Blastaway

by Melissa Landers

  An ache opened up behind my ribs. I glanced at Fig, who bit her lip and dropped her gaze. At least she didn’t gloat, though she could have. She’d been right all along. Quasar Niatrix had wanted the best on his team, and that was Dr. Nesbit, the scientist I had spent half my life admiring. The person I had wanted to be when I grew up. Now I didn’t know what was real. I felt like someone had reached into my head and torn out half my brain.

  With numb fingers, I tapped my comm screen and switched the call to video. I couldn’t see Dr. Nesbit at first, because she hadn’t turned on her camera. But that was okay. I didn’t want to see her face. That was how far she’d let me down.

  “How could you?” I asked in my own voice.

  There was a pause. “Who is this?”

  “Turn on your video feed.”

  After another pause, Dr. Nesbit’s image appeared on my screen. Right away I could tell she’d lost weight. Her cheekbones were too sharp, and her skin had lost its glow. She seemed miserable, which made me feel better. Maybe she would help undo the damage she’d done.

  She arched her brows and breathed, “Kyler.”

  At least she remembered my name.

  “What’s this about?” she asked, looking behind me for clues. “What’s going on?”

  “Quasar’s not here,” I told her. “I used his voice to test you, to see if…” I had to pause to clear the thickness from my throat. “I know you helped him steal the star.”

  Dr. Nesbit froze, wide-eyed. “I…I…don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Please don’t do that. Don’t deny it. This is hard enough as it is.”

  Fig added from the pilot’s seat, “Plus, we don’t have time.”

  “That too,” I said to Dr. Nesbit. “I’m chasing down your star, and I need to find out how to blow it up. I know you loaded the star with dark matter so it could be destroyed and make Quasar look like a hero. I know this because the sharpshooter Quasar hired is sitting right next to me.”

  Fig leaned toward the comm and waved, then returned to piloting the ship.

  “What I don’t know,” I went on, “is how to detonate the star without frying Earth. Or opening up a black hole. We’re only a few klicks away from it, and I’m not sure what to do. We have one chance to save Earth. I need your help so we don’t waste our only shot.”

  Dr. Nesbit licked her lips, saying nothing. Maybe she was afraid of admitting what she’d done because she was ashamed. Or maybe she didn’t want to go to jail. Either way, I had to convince her to trust me before she would give me the information I needed.

  “I’m not trying to get you in trouble,” I said. “I just want to save my family. I think you want that, too. Because deep down, I believe that anyone who dedicates her life to celestology does it because she wants to help people, not hurt them. And I believe that if someone makes a bad choice, that doesn’t make them a bad person…as long as they’re willing to do the right thing in the end.”

  She fidgeted with her collar for a moment or two, until she gave me a slow nod. “All right. The most important factor in safely destroying the star is distance. Make sure it’s no less than five klicks away from Earth before you fire at the core. That’s going to be tricky, though, because it’s traveling toward Earth.”

  “I have an idea about that,” I said. “The star has a force field around it, including the tether from when it was being towed. What if I could attach the tether to my ship and then swing the star around a few times and slingshot it away from Earth? When it gets far enough away, we could blow it up. Would that work?”

  “Yes and no,” she told me. “I can send you the calculations for which speed and angle to use in aiming the star away from Earth, but a passenger ship has less power than a barge. Your engine can’t generate enough force for a slingshot maneuver. You would need to circle the star around to change its path and then tow it in the direction you want it to go.”

  My stomach sank. “So I need a second ship?”

  “Either that or you can set an autopilot course to tow the star, and eject yourselves.”

  I rubbed my temples and shared a worried glance with Fig. If we abandoned ship, we would be on our own because of the no-fly zone. And no one on Earth could save us, because Quasar had everyone trapped on the ground. I guessed we could survive for a few hours in our thermal suits and oxygen helmets, but after that, we would be toast.

  “How about radiation from the star?” I asked.

  “The force field should protect you,” Dr. Nesbit said. “It’s a one-way shield, meaning things can get in, but not out. So your sharpshooter friend will be able to hit the sun with her laser, even with the shield intact.”

  I didn’t like the way she said the shield should protect us, but I nodded.

  “Do you want me to send the calculations?” asked Dr. Nesbit. “If so, I need to go back to my office and run the numbers.”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “What about opening a—”

  She disconnected before I could ask about black holes.

  Fig and I sat in silence for a while.

  I knew what we had to do, but I was too scared to say it out loud. When we’d agreed to do whatever it took to save Earth, it had never crossed my mind that we might not live to see the next day. I still wanted to take care of my family, and every other family on the ground—losing two lives to save six billion people was a worthy trade—but given the choice, I would rather not die in the cold void of space.

  “I can’t believe we’re losing the ship,” Fig said. “The Whirlwind is the closest thing to home I’ve felt in a long time.” She slumped over in her seat. “By the way, I guess I should apologize for trying to steal her. Sorry about that.”

  As much as I loved the Whirlwind, she was just a collection of metal parts. “That’s your biggest worry right now? Not potentially dying?”

  “You don’t get it,” Fig told me. “I thought this ship was my ticket to a new life. No more sleeping in transport stations, no more begging for jobs, no more ending up at the mercy of people like the Holyoakes. Without a ship, I have nothing to live for anyway, so yeah, I guess you could say my biggest worry right now is losing it.”

  “But you never had it to begin with.”

  “In my mind I did,” she said. “And it gave me hope, enough to keep going.”

  The sadness in her eyes plucked at my heart, and in the beat that followed, I put myself in her shoes. Her parents were dead. She had no friends, no family, no money, and no home. And to add another layer of garbage to her dumpster-fire of a life, her own people were hunting her down like she was some kind of intergalactic serial killer.

  No wonder she felt hopeless.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I told her.

  She peeked at me. “For what?”

  “For being a bad friend. For not asking about your parents sooner.” I paused, thinking of my brothers and their biggest complaint about me. “For not treating us like a team.”

  Fig’s grin told me I was forgiven. “Better late than never, right?”

  “Friends?” I asked, extending my hand for her to shake.

  She gripped it. “Best friends.”

  “Wow, I finally have a best friend…just in time for us to die together,” I joked.

  Neither of us laughed.

  In front of me, the transmission station beeped to announce a new recorded message. I glanced down, expecting to see a formula from Dr. Nesbit, but instead, my twin brothers’ faces appeared on the screen. I pressed PLAY and leaned in closer to listen.

  “Hey,” Devin said. “Hope you can see this. Quasar’s force field is blocking the main comms, but it takes more than that to defeat a Centaurus. We’re using old tech to get a message through. Just wanted to say—”

  “—get Figerella here, quick, and blast that star to pieces,” Rylan finished.

  “Yeah.” Devin thumbed at his twin. “What he said.”

  Duke elbowed his way in front of the camera. “Dude, you can’t give up. The ga
me isn’t over till the ref blows the whistle. You gotta go down fighting. Like the time I threw a twenty-yard pass with two seconds left in the—”

  “Boooooooring,” Bonner interrupted, poking his head into view. He pointed at me and said, “I have faith in you, bro. Hearing how you stood up to those pirates gave me the guts to tell Lori Ann McCallum that I love her.”

  Duke snorted. “And then she slammed the door in his face.”

  “But still, I told her.” Bonner shrugged. “Anyway, you got this, Ky.”

  “Yeah,” echoed the others.

  A smile lifted the corners of my mouth. My brothers believed in me.

  “Tell your Wanderer friend she’s got this, too,” Duke added. He huffed a dry laugh. “Maybe she can blow up Quasar’s yacht while she’s at it.”

  “We gotta go,” Bonner said. “But first, one more thing.” He extended an index finger toward the camera. “Pull my finger, Ky.”

  I rolled my eyes hard enough to see my frontal lobe.

  “I felt it!” Bonner yelled. “You pulled my finger with the power of your mind. Now I owe you one when you get home—a wet, juicy one. Prepare yourself, bro. It’s coming, and it’s gonna be epic!”

  The screen went blank.

  Fig glanced at me with wide eyes. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah, he’s always asking me to pull his finger.” I made a face. Just thinking about it evoked the stench of sewage and rotten eggs and maybe something hot and steamy like boiled cabbage. “As if I haven’t learned by now.”

  “No, not that,” Fig said. “The part about Quasar’s yacht.”

  I drew a gasp, because I understood what she was getting at. “Of course. I can’t believe we almost missed it.”

  We were wrong before. Quasar didn’t have all the ships trapped on the ground. There was one floating above the force field, and it was a whopper. Quasar’s yacht would give us someplace to go after we ejected, and if a luxury cruiser didn’t count as a ticket to a new life, I didn’t know what did. Plus, we seemed to have ditched the Wanderer Council, but even if they caught up with us, we could always land Quasar’s ship on Earth. The Council couldn’t touch Fig there.

  “We can steal his yacht, right?” I asked.

  Fig tried to hide a grin, almost as if she was afraid to hope. In the end, her enthusiasm won out. The twinkle in her eyes told me so. “We broke into a pirate barge. Some billionaire’s space cruiser is bound to be a piece of cake compared to that.”

  “All right, then. First we’ll lasso the sun, then we’ll blow it up and figure out a way to steal Quasar’s yacht.”

  “An ordinary day,” Fig joked. She nodded at the blank transmission screen. “By the way, what happens when you pull Bonner’s finger?”

  “You seriously don’t know?”

  “No, why would I?”

  “Well, trust me, you don’t want to find out,” I said. “Be glad you don’t have brothers. They’re the worst.”

  “Doesn’t seem that way,” she said. “They cheered us on and helped us figure out what to do. That’s something.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but I closed it again. “All right. They were cool today. I’ll give you that.”

  “So maybe brothers aren’t the worst.”

  I snickered under my breath. “I’ll tell you what. If we actually save Earth and make it to the ground alive, ask my brothers to show you what a NWARF is. Then you can decide for yourself whether they’re the worst.”

  “What’s a NW—”

  “Nope,” I said, cutting her off with a lifted hand. “It’s best if you find out from the source.” I teasingly added, “Now you have a real incentive to save the world.”

  After two hours of pushing the Whirlwind to the max, we reached the miniature star, which looked more like a comet than a sun as it sailed toward Earth. Compared with a planet, the Fasti star was deceptively small. Even the moon, looming in the background, was ten times its size. Hard to believe such a tiny package could end mankind.

  I dimmed the windshield and gazed at Earth, swirling with bright blue and green, and felt my heart swell until it nearly bumped my rib cage. I had never seen the original planet until now. I wasn’t prepared for how vibrantly it stood out against the stars, so teeming with life that it glowed. All of the outer planets, even the designer colonies, were muted in color, made up of different shades of brown and offset by water that looked more gray than sapphire. I had thought some of them were pretty, but I didn’t know true beauty until now. All of a sudden I got it—I understood why Earth was special.

  There was no replacing the original.

  “How close are we to the tether?” I asked Kyler. I didn’t like how quickly the star was sailing away from us. My insides felt like an antique watch, winding tighter and tighter with each moment. “If we don’t latch on soon…”

  “I know,” Ky muttered, his eyes fixed on the screen in front of him. Dr. Nesbit had called to say she was almost finished with the formula to slingshot the star away from Earth, but first we had to connect to the star’s tether. Kyler activated a camera at the bottom of the ship near the boarding hatch, and zoomed in on the image of a broken ring that had once connected the star to its barge. “We’re right on top of the ring. Can you keep us here?”

  “Yep,” I said, gripping the wheel.

  After that, Kyler used his remote-control fob to talk to Cabe, who was waiting in the airlock. “Okay, buddy. We’re in position. Go ahead and work your magic.”

  “Magic is not a part of my programming, Goosey,” Cabe replied.

  I snorted. Leave it to Cabe to make me laugh at a time like this.

  “I meant do your thing,” Kyler said. “You know, repair the link and attach the star to the Whirlwind.”

  “Affirmative,” Cabe answered. “That is within my capabilities.”

  Despite the tension building in my chest, I smiled while I watched the camera footage of Cabe using his metal ropes to build a new ring and fuse it to the ship. Cabe was a goofball, but we would never have survived without him. More than that, he accepted me for who I was and didn’t try to change me, only protect me. He was the closest thing I had to a family.

  I glanced at Kyler and wondered if Cabe meant the same to him. Before I knew it, the words popped out of my mouth. “Hey, you know how your family kept Cabe in a closet for two years?”

  Kyler nodded, still watching the screen.

  “Well, they probably wouldn’t miss him if he was gone, right?” I asked. “If we live through this, do you think they might let me have him?”

  When Ky looked up, his lips parted, and I knew Cabe meant as much to Kyler as he did to me. Maybe more.

  “Never mind.” I flapped a hand and distracted myself by gazing at the space yacht floating above Earth’s atmosphere. I told myself a yacht was better than a quirky robot, but it felt like a lie. “It was just an idea. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We have more important things to worry about than who ends up with what.”

  Speaking of important things, the transmission screen beeped and displayed an incoming message from Fasti. I tried to read the text, but all I saw was a jumble of letters and numbers.

  “It’s from Doctor Nesbit,” Kyler said. “She sent the formula.”

  I pointed at the screen. “That makes sense to you?”

  “Sure. It’s basic physics, with a little extra strategy thrown in.”

  “Huh. I just use instinct when I’m blasting.” I suddenly felt useless. We didn’t need my flying skills now that we were attached to the star. It was time to set the autopilot and eject. My next moment to shine wouldn’t come until the star was far enough away to blast it to smithereens.

  “Tell me what I can do,” I said.

  “You can go to the loading bay and get our things ready for when we eject,” he suggested. “We’ll need—”

  “Suits and oxygen,” I finished, standing up. “And a way to propel ourselves to the yacht after we’re outside the ship. Plus, my blaster, of cou
rse.” That would come in handy even after I destroyed the star. No way was Quasar going to open his doors for us. I would have to rip a hole in his airlock. “I’m on it.”

  “Work fast,” Ky said. “We blow this Popsicle stand in T-minus five minutes.”

  “Cabe,” I called through the comm link. “Is the star still latched on good and tight?”

  “Affirmative, Goosey.”

  “Okay. Now that the star is fused to the ship, I want you to detach from the line and come inside. We’re going to need both of your cables free to pull this off, buddy.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “How about Fig?” I asked. “I mean Weirdo. Is she ready to evacuate?”

  “I’m ready,” she shouted in the background.

  While we spoke, I entered Dr. Nesbit’s formula into the ship’s autopilot program. I knew Fig was a good enough pilot to follow the instructions, but whipping the ship around would create a wicked amount of force, and I didn’t want to risk either of us puking or passing out and mucking up the operation. So in other words, in order to save the human race, I had to eliminate human error.

  Kind of ironic, I know.

  “Here we go,” I called through the ship’s speaker system. “Hold on to something.”

  I punched the EXECUTE button and sat back in my seat. To picture what happened next, imagine holding a string attached to a ball. (Obviously, that ball represents the star, and the string is its force-field tether.) Now imagine you want to circle the string over your head and whip the ball around, but there’s a major catch: You’re doing all of this underwater. That was the challenge we faced: generating movement in space, where gravity was wonky.

  The motion began as a slow pull to the right that revved the engines to maximum power but barely changed the ship’s position. The engine lulled, almost as if catching a breath, and then it geared up for the next movement, which swung us around a little farther. I glanced out the windshield and noticed the miniature star beginning to change direction.