toward a planet. Then, without a barrier to stop you, it’s just a matter of time before gravity takes hold, and your ship becomes a literal ball of fire as you streak through the sky and plummet to your death.

  And guess what? Because I had set the autopilot on a course for New Dakota, the engines had already propelled us in that direction, so we were about to get up close and personal with it.

  Good times.

  “I’m going to send a Mayday,” Fig said, standing from her seat.

  “With what?” I asked, gesturing at the lifeless transmission station, barely visible in the dim glow of sunlight that trickled through the windshield. “No power, remember?”

  “I have a handheld comm in my room,” she told me, then she muttered something about low battery life as she walked away. That didn’t sound promising, so I brainstormed a way to change the ship’s path before we gave New Dakota its next crater.

  Physics, I thought to myself. Remember the laws of motion.

  That was the answer. But how?

  I thought about my first day on the ship, when I had used a fire extinguisher like a broomstick to propel me through the air. I could force open an exterior hatch and spray the extinguisher nozzle away from New Dakota, but that wouldn’t do much good. The Whirlwind was too heavy, and she was drifting too fast to be reversed by the force of one dinky pressurized canister. So either I needed something with a lot more force than a fire extinguisher, or…

  Or a fixed object to push off of, I realized.

  Okay, so maybe fixed was the wrong word. N
othing in space was tied down. But if there was a heavy enough object within Cabe’s roping distance, we could collide with it on purpose and change our path—like a living game of pool, with the force of one object transferring to another. At the right angle, we could skew ourselves away from New Dakota and then float along safe and snug until someone rescued us.

  Now I needed a figurative cue ball to set my plan in motion.

  I ran to the observatory and peered out the window, scanning the void for anything large enough to bump us along a new trajectory. Believe it or not, there was a surprising amount of junk in space—a side effect of people being, you know, complete slobs—and most of the clutter tended to gather around planetary settlements like this one. Garbage pods, broken-down shuttles, engine pieces, caskets (yes, that’s every bit as creepy as it sounds), hazardous-waste capsules, building materials from old satellite stations. As long as the garbage was hefty, I could make use of it.

  I squinted and made out a shadowy cone-shaped object floating in the distance, roughly the length of a football field away from me. I couldn’t tell what the object was, but it seemed to be the same size as the Whirlwind, maybe even bigger. Cabe had more than enough line inside him to lasso the thing and tug it in our direction.

  “Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” I whispered.

  Fig had snuck up from behind, making me flinch when she pressed her nose against the observatory window. “Chicken dinner? Did a food ship come to tow us away? ’Cause I could get down on some chicken and mashed potatoes right now.”

  So could I. The only thing that kept my stomach from growling was the threat of a fiery death on New Dakota. “No,” I told her, “but I have an idea that might save us.” I searched her face for a sign of emotion, a hint to tell me if she’d had any luck with her handheld comm. But all she did was fog up the glass and trace her name in it. Finally, I asked, “Did anyone respond to your Mayday?”

  She scrubbed the side of her fist over the glass, erasing her doodles. “No. My battery died after I put out the distress call.”

  “Then why are you acting so chill?”

  She turned to face me and leaned against the window. “Because I have an idea, too.”

  Something in her confident tone set me on edge. Ideas were all I had to offer. I liked being the problem-solver; it was my thing.

  “Okaaaay,” I said warily.

  Her eyebrows formed a V. “What is okaaaay supposed to mean? You don’t want to hear my idea?”

  I held up a palm. “No offense, it’s just…I consider myself more of an idea person.”

  “What does that make me?”

  I shrugged. “Good with lasers?”

  She glared at me. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a smug know-it-all?”

  I pressed my lips together. I wasn’t about to admit that my brothers called me that on the regular.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, reading my face. “You know what? You’re a real piece of work, kid.”

  “Kid?” I repeated as my head cocked sideways. All of a sudden I didn’t care that we were drifting toward a planet. “We’re the same age, you know.”

  “Chronologically, maybe.” She lifted one shoulder in an annoyingly superior way. “But there are different kinds of ages.”

  “What, like developmental?” I asked with a snort. “If you’re trying to say I’m younger than you when it comes to smarts, then I’ve got a closet full of science trophies that say you’re wrong.”

  “Street smarts, then.”

  “Those aren’t as important as book smarts.”

  “Really?” She stood tall, gripping her hips. “Who saved your ship from pirates?”

  “The same girl who wrecked it,” I reminded her. “So thanks for the help…kid.”

  She made a noise of aggravation and flipped her hair, looking like every human girl I’d ever known. “I’m done wasting my time with you,” she called over her shoulder as she stomped out of the observatory. “If you need me—which I’m sure you will—I’ll be suiting up and saving your bacon. Again.”

  “Wait, suiting up?” I said. “As in going outside the ship?”

  “Yes, that’s where the asteroids are.”

  “Asteroids? What do those have to do with anything?” I jogged after her, following down the stairs into the loading bay. “We have to talk about this. We don’t have a plan.”

  “Sure we do.” She crossed the loading bay and pointed at the blaster strapped to the floor. “I’m going to take that beautiful piece of tech outside and do what I do best.”

  “What, blast rocks?” I asked, unable to stop my voice from rising. “How’s that supposed to help?”

  “It’ll get us noticed.”

  “That’s crazy! Is blowing stuff up all you know how to do? There are other ways to solve problems, you know.”

  “As in?”

  “As in science. It fixes everything.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  “What experience?” I asked as I ran around to block her path. “When was the last time you were floating two klicks away from a planet’s gravitational field?”

  She frowned. The obvious answer was never.

  “There’s no room for error out there,” I told her, thumbing at the airlock door. “I’d rather not die in a fire today, if you don’t mind. We might only get one chance to save ourselves. Let’s not waste it.”

  I explained the science behind my idea, and why it was sound. When I was done, she pursed her lips in thought for a few seconds, both arms folded across her chest, before she finally broke through her own stubbornness and agreed with me.

  “All right, we’ll try it your way,” she said. “But you’d better not be wrong about this.”

  “Trust me,” I told her. “Science is never wrong.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes and three arguments later, we were inside the airlock chamber, decked out in our thermal suits and oxygen helmets. Cabe stood between us, nervously whirring his cable reel despite the extra time I had taken to explain to him what we were about to do.

  “No improvising,” I reminded him. “Stick to the plan, okay?”

  “Affirmative, Goosey.”

  Fig rolled her eyes and mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear. I didn’t ask her to repeat herself, mostly because I was tired of bickering with her, but also because every thump of my heart brought us a little closer to New Dakota’s atmosphere. If we didn’t change our path soon, we would crash. My palms were already sweating inside their insulated gloves. The last thing I needed was another wisecrack from Fig to undercut my confidence.

  You can do this, I told myself. Science fixes everything.

  “Get ready,” I said, gripping the outer door latch.

  In response, Cabe slid a long section of rope through a metal loop called a carabiner that was attached to the waist of my space suit. He tethered the cable to a hook on his chest, and then Fig clipped her carabiner to the same line. That way neither of us would float too far from safety. Now Cabe had both of his reels free, one to secure himself to the ship, and the other to retrieve the cone-shape mystery object in the distance.

  With a deep breath, I slid the airlock latch upward and flinched as the chamber filled with the hissing sound of escaping oxygen. The room had to equalize pressure with the outside before the door could open, otherwise we would shoot into space like the contents of a shaken can of soda. Once the pressure was stable, the door opened with a click, and my boots drifted up from the floor as the vast chill of space unfolded before me.

  I had never taken a space walk before, and even though my breaths came in gasps, a flutter of excitement tickled my chest. I was floating, drifting weightlessly in a sea of emptiness, with nothing holding on to me except a thin cable around my waist. It was like diving into a pool that had no bottom. The thrill topped any roller coaster or zip line I’d ever ridden on Earth.

  But it was colder than I had expected, a bone-deep freeze that sliced through the laye
rs of my thermal suit. In seconds, my sweaty hands were beginning to tremble, and I knew it wouldn’t take long for the rest of my limbs to follow.

  We needed to hurry.

  “Okay, buddy,” I told Cabe. “Time to go fishing.”

  “You got this, Cabe,” Fig added encouragingly. “Just remember how clever you are. You know, for a robot.”

  Cabe fixed himself to the airlock and then aimed his remaining spool at the target, shooting out at it with maximum force. His cable sailed flawlessly through the darkness, but the motion caused the Whirlwind to rotate a quarter of a turn toward New Dakota. The sight of the planet looming there, all red and green and brown…and way too close for comfort…raised a lump in my throat that all the spit in my glands wouldn’t wash down.

  If Fig shared my fear, she didn’t let it show. Her eyes gleamed wide and alert with readiness for her part of the job, probably because it involved a laser. I had agreed to let her bolt her laser cannon to the hull of the ship so she could help blast the cone-shape object into the right position when Cabe roped it in. The angle had to be precise when we collided with our “cue ball.” According to Fig, precision was her middle name.

  We would see about that.

  Anyway, she got right to work, pinning the cannon between her knees and using her hands to scale the network of ladder rungs along the hull until she reached the top. And after that, I lost sight of her.

  I stood on the middle-most rung and turned my attention to Cabe, who was still attached to the airlock chamber and unspooling metal rope as hard as he could. Whatever the cone-shape hunk of metal was, it must have been farther away from the Whirlwind than I had thought. I pulled a handheld density meter from my zipper pouch and used it to scan the object, discovering that its mass was heavier than I’d estimated, too. By more than half a ton. That wasn’t a problem—it was actually a good thing—but I would have to account for the changes when I crunched the numbers. I tapped my helmet’s MAGNIFY button and watched the end of Cabe’s rope make contact with the cone. The industry-grade magnet I’d fastened to the tip of his cable latched on with a loud click that echoed like thunder in my ears.