He paused, looking past Lucas at the computer console on the back wall. With a quick motion he darted forward and pulled something out of a port. He held it up to the light and turned it back and forth.
Elena gasped, and suddenly Lucas felt dizzy. He recognized the chip in Hofstra’s hands. It was the same one that Stockton had given him. The same one that Rahul had analyzed on his computer.
The same one he’d last seen his sister putting into her pocket.
Hofstra smacked the intercom button. “Captain—I’ve found something. A data chip was plugged into the secure network on the backup bridge.”
There was a brief moment of silence. “Get those cadets out of there,” Sanchez said. “Moskowitz, tell me what you need.”
Hofstra pointed at the door. “You heard her. Up and out.”
Lucas’s heart pounded in his chest as he followed Elena and Rahul out into the hallway. There was only one explanation—Tali had planted the data chip. Like an idiot, he’d given it to her, and she’d gone and done the exact thing she’d told him not to do.
“How could you?” Rahul asked in a hoarse voice. His arms were wrapped around his chest as if he was shivering. “You knew what was on that chip. How could you plug it in?”
“I didn’t,” Lucas insisted. “I swear, it wasn’t me.”
“You said you gave it to the captain,” Elena said.
Lucas opened his mouth to answer, but his throat had closed up. It was as if everything he cared about was being ripped apart in front of his eyes. After a moment he just shook his head mutely.
“You lied,” she said incredulously. “You lied to us.”
“You really expect us to believe that you didn’t plug the chip in?” Rahul asked. “It was the exact same chip!”
“I got rid of it,” Lucas said weakly. “I thought—I thought it was gone.”
“Got rid of it how?” Elena asked.
In response, Lucas just closed his eyes.
“Let me guess,” Rahul said. “You can’t tell us. How amazingly convenient.”
“Right now the only thing that matters is telling the captain,” Elena said. “We have to get onto the bridge and explain. Maybe it will help if she knows where it came from.”
Rahul and Elena darted up the ladder toward the front of the ship. When Lucas started to follow, Rahul stopped and glared down at him. “No way. You’re not coming.”
“Yes, he is,” Elena said, grabbing Rahul by the arm. “He knows the most about what happened.”
Rahul clenched his jaw and started up the ladderway again, muttering quietly to himself. They rushed straight past the NO CADETS ON THE BRIDGE sign and up through the hatchway.
“Hey!” Ensign Weber shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Elena turned to Captain Sanchez, who was huddled over a computer console with Palmer. “Captain! We need to speak to you.”
“Cadets,” Sanchez said in a tired voice, “you’d better have a really good reason for doing this. It takes a lot of paperwork to put all of you in the brig.”
“That data chip Lieutenant-Commander Hofstra found—we know where it came from,” Lucas said quickly.
Sanchez and Palmer exchanged a look. “Tell me everything you know,” Sanchez said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Some miners on Vesta gave it to me,” Lucas said. “It has a virus—the same one Moskowitz is fighting. I think it tries to put blind spots in our sensors.”
“How do you know all that?” Palmer demanded. “And how did it get onto the backup bridge?”
Lucas swallowed. “They told me, sir. But I didn’t plant it there. I swear.”
“It just magically appeared,” Rahul said sarcastically.
“I got rid of it,” Lucas said. Which was true enough, he guessed. “Someone else must have plugged it in.”
Palmer snorted. “There are so many holes in that story I don’t even know where to start.”
“That’s going to have to wait till later,” Sanchez said. “Right now—”
“Bridge, this is engineering!” Moskowitz called over the intercom. “Our patrol ships are picking up an unidentified ship approaching quickly.”
“There’s nothing on our main sensors,” Lieutenant Feinman said, looking down at her console.
Sanchez’s face turned grim. She leaned down and smacked a button on the arm of the captain’s seat. “All hands, prepare for emergency acceleration.”
“It’s matching speed!” Moskowitz called. “One of my crew got a visual—some kind of beefed-up courier ship. They’re coming around to the waist airlock.”
“Get ready for full emergency thrust,” Sanchez barked. But even as she spoke, a faint clang echoed through the hull. “Belay that—it’s too late.”
She hit the shipwide intercom button again. “Attention! We have a hostile party attempting to board the ship. Cadets and crew, shelter in place and stay off the ladderways. This is not a drill.”
Palmer opened up a locked storage bay at the back of the bridge and took out handheld pulse weapons for Sanchez, Weber, Feinman, and himself. “They’ll be ready for us.”
“You take Lieutenant Feinman,” Sanchez said to him. “Secure the backup bridge and then head to engineering. Ensign Weber, with me.”
“What about the main bridge?” Palmer asked.
“I guess it’s time to see how well those simulations prepare our cadets,” Sanchez said, turning to Lucas and his friends. “Stay here. Keep the door closed. Turn the ship around and head back to Vesta, and then get a message to Rieschling Base and let them know what’s happening.”
Lucas swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Under no circumstances are you to open this door until a ranking officer gives the all clear.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
Sanchez led Weber, Palmer, and Feinman down the ladderway. She swung the hatch closed behind her and locked it with a loud clang.
“I can’t believe she trusts you enough to leave you on the bridge,” Rahul said harshly. “If it were up to me—”
“It’s not,” Elena said. “And right now isn’t the time. We need all three of us to run the bridge.”
Lucas’s skin felt cold and clammy. This was the moment he’d been dreading. It felt like it was only yesterday that he’d discovered what it felt like to have real friends. Now he was finding out what it felt like to lose them.
“I don’t blame you for hating me,” he said, his voice trembling a little. “But Elena is right—we have orders to follow. Get a return course plotted and open a link to the naval base.”
Rahul muttered something to himself and tapped out a few commands on the engineering console. “Link is up.”
“Rieschling Base, this is Cadet Lucas Adebayo of the ISS Orpheus,” Lucas said. “We have an emergency situation and need immediate assistance.”
There was a brief crackle of static, and then silence. “Are you sure you’re using the right frequency?” Elena asked.
“I’m sure,” Rahul snapped. “But nobody is responding.”
“Rieschling Base, this is the Orpheus, please respond,” Lucas said again.
Nothing.
“Bridge, this is the captain,” Sanchez said over the intercom. She was breathing heavily and in the background Lucas could hear shouts and scuffling. “Shut off the hatchways at decks twelve and thirteen.”
“On it,” Elena said, leaning over her console.
“Have you heard from Vesta?”
“We can’t raise anyone,” Lucas said.
“Keep trying. If—”
But whatever Sanchez was going to say next was interrupted by a series of incoherent shouts. There was a loud screech of metal, and then the link went silent.
“Captain!” Lucas called. “Captain Sanchez, are you there?”
There was no response. Suddenly the lights on the bridge cut out, leaving them in darkness except for the faint gleam of starlight. All four of the crew consoles went black. After a mo
ment, a pair of emergency lights turned on, bathing the entire bridge in a sickly red glow. The consoles flickered back on with four identical messages: Emergency Power Activated.
“Someone disabled the main power grid,” Rahul said.
“Was it the captain? Or the intruders?” Elena asked, echoing the question in Lucas’s own mind.
“Even on emergency power, we should still be able to get a message to Vesta,” he said.
“We’ve still got a link up,” Rahul said, checking his console. “But I’m getting nothing back.”
Think, Lucas told himself. There has to be something you can do besides sitting here.
A sudden pounding on the bridge hatchway made him jump. “Open this door!” called a man’s voice. The attackers had reached the bridge.
Lucas moved over to the hatchway and listened. He heard muffled voices, but he couldn’t make out any of the words. Had the intruders secured the rest of the ship? Or were they all here at the bridge? Maybe if he gave the captain enough time, she and the other officers would be able to fight their way back.
“Lucas,” called another voice from the other side of the hatchway. He recognized that voice: McKinley. “Lucas, I know you’re in there. Open the door so we can sort all this out.”
“We’ll sort it out, all right,” Elena muttered.
“Don’t make this hard, Lucas,” McKinley said. “We’ve won. It’s over.”
They might have taken over most of the ship, but with the backup bridge locked down, they wouldn’t have control of anything as long as Lucas could keep them on the other side of that hatch. He turned to Elena. “Turn back for Vesta. Increase power to two-thirds.”
She nodded and bent over her console. After a few moments, the pitch of the engines increased and the ship swung around in a broad arc.
“That’s not wise,” McKinley said angrily from the other side of the door. “You’re just making this harder.”
A fist pounded on the hatch again. “Lucas, this is Stockton. You remember me, I’m sure. If you don’t open this door, I’m going to start killing cadets, one by one. And first up is going to be someone that you know rather well.”
There was a brief sound of struggle from the other side of the hatchway. “Lucas!” Tali shouted. “Don’t open it! Do you hear me? Don’t—”
Her voice was cut off, as if someone had put their hand over her mouth. Lucas froze. His skin went cold. They were lying. They had to be. They wouldn’t kill her.
“In about ten seconds, there’s going to be quite a mess out here,” Stockton said. “Tali is a smart girl. It’ll be a shame to have her clever brains splattered all over this hatchway.”
Lucas closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his chest. He didn’t think that McKinley would hurt Tali. But Stockton might.
A voice crackled over the radio. “This is Rieschling Base,” a woman said. “We’ve received your message.”
Lucas’s heart leapt. Someone had heard them!
“Or, I should say, this is what used to be Rieschling Base,” the woman said. “It’s now part of the Free State of Vesta, along with everything in this sector. You’re under our jurisdiction, and your ship is being impounded.”
“The Free State of Vesta?” Rahul repeated incredulously.
McKinley pounded on the door. “You’re not going to be getting any help from Vesta,” he called. “Our friends there took it over about an hour ago.”
Rieschling Base had been taken over? It wasn’t possible—just like it wasn’t possible for them to have boarded the Orpheus. Just like it wasn’t possible for them to have taken over the entire ship in just a few minutes. None of it was possible, and all of it was happening anyway.
“You have five seconds, Lucas.”
Lucas bowed his head and opened the bridge door.
17
“YOU’RE GOING TO have to talk to me at some point,” Lucas said.
In response, Tali made a sound halfway between a snort and a cough. Though from the way she was floating at the far end of the captain’s quarters with her legs folded and a book held neatly in her lap, it wasn’t even clear that she actually was responding to him. She might have just been clearing her throat.
Truthfully, in the eighteen or so hours since McKinley had locked the two of them up here in Sanchez’s room, she’d done a remarkable job of not talking to him. That coughing sound she’d just made was the closest she’d come to acknowledging his existence. She’d perused Sanchez’s bookshelf for a while and pulled out an old hardcover book. At 2200 sharp, she’d closed the book, climbed into Sanchez’s sleep sack, and turned off the lights without saying a word, leaving Lucas to sleep out in the middle of the room. Sometime in the middle of the night, the ship had turned off its main engines and entered free fall. Without a sleep sack to hold him in place, Lucas had floated around the room, buffeted by the air currents from the vents in the ceiling. At 0500, Tali had turned on the lights and gone back to her book.
“Remember the week you spent ignoring me when I was six? When I broke your robot project? You almost had me convinced I didn’t actually exist.”
“It was a drone project, not a robot,” she said. “And I’ve already said everything I have to say.”
The sound of Tali’s voice made Lucas jump. It took him a moment to decide whether she’d actually spoken, or if maybe his sleep-deprived brain had just imagined it.
“You haven’t said anything at all,” Lucas protested.
“I’ve said plenty,” she replied, with her eyes still locked on the book in her lap. “But for your dimwit brain, I’ll repeat. You. Shouldn’t. Have. Opened. That. Door.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” Lucas said. “They’d captured the ship and they’d taken over everything on Vesta. And they were going to kill you!”
Tali turned toward him angrily and ticked off her arguments one by one on her fingers. “First, they hadn’t actually captured the ship until you let them onto the bridge. Second, for all you know, that person you talked to was a Belter on some ship who intercepted your transmission. Third, they weren’t going to kill anyone. They were just bluffing.”
“They weren’t bluffing,” Lucas said.
“And you knew that because of the vicious tone in their voice? The angry way they pounded on the bridge door? The murderous smell of their body odor?”
“I know them,” Lucas insisted. “I met them on Vesta.”
“You don’t know anything about them, Lucas. Stockton was only threatening me because he knew you’d give in.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he’s my uncle,” she said in an exasperated voice.
Lucas stared at her. His sister couldn’t have surprised him more if she’d told him she was really a four-armed alien. “Wait, what? That guy who just kidnapped us is your uncle?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Stockton—the guy who—”
“Lucas,” she snapped. “Yes. Him.”
Lucas exhaled in a long, low, whistling breath. “Okay, can you start at the beginning, or something? Because out of all the things I thought you might get around to telling me, ‘Stockton is my uncle’ was pretty far down on the list. Did he just call you up and say, ‘Hey, I’m your long-lost uncle, how about you help me hijack your ship?’”
Tali pursed her lips. From her expression, Lucas knew that this was the part of the story she really didn’t want to tell. He half expected to get her usual I-can’t-tell-you answer, but to his surprise, she answered the question.
“It wasn’t like that. I contacted him. This was back when I was ten or eleven years old, when I didn’t really know anything about him. I just wanted to ask him questions about my parents and find out why he didn’t become my guardian.”
“Did he tell you?”
She shrugged. “He said he was in prison on Mars when they died. He told me he was innocent, and I believed him. He can be very charming when he wants something from you.”
“What did
he want from a ten-year-old kid from the Belt?”
“I guess at first I was just a curiosity,” she said. “Or maybe he liked having someone to listen to him. Back then all I wanted was to be anything other than a miner, and I loved his romantic stories about smuggling diamonds and outrunning patrol ships. At some point he started telling me that I ought to join the Navy and learn to be a pilot. He said he could make it look like I grew up on Mars instead of in the Belt by bribing people to forge transcripts and write recommendations. He even planted a fake article about how I won second place in the Port Meridian colonywide science fair.”
Now everything was starting to make some sense. “Dad knew, didn’t he? That was why he was so angry?”
Tali nodded. “He told me it wasn’t worth coming here if it meant I had to get Stockton’s help and lie to everyone about where I’d grown up.” She paused. “I can’t believe he never told you. I was sure he would.”
Lucas remembered all the times his dad had refused to talk about Tali and the academy. He’d thought it was because he didn’t want to talk about her, but maybe he just didn’t want Lucas to know how she had gotten accepted. He’d carried that secret for three years. No wonder he’d been so angry.
“I think it was why he didn’t want you joining up,” Tali went on. “He knew Stockton would want something from me in return for getting me into the school, and he was worried the same thing would happen to you. And he was right—as soon as I enrolled, all of Stockton’s charm evaporated. He told me that if I didn’t work off the debt I owed him, he would tell everyone that I was a fraud. The first year or two it was tiny little things—information, mostly. Stuff that he could sell to other smugglers. Later it started to get more serious.”
“Why didn’t you just tell him no?”
“You make it seem like that would be so easy,” she said. “If the Navy found out about my forged papers, I would have gotten kicked out of the school—maybe even gone to prison. And if I helped him, I could keep everything the way it was. I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone, and that someday I could finish paying him back, and then I’d be free.”
The Orpheus Plot Page 18
