Olari rolled onto his back, revealing a gaping photon wound in his chest. It went straight to his core.
“Quee,” Zachary said. “Go. Now.”
She ran over to the mainframe and began using her robotic hands to hack in. Zachary, Ryic, and Kaylee knelt around Professor Olari.
“Hang on,” Zachary said. “We’re going to get you out of here.” But even as he spoke, Olari was fading.
“You must continue what I started,” Professor Olari said, grabbing Zachary just above the elbow. “Armed with the knowledge I’ve left you, you can save the outerverse from an unspeakable evil. But share this information with no one.”
Zachary felt Professor Olari’s grip tighten and a burning sensation sear into his flesh. He pulled his arm back, wincing. Then Olari’s eyes closed, and the superheated core inside his chest cooled to a lifeless gray. Any last sign of warmth was gone. It was that quick.
“What was he talking about?” Ryic asked.
“I have no idea,” Zachary said, still smarting from the singed mark on his bicep.
“Almost got it,” Quee said. Her fingers were back at work on the portion of the thin metal card sticking out of the mainframe.
Something caught Zachary’s eye through the panoramic window. He watched as Skold’s battle-axe flew so close to the glass that it looked as if the ship was going to crash right through it. But instead it turned and dipped out of view.
“I’m in,” Quee said.
Zachary, Ryic, and Kaylee came up behind her.
“Okay,” Quee said. “Communication lines are reopening. Lockdown is being reversed. And if you want, while I’m connected, I could make all the campus’s drinking fountains dispense soda instead of water.”
“Link us to Indigo 8,” Zachary said.
Quee entered a command, and suddenly a holographic display appeared on part of the panoramic window. Dozens of IPDL officers were frantically hustling about in the command center of the Ulam, directing aux-bots to different parts of the control panels.
“Who is this?” one of the officers asked.
“My name is Zachary Night. Nibiru is leading an attack on Indigo 8. You need to get as many pitchforks out here as possible.”
“The starship hangar is malfunctioning,” the officer replied. “We’ve been trying to override the virus infecting Indigo 8 for the last couple hours.”
“Well, you won’t need to anymore,” Zachary said. “We hard-lined into the mainframe from Callisto. Cerebella has been debugged.”
“Then we’ll initiate—”
Just then, the transmission cut off and all of the power inside Callisto started to flicker and hum.
“We must have been hit,” Ryic said.
One by one, the bigger equipment panels began to shut down. Larger overhead lights flickered off around them.
Zachary looked out the window and spotted Skold’s battle-axe as it flew past. Attached to its rear cargo hold was a trio of giant cylinders.
“What is Skold doing now?” Ryic asked.
Zachary fixed his lensicon’s crosshairs on the device the battle-axe was hauling behind it. He blinked twice.
* * *
CELESTIAL OBJECT:
PERPETUAL ENERGY GENERATOR
THIS RARE AND HIGHLY VALUABLE ENGINE COMBINES FUSION, FISSION, AND VACUUM ENERGY TO ALLOW A CONTINUOUS FLOW OF POWER WITHOUT ANY EXTERNAL FUEL ADDED.
THE SECRET OF ITS MECHANICS IS TIGHTLY GUARDED BY A SHADOW ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTISTS KNOWN AS THE BLACK ATOM SOCIETY.
* * *
“He didn’t come back here to save us,” Zachary said. “He came to steal the perpetual energy generator!”
“Unbelievable,” Kaylee said. “He knew Callisto would be unguarded. He used us again.”
The display on the window started flashing the words All-system failure.
“We need to get out of here,” Quee said. “Once the power goes down completely, every life-support system in the station will stop functioning.”
“What about Professor Olari?” Ryic asked.
“He’s gone,” Zachary said.
The four started for the double doors. As the gravity in the space station faded, Zachary’s strides became longer and lighter. Quee reached the hallway first. Ryic and Kaylee followed. But before Zachary could get through, the doors slammed shut. His nose smacked into a thick, circular glass window. Kaylee looked at him from the other side, confused. Then her eyes went wide, as if she saw something over his shoulder.
Zachary turned around just as a warp-glove-encased hand grabbed him by the hair and threw him across the room. He went tumbling. When he came up on his knees, he saw that Loren was pulling his own arm back through a warp hole. Loren’s other hand was on a lever that must have manually shut down the doors.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Loren said. “Not without me, that is.”
Loren bounced over to Zachary, the gravity getting so weak that his feet barely needed to touch the ground. Loren kneed Zachary in the chin, sending him flying backward. Zachary felt a shock of pain shoot straight through his teeth right up into his head. Loren used his warp glove to scoop up his fallen photon cannon, then aimed it at Zachary.
“I’m going to pilot my pitchfork out of here,” Loren said. “And you’re coming with me until I’m safely out of the galaxy.”
Although they were standing ten feet from each other, distance didn’t matter when you were wielding a warp glove. Zachary lashed out his own gloved hand, shooting it through a hole and grabbing the weapon Loren was brandishing. He tried to wrestle it free, but Loren struck back with his warp glove, reaching through a different hole and clutching Zachary’s throat. Zachary spun out of the choke hold but had to pull his hand away from the photon cannon.
Even in the midst of the fight, he saw a hopeful sight through the panoramic window. The space fold from Indigo 8 had opened, and dozens of pitchforks and battle-axes were pouring out of it. He had no doubt they would fend off Nibiru’s attack on Earth, even though it would be of little help to him now.
Callisto was beginning to feel the effects of the loss of power. The air had already grown stale, and the fans had stopped blowing. It seemed that there must have been something electric stabilizing the entire space station, because the structure was starting to crumble.
Kaylee, Ryic, and Quee remained locked outside the doors, watching through the glass window as Loren pounced again. He delivered a series of blows to Zachary’s face and body before lifting him up and spinning him around. A coppery taste filled Zachary’s mouth, and he knew it was from the blood pooling behind his teeth. Zachary felt the barrel of the gun jam into the small of his back.
“I’m going to open those doors and walk us out into that hallway,” Loren said. “If you do everything I ask of you, maybe I’ll let one of your friends live.”
Zachary knew that once they walked through those doors, his friends would become casualties just like Professor Olari.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Zachary said. “Just don’t hurt them.”
Loren pushed Zachary across the room toward the command center’s control deck. As Loren reached out for the lever that would manually reopen the doors, Zachary seized the moment. He shifted his weight and grabbed hold of the photon cannon that had been pressed up to his back. He tried to rip it away, but Loren’s fingers tightened. The two struggled to gain the upper hand on the weapon. They were at a stalemate.
“Did you think I’d really let you turn this gun on me?” Loren asked.
“No,” Zachary said. “That was never part of the plan.”
Zachary used all his muscle to aim the photon cannon down at the lever. Then his finger pulled the trigger. A beam of superheated light obliterated the entire lever and the control deck around it, leaving nothing but a gaping hole.
Loren put a hand to his head.
“What did you do?” he asked. “There’s no other way out of this room.”
The command center’s walls were shaking vigoro
usly now, and the panoramic windows were beginning to crack. Gravity was gone. Loren floated just above the smoking panel, shock turning to anger.
“You’ve killed us both,” he said.
Yet Zachary looked remarkably calm.
He turned to the glass windows on the double doors and called out to Kaylee and Ryic.
“Pull me through!”
With that, Zachary created a warp hole and stuck his arm in. His gloved hand emerged from a hole on the other side of the doors. Zachary could immediately feel fingers wrapping around his. Loren realized what Zachary was doing and squeezed the trigger on the photon cannon. The flash of light from the muzzle of the gun was the last thing Zachary saw before he was tugged into the warp hole itself.
While inside, he felt as if he was in between the fabric of space and time, where distance was nothing and time may or may not have been passing. Whether he was traveling through the hole for a fraction of a second or thousands of years, once he came out the other side, he was back with his friends.
Loren was at the sealed door in an instant, pounding his fists on the thick glass. But Zachary and the others turned their backs on him as he desperately started firing photon bolts at the reinforced door.
“The only way to get back to the pitchforks is the same way we came,” Quee said.
Zachary pushed off, gliding through the long, white hallway that he had once run down. Ryic and Kaylee were having no problems keeping pace, but Quee was lagging behind, struggling to maneuver herself in zero gravity. Ryic stretched his arm and took hold of Quee’s hand.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
Wall panels were breaking loose and cracks were forming in the floor and ceiling below and above them. Tools and equipment from the neighboring rooms were now drifting through the thin air. Zachary spied a box of bio regulators moving past them in slow motion. He swam toward it and reached inside, pulling four masks out from the box. He kept one for himself and passed the other three to Ryic, Kaylee, and Quee. Zachary inserted his immediately and felt a rush of air reenergize him. Soon all four had the breathing apparatuses in their mouths.
Zachary reached the junction at the top of the staircase. The group was about to soar down the three flights of steps when they heard a loud crash. The far wall exploded open. A Clipsian slicer had smashed through the Callisto Space Station, tearing apart everything in its path: the walls, the stairs, the floors. Zachary and the others were just lucky they hadn’t been crossing sooner, or they would have been in pieces, too.
The Clipsian ship went straight out the other side, leaving rubble and wreckage in its wake. Zachary could now see everything that was happening outside the space station. Pitchforks and battle-axes were annihilating the enemy fleet, facing down Nibiru’s ships with superior speed and weaponry.
Quee pointed to the white circular hallway that led to the Callisto space hangar. To get there, they would have to cross a wide expanse littered with debris. There were chunks of staircase spiraling upside down, hovering platforms, and even metal rings floating in every direction. This was like the Qube’s zero-gravity obstacle course times a thousand. But this was no race. Everyone had to get to the finish line.
Zachary gave a nod and pushed off, soaring past halogen tubes and pieces of dislodged banister. Springboarding off one of the staircases, Zachary propelled himself forward, leading the group to their destination. Or at least he thought he was, until Kaylee zipped past him. She gave him a satisfied smile. Ryic pulled Quee along behind them.
As they neared the other side, another slicer whizzed overhead, rolling to avoid the particle blasts coming from the pitchfork right on its tail. The Clipsian battleship’s blades seemed so close, Zachary was surprised he didn’t get a permanent haircut.
The group reached the circular hallway and raced all the way to the hangar, where they found their pitchforks, like everything else, beginning to drift away. Zachary and Ryic flew for their cockpit entrances. Kaylee and Quee did the same. They all took their seats and sealed themselves inside.
Without any power, the hangar doors weren’t going to automatically open for them as they had when they arrived. Luckily, they had debris cannons. Zachary flipped a switch and fired, blasting the doors clear off.
Zachary removed the bio regulator from his mouth and activated the lang-link.
“Let’s go back to Indigo 8,” he said.
The two pitchforks zoomed out of the space station in time to see Nibiru’s armada fleeing, heading away from Earth as fast as it could.
Zachary waved his gloved hand before the Kepler cartograph, setting the waypoints for the fold between Io and Europa, the one that would take them back to the runway beneath the Ulam.
Once again his eye caught sight of the warp glove. This time as he looked at it, he couldn’t help but think: while the glove had always fit him, now he fit the glove.
«SIXTEEN»
Zachary was being led out of a debriefing room deep in the bowels of the Ulam. DiSalvo ushered him into the hallway, where Kaylee, Ryic, and Quee sat waiting on wooden chairs.
“I know that was a lot of questions in there,” DiSalvo assured Zachary. “You must be exhausted.”
It had been a whirlwind since they got back, filled more with precautionary procedures than fanfare or congratulatory hugs. As soon as Zachary and the others had landed their pitchforks in Indigo 8’s starship hangar, they were met by a special team of IPDL officers dressed head to toe in protective suits. They were immediately taken to decontamination vaults to ensure there were no dangerous microbes on them, brought back from other parts of the galaxy. After being cleared, the next stop was the Ulam’s infirmary, where Indigo 8’s emergency-medical-assistance team injected Zachary and Kaylee with doses of vitamin serum and placed them in warm baths of gelatinous liquid. Ryic and Quee were sequestered in separate rooms to be given special treatments unique to their off-planet physiology.
The only permanent injury Zachary had received was an oddly shaped pattern of burns branded into the skin on his arm where Professor Olari had grabbed him. The medical team had tried to treat it with salves and ointments, but it seemed Zachary would be living with it for the near future.
Once all their vitals were checked and rechecked, the four of them were brought to the debriefing room, where they were individually questioned by a committee of IPDL intelligence officers about their time in the outerverse. Zachary had been the last to sit before the committee. Now he was rejoining his friends in the hall.
“Not exactly the hero’s welcome I was expecting,” Zachary said.
“Was it just me, or did that guy who wouldn’t come out of the shadows give you the creeps, too?” Kaylee asked.
“Definitely not just you,” Zachary said.
One of the inquisitors had remained hidden in the corner of the room. It was the same masked figure they had seen exiting Madsen’s office before he punished them with freighter duty.
“And what was with all those questions about the Black Atom Society?” Ryic asked. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
“After all the talk about Nibiru and how he got away, the only thing they really seemed to want to know about was the perpetual energy generator,” Quee said.
“You’re right,” Zachary said. “I even got the feeling they thought we were working with Skold.”
“The whole thing was weird if you ask me,” Kaylee said.
Henry Madsen approached from the other side of the hall, looking relieved. It was the first time they had seen him since their return.
“I want you to know that I take full responsibility for what happened to you,” Madsen said. “We’re still trying to figure out how Loren sabotaged the dreadnought’s starbox and got those felons onto the ship. You must know that this was not the punishment I had intended when I sent you on that freighter. But with the way things turned out, I guess it was most fortunate that I did.”
Zachary couldn’t help grinning with pride.
“Humanki
nd will never know that it was on the brink of destruction today,” Madsen continued. “And they’ll never know that if it weren’t for you, this planet we call Earth would be gone.”
Madsen led the group down the hall to the large open platform, and they all stepped inside. It began rising up.
“Professor Olari gave his life to save us,” Zachary said.
“I would have expected nothing less from him,” Madsen replied. “Did he give you anything before he passed? Anything at all?”
“No, sir,” Kaylee said.
Zachary and Ryic concurred. But then Zachary glanced down at the burn marks on his arm. It almost appeared as if they had formed a grid of blackened squares, just like the tattoos he’d seen on the knuckles of Quee’s hacking hands. Zachary thought perhaps Professor Olari had given him something before he died. He was about to tell Director Madsen when he remembered what Olari had said: not to share this information with anyone.
Sputnik peeked his head out from Kaylee’s pocket.
“I hope you’re not planning on bringing that to any bonfires,” Madsen said.
“I thought maybe he could live with me,” Kaylee said. “You know, as the Lightwing girls SQ’s pet.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The platform arrived at the ground floor of the Ulam. Zachary saw his mom and dad sitting on a bench waiting for him. He was running into their arms as they stood up.
“Mom, Dad,” Zachary said.
“Thank God you’re alive,” Zachary’s mom said.
Through their tight squeeze, Zachary could see that Ryic and Quee were standing off to the side with Madsen, while a plainly dressed, sweet-looking woman held Kaylee close. He couldn’t help overhearing.
“I know your dad wanted to be here,” Kaylee’s mom said. “He got stuck doing some business in the Tranquil Galaxies.”
Starbounders Page 17
