“JEFF?” he called out of sheer panic. “Can we take off?” He leaned back toward the cockpit and saw that JEFF was now slumped over, his eyes dark. “Why would you—”
The magnet drill rattled through the floor, through his bones. He was breathing too fast and his heart was hammering and he felt like walls were pressing in on him. He sprinted back to his parents’ pods. “What do I do?” he said uselessly to their peaceful faces. Maybe the skim drone? Could he take off? Could he attach his parents’ pods to it somehow? But he’d never get past the soldiers outside.
“Hey.”
Phoebe stood in the doorway. Her mask and hair were gone. And she must have seen the fresh fear in his eyes, because she added, “It’s still me. I swear.”
Liam moved around behind his parents’ pods. “Was this all a setup?” All his thoughts and feelings were a blur.
“No! I had no idea they would be here.” Phoebe stepped toward him.
“Stay away from me. I shouldn’t have trusted you. You’re all murderers, you—”
“We’re the murderers?”
“I don’t know!”
A sharp bang rumbled through the ship as the outer airlock door sprang open. A pause: the drill began to rattle the inner door.
“What are they going to do?” said Liam. Tears welled in his eyes. He looked down at his parents. “Will they kill us?”
“Liam”—Phoebe held out her hand—“I won’t let them hurt you.”
Liam could barely breathe. Maybe Phoebe was his only chance right now. He looked at the chronologist’s watch: still blinking rapidly.
There was a sound like tearing metal, and the inner airlock door crashed open.
“Hello?” It was Barro.
Phoebe turned toward the main cabin.
Give her the watch. The thought pushed through his head in that dizzying way again, almost like an actual voice speaking in his head. Liam turned—
And saw himself standing there, just beside him. Except not. Sort of flickering and watery, a version of him similar to the one in the other future that he’d seen beneath the Delphi station.
Give her the watch, this other version of himself said. Tell her to hide it. He smiled.
Liam looked at himself looking back at him and winced against a sensation of empty spinning—was this real or a memory? Now, before, or even his future somehow? He had that stretchy feeling like he was moving in time. Could this version of himself be from another timeline? But they weren’t near a weak point in space-time out here, and he wasn’t even using the watch. Maybe this wasn’t real at all. Maybe his brain had finally started to break—
Liam stumbled against the pods, his vision swimming.
“Come on,” said Phoebe, turning back to him. Her blue, black, and gold eyes were rimmed with tears. “We have to.”
Liam glanced to his side—his alternate self was gone. He pushed himself upright. Trust is a powerful adaptation, the chronologist had said. He slipped off the watch and held it out to Phoebe. “Take this. Hide it. Keep it safe.”
“Okay. Why?”
“They won’t search you.”
Phoebe slid it onto her wrist. Liam had thought it might stop blinking, but it didn’t. She pushed it beneath the sleeve of her thermal wear.
“There you two are.” Barro appeared in the doorway. His human mask was gone, too. “Well, this has been fun. I’m glad to see you looking like your true self, Xela. Now, no more games. Outside.”
Phoebe gave Liam one last wide-eyed look. Trust me, Liam hoped it meant. She turned, and Liam moved around the pods toward Barro and the doorway. He tried to make his face expressionless. He wouldn’t show his fear.
“Don’t look so glum,” said Barro, shoving Liam into the main cabin. “I know you thought you’d left us far behind, but our people came back for us. We have a very fast ship.”
“What did you do here?” Phoebe asked.
“Well, obviously we commandeered the ship,” said Barro. “A regular old hijacking. The team learned at Delphi that taking out a starliner is a tall task from the outside.”
“How were you able to board?” said Phoebe. “It doesn’t look like you blasted your way in.”
“Didn’t have to,” said Barro. “We had a backup plan. All we had to do was wait until it was Captain Freeman’s turn at the helm. She’s one of us. That was a few months after Delphi. Once we had control of the ship, we realized that with some patience, we could score a much bigger victory by biding our time until the fleet arrived here. We made a few trips to bring some of these stasis pods to our people. Since then, we’ve been asleep ourselves. Very comfy.”
“But what about those other starliners? When they find out that you’re here—”
“Already taken care of,” said Barro. “We were just going to fire on them, but unfortunately we damaged the ship’s weapons guidance systems at Delphi. Whoops. But it turned out fine: Freeman put the other captains at ease, and then we posed as teams coming over for technical supplies to begin repairs. We boarded, took out their command crews, shot down their military escorts, and shut down their bots. The passengers were all still in stasis, just like here, and that’s how they’ll stay until that star goes . . .” He made an exploding motion with his hands.
“But you can’t,” said Liam. “That’s three hundred million people. It’s—”
“Efficient,” said Barro. “Three ships down, just like that. Of course that’s not nearly as efficient as what your species did. Now let’s go.” Barro motioned Phoebe through the airlock.
Liam followed her, his heart pounding. She trudged down the steps, but Liam paused at the threshold. The squad of Telphons waited for them on the deck, all holding rifles. He could barely breathe—Barro shoved him and he stumbled down the steps, landing on his knees.
Liam gathered himself and stood up straight, feeling as alone and terrified as he ever had. Tarra was at the front of the group. She put her arm around Phoebe, who gazed at him sadly, and yet Liam couldn’t help thinking that she looked like one of them. Aliens. She belonged with her people, not him. It seemed so obvious now. No, he told himself. You can trust her.
Tarra motioned to a Telphon soldier beside her. The man grabbed Liam by the arm, ripped off his link, and reached into his pocket for the data key.
“Stop it!” Liam squirmed, but the man struck Liam across the face. Bright pain, stinging and pounding all at once.
“Don’t!” Phoebe shouted.
Liam stopped resisting, stunned.
The man hurled Liam’s link off the deck and handed the data key to Tarra. She smiled at Liam, pocketed the key, and patted Phoebe’s shoulder. “Mission accomplished.” Phoebe tried to pull free but Tarra held her tightly to her side. “Don’t worry, Xela—when your parents awaken, we will tell them that you served the cause ably while they slept.” She motioned to Liam. “There’s no reason to bother them with all of this confusion you’ve been having.”
“He saved my life,” said Phoebe. “So many times.”
“Humans are funny that way,” said Tarra. “What about the bot?” she said to Barro, who was still in the cruiser doorway.
“It’s dead. Won’t reboot.”
“He had a system failure,” said Phoebe. “During stasis. He’d been messed up ever since I used the dampener on him.”
Tarra motioned to three other Telphons beside her, then to Barro. “Get the pods.” She looked at Liam. “I guess I should say thank you for taking care of our girl.” She patted Phoebe’s shoulder. “This must be quite the shock, finding out who she really is.”
“I showed him back on Delphi,” said Phoebe.
This seemed to take Tarra by surprise.
“Please just let us go,” said Liam.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” said Tarra, as Barro and the other soldiers appeared, carrying the pods with Phoebe’s parents. They climbed down the steps and moved toward the sleek ship that hovered nearby. “We have a mission to finish here, and time is growing sh
ort.”
“But it’s not their fault!” Phoebe wrenched herself away from Tarra and darted over to Liam. She stood beside him and faced her people. “They were desperate!”
“Xela,” said Tarra, “we are not going to go over this again. You’re young and you’ve spent a long time with these humans. It’s understandable—”
“Tarra! Listen! I know they did what they did, and we can’t ever forgive them for that, but we have bigger problems.”
“Bigger problems than an alien race heading for our home world?”
“Kind of, yes! You don’t know about the Drove!” shouted Phoebe.
“The who?”
“They’re another race of beings. Maybe from another universe. They’re blowing up stars on purpose. That’s what happened to the humans, and it’s happening to Centauri right now. But it’s even more dangerous than that. We have to work together if we’re going to stop them.”
Tarra peered at her like she was speaking another language. “And how do you know about this?”
“We saw it. There are these other aliens. Chronologists. We found a dead one on Mars and she showed us the proof.”
Tarra cocked her head. “Do you hear yourself? None of this makes sense.”
“It’s true! Don’t just discount what I’m saying. Please let us show you.”
Tarra seemed to think about this for a moment. “Even if it is true, we can worry about it once the existential threat to our people has been eliminated.” She turned to another Telphon soldier. “Take her to the ship.”
“This IS the existential threat!” Phoebe shouted. “You have to listen! What they’re doing is endangering the whole universe!”
“That’s enough.”
The soldiers grabbed Phoebe by either arm. She struggled against them but they were too strong. “The humans didn’t mean to do it! They—” Phoebe made an inhuman sound, like a high-pitched whistling, her face contorted, and the effort made her double over, coughing.
“Stop!” Tarra shouted.
The soldiers paused, holding Phoebe between them.
“Phoebe . . .” Tarra pointed at Liam. “They knew. Tell her.”
“What?” said Liam.
“I don’t know what lies you’ve been feeding her on this journey,” said Tarra, “about your poor, innocent humans, but it sounds like you conveniently left out one thing: you knew. We hacked the archives of the Phase One project. There was a faction of scientists on the team who were convinced that your data showed a reasonable chance of evolved life on Telos. But the rest of them didn’t listen. They chose to destroy our world anyway.”
“They wouldn’t,” said Liam. “There’s no way if my parents knew that they’d—”
Tarra’s eyes narrowed. “Your parents were part of the group that overruled that faction. Your father gave the launch order.”
A surge of cold raced through Liam. He locked eyes with Phoebe. “That can’t be true.”
“Put her on board,” Tarra said, waving Phoebe and the two soldiers away.
“Phoebe, it’s not true! I swear!” And yet Liam didn’t feel sure of that at all.
“Don’t hurt him!” Phoebe called. “Tarra, please, don’t.”
Tarra hesitated, then motioned to Liam. “Put him in a stasis pod.” She turned to two other soldiers. “Double-check our setup on the bridge.” She strode toward her ship. “Then we depart.”
Liam tried to run—he barely made it a step before two guards had him. “What about my parents?”
Tarra spun around, her voice razor thin. “Thank you again for taking care of Xela.”
“Liam!” Phoebe shouted from the stairs to the alien ship.
Liam fought against his captors, but they dragged him across the hangar, his arms burning in their grip, his feet skidding on the floor. He twisted and writhed, but it was no use. They took him to the edge of the platform, the dizzying view of decks above and below, and for a moment he thought they might just throw him off the edge, but instead they forced him down switchbacking flights of metal stairs, two decks below, then over to another haphazard pile of stasis pods.
Many were full, but there was a line of about ten that were open, their insides empty, the fluid lines and stimulators hanging unceremoniously over the edge. As the soldiers pushed Liam toward one, he saw a smear of blood on the pillow.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
The Telphon soldier spoke in strange chirping, whistling sounds. The other replied, and they shoved him in and slammed the top down.
“No!” Liam pounded his hands against the flex-glass top. One of the Telphons held it down with both hands while the other activated the pod. The locks engaged. The lights lit up around the inside edge. The two Telphons stepped away.
“No, please! Don’t!” Liam screamed and kicked, sobbing now, slamming his hands, and they hurt, everything hurt. They couldn’t do this—
The gas jets began to hiss.
“NO!” Liam fell back, his body limp in shock and terror. He lay there, blinking, breathing out of control, chest heaving.
There was a hum and a rumble that shook the pod. Liam saw a shadow above: the Telphon ship moving out over the edge of the hangar decks and rotating.
Phoebe . . .
The ship slipped out of sight, heading toward the airlock.
He was going to die. They were all going to die.
His fingers and toes started to tingle. His head swam in that familiar way as the stasis gas took hold. He blinked against tears and saw the supernova, saw himself facing it—
Blinked: to the balcony on Mars, Mina frowning at him as he made a move on the game board—
Blinked: to the basement levels of Delphi, saw the explosion that killed him—killed the other him—
He felt like he was in all those places at once, felt that rush of wind inside him, that sense of being unstuck, adrift, like he had just turned the watch dial, like he was traveling in time, except Phoebe had the watch.
Liam saw himself outside the pod, saw himself back on the cruiser as Barro rattled the door, standing there between his parents, saw the Telphons approaching the starliner.
His head spun like he was in zero gravity, but it was more than that. It was as if forward and backward were places he could see, could reach, if he pushed toward them, like he didn’t even need the watch.
And yet what did it matter? There was no way out of this pod, no one to help him. In moments, he’d be in stasis, as good as dead. Maybe he could call JEFF—but no, JEFF was shut down, and he didn’t even have his link. . . .
I have modified this, per your instructions, JEFF had said before deactivating himself. But Liam hadn’t given him instructions.
Or had he?
He thought of that voice in the cockpit that had sounded like his own, and then that vision of himself by his parents’ pods.
Maybe he hadn’t given JEFF those instructions . . . yet.
Liam closed his eyes and focused, through the wind and fog in his mind, and he could almost see it, the cruiser, himself standing by his parents’ pod, in his past, the memory of it—
But this was more than that. Like Liam really was seeing it, even like he could be there if he concentrated, if he pushed.
Stasis gas filled his lungs. Liam’s hands and feet felt distant. His skin far away. He was going under—but also maybe somewhere else entirely.
You are starting to experience time differently, the chronologist had said. Could he? He pushed harder, felt that breeze in him, like his very molecules were seeds on the wind.
Pushed . . .
The gas completed its cycle inside the stasis pod.
But Liam was no longer there.
16
TIME TO CENTAURI A SUPERNOVA RED LINE: 1H:58M
Liam pushed through the wind, a cold liquid feeling. He saw the stasis pod, the confrontation with Tarra, the cruiser leaving the Scorpius, all passing by in reverse, and now he saw himself standing between his parents’ pods—remembered it, too, a st
range sensation of seeing something new that was also a memory, of being both inside and out.
There was Phoebe, a few feet away, her human face just removed. The rattling of the magnet drill on the cruiser doors. He could hear it, feel it in his feet. This was different from when he’d traveled with the watch. It didn’t feel like he was merely observing. He seemed to actually be here, in his past. Liam remembered this moment, how there had been two of him here. Now he was that second version of himself.
Inside his head, though, something else was happening. Liam had a sensation as if his entire life were somehow all around him, each moment like one of those glass bubbles in the baths on Delphi. His past: the chronologist’s office, landing at Delphi, kissing Phoebe, leaving Mars, the balcony with his family, and so many more. And in the other direction his future, though these moments were less defined, perhaps because he hadn’t lived them yet. He saw a dark area lined with stasis pods, flashes and explosions in the blur of space, and then the vision he’d had so often: stuck in the skim drone with Phoebe, facing the coming supernova. What happened after that? Liam tried to see farther, but everything beyond there seemed to be blurry, almost as if he’d reached the limits of what his human brain could handle.
We experience time the same as you experience the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, the chronologist had said. Was that what was happening to him? Was Liam experiencing his life four-dimensionally? Whatever this was, he wanted to stay and visit all these moments—
Yet this ability didn’t change the fact that he was still, at some point in his timeline, stuck in that stasis pod, with Phoebe gone and hundreds of millions of lives, including his family’s, in grave danger. It was astonishing that he could experience time like this, but right now he needed to use time.
And he already had. He’d moved himself backward from the pod to this moment in the cruiser. Somehow he had done this without the watch. The watch changed me, he thought, and the idea turned some of his wonder to fear, but he would have to worry about that later.
Right now, or then, the watch was what he needed to worry about. The past version of himself was still wearing it. Liam already knew from being in this moment the first time that this was what he was here to do. But why give the watch to Phoebe? Because they’d take it from him, that seemed certain. Maybe he could think of a place on the cruiser to hide it, but Barro was already inside.
The Oceans between Stars Page 22
