Rion swears creatively. I hold up my hands, then realize I’m still holding the gun and flick on the safety. Whoops. My ammi the police officer would be horrified with me right now.
“Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t fly!” I slide into the pilot’s seat, set the gun down on a side console, and grab the control wheel with shaking hands. “Just not legally.”
Flying is what I came to the Academy for, after all. Can’t have a space permit until they say I can, and they’ve already made their feelings on that perfectly clear. Should I tell them I’ve never flown a real ship, just simulators? Should I tell them about—
Well. What would be the point of that? I’m our only option, apparently. Better to just get my shit together and do this.
Yeah. I can do this.
I adjust the seat until my feet fit comfortably on the rudder pedals, blow out a slow breath, then look over at Genius Girl. “Any chance we can get those bay doors open, or do we have to do this the explodey way?”
“I’ve almost got it,” she snaps back. “Scans show four more ships on the edges of Academy space, by the way, 269 by 53 by 620. You should see them on your heads-up display once we’re out of here.”
I wipe my sweaty palms on my pant legs and grip the controls again, glancing up at the HUD. “Great. Fantastic. Anyone religious? Want to say some prayers, maybe sing a hymn or two?”
Dr. Eyeliner forces a smile when I peek back around my chair, but Rion only taps his fingers against his folded arms, eyes fixed on the viewport. No one’s impressed by my attempt at levity, but it helps tame the writhing ball of nerves in my stomach all the same. Flying by myself? Fine. That would be fine. If I screw something up and get myself killed, that’s my problem.
But all these other people in the ship with me?
I close my eyes to the vivid memory of flashing ambulance lights, twisted metal, and blood, my brother’s voice and the sirens melding into a blaring alarm in my mind.
“Got it!” Genius Girl says. My eyes snap open, and true to her word, the inner bay doors creep apart. I take a deep breath, say bismillah in my head, and steady my hands.
I feed some power to the magnetic coils, and the ship lifts smoothly off the deck. Okay, good so far. I can do this. Slowly, carefully, I spin us around and ease the throttle open. The ship jerks forward, way too fast.
“Open the outer doors!” I shout as we careen past the first opening.
“I’m trying!” Genius Girl taps away. The doors stay stubbornly closed. I ease back on the controls and tip the ship up, bringing the magnetic coils to bear on the closed doors in front of us, which bounces us back the other way, toward the closing inner doors. This is the worst game of Pong ever.
Someone behind me makes that hissing inhale-between-the-teeth noise my ammi used to make when she was teaching me to fly. I’d floor it and go hurtling down Route 401, racing past the cornfields, and she’d make that sound as she held her hair out of her eyes with one hand and choked the life out of the oh-shit handle with the other.
I hate that sound.
The outer doors finally begin their slow parting, and as soon as the gap is large enough I push the throttle wide open. The sudden momentum slams me deeper into my chair, my favorite feeling in the world. Simulators never quite got it right—it’s even better in a real ship. My stomach swoops as the shuttle’s inertial dampener struggles to compensate, and three terrified screams replace the irritating hiss as we hurtle toward the still-opening doors.
Much better.
My timing is fine, though, of course it is, and we rocket through the opening with several generous inches on either side of the stubby wings. The screams die out as we roar away from the moon’s craggy surface, toward the gentle blue glow of the Rock.
I put the ship through a little barrel roll just because I can. I can’t resist, even though my brain is half waiting for the ship to explode underneath me or careen out of control without warning. The controls feel different, somehow. More . . . physical, like I can feel the ship as an extension of my feet and hands. I pull a few more maneuvers to get it out of my system, grinning like little-kid me running through the field with his arms out like wings.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Rion calls from behind me. “You! You’re that asshole all the pilot trainees were bitching about, aren’t you? The guy who showed up with a perfect score on the prescreening flight exam.”
“Yeah, that was me.” I grin, letting it cover up the hollow ache in my chest. It started so well, but obviously it didn’t end that way.
“Seriously?” he says. “How in the hell did you manage to fail out?”
“Bigger problems, guys,” Genius Girl cuts in. “Point us back toward the station so we can see, hotshot.”
I do as she asks, and we swing around just in time to see the billowing clouds of escaping oxygen from the station taper off, then cease altogether. And all at once, the gravity of the situation hits.
“Did they manage to keep the last of the atmosphere from venting?”
I know the truth even as I ask.
No one stopped it. The station ran out of air.
“I’m only getting a handful of heat signatures from the entire station. They’re all . . .” Genius Girl trails off, her voice thick with tears.
Tucker Fineman is dead. We went to high school together. I just saw him fifteen minutes ago.
The guy I passed who was cleaning out the vac-suit lockers . . . did he manage to get one on in time? Is he dead, too?
And it’s not just the Academy, but all of Ellis Station. The emigration port. The warehouses. The laboratories. All of the air from the whole station, gone.
All of those people, gone.
My stomach is hollow.
I dial back the throttle and let us drift for a moment. The emptiness of space surrounds us, swallows us up in blackness. Stars fill the void beyond the curve of the moon’s surface, beyond the reflected light of Earth, dotting the endless horizon with glittering points of brightness.
It’s silent in the cockpit for a moment. Just four strangers breathing the same air. Being alive. Trying to process. Who would do this? Why would they do this?
Finally Eyeliner speaks. “Should we try to hail the station? See if any of those heat signatures are survivors? Maybe they were able to—”
Then the comm crackles. “All ships, you are clear to approach along your assigned vectors. The station has been neutralized.”
The speakers hiss, then a different voice takes over. “Acknowledged, lead. Should we expect resistance?”
“We cut communications before Earth could be alerted. Clean and quiet. Our insiders are adjusting the logs and flooding the station with fresh atmosphere. We’ll be ready by the time you dock. Everything should look status quo from the surface.”
Insiders? Someone on the station knew this was going to happen? And helped? My breath catches in my throat, and I turn to Genius Girl. “We have to tell someone.”
She nods, mouth hard and eyes blazing. “I’ll open a link with Command down on the planet. It’ll give away our position, but the GCC shou—Break hard starboard!”
My hands and feet obey before my brain processes her words, and the ship flips up and to our right. A missile flashes past the viewport, and a new voice crackles from the comm, lean and assertive.
“Alpha, this is Tiger Five. Two Flight has located the rogue shuttle. Terminating now.”
“Good hunting, Tiger Squadron.”
I jam my foot down on the rudder pedal, banking hard as a stream of bullets flashes past. Two hard maneuvers in a row, in an unfamiliar ship, and I’m completely disoriented.
Gotta angle for Earth, shitshitshit, which way is . . .
I spend a precious two seconds studying my instruments, then swing us around to port and tip the nose of the shuttle back. Earth comes into view, a long arc of blue backlit by the sun. With my brain finally calibrated correctly, I open the throttle wide again, prepared this time for the feeling of my organs being squish
ed against the back of my rib cage. Two hundred thirty-nine thousand miles from Ellis Station on the moon to Earth Command down on the surface. My heart pounds deafeningly loud in my ears. I can’t screw this up, gotta keep us alive, we’re the only ones who know.
A flash of color in front of us, two, and a hail of cracking gunfire. Our shields handle most of it, but a single ping of metal-on-metal sounds from the aft, sending a coughing vibration through the ship. Not good, not good . . .
“Damn bastards!” I yank back on the controls as the HUD blares a shrill warning. Missile lock. Again. One of the fighters is on our tail, and there are at least three others circling around, skilled and confident predators. I wasn’t actually planning on dying today, and as much as I didn’t want to be stuck back down on the Rock, I like this even less.
“Another flight incoming!” Genius Girl reports. “About thirty seconds out. They’re cutting us off.”
I blow out a breath. Steady my hands on the sweat-slick controls. Push down the panic clanging in my skull.
“Okay. Unless you’d like to go home with significantly more holes, I think we need a plan B here,” I shout over the ship’s groaning complaints and alarms. “All cards on the table, y’all, because there’s no way we’re gonna make it back to the Rock. This is a clunky-ass shuttle, not a fighter jet, and I can’t keep these assholes dancing forever.”
Rion leans forward, gets a hand on the back of my chair. “Let’s fight back,” he shouts in my ear, then loses his grip as I cut the throttle and pull a hard maneuver. A fighter goes sailing past. “I’m a good shot. We can do this!”
“Yeah, great idea! Only we’ll have to hang you out the window and let you throw rocks at them, because, once again, this is a damned shuttle, not a fighter. We’re toothless,” I shoot back. A politician who’s good with weapons? There’s a scary thought. Where did the fourth fighter go? What I wouldn’t give for a ship with weapons right now. . . .
“Call for reinforcements, then,” Rion says.
The shields flicker for a brief moment.
“We’re being jammed,” Genius Girl yells in between bursts of gunfire. She flips a switch, and the cockpit speakers hiss with random garbled patterns.
“Well, fix it!” I jerk the controls hard, throwing everyone against their restraints, just in time to avoid another missile.
“I can’t find a clear frequency!”
I grit my teeth. The nearest fighter wing would have been stationed at the Academy anyway. The pilots are probably all dead. We’d be dust long before help arrived, either by the fighters or the orbital defense guns ready to shoot down anything without landing clearance. We’re out of options.
My stomach sinks. I hesitate, gulp for air to calm my racing heart, but there’s no time.
Say it.
“I think we have to jump for the colonies.”
A beat of silence.
“Do it,” Dr. Eyeliner says, precise and calm.
“You’re cracked!” Genius shouts over the increasingly worrying noise from the engines. “What about the no-return rule? If we leave—”
“What choice do we have?” Rion shoots back. “If we’d made it through our time at the Academy, we wouldn’t have been able to go back anyway. That was always the deal. I want to live. So we have to jump.”
I don’t bother adding to the commentary. The HUD is solid red, and between its screeching and the static over the speakers, my head is crowded and panicked. I’m definitely going to get us killed. I can’t do this, I’m terrible, I’ve never even flown a real ship before, this is impossible. My hands slip on the controls, nervous sweat and trembling muscles making the job so much harder. One fumble, one wrong maneuver, and those fighters will have us.
I take one last look at the sun rising over Earth’s jewel-tone arc, then swing the shuttle around and throw us into the black, out of the moon’s gravity shadow. The bullets follow, slamming against hull instead of shield now.
“Does this thing even have an A-drive?” I think to ask at the last second.
But it must, because Genius Girl pulls up the nav chart and picks an illuminated destination at random. The whining from the engines ramps up, increasing in pitch and sending a horrific shudder through the pedals under my feet. Oh god, we’re actually doing it, actually leaving Earth space, never coming back, never seeing our families again, and I knew it was coming, I wanted it, but not like this, not—
Stomach dropping, rib cage compressed, light bending in incomprehensible headache-inducing ways. Hold her steady, hit the mark, one last sudden acceleration . . . then the space in front of us scrunches. A tiny hole in the universe appears, just for us.
We’re gone.
Two
BA-CLANG, BUMP, BA-CLANG, BUMP. SCREE-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee . . .
The noises as we pop back into normal space are not comforting. The ship’s vibrations crawl up my legs, an intense itch, and the controls buck in time with every CLANG from the aft.
“Status report!” I snap, because it seems like the kind of thing someone should say in this situation. It comes out less like authority and more like a plea for reassurance.
Genius Girl looks over her shoulder to check on Rion and Eyeliner. “Everyone’s okay,” she says, her voice shaky. “We’re in the A-jump arrival zone outside the colony world al-Rihla. Um . . .”
She trails off, and her tapping on the display is much slower than it was before the jump, her fingers shaking over the glowing screen. She closes her eyes for a second and bites her lip, breathing in for four counts and out for eight. I have to look away. Her expression is too close to the same cracking feeling inside my chest, the one threatening to steal the breath from my lungs; I’m going to break open right along with her if I don’t get us moving again.
I open the throttle halfway to move us out of the arrival zone, just in case any more ships jump in behind us. Good first step. It would be embarrassing to escape a daring firefight in the skies over Earth’s moon only to be obliterated by some arriving supply ship. Once we’re safely away, I flop back in the pilot’s seat.
“Well,” I start, then swallow painfully. My throat is thick, my voice a ragged disaster. “So much for Earth.”
The no-return rule is officially in effect. We can never set foot on Earth soil ever again. Rion and Dr. Eyeliner don’t seem too bothered—both staring out the viewport with blank expressions—but Genius Girl makes a strangled sound and hides her face in her hands.
The enormity of it comes crashing down on me.
I never got to say good-bye to my parents. Not for real. We sat in the spaceport parking lot in near silence for almost ten minutes before I gave up and got out of the car, grabbed my bag, and just . . . left. I was supposed to be back in six months for the winter break. I was supposed to come home with a flight permit and a wing-leader insignia on my uniform, and they were supposed to cook me dinner and call my uncles and aunts to brag and forgive me for every mistake I’ve ever made.
And now it’ll never happen, along with video games at Mel’s house and pickup soccer at the abandoned farm and climbing all over ancient crumbling barns with Riz. No more stuffing my face during endless Eid visits with my ammi’s whole family, or Christmas cider and pecan pie with Grammy and Pa, and it’s all gone, gone.
It’s not even like I disagree with the no-return rule, really. The last thing the human race needs is some weird space virus that only affects the fruit-fly population but leads to a worldwide ecosystem collapse. They have proven decontamination procedures out in the colonies, but no one trusts them enough to risk the homeworld. A bit paranoid, maybe, but it only takes one space plague to bring ruin to the birthplace of humanity. Besides, we couldn’t just go out into space, multiply, then let all those people come back to an Earth that’s already bursting at the seams and just barely over its first energy crisis. Harsh, but necessary.
I always planned to end up out here permanently. My parents mostly supported me, and I knew I’d be leaving Earth forever after
my four years at the Academy. But this . . . this is not what I imagined at all. So soon. And sudden.
My stomach roils with the weight of it. This would be such a bad time to vomit.
“Hey, everyone?” Rion asks, his voice deep and even. “Does that screeching sound like venting atmo to anyone else?” He says it with the cadence of a joke, but his knuckles are pale where they grip the back of my seat.
Genius Girl wipes her eyes and peers at her display.
“I would love to disagree with you,” she says, breath still ragged, “but this blinking red screen in front of me seems to think you’re right.”
“Can we make it to al-Rihla before the air runs out?” Doc Eyeliner asks, straight to the point.
I thumb the throttle control slowly forward, easing more juice to the engines, but they only cough harder. I really have killed us all. Deep breath, Nax. “Looking less likely by the minute.”
“The atmo is actually not our biggest problem,” Genius Girl says. Rion’s and Eyeliner’s calm seems to have steadied her somewhat. These people have their shit surprisingly together when faced with imminent doom. How the hell did they end up as washouts?
Al-Rihla grows larger on the horizon, filling the starboard side of the viewport with its glowing red-and-blue arc, its two moons reflecting the light of the yellow sun. I gently turn the controls to the right to bring us more in line with the planet.
Nothing happens.
I test the roll using rudder pedals, and the wings tip up and over just fine; I push the controls in and pull out again to test the pitch, and the nose of the shuttle tips up and down. Finally I wiggle the controls left and right to test the yaw, with small motions at first, then larger, until I’m wrenching it from one extreme to the other.
Nothing. No side-to-side motion. We can’t turn.
“So, I’m guessing this is our biggest problem,” I say, lying back against the headrest to look at Genius Girl. I’m hovering right on the sharp edge of panic, every muscle in my body tense, but I keep my words as even and chill as I can. If I give in to that shivery tingle of dread in my gut, they’ll all panic, too, and they’ll figure out that I really shouldn’t be flying this ship and we’ll definitely all die.
The Disasters Page 2
