A blast shook the Whirlwind, knocking the words out of my mouth. I glanced up just in time to see another shock wave rippling toward us from the Guard cruiser. The wave collided with our ship so fiercely it rattled the bolts in the triple-reinforced hull.
“What the—” My mouth dropped open. “They’re firing on us!”
“Of course they are,” Fig said, veering left to avoid the next blast. “You just spilled your guts to one of Quasar’s paid men.”
“How could I know?”
She gritted her teeth and zigzagged away from the cannon fire. “Because half of them are in Quasar’s pocket! I told you that!”
“So what do we do now?”
“My cloaking device,” she said, waving a hand toward the console. “It’s around here somewhere. It might have one use left in it.”
I tore through every nook and drawer until I spotted something that looked like a tube of lipstick. “Got it!”
But then I had to find the cord—because, you know, outdated tech. And it wasn’t easy fishing through the junk drawer while the ship spun and jerked all over the place. By some miracle, I found the cord and jammed it into the matching port on the console.
I held my breath, watching the tiny tube. “Is it working?”
“Only one way to find out,” Fig said.
She circled around to the other side of the Guard cruiser and shut down the engines. We floated in their line of vision. When they didn’t fire on us, we had our answer.
I exhaled in relief, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. Fig’s cloaking device didn’t have much juice left in it. Which meant at any moment, we could reappear and be blown to bits by Mr. Mustache. Oh, and as a bonus, now it was up to Fig and me to stop the miniature sun from reaching Earth.
No pressure.
Fig piloted the ship to an asteroid floating nearby, barely large enough to hide us. After we were concealed by the rock, she rounded on me and demanded, “Are you happy now? Your idiocy almost got us killed! We should’ve tried shutting down the barge on our own!”
“I was trying to help,” I argued. “The Galaxy Guard is supposed to”—I flashed both palms—“wait for it…guard the galaxy. So calling them was the logical thing to do. Now I know better. But I had to try.”
“No you didn’t,” she snapped. “You could’ve thought outside the lines. Or listened to someone else for a change.”
“Are you saying I can’t think for myself?”
“Yes! You trust all the wrong people! You’re the dumbest smart person I’ve ever met!”
Her accusation stunned me into a beat of silence. Besides the Galaxy Guard, who were all the wrong people?
“Like that scientist,” Fig went on. “The one who invented the Fasti stars. You think that just because you talked to her, she’s an honest person. But she’s practically a stranger. You don’t know anything about her.”
I shook my head because that wasn’t true. “I know that Doctor Nesbit started the field of celestology. She cares so much about finding new homes for people that she dedicated her whole career to it. That’s why I trust her.”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“Well, I think you have trust issues.”
Fig threw up her hands in frustration. “You’re one to talk! You put your faith in strangers, but you don’t trust your own family. That’s messed up.”
“What?” I asked. Who did this girl think she was? “You have no idea what I deal with at home.”
“Your parents seem like good people.”
“They are, but that doesn’t mean things are okay. They look the other way and let my brothers terrorize me.”
“Oh, please,” she said in disgust. “You’re part of a family, an actual flesh-and-blood family, with a mom and a dad and brothers, and probably a floofy little dog, too. And until today, you couldn’t be bothered to tell them you were safe!”
She was right about the last part, but I couldn’t admit it. So I mumbled, “I don’t have a dog.”
“Well, I don’t have parents,” Fig spat. “I used to, but one day they were here, and the next day they were gone. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I didn’t get a warning. And you know what? It’s not fair, because I always loved them. I didn’t take my family for granted like you do. They’ve been gone for two years, and I miss them every single day. I would do anything to have the same thing you ran away from.”
My cheeks went up in flames.
“So don’t judge me, Kyler friggin’ Centaurus,” she said. “I might have trust issues, but you suck at being a son and a brother, and that’s a thousand times worse!”
Her words stung. Even though I knew she had lashed out at me in anger, I couldn’t deny there was a kernel of truth in what she’d said.
But how big a kernel?
Was she right? Was I a bad son and brother?
My first instinct was to say no, but when I considered the evidence, it didn’t look good. Now that I thought about it, I’d done a lot of things to push my family away. I had fought with my brothers, even though it made my mom sad. I’d spent more time with my books than my parents. I had told myself that I didn’t belong in a home with a bunch of jocks and protesters because I was different from them. Better than them. I might’ve run away by accident, but I’d wanted to leave my parents and my brothers behind. That was why I’d set the course for Fasti in the first place.
My shoulders sank.
Fig was right. I sucked at being part of a family. It chilled me to think I might lose them. Would the universe do that to me? Take away my family to teach me a lesson?
“You’re a jerk,” Fig said. “After we save Earth, I’m done with you.”
* * *
Fig and I didn’t speak for the next hour.
But her words kept echoing in my ears—not just what she had said about me, but how she’d lost her mom and dad. She had never talked about her parents before, not even on the Holyoakes’ ship when I’d tried to get her to open up about them. I couldn’t imagine losing my parents. They weren’t perfect, but at least they were mine. I had so many questions for Fig. I wondered what her life had looked like before the accident, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture her as a normal kid with normal kid problems. I mean, think about it: Fig sitting in the galley of her parents’ ship, whining about having to eat broccoli?
Yeah, no.
Fig was so tough I figured she’d been born that way. But maybe I was wrong. Had she been like me once, a sheltered kid who’d had to toughen up after she had lost everything? What had that been like for her? How had she survived all by herself?
So many questions, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask them. I didn’t feel like I had the right to invade her privacy, and besides, the icy silence between us told me she didn’t want to talk to me, anyway. So while we floated behind the asteroid, I focused on bigger problems than the ones inside my head.
Like how to steal a sun from pirates.
Because that was what we had to do. And despite the fact that I’d stolen a spaceship in my sleep, I had no useful skills. Not compared with the professionals. Anyone crafty enough to hijack a star barge was no one to take lightly. Then there was the fact that the Galaxy Guard itself was trailing the barge, half of which were secretly working for Quasar.
I blew out a breath and glanced at Fig, who sat beside me in the copilot’s seat, quietly reading a data tablet. I could see from the text heading she was researching the Fasti star barge.
“I’m calling a truce,” I said. “Let’s hit the defrost button long enough to wreck these pirates, then you can go back to freezing me out.”
“Fine,” she agreed, not looking at me.
“Tell me what we’re up against.”
“Basically the barge is a fortress inside a force field,” she said, pointing at the barge’s image on the navigation screen. “The hull is reinforced with a crap ton of layers to
protect it from the star’s radiation, and then the whole thing is surrounded by a force field to protect passing ships and planets from the same radiation. There’s one sealed tube that allows shuttles to come and go inside the force field, but it’s controlled from the barge’s pilothouse, so the pirates would have to let us in.”
“That’s why the Galaxy Guard—the good ones, I mean, the ones who are actually trying to do their jobs—can’t get inside.”
“Yep,” she told me. “The barge and the star are in a bubble that no one can pop, not unless they want to be incinerated. That’s why Corpse and Cadaver can sail right down the center of the galaxy with their middle fingers out the window.”
I lowered an eyebrow in confusion. “Corpse and Cadaver? Who are they?”
“The pirates who stole the barge.”
“How do you know their names?” I asked.
Fig parted her lips, her eyes going wide. It was a look I knew well, the face of a kid who’d done something wrong and had just busted herself.
“I heard it on the Guard scanner,” she said.
I didn’t buy it. Something was up. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She snapped her gaze to mine and instantly made me regret that I’d asked. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you, Kyler,” she spat. “Like how much I hate your face right now. Do you really want me to vent my spleen, or should I stick to what’s important? Because I was kind of under the impression that we don’t have a lot of time to mess around.”
My gut still told me she was hiding something, but I didn’t have time to figure out what it was. “Whatever,” I said to get us back on track. “Let’s think about our options. If we can’t pop the force field bubble, then we’ll have to stop the barge another way.”
“Like how?” she asked. “A roadblock won’t work. The pirates will mow down anything we put in their path.” She pointed at the enormity of the barge in comparison to the Guard ships flying behind it. “Look at the size of that thing. It’s like a glacier sliding through snowflakes.”
A glacier sliding through snowflakes…
Her words gave me an idea. “Even glaciers can be worn down by the elements.”
She shot me a skeptical glance. “Are you suggesting we melt the sun?”
“No, but maybe we can shrink it somehow,” I said. “Think about it. If the Fasti scientists can keep a star in a miniature form until they deliver it, there might be a way to make it even smaller. Or unmake it altogether.”
“Unmake it?”
“Yeah.” I took a moment to consider the possibility. It didn’t seem too far-fetched. “The star is man-made, right? So if people can build a star, it stands to reason that people can take it apart, too.”
Fig didn’t answer. She stared out the windshield, either dazed, tired, or deep in thought, I couldn’t tell which. We approached the star barge as close as we dared without entering the Guards’ line of sight, but it was still near enough that the brightness forced us to engage the Whirlwind’s sun filter. Even after the windshield dimmed, Fig kept gazing out into space until she asked in a soft voice, “What about black holes? Don’t they form when a star dies?”
“Sometimes,” I told her. Maybe that was why she was acting weird, because she was worried about opening a black hole. If so, I couldn’t blame her. That was scary stuff. “But that’s the case with natural stars,” I pointed out. “I don’t know about the man-made kind. The rules are probably different for the Fasti star because it was formed in a lab.”
“Probably different,” she emphasized. “And this one has dark matter in it.”
“That does complicate things. No other stars were made that way.”
“The recipe for man-made stars is top secret,” she said. “So you can’t know for sure how they’re made, just like you can’t know for sure whether we’ll create a black hole if we try to ‘unmake’ one. You can’t guess based on limited information. We both know how well that worked out last time.”
“So I’ll call Doctor Nesbit and find out.”
“I don’t trust her to tell us the truth.” Fig went quiet again, gnawing on her lower lip for a moment. “What if we could take control of the barge and fly it away from Earth?”
“We’d have to get inside it first.”
“What if I could do that?” she asked. “Get us inside?”
I huffed a laugh. “How? With Floo powder and portkeys? Or did Hogwarts teach you to Apparate?”
“Be serious.” Fig refocused me with a light smack upside the head. “Never mind how I get us inside the barge. What if I could do it?”
“That would change everything,” I told her, rubbing my scalp. “Our battle plan would go from shrinking the star to hijacking the barge, a completely different mode of attack. Less science, more sabotage.”
She slanted me a glance so full of mischief it made my lips twitch in a smile. She looked like the old Fig. I hadn’t realized how much I hated fighting with her until then.
“That’s right up our alley,” she said.
“If you can get us in,” I reminded her.
She sprang from her seat, calling, “Leave that to me,” over her shoulder. Then she raced out of the pilothouse before I could ask her any more questions.
It was a good thing I’d remembered to charge my comm link when I restored power to the Whirlwind, because the innocent buttonlike device in my hand was also my golden ticket inside Corpse and Cadaver’s stolen star barge.
Assuming I spun the right lie.
So it was also a good thing I could lie like a rug.
I pinned the comm link to my shirt collar and sent a call request to Cadaver, the dumber of the two pirates. As soon as he answered, I used my most panicked voice to tell him, “I’m right behind you in the Whirlwind. Quick, you have to bring me on board!”
“Whosey whatsit?” was his reply.
I rolled my eyes and spoke slower for him. “I was flying to Earth, just like you told me to do. But then I got busted for breaking curfew, and the Galaxy Guard saw my blaster. They tried to pop me for illegal weapons possession, so I made a run for it. They’re on my tail right now, hailing me. If I don’t surrender, they’ll use a shock-wave bomb to hobble my engine.”
When I paused to take a breath, I could hear Cadaver scratching himself wordlessly, as though he still didn’t understand.
“If they catch me, they’ll send me to a prison farm,” I told him. “You know what’ll happen after that. I’ll never come out again…unless I give up information in exchange for my freedom. Information like the names of the people who hired me to blow up the sun you’re towing.”
On the other end of the comm, Cadaver went as silent as a tomb.
“Mainly Quasar Niatrix,” I added. “I know he’s the mastermind behind this whole steal-the-sun-and-use-it-to-scare-Earth thing.”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you snitches get stitches, ghostie?”
“Then don’t make me be a snitch,” I said. “Let me on board the barge. If I get arrested, you’ll have no one to fire the big demo shot. You said yourself the aim has to be dead accurate to hit the dark matter at the sun’s core. You’re fooling yourself if you think anyone in the galaxy has better aim than me.”
Cadaver grumbled to himself while I held my breath, willing him to give in. Then with a grunt, he replied, “All right. Fly your ship to the bottom of the barge. There’s a circle of lights to show you where the chute is. Position your ship inside that circle, and I’ll let you through the force field.”
I silently pumped my arm in victory. “Thank you!”
“Don’t thank me yet, kid. If you can make it here alone, I’ll let you in. But if any Guard ships try to follow you in, I’ll clamp that chute down so fast it’ll squash you like a bug.”
I shuddered at the mental image he had painted. “I’ll ditch the Guard,” I assured him. “Just be ready to beam me up when I get there. I’ll see you in ten.”
I ran back to the pilothouse and took the wheel, ignorin
g Kyler’s questions as I searched for the quickest path through the maze of Guard ships to the barge. If I was lucky, maybe I could sneak past the lot of them before they had a chance to fire.
Too bad luck was never on my side.
I had barely entered the fringes of the Guard fleet when the same cruiser that had fired on us before sent another shock-wave blast at our hull. It was skill, not luck, that saved us as I tipped the Whirlwind out of the way. Two more shots followed. I dodged them both before an idea came to mind. Veering off my path, I flew deeper into the fleet and slowed down to make myself an easy target. The next blast came, just as I knew it would. But I was ready for it. I zipped away, just in time for the shock wave to hit the Guard ship behind me. That created enough havoc for me to fly right into position beneath the barge, undisturbed.
Kyler started to say something, but the Whirlwind lurched, making us both gasp. The barge’s wireless piloting system had taken over our controls. I let go of the wheel as a circle of flashing lights appeared high above us on the starboard side of the barge. Out of nowhere, a translucent chute appeared, sucking us inside it and closing quickly behind us to create a bubble.
“Whoa,” Ky murmured. He leaned toward the windshield and gawked at the shimmery tunnel surrounding our ship.
I admired the view with him. The star’s force field was made of energy that rippled and moved like a living waterfall. Silvery and electric, it pushed us up the tube at speeds fast enough to send my stomach dipping into my lap. I’d read that the force field wasn’t technically solid but made of zillions of molecules linked together to form a shield stronger than titanium. I didn’t have to be a science geek like Kyler to find that cool.
“Did you look up the floor plan?” I asked, mostly to keep him from prying into how I had managed to get us inside the force field. “And what about the pilothouse controls? We need to know how to set the barge’s navigation course to return to Fasti. Either that or disable the engines until someone can come fetch the star and take it to the system where it belongs.”
Blastaway Page 15
