Star Binder

by Robert Appleton

  Three things happen in quick succession after we hit dirt. Sergei leaps to his feet and catches both Orkney and Ramirez as they attack him from opposite sides. He uses their sprint momentum against them, cracking their heads together. The noise of that collision echoes round the Hex. Neither of them gets up.

  On seeing his two lieutenants drop, Sarazzin scrambles to his feet and tries to get away. I lunge at him and wrap myself around his legs, anchoring him to the spot. He throws a few desperate punches. Nothing compared to what I’ve endured already, and now that I have Sergei backing me up, I could hold on like this forever.

  But I don’t have to. A forest of arms wrangles us apart, though not violently. It’s most of the other buggos come to help. In short order they expel the emperor and the remainder of his posse from the central gig. Then they form a protective barrier to defend us—Lyssa, Lohengrin, Rachel, Sergei and me. It all happens so quickly, I’m still not sure whether I’m imagining it or not.

  “You’d better watch your backs—all of you!” Guess the speaker. No prizes. “’Cause one by one, you’re gonna burn. Trust me. You’re all in—”

  The blow that finally ends the emperor’s reign receives the biggest ovation in our history of the Hex. Lohengrin, persecuted and bullied for months because of his royal heritage, takes the crown the only way the Hex will let him—by force of justice. His uppercut, in full view of every last buggo, sends Sarazzin reeling onto the red sand.

  We scoop Lohengrin up onto our shoulders and, chanting his name, parade him around the arena—it’s our arena again—until the alert sounds to end the session. This session we will never forget.

  As for Sergei and me? We stay behind on our own, bunking off the afternoon classes, to catch up on what seems like a lifetime. I’m sore all over, but the doctor can wait.

  Some things are more important.

  Part Two

  In the Field

  CHAPTER 12

  The Missing Piece

  “How did you get here, Sergei?”

  “Trench Coat Man—Thorpe-Campbell. He said you were in trouble, that you needed my help.”

  “Not just me, it was all of us needed help.”

  “I know.” He rests one of his big bear hands on my shoulder. It might be the gentlest he’s ever touched me. “I guess you just needed a way to even the odds in here, right? That doorak been like that all along?”

  “Sarazzin? Pretty much, yeah. He couldn’t hack anyone else being ahead of him on the scoreboard, so he started rigging the game, strangling off the competition. You know how guys like that are.”

  “I get Sarazzin. And his suck-ups, too. He guaranteed they’d be on the winning team if they did what he wanted, screw the rules.”

  “Rules!” I point out my numerous cuts and sores, which, by the way, are really starting to sting. “Sergei, skimming was safer than this—we could always get out if things turned dicey, or we could go to the cops. Here they don’t interfere for anything.”

  “But I’m here. They drafted me in to give you a hand. I guess that’s interfering.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s real responsible. Wait till we’re all bleeding from our eyeballs before sending in the big ringer. Hopefully he won’t crack too many heads. Ta-da! Problem solved.”

  He clasps his hands on the back of his head. “I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

  “I am! Sergei, I am. Believe me. But this doorak has been bullying us all for months now, and they haven’t lifted a finger. And you did leave me out there in the desert. You did break your promise.”

  “I know. That was harsh. But I...I just had to get you on that shuttle. You’d never have left me otherwise.”

  “I wish I’d never got on that shuttle.”

  Neither of us speaks for some time.

  “So what now? You staying on for a bit?”

  “Till the end of the year,” he replies casually. “I had to promise Thorpe-Campbell I’d stay till then. He said something about a missing piece of his puzzle. Guy’s short a lot more than one piece, if you ask me. He’s obsessed with this thing—whatever it is he’s got going here. Obsessed. Kept repeating how high the stakes are. Sheikers this, Finaglers that. Top secrets up the wazoo. I’m telling you, I was starting to think you were in more danger from him than anyone else. What’s he been like here?”

  “I haven’t seen him since I arrived. Don’t think I want to either. As far as I’m concerned, he’s screwed us over. His daughter too! Did you know his own daughter’s in here?”

  “No.”

  “Lyssa. She was the girl you saved, the first one in line for a beating.”

  “Really? The hot one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, maybe this place isn’t so—”

  I kick sand at him. He kicks it back with interest.

  “Sergei, why are you here really?”

  “What do you mean?” He spies on me askance.

  “You wouldn’t have given up your freedom for something like this, not without an angle. I know you. School, authority, four-square rooms and meals, locked doors: any of this ring a bell? Admit it, you didn’t sign away six months of your life just to help me out of a jam, did you?”

  He scrunches up his face, then scrubs it with the heels of his hands. “You always did ask too many questions, Trillion.”

  “I knew it!” The idea’s so appalling and so mercenary and yet so Sergei, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. “So how much did he pay you?”

  Wrestling a full-on guilty Minsk beamer, he answers, “Ten thousand clips.” Now he shows all his teeth. “Thirty if I can pass his exams.”

  I slip off my seat and grab him by the throat. “You’re getting thirty thousand clips?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For doing what we’re doing—while we’re getting zip?”

  “It’s called skimming, brother. You might want to try it sometime.”

  I let go his neck and squeeze his face instead. “Sergei, sometimes I just want to kill you.”

  “I know. I missed you too.”

  “So you’re skipping out at the end of the year, a rich man?”

  “Probably. Thorpe-Campbell reckons I might change my mind and stay on, when I see what this is all about. That’s what he thinks. But either way, I get the clips. The rest is up to us, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He crouches in the sand for me to climb on his back—a piggy-back to the infirmary. I can’t tell you how I know that’s what he intends, I just do. It’s me and Sergei. We know each other. I climb on. “What I mean is, we’re skimmers,” he explains. “We get what we need any way we can. As of today, this is a free house again. So if you can persuade your friends to help me pass my exams, I’ll make sure no one ever touches them again. You’re a team, right? The four of you?”

  “Kinda. I mean yeah. Not officially, but we did make a pledge.”

  “Next time they’re all in here, we’re making another. You’re gonna swear me in.”

  “Give me a cut of that fortune and I will.”

  “In your dreams, Trillion.”

  “Up your—”

  He starts to jog toward the elevator, cutting off my reply. The motion flares every wound in my battered body, but I say nothing. For this moment I’ll gladly pay whatever it takes.

  Of course, you can’t just have a revolution and leave it at that. You have to make plans, form alliances, to ensure things can’t go back to the way they were. For us, in the Hex, that means creating a coalition of all the friendly teams. It’s Lohengrin’s idea. He proposes we get each of the team leaders to make a pact—that if any individual or group should “do a Sarazzin”, or try to grab too much power over his fellow buggos, we all unite to bring him down.

  That’s all well and good, but what they’re really doing is making Sergei their enforcer. Without him, we’d still be under the emperor’s rule, and everyone knows it. That leaves the big guy in a tricky spot. Thorpe-Campbell almost certainly broug
ht him here for this purpose—to balance things out in the Hex, to be the “missing piece of the puzzle”—but Sergei doesn’t care about any of that stuff. Politics, to the Minsk Machine, begins and ends when fist meets punching bag. That’s not to say he’s some kind of animal. On the contrary, his academic performance during his first two months in the Hex surprises everyone, especially Sergei. He advances rapidly in every area except maths. But the other buggos don’t seem to understand: he didn’t take down Sarazzin for them, he did it for me. If I hadn’t been in danger that day, he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. Trust me. He’s a career skimmer, and his sense of duty is narrow. It’s pretty much confined to himself and his family, because the galaxy has not been kind to Sergei.

  I’m his family. They’re not. If they want his help they’re going to have to earn his trust. And that’s something neither politics nor words can bring about.

  It’s a quiet time in the Hex. Ideas come, ideas go, and nothing really changes. Walpole continues on his “ego-fuelled trajectory to nowhere”, as Rachel dubs his obsessive studies. He’s a long way out in front on the scoreboard, but his “critical mass” theory, that at a certain complexity his branches of study will “converge” and “coalesce” into the perfect system, somehow accelerating his points scoring, hasn’t worked so far. He won’t even reach a fraction of the Hall of Fame totals.

  Sarazzin’s team is down to five now. All except the most loyal have deserted him: he’s left with Orkney, Ramirez, Walpole, and Heathcote, one of the Harpies. They don’t interact at all with the other buggos, which is why the Hex is so quiet. But the sad fact is they’re winning, and unless the rest of us can come up with something new, they will win.

  “But what else is there?” Sergei asks one morning, flat on his back, eyes closed after a particularly fast and sickening spin on one of the g-force gigs. “You think maybe the teachers are jerking you around?”

  Lyssa sits next to him in the sand, cradling his head in her lap. The two of them have started doing that more and more, taking turns. I didn’t like it at first, and I don’t think Lohengrin and Rachel did either; but Lys and Sergei don’t make a big deal about it. It’s just a quirky little thing they do. Nothing else ever happens, so it’s okay, I guess.

  “I think they are jerking us around,” replies Lohengrin, “but they’re also using the truth to do it. I think those Hall of Fame scores are real. And I think the answer is right in front of us, right here in the Hex. We’ve just not seen it yet.”

  “Agreed.” Rachel links arms with the prince—another thing I don’t like that’s been happening more and more. “They wouldn’t have put those scores up if they knew we couldn’t reach them,” she adds. “It’s like Jim said, they’re always wanting us to think outside the box. I mean how many of our lessons involve problem-solving, one way or another?”

  “Most of them,” Lohengrin agrees. “Then they tease us with the same question all the time we're in here.” He points to the wall of the central gig: WHAT IS THE HEX?

  “Well, you guys can take these gigs seriously if you want, but me—I haven’t had this much fun being sick on a ride since...what was that one called, Jim? At the Big Red. The one where you’re in that shuttle, barrelling round that grey metal planet, and then whoosh, you just miss the other spheres by this much.” He demonstrates an inch between his forefinger and thumb. “We caught some serious g’s on that. Yeah, yeah—” He sits up and faces me, grinning, “—that was the one you made me swear never to mention again.” He puckers his lips. “Oops.”

  They all turn on me.

  “Yeah, thanks, Sergei, you big ape.”

  “What am I?”

  “Pretty freaking tragic.”

  “But what am I?”

  I sigh, accepting Rachel’s arm around mine—now if only that would happen more often. “The Minsk Machine, Sergei.”

  “Made for what?”

  “War, women and...”

  “And what? I can’t hear you.”

  Made for what? Made for. Made—

  “I’m still waiting.”

  “Sssh. Shut up a minute, Sergei. I need to think.” I pull away from Rachel and, crouching low, grab two fistfuls of sand. I imagine the grains flowing through my fingers as all the clues, ideas and experiences I’ve encountered since that day in the café, when everything changed.

  Made for what?

  A theme park? But not the theme park, not the Big Red. This one. Buried under the ice. Untouched. Waiting...

  “Guys, it’s the gigs themselves! They’re the discovery.”

  “What? What are you saying?” Lohengrin is the first to crouch beside me. The others quickly join us.

  I lower my voice but not my enthusiasm as I try to explain. It’s a bit like making a haycock in a hurricane—you have to grab what you can and hope it all ties together before you lose grip. The ideas are still swirling in. “It’s this place. We just assumed it was part of the facility, didn’t we? The basement level. But I don’t think it is—no, I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “Why do you say that?” asks Lyssa.

  “It’s what Sergei said—about that ride in the Big Red. Not just that one, several of them. The tech needed to design and build those...it was a quantum leap forward at the time. The most advanced rides ever made, right? They stunned everyone.”

  “Yeah. And the patents for those designs are still under lock and key. ISPA has—”

  I interrupt Rachel to continue: “ISPA, that’s right! Remember geology class. ISPA funded all those expeditions to the North Pole. Guys, here’s what I think happened: the scientists were drilling in the ice when they discovered something buried even deeper—this cave. Only it wouldn’t have been a cave once, before the ice, it would have been a walled enclosure. A hexagon on the surface of Mars. Look around you. These walls and these gigs weren’t built by us. They were excavated. The real builders left them here millions of years ago. We just built this facility over them, to keep them secret.”

  The others stare at me in wonder, but Lyssa isn’t convinced. “You’re making some pretty big leaps, Trillion. How do you go from a ride in the Big Red to ancient aliens? Where’s the connection?”

  I'm so close to telling them everything about the dragonfly, the sanctum, my extra-terrestrial travels. But something stops me. I haven't even told Sergei yet.

  “The gigs, Lys. The gigs are the connection. Think about it. No one had seen tech like that before the Big Red opened. I think ISPA copied those designs from these apparatuses here, the ones they’d excavated. Maybe to bring in some extra revenue. Who knows? But they kept this place a secret, never told the public what they’d found.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s say you’re right,” she says. “Why build an entire facility around it? I mean this must have cost ISPA gajillions. If you want to keep somewhere secret, you don’t ferry buggos in once a year to use it as a playground. That’s just dumb.”

  “She has a point,” agrees Lohengrin. “You’re thinking there’s something more to this place, aren’t you, Jim? Something we haven’t seen yet. The power outages springs to mind. I mean what the heck happened there? The gigs lit up like Christmas trees.”

  He's quick. So close to knowing my secret. “Yeah. But let’s think even bigger. About your dad, Lyssa.”

  “Uh-huh. What about him?” She chews her bottom lip.

  “He disappeared...what...about a century ago? But here he is, and he hasn’t aged more than about a decade or something. And he has a daughter, who’s fourteen.”

  “Correct.”

  “So where’s he been?”

  “I already told you—he never said. ‘When you’re older’—that was the most I ever got out of him.”

  “So we’ll have to speculate. But now that we’ve established an advanced alien civilisation is involved, we have to think big. Why do you guys suppose the Sheikers or the Finaglers would want to find this place so badly?”

  “Not to score points,” Rachel jokes.

  “
Exactly. So maybe we should ask Lohengrin’s question again,” I add. “Why build an entire facility over this place? And why—why are we here? That’s gotta be the most important thing. Why is it so crucial that we’re trained here?”

  “So we can train using the alien gigs?” Sergei suggests.

  “Yeah, but ISPA has that tech now. They used it to build those rides in the Big Red. Why not rig up some new gigs someplace else, someplace safer? Why do they want us here, at this original excavation site?”

  “I think I see where you’re going,” says Lohengrin, tracing the contours of his scalpture. “Or maybe that should be the question. Re-phrase: not where are we going, but where are they going to send us?”

  That shuts everyone up, including me.

  “There’s never been any other evidence found of an ancient civilisation on Mars, as far as I know,” he explains. “So maybe this place is some kind of waystation. Or a checkpoint.”

  “A checkpoint on the way to where?” asks Lyssa.

  No sooner has she finished than the Hex lights dim and the wall screen begins to flash. The roll of seventy-odd names vanishes and is replaced by ten, with instructions:

  THE FOLLOWING STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO ROOM 9c IMMEDIATELY:

  Sarazzin

  Heathcote

  Orkney

  Walpole

  Ramirez

  THE FOLLOWING STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO ROOM 9i IMMEDIATELY:

  Lohengrin

  Foggerty

  Balakirev

  Van Buren

  Trillion

  CHAPTER 13

  Behind the Curtain

  “Come in, guys. Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. Go ahead and stand by the black screen over there. There’s something I want to show you.”