Escape the Vortex

by Jeanne DuPrau

  But Ike didn’t offer a comment. “What else?” he said.

  “We have a prisoner,” Anna said. She told him about Piper. “With her on board, the Alphas aren’t likely to try any nasty tricks. Plus now we have two medics, just in case.”

  “Not bad,” said Ike. “So listen, crew. You’re closer to the end, just two elements left to get. I want everyone in top form. No mistakes. We’re talking about…”

  His voice faded.

  “We’re losing you, sir,” Anna called.

  Colin reached over her shoulder and adjusted a switch.

  “…future of the planet,” came Ike’s voice again, overly loud all of a sudden. “When you get back—”

  The signal weakened again, and Ike’s voice faded to a distant whisper.

  “Got it, Commander,” said Anna. “Signing off.”

  Soon, she thought, when they returned to Earth with the elements needed to fuel the planet into the far future, Ike Phillips would give them the praise they had earned. From then on, the management of Earth’s power would be in his capable hands, not in the hands of his dim-witted son, Shawn, or the government Shawn stood for. And the glory (Anna had to admit she liked glory) would be all for the Omega team.

  —

  It was time for the Tundra briefing. Anna surveyed her team, gathered on the navigation deck. They were battle-hardened by now. They had conquered four planets; they had raced against the Alpha team and—sometimes—outmaneuvered them. Their long journey would soon be drawing to a close, and Anna wanted it to end the right way: with their victory.

  Whatever it would take to accomplish that goal, that’s what Anna was willing to do. If it meant giving orders now and then that her team didn’t like—well, that came with being a leader. She gazed at the faces before her and thought, They’ve done it so far. They can do it again.

  “Everyone listen,” she said. She glared at Niko Rodriguez and Siena Moretti, her second-in-command. They had been whispering, but Niko went quiet immediately. He knew not to mess with Anna when she was in command mode. And yet Niko had urgent things to say to Siena, things that Anna couldn’t know. He nodded to her very slightly so that no one else would notice. Siena knew what the nod meant: Later.

  Anna assumed her gravest expression. The best way to keep her crew safe, she knew, was to make sure they understood from the start how dangerous the task ahead of them was.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we will be landing on the planet Tundra. It’s a place so cold that exposed skin will freeze instantaneously—that is, it will get numb, turn blue, and die.” She paused to let the seriousness of this sink in. They all had to think about what this would mean.

  Each person was thinking something different.

  Ravi was thinking about snow. Since his home was in Mumbai, India, he’d never seen snow. He looked forward to it. There might be time to have a snowball fight. Maybe even make a snowman.

  Niko, the team’s medic, was thinking, Incorrect. Frozen flesh does not turn blue; it turns white.

  Siena was thinking, Anna would be more impressive if she didn’t try so hard to be impressive.

  SUMI, who had left Piper securely locked into the training room, was simply entering all the information she heard into her thousand-terabyte database.

  And then there was Colin, who was different from the others on the team. He knew a lot more than they did about the history of this voyage and about the planets the Voyagers would visit. He was also a clone—not a human clone, but an alien clone, a duplicate of the real alien, Chris. He watched Anna intently as she spoke. Whatever he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face. There was nothing in his eyes but cold determination.

  Anna went on. “Ice crawlers are extremely large,” she said, “and there aren’t all that many of them; snow locusts are tiny, only about an inch long, and there are hundreds of millions of them.”

  “Do they sting?” asked Niko, who had recent and unpleasant memories about being stung.

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said with a quick glance at Colin. He nodded, and she said, “No, they don’t sting. It’s the ice crawlers that are likely to be dangerous. They are huge.”

  “How huge?” asked Siena. Huge was such a vague word. Siena liked information to be detailed and specific.

  “As big as a…” Anna hesitated, and Siena could tell she didn’t know and was about to make something up. “About as big as a car,” she said, and quickly changed the subject. “The point is,” she continued, “that ice crawlers are our target. We need zero crystals, and they’re inside the ice crawlers.”

  “Inside?” Niko was puzzled. “How do we—”

  “You’ll get that information later,” Anna interrupted. “Colin will brief the extraction team.” She switched on a screen behind her. “Here’s how the team will get around on Tundra.”

  The screen showed a picture of a sleek, high-powered snowmobile. It was silver, with red blades. “It’s called the Cheetah, because it can get up to seventy-five miles an hour.”

  There was a sigh of admiration from Niko.

  “But you won’t be going, Niko,” Anna said. “You’re just back from a mission that almost killed you. You need to get up some strength before you’re going anywhere. The Tundra team will be Ravi and me.”

  Niko’s heart sank, but he didn’t show it. It was true that he still wasn’t himself after what had happened on Infinity. He gave a quick nod.

  Ravi, on the other hand, was thrilled.

  Siena tried to catch Niko’s eye and gave a small shrug. They hated it when Anna was right.

  Early the next morning, Dash sat alone at the controls of the Cloud Leopard, speaking urgently. He had contacted the team’s commander back on Earth. “They kidnapped Piper,” he said. “They knew she’d go and help if Anna was in danger. It was all a trick.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Shawn’s voice came through, clear and somber. “That’s terrible news,” he said. “But I don’t see what you can do about it at this point. Your Tundra mission has to take priority. At least Piper will be safe on the Light Blade. The Omega team wouldn’t do anything to harm her.”

  “I guess not,” said Dash, though he wasn’t sure.

  “How’s your health?” Shawn asked.

  “I’m all right,” Dash said. He wasn’t sure about this either. There were times when his strength suddenly failed. It always came back, though. He was probably fine.

  “And you leave for Tundra in about an hour?”

  “Fifty-five minutes,” said Dash.

  “Good fortune to you,” Shawn said. “You’ll need it.”

  And although Dash had all the information about this next planet and knew everything was ready for the mission, he felt a shiver go through him.

  He shook it off. “Thanks.” This might be a good time to squeeze in a little fun and give his worries a rest. He left the navigation deck and headed down the central corridor toward the relaxation room.

  No one was there, just as he’d hoped. Someone had left half a bagel on the counter, and a couple of pillows had been tossed on the floor. How come the ZRKs hadn’t cleaned this up? Dash made a mental note to do it himself—or to ask a ZRK Commander to handle it. But he didn’t have time now. He went to the portal on the far side of the room. On the touch screen beside it, he marked the points of the route he’d planned through the maze of transport tubes that ran within the core of the ship.

  It was a contest between the members of the Alpha team—a sport they’d invented for themselves. Part of it—zooming through the twists and loops and dips of the tubes—was pure pleasure. Another part was a puzzle: Who could find the longest route between two points of the maze? Dash had memorized the map that was posted next to every port, and he studied it when he wasn’t dealing with the duties of being team captain. He’d draw different connections between ports, try them out, keeping track of his time; then he’d draw again and try again, always looking for a new longer route.

  But he kept mak
ing wrong turns. He’d make a U when he shouldn’t have and end up in the dining room, or he’d go sharply upward and find himself in the boys’ dorm. Each time, he’d store the error in his mental map; he never made the same mistake twice. He would find the route, he knew. If he was lucky, he’d find it today.

  He reached up, took hold of the overhead bar, and swung himself inside. Instantly, the rushing current of air caught him and swept him forward, first steeply upward, and then plummeting downward. His imagination flashed pictures before his eyes. He was a salmon speeding upstream, he was an eagle plunging toward its prey, he was a fast car on a freeway swerving left, then right—his mind worked as hard as his muscles, marking the turns, mapping the tangle of tubes.

  Carly Diamond whizzed by him at an intersection, her long black hair streaking out behind her. “Dash, where are you going?” she called back. “We’re leaving in less than an hour!”

  He didn’t answer. Already he could feel it: pulling air down into his lungs was harder, and his heart was pounding faster. He’d be all right, though. He wasn’t that tired. He kept going.

  He ignored the hammering of his heart. He took the S-curve that led upward—and saw, just as he passed, the turn that would have led to the path he had meant to take.

  Instead, the maze spit him out into the rec room, where he crumpled to his knees, coughing so hard he thought his ribs might break. His heart was racing—a pulse of a hundred and ten, his Mobile Tech Band told him, way too fast. His oxygen level was low too.

  Luckily, the rec room was empty. He couldn’t be seen like this. No one but Chris and Piper knew he was too old for this journey, and that he could survive it only with the help of daily injections to slow down his metabolism. But they might guess if they saw him weak and sick. He took some deep breaths. He focused his mind on the thudding of his heart and slowed it down. He checked his MTB again, which told him he was doing better and also that forty-eight minutes were left before the exploration team was scheduled to leave for Tundra. He had time. He’d go once more.

  He got to his feet. On the touch screen beside the portal, he entered the corrected route. He swung himself in and sped along until he came to the turn he’d meant to take before. Woo-hoo! This time he did it right. Curve after curve followed, downward slopes and upward climbs, and at last he tumbled out onto a hard, shiny white floor. He checked his time. He’d done it—the longest route yet. He pumped a fist in the air. And then he looked around and realized he had no idea where he was. No other room in the entire ship looked like this.

  Dash got to his feet in the unfamiliar corridor and looked around. He was breathing hard, but now he was more excited than tired. Slowly, he walked to the right, examining the wall as he went. His fingers felt it before he saw it: the almost invisible outline of a door in the wall. Where a doorknob should be, there was an oval indentation with a strip of metal across it. Dash took hold of the strip and pulled, and the door swung open easily.

  Inside was a single room, wide and high-ceilinged and full of light, and in the center of the room stood something that looked at first like a battered old blimp. Dash stepped forward.

  “Finally,” said a voice, making Dash jump.

  A hatch in the blimp-shaped thing rose with a creak, and Dash realized he was looking at a rocket ship, ancient and strange, but clearly meant for space travel. It was like a small oddly shaped version of the Cloud Leopard—as if the Cloud Leopard had somehow swallowed another ship and was carrying it in its belly.

  Suddenly, Dash couldn’t catch his breath. His head was spinning, and darkness was crowding in around the edges of his vision. He felt his knees giving way, and then he was on the floor.

  The same voice spoke. “You’re in bad shape.” His arm was lifted. “Let me check your vitals.” There was a pause. Dash was sinking into a foggy darkness. The voice came again, as if from a distance. “All right, don’t move. You need a shot right now.”

  Some fast footsteps. Some clicking sounds. Then a prick in the arm, and slowly, Dash’s vision cleared and some strength returned. He looked up to find Chris’s face, familiar and kind. He tried to say thank you, but the words came out blurred. Even so, Chris understood. “You’re welcome,” he said, smiling.

  But the smile faded quickly. “This was a bad one,” he said. “All your signs were drastically low. You just can’t keep up this pace. You have to slow down if you’re going to last the trip.”

  “I can’t slow down,” Dash said, his voice a little stronger now. “I’m the leader.”

  “You won’t be any good to the team if you’re dead,” said Chris. “I mean it.”

  “But I need to go on this mission. How can I lead if I’m not even on the planet?”

  Chris looked like he was going to argue, but Dash jumped in again.

  “With Piper gone, we’re down a team member,” Dash reminded him.

  “Well, if you won’t sit this one out, at least be careful,” Chris said. He stood and reached for Dash. “Can you get up?”

  Dash struggled to his feet, using Chris’s arm to steady himself.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in a carefully hidden space directly under the engine room, accessible only via the tubes.”

  Dash stood. The blackness swam up before his eyes, and he staggered but stayed upright and again his vision cleared. “I’m fine,” he said.

  Chris gave him a doubting look but said nothing, just motioned him up two steps and inside the smaller ship.

  Dash looked around in wonder. They were in a control room. An array of lights blinked red, green, and yellow, and something rumbled, making the walls and floor shudder. “What is this thing?” said Dash. “What’s it doing here?”

  “It’s an old friend of mine,” said Chris. “This is the ship that carried me on my journey to Earth.”

  His journey to Earth. Dash almost forgot sometimes that Chris was not from Earth. He looked like a human being, and—usually—he acted like one too.

  Dash was confused. “You came to Earth in this?” With Chris at his side, he walked around it and peered in the open hatch. What he saw amazed him. Once, he could tell, this had been a sleek, compact ship. Its hull was still a lustrous silver in places, and there was a line of graceful loops and slashes on the side that must be writing, but not in any script Dash had ever seen. He peered in an oval window at the rear and saw a tiny, perfect cabin, with a narrow bed and panels in the walls that must open into cabinets. Across one end of the room lay a person-sized cylinder of clear glass.

  Dash pointed at it. “What was that for?”

  “I made parts of the trip in there,” said Chris. “Suspended animation.”

  “For months at a time?” Dash asked.

  “Years at a time.”

  On the far side of the ship was another small window. Through it, Dash saw what looked like a lab, with coils and flasks and instruments. Up against the ship’s wall, he saw a glass case, and inside the case a rack holding twelve test tubes, each one filled with a crystal-clear liquid.

  “What’s in the tubes?” he asked.

  “It’s the DNA we collected back at camp, from everyone.”

  “What’s it doing here?”

  “I thought it might be useful.”

  Dash raised his eyebrows. “Really? For what?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Chris replied. “I was wrong.” He pressed his lips together, staring down at the tubes as if they were living things that had died.

  Dash wasn’t sure he wanted to let that one go. They’d had so many secrets on the ship….Was this another one? Did Piper know about these DNA samples? Unfortunately, it wasn’t like he could ask her now. And that was an even bigger problem.

  Before he knew it, Chris was guiding him back toward the front of his ship, and his curiosity about the much larger secret—this hidden vehicle—took over.

  Dash peered in at the command center. Parts of the console were hanging open, revealing tangles of wires and circuit boards and tiny f
lickering lights. A couple of large red lights—clearly warning lights—flashed steadily off and on. On the floor was a box full of jumbled equipment. Dash recognized pliers and a screwdriver; the rest was mysterious.

  “Looks like it’s in bad shape,” Dash said.

  “It is,” said Chris.

  “So why have you kept it?” Dash asked. “Is this sort of a museum, this room?”

  “Not at all,” said Chris. He motioned to the other side of the ship and pointed to a bundle of heavy cables that led into the far wall. “I’m going to tell you something no one else knows,” he said. “I want you to keep it to yourself.”

  “Okay,” Dash said. He was a little troubled about keeping another secret from his team.

  “This ship is the brain of the Cloud Leopard. The system we’re running—the one that manages everything from night-lights to interstellar navigation—is the system built into this old clunker. It guided me on the trip from my home planet to Earth, and now it’s guiding us on the return. Without this ship, we’d be no better than a chunk of rock, lost in space.”

  Dash wondered if his mind was still a little foggy. This broken-down wreck was the brain of the Cloud Leopard?

  He turned back to Chris. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Everything I’ve told you is true, but there’s something else: as you can see, this ship is not exactly in top shape. Remember when the kitchen lights went out that time? And remember when we got off course between Meta Prime and Aqua Gen? Those were system glitches, the first one trivial and the second potentially fatal. You know why I so often disappear? Because I have to work on this thing all the time, adjusting and patching and recoding, trying to keep it working long enough to get us there and back.”

  Dash was speechless. His mind whirled. He had a sudden vision of the Cloud Leopard as a rock—no, a tiny pebble—in the vastness of space, drifting through the dark, its brain having blinked out. There was terror in that vision, but he shunted it away. “Will we make it?” he managed to say.