“In theory, we should be able to send communications with this for up to a hundred light years, but to do that, you’d need more than the remnants of energy from a Core. With the proper design, someone could set up a tower or a station, and it would act as a hub between systems.”
And somehow Bryson had heard about it. “How did he know you created this?”
“He asked what types of things interested me in our interview.”
“You had an interview?” I asked.
“Sure. Didn’t you? I was told there were ten candidates from around the world speaking to Bryson about this position.” Jade stared up at me. “Wait, you didn’t have one, did you? The great Hawk Lewis was hand-selected by Bryson. I should have guessed.”
“Don’t get mad at me. I didn’t ask for any of this,” I told her.
“It doesn’t matter, because I’m the best, and I secured the job.”
“That’s right. Now, why would we add this to Pilgrim?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Bryson requested it.”
“Does it fall within race protocol?”
Her hand tilted back and forth. “There’s no actual reference to adjusting your communication features, which means we could dispute any objections.”
“As if the Board is going to ever side with us,” I said. “I don’t care how much money SeaTech has. He goes up against the other Primaries on anything, he’s toast. Go ahead. Let’s load this modification.”
“Perfect. And, Arlo,” she said as I started away.
“Yes?”
“Good work today. That was quick thinking.”
I returned to my seat smiling.
Fifteen
I woke to the sound of alarms. That was never a good sign in space, and a terrible one during the Race. I was on the bridge in two minutes, my jumpsuit undone to the waist.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to understand what the issue was. Holland hopped from the seat, and I took over.
“Nothing to worry about. We just encountered some debris that wasn’t on the radar,” Luther said.
“Are we in danger?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Then shut the damned racket off.” I rubbed my temples. I’d only been resting for an hour, and when I checked the map, we were twenty-five minutes from the fourth Ring, but we’d closed the gap on Espace.
Luther was onto something. “R11, any read on the waste?”
“Appears to be manufactured composite material,” the robot replied.
“Someone dropped it behind them, hoping to slow us,” Luther surmised.
“You think so?” I stared at Espace’s ship, a sleek and small Racer model. It was surprising the craft could even house a Pod, let alone four crew members and their robot.
“Definitely. There’s a lot of composite in their ThermaSuits, isn’t there, R11?” our tactical officer asked.
“Correct. This was their equivalent of dumping marbles on the track behind them,” R11 said.
“What’s a marble?” Holland piped up.
“Never mind, we know how to deal with this,” I said. “Jade, did you finish that modification yet?”
“Sure, a while ago.”
“Is there any way to have a message redirected through Primary City and back to Espace?” I asked.
Jade stayed quiet while she considered it, and I smiled when she finally responded, “I think so.”
I couldn’t stop grinning. “Send a message, telling her the Race Committee saw her malfeasance, and she’s being given a ten-minute penalty as a result.”
She didn’t seem to love my idea. “Are you kidding?”
“Come on, we’ll bluff her out. If she did try to screw us over, she’ll stop. If she didn’t, she’ll argue the fact and continue on.”
“I’ve watched the feeds in slow motion, and I do see matter blasting from their vents. It looks like they released it with their waste, trying to hide it,” Holland said. His obsession with the feeds was paying off.
“We have a half-hour until the next Ring. Let’s do this and pass into sixth.” I spun in my seat, seeing Jade finally side with me.
“Okay, but it’ll take me a moment to encrypt this. I don’t want anyone tracing it to Pilgrim.” Jade started working on it, and I winked at Holland.
“I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I thought it was honorable, based on our skills and creativity,” he said.
“Little in life is ever so easy. Each of these teams has scraped their way here, to the top of their fields within their Corporations, and they’ll do anything to win. Just like their CEOs will do whatever it takes to turn a profit. There’s nothing honorable with how they run their businesses, and this is no different.” I made the speech and felt the power of it. I wished there was another solution, but we were being forced to play the same game as the other teams.
“I know, but…Dad isn’t like that.”
“You think so, but the road to success is messy,” I told him.
Holland didn’t reply, and we flew in silence, the Espace Racer only a kilometer in front of us. I checked behind and saw Barret was five minutes behind us. The race was close. Sage was nearing the Ring, a good twenty minutes ahead. What was Varn doing to maintain that lead?
“Message is ready. You positive this is the right move?” Jade asked.
I glanced at Luther, and then to Holland, who gave me a tight-lipped smile. They were supporting the decision. “Good to go.”
“Sent.”
We watched and waited while racing for the next Ring. Lotus entered a good chunk of time ahead, followed closely by Luna Corp, with five minutes between them and Oasis. Travis was making the best of the opportunity. Orion started losing ground, and they were a few minutes ahead of Espace, who was my next target to pass.
“Nothing’s happening,” I muttered. “Holland, bring up the feeds. Give them some volume, I want to hear this.”
“No huge surprises over this last section, Baru, but SeaTech is gaining ground on Espace. Couldn’t have seen this coming,” Yon said. The commentating duo was starting to look tired, and I wondered when their shift would end.
“What’s this?” Baru almost stood in his seat. “Espace is slowing their thrusters! They must have a malfunction, because there’s no reason they’d be decelerating so close to the next checkpoint.”
I watched the feed from the drones following Espace’s number six-labeled Racer. The thrusters went from full to zero within a minute, and we raced under them, moving into sixth position.
“Wooooohoooo!” Luther shouted. “Damn if we don’t have a killer captain.”
“We have some work to do.” Orion was number five, and I wasn’t going to be happy until I passed them too. One at a time. That was all I needed to focus on. I couldn’t worry about Sage at the lead or Lotus taking second. All I could control was my own future, and that meant rising through the scoreboard sequentially.
“Someone better tell them there’s a race going on, because this is unprecedented.” Baru was at his wit’s end, and it made me even more excited over our position.
The Ring was ahead, and a few minutes after Orion entered, I guided Pilgrim through. A timer started to the final checkpoint before we landed at Mars for the Pod race, and it was an estimated seven hours, the longest leg of the trip so far.
“You want to get some sleep, Arlo?” Luther asked.
I was too jacked up to rest. “Maybe in a bit.”
This must have been what it felt like to be Bryson Kelley, taking SeaTech from the bottom to the top ten within a couple of decades. Every rank he climbed was a huge achievement, and I understood his drive even more now, albeit on a smaller scale.
“Captain, we’re getting a message from Espace.”
“Patch it through.” I pretended to be concerned as Captain Clara Durand’s face appeared on screen.
“I know it was you, SeaTech!”
I spoke calmly. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
“I’m not stupid. The Committee sent no such message.”
Her ship’s icon was moving once again, but now it was behind Barret in eighth position.
“Did you have an engine malfunction? Maybe some minor composite blockages?” I asked, hinting I knew the truth of what they’d done.
Captain Durand just stared at the screen, and a second later, the communication was ended.
“Nice work, Arlo,” Jade said. “I would have told her off.”
We flew the few hours without incident, and eventually, I fell asleep in my seat.
____________
“Arlo, there’s something you should see.” Jade gently shook my shoulder, and I blinked my eyes open. I’d been dreaming. My parents were on the beach near their retirement home in the Islands, and I was walking toward them with a woman at my side. Someone watched us from a distance away, and I felt my grandfather’s stare on the back of my head. When I looked up, it was Jade watching me with those big dark eyes.
“I’m awake. What is it?” We’d been flying at full bore for hours, almost a day in total. Luther was gone again, and Holland chatted with R11 quietly while watching the Race feeds.
“I opened the communicator up after adding my new measures.” She demonstrated the program. It showed all incoming messages aimed at us, along with random ones crossing our path. Each was displayed with their destination and origin. “It’s not unusual to find a hundred or so communications passing through a particular region. Some are old, some never reach their true source, and others are misdirected.” She tapped the screen in the middle of the transmission records.
“What’s that one?” It was written in orange text, unlike the green from the rest.
She played with her curls. “Arlo, it might be a glitch, but…I think it’s coming from far away.”
The hair on my arms stood up. “How far?”
She glanced behind her across the bridge, making sure Holland wasn’t listening. “Fifty light years. Give or take.”
“Fifty?” I shouted, and slapped my hand over my mouth. “Fifty?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. It might be the program screwing up, but I made it myself. From what I can tell, there’s a system. Yellow dwarf, estimated to have fourteen planets in orbit. Paedra is her name.”
“Who?”
“The star,” she said.
“Okay, you’re telling me there’s a message from Paedra?”
“Well, the star didn’t send the message, but…”
I swallowed hard, suddenly thirsty. “What does it say?”
“It’s a file. I think there’s embedded audio, maybe visual, but it’s complicated. It’ll take me some time to separate and convert to view.” Jade seemed excited.
“This could be nothing. What if it’s Espace or one of the others trying to distract us?”
Jade tapped her screen. “I don’t think so, but it’s certainly a possibility. But what if it isn’t?”
“If it’s a message from another system, we’re famous.” But there was more to it than that. “Should we tell Bryson?”
“Let me see if I can learn more first. Do you want to see the data files? I only took a quick peek, and they’re…”
“Do it.” I stared at the screen in anticipation while the first file appeared. Text scrolled down the program, and I felt my vision beginning to narrow. The text… it was the same as on the ship I’d encountered. “I’ve seen this before.”
“Barret is advancing, finding the power to catch SeaTech just minutes before the last checkpoint commencing the Pod Race. Keep your eyes peeled, people, because this is going to be one hell of a showdown,” Yon said as Holland turned up the race feeds.
“What? You’ve seen this before? How’s that possible?” Jade asked.
“R11, come over here, please.”
The robot shuffled quickly, standing beside me. “Captain Lewis, is there a task I can—”
“Read this message. What does it say?” I asked.
His response usually came within seconds, and the delay told me all I needed to know. “It’s not in my parameters, but maybe if I link to SeaTech’s master database, I can determine the origin.”
“Don’t bother. I have a distinct feeling there won’t be any hits.” I watched the text, the lines squiggly, broken with large spaces between the symbols.
“Arlo, don’t evade my question.” Jade was growing restless, and I had to make a choice: trust someone I barely knew or pretend I’d slipped up. It was time to be a team, not a solo pilot.
“On my last trip to Eris, I stumbled on…something. Fragments of an ice world were scattered about, and I received a transponder from a ship. The message was in this very same text,” I explained.
“What kind of vessel was it?” Jade urged.
“I don’t know. I have images.” My fingers wrapped around the memory Coin in my pocket, and I pulled it out, laying it on my palm. “I went to investigate, and the thing self-destructed. Blew itself up before I could get any clues to its identity.”
Jade stared at me from her seat, a look of disbelief on her face. “You’re messing with me.”
“No. I swear.”
Holland had broken free from his viewing of the Race coverage and watched from the other side of R11 as I dropped the Coin onto Jade’s keypad. It glowed brightly, transferring the data, and Jade accessed the files, opening the images first.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Jade pointed to the nose. “See the way it curves up, and the round hull?” She zoomed to the neck below the cockpit, laughing like she’d heard a funny joke. “It’s definitely not from the Corporations. There are no welds, which has been a safety feature on every ship. Corporate-mandated access hatch for repair drones.” She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “The ship doesn’t have one.”
“It could be a prototype,” Holland suggested.
“That’s what I thought all along. The text could be a cipher.” I’d had my suspicions it wasn’t from Earth, but they’d been buried under worry for my job, and then the Race.
“I don’t think so,” R11 said. “I’m familiar with many ciphers, four hundred and forty-nine from my count across your human history, and never has the text looked similar to this.”
“R11, do you have translation capabilities?” I asked him.
“Are you inquiring if I can somehow read this?” R11 replied.
He was a strange robot. “Yes. That’s what I’m after.”
“May I?” he asked, and Jade gave up her seat. The chair groaned under his weight, and a connection relay extruded from his finger. He pressed it into the keypad’s outlet, and the screen began scrolling through data faster than any human could analyze it.
Holland looked nervous. “What do you see?”
“The text is layered with numerical equations. The universal language. I believe I may be able to determine what the message says,” R11 told us.
“I don’t know if I should be thrilled or worried.” I glanced at the cockpit. The ranks were the same as we neared the last Ring before our stoppage at Mars.
“How long?” Jade asked the robot.
“I’m unsure. Let me transfer this to my station, and I’ll keep working at it.” R11 took the Coin and returned to his seat across the bridge.
My nerves were twitchy after day one in the Race, and now this message from a distant system was enough to push me over the edge. I wanted to concentrate on winning, but there were so many distractions.
The rumor of the Primaries merging to put the others out of business and control everything clung to my mind, along with Eclipse’s plan to attack and prevent this from occurring. Throw in the strange mossy creatures on Eris, and the alien ship, and things were even more complicated. The Race was expected to take nearly a week, and that countdown felt like it was factoring in more things than just crowning a winner to Proxima’s rights.
Lotus sped through the checkpoint, and the announcers were gushing over how great the rest wou
ld be for the top teams. Once we landed on Mars, we’d have about ten hours before the Pod Race began, giving us a chance to touch base with Bryson and hopefully recharge.
When we were only a few minutes from the Ring, Luther’s head poked up from the deck below, and he climbed the rungs, yawning as he walked up to me. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing. Still in sixth. Oh, Jade managed to receive a message from aliens. R11’s working on deciphering it now.” I could tell from his expression that he thought I was pulling his leg.
“Sure, and I just dreamt that I was the new Lead Chair.”
“Go take a look.” I indicated R11’s station, and Luther sauntered over.
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“What does this mean?” He looked lost, but it was Holland who answered.
“We’re about to make contact.” He smiled, like this was the plan the entire time.
Sixteen
I used to love Mars. Sage and Lotus had done a wonderful job creating cities despite the obvious challenges. They’d managed to give the planet an atmosphere that allowed for limited crop growth, but the place had never lived up to their expectations. Now, as we entered the manufactured environment, I could see that they’d terminated city funding.
An area that had once been hectares of farmland was empty, no more workers or drones constantly tending to the unreliable fields. Even the cities themselves looked worn and unkempt. The wind and temperatures on Mars were harsh, making everything wear much faster than on Earth or the Moon.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Mars was eventually abandoned entirely. Holland, on the other hand, was bouncing off the walls. Tomorrow was his big day, and he seemed more excited than nervous.
“Mars. Have you ever seen such a beautiful place?” he asked.
“I haven’t been here before.” Jade stared at the surface, and I wondered what it was like to witness the red planet for the first time. Surely she saw promise and adventure where I found failure and resentment.
This section of the planet was owned by Lotus, and it showed in the style of construction. They opted for shorter buildings, with curved edges and colorful designs. Each structure was connected by tubes, allowing people to walk through the entire city indoors. The only independent structure was the main Lotus satellite office. I’d delivered some private materials there in the past, in my early days with Sage.
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