by Dan Krokos
Tom was pretending not to listen. The shuttle’s engines slowly spooled up, at first a low and throaty buuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrr rising to a high-pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
“Like it wants to be with the other glove,” she said.
Mason considered his right hand, and the glove he now held in his left. The one on the left had expanded now that it was off Merrin’s hand, but he knew it would shrink again when he put it on, and stop at his shoulder, the perfect fit. The material seemed like some kind of grippy rubber, but thin enough that he could still make precise movements with his fingers.
“You’re sure?” Mason said. It felt greedy to wear both gloves, but Tom didn’t ask for it, and if Mason was honest, he wanted them both. He wanted the full power of the Rhadgast.
Merrin patted him on the shoulder. “Yep.” Then she disappeared into the aft compartment, and Mason heard her strap herself to the bench.
Jeremy’s voice broke through on the shuttle’s com: “We are now parked in Nori-Bluespace.”
“Thanks, Jer,” Tom replied, entering their current location on the computer. It would calculate the precise path to enter the planet’s atmosphere, the path that would provide the least atmospheric resistance. Coming in too hot would turn them into a collection of cinders like that.
“You ready for this?” Mason asked Tom.
“Of course not,” Tom said. He pulled up the navigation page from the copilot seat.
Mason removed the armor plates from his left hand and arm, then tugged on the other Rhadgast glove. A moment later, it shrank to a second skin, sealing at the shoulder. He was bone-tired throughout his body, but his hands and forearms felt … strong. Wearing both gloves felt right in a way he couldn’t explain. He looked at his palms, wiggled his fingers, felt the electricity dwelling within. It was waiting for his call. “Me neither,” he replied quietly.
“But let’s do it anyway. Pad clear,” Tom said.
“Ready,” Mason said.
“Ready,” Stellan and Merrin echoed from the rear.
Mason punched the big red button on the ceiling, and the floor broke open in an instant—one second there was solid starship-grade flex-metal under them, the next the inky black of space, with the big green sphere that was Nori-Blue right in front of them.
The atmosphere rushed out of the room, taking the shuttle with it, and the four cadets dropped toward the planet, toward humanity’s last hope.
Chapter Thirty-five
The gravity compensators reduced the stress on their bodies, but Mason definitely felt how fast they were moving. As soon as they were clear of the Egypt, Mason pushed the throttle near his left wrist to max. In a matter of seconds, they were traveling at two percent of the speed of light. The Dragon’s twin engines were screaming, yet the vibrations were minimal. The big green planet grew larger, and larger still. There were barely any clouds, just an expanse of endless green.
And then they were in the atmosphere. The windows were suddenly opaque—red and orange with flames. Mason eased the throttle back and the air conditioners kicked on with fierce buzzing sounds. Cold air blasted him in the face, but he was roasting from the chest down.
He pulled back on the control stick to level out, maybe glide forward for a few thousand klicks, but the stick suddenly yanked out of his hand. He grabbed it again, heart in his throat, but couldn’t pull it back. The shuttle dropped into a steep dive, and then the fire was gone, and Mason could see trees. A forest spread out in all directions for as far as he could see.
“Pull up!” Tom shouted.
“I’m trying!” He heaved on the stick with all his might, but the ship continued its dive. “Elizabeth, control this thing!”
No reply. The ship leveled out suddenly, pressing Mason into his seat, and then banked hard to the right, pulling with enough force that if the compensators hadn’t been on, they would’ve been crushed to death in their seats.
“Elizabeth!” Mason shouted again.
The shuttle finished its turn until it was heading the complete opposite way, for the southern hemisphere—what had been named, unoriginally, the Southern Forest. It was a place the ESC had not even begun to map out. The Wildlands, some soldiers called it. The throttle pushed forward on its own, until they were screaming over the trees at fourteen times the speed of sound.
“What are you doing?” Merrin called from the back, followed by, “Stellan just threw up.”
Mason glanced over his shoulder: Merrin was wide-eyed, and behind her, through the strip of transparent hardglass, the forest was flayed open from their passing, like the wake from a boat.
“I’m not doing anything,” Mason replied, as calmly as he could. For a second, he considered shocking the shuttle’s controls with his gloves, but decided that was the worst idea ever. A power failure would send them tumbling into the trees at just, oh, somewhere around sixteen thousand miles per hour.
Five seconds later the engines began to wind down, and the speed readout plummeted. The trees became less of a green blur and more distinct. Two seconds later, they were cruising at a comfortable 200 miles per hour. It was clear the shuttle wasn’t just malfunctioning, but being controlled by someone remotely.
Tom saw the building first. “Look!”
In the distance still ahead, a tall narrow building was visible. At first Mason thought it might’ve been an ESC installation, but no—ESC bases were low-slung and blended in with the environment, to better hide visually from Tremist scouts. Plus they were already way too far south.
Then suddenly they were hovering next to it, and Mason could see it clearly:
It was some kind of ancient skyscraper. It had broken halfway up, and pieces of it were strewn around a clearing in the forest. Like a giant had punched the building and broken the top half all to bits. Still not responding to Mason’s input, the shuttle dropped a few hundred feet to the clearing, between two large crumbling sections of the building. The skyscraper wasn’t gigantic, not by Earth standards. If you added up the pieces, it looked more like something from the twenty-first or twenty-second century of Earth, before the new cities were built atop the old. The building was constructed from some kind of silvery metal that looked totally out of place in the lush forest. The metal surface was cut into a brick pattern that caught light from the blue sun. Lightly, the shuttle touched down on the grass.
The com readout on the dashboard flickered with an incoming transmission from an ESC base to the north, but Mason couldn’t answer it. The system wouldn’t respond. With a hot sigh, the shuttle powered down, leaving them with the sound of ticking metal. The trees were enormous from ground level, challenging the skyscraper for height and blocking much of the light. It felt like dusk down there.
“What just happened?” Tom asked flatly.
“No idea,” Mason said.
Tom tried to pull up a map of the area, but right then the ship powered down completely, leaving them in near darkness save for some red backup lights embedded in the floor and ceiling.
Mason hit the ignition, but the shuttle was dead.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Merrin said.
“Uh, seconded,” Stellan added.
“I guess it’s time to get out,” Mason said. They didn’t have a real plan yet. He needed to trick the king into giving his sister back, while keeping Merrin … that was all he knew. Maybe bringing Merrin had been a bad idea; if they failed, she was captured. But if they failed without her on Nori-Blue’s surface, she still had a chance. Too late now, Mason thought.
Mason felt lighter as he walked to the shuttle’s exit ramp, a side effect of Nori-Blue having less mass, and thus less gravity than Earth. He lowered the ramp, and air thick with the smell of jungle rolled in. It was sweet and heavy and humid, a little tangy, and coated the back of his throat. He stepped down the ramp and came out next to one of the fallen pieces of skyscraper. The metal looked ancient, clumped with dirt and worn by time. A lot of time.
It went against everything Mason knew: Nori-Bl
ue wasn’t supposed to have a sentient species, but the skyscraper didn’t build itself, and he highly doubted it was the ESC—or the Tremist, for that matter, unless they’d been aware of Nori-Blue’s presence for that much longer.
Nori-Blue’s equivalent of birds and insects made strange sounds in the trees around them, a kind of layered warble from which he couldn’t distinguish any one sound. It put his teeth on edge. He remembered a lesson from his class Wildlife of the ESC Colonies. He and his fellow fourth years had seen video of chittering bat-like creatures hopping from branch to branch, roosting in trees that could swing their branches down at the ground reflexively, to knock aside furry two-legged creatures that liked to gnaw on the tender roots. He remembered a bird that was not a bird at all—it was the size of a fat dragonfly, but looked like a miniature house cat with tiny sets of wings all down its back. The alien animals all looked so cute on the video, until he learned that most of them could kill him.
Now that he was here, Mason was suddenly not a huge fan; Nori-Blue made his skin crawl. He definitely preferred the deck of a ship under his feet.
But they had a job to do.
“Let’s assemble the Lock and get out of here,” Mason said.
The four went back inside, grabbed their packs, and exited again. They jogged for the woods, keeping the skyscraper on their right side. In the gloom, it appeared gold in color, not silver. Under the built-up crud, it might have even been majestic. Mason stopped just within the tree line, where the growth above them was so thick it let in almost no light. The trees swayed above him, but Mason didn’t know if it was the wind, or if these were the kinds of trees that could move.
Focus. The king’s Hawk would be there soon, if it wasn’t already, and Mason wanted to make sure his team wasn’t anywhere near the Lock by then. He just had to hope the shuttle would power back up.
Mason cleared some dead roots and minor vegetation aside with his feet, and the four of them placed their cylinders down in the dirt, positioning them the same way they had been on the Egypt.
“Yours is too close to Mason’s,” Stellan told Tom after a moment.
Tom made a minor adjustment.
“Too far now,” Stellan said.
“I’m trying—”
SNAP-hiss. The cylinders lit up like they had before, emitting a gentle hum. The Lock was activated.
“That was easy,” Merrin said.
“Hey brainiac,” Tom said to Stellan. “What’s your theory on that tower back there?”
“A long-dead alien race,” Stellan replied without hesitation. “There is no other explanation, unless we’ve traveled through time, which is impossible. So there is no other explanation.”
Theories weren’t going to keep them safe right now. The skyscraper was a distraction, but Mason couldn’t ignore that the shuttle brought them here on its own. Was that even possible? Had Elizabeth predetermined this spot and then not told them?
Mason tapped the skin below his ear to open a channel to the Egypt. “Hey Jeremy, what’s it look like up there?”
“Like space. Black mostly.”
“Keep me posted,” Mason replied. “Is Elizabeth okay?”
“… Uh, yeah? What do you mean?”
“Can you put her on?”
There was a pause, followed by, “She’s not responding. But she’s still online, and operating.”
That made the hair on Mason’s arms stand up against his gloves. But he had to ignore Elizabeth’s status, at least until they were offplanet. The Hawk wasn’t there yet, so they still had some time. And his curiosity was getting the better of him.
“Start the shuttle,” he told Tom.
“Please,” Tom prompted.
“Start the shuttle, please,” Mason said, even though he was technically Tom’s superior. For right now, anyway.
“Whoa, where do you think you’re going?” Tom said.
Mason was walking toward the building. From this angle, he could see the doorway in the bottom floor. The skyscraper was huge, but the door was small, and not even a door, just a vertical rectangular opening framing the darkness within.
“I have to know why we were brought here,” Mason said.
“On second thought, Stellan can do the shuttle,” Tom said. “I’m coming with you.”
“I can totally start the shuttle!” Stellan said, hurrying for the ramp.
Mason looked at Merrin, who raised her violet eyebrows. “Let’s check it out.”
If the inside was structurally stable, maybe they could use it against the king: lure the Tremist inside, and then grab Susan in the darkness or something. They would need an advantage no matter what. If the trade happened on open ground, Mason had a feeling they’d all be taking a ride in the king’s Hawk.
The three of them approached the tower, falling into a wedge pattern with Mason in the front, slightly spread out so they didn’t make one big target. Mason kept his hands ready; he could feel a charge crawling across his palms, tickling him. The warble of life around them began to fade the closer they got, as if the tower was muting it somehow. It became very quiet within ten steps, then absolutely silent five more later. As if they’d passed through some kind of shield that kept the noise out.
Mason turned around; everything behind them looked okay. Stellan waved at them from the cockpit of the shuttle. Merrin waved back.
“Creepy,” Tom said.
The entrance was right in front of them now, shadows within. Mason swallowed and reminded himself he’d gotten this far. Then he stepped inside the tower, and his friends followed.
He was not prepared for what he would find inside.
Chapter Thirty-six
Columns rose up around them, disappearing into darkness above. Everything was filthy and crusted with time. Yet the air smelled fresh, not ancient. As far as Mason could tell, the entire tower was one incredibly tall room.
“There,” Tom whispered. “Just ahead.”
Tom pointed to a single pillar in the very middle of the room. It was just a few feet taller than Mason. Resting atop it was a pure black sphere, like someone had dipped a basketball in the blackest paint imaginable.
“Come closer,” a voice said, filling the entire tower. Filling Mason’s mind.
He couldn’t be sure if he’d imagined it, until Merrin said, “Yeah, right.”
But the voice didn’t seem hostile; it wasn’t dripping with malice. It was more like an invitation.
The sphere on the pillar began to glow. “Closer, please? Don’t make me come to you,” the voice said again.
“I wonder if Stellan needs help with the ship,” Tom said.
Mason wondered that too. Perhaps Stellan needed all their help, and maybe they should go try to help him, like right now.
“Oh, for Adams’ sake, I won’t bite!” the voice said.
In the blink of an eye, the sphere was hovering a foot above the pillar. On the surface was a perfect image of a bright red heart. It beat slowly. “See? I love you.”
The voice came from the sphere.
So Mason took yet another chance, and began to walk toward it. Once they got halfway, the heart changed into perfectly clear words that said THANK YOU! in neon yellow. It was like a video screen covered the sphere, like the peel of an orange.
“I have been waiting so long for your arrival that if I told you how long, you would call me a liar,” the sphere said. Now it showed various scenes of the forest around them, the sky above, flickering back to the beating heart, and then a smiley face.
“How long?” Mason asked.
“I may have forgotten. But—never mind. You really don’t have the time. I have to tell you something, and then I have to send you on your way. Your enemies, they are close.”
“What—” Tom began.
“Stop!” the sphere said. “I mean, please stop. My name is Child. I am a creation of the People, who last populated this place you call Nori-Blue. I am what you call intelligence that is artificial. I am more powerful than you can po
ssibly imagine.”
A cold finger prodded Mason’s lower spine. The way Child had said it …
“The People make you humans and your Tremist enemies look like blithering idiots,” Child said, and an image appeared on his screen of a man’s sneering face.
“You brought us here,” Mason said, realizing it as he said it.
“Of course,” Child replied. “You are the first sign.”
Mason almost asked what he meant, but didn’t want to get scolded.
“Thank you for not asking that question,” Child said. “I saw your Egypt in orbit, and decided now was the time to reveal the truth. Because you can deliver this truth to both sides equally. You are a human and Tremist united.”
He meant Merrin. A Tremist cadet in the ESC.
But what truth…? Mason’s stomach turned. He almost didn’t want to know. Or he wanted to know right now, to get it over with. The dread soured the taste in his mouth.
“Let me be clear,” Child said. “I do not trust the Tremist, and I do not trust the humans. You have both grown self-centered over your years. Both sides would use the truth for their own gain, not for peace. But I have seen into your hearts, young ones, and I know you can end this war.”
The heart came back, beating happily on the surface of the sphere.
Just then, the com in Mason’s ear clicked.
It was Jeremy. He sounded out of breath. “—gotta bug out. Mason? I gotta bug out. Tremist in the system in a big way. Not just the king’s Hawk—all of them. I’ll try to come back. Hole up tight, buddy.”
Before Mason could reply, the com went dead.
The others hadn’t heard.
“The Egypt had to leave the system,” Mason told them, swallowing. “The Tremist are here.”
“Listen, then,” Child said, before the others could reply. “This is the truth you will bring to your people.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Instead of telling them, Child granted them understanding. In one moment, they knew nothing. Then the sphere emitted tight beams of light into their eyes. Mason squeezed his eyes shut and flinched away, but the beams tracked his eyes, pierced his lids, and fed directly into his brain.
