Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon

by Searles, Rachel

  “Do you think it’s out in the whole ship?”

  Parker didn’t answer for a moment. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The sound of nothing. There’s no airflow coming through the vents. The whole ship’s mainframe must have gone down for the life support systems to crash.”

  “You mean there’s no more air?” Chase asked in a panicky voice.

  “There’ll be a couple of hours’ worth of oxygen in the system. I’m sure this won’t last that long.”

  They stood there for a minute, listening to their own breathing and waiting to see if the lights would come back. “Let’s try to get to the canteen,” said Chase finally. He took a step, sliding his foot out first to make sure he wasn’t going to run into something. As they inched their way down the hall, his other senses sharpened, and he could hear distant sounds of shouting, the whoosh and crash of a door slamming.

  Suddenly he noticed something much closer, a sound that didn’t quite fit: three sets of footsteps, not two. Adrenaline surged through him and he stopped, heart pounding. Parker’s grip on his shoulder tightened.

  “Who’s there?” asked Chase, sounding bolder than he felt. No one answered, but whoever it was had snuck up on them without a sound. “Lilli, is that you?”

  Brief silence. “Yes,” came her scratchy voice from the right.

  Parker groaned. “Good grief, Lil. Thanks for the heart attack.”

  Chase reached out in the direction of her voice, but his hand found nothing. “Are you okay? Come with us to the canteen. I’m sure the captain’s going to make an announcement any second now to let us know what’s happened.”

  “Um, not with the power out he won’t,” said Parker.

  “They’ll fix it.” He hoped Lilli couldn’t hear how nervous he was. What if this was the retaliation he’d feared all these months? Was this the precursor to an attack? “I’m sure the engine room’s already figuring it out.”

  “I’ll go check,” came Lilli’s voice.

  Chase started shaking his head before he realized she wouldn’t see it. “No, wait—”

  She didn’t make a sound, but Chase could feel her absence and knew that she’d disappeared again. He cursed under his breath.

  “Lords, I almost wet my pants when she showed up like that,” whispered Parker.

  “Yeah, it’s a great party trick,” said Chase sourly.

  Another minute ticked by as they waited, and then the sound of Lilli’s breathing filled the air beside them again. “All the power systems shut down,” she announced. “The mainframe’s rebooting.”

  “What?” asked Parker. “They just shut down? Impossible. There are backups, and backups for the backups. On top of it the mainframe has its own local power unit.”

  But what if someone was messing with the mainframe? Chase didn’t share the thought. Parker’s hack job couldn’t have caused a blackout on the whole ship … could it?

  “Well, Chief Kobes didn’t say that exactly. Something about an upgrade and a glitch—”

  “There’s no ‘glitch’ big enough to take out the entire power system on a starship, including the emergency lights,” Parker interrupted. “It’s impossible, there are too many redundancy measures.”

  “Well, I didn’t investigate the problem myself!” snapped Lilli. “Take it up with the engineers if you’re so sure of yourself.”

  As much as Lilli fought with Chase, she was even quicker to butt heads with Parker—which was why Chase usually tried to keep them away from each other. “Calm down, you guys. Whatever happened, they’ll figure—”

  A door crashed open somewhere down the hall, followed by the rapid pounding of boots against metal. Someone was running toward them.

  “Hey!” shouted Chase. “Slow down!”

  Whoever it was didn’t stop running, and Chase jumped to the side of the hallway as the runner blew past, heaving for air. The footsteps quickly faded out down the hall. Was there some kind of emergency? Chase rubbed his sweaty palms against his pants.

  “Jeez, panic much?” growled Parker. “What an idiot. You guys okay? Still here, Lilli?”

  Lilli muttered a wordless reply, and again Chase felt the impulse to reach out and squeeze her arm to reassure her that they would be okay. On some level, it made him happy that she’d sought him out in the blackout. But what if she pulled away or snapped at him? It almost felt as though he were reaching out to touch a spiky Goxar alien. “Let’s keep going,” he said instead.

  They were getting closer to the canteen when they heard the tap of footsteps coming up from behind them, walking swiftly but not running. A light swung around the corner of the hall, and a lilting voice called out.

  “Chase? Parker? Is that you?” Maurus’s face emerged from the darkness, illuminated by a glow of light. The Lyolian soldier held a short white rod that lit the immediate space a few feet around him. His expression was pinched. “Lilli too? Cursed suns of Hesta, what are you all doing out in the hall? You should stay in your quarters when something like that happens.”

  “If I could tell my orifice from my elbow right now, maybe I’d be there already,” said Parker. “What happened to the power?”

  Maurus ignored his question. “The captain sent me to find you and take you somewhere safe.”

  “Why?” asked Chase. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know yet. It’s just a precaution.”

  “In case of what?” asked Parker. The same question had popped up in Chase’s mind. Was the captain still worried about someone on the ship discovering their secrets? Or had they already been found out?

  Maurus turned and waved the glowing rod over a metal box affixed to the wall. “Do you know about these emergency stations? They should always be stocked with phoswhites.” He opened the box, where a stack of clear rods rested in a bin, and tossed one to each of them. “Just hit the round end hard against the wall, like this.” He demonstrated by whacking a stick against the wall. The echo rang down the hallway as more light filled the space around them. “They’re good for about an hour.”

  Lilli grabbed a rod from the bin and gave it a savage smack against the wall, her eyes glittering in the glow it created. They all took turns lighting phoswhites, until enough light surrounded them that they could see everything for several feet. Beyond that the view dropped off into dense blackness. They moved slowly down the hall, where Maurus led them past the empty canteen. Shouts were being exchanged somewhere in the distance. Chase strained to hear what was being said, but he couldn’t make out a single word. When they came to one of the ship’s three wide stairways, Maurus pulled the stairwell door open and waved for them to go inside.

  “Where are we going?” asked Chase as he passed by.

  “Head upstairs,” said Maurus. “We’ll go to the armory.”

  Parker looked back. “What? Why?”

  “The captain told me to get you somewhere safe. The armory’s our best bet.”

  “But I want to go to the engine room,” said Parker.

  “I want to go to the engine room,” mimicked Lilli in a mocking voice.

  A door crashed open above them, and the sound of multiple footsteps echoed down the stairwell. Four grim-faced soldiers marched past and headed through the door Maurus still held open into the hallway, all with their blaster guns out and at the ready. Bringing up the rear was Colonel Forquera, the ship’s second-in-command. A frown flashed across his lean, shadowy face when he saw the small group.

  “What are they doing out of their rooms?” he asked Maurus in a low voice. Forquera was one of the few people aboard the ship who knew about Chase’s and Lilli’s unusual abilities and the true reason why they had been taken aboard the Kuyddestor.

  “Captain wanted me to secure them and get them somewhere safe. I was taking them up to the armory.”

  Forquera shook his head. “Armory’s no good—Poliski’s team is out doing a sweep of the ship to check for any signs of external incursion.”

 
“You think this could be an outside attack?” asked Parker. “I highly doubt it.”

  Chase’s blood went cold. Parker had told him that it was impossible to hack the ship from the outside, but maybe someone had found a way. Parker didn’t know everything, after all.

  Forquera’s eyes flickered briefly to Parker. “Take them to the brig. All the cells are empty right now.”

  “No,” said Chase firmly. He’d spent time in that brig before and had no interest in revisiting it.

  “Take us to the engine room,” said Parker. “I can help fix the problem.”

  “The bridge—” Maurus started.

  “Absolutely not,” said Forquera.

  “Engine room. Engine room. Engine room,” said Parker, like an obnoxious parrot.

  “Enough!” barked Forquera. The communicator at his belt beeped, and he looked down at it. “Lieutenant, just make sure they don’t get in the way.” He turned and continued into the hallway after his men.

  As soon as the door closed behind Forquera, Parker crossed his arms. “Engine room.”

  Maurus sighed. “Please, don’t make this hard. You know I’m still under extra surveillance right now.” After Maurus was framed for orchestrating the Trucon disaster, Captain Lennard had publicly cleared him of any involvement with the plot, but because he had learned along the way that Maurus actually had covered up his past involvement with the Karsha Ven rebel group when he joined the Fleet, Maurus’s return to the Kuyddestor had come on the condition that he let himself be monitored.

  Parker snorted. “We know nobody’s surveilling you right now, there’s no power. Besides, Forquera never explicitly said not to take us to the engine room.” He prodded Chase toward the stairs that headed down toward the engine deck. “Look, Chase is going there, and oh no, there’s no way you can stop him. Better keep up so you don’t lose track of him.”

  Chase took a halfhearted step down the stairs, giving Maurus an apologetic look.

  Maurus had the flat expression of someone who was about to give in. “If they yell at us to leave, there won’t be any objections.”

  Parker grinned. “They won’t ask me to leave. I’ll be quiet as a ghost.” He gave Chase another prod and then jogged down the stairs ahead of him. “Hey, is it true that Colonel Forquera used to be a smuggler before he joined the Fleet?”

  “Where did you hear that?” asked Maurus sharply.

  Chase’s head snapped to attention. Parker had never mentioned this to him before.

  “Just some talk I overheard.”

  “Do you believe all the gossip you hear?”

  “Well, if it walks like a Horga, and talks like a Horga…”

  Chase frowned at Parker’s back. How many other things had he heard about and not shared?

  “He wouldn’t have been allowed to join the Fleet if he was a smuggler,” said Maurus. After a long pause, he added, “I heard he raced in the comet-chaser circuits. So, yeah, he probably ran with some pretty sketchy people, but I doubt he did anything illegal.”

  “Or maybe he just didn’t get caught,” said Parker with a sly smile in his voice. “I heard you can still get into the Fleet if you lie about your past.”

  “Shut up,” said Chase. That last comment had been a dig at Maurus.

  “Yeah, Parker, give it a rest,” mocked Lilli.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re really annoying?” said Parker.

  “Enough,” said Maurus in a firm voice. “Move aside. I’ll take the lead here.”

  They had reached the bottom level of the starship, the engine deck. The engine room itself was located in the rear half of the ship, but someone had tossed phoswhites on the ground down the length of the hall to light the way. They walked past soldiers prying open doors with crowbars, while other soldiers jogged by them, passing information to one another in urgent tones.

  The door to the engine room had been jimmied halfway open, and in the dimly lit space behind it, shapes moved among the shadows. Maurus squeezed inside and pointed for everyone to stand along the back wall.

  The engine room was technically an entire suite of individual chambers, but when people referred to it, they meant the big, circular room that ran around the engine core. At any given time there were at least a dozen engineers seated at the consoles and walking briskly from room to room. Chief Engineer Kobes practically lived there full time, reviewing calculations and barking orders. Chase had met him on a few occasions and was always somewhat intimidated by the stout, perpetually grumpy older man.

  One of the consoles in the room was glowing, and a group of engineers including the chief stood clustered around it. “We were running a standard system upgrade on the navigation controls, but instead of performing a concurrent reboot like it always does, it crashed the entire mainframe,” said Chief Kobes loudly.

  “How soon until you get it back up?” crackled a deep voice from a handheld communicator held up by one of the engineers.

  “We’ve had to reboot the whole mainframe from scratch. We’re scrapping the update and reverting to the previous version. The reboot time is short enough that there won’t be a lapse in any of the life-support systems. All electrical power should be back shortly, although navigation and propulsion might take up to half a day to get fully back online.”

  Parker stepped forward with a loud, attention-getting cough. Maurus snatched at his arm, but Chief Kobes had already looked up. “Who’s back there?”

  Maurus spoke up in a hurry. “It’s Lieutenant Maurus, sir. Captain sent me to secure these young passengers and take them somewhere safe. Engine room was closest. We’ll keep out of your way.”

  But Parker was already walking past him toward the console, ignoring Chase hissing his name to try to get him to stop. “If it’s just a system update that crashed the entire mainframe of the ship, then why are the emergency lights out too? Those should be on a separate network.”

  Kobes squinted at him for a second. “That’s not my biggest concern at the moment. Power will be back up shortly.”

  “Doesn’t it seem kind of strange to you that all the lights went out? That would have to override multiple safety redundancies.”

  “It’s a giant starship with a lot of integrated systems, kid. Glitches happen.”

  “I want a look at that code you were updating with,” Parker said.

  A growl fit to match his bulldog face came from the back of the chief’s throat. “I don’t have time for this. Lieutenant, get him out of here.”

  Muttering apologies, Maurus grabbed the back of Parker’s shirt and shoved him toward the door, waving for Chase and Lilli to follow. When they were back in the dark hallway, he hissed, “Is that what you meant by quiet as a ghost?”

  Parker twisted out of his grip. “They’re making a mistake. I don’t think this blackout was an accident.”

  Chase’s pulse spiked. This was it, the attack he’d been expecting for the past three months. “We should go to the captain and tell him before things get worse. What if we’re already under attack? Would we even know if we’re being surrounded right now?”

  Maurus stopped and raised his hands. “First off, if this were an attack, the best thing to do would be to let the Chief and his crew get the mainframe back online as quickly as possible. Not pester him about technicalities.” He glared at Parker. “The second best thing, Chase, is to keep a cool head and not overreact. The captain and the rest of the bridge team have things under control. You saw that Colonel Forquera and his team were sent out to look for possibilities of external incursion. The ship’s already on high alert. But you heard the Chief, it was very likely just a problem with a system upgrade. If there’s something else wrong with the ship, the engine crew will find it.”

  Parker shook his head. “They won’t be looking for sabotage. They can’t expect retaliation for something they don’t know about.”

  “And when this is over, you can investigate the blackout to your heart’s content,” said Maurus. “But for now, you let the crew do
what they were trained to do. They’ve got the ship under control. You do your part and be a respectful passenger.” As if to emphasize Maurus’s words, dim blue lighting flickered on overhead. “And there’s the emergency lighting.”

  “Only fifteen minutes too late,” retorted Parker, before he turned and headed back to the stairs.

  Maurus saw them back up to their rooms on the soldiers’ level, where Parker went straight to his desk and checked the connections on his computer before trying to power it back up. The air and regular lighting had kicked back on while they were walking up the stairs. Chase stood behind him, still shaken from the blackout and trying to formulate the question he’d resisted asking in front of Maurus. “Is it possible … with all the hacking you’ve been doing, piggybacking on the mainframe…”

  That made Parker look up from his screen. “Are you serious? You think I caused the mainframe to crash?”

  “I know you’re good at what you do, but this isn’t a house or a cruiser, it’s a humongous complicated starship. Maybe you did something by accident.”

  Parker narrowed his eyes. “A starship’s core is nothing more than a great big computer. Sure, it’s a computer that makes engines fire and produces gravity and maintains life support, but at the basic level it’s still just a very complex computer. That’s all. And I know computers better than anyone.” He turned his back on Chase and tapped his finger on the desk, waiting for his console to start up.

  Chase paced in front of the bunk, restless. As usual, there didn’t seem to be much he could do to help. “So what should I do?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered Parker. “Do anything, for once.”

  Chase stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Parker turned around with the irritated expression that Chase knew meant he was being distracted from what he really wanted to do. “It means you spend every day sitting in this room or you mope around the ship, lurking in the officers’ lounge or mooning over a videofeed of the captain. You don’t actually do anything else.”