Infinity Base

by Diana Peterfreund

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she replied. “Dani said anyone could hack into the old computer tech on Omega City, but she couldn’t figure out one measly hex code? And you said yourself that Dr. Underberg liked to make things easy for his friends to figure out here. What’s easier than a key every single resident of Omega City would be wearing on their clothes?”

  I looked at her in amazement. My best friend was a genius.

  “You knew this whole time? Then why didn’t you tell Dani?” I asked.

  “I only figured it out when we were hiding,” she said. “We were just sitting there, forever, so I started playing with the hexaflexagon again. And that stupid voice kept repeating ‘hex key, hex key, hex key . . .’” She folded the hexaflexagon and revealed the bumpy side. In the light, I could see the pattern on the surface clearly—an arrangement of bumps and grooves and squiggles that covered every facet. “See?”

  It did make sense to me. And it was just like Dr. Underberg, too. These rockets were for Omega City, and so he’d design it so that Omega City residents could use them. Maybe there were even directions on how, directions that had been burned up when I’d been forced to throw away all those instructional videos right before we escaped the last time we were here.

  “So where does it go?” asked Howard. He pointed at the control panel. “I don’t see any kind of hexagon-shaped lock anywhere here.”

  Savannah shrugged. “I don’t know.” She pointed at the pilot chairs. “Maybe there?”

  I looked at the chairs again. There were six of them, arranged in three rows of pairs. Each was firmly bolted to the floor of the chamber, and covered with an oversized piece of fabric and a five-point seat-belt harness. When I touched the fabric, I felt the unmistakable squish of silicone gel inside. The side of my chair had printed instructions for activating something called Shock Absorption Molding. The instructions were marked with the Shepherd crest.

  Shock absorption molding. I’d seen that before—in the pods Dani had used to transfer us out of the biostation! I thought back to meeting Dr. Underberg in his rocket, trying to remember what the pilot chairs had looked like on Knowledge. If these chairs were new, replaced by the Shepherds when they were refurbishing the rocket, then the hex key lock might be gone.

  Launch sequence paused. Deploy hex key to continue.

  I walked around the back of my chair, careful not to disturb the wires and tubes, but couldn’t see anything.

  A dead end. Again.

  Howard was currently searching every button and switch on the terminal. I started scanning the walls, the storage lockers, the screens and readouts. Even Savannah was looking around, kneeling on the floor and running her hands over the tiles in case there was something useful there. But another five minutes passed with no progress. Dr. Underberg kept repeating his order, over and over, and I began to despair. We were never going to find it. We were never going to get out of here.

  “You guys are idiots,” said Eric, poking his head through the top of the hatch. He pulled himself in, dropped lightly to the floor, and picked the hexaflexagon up where Savannah had left it at the terminal. “It’s a zipper pull on a jumpsuit. Where do you think the lock is? Not on the floor, I promise you that.”

  He came over to me and planted one hand on my shoulder.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” He tilted up the edge of my helmet and pressed the hexaflexagon onto a spot at the bottom of my chin. It clicked into place.

  Instantly, a pale green light rimmed my visor shield and I heard a small metallic hum, like I’d put on a headset.

  Hex key activated. Launch sequence in progress for Rocketship Wisdom.

  11

  INTO THE BLACK

  THIS TIME UNDERBERG’S VOICE SOUNDED LIKE IT WAS COMING FROM inside my head.

  “Eric!” I cried, and my voice echoed around in my head. “You did it! Thank you!”

  “Cool!” Howard started fiddling with his hexaflexagon zipper pull until it, too, popped open. “Savannah, show me how you get to the key side.”

  While Savannah did that, I grabbed another helmet and turned it over in my hands. Sure enough, there, on the underside of the chin bar, was a small, hexagonal indentation. It even had the words hex key written above it.

  Well, at least that explained why Dani hadn’t found it. She’d hacked the Shepherd system to keep them from disarming the fail-safe, but without being allowed into Omega City, she’d never seen these helmets firsthand.

  Liftoff minus ten minutes. Please secure all persons and items for final launch status positions.

  “I think that’s our cue, Eric,” said Savannah.

  “Yeah,” said Eric. He looked at Howard and me.

  Howard, having attached his helmet and hex key, was now making sure his suit was wired into the system like mine. I knew he’d done it right when his helmet, too, lit up with a green line of light around the outside of his visor shield.

  “Bye, guys!” Howard hopped into the front-most chair and started buckling himself in.

  “Yeah,” said Savannah. “Bye.”

  Both Eric and Savannah just stood there. I climbed into my chair and began attaching all the buckles. I was doing this. I was really going to go into space. I hoped I didn’t throw up inside my helmet.

  Liftoff minus nine minutes.

  Rocket systems check. Life support check. Navigational systems check. Silo surface release.

  All systems go.

  “The walkway is going to retract soon, guys,” Howard said. “You’d better get a move on.”

  “Yeah,” said Eric. “And the doors will seal. You know, trapping us inside.”

  “Then we wouldn’t have a choice,” Savannah said.

  “Right,” Eric agreed.

  I whipped my head around and peered at them through the visor. “Are you guys for real?”

  “No,” said Eric. “I think we might actually be crazy.” He pulled another helmet off the rack. “Because I can’t make myself get off this ship.”

  Savannah sighed with relief. “Me neither. Someone pass me a hex key. I gave mine to Howard.” She, too, grabbed a helmet.

  I practically squealed. “You’re coming! You’re really coming!”

  “Yeah,” said Savannah. “I guess I have to.”

  I quickly disconnected my hex key and helped Savannah get into her helmet and wired her to her pilot chair. Howard did the same for Eric. By the time Dr. Underberg announced the three-minute warning we were all back in our seats.

  Liftoff minus three minutes.

  Retracting walkway. Sealing inner and outer doors of Rocketship Wisdom.

  External rockets at 50 percent ignition status.

  A loud roar began, very far away, and the rocket began to vibrate.

  “Maybe we should inflate the shock absorption molding?” I suggested, reaching over to find the button on the side of my chair. My voice sounded tinny in my ears. When the others spoke, it was as if they were whispering from very near.

  “Yes, great idea, Gillian!” Howard must have pressed his button, as ahead of me, his chair started to puff out. “Oh, this feels weird . . .”

  I pressed the button. Just as in the transport pod, it immediately began to puff up around me and solidify, conforming to the shape of my legs, butt, back, and arms. Within a minute, I was half-encased in a giant molded seat that held me perfectly still. I couldn’t even turn my head. Distantly, I heard the roar of the rocket’s engines, and the rattling of the equipment, but the molding was shielding me like a cocoon.

  Liftoff minus one minute. Switching to internal power.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Savannah was whispering under her breath.

  “It’s okay, Sav. Think about Nate,” Eric said. Except I don’t think Savannah’s crush on Nate had survived throwing up on him the first time we were in Omega City.

  “Sure,” she replied, unenthused. “I’ll think about how if I die trying to rescue him, he really owes me one.”

  Thirty seconds.

&
nbsp; The roar became even louder. On-screen, the monitors showing scenes from inside the silo were replaced with a blinding white light. I didn’t know if it was because the doors to the silo had opened or the rockets had caught fire.

  I bit my lip. It was going to be okay. It was. Dad, we’re coming for you.

  Twelve.

  Eleven.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Seven.

  Six.

  “Oh, you know what I forgot to do?” Eric said over the sound of the countdown. “Go to the bathroom.”

  One.

  Liftoff.

  A sudden pressure glued me to my seat, like a giant invisible weight lay on me. But it wasn’t nearly as strong as I expected, cocooned in my suit and the shock-absorption padding. I was expecting to be flattened. Instead, I just felt heavy, as if my suit were made of lead and held me down. There was a roar so loud even the noise-canceling effects of the helmet couldn’t muffle it entirely. Ahead of me, the screens showed flashes of light and dark, rocket fire and night sky, but nothing that told me anything. We could be anywhere, or simply shaking and not lifting anywhere. I started feeling sick, then realized I was holding my breath. Breathe, Gillian. Breathe.

  Then Howard’s voice, calm and steady, broke through my fog.

  “One minute into flight and we’ve broken the sound barrier. We’re now moving faster than the speed of sound.”

  I tried to remember to breathe. I don’t know what I expected from spaceflight. Something more intense, maybe? This felt halfway between a roller coaster and a bumpy plane flight.

  “Now exiting the troposphere. Prepare for secondary booster rockets.”

  “How high are we?” Savannah asked Howard.

  “Ten miles up,” he replied. He sounded almost giddy.

  Ten miles. Up. And moving faster than the speed of sound. I breathed in. I breathed out.

  “Secondary rocket boosters will deploy in three, two . . . one.”

  A minor tremor, another jolt of acceleration. I fought against the pressure pinning me into my seat and clasped my hands in front of me. I thought about asking Howard how fast we were going now, but my mouth was dry and devoid of words.

  The screens above our heads flashed with data, but none of it meant anything to me. There were tons of readings—maybe Howard understood them.

  “Okay in there, Gills?” Eric said.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah. Mostly. We do know where we’re going, right?”

  I hoped so. I wondered what was happening to Mom and Dani right now. Surely the Shepherds knew the rocket had lifted off. Would we get them in even worse trouble?

  “We’re now moving at two thousand six hundred miles an hour and beginning to angle into place to increase to orbital velocity.”

  “What?” I blurted, my voice sounding shaky and strange in the headset.

  “We’ve been flying straight up,” Howard said. “Now that we’ve exited the thick part of the atmosphere, the rocket will start moving at an angle and accelerating.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if we don’t, we’ll crash back into the Earth.”

  I gripped my fingers tighter. What had we done?

  “Two minutes and thirty seconds into flight,” Howard said. He sounded so calm. I mean, he’d been planning for this his whole life, but still . . .

  “Thirty-nine miles up and traveling at three thousand two hundred miles an hour,” he reported now. “That would be fast enough to get us across the country in less than an hour.”

  Were we in space yet? How far up was space?

  Another minute passed, and then another, in which the only sounds were the persistent roar of the engines and the rattles and beeps of the machines around us. Howard regularly updated us with flight information. Fifty miles up and five hundred miles away from the launch space. Sixty miles up and moving at four thousand miles an hour.

  “Look how fast this fuel is burning,” Howard said in awe. “Five hundred pounds a second. Wow, it’s really hard to get people into space, isn’t it?”

  “How much do we have left?” I asked, worried.

  “Um, like a third of a tank?” He leaned forward. “Four hundred thousand pounds.”

  “Oh, is that all?” said Eric, but no one laughed.

  “How fast do we have to go?” Savannah asked.

  “Seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour,” Howard said matter-of-factly. “We’re only going six thousand right now.”

  I noticed that Eric didn’t say Oh, is that all again. Would we even have enough fuel to make it? Everything started shaking harder than ever.

  “Prepare to throttle down acceleration to preserve structural integrity.”

  I tried to lean forward but it was no use. “What? What did you just say about structural integrity?”

  Howard didn’t even hesitate. “At a certain point, we have to slow down the rate of our acceleration or we will break apart.”

  “Slow down? But I thought you said we needed to get to seventeen thousand miles an hour or we would crash!”

  “Not slow down,” said Savannah. “He’s talking about acceleration. We’ll just speed up a little less quickly than we’ve been speeding up so far.”

  That didn’t make sense to me at all. Suddenly, I was breathing very, very fast.

  “Gills? Gills?” Eric’s voice cut through my panic. “Guys, I think Gillian passed out.”

  “No,” I forced myself to say. “No, I’m okay.” I closed my mouth and counted to five, then breathed out. My visor clouded for a second, then cleared. No one was talking. The shaking had diminished. “I’m okay,” I repeated.

  Dad and Nate were lucky. They were unconscious through all this.

  “So when do we become weightless?” Eric asked. “Because I feel heavier than ever right now.”

  “We have to get into outer space, silly,” said Savannah. “We’re still in the Earth’s gravity.”

  “We’ll always be in the Earth’s gravity,” said Howard. “The moon is in the Earth’s gravity. People aren’t weightless in space because of gravity. They are weightless because being in orbit is like being in a state of constant free-fall.”

  “No!” cried Savannah. “Wait, really?” She was quiet for a moment, thinking about this. “So the Earth still has gravity all the way up here?”

  “Yes,” said Howard. “That’s what holds the moon in.”

  Leave it to Howard and Savannah to argue about physics while we were accelerating to ten thousand miles an hour. By the time they were done, my breathing was back to normal, and I’d gotten quite the lesson on how objects—like us, and Dr. Underberg, and Infinity Base—stayed in orbit. Apparently, once we were at the appropriate height and speed, the engines on the rocket would turn off, and we’d just . . . fall.

  Except that we were falling so fast, and from so far up, that as we fell, the Earth would keep moving underneath us and we’d keep . . . missing the ground.

  “Forever?” Eric asked in disbelief.

  “No. I mean, there’s some drag and friction and stuff. So occasionally we’ll have to boost our speed or correct our course. It’s kind of like how if you go to the top of a hill with your bike, you can coast all the way down, but eventually you’ll start slowing, so occasionally you’ll pump the pedals.”

  And it turned out that we weren’t weightless in space. What we were was falling, constantly. Like we were stuck at the very top of a jump on a trampoline. A really, really, really high trampoline.

  I’ll be honest, a large part of me wished I’d studied as hard as Howard on space stuff. But I was relieved to have him here. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a clue what we were doing.

  Ten minutes in, Howard announced that we’d achieved low Earth orbit, and the engines were shutting down. I couldn’t believe it had only been ten minutes. It felt like years since I’d strapped myself in.

  “Do you want to see it?” he asked.

  “Yes!” we all
cried.

  He clicked a button and the overhead screens changed from data to a singular image—a great expanse of hazy blue, stretching all the way across the screen. At the top, the blue faded into an unrelenting black, and at the bottom, into a textured white, pockmarked by darker shadows that might have been the edges of a continent.

  Again, I stopped breathing, and just stared. I think we all did. It was Earth, spread out below us. Massive, solid, blue and white. There was nothing around us. No identifiable shapes of the landmasses beneath us. Just one big ball and the unending blackness of space.

  We were alone.

  All I’d seen, all the wonders of Omega City and the horrors of Eureka Cove, paled in comparison to this. I was far from home, far from the reach of everyone I’d ever known or loved. I should have been terrified. But instead, I felt elated.

  The scene on-screen seemed so real, like I could reach out and touch it, just poke that big blue ball slowly turning before us. Nothing could touch us up here. The Shepherds were insects, their plans and places and fears microscopic. The Earth wasn’t going anywhere. Look at it! Humongous and bright, solid and whole.

  “We did it.” Howard broke the silence.

  “We did it!” echoed Eric.

  “We did it!” Savannah cried in agreement.

  I still couldn’t find words. My heart was full to bursting, staring at the vista of Earth and space. I don’t care what Howard said—this wasn’t falling. This was floating. Even strapped into my seat, I felt like I might drift away, like the walls of the rocket were nothing but paper and wishes, and might blow apart on a breath. But I’d remain.

  “Earth to Gills . . .”

  I heard him, but it took a moment for the words to sink in. “No,” I said, barely able to contain my laughter. “Not Earth. You’re nowhere near it.”

  Eric laughed, too. And then we were all laughing and cheering. We’d made it into outer space! Alone, strapped on the side of a rocket going, Howard announced proudly, fifty times the speed of sound.

  “Can we take off our helmets?” Eric asked Howard.

  “Let me check our cabin pressure.” Howard looked down at the monitors on the display in front of him. “Yes, it looks like we can.”