Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon

by Searles, Rachel

  Beside him, Lilli’s hand rested on the bench, and he laid his own hand over her cold fingers. He couldn’t look at her. His fingers sank to the bench as hers disappeared, and she was gone.

  So he liked puzzles and camping, and both activities were linked with his parents. This had been his life only four months ago, and now he had nothing but questions and worries and a sister he couldn’t connect with. Chase rested his elbows on his knees and looked out at the black space beyond the mining colony, and tried to pretend he was okay.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Kuyddestor pulled up stakes and left the mining colony two days later. Deep space travel was much different in a massive starship than it had been the times Chase had experienced it in a cruiser. He barely noticed when the ship made folds, bending space around it to leap through unimaginably gargantuan parsecs of the cosmos. Aboard the ship, everyone was in an uproar of preparation. Announcements blasted through the loudspeakers, calling different groups to readiness reviews, or reminding soldiers to install the latest system updates to their mod software.

  Chase sat in his room, sorting through the contents of an emergency bag he’d put together after the blackout, mainly just a few phoswhites and some packaged rations from the canteen. He kept it near the head of his bunk, to feel like he was at least doing something to be prepared. Everyone else on board was eager to start the new mission—even Parker, who claimed that the new location would give them a much better chance of making headway with his microchip search. It seemed like Chase was the only one with any apprehensions about leaving the Movala system—well, he and his nearly nonexistent sister.

  Maurus had asked Chase to meet him in the officers’ lounge at 1700 hours so they could go to dinner together. Chase had planned to bring Parker, but Parker had gone off to the engine room that afternoon and wasn’t back yet, so at 1658 hours he headed into the hall alone. On his way he stopped by Lilli’s room to see if she wanted to join, but she wasn’t there either, which irritated him more than he liked to acknowledge. What kind of trouble was she getting into right now? As he walked his mood darkened, until he arrived at the officers’ lounge with a scowl on his face.

  He hit the entry key, and the door slid open on an empty room. Chase sighed in disgust. Maurus had forgotten and gone to dinner without him.

  “Surprise!” cried a chorus of voices coming out of nowhere.

  Chase stepped back, confused, and the view of the empty room shimmered and vanished—a hologram projection—revealing that the room was actually packed. There was Maurus and Parker and Lilli, along with Vidal and Seto and a dozen other young officers and pilots. A confused smile touched the corner of Chase’s mouth.

  “Happy birthday, Chase!” Parker grinned and waved excitedly at the table. “We made you a real cake!”

  “Today’s my birthday?” Chase asked. An unsettled feeling mixed with the pleasure of the surprise.

  Awkward laughter filled the room, and Maurus stepped forward and put his arm around Chase’s shoulder. “Lilli told us, and the captain confirmed your birth record.”

  This, Chase knew, was a lie—there was no public record of his birth. But everyone on the crew knew about his amnesia, which was woven into the captain’s cover story about him, Parker, and Lilli being orphans of the Trucon disaster. “Where is the captain?” he asked, looking around.

  “He said he’d try to come, but he didn’t make it in time for the surprise.” Maurus squeezed his shoulder. “Sorry if this was a huge shock. We figured you didn’t remember your birthday, but thought this would be the best way to learn about it, right?”

  “Are you going to cut this cake or what?” asked Vidal.

  Chase glanced around the room again. “Shouldn’t we wait for the captain?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Maurus. “Go ahead and cut it—we’ll see if Vidal can bake as well as she claims.”

  “Real cake!” repeated Parker, his eyes locked on the confection. “Chocolate!”

  “Disrespectful though, isn’t it?” Lieutenant Derrick unfolded himself from a chair, speaking not to Chase but to Maurus, his face arch with disdain. “We should wait for the captain.”

  Maurus glared back, his dark eyes sparking for a challenge.

  “Let the kid cut his cake, jeez,” said Seto, turning his toothy grin on Derrick, who rolled his eyes and looked away. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Seto’s cheerful cluelessness was authentic, or if underneath that grin he knew exactly what was going on.

  “Here,” said Vidal, handing Chase a slim melamine knife. He looked around the room, flushed. He’d grown comfortable hanging out in the officers’ lounge, but it was different with everyone’s attention focused on him. For a moment, he stood frozen with the knife in his hand. Maurus began to reach toward his hand, to take the knife away, and with his cheeks burning, Chase lowered his head and began sawing into the rich chocolate frosting.

  Vidal helped him hand out plates with slabs of cake on them, finally taking over so that he could enjoy his own piece. He took a seat on a couch, balancing the plate on his lap, and dug in, closing his eyes in pleasure at the first moist, decadent mouthful. Parker was right—real food was always light-years better than synth.

  “Mmmm,” said Ensign Cutler from a nearby chair, his eyes closed in delight as he ate the cake. “This reminds me of my mom’s cooking back on Ueta. She always made us birthday cakes.”

  “You’re from the farmlands, Cutty?” asked Maurus. “How on Taras did you end up in the engine room?”

  “What, you think farm boys can’t learn to code?” Cutler said with a grin.

  Parker was already scraping the last of the frosting off his plate with the edge of his fork. “Jeez, Parker, there’s more,” said Chase. “Have another piece.”

  Parker rose from the chair. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Maurus squinted up at him. “Wow, you’ve really grown since you came here, haven’t you?”

  It was true—Parker had sprouted up several inches over the past three months, as if the atmosphere aboard the Kuyddestor encouraged growth. For him at least—not for Chase, who had already been shorter than Parker and now felt positively dwarfed.

  “Cheers to you, Chase,” said Vidal, who sat in the corner with her friend Lieutenant Chiao. “How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen,” said Chase. The same age as Parker—at least for a few months.

  A flat little voice rang across the room. “No, you’re not.”

  Everyone turned to look at Lilli, who sat perched on the arm of a chair, balancing a plate with an untouched piece of cake on her knees. It was rare that she spent time in the officers’ lounge, and rarer still that she spoke. She looked at everyone defensively, shrinking back into herself.

  Please don’t vanish, please don’t vanish, thought Chase. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She stared at him for a moment. “You’re thirteen.”

  “No, I was thirteen. Now I’m fourteen.”

  Lilli shook her head. “You were twelve. Now you’re thirteen.” Chase began to say no again, certain she was wrong, but she interrupted him, reciting facts rapid-fire. “We celebrated your twelfth birthday last year. Mom surprised you with a blackberry tart instead of a cake. We packed up our dinner and ate a picnic at the lake. I remember this.”

  Heat rushed over Chase’s face. Why had he thought he was thirteen? Because Parker had guessed that was his age, and he’d never even questioned that assumption. It wasn’t like he’d ever had a reason to talk to anyone about his age. He looked around the room and saw pity on everyone’s faces. They didn’t know everything about him, but they knew enough to feel bad for the boy with no memory. A boy who couldn’t remember his last birthday.

  Slowly he set his half-eaten cake on the table. When he raised his gaze, the first thing he saw was Maurus’s dark eyes locked on him. The second thing he saw was that Lilli was no longer sitting on the chair. She was no longer in the room at all, but no one had noticed that she’d vanis
hed.

  He felt like he was going to explode.

  Maurus stood up quickly, setting his empty plate down. “Chase, will you come with me?” Without waiting for a response, he guided Chase out of the quiet lounge and into the hallway, where they walked a while without speaking, their footsteps ringing on the metal floors.

  “You’ve had a harder time adjusting to the ship than Parker has,” Maurus finally said.

  Chase said nothing at first, placing his hands briefly against his burning cheeks. “He’s got all these friends already, and interests.… I just—I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to be doing now?”

  Maurus hesitated. “Adjusting to your new life. Getting reacquainted with your sister. Building new memories for yourself.”

  “How do I do that? Am I supposed to forget about everything that happened to me? Stuff like this always happens and gets thrown back in my face.”

  “It will always be a part of who you are. But as time passes and you learn more and grow more, hopefully the experiences you have will fill you up and make your amnesia seem like a smaller and smaller part of you.” Maurus looked ahead. “On Lyolia, belief in fate is a very strong part of our culture. I think you have a very special fate, and the unique events of your life will bring you closer and closer to it.”

  It was strange to hear Maurus sharing this deeper, philosophical side of himself. Chase tried to think of something to lighten the conversation and move away from the topic of fate. “Yeah, I’m definitely special. I’m the only person I know who has a birthday and gets a year younger.”

  Maurus smiled and squeezed Chase around the shoulders with one arm. “Do you want to go back to the party?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “No. Go ahead—I’ll tell them the captain called for you.”

  “He’s not coming down to the party, is he?” Chase felt silly for even asking.

  Maurus’s smile twisted into a regretful look. “No, but you should go visit him on the bridge. I’m sure he’d like to wish you a happy birthday.”

  Chase shrugged. He already felt stupid enough about his age blunder—he didn’t want to interrupt activity on the entire bridge just because it was his birthday. He left Maurus and headed for the stairs, but instead of going up he went down, farther and farther until he was deep in the lower part of the ship somewhere near the engine room, an area he wasn’t as familiar with. He wandered the dark metal corridors of the lower halls, looking for anything that might possibly be Lilli’s hiding place, but there were too many doors and hallways and ladders to search. Finally he found a dark entryway and sank down against the wall. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. Wherever Lilli’s hiding place was, he wasn’t going to find it. She’d just stay hidden forever, which was probably the way she wanted it.

  Soft footsteps came down the hall and stopped beside him. Opening his eyes, he expected to see his sister and was surprised by the sight of long golden hair—and puffy red eyes. Analora stared back at him in surprise. Her cheeks were shiny with tears.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she said bluntly. “Are you?”

  Chase shrugged and sighed, looking at his hands on his knees. After a moment, Analora came over and sat beside him on the floor. “Sorry, that was a dumb question. Nobody just sits by themself on the floor of the engine deck hallway if they’re feeling awesome.”

  Chase gave a half-laugh and paused, trying to think of something to say. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Just walking around. Remembering stuff. I used to play down here with my friends.”

  Chase looked around at the sterile hallways. “It doesn’t look like a ton of fun.”

  A wistful look crossed her face. “You’d be surprised. When we were really little, when my mom still lived on the ship and I was here all the time, we’d pretend to be defending the ship from raiders. Or sometimes we’d pretend to be the raiders. It was pretty great. Then my parents split up and I started having to go to Jypras half the year, and when I’d come back it would always be something new, a different kind of game.” She sighed. “And now they’re all gone.”

  “Your friends? Where are they?”

  “Genevieve’s parents got transferred to another ship. Samir was older than the rest of us, and smarter than the rest of us, so he went off to university. And Dany … he got sent to Fleet academy.” Her voice threatened to break. “I went to the engine room to see Chief Kobes—Dany’s his son—and he told me he’s back on disciplinary status. I can’t even message him.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Chase awkwardly.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s stupid of me to sit here and bawl about losing my friends to someone who doesn’t know them or me, really.” She took a deep breath. “So what’s your story?”

  Chase hesitated. He’d assumed that she at least knew his cover story about being an orphan from Trucon, but maybe the doctor hadn’t told her. Or she hadn’t asked. So he told her the sanitized, crew-friendly version of his life story in brief.

  Analora’s face grew still as she listened to him speak. “That’s awful,” she said quietly when he was done. “I followed the Trucon events in the news when it happened. I can’t even imagine what it was like for you.”

  Chase shook his head. “It’s weird, I don’t even remember my parents. I don’t know which I’m sadder about—losing them, or not even remembering who they were to begin with. My sister’s here now too, but I don’t have any memories of her either. We don’t really get along.”

  “That sounds horrible.” She stretched her legs out beside his.

  “I guess when you lose the things that matter to you, it kind of feels like you don’t know who you are anymore. With or without amnesia.”

  Analora nodded. “I know that feeling for sure.” She knocked her foot companionably against his and smiled at him. “Maybe we can hang out, then, and be a little less lonely.”

  “I’d like that.” Chase returned her smile, and his spirits brightened for the first time that day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lying in his bunk in the early morning, Chase watched the view from the observation deck on their video screen as a smaller vessel pulled up alongside the Kuyddestor. After three days of travel, they had stopped at the edge of the Galloi star system for a rendezvous with a Federation envoy ship, the Falconer. In the officers’ lounge Chase had overheard that the ambassador sent by the Federation was coming aboard this morning to meet with the captain.

  “Do you understand what it is we’re supposed to be doing on this mission?” he asked.

  The sound of rustling sheets came from the top bunk. “Escorting some peacekeepers,” mumbled Parker, half asleep.

  “Yeah, but what are they keeping the peace about?”

  Parker sighed and rolled over. “This planet we’re going to, Storros, wanted to terraform one of its moons, so they hired some workers from another planet in their star system to do it. But then the people from this other planet were pretty happy with the terraforming work they’d done, so at the end they were like, hey, we’re gonna just stay here, okay? Bam, conflict. Honestly, you should watch the news once in a while.”

  Chase rolled his eyes. “Couldn’t they just share the moon?”

  “If you were having a house built, would you invite the contractors who built it to live in it with you afterward?”

  “A moon’s a lot bigger than a house.”

  “Yeah, but the principle’s the same.” Parker’s feet dangled over the edge of the top bunk, and he dropped to the floor and slouched toward his desk. Between working on his microchip and sorting through data about the blackout to look for anything suspicious, nearly all his time lately was spent in front of the computer.

  Chase got out of bed and started changing into the clothes he’d left lying on the floor. “So we get to Storros tomorrow?”

  “I suppose so. Or maybe later today.” Parker started fiddling with a jumble of tiny wires he’d b
rought back from his last visit to the engine room.

  Chase walked to the desk and leaned over to watch Parker laying out each thin wire as he untangled them. “Did hacking into the mainframe help you with the Asa stuff at all?”

  “It did, but then I needed to get a more accurate signal reader. I just finally got the right stuff to build one.” He kept working, head bent over his desk.

  “I’m going up to the observation deck for a closer look at the Federation ship.” Chase paused. “Wanna come?”

  Parker shook his head, not looking up. “Nah.”

  Chase slipped out of the room and headed down the hall, but not toward the observation deck. His path went toward the teleport chamber. If someone were trying to entrap Captain Lennard or anyone else on the Kuyddestor, the ambassador would be the first possible suspect. Catching a glimpse of the man might not tell Chase much about him, but it was a start.

  The room to the teleport chamber was open, and the only person inside was the officer manning the teleport console. Chase groaned internally when he saw who it was. Corporal Liadan Lahey, with her limp brown bob and permanent sour expression, was probably the unfriendliest person on the entire ship—surpassing even Lieutenant Derrick. Swallowing his apprehension, he tried to stroll casually into the room.

  “Hey, are the Federation people here?” he asked.

  Corporal Lahey looked up from her console with an insta-scowl, pursing her lips. “It’s none of your business. Get back to your quarters.”

  Chase tried again. “I was just curious if the ambassador’s on the ship.”

  “What part of ‘get back to your quarters’ did you not understand?” Her eyes shrank to angry slits. “Get out of here, or I’ll have the MPs escort you off the deck.”

  Chase opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and turned back to the hallway. He knew Parker would have had some kind of smart response for this, but he didn’t feel safe risking it, nor could he think of anything halfway clever to say. He was certain that Corporal Lahey was one of the soldiers who’d been sworn to secrecy about Chase’s status aboard the ship. He didn’t think she knew about his ability, but she’d been one of the few people present when Captain Lennard had accused Chase of being a clone—before Chase proved him wrong by surviving the vaporizing beam of a particle disperser.