The Rogue World

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “Eleanor?” Watkins said behind her, sounding almost frightened.

  She turned around and saw his approaching silhouette against the light from outside.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “What—what are you doing?”

  “I’m taking the ship up to the rogue world.”

  He said nothing.

  Beyond Watkins, she could see that her mom and Hobbes had entered through the hatch as well. Eleanor resumed her journey inward. Her connection with the console outside had given her an understanding of the ship’s layout, and she knew where to find the pilot’s cockpit.

  “Eleanor!” Hobbes said. “Don’t take one more step!”

  “Sweetie, please!” her mom said. “Come back!”

  Eleanor scurried ahead. If she moved quickly, soon there wouldn’t be anything they could do to stop her. Numerous chambers opened off the main corridor, and the passage forked several times into side channels, but eventually Eleanor reached a ramp leading up to the ship’s cockpit. As she climbed up and stepped inside it, she thought of Luke, and wished he were there to appreciate what she was seeing.

  A tall, wraparound window offered views of Stonehenge and the surrounding countryside from high above, as well as the rest of the ship and its myriad jointed legs reaching out and down into the ground.

  The pilot’s chair, if it could be called a chair, had clearly not been made with human dimensions or shape in mind. It looked like something that had been brought up from the bottom of the ocean, sculpted by the sand and the endless currents, a sprawling and graceful repository for a living thing Eleanor couldn’t imagine. A central console rose up on a pedestal before it, and Eleanor crossed the room to stand in front of it. Aside from these central features, the cockpit had no other features, the walls like those in the rest of the ship.

  A blade of spotlight sliced across the window. No doubt the UN soldiers knew Eleanor had gone into the ship. No doubt they still had their tanks and guns pointed at it. At her. But they wouldn’t shoot if Hobbes was on board. Eleanor doubted the inferior technology of their guns could do much damage anyway.

  She looked down at the console, and laid both her palms against it.

  The ship came alive at her touch, but not in the way of the Concentrators she had dealt with. This was simply a responsive tool, not an intelligence, and it waited for her to accept what it offered. Eleanor took a breath, and let the ship into her mind.

  The sudden rush of information staggered her, and she gasped, nearly breaking away from the console. But after a moment, her mind began to adjust to it, and when she looked up, the blank walls and window of the cockpit had been replaced and overlayed with bright, glowing imagery she couldn’t understand. There were charts and maps of stars, readouts from different parts of the ship, messages in a language as indecipherable as the architecture of the Concentrators.

  “Eleanor!” she heard Hobbes shout. He was getting closer, and would find his way in here any moment. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing!”

  Eleanor knew exactly what she was doing. She reached her mind into the ship, as she had done with the Concentrators. She mentally returned down the corridor through which she’d come, and she found the main hatch. Watkins, her mom, and Hobbes were on board—the ship could sense their movements—and Eleanor hoped that at least her mom and Watkins would forgive her.

  She shut the main hatch, sealing them all in.

  Then she brought her mind back up to the cockpit.

  “Eleanor!” Hobbes shouted.

  He was very close now, marching up the ramp toward her, and she looked over her shoulder just as his head snarled into view.

  “Kid, you are entering a world of hurt,” he said.

  Eleanor reached with her mind toward the cockpit door.

  “This is—”

  She closed the door just as Hobbes reached it, the last look on his face one of fearful fury.

  Eleanor smiled to herself. No one would bother her now. No one would stop her from doing what she needed to do. That was all she had wanted from the beginning.

  Eleanor turned her attention back to the ship’s main controls, and the elegant, prismatic displays that danced in front of her. She still couldn’t make sense of them, but hoped she would be able to connect with the ship without them. She had to trust that the DNA she carried would make her compatible enough to fly it. Into space.

  Into space.

  If Eleanor’s hands had not been pressed up against the console, she knew they would have been shaking. Now that she had sealed herself into the cockpit, she could hear her own heartbeat thumping through the silence.

  “I can do this,” she said aloud.

  But she didn’t know how. Even if she could figure out how to get this ship into the air, how would she know where to go? From the surface of the earth, whole planets looked like specks. Space was big. So big the word became meaningless. How in all that vastness would she find the rogue world and the black mountain that had called to her for—?

  She stopped.

  A call.

  That was the answer. The ship had to have some way to communicate. Perhaps Eleanor could use it to contact the rogue world. The black mountain. Something there had reached out to her. Why couldn’t she reach back?

  She went back into the ship’s systems, proceeding by feel with her mind, exploring its different functions, letting the ship guide her when it could. But stuff wasn’t exactly labeled in stencil, like GIANT ALIEN PROPULSION THING, or THERMAL EXHAUST PORT. Eleanor didn’t have the ship’s vocabulary, and the ship didn’t have hers. But it had connected with her mind to a certain degree. What if it could sense what she wanted?

  Eleanor closed her eyes and imagined the black mountain as she had seen it in her dream. She recalled its shape, its texture, its height as it rose above the world-city. She imagined the green light at its summit, and the call for help that had come to her. She tried to send back a message of her own, as simple a pure thought as she could form, one rooted in the only thing she really knew.

  I’m here.

  She pushed this thought with her mind toward that green light in her memory, and suddenly a new display glimmered before her with scrolling, oscillating waves of color. A moment after that, she felt a familiar presence approaching her, and if a mind could have a voice, this voice sounded like the one she had heard in her dream.

  I’m here, she thought again.

  The black mountain responded immediately. She felt it move through the ship, and then the ship moved into action. Deep within its core, the giant alien propulsion thing surged with power, sending minor shock waves through the floors and walls. Out the window, Eleanor saw the ship’s legs extracting themselves from the ground, sending dirt and debris flying. The UN soldiers and staff scurried to safety as the legs bent up and folded inward, like a spider’s when tucked away deep in its funneled lair. The ship was preparing to fly.

  Eleanor didn’t know exactly where they were going, or how they would return. She thought of her uncle Jack, and it broke her heart to be leaving him behind again.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered to him, hoping that somehow he could hear it the way she had heard him when she was lost underground.

  A deep and resonant drone rose up from beneath Eleanor’s feet, thrumming the bones of the ship, and the vessel up into the air. Eleanor maintained hand contact with the console, even though she wasn’t exactly in control of the ship anymore, and watched out the window as they ascended. The fields and pastures below grew smaller and became a kind of geometric abstract painting. The ship soon reached the height at which Consuelo had flown them around the world—tough, reliable Consuelo—and then rose even higher.

  The horizon began to bend, as if a strongman had taken one end in each hand, and Eleanor watched the sun rise against the curvature of the earth, spreading light over a globe of white, brown, and blue, gauzed in the thin haze of its atmosphere.

  How many people in the history of the worl
d had seen their home this way? Before the Freeze, Eleanor had heard that kids dreamed of growing up to become astronauts. There were no astronauts anymore, and that wish had never been Eleanor’s. Yet here she was, in space.

  Over time, the earth grew smaller, and soon, the entire world fit within the frame of the ship’s window, and Eleanor could see the white of the glaciers covering half its surface as though someone simply taken an eraser to the image.

  Suddenly, the ship spun, sweeping the earth from Eleanor’s window, pointing her in a new direction. The droning of the engine then fell to a lower note, and the ship launched itself forward, though it was hard to tell how much faster it was traveling now without something to give her reference. The stars seemed not to move at all, and Eleanor couldn’t see the earth’s moon, but she scanned the section of space ahead for signs of the rogue world.

  Minutes passed. She heard a pounding on the door outside, but eventually, her mom or Hobbes or whoever it was gave up, and Eleanor did her best not to think about them.

  Hours passed.

  Eleanor became tired, and wished the seat behind her had been designed with human anatomy in mind, so that she could sit down. As it was, she couldn’t find a comfortable position anywhere on it to rest.

  And still the ship flew on. Into nothing. Nothing changing.

  Eleanor slowly realized that the pictures of the solar system from her science classes were a lie. They got the scale completely wrong. They weren’t like marbles rolling around out here. She would have been able to see marbles. They were more like motes of dust, barely visible from one to the next, with emptiness between them.

  Over time, that emptiness settled a nameless dread over Eleanor’s mind. A feeling of smallness and insignificance. And powerlessness. Even meaninglessness. She reached a point where she couldn’t look into it anymore, and she took her eyes from the window, trying not to think about how far she was from home.

  Her exhaustion increased.

  All she wanted to do was lie down and shut out the void.

  She even thought about removing her hands from the console, and just as she had resolved to do so, an impression intruded on her mind. The black mountain conveyed to her a feeling of urgency.

  Close.

  Eleanor looked out into the stars and saw nothing.

  Close.

  She scanned the unchanging stars. Waiting. Watching.

  Until she thought she saw something. Or the absence of something, an absence that seemed to be growing. She kept her eyes on it, and soon that absence had spread, becoming a round, black pit. A hole in space.

  That was the rogue world.

  Lightless. Cold. All alone on its hunt, and seemingly unaware of her.

  The dark planet grew in size just as the earth had shrunk, until its horizon leveled, and the blackness of its surface resolved into hideous shapes and shadows. The ship descended, flying over and through labyrinthine canyons of twisted, angular towers that appeared to have been melted, dripped, and shattered into shape. This was the world-city from her dream.

  She saw no light down there, except for what reached the rogue world from her own sun, looking dimmer and weaker than it should. The alien planet seemed completely lifeless, and while she knew that to be strictly accurate, she hadn’t forgotten the deadly machine that had chased her, and she shared the sky with distant swarms of ships just like the one she was piloting.

  Close.

  Eleanor searched the horizon for the black mountain, and soon found it, a pyramid looming over the city at its feet, its pale green light a single spark in a plain of ashes. They sailed toward it, and Eleanor felt something new from the entity that had reached out to her. A feeling Eleanor knew well, and worked hard to keep.

  Hope.

  She did not understand this being. It felt entirely different from the alien intelligences she had encountered. But she trusted that her questions would be answered when she reached the summit.

  The ship sailed closer, the black mountain swelling in size. Eleanor wondered whether it would set them down at the base, or fly them to the summit. Of the two, she definitely—

  There was an explosion, and the ship suddenly jolted and heaved, pitching sideways, throwing Eleanor from the console. She stumbled down along the angled floor, slamming hard into a wall of the cockpit. All the lights and displays had gone out as soon as her hands had lost contact with the ship, and the connection with the black mountain was now severed.

  Through the window, she saw one of the other ships flying alongside her, its legs flared, pointing like daggers at Eleanor’s vessel.

  They were under attack.

  Eleanor thought of her mom and Watkins, praying they were okay on the other side of the door, and then labored to her feet. She had to get back up to the console and regain control.

  She scrambled and climbed up the floor until she was able to grab the base of the console, hook her elbow around it, and then slowly pull herself to her feet. As soon as she was in position, she smacked both her palms against the console, desperate to talk to the ship.

  The connection failed. And failed again.

  She had to concentrate, somehow, while the ship barreled ahead halfway on its side. She spared a moment for deep breath, and another to close her eyes, and then she tried again. This time, it worked, and she welcomed the flood of the ship into her mind. The lights and displays came back up across her vision, many of them flashing urgently, some having simply gone dark.

  The black mountain was still there, too, in the ship and on the horizon.

  Close.

  “Close?” Eleanor shouted aloud. “How is that supposed to be helpful?”

  She tried to reach with her mind for the ship’s navigation, but it was either damaged or beyond her ability to control, because she couldn’t do anything to change their trajectory. She was able to right the ship by shifting her weight and stance within her mind, and then she dug in her heels to slow their descent as much as she could. Even so, it didn’t matter.

  They were going down.

  CHAPTER

  24

  ELEANOR COULDN’T MOVE. TERRIFIED OF WHAT SHE MIGHT see, she opened her eyes and looked down at her body. But her body wasn’t there. Or it was, but it was encased in some kind of rigid foam. Where had that come from?

  She was lying on her side against the cockpit’s forward bulkhead, beneath the window. The impact of the crash must have thrown her there, and whatever this foam stuff was, it seemed to have cushioned her, probably saving her life.

  Had it come from the ship? Some kind of alien airbag?

  And how was she supposed to get out of it?

  She tried to wiggle, and couldn’t, so she put everything she had into bending at the waist, hoping to just crack the stuff open, but even then she couldn’t escape it.

  “Survive the crash,” she said. “Then death by Styrofoam.”

  Something made a crumbling noise, like sand. She looked down and saw that some of the foam had started deteriorating. Just crumbling away and disintegrating. She tried to move again, and this time she could. The foam fractured and broke and turned to dust as she fought her way out of it, and by the time she was on her feet, there was only a trace of it left on the floor.

  “So I guess that actually works pretty well,” she said, patting the console. “Sorry for doubting you.”

  Through the window, she could see the black mountain in the distance, perhaps a few miles away. It was hard to judge the distance here. The architecture of the world-city that surrounded her shifted and dodged in her vision the same as everything else the aliens had built, and she wasn’t looking forward to crossing any distance of it.

  But first she needed to turn her attention to the cockpit door, which was sealed shut. When she laid her palms on the console to open it, she feared there would be no response. But as she connected with the ship, it reached back. Almost all its systems had gone dark, but there was basic power to central areas of the ship. She almost felt like she had to be
careful in the wreckage with her mind as she reached to find the cockpit door, and she worried that it might not open. But it did.

  Eleanor pulled her hands away from the console and turned around.

  Her mother stood in the doorway, and of all the looks Eleanor had ever seen on her mom’s face after all the stupid things Eleanor had ever done, she had never seen a look like this. Eyes open wide, mouth open wide, forehead twisted up. At first, Eleanor thought it was simply disbelief, but almost immediately worried it was anger, and her mom was so furious she just couldn’t say anything.

  Behind her, Hobbes made his feelings clear. “I’m glad to know you’re not hurt, kid. Because I want to see to that personally.”

  “What are you going to do, Hobbes?” Watkins stepped out from behind the soldier. “She’s a child. And we’ve just crashed on an unfamiliar planet in the depths of space. I think we have other things to worry about.”

  Eleanor’s mom finally blinked. “Eleanor, how did you—”

  “Mom, I had to. There was no other way.”

  “No . . . other way?”

  “We’re not going to have this conversation here,” Hobbes said. “Eleanor is going to open that hatch, and we’re going to exit this ship so that my team can get to work.” He pointed at Eleanor. “Then we’ll deal with you.”

  His statement puzzled Eleanor. “Your team?”

  “That’s right, my team.” Hobbes shook his head. “Haven’t you been paying attention? What do you think this is, some kind of—”

  “Hobbes,” Watkins said, wide eyes now focused past Eleanor, over her shoulder.

  “Don’t interrupt me, Watkins—”

  “Look outside.”

  Hobbes glanced. Then he stared, and apparently forgot what he had been about to say.

  Eleanor looked to see what had drawn their attention. Through the cockpit window she saw the world-city and the black mountain, just as they had been several moments ago. But then it occurred to her. The ship had no other windows than this one. With the cockpit door shut, she had been the only one who knew what was happening.