He got my meaning. To his credit, he met my eyes, as if trying to give force to his words. “I never deceived you about anything other than my identity. And I never wished to use you. I . . .” His eyes went to the ceiling, as though he might find an answer from above. “I was sincere. And . . . impulsive. And I am sorry for hurting you.”
“You’re sorry.”
“It’s all that I have.”
I shook my head, took in a breath, and let it out slowly. “You’re a different person to me now. Okay? So whatever . . . happened, back on Earth, that’s not how it is now. Understand?”
He ducked his head in a nod, eyes still on me. “I understand,” he said, voice solemn.
This wasn’t how I’d wanted this to go. I’d wanted to make things right again. If not normal—because normal was out the window—then at least okay between us. I struggled for a neutral topic to switch to and came up empty. My breath was coming hard, and I was dangerously close to raw emotions.
It was Luka who spoke next. “I won’t ask forgiveness from you, Cassie. You have a right to withhold it if you wish, and I have asked enough of you already. But I hope that we can work together going forward.”
Why did he have to be so damn reasonable all the time? I sighed, the anger in me still fizzling, not having found a satisfying outlet. “Yeah, sure. Of course.”
I walked back to my room alone.
Four
I SLEPT FITFULLY, chased by dreams. Sunny nudged me out of sleep at the appointed time, and when I opened my eyes it was like I hadn’t slept at all.
The same delegation of megobari met us in the antechamber. We ate a breakfast of prepackaged NASA food from Odysseus with a side of fresh fruit—making me wonder how fast the megobari actually could travel through space.
It still seemed ridiculous to me the megobari had been on Earth at the same time as us, watched us as we launched, and then apparently passed us on the way here. Had they stayed on Earth until recently or had they been here the whole time? What had they been doing while we were asleep?
I added all that to the list of questions I wished I’d asked Luka last night. I probably wasn’t going to get another chance to talk to him alone again.
That morning the mood was a little lighter. My crew with their helmets lying on the table, breaking figurative bread with our hosts. One of the megobari, an older woman with deep brown skin, laughed at Shaw’s jokes, while another conversed with Bolshakov in a language that sounded Russian, but was incomprehensible to me.
Still, it was mostly quiet, as the megobari by and large didn’t seem to speak English.
I ate my rehydratable granola in silence, watching Otor attempt to translate a conversation between a megobari woman and Dr. Copeland. All the megobari seemed indistinguishable from humans. Other than their unique space suits, there were no telling differences between them and us. To an outside observer, we might appear to be the same species. The megobari were all quite tall and broadly built, most of them with dark hair and eyes, and shades of skin from light tan to dark. I wondered if this was part of their disguise. Did they adopt the features of the humans who lived wherever they first landed?
Luka was the only one among them with blond hair. I couldn’t help wondering which of their genetics blended to create him, and how it all worked.
Otor cleared his throat and stood. “My friends—as I hope we shall be friends—I hope you have eaten well and recovered somewhat from your journey. I would like to invite you to come aboard our ship and take a short trip with us to our home planet, where I can give a full explanation as to why we require your help.”
Bolshakov sat back in his chair, an apple core and empty food packets sitting in front of him, drinking coffee out of a silver pouch with a straw.
“Gupta, do you have any objections to us working with these megobari?” Bolshakov asked, tripping only slightly on the unfamiliar word.
Why did he start with me? “No,” I said. “No objections.”
“Anyone else?” Bolshakov paused, and at the silence, continued: “I think we have a duty to gather all the information we can before we return to Earth. We gladly accept your offer.”
Otor nodded, pleased. “We can be ready to leave in one half hour.”
As we boarded the megobari ship, Shaw quipped under his breath, “If anyone mentions something about a cookbook, run.”
That sparked a jolt of nervous laughter out of me and Jeong. Hopefully, the megobari had never seen any old Twilight Zone reruns, and weren’t claiming to want to “serve man.”
The megobari ship was minimalist and beautiful. Off-white, smooth lines, curved openings—I felt like I was inside an egg. The human crew followed the megobari crew up the ramp to some sort of control center that could have been a bridge, with two levels.
We stood at the top of the higher level looking down, with a half wall of a rail as a separation. The colors here changed slightly to break up the expanse, with the lower half more gray and the top half a little more yellow. I had no idea what the rest of the ship contained, but from the outside it was at least twice the size of Odysseus. It seemed every megobari we’d yet seen was coming with us, and that only amounted to about twenty-five individuals. Luka was the only young person among them. The rest all appeared to be at least in their midthirties.
The ship itself appeared to be constructed of a material similar to the chamber walls. When no one was looking, I touched a fingertip to it, feeling the same thing Copeland had reported: it wasn’t rigid. It gave way, just a fraction, under pressure—like some incredibly strong, pliable silicone.
They didn’t seem to use computers in the way that we did. Instead, it was like the entire ship was an interactive screen. It pulsed periodically with color, greens and purples and reds. Some raced down the walls like messages, sent from place to place. Others floated, lazy, undulating like jellyfish before dissipating completely. Could patterns of color be a form of written language? I watched, entranced.
I leaned over the railing a little. The lower level was an explosion of color: pop-pop-pop of yellows and reds, firing like bullets; streams of blue lines cutting through purple clouds. It seemed like some kind of psychedelic mind trip, but after only a few seconds I recognized patterns. Maybe it was a language I could learn.
Luka came down the corridor, still wearing the same black space suit with the strange shifting blue veins running throughout, this time carrying a helmet under his arm. He stopped in front of me and smiled without showing teeth, a polite thing. “How do you like the ship?”
“It’s incredible. One day—when we have more time—I want to know everything about it.”
His smile dropped away, but he indulged my curiosity. “It’s called Exodus. It’s the same one my family used to escape the war. They hid it on Earth before I was born.” He looked away from me. “I had never even been to space before now. Not so different from you, yes?”
He glanced at me, unsure, trying to smile. So I tried, too. “Your original destination, Kepler-186f, was our home world. But it is not safe to land there, thus we redirected your ship to land here instead. But we wish for you to see it.”
Apparently the megobari had found a way to simulate gravity on their ships. It was a nice convenience, except for those of us with reduced muscle stamina. Luka noticed how I’d grabbed hold of the rail to support myself and immediately realized their error. He enlisted some of his fellow crew to pull down some jump seats for us along the back wall of the bridge area. They’d obviously been installed after the megobari had changed their forms; the materials were distinctly more earthlike and human-proportioned. We each collapsed into the seats gratefully and buckled into the five-point harnesses. Once I was settled, Luka returned to his father’s side.
I felt only a gentle pull as the ship lifted horizontally off the ground and into orbit. Either the internal artificial gravity or the weak gravity of the smaller moon made it much easier than our liftoff from Earth. It was like a lazy river ride in comparis
on.
The top half of the chamber turned translucent, a dome of distant stars, and I gasped out loud. We suddenly had a 360-degree view of space, almost as if we were floating freely within it. The constellations around us were all different from what I was used to; I recognized nothing by sight at this orientation.
In the distance loomed the planet Kepler-186f, seeming a lot closer than it was due to its massive size. It was a deep copper color, pockmarked with craters, and even from here I could tell there was no water, no clouds, no atmosphere. A dead thing.
The translucent screen narrowed its focus until the planet filled our vision. The entire world was dry and dusty, with no signs of life ever having existed on it. Even from this distance, it was obvious it was barren. Lacking even the beauty of a desert, because in deserts, there was life. It looked like the surface of Earth’s moon. I couldn’t take my eyes away, trying to envision what it could have been like.
Until, suddenly, I didn’t have to. I blinked, and the bare rock above was alive. Sunlight refracted off a blue-gray ocean covering about half the world. White clouds swirled above a lush continent that covered the eastern hemisphere, and lights shined from the narrow slice of nightside that we could see, revealing pockets of cities and civilization. Smaller bodies of water, the ridges of twisting rivers, mountain ranges, deserts, and thick forests of bronze vegetation were all in sharp focus. What was this?
“This is how we wish to remember our home,” Otor explained, as if answering my question. “Before war and destruction took it away.”
All the megobari who were not piloting the ship had gathered on the bridge, standing around and in front of us. Luka stood beside his father, their backs to the pilots below, facing human and megobari crews alike.
A respectful silence had taken over the megobari, and we watched attentively as Otor spoke. “We can no longer touch the soil of the world that gave birth to our people.” Otor’s voice rattled out of his helmet radio, but it was clear and strong and sad. I felt suddenly like I was at a funeral. “But we come here so that it may be remembered, both as it was and as it is. We mourn the loss of home. All the beauty that remains only in memory.”
For a second, the image on-screen wasn’t an alien species’ dead planet; it was Earth. Earth as I’d seen it last, green and glittering blue, marbled with clouds. Alive with the only color in a vast darkness.
I saw the color drain away from my home—the water vaporize and the grass scorch and the soil sweep out like dust into the void. Saw life vaporize in an instant.
I blinked. The megobarian planet hung before me. An illusion, a memory.
“My human friends. We did not ask you to come so far from home and face such dangers for nothing. We invited you here to simply ask for your help. We called you away from Earth because we believed it was no longer safe for us to speak there. That Earth may soon be in danger.”
Deadly silence pervaded the bridge.
“You’re going to have to explain that one a little more,” Copeland said, her voice dry and hard.
Luka stepped forward, taking over. Kepler-186f is irradiated and barren of life. But it once was home. Years ago, an alien species we call the vrag invaded us without warning or explanation. My people fought back, even managed to wipe out most of the enemy. But our planet, and even our colonies on various moons, were lost.”
He said it so casually, it almost belied the pain within the words.
“One contingent of vrag escaped using a stolen megobari ship. What was left of the megobari scattered into the galaxy, fearing that to stay together would draw the attention of the enemy. The vrag have hunted us ever since.”
Otor gazed at his son sadly. And I realized that now, all the megobari were looking at us. I felt dread trickle through my body. “There are only a few thousand of us left, spread out on a few hundred ships. We split ways so that we may expand our search for a new planet that could sustain us. And so that we may be more likely to avoid detection by the vrag, who are able to use our technology against us. We traveled many years and lost many of our family. We thought perhaps we would never find another home like the one that had been taken from us.” His large hand covered his eyes.
“Until we found Earth,” Luka finished, his gaze finding mine.
Tears warmed the backs of my eyes. I blinked them away.
Otor’s voice was beseeching. “Earth was not perfect, but it was our best hope. We studied you for a long time before even attempting to land. We thought—we hoped—we could communicate with you. Ask for help. For alliance. A home, in exchange for technology.”
“My father developed a genetic virus,” Luka said. “To change our DNA. He inserted enough human genetic material into our own that it would make us appear in all outward respects as human. Permanently. He believed that was the only way we could communicate with you and be accepted. A third of our remaining crew died while perfecting the procedure. But they kept trying because enough of us believed in the hope of Earth, and they were so tired of running.”
Otor grimaced at the reminder. His wrinkled skin became gray and bloodless. “We had so looked forward to this meeting. All the work spent to come to this point—the years of study and the sacrifices made. Everything had come to fruition, and the vrag had disappeared into the galaxy. Only for us to discover on the eve of our departure that the vrag had found us.”
Beside me, Jeong sat up straighter.
“Shit,” Copeland muttered on my other side.
“The vrag are ruthless, intelligent animals,” Luka took over. His father looked like he might be sick. “They reproduce at astounding rates, act as one mind, and cannot be reasoned with. We cannot even communicate with them. They are swift, violent, and vast in number. Their only weakness now is that they are confined to a single ship, as they lack the physical capability to build their own.”
Otor put a heavy hand on Luka’s shoulder and turned his gray gaze to us. “They destroyed our world. And they will destroy yours, if we do not stop them.”
Five
“WHAT THE HELL are you talking about?” Shaw demanded.
“There is a hope,” Otor said. “A weapon. That is why we brought you here. This moon was at one time a research facility. It was abandoned before the weapon could be put to use against the vrag. But if it is still here, it may be our best hope.”
I felt sick. This wasn’t what I wanted to do. I suddenly wanted to go back. Back to when space was a grand adventure of scientific achievement and we’d return to Earth as heroes for the ages. Not as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Earth. I pictured it as I’d seen it last, a fragile, beautiful blue marble hanging in dark space. Alone, unprotected, and so far away.
Were the vrag there now?
Would it even still be there when we returned?
“How do you know about this weapon?” Bolshakov asked. To his credit, he sounded like he was taking this news much better than I was. “And why have you only now returned to retrieve it?”
Luka turned to his father for the answer.
“None of us dared before now. We feared leading the vrag directly to it. One of our deep-space probes alerted us to the nearing presence of the vrag. We knew they were approaching Earth. This was our only chance.”
I may have been fighting the aftereffects of interplanetary travel, but I didn’t miss that Otor didn’t answer how he knew about the weapon to begin with.
“Where is it? Do you know?” I asked.
“We have drones searching for it now. I believe we may soon uncover the vault in which it was stored. Once we recover it, we ask that you return to Earth with us immediately, so that we may have it in place before the vrag arrive.”
“It would take only days to return to Earth in this ship,” Luka explained quickly, seeing the uncomprehending faces of my crew. “You would not need to return to stasis.”
“Are you truly asking our permission?” Bolshakov asked wryly. “I feel as though you will do this regardless.”
Copeland leaned over me to speak to Bolshakov, sotto voce: “They will only grant us the use of the weapon if we agree to let them stay on Earth. Otherwise, we’re on our own.”
I startled, but she was right, of course. That was the offer. They’d help us repel the vrag only if they got to share in the reward.
“It is our sincerest wish that no other species lose their homes to the vrag,” Otor said diplomatically. “But we will not force alliance where it is not desired.”
Jeong shook her head. “They’re making us an offer we can’t refuse.”
I stared at Luka, and he leveled a hard gaze right back at me. We were on two sides of a divide now. And neither of us was the decision maker here.
When Bolshakov spoke, I turned to look at him instead. “Otor, my friend, surely you know that the decision to ally with your kind does not fall to me alone. We are only five out of seven billion. Even if I wish to give you what you ask, there is no guarantee those in charge back home will honor our agreement.”
Otor nodded like this was a reasonable and expected problem. “Questions of the future can remain in the future. I know you cannot promise what I ask, commander. All I ask, at this moment, between your crew and mine, is if we have an agreement. Our help, for yours.”
In that moment, the illusion of life on the planet above blinked out, and the cold reality of barren rock returned. There was not a speck on that rock that was not blasted away from meteors or radiation. We watched the feed of the dead world until it passed from view, obscured as we left it behind to float alone in the void.
“I agree,” I said quietly.
After a moment’s hesitation, I heard Copeland murmur her agreement. Then Jeong. Finally, Shaw.
One Giant Leap Page 4
