Tiff’s hand gripped his, squeezing hard. Even though he held her hand to keep her at bay, she shivered at his touch. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“You’ve missed the map, that’s what you’ve missed.”
Tiff balked, her hand going limp. Is that really what he thought of her? She did feel love for him, but now, because of her actions, he’d never believe her.
Bitterness stung her heart. She only had one last card to play. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”
“Risk our lives for some girl you barely know.”
Anger flashed in his features. She’d miscalculated.
“Aries is not just some girl. She doesn’t deserve to be locked up in that ship.”
Tiff’s voice hardened. Hearing her name was like putting a brick wall up between them. “Striker, forget about her. We could be together again, you and me.”
“Yeah. I need that as much as another stab in the back.” Striker pushed by her and grumbled, “I’ve got more important things to do.”
Tiff’s world shattered, like some pretty façade she’d been building on glass. She was losing him, so she clenched on tight, grasping his arm. How could a prissy, colonial snob be better than she was?
“What does she have that I don’t have?”
He whirled around and crowded into her personal space, forcing her to slink back against the wall. “I’ll tell you what. Aries put her life on the line for me. She gave up her freedom for mine.”
Tiff loosened her grip on his arm. It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear.
“Yeah, you look surprised? Self-sacrifice is a concept you know nothing about.” He put up an incriminating finger and pressed it into her chest. “I’ll tell you what you are: you’re just another desperate pirate, putting yourself above everyone else. You left me to die here and only came back when you needed something from me.”
He yanked his arm back, breaking free from her. Tiff felt the last of her hope die. Some mistakes couldn’t be taken back. Like her brother’s misjudgment of his ship’s engine capacity. Ka-boom.
“Aries is a better person than you’ll ever be.”
Striker’s words hit a dissonant chord inside her. He was right. She was a selfish, conniving bitch. Having Striker say it made it all that much more true. Her chest burned and Tiff thought she’d explode into tears, but Reckon bolted into the corridor at that moment.
“Sorry to intrude, Captain, sir.”
Striker exhaled. “It’s all right. You’re not interrupting anything. What’s up?”
“You’ve got to see this. I’ve been playing around in the ship’s functions and you’re never going to believe what these bird people came up with. It may be the one thing that can get us on that speeding colony ship.”
“Show me.” Striker’s voice gained energy with what Tiff heard as hope.
They raced to the control room and Tiff followed, too curious to stay away. Reckon positioned himself in the captain’s chair and brought up the main sight panel. Stars blurred as they sped through space.
“I’m going to need a stationary position near another object for the demonstration.” He looked at Striker for approval.
“Okay, if you think it’s worth it, then by all means, I’ll slow it down.”
Striker pulled on a few levers and the engines calmed. He looked at the readings. “There’s a small asteroid over here.”
“Excellent. Park it within a mile of the asteroid’s surface.” Reckon used three wire tips to paint figures across the panels like he was creating a masterpiece with light pens. “I’ve been playing around with the functions for awhile now, and I found a device that simulates two high pressure points and connects them, creating a corridor of atmosphere that can withstand the vacuum of space.”
“Say that again.” Striker leaned forward.
“It can connect two objects in space and create a walkway, so to speak, in which to travel between them. Meaning, we could connect to the New Dawn and walk through space to knock on their door.” He smiled at his joke. “Are you watching?”
Of course Striker was, Tiff thought bitterly. They all were. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the sight panel. A spot of light flickered on the surface of the asteroid. A blue laser shot from the hull of the ship to connect to the asteroid. When the laser dispersed, a clear, cylindrical tube coalesced, distorting the space around it in a ripple of light.
“That’s it?”
“Yeppers.” Reckon sat back, obviously pleased.
“You’re certain we can walk across it?”
“We’ll have to test it out, of course. The farther apart you stretch it, the less stable it becomes, so someone’s going to have to stay aboard to adjust the speed to match the New Dawn’s.”
“Good work. Looks like you’ve earned your place on the ship to Refuge and then some.” Striker turned to look at the old man. “I owe you one.”
Reckon winked. “All in a good day’s work, Captain.”
Tiff’s anger reached an ugly head, like a pimple filled with puss waiting to pop. She wanted to throw a wrench in their fuzzy, warm thoughts of accomplishment and comradeship. She hated the thought of Striker with Aries. If she was miserable, then he should be, too. “That’s all fine and dandy, but how are we going to get onto their ship? It’s not like they’ll open the hatch for us to come in.”
Striker shrugged. “I’ll decode the door.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How do we locate her on a ship the size of a small city? By the looks of what they did to those lizard men, they’re not going to hand her over.”
Striker’s eyes burned and his face hardened. “Then we fight.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Transformation
Barliss awoke with a colossal headache. He lay in a hospital bed in his T-shirt and boxers. He moved to sit up, but a tug on the back of his head stopped him from rising. Reaching behind his head, he felt a wire running from an input hole just below his hairline to a panel in the wall.
“Look who’s up!” The nurse who’d administered his anesthesia before the procedure straightened the white sheets covering his legs. Usually a subordinate talking to him in that way would annoy him, but Barliss had no urge to put her in her place.
“How do you feel?”
Not like himself. Barliss’ thoughts whirled. Images of Aries running, Gerald’s round face drooling over young women and, finally, the drill careening toward his head swirled in his mind. The procedure was finished. He was connected to the mainframe.
He felt another presence looming in his thoughts, making the synapses in his brain fire at an accelerated rate. A higher intelligence presided over his consciousness, calming his surge of panic. “I’m fine.”
“Good. As you can probably guess, the procedure was successful. Dr. Pern will be in soon to talk with you about initial communication.” She wrapped a plastic pad around his arm and checked his blood pressure.
Barliss closed his eyes. He stood on the banks of a vast ocean of information waiting to pour into his thoughts and overwhelm him. Each gigabyte of knowledge humanity had accumulated over the years was stored in the ship’s archives, including every word of the Guide. The commander’s gentle voice entered his thoughts like a guardian angel, goading him on. Take your time, Barliss. Have a look around.
Barliss sensed every person onboard, every click of a door panel and every order processed through central command. He craved the success of the New Dawn’s mission now more than ever and could feel the dual engines working in overdrive, thanks to the new stores of lithium, propelling the ship forward.
The ship was an organism, each person a different cell. As he surfed the vast sea of knowledge and life, he sensed an anomaly in one area, a pinprick of a sore in the organism’s systems. Barliss nudged toward the incongruity, seeking it out as one would prod a wound. A string of numbers emerged, flashing behind his eyes in a warning. The ship talked to him in a series of code. Emergency breac
h in sector eight alpha.
Barliss tensed. That was Aries’ room.
“Lieutenant, I need to take your temperature.”
“No. I don’t have time. I must get on the main deck immediately.”
He pulled at the wire and a sharp pain zapped his neck. His body tensed as if someone had hit him with a stun gun and he fell back on the bed.
“You can’t remove it, Lieutenant.” The nurse sounded like she’d told a toddler he couldn’t fly. She smoothed his hair. “It’s connected to the nerves in your brain.”
“How am I going to walk around and do my job?” Images of the commander came to mind, always riding in his hoverchair. Barliss fought a rising sense of terror. The commander’s voice resonated in his thoughts, Patience, dear Barliss. We have teams dispatched to find her. The escape pods are disabled. There is nowhere for her to go. You must focus on the central directive.
Whether it was the commander, or the ship itself, a presence in his brain reached out to him, soothing his nerves and steadying his climbing heart rate. The nurse reached over and pulled out a box the size of a wallet. “You can plug the wire into this. It stays charged for up to three months.”
She reached behind his head. “May I?”
“Yes.”
She unplugged the wire from the wall and re-plugged it back into the box. For a moment he experienced a sense of enormous loss and displacement before reconnecting.
“There. Now you can move about the room.”
“Where’s my uniform? I need to attend to an urgent matter.”
“Dr. Pern is arriving shortly.”
Barliss would have snapped at her before, but now he remained calm, his voice even and controlled. “I understand your concern, but this is an order from high command. Bring me a change of clothes immediately.”
Looking like she’d just swallowed a large pill, the nurse hurried to a panel in the wall and pressed the touchscreen. The chrome dissolved above her head, revealing a shelf with his uniform and other belongings. She picked up his things and placed them on the foot of the bed. “Here you go, Lieutenant. Or should I say, Commander-in-Training?” She bowed and left him.
Barliss dressed in his uniform, careful not to detach the wire from the box. He didn’t want that awful feeling of displacement to come over him again. The computer mainframe instructed him to remain in the hospital and begin training with Dr. Pern, but Barliss overrode it and looked at the door. It dematerialized without Barliss needing to do something as mundane as pressing a panel. He walked into the corridor in search of his runaway bride.
…
Aries bent over a vent shaft, watching figures patrolling the fields in the bio-dome through a grating. Every time one white lab-coated figure walked farther away, another came closer. Her instinct told her to stay in the air shaft, but her stomach felt like it was eating itself.
Juicy tomatoes poked out from the greenery and she imagined herself sinking her teeth into one of them. Even Striker’s stories of recycled food sounded appetizing.
Another wave of nostalgia washed over her. Her stint on Sahara 354 had been dangerous and exhausting, but it was also the best time she’d ever had in her life. If she could have anything in the world, she’d live with Striker in that desert for the rest of their lives. It didn’t even matter now if the alien ship ever worked or if she got to see Paradise 21. Her paradise was with him.
Aries sniffed, wiping tears from her cheeks impatiently. Honestly, how was she ever going to find out if Striker was aboard if she kept sniveling like a lovesick teenager? She straightened up and watched as two of the lab-coated figures left the fields, leaving only three patrolling the corn crops.
Aries had already unscrewed the grating. She moved it aside in the air shaft, held her breath, and jumped. She landed in the compost heaps in the back, the same place where she’d hidden with Tria so many years ago. Ducking underneath discarded branches, she made her way to the tomato patch.
The smell of the fresh vegetables tantalized her tongue. Aries plucked a ripened tomato and bit into it, letting the juice run down the sides of her face. She’d never been so hungry. How long had she been navigating the air shafts? Two days? Three?
Five tomatoes later, her stomach lurched and she sat down on the soil. She should have thought out a more balanced diet and snuck around to the pear trees. That prickly feeling she got right before she vomited came over her. “Oh God, no. Not now.”
Aries held her head and counted her breaths. “One, two, three: breathe in. Four, five, six: breathe out.” She tried to think of calming images, but Barliss’ stern face kept coming back to her, making her want to vomit even more.
She held onto her stomach and thought of Striker. Aries pictured herself sleeping next to him under the shade of the tarp in the desert and the way his hair fell across his forehead. She’d wanted to reach out and kiss him, but he’d pulled away. Now she wished she had, despite his reluctance. The surge of nausea passed, leaving her with melancholy instead.
“Hey, you over there!”
What she hadn’t been doing, was watching out for vegetable pruners.
Aries scrambled up and darted toward the air shaft. She heard voices behind her.
“What did you see?”
“I saw a woman stealing tomatoes.”
“Over there. She’s running toward the compost heaps.”
Aries had no way to jump back to the air shaft. Blinded by the food, she hadn’t thought of escape. Her only hope was the cornfield. The golden stems reached high enough to cover her head. She zigzagged through the vegetable patches.
Two biologists ran at her, one from the left and one from the right. Aries leaped into the long husks and pushed through three rows before crouching down. She heard their steps crunching through the dry husks on the soil.
Crawling on all fours, she sneaked to the far end, where a giant greenhouse towered over the golden husks. Hearing their steps behind her in the cornfield, she dashed for the door to the greenhouse. Thankfully, they’d left it unlocked. From her escapades with Tria, she knew it had another door on the opposite side, leading to the upper decks.
She ducked underneath tables of Petri dishes, expecting the Lifers to come crashing through the door after her. A computer blinked on and off in sleep mode in the far corner, luring her over. Aries chanced a glance out the smoky windows of the greenhouse and saw no one coming.
The computer held the information Aries needed. Tria had taught her how to hack into information files in the mainframe. She could search for Striker in the prisoner cells or in Barliss’ confidential rescue reports. Peering again through the foggy glass, she saw the cornhusks shift as the biologists searched for her. She could spare one minute.
Aries touched the screen. The computer flashed on. Growth reports popped up, along with seasonal statistics and crop yields. Aries pulled up a different window and typed in Striker’s name, along with prisoner and confidential.
Please redefine the parameters of your search.
Damn. Aries stared at the screen in frustration. Did this mean the search crews didn’t find him? That he was still on Sahara 354? She tried again, typing in a secret clearance code Tria had taught her years ago. Again, nothing. Maybe the code was obsolete.
Suddenly the screen blinked of its own accord, turning green, then a fuzzy blue. She’d never seen a computer do anything like that. Perhaps the monitor was burning out.
A face emerged from the static: a long, straight nose, hard-edged cheeks, and a mold of bright hair. Barliss. If he wasn’t so dangerous and controlling he would have been handsome, galatically gorgeous. A hard knot tightened in her stomach. Was he their screensaver?
His eyes blinked and stared at her. Aries backed away from the screen.
“He’s not on this ship, Aries.”
That was definitely Barliss’ voice, but it sounded different, calmer, with less gruffness. His eyes had a strange, faraway look in them, almost glazed over as if he’d watched the main sight panel
for too long. His change in demeanor scared her more than the fact he stared at her through pixels.
“Barliss?”
“Yes.”
Aries looked over her shoulder, but besides the tiny sprouts poking through the soil beds, she was alone in the greenhouse.
“What are you doing on the computer screen?”
He smiled, his lips curling like two thick earthworms, a gesture he’d never done in her presence. “There is a lot I need to tell you. Please, stay where you are.”
Aries stared in shock, utterly stupefied. She felt her mouth drop open.
“I’ll be right there to get you.”
There was only one explanation for his consciousness streaming through the main computers. Barliss was connected to the ship like the commander. Her nightmarish vision of him sitting at the helm of the New Dawn came true.
“I’m not staying anywhere!”
She yanked the screen off the desk. It crashed to the floor, shattering with electrical sparks. The biologists shouted from the cornfield.
Aries bolted through the opposite door, running from at least three white-coated biologists. The image of Barliss’ pixilated face burned in her retinas. He was more powerful than ever, and she didn’t stand a chance.
Chapter Twenty-six
Second Repo
Striker programmed the lasers, adjusting each setting to stun. Innocent people shouldn’t have to die, even if they were crazed colonists on the New Dawn. The population of humanity dwindled, and killing each other would only lead to further decimation. All he wanted was Aries and a free getaway.
As Striker began recharging the energy cell of each laser, Loot appeared as a shadow in the doorway. The boy’s face was somber, his body tense, like a wound toy waiting to spring. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” Striker gestured with a tilt of his head, since his hands were busy. “You can help me prepare the weapons.”
Loot walked to the other side of the table and Striker handed him a rag. “Wipe off as much sand as possible. Pay special attention to the creases around the triggers.” Striker forced a smile. “We wouldn’t want it jamming on us at the wrong moment, now would we?”
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