Mike Stellar

by K. A. Holt

  “What do you want to do, then?”

  “Besides not get in trouble for hacking some internal system? Oh, I don’t know….” I gave Larc an exasperated look. “Play handball?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Go study by yourself, then.”

  “How are you not worried about this?” I asked incredulously. “We just saw our parents and a bunch of other people on some secret internal surveillance system. And they might have even seen us. This doesn’t bother you because …?”

  “Because nothing, Mike. If they were doing some kind of secret thing, they won’t come after us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, dope, if they come after us, they have to admit that they were doing something that obviously isn’t protocol.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hmmm. That’s a very good point.”

  Larc showed off her blue braces with a big smile. “So are we going to study or what?”

  I wandered around the apartment, looking at odds and ends on the shelves lining the walls. There were old-fashioned poetry books and glowing knickknacks everywhere. I drank a sip of my water. After a bit of awkward silence, I said, “Has your dad been acting weird lately?”

  Larc cocked her head to the side and said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean weird. Has he been acting secretive or whispery or anything? Does he raise his eyebrows a lot? Is he reading books?”

  Larc raised her eyebrows and smiled in a joking way. Then she said seriously, “I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any books around. And he’s no weirder than usual. He always has classified projects he’s working on for the Project. He doesn’t talk about those. But I don’t know if you’d call that being secretive. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t know why I was opening up to this girl, but when I started talking, it was like white-water rapids. I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d wanted to. By the time I finished, I’d told her practically everything. From Mom and Dad’s acting so preoccupied, to Mr. Shugabert’s creepy smile and knack for being everywhere, to Nita’s strange request about Hubble … I just blurted it all out. And the whole time I talked, Larc sat on the sofa, looking thoughtful and never interrupting. Sometimes she played with her hair. Other times she wrinkled her lips over her teeth like she was trying to make sure her braces were still there. But she always kept her eyes on me and acted like she was taking everything in.

  When I finished, I collapsed next to her on the sofa, dropping my empty water pouch on the floor. She got up and walked out of the room. A few minutes later she came back with a fresh water pouch and a candy bar. She handed them to me without saying anything.

  “That was some story,” she said finally. “I’d like to meet your friend Stinky. He seems like a nice boy.”

  “He is,” I agreed. “He’s a really cool guy.”

  “I’d like to meet his brother, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hubble was a great guy, too.”

  “Your sister sure seemed to think so.”

  I gave a halfhearted gag. “Nita probably thought they were going to get married one day.”

  “Maybe they would have.”

  I thought about that. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard for me to remember how Nita used to be. When Hubble went on the Spirit mission, and then disappeared … she got so mean and mad all the time. And I just pretended like Hubble never existed. I was afraid if I talked about Hubble, Stinky wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. Anyway …” I trailed off.

  Larc patted my shoulder. “It must have been a real smack in the head to have everyone turn against you—even your sister.”

  “Smack in the face, you mean?” I started chewing my fingernails. “Yeah, it was. I mean, it’s not like I had a million friends to start with, but yeah, I guess. Nita and I used to be friends. I just got lucky that Stinky didn’t start hating me.”

  “Why would he have?” Larc asked softly.

  “I … I should probably get going,” I said abruptly, moving away from Larc. “It’s getting late. I have to find out if I can get the com-bracelet hack to work, and if Mom and Dad have heard anything from Nita.”

  “Right,” Larc said, putting her hands in her pockets. “Keep me updated.”

  I turned around to make my way out the door and spotted a framed certificate on the wall.

  Excellence in Teaching

  I made a face. Excellence in teaching, my butt. I reached up to wipe some dust off the glass so I could see the date on the certificate, and—whoosh—the door flew open.

  Mrs. Halebopp stood there, with her black eyes wide as ever. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look startled. I immediately yanked my hand off the framed certificate. It was one of those instinctual yanks that you do when you’re caught, and I totally pulled the frame off the wall by accident. It crashed to the floor and the glass shattered.

  Mrs. Halebopp’s startled look quickly turned into a scowl.

  “S-sorry,” I stammered. “I can clean it up.” I knelt down and fumbled with some of the large pieces of glass.

  “Leave it,” she said in a hushed tone that meant she was already planning the recipe for boiling my hide.

  “What’s happening here, Larc?” she asked crisply, setting the book she was carrying onto a shelf and marching over to where Larc was standing. Mrs. H stood there, arms crossed, shooting fire from her eyes, and Larc, bless her amazing soul, launched into this long story about coming here to study because it was neutral territory, blah blah.

  I was still kneeling by the broken glass when I saw a piece of paper that had slipped out from under the certificate. I couldn’t see all of it, just the top part. It looked like a poem or something. I have no idea why I did it, but I snatched the piece of paper and shoved it deep into my pocket. I stood up. Larc and Mrs. H were still having a somewhat heated conversation about “boundaries” and “responsibilities” when I bolted out the door. Fight-or-flight had kicked in late. Thankfully, flight won.

  After running at top speed for a few minutes, I stopped to catch my breath. The regulated seventy-two-degree temperature in the ship was suddenly feeling very hot. I didn’t think Mrs. H was going to chase me, but I had run just to be sure. Now I was huffing and puffing, my mind struggling to make sense of what had happened. Why had I just opened up like that to Larc? I guess because she was nice. Crazy. But nice. And she seemed to like me, or at least like talking to me. And it had been so long since I’d had a friend other than Stinky.

  I wiped my face and reached into my pocket.

  “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by e. e. cummings.

  Weird.

  It had been almost a week since we’d found out about Nita. There was still no word from her. My secret attempt to hack Nita’s com-bracelet was moving at a teeth-gnashingly slow pace. After the first success of hacking into Larc’s monitor, I’d had no luck with anything. I was down to three hours of sleep a night, trying to get the stupid thing to work.

  Understandably, Mom and Dad were even more preoccupied than usual. They spent almost all their free time locked in their bedroom. I tried listening through the door several times, but I could never hear anything.

  They hardly noticed my sunken zombie eyes and I pretended not to care that they ignored me most of the time. None of us had mentioned anything about the whole “whoops, look who’s on the computer monitor” thing, so it looked like that little catastrophe was going to pass under the radar. Whew.

  I was now on my way to “rendezvous” with Stinky. My parents didn’t know I was gone, and I had about twenty minutes until they woke up. Before calling Stink, though, I had something important to do. I’d tried to hack into the navigation system so that I could find out where the ship was going, but the code was taking me forever to penetrate. I’d tried asking Mom, but she just kept vaguely assuring me that everything was okay. She wouldn’t say what the deal was with the plasma propulsion and I knew there was no way we could make it to Mars without a full charge. So if we weren’t going to Ma
rs, then where were we going? With Mom’s suspicious answers I figured it’d just be faster to bust into the flight deck, take a quick look around, and figure it all out for myself. I had done some research (well, hacking) into the mainframe of the Sojourner and found the captain’s personal and professional schedule. He was supposed to be in the gym having a morning workout. That meant the autopilot systems were running the ship and I could slip onto the flight deck without being spotted.

  I walked quickly to the flight deck door at the front of the ship. Glancing around, I didn’t see anyone, which was a miracle. I took a deep breath and stared at the keypad next to the locked door. It had one row of letters, one row of numbers, and one row of symbols. Dang.

  I knew there was going to be a keypad, but I thought it was going to be a regular one, not a fancy-shmancy one. Dang. Dang. Double dang. My plan had been to try Mom’s code for the house back on Earth.

  Dang.

  I looked over my shoulder again; then I held my breath and tried Mom’s code anyway, just ignoring the letters and symbols. I was rewarded with the loudest buzz I’d ever heard. I winced and ducked, looking around for anyone who might have heard the deafening noise.

  One more try, I thought, and then I’m going to have to just take the time to hack the navigation system. I steeled myself and steadied my finger.

  I tried a trick Hubble had taught me. Most security systems have a backdoor code for emergency personnel and repairmen and people like that. The backdoor code for the keypad at home was every single key on the keypad, in order, one after the other. I gave it a whirl.

  Bzzzzzzzzzzz.

  I should have known that wouldn’t work…. Too simple. I looked at my watch. Five minutes until I was supposed to contact Stinky. I was just going to give up, but I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye.

  Sugar Bear.

  He was coming down the stairs from the observation deck and he was headed straight for me. It didn’t look like he could see me—there was a tree kind of obscuring me—but he was heading down the stairs at a pants-on-fire pace. Had he heard the buzzes?

  Wait! I suddenly remembered the keypad on our drivedropper at home. We hardly ever used it because Mom and Dad had remotes on their key chains, but it had the letters/numbers/symbols interface. I wasn’t sure if I had it right or not, but I held my breath and tried the drivedropper code anyway. To my surprise, the keypad turned green. Mom’s really got to work on her security protocols, I thought, laughing. The door whooshed open and I darted inside, just missing Shugabert.

  Once on the flight deck, I took a minute to catch my breath. It would so suck if I had a heart attack.

  “Mom?” I said, knowing she wasn’t there. “Mom, are you here?” I figured it was a good cover if someone was here. I was just looking for my mom, right?

  I glanced around the room. In a corner was the air lock capsule they used for spacewalking. The suits hung in the capsule, their huge helmets hanging limply, like decapitated ghosts. I shivered and walked over to a strange desk at the front of the room. It was placed in a clear alcove so that it looked like it was just floating in space. As I checked out all the computers and various equipment it held, one screen caught my attention. It had a red dot blipping along a curved line, kind of like a really old-fashioned radar screen. Under the blip, a list of coordinates streamed. From what I could tell, they were charting a path. Each coordinate had a corresponding date and time and—suddenly there was a loud …

  Whoooooooossssshhhhhh …

  I jumped about eighty-five feet into the air. Through the huge window, I saw feet gliding to a stop right above the now open outer door of the air lock capsule.

  There was someone outside, and he was coming in!

  I should have run right then, but I couldn’t move. My breath was coming in short bursts and the room spun around me. I grabbed the table for support and watched as the feet floated into the air lock capsule.

  Aliens! my brain screamed. The ship is being taken over.

  Then there was another loud whooooooosh and the floating figure in the capsule landed with a thunk on the floor. He had closed the hatch and flipped on the AutoGrav.

  I watched in horror as he—the alien—whoever—removed his helmet.

  Huh? It was the captain. And as soon as I recognized him, he saw me staring. I thought about running, but it was definitely too late for that.

  “Son?” he said as the thick, clear plastic air lock door opened. “Michael Stellar? Is that you?”

  Feeling all blood, sensation, and muscle control drain from my face, I tried to smile. “Oh, hi, Captain,” I said in a strangled voice.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, his face clouding over. “This is a restricted area.”

  “I’m, uh, just looking for my mom,” I answered, feeling proud that I remembered my cover story as I tried desperately to control my rising panic.

  “She isn’t at home getting ready for work?” he asked skeptically. I could see that he was looking me over, checking out my hands and the pockets of my jumpsuit.

  “Uh. Maybe she is, actually,” I said lamely. “I just, uh, didn’t see her at breakfast, and, uh, Dad was in the shower, so I couldn’t ask him, and so, uh, I thought I’d come looking for her.” I was such a bad liar. I could feel my face burning.

  “You best get home now, son. Your mom isn’t due here for another hour. If she’s not at your apartment, and your dad doesn’t know where she is … well … come back and I’ll call up a rescue party.” He looked pretty stern still, but there was a small twinkle in his eye.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, practically running for the door.

  “Oh, and, Mike?”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s not mention this to anyone, okay? Some people frown on the captain of the ship flying around outside the ship.”

  I nodded and hightailed it out the door.

  Right on cue my peapod buzzed. Stinky was going to love this.

  I scooted into the men’s room, climbed onto the toilet in the last stall, and took my usual position sitting on the tank.

  Stinky kept saying, “Mike? Are you there?”

  “Right here,” I said quietly “I was out in the hall, sorry.”

  “You sound … weird. Are you okay?”

  “Man, Stinky, I just busted into the flight deck and—”

  “You did what?”

  “I busted into the flight deck. It was the only way to find out where the ship is going without waiting a billion years to hack into the system.”

  “Why couldn’t you just ask your mom?” Stinky asked.

  “Duh, knucklebutt, all ship movement is classified.”

  “Hey, don’t call me knucklebutt, snotmunch.”

  “Sorry. It’s been a very stressful morning.”

  “So what’d you find out?”

  “The ship is definitely moving, and it’s definitely still moving in the direction of the Fold. We’re supposed to be there in three days.”

  “Whoa, that’s fast!”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense. Without time to power the plasma propulsion—”

  “You’ll never get—”

  “To the other side of the Fold. I know.”

  We were both silent for a minute. And then Stinky started talking about not finding much in Mrs. H’s old hard drives.

  He laughed ruefully. “I don’t know why I ever listen to you. ‘You can get a detention so you can snoop in Mrs. H’s things and blahdy blah blah,’” he said, imitating me in this annoying high-pitched voice. “Who knew throwing a flashnobang onstage during an assembly would cause so much trouble?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, come on. I never told you to go crazy and momentarily blind the entire student population! I just meant toss one in homeroom and get an afternoon of detention or something. Not days and days and days.”

  “You suck.” Stinky pouted for a moment. “Did you find anything else out while you were lurking around the ship? Mrs. H’s
true identity as a child-eating zombie?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was in her apartment for a little bit last week.”

  I could tell that Stinky was stunned. “You broke into her apartment? Dude, I am impressed!”

  “I didn’t break in,” I said, feeling my chest puff out with pride anyway. “But I did find something cool.”

  “What?”

  “An old poem or something, written on actual paper. It fell out of a framed thing I accidentally broke.”

  “What’s cool about that?”

  “Don’t know. But it was weird. Why would there be a poem hidden behind some dumb certificate in a frame?”

  “Did you get caught?”

  “I’m hurt, Stinky. Why would you automatically think I would get caught?”

  “Because I know you, Mike. You think you’re a good snoop, but you’re not. So did you?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  Stinky let out a howl. “I guess you’ve been in detention for a week, too?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s the really weird part. When she opened the door and saw me standing there, I just bolted. And she hasn’t said anything to me about it. Larc must have said something to her.”

  “Larc?”

  “Yeah. She was with me.”

  “You were in Mrs. H’s apartment … alone with a girl? Dude, I am even more impressed!”

  I felt myself blush. “It was nothing like that. We were running away from someone and she had a key to Mrs. H’s apartment.”

  “Who were you running away from?” Stinky asked excitedly. “Man, you move to outer space for a week and suddenly you’ve turned into Space Agent Stellar!”

  My blush deepened. “It’s a long story, and I kinda have to go now, Stink. I really, really, really need to get home before my parents wake up.”

  “Okay—but you owe me a story.”

  “Hey, Stink?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Once I’m out near the Fold, these peapods are just going to be shiny little balls of metal.”

  “I know, man.” Stinky paused. “Hey Have you heard anything about Neeters?”