by Karen Bao
“Everyone shut up. Stripes, dodge those damn hills.”
“The instructors can hear you, mate,” Wes says through his teeth.
Jupiter shuts up.
According to my radar screen, the track will take us through a row of rugged mountains up ahead—the Montes Carpatus. We can’t fly over them or we’ll lose the path, so I’ll have to steer us through the narrow valleys between. If only Io would help instead of daydreaming.
“Stripes! Move! There’s a damn ship!” hollers Jupiter, jarring my ears.
He’s correct, much as I don’t like to admit it. Team Two is approaching us from behind, and they’re going 150 kilometers per hour—their pilot is willing to risk hitting something for a higher top speed. That something happens to be us.
I fire the starboard-side thruster. We jerk to the left, and Two pulls ahead, leaving us in a cloud of exhaust.
“Damn it, now we’re gonna hit a mountain!”
We’re about to collide with a peak. I clack my jaws together in irritation. Focus. My hand twists the steering rod right, but another precipice bars our way.
Wes clacks at his keypad; an instant later, the wingtip fires some of our more powerful ammunition—not the lasers but the missiles—straight at the peak.
“What in the . . .” Jupiter trails off as the missiles strike. Clouds of dust rise from the impact; our ship trembles. Debris pings against its exterior. I grip the controls tight, relying on instinct and luck until the windshield clears.
“Whoo, Kappa!” Triton cheers. “You sure we’re allowed to do that?”
“It’s better than breaking our skulls open,” Wes deadpans. “Anyhow—Phaet, good job, but concentrate.”
He’s treating this like another nighttime training session. Feeling some semblance of calm from hearing his voice, I steer us away from the area and back onto the track. Two more ships have passed us, but at least we didn’t crash.
If we had, though? We’d suffer severe burns before dying and languishing in nothingness forever, with no pressure to hold our cells together—like Dad.
The path takes us into the mouth of a cave—a lunar lava tube, formed by hardened lava and traversed by magma, but now open like an empty blood vessel. I fold the wings, hiding our artillery but decreasing our surface area.
Inside the lava tube, it’s dark except for the track markers and the taillights of Team Six’s ship ahead of us. The walls inch closer and closer, until the vein opens into a space taller than five Atriums stacked atop one another. Here, a mammoth bubble in the magma formed and cooled. Team Six and Team One are engaged in combat with a fleet of ugly prism ships.
Jupiter launches into a nuke-oriented series of curses. Everyone but me joins him.
19
“TEAM EIGHT, BECAUSE YOU ARE ENTERING the interior of the shield volcano, we are transmitting an important announcement,” Yinha’s canned voice says. “Battery Bay’s ships have been detected, but the evaluation will progress regardless. Points will be awarded to teams that destroy enemy spacecraft.”
A click and she’s gone.
How could the Batterers possibly get in here? Is this some sick practical joke from the instructors?
A gray block about our size swerves into our headlights before I can unfurl our ship’s wings. While we wait for the artillery to reemerge, I point the ship straight up and perform a corkscrew maneuver, dodging the Batterers’ fire. When the weaponry is ready, Triton incinerates an enemy ship, but the explosion also rocks our own vessel.
Jupiter sees more ships behind the remnants of the first and grunts in frustration. “The enemy is closing in on left, right, and front! Move the ship forward-right! And do it now!”
That wasn’t my idea. I check the radar. Nothing above us. Wearing my own version of Wes’s dim smile, I tilt the nose of the ship upward and put on an extra spurt of speed that jars everyone’s spines. Batterer fire streaks toward us from below. I jerk the controls again, but a small missile grazes the belly of the ship.
Pinpricks of light sparkle above us, clustered together in a small circle. Stars? Here? We’ve found the vent of the dead volcano. Even if flying through wouldn’t help us get away from the enemy, I’d still do it out of curiosity.
I fire more exhaust, and we speed toward the night sky.
“What are you doing?” hollers Jupiter. “Where’s the damn track?”
“She’ll find it again, don’t you worry,” Wes tells him.
Our ship is once again flying over the lunar surface. Far below, yellow dots line the path back to the distant crater that contains our home.
But there’s something in our way: a gargantuan Batterer ship languishes in the middle of the track. Three destroyers weave around it, all using full firepower. The cruiser is an old model made to house dozens of passengers, dating back to Battery Bay’s diplomatic fiasco.
Triton fires a series of shots. He manages to strike it once, yelling, “Whoo! Got it!”
Though I like Triton, I’m disgusted. He hit a passenger ship, the spaceflight equivalent of attacking a horde of civilians. I retract the wing weapons, to Jupiter’s irritation, and push the speed lever all the way forward. Our ship zooms over the civilian cruiser and finds the track again.
“You piece of grit!” Jupiter’s face is probably swelling like a tomato. “We get more points for blowing up enemy ships!”
“That was a civilian vessel,” Wes sputters, sounding lost.
“Are you sure?” asks Triton. “What if it’s a military ship that just looks like one?”
Io whimpers into her hands.
“Well, we get points for any enemy ship.” Jupiter fumes. “Turn us around!”
I ignore the order, although I’ll lose points for doing so. I’d condone incinerating military ships out of necessity, but never civilian ones. Within the privacy of my helmet, I mourn everyone who might’ve been on board that cruiser. My fingers on the levers urge our destroyer onward. Soon, we overtake Team One.
But as we approach Team Five, a missile zooms toward our ship. I tilt the nose downward just before the missile would hit us head-on; it scrapes us, and we lurch forward as our velocity is abruptly reduced. Glowing metal scraps bounce off the windshield.
“Team Five did that!” Triton shouts. “That’s definitely not allowed!”
“Callisto!” Jupiter’s bellow is hoarse with indignation—somehow, he’s sure that his girlfriend is the one who attacked us. “Extract the wing weapons, damn it!”
I keep the wings folded, preferring to lose points for insubordination rather than friendly fire. Since we’re on a plain, with no mountains to protect us, I brace myself and tap the joystick from left to right, egging our ship on to the finish line. Let them try to hit us now.
“You’re gonna make me barf,” Triton grumbles, his voice oscillating with the shark’s lopsided swimming.
As the green finish line draws ever closer, I push us past 160 kilometers per hour. Soon enough, we’re right behind Team Five, bathing in their exhaust. Every time I try to pass them, the ship swerves to block us. And when we reach the finish line, we’re still behind them.
Jupiter swears violently to show his fury at his girlfriend’s antics. But within a few seconds, his face returns to normal—he looks pleased—and I wonder if they made some intra-couple agreement beforehand.
The last part of the evaluation involves docking the ship. To take us out of full speed, I shut off propulsion and fire the reverse exhaust.
We trail the victors into the Defense training hangar. I release the wheels, used only for takeoff and landing, and we follow them back through the first gate and the air lock.
“Well,” crackles Yinha’s voice. “Nice job, Team Eight. You realize that you win, right?”
Triton’s cheering and Jupiter’s dumb yelling force her to stop talking for a few seconds.
“Team Five was disqualified for friendly fire. Congratulations. You’re guaranteed high scores, even with those nonregulation tricks.”
&n
bsp; Wes chuckles. She probably means his stunt with the missiles, and my flight away from the cruiser to protect innocent lives.
“You showed ingenuity in unpredictable situations. Like how you dealt with the unmanned old Batterer ships we stuck in that volcano for you.”
I puff out my cheeks and exhale, slowly releasing the air and the tension. The visor of my helmet clouds. The Batterer ships were fakes: no one got hurt.
“And Stripes, cool piloting. Haven’t seen a trainee do a roll like that for a long t— No! Watch out!”
A great impact from behind throws our ship nose first into the second gate. My seat belt catches me before my head knocks into the controls. I gasp for air, thankful all my bones are intact, and glance backward.
The first gate now sports a massive dent. As it creaks open, the third-place ship hobbles in, left wing hanging onto the belly by a hinge. The polymer exterior around the disconnected limb has melted and then solidified into a lumpy mess.
I gawk at the mangled destroyer, horrified that all the flat training statistics I’ve read have become reality. Who’s in that ship?
“Do not move!” Yinha’s voice booms from the sound systems within both our ship and the hangar. “I repeat—trainees, do not move! Do not enter or leave the air lock! This is an emergency. Instructors, registered Militia, and Medics will get the situation under control.”
Outside the half-open gate, three more ships prepare to land—how will the trainees within them react? Within the next few minutes, all fifty of us will have seen the collision or heard about it. Our superiors may be able to clear away the debris from the crash, but they’ll never contain the echo.
20
OVER THE NEXT HOUR, I PIECE TOGETHER what happened from stray slivers of sentences. Team One and Team Four were racing nose and nose toward the hangar, pursued by “Batterer” ships, when Team One’s pilot tried some complicated maneuver he’d “read about” and lost control of his craft. The ship slammed into the air lock gate. Four team members will spend the week in the Medical quarters.
The fifth, Vinasa Epsilon, was assigned to left wingtip. The impact threw her onto her weapons controls, breaking her ribs and stopping her heart.
Nash crushes me in a cinnamon-scented hug. I’m aching from my grief, but hers must be crippling. I’ve only known Vinasa for six weeks. I never explored the landscape of her mind, as I have Umbriel’s, and I didn’t learn everything that existed behind her biting pleasant humor, the golden backlit glow in her eyes, her appreciation for things long gone by. Compared to Vinasa’s lifelong companions, Nash and Eri, whose faces are distorted in misery, do I deserve to feel this devastation? Compared with them, I lost only the promise of a friend.
We read our new rankings, unable to keep from thinking, It could have been me. One mistake during that evaluation, and any of us could have been in Vinasa’s place.
I’m ranked second, one place behind Wes and one in front of Orion, and Nash has moved up to sixteenth; I feel no joy. Jupiter has risen to fourth, while Callisto dropped into the twenties; I feel no satisfaction.
The instructors should have expelled Callisto for her friendly fire stunt, just like they should have expelled Jupiter for stabbing Wes. I need to find out what’s going on—why both Callisto and Jupiter are still around.
I disappear behind the climbing wall, where, on the first day, I swapped my civilian clothes for Beetle black. How much has changed since then?
CALLISTO CHI, I type into my handscreen.
Unlike Jupiter, she doesn’t have any policy infractions listed. Her father, now deceased, worked in Financial. Her mother’s occupation, like that of Jupiter’s father, is “Not Applicable.” Neither the amount of money in her bank account nor her apartment number in the Chi complex is accessible. Frustrated, I close her profile.
She’s as sinister in the intra-base network as she is in the flesh.
At night, I run endless laps around the Medical quarters until my mind is numb and my system is full of endorphins. Running is cheap, a temporary barrier to unwanted feelings.
Afterward, I creep through the silent halls, knowing I have stayed out past curfew.
A tiny squeak reaches my ears; my heart thumps in my rib cage, deep and hollow. I crouch, listening hard. Human hissing ensues. In these echoing halls, I can’t tell where it’s coming from.
I fight down trepidation, which persists even after the hissing stops. Maybe there’s nothing.
“Hey, little Stripes.” A smiling Callisto steps out of a doorway. “Let’s talk.”
Dim light from the hall catches her curls, which puff out around her head like polyester pillow stuffing.
Jupiter swaggers over to her. He tosses an arm around her shoulders, and she leans inward, her face a mask of romantic satisfaction.
“I’m so, so sorry about Vinasa. You were friends with her, yeah?”
I look at Callisto without even a nod; I don’t want to discuss this topic, and judging by Callisto’s saccharine tone, she doesn’t care.
“Well, it’s really sad, what happened. But it’s a sign that we trainees need to work together better—you and Jupe have sure had a few misunderstandings, hmm?”
Jupiter nods. I don’t. I rest my left hand on my right shoulder, adopting a posture that ensures my handscreen will pick up everything she says.
Callisto simpers, licking her lips. “What I really mean is, let’s forget all that and talk about Kappa. Jupe heard him muttering in his sleep—something about keeping you in line—oh? You think he’s playing fair? He wouldn’t let you get what he’s wanted forever, now, would he?”
Alarmed, I listen harder.
“Sweetie, you’re fifteen. Too young to tell a backstabber when you see one. We went to Primary with Kappa. There’s a reason he never had any friends. How’s this: we protect you from anything he tries to pull.”
It sounds too abrupt to be true, especially after a 180-degree turnaround on Jupiter’s part. I cross my arms and make my most affected, superior face at them, though objectively it’s neither affected nor superior.
“As payment, you help us place first and second. You can be third—it’s higher than anyone expects of a little kid, anyway.”
For grits’ sake, they think I’m a child who can’t recognize blatant ambition when she sees it. “No thanks.”
Callisto disentangles herself from Jupiter, removing his limbs from her body while gazing intently into my eyes. “Oh?”
I shake my head to restate my point.
“Aw, she’s rank-hungry too. What a pity.”
She’s right. I want to prove that Jupiter’s initial wariness of me was warranted. “Pity,” I agree.
“Well . . .” Callisto looks to Jupiter for a nod of approval. She gets it. “Why don’t we tell Yinha and Arcturus what’s going on with your mom? We’ll throw in the rest of the trainees for good measure, hmm? Actually, we could say it right now, with everyone’s handscreen uncovered—”
“No!”
How in the universe do they know about Mom? I dare not ask.
Jupiter and Callisto want to place high at any cost. If I teamed up with them, I’d be easier to sabotage; they could ensure that I placed much, much lower than third.
“I still say no,” I tell them.
“What a pity,” Callisto repeats. She nods to Jupiter. In the darkness, I see a flash of silver.
An instant later, something chilly runs down my thigh, and Jupiter holds a bloodied knife half as long as his arm.
I thought bleeding was supposed to feel warm, at least as warm as the stinky arm around my neck and the anger festering in my stomach. I consider screaming for someone, anyone, but I can’t even inhale. In less than two minutes asphyxiation will knock me out, and the stars only know what these two will do to me before someone picks up my handscreen readings and comes to help.
“So quiet,” Callisto muses, pacing. “Not fit to be a leader in the Militia. Don’t you have friends to run to? Ah, of course not. You think you’re
too good to even talk to people here.”
Jupiter puts a hand over my mouth, just in case. I try to kick and squirm. He needn’t worry. He’s twice my mass and, unlike me, has access to oxygen.
“Oh, right.” Callisto pats my cheek, sneering. “You can’t run.”
The chill invades my other leg; I sway back and forth. Their shapes grow blurry, lose their definite edges. I could give up. I could slip under, let the pain stop, and never know what they’ll do to me next.
Stop it! Wes’s voice in my head says, the way he sounds when I’ve made a dumb sparring maneuver. Thinking of him reminds me that I’m cleverer than this. I clamp my canines onto Jupiter’s hand, which snaps back. His curses echo around us as I elbow myself free. Blurriness recedes from my eyes and brain as I gulp for air, trying to find a way to defend myself against their long knives.
I have short knives; they will have to do.
I crumple to a sitting position on the floor and make stupid sobbing noises into my knees, screaming intermittently with all the breath in my lungs. To assess the damage, I brush my hands along my legs and find a sticky gash, deep into the muscle, trailing up each thigh. I’d better end this quickly. My fingers find their way into my boot and pull out one of my daggers, fiddling with it until I hold the hilt in my fist and slip the blade into my sleeve.
“Get up.” Callisto yanks me up by my hair, and Jupiter reestablishes his death grip around my neck.
If I survive this, I’d like to slap her, something I’ve never done to anyone in my whole life.
But first I need to escape this choke hold—again.
Jupiter is about thirty centimeters taller than me, but he’s slouching, so I should aim approximately twelve centimeters above my head. My right hand reaches up behind me and smacks the hilt of the dagger into the joint where his jaw connects with his cheek. His mandible slides leftward with a crack. He collapses without even a whimper.
If Wes were here, he’d be pleased with my use of his sneaky trick for knocking people out. Moving the mandible triggers the cranial nerve and causes immediate unconsciousness.
