Parker pushed Chase out of the way and marched toward the hovercraft. “Take us to the surface. We can still catch his trail if we hurry.”
The medic shook his head. “I’ll take you to the refugee station so you can get registered. That man can take care of his wife’s problems on his own.”
“Are you a moron? That wasn’t his wife, he just stole my android! We need to go after him, right now.”
The medic’s expression hardened. “You’ll have to report it at the refugee station. Now get on board.”
Parker crossed his arms and scowled at the medic. At the edge of the platform, a gray-uniformed Fleet soldier stepped down off the hovercraft. “Are these boys giving you trouble?” he asked.
Chase took a step backward. Maurus might not have recognized him, but Dr. Silvestri’s last words echoed in his mind nonetheless: Do not go to the Fleet. He exchanged a quick glance with Parker, and without a word they spun around and ran.
“Hey!” shouted the medic. “Get back here!”
Leading the way, Chase sprinted toward the vehicles docked along the circular platform. He dodged around a long, narrow airship, right into a hanging metal flap that the owner must have forgotten to close. Stumbling a step, he grunted in surprise, but was already past it, his face tingling where he must have grazed it.
A second later, he heard a thud and a cry behind him. He looked back, still running, and skidded to a stop. Parker lay flat on the platform, his hands clutched to his face. A streak of blood painted his forehead right at his hairline, where he’d opened up a wide gash.
Chase looked back at the metal flap, touching his own forehead. How had he managed to miss it? He looked at his hand, but there was no blood.
“Aughhhh,” Parker groaned.
Chase started back to his side. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, that’s just great,” said the medic, who’d jogged up beside them. “Why do you dumb kids always have to run? That laceration’s too big for steamgel. You’re going to need a lasobind.” He pulled a bandage from his satchel and pressed it on Parker’s forehead, helping him to his feet. “Come on, kid. You’ve earned yourself a trip to the medical center.”
Chase kept his head tipped down and didn’t look the soldier in the eyes as they boarded the hovercraft. A practical side of him insisted it was silly to constantly think he might be recognized, but the memory of the soldiers who’d chased them on Mircona was still too fresh in his mind to take any risks. He crouched in the back of the vehicle as they flew into the deep shaft and zipped past rows of docked vehicles, cool air rushing through the open hovercraft.
Parker glared at him with one eye, pressing the soaked bandage to his head. “Thanks for warning me there was something in the way.”
Chase gave Parker a pat on the shoulder. “Sorry about that. I guess I was running too fast.” Inside, he fidgeted, wondering how long it would be until they could get away from this soldier and look for Maurus and Mina.
“Hey, am I going to have a scar?” Parker asked, raising his voice.
The medic turned from the front, where he sat beside the Fleet soldier. “No, but you might have a concussion. You’ll have to get a scan.”
The hovercraft emerged from the portshaft into muted daylight. Chase wasn’t sure how many hours had passed since they’d left Trucon, but based on how exhausted and hungry he felt, it was at least the middle of the night for him. Here on Qesaris, it looked like early morning. They flew into an endless forest of gray buildings and headed around an enormous, circular structure with grand arched entryways. Throngs of people milled in and out of the building, and even from where they flew, Chase saw expressions of shock, grief, anger, resignation—an overall atmosphere of misery and loss. He tried to look for Maurus, but instead his gaze was caught by a sobbing woman clutching the arm of the grim-faced man beside her, while a few feet away an older man with a white beard screamed at the sky. Soldiers in gray uniforms milled through the crowds around them.
They soared away from the stadium and down a street buzzing with sky traffic, darting between vehicles as they sped ahead. Tall skyscrapers hemmed them in on either side, disappearing into a smoggy haze above. After a few turns and one very long stretch, they pulled up outside a monstrous building. Its exterior was several shades darker than most other buildings, and covered almost the entire block, looming over the street. Half the windows were covered in metal bars.
The medic jumped off the hovercraft and led them inside the dark building into a lobby packed with confused, angry people. He looked around, shaking his head. “What a mess. Just, uh, get in line here, and someone will come take care of you.”
“Get in line?” asked Parker. “I could die of a concussion before I get helped.”
The medic rolled his eyes. “You’ll be fine.” He turned and left, abandoning them in the middle of the chaos.
A group of soldiers entered the lobby and began weaving through the crowd. Chase lowered his head and tried to casually block his face with his hand. “We need to get out of here,” he said under his breath.
“What, you think I’m okay to go?” Parker said loudly, lifting the bandage to reveal the oozing gash on his forehead. “Does it look good to you?”
Chase winced. “Alright, yeah. You need to get that looked at.”
“They’re probably only going to make me check in, but if they ask you, don’t try to give your real name this time—you’re still Corbin Mason, and I’m your brother.”
“Shouldn’t you change your name too?”
“You’re right. I’ll be Livingston Mason.”
“Livingston?”
“You have a better one?”
“I could think of a thousand.”
Parker rolled his eyes. In front of them a tall blond boy turned around and gazed at them with watery, bloodshot eyes. “Where were you?”
“Huh?” said Parker.
“When it happened, I was on an autobus, heading home from school,” the boy continued in a shaky voice. “The driver yanked the bus offtrack and headed skyward … I don’t know where my … my…” His eyes filled with tears.
“Oh. Well, we were on Mircona,” said Parker awkwardly. “Didn’t even realize what was going on until the whole planet looked like a bonfire. Wild, right?”
The boy stared at Parker for a moment. “Freak,” he mumbled, turning away.
“What is wrong with you?” hissed Chase.
“What?”
Chase shook his head and looked away, embarrassed. On one side of the room, a makeshift registration area had been set up. Chase squinted at the men sitting behind the tables, taking people’s information. They weren’t human—even he could see that—their movements were stilted, and they had smooth, peach-colored skin and glassy eyes that never blinked.
“Are those androids?”
“Ding ding ding, genius,” said Parker. “Lords, I’m starting to feel dizzy.”
An older female officer in a tan uniform cut her way across the room, shouting orders at the soldiers. “Get a system in place! This is not hacking it, private,” she barked. She stopped in front of Parker. “What have you got under there?” she asked, nodding at his bandage. When he showed her, she pulled an instrument from her belt.
Chase dropped his head, hiding his face. From the corner of his eye he watched the woman’s round, rosy face, with a clipped blond-gray bob and bright blue eyes, making her look like the world’s oldest baby doll, dressed in military gear. She held Parker’s chin with one hand and pointed the device at his forehead with the other.
“Ow, that stings!” said Parker.
“Of course it does,” she said. “Where’s your family?”
“Dead.”
The officer bit her lip and didn’t speak as she finished mending the gash on Parker’s forehead. When she was done, she gave it a wipe and examined her work.
A soldier appeared on her right. “Colonel Dornan, vector command wants you in a telecon right away.”
The woman nodded, focusing
all her attention on Parker as she pulled out another device and held it in front of each of his eyes. “We should see about sending some of the orphans over to recruiting,” she said quietly to the soldier.
“Kinda young, isn’t he?” he asked.
Chase glanced up to see her reaction. Recruiting? Did she mean for the Fleet?
Colonel Dornan shrugged. “Okay, you’re all set,” she said to Parker. “Wait here and someone will take you back to refugee registration.” She turned to the soldier, and as they walked away, Chase heard her complain that they should be processing everyone this quickly.
He looked at Parker. “Can we go now?”
“After you.”
It was easy to slip out of the chaotic medical center and onto the street. Hovercraft traffic zipped by in orderly lines overhead, but on the ground only a few wheeled vehicles rolled past. Chase sped down the street, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the medical center. “Which way?” he asked, stopping on a corner.
“I think we’re okay now.” Parker placed his hand against a building. “Woo, dizzy. Let’s sit down somewhere. There.” He pointed down the street to a doorway with a magenta sign hanging over it that read Captain Orion’s.
Inside was a bustling, brightly lit café, filled with the comforting smells of fresh baking and hot grease. They squeezed their way through the tightly packed room and took seats at a small table near the back. The walls of the café were covered in video screens, each one blaring an advertisement for something called ReNuvaGel, accompanied by images of a nondescript woman’s wrinkle-free face. Parker tapped on the illuminated tabletop and began scrolling through a list of pictures.
Chase laid his head down to rest his cheek on the cold, smooth surface. His head whirled as the remaining shreds of panic dissipated. They were safe. For now. “What did that officer mean about recruiting you for the Fleet?” he asked.
Parker shrugged. “Another warm body to serve the Federation. They’re always pulling shady stuff like that. Yes! They have scrappies here! I hope you’re hungry.” His fingers flew excitedly over the tabletop. “What’s wrong with you?”
Chase took a deep breath. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten and he was starving, but that wasn’t his first concern. “What are we going to do now? There’s no way to contact Asa without Mina, right?”
“Right. We just need to find her.”
“Okay,” Chase said sarcastically. “No problem.”
“You’re forgetting something, dummy.”
“What?”
“Maurus told us what ship he serves on. The Kai Desser or something. We just have to find it and then we’ll be able to find him.”
Chase snorted. Parker had a magical way of making things sound easier than they really were.
“Hey, sit up. Food’s here.”
“Already?” Chase lifted his head off the table as Parker took drinks and paper packets from a tray hovering beside them. Chase unwrapped one of the packets and found something that looked like a dense orange sponge. He poked it cautiously.
“It’s called a scrappy—soy-chitlin-riboflavin patty,” said Parker. He broke his own patty into quarters and folded each piece meticulously in half before cramming it in his mouth.
Chase tentatively took a bite. The texture was strange—melty smooth on the outside, unexpectedly crunchy on the inside, with a rich, almost cheesy flavor. In three bites he devoured the whole thing. He washed it all down with a huge gulp of the fizzy red drink, wincing a little at its sweet-sour taste, like raspberries soaked in vinegar, and reached for another scrappy.
Parker swallowed and grinned. “Good, right?”
Nodding vigorously, Chase took a huge bite.
“One time last year, I snuck out and went into Rother City to a Captain Orion’s and bought like a hundred scrappies, and brought them back and hid them in my closet.”
“Ew. Did they get all nasty?”
Parker’s face lit up. “No! That’s the crazy part—they stayed exactly the same! I was eating them for a month.”
Chase laughed. “That’s gross.”
“I know. They’re probably really bad for you.”
“Did Mina get mad?”
Parker gave him a devilish grin. “She never found out. Her central processor almost caught fire trying to figure out how I skipped every meal for two weeks and never lost any weight.” He frowned at the scrappy in his hand. “Actually, this is the first time I’ve eaten one since. For a while, I couldn’t even think about them without getting sick.”
Chase took a long pull on his red drink. The flavor had become strangely appealing. “Why didn’t you just have your autokitchen make them for you?”
Parker made a face, shaking his head. “Synthesized food seems like a great idea. You store the basic molecules of food—proteins, fats, sodium, the like—and the machine reorganizes them in a million different ways. But after years of eating nothing but synth, you realize that everything has this same underlying bland taste like, I don’t know, petroleum jelly.”
“That breakfast we had at your house was pretty good,” argued Chase.
“It’s not inedible, but you can’t compare that synth croissant with a real, freshly baked croissant, can you?”
Chase mentally reached for the comparison, but there was no memory of a freshly baked anything. Did that mean he’d never had one? Maybe he’d eaten a thousand croissants in his lifetime—or maybe he’d eaten nothing but animal feed from an aluminum chute. His grin faded, and he looked down at the table. “I don’t know,” he said.
For a moment Parker was silent. The chatter of the café rose up around them. “Sorry.”
Chase shrugged. When he raised his eyes to meet Parker’s sober gaze, he felt self-conscious, but there was no trace of pity in Parker’s expression. For a moment Chase got the feeling that Parker really saw him, really understood how he felt. Then Parker picked up the rest of his scrappy and shoved the entire thing in his mouth at once, making his cheeks bulge out like twin balloons.
“Now finish your unidentified indestructible food product,” he warbled around the mouthful. “Who knows when we’ll eat this well again.”
With a wan smile, Chase reached for his third scrappy when he noticed that the noise of the café had started to die down. The wall of screens had switched to a video feed showing a blond female newscaster standing like a perky sail in a sea of distraught refugees, and everyone was watching. Her voice echoed at them from all directions.
“With aid primarily provided by the Federal Fleet, refugee centers on Qesaris are processing most of the survivors of the Trucon disaster. If you’re just tuning in, this is Parri Dietz reporting on the event of the millennium, a devastating and unprecedented attack on the Federal colony Trucon. With stolen military technology, the attacker used nuclear thermodetonators in the oxygen plants of Rother City to scorch the atmosphere…”
Her image was replaced by a view of Trucon from Mircona, looking peacefully blue and sandy. Everyone in the café watched in horror as a black smudge appeared on the globe, expanding and blossoming with red and orange as it moved out over the entire planet. Just as it was about to eclipse the last bit of blue ocean, the newscaster’s image reappeared.
“One moment, Boris, I’m getting an update here,” she said. “Early reports indicated the involvement of the Lyolian resistance group, Karsha Ven, and now we do have a photo. The suspected mastermind of the Trucon disaster is a Lyolian pilot serving in the Federal Fleet, a Lieutenant Elmans—I’m sorry, I’m not even going to try to pronounce this one—Lieutenant E. Maurus.”
The screen changed before Chase’s brain caught up, and he gasped when he saw the image that flashed across the screen: Maurus in his military gray, wearing a severe expression, his dark eyes arrogant and fierce.
“Lords!” yelled Parker. He slammed his half-eaten scrappy on the table.
“That’s right, a Lyolian in the Federal Fleet—part of an experimental office
r interchange program,” the newscaster continued. “Lieutenant Maurus has been serving as a pilot on the IFF Kuyddestor. Although we haven’t received a copy of the image yet, he was photographed on Trucon shortly before the disaster, meeting with members of the Karsha Ven rebel group, where he allegedly provided them with the stolen thermodetonators.
“Although the Karsha Ven have not yet claimed responsibility for the attack, security analysts have been expecting some form of anti-Federation assault for the election of the new Lyolian president. Lieutenant Maurus is suspected to have died in the ensuing disaster. We’ll have more on this story as it unfolds, Boris.”
Chase opened and closed his mouth several times, trying to find words for all the thoughts tumbling through his head. “But he’s not dead.”
“No, genius, he’s not.” Parker slammed his drink on the table. “Because we saved his life. We saved the life of the biggest mass murderer in history. Why did they let a Lyolian in the Fleet to begin with?”
“They said it was an experimental program—” Chase began.
“That’s stupid! It’s like if I ‘experimentally’ invited a Zinnjerha into my house to see if it’d make a nice pet.”
“There’s a slight difference between Maurus and a Zinnjerha.”
“Right, because at least I know what a Zinnjerha’s intentions are from the start. Lyolians are physically the most similar to Earthans, but they’re all sneaks and liars. Their planet’s been in a messed-up civil war forever and the Karsha Ven are just … they’re monsters. They’ve killed tons of innocent people. I don’t even know what their goal is, other than making trouble for the Federation.”
Parker’s railing on about the Karsha Ven wasn’t getting them any closer to finding Mina. Chase took a sip of his drink to clear the tight feeling in his throat and rubbed his forehead. “I guess we’re not going to find Maurus on his ship then, are we?”
Parker loosed a torrent of profanity. “He may think he’s gotten away with Mina, but when she wakes up, she’ll break his neck.” He crumpled up a wrapper and threw it at the table. “She’ll come back to me.”
Chase looked back at the screens. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a tiny movement, but before he could focus on it, a sudden coldness spread in his lap. Parker’s glass lay tipped over on the table, its fizzy red contents spilling everywhere. Chase leapt to his feet, wiping the liquid off his pants. “Thanks a lot!”
Lost Planet 01 - The Lost Planet Page 8
