by Ramona Finn
“Yeah. I…” I trailed off, shaking my head again and turning to look at the ships. I’d come here, hadn’t I? I’d dressed for combat, hadn’t I? Wasn’t that a direct answer to Wells’ question? What exactly was I doing down here?
“Does your high-strungness happen to have anything to do with the fact that we’re within half a day’s journey of the Station at this very second?” he asked, dropping his hand from his throat and bending to retrieve his wrench. I followed him back to the corner where he’d apparently been re-assembling a pulley door that had broken in the galley kitchen about a week ago. I hadn’t even noticed him when I’d come in.
“You could say that.” He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t right in the way that he thought he was. I wasn’t nervous about being close to the Station because of all the bad memories, or even because of the proximity of all the heavy artillery they kept there. I was nervous because I was considering—
“You two forming a breakfast club?” Kupier called from the doorway of the landing deck where he leaned, his hands in his pockets and his feet crossed at the ankles. His posture was casual, but his eyes told a different story.
This wasn’t a social call. Kupier had come to the landing deck for a reason.
“Hey, boss,” Wells called. “I couldn’t sleep and decided to get a jump on fixing the pulley door that broke in the kitchen.”
“And you, DP-1?” he asked me. “Couldn’t sleep, either?”
“Don’t see how she could,” Wells answered for me, and I was grateful. Meanwhile, Kupier’s eyes swung over me, taking in every detail he could all at once. I got the impression he was swallowing me whole, deciding what flavor I was. “Being this close to the Station.”
“What do you mean?”
I glanced at Wells and saw that he was sweaty around the collar, his hands slightly shaking as he used the wrench to loosen a set of bolts.
I took over for his explanation, because I did know what he meant, even if it wasn’t exactly how I was feeling. “The Station feels sort of like a black hole. Like if we were to get too close to it, Wells and I might get sucked right back into it. Get stuck there again.”
“Cast, too,” Wells mumbled. “He’s barely slept in the last two days.”
“We’re in stealth mode,” Kupier reminded us.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Wells said, and immediately an apologetic look came over his face. “Sorry. I just mean that there’s no logic when it comes to the way I feel about that place. It was my home, yeah. But it was also my prison. For most of my life, I thought I’d never be able to leave. I thought it’d be my graveyard. It wasn’t until I met Cast that I started to dream about leaving.”
“What happened then?” Kupier asked, leaning into the wall and staring down at Wells, genuinely interested.
Wells shrugged. “I found out that he was dreaming about leaving. And it made me realize, somewhere deep inside me, that it was possible. You know? I suddenly had this important person in my life who had all these talents and privileges and skills that I’d never even dreamed of having, and here he was, trying to find a way to leave it all behind. And I just thought, maybe this could work.”
This was news to me. “You and Cast were planning on leaving the Station together? Did you have a plan?”
Wells gave one last tug at a rusty bolt before he gave up and tossed the wrench down. He grabbed an oily rag from his back pocket, inspected it, and deeming it clean enough, wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “Not really. Not more than a general desire to leave. The new protocols for Datapoints started up soon after we first talked about it, and he… got sick.”
He’d gotten more than sick. I thought of how Wells and I had basically carried Cast out of the Station. He’d been barely able to move his feet. His new Datapoint training had almost killed him.
“Anyway, leaving became a lot farther down on the totem pole after that. I just concentrated on him getting better.”
I eyed Wells for a second before letting my eyes meet Kupier’s. It wasn’t a surprise that he’d been watching me. I’d been able to feel his eyes the whole time Wells had been talking. Kupier’s gaze was often like a physical touch. I wondered if he even knew that.
“Wells,” I said, experimentally, my eyes still on Kupier’s. “If you had to, would you sacrifice Cast’s life for all the lives in our solar system?”
He looked up at me, his face quirked into a frown. “That’s a terrible question.”
“Can you answer it?”
“Yeah. I mean, of course I wouldn’t value one person over an entire solar system’s worth of people.”
Kupier raised his eyebrows at me. I ignored him. “What about half the solar system?”
“Does it really matter if we’ve halved the number of people?” Wells asked, looking back and forth between Kupier and I. “If we’re killing a bunch of people just to save one, it doesn’t really pan out, you know? It doesn’t compute. Just because I love Cast and the other people are anonymous doesn’t mean they should die.”
“Fair point,” Kupier said, a small smile on his face.
“What if you could die in Cast’s place?” I asked Wells, focusing in on his face.
Wells’ brow furrowed, but he didn’t look conflicted. “Of course, another easy decision; I’d take his place.”
“No hesitation?”
“No.” He’d taken on a strangely mulish expression that melted into something a little more complicated as he looked back and forth between Kupier and I. “What exactly are we talking about here?”
I opened my mouth again, but it clapped closed as the Ray suddenly and viciously juddered forward, jolting all three of us to the side. Wells slid palms first across the floor as the Ray slipped off her axis. Kupier lunged and grabbed him by the waist of his pants. I grabbed the doorway and Kupier’s hand, and for a moment, the three of us hung there, like the interlocking chains of a necklace. Wells’ wrench skittered past our hands and clanked loudly into one of the parked ships. Abruptly, the Ray righted and we regained our footing.
“I’d say we’ve officially entered the asteroid belt!” Kupier hooted. He brushed some dust off my pants and a smug smile came over his face. “Too late to release any landing ships now.” “Why would we ever do that?” Wells asked, patting his pockets as if he’d lost something and looking around the landing deck in befuddlement. He looked at all angles, too, as if he were waiting for the Ray to go off-kilter again at any second.
“Come on,” I said, ignoring the question and grabbing Kupier by the hand. “Let’s go see if they need any help in the cockpit.”
We waved goodbye to Wells and strode down the hallway side by side.
“I can’t believe you, you sneak.” Kupier’s words had a bit of a bite to them as if he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or scowl.
“What?”
“You were down there, about to commandeer a ship and head back to the Station. Admit it!”
“If we’re being honest—”
“It would be a nice change of pace.” He raised an eyebrow at me and halfway shoved me up the ladder that led to the cockpit level.
“Then,” I continued, resolutely ignoring him, “I would say that I went down to the landing deck undecided about what I was going to do next.” “When did Dahn tell you?”
“A few days ago.” The heaviness of that conversation sank over me like a blanket all over again just at the sudden thought of it. All of Enceladus’ population, gone like a lamp clicked off. Just like that. It was too horrible to even fully comprehend. Bile rose in my throat as I contemplated it again anyway. Part of me had wanted to return to the Station just to take care of Haven once and for all. And part of me had wanted to go back because I knew Dahn was right. If I was in the driver’s seat for the Culling, then the solar system would be infinitely safer. Not to mention that Kupier wouldn’t have to offer himself up for slaughter.
It would suck for me, though. Not to mention all the people I had to cull.
“And your plan was to what? Sneak a ship and return to the Station? Just hope that Haven welcomed you back with open arms?” I shrugged. “I told you. I hadn’t made up my mind yet.”
“Oh, Lord,” he groaned. “Am I gonna have to tie you to one end of a rope or something?”
The Ray suffered another impact, this one lesser than the first, but still, we went tumbling into one another and skidding down the wall. I shoved Kupier off of me, making sure he had his footing.
“I didn’t do it, did I?”
“Only because I caught you in the act.”
I watched Kupier stumble down the rolling hallway and through to the cockpit. I studied the back of his neck, square and corded. The graceful set of his shoulders. His long, long arms and big feet.
He was right. I’d gone down to the landing deck that morning because I hadn’t fully answered my question. Would I sacrifice half the solar system just to keep that man alive? Wells’ answer had been clear enough. No. It was immoral to do so. I couldn’t return to the Station just to participate in the Culling again. It was problematic even when the system was flawless. But now that I knew what I knew about it? Well, it was just murder.
What Kupier didn’t know was that I’d left the landing dock with a completely different agenda on my mind. Cast was right. The Station was like a horrible, unblinking eye willing me to look right into it. It was willing me to let myself get hypnotized again. To get dragged back into its horrible draw. But I wasn’t going back.
What I really wanted was for Kupier not to die.
And, the shortest distance between two points was a straight line.
Kupier was right. We needed a body in the pilot’s chair of the ship we were going to have to use to explode the base that housed Earth’s shield. But Kupier wasn’t going to be that body. I was.
Chapter Sixteen
I bolted up off of my cot, unsure if I’d awoken because of the jolting of the ship or because of the silhouetted person standing in the open maw of my doorway.
“Hurry!” the person yelled as I jumped to my feet, getting my bearings. My Datapoint training already had my feet in my halfway-laced boots and my jumpsuit buttoned.
My vision cleared and I realized that it was the Ferryman Nix who was calling to me. I steadied him even as the ship jolted and he tumbled backwards from the doorway.
“What’s going on?” I asked, cocking my head to the side as my ear caught a familiar sound. Actually, two familiar sounds. There was the buzzing zing of the Ray’s defensive shields firing up, and there was the telltale zip of weaponry being fired in our direction. “We’re under attack?”
He didn’t need to answer. Nix and I sprinted along the corridor toward the cockpit, our shoulders knocking and our feet sliding as the ship juddered and dived.
“Started about five minutes ago,” he puffed, shoving me forward.
“Did we—”
“Disable their communications systems?” he asked. “It was the first thing Aine thought to do.”
“Thank God,” I murmured to myself. Whoever was attacking us was most likely a Station guard dog of sorts. A sentinel sent out to guard the perimeter of the Station’s territory, checking for intruders or suspicious skips of any kind. The first thing they would have done upon spotting us would have been to contact the Station. And though the Ray had plenty of stealth systems to keep us from being tracked on radar, seeing it in plain eyesight was a whole other can of beans. It couldn’t exactly be confused for an Authority skip. The Ray basically looked like five different ships soldered together haphazardly. She was fast as hell, though. A feature I hoped we’d be utilizing soon to get us away from the sentinel.
We skidded into the cockpit and into a flurry of action. Kupier was in the pilot’s seat and Cast was in the co-pilot’s seat. Oort was strapped into the third man’s position. Aine was on the other end of the cockpit, her hands furiously tapping on the keyboard of one of the ship’s defense computers. Her shoulders were around her ears and she was standing, foregoing the sliding chair behind her. She looked like she could use a hand.
“Glade!” Kupier shouted as soon as he saw me. He yanked one lever toward himself and another away from him. The Ray plummeted and spiraled, just barely missing a barrage of artillery. The Ray had all sorts of weaponry designed for this very type of situation. Why the hell weren’t we using it? “We need you to help Aine figure out if the sentinel was able to send any sort of information to the Station before we cut their communications, alright?”
He dipped the Ray again and I grabbed hold of the wall, practically crab-walking my way over to Aine.
“I. Don’t. Need. Help,” she gritted out between teeth clenched so tight they could have splintered glass. I peered at the screen in front of us. She’d hacked into the sentinel skip’s hard drive, but hit a firewall and was going about it all the wrong way. She’d never get into their call log that way.
“Aine, the sooner we get this information, the sooner we can get these assholes off our tail, okay?”
She glared at me but didn’t hand over the controls.
“Aine,” I tried again, locking eyes with Kupier for just a second, warning him off. Aine would hand over the controls in the face of a direct order from him, but that wasn’t going to win me any points with her. She needed to hand over the controls willingly. Whether it was an echo of our conversation in the kitchen, I wasn’t sure, but I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Something I’d only ever felt with Dahn before. I wanted to prove myself to Aine. I wanted her to acknowledge that I was worthy of passing this job off to. “We need to know immediately if they’ve contacted the Station. I can do that for us. If they have, there might be a hundred more sentinels headed our way. And if they have, then this whole mission might be blown. Either way, we can’t fool around with their firewall anymore; breaking through it your way is like trying to punch through a mountain.”
“What’s your way?” she asked, obviously pissed. But there was something else there, as well. Challenge, and curiosity.
“My way is that we make the wall think that we’re a part of it, and it’s none the wiser that we even tried to break in.”
I held out my hand and, to my infinite satisfaction, she slapped the keyboard into my palm. I pulled up the chair, blocked out all the shouts and alarms and sirens from the cockpit, ignored the jumping and diving off the Ray, and destroyed that firewall. My fingers flew over the keyboard, my eyes never leaving the screen. I could feel Aine’s eyes alternating between my hands and the screen. She was trying to follow what I was doing.
I remembered what she’d said before, that I wasn’t a good teacher because I was such an asshole. I wasn’t sure exactly why I did it, but I started telling her exactly what I was doing as I was doing it, narrating each of my steps out loud, speaking as quickly as I could to keep up with my own actions. I was moving so fast that there were moments when my hands moved faster than my words, but I could tell she was following me. Especially when she took up the alternate keyboard and started working the problem from the other end. She really was a fast learner.
“Come on!” Kupier shouted behind me, and I didn’t know if he was exclaiming at the sentinel ship or at me to move faster, but it didn’t matter. In seconds, Aine and I had cracked the firewall. We were in. I let her do the honors of scrolling through their call log. Meanwhile, I quickly re-wrote their outgoing program. We ejected from their firewall and slapped hands together, good and hard, the sound cracking through the cockpit.
“I take it,” Kupier started, slamming the ship into reverse and flipping us around the way we’d just been coming, “that you were successful.”
“They had no contact with the Station. We’re still undetected,” Aine reported.
“Don’t destroy them!” I shouted as two Ferrymen on the far side of the cockpit readied the exterior cannon system as if Aine’s words were the only go-ahead that they needed.
“Why?” Cast
asked incredulously.
“Because a missing sentinel skip is suspicious. It might raise an alarm back on the Station. I re-wrote their outgoing message program to regularly check in with the Station, but they can’t send any specific messages. The Station will know if they’re destroyed or go off radar, but they won’t be able to tell anyone what happened unless it’s in person. Which, considering the damage we’ve done to their aft thrusters—”
“Won’t be for another two or so days,” Kupier finished. He looked back at me. “At which point, we’ll have already made it to Earth.”
“Exactly.”
He turned back to the controls and waved the Ferrymen to stand down. “Anybody told you that you were a genius yet today?” he called over his shoulder to me.
“Seeing as it’s the middle of the night, I think you’d be the first.” I glanced over at Aine, who was ducking down to watch us dodge the sentinel one last time. Now that we had all the information that we needed, we were free to leave them behind. Which was exactly what Kupier did. I continued to watch her as she gripped the roll bar on the ceiling of the cockpit and glanced briefly at Kupier.
“You learned that new hacking system pretty fast,” I said to her. She shifted her eyes to me. “I’d done that before. In simulations.”
“They used to make us practice taking down our own skips in case one of them went rogue,” Cast confirmed, his eyes still trained on the sentinel skip shrinking into the distance.
Aine’s eyes went back and forth between us. There was a pink glow in her cheeks that I could only remember having seen once before. She was slightly embarrassed.
“Took me a week to learn how to do it,” I told her, embellishing just a little. “You just picked it up in about thirty high-pressure seconds.” I paused. “Plus, your teacher was an asshole, so extra points for that.” “Not an asshole,” she corrected, punching me lightly on the shoulder. “Just too smart for her own good, or anybody else’s.” “That would make two of us, then.”
