Colonization (16 page)

The guard waved at someone inside the control tower, and a man shuffled down the stairs behind him. “Inform the lieutenant Andromeda Barliss is here to see him.”

“Yes, sir.” The man disappeared up the stairway and I tried not to lock eyes with the guard, lest he see through my white lie.

The guard stared at me with big desert-cow eyes, and I busied myself retying the strap on my uniform. “What’s it like being the commander’s great-granddaughter?”

That question haunted me everywhere I went. Yes, I had advantages, but no one looked at the expectations heaped on me or the fact my grandpapa was connected to a machine. I kicked a crystal rock across the airstrip with my shoe. “It sucks.”

He chuckled. “I doubt that.”

Before I could spit out a response, the man inside returned and gestured for me to follow him. “Right this way, miss.”

Fear and doubt weakened my knees.
Is this really the only way to go?
I thought of Sirius out there, with no knowledge of what he was up against, and forced myself forward. He’d have to forgive me later on, if he could.

I followed the man up the stairs to a glass room at the top of the control tower. Computer screens lined the circular wall below the sight panels, and men sat in hoverchairs, spouting coordinates and listening to headphones.

Lieutenant Crophaven spoke into a communications receiver. “Yes, yes. We’re doing the best we can.”

I bet he was in deep with all the missing colonists’ families. I could imagine Sirius’s mom in a fury on his wallscreen.

Lieutenant Crophaven turned around and gestured for me to follow him to a back room where computers beeped and wires stemmed in bunches across the ceiling. I’d stepped inside a sub-brain of the
New Dawn
.

“Hello, Andromeda. You have a private message for me?”

I nodded and a drip of sweat fell off the tip of my nose. “I know where to find the scout mission.”

“You do?” Surprise and doubt flashed in his rigid features. I swear more hairs turned gray on the sides of his head.

I cleared my throat, feeling I was in a ton of trouble with no way out. “The day I visited Sirius, I told him to scout the far ridge. I think some of the poisonous plants may be over there.”

He squinted his eyes, making me feel as though I was two feet tall, and I resisted the urge to cringe.

“Nonsense. First Officer Smith would never deviate from his course.”

I was the mother of all tattletales. “I asked him to, sir. He said he would.”

“You must be mistaken.” The lieutenant waved me away. “The last coordinates of the ship were fifty kilometers in the opposite direction.”

“You have to send search teams over the ridge.”

He scratched his head and looked away, as if searching for a way out of our conversation. “I thank you for your information, but we have exact coordinates to dispatch the search and rescue teams.” He gave me that don’t-tell-me-how-to-do-my-job look.

I had to keep trying, so I stared back at him. “I know Sirius planned to fly over the ridge.”

“The idea of a first officer deviating from orders is preposterous, especially navigating into dangerous winds above the ridge. He’d have to lose his mind before he flew there. Now, I have a lot of work to get back to. So if you’ll excuse me.”

He pushed past me like I was a fly on the wall. “Bradly, please show this young lady out.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man who brought me up took my arm to lead me back down. I wanted to yell over my shoulder, telling Lieutenant Crophaven he was wrong, but it was pointless.

As Bradly escorted me down the stairs, my mind swirled with the new information. I hadn’t known about the dangerous flight winds above the ridge. Would Sirius really endanger the mission because of me? Had he crashed over the ridge where no one would find him? I knew Sirius better than Lieutenant Crophaven, and I believed he would follow my advice. He always acted like he was invincible. Nothing ever got in his way, until now.

Chapter Nineteen

Shifting Gears

The floor chugged underneath my feet. At first I thought I was back in space, coasting along on the
New Dawn
like I had the past seventeen years of my life. My heart exploded with elation. Maybe it had all been a bad dream and Great-grandma Tiff would be waiting for me in our family unit, wanting to tell me Sirius stood at the portal to take me on another adventure.

The floor pitched down and sprang back up again, shattering my delusion. No, I wasn’t on the
New Dawn
. This vessel coursed faster and lighter through buoyant air, not space. I was on a ship, a Corsair.

Straightening up, I looked around me. Nova sat belted in a passenger’s seat along with Alcor Dunstable and Lyra Bryan. I cringed at the thought of being there in my sleep-pod nightdress, but no one seemed to see me or offer help as the ship pitched again, and I stumbled into the chrome wall.

A familiar voice rang out on the intercom. “We’re experiencing some turbulence due to high-speed winds. Stay seated and don’t panic.”

Sirius!
My whole body flipped to attention. Had I been assigned to the scout mission? Fog clouded my mind, and I couldn’t remember. A strange feeling of displacement tingled in my limbs. The situation didn’t seem right.

Pushing that thought away, I picked myself up and held onto the railing securing the supply containers. Gravity pulled me back, but I fought against it and tugged my way up to the cockpit.

Nova spoke behind me, her snobby, high-pitched voice making my insides crawl.

“This flight time is taking too long. We should have been back to the base by now. Something’s wrong.” I wanted to crawl back and smack her. How dare she question Sirius’s abilities?

Alcor peered out a small sight panel to his left. “I don’t recognize that ridge.”

“What ridge?” Nova squeaked.

A terrible sound wailed throughout the cabin, the sound of metal bending and a howling wind. Lyra screamed. All I could think of was reaching Sirius. I had to warn him about something, I just didn’t remember what.

My feet lifted from the floor. I free-floated, like on the
New Dawn
when the gravity rings cycled down. Below me, Nova ducked her head. Beside her, Alcor struggled to secure his mask while Lyra flailed around, totally freaking out. I reached down to calm her, but my head hit the ceiling and the world dimmed to black. I tried to open my eyelids, but they stuck to my face. Was I blind? I panicked, clawing at a hard surface above my head.

***

The lid of my sleep pod rose up and light from my room poured in. I took a deep breath, sweaty and shivering at the same time. The safety of my room surrounded me, yet I trembled with the memory of my dream.

Was it a dream? It seemed so real.

I stepped out of my sleep pod and pulled on the undershirt of my uniform. My head hurt where I’d hit it in the dream, and I rubbed my hand over a bump in the back. How could I have hurt myself so badly in my own sleep pod?

Had I somehow transported myself into their Corsair? The thought was so ridiculous I laughed out loud. Yeah, next I’ll have the ability to see through walls, and then to shoot lasers with my eyes.

There was only one way to be sure.

I sat on the floor next to the wallscreen and typed in
mission personnel corsair 747
. I hugged my shoulders while the computer searched for the information, hoping I was wrong.

The names popped up, and I recognized them one after another:

Sirius Smith, Navigator

Nova Williams, Team Expedition Leader

Alcor Dunstable, Medic

Lyra Bryan, Field Work Assistant

Before this, I hadn’t checked to see who was on the mission with Sirius, so how did I know it in the dream? Had I overheard someone talking about it? Thinking back, I couldn’t recall any particular conversation.

Could it have been a good guess? What were the odds I’d get the entire team right?

Dammit!
I stank at statistics.

If I had seen it firsthand with my weird psychic abilities, then they were in trouble. No one except Great-grandma Tiff would believe me. I couldn’t let this knowledge sit without acting on it. If something happened to them and I could have prevented it, then their deaths would be my fault. Thinking about how I’d sent Sirius over the ridge, they were my fault anyway.

I paced my room, thinking about all of the ways I couldn’t possibly rescue Sirius. I couldn’t fly a Corsair, trek across miles of jungle turf, or convince Lieutenant Crophaven to send reinforcements on the whimsy of a dream. None of it would work.

The Landrovers’ giant tires came to mind. The night that Corvus showed me the excavation site, I passed by several of them, fueled up and ready to go. How hard was it to drive one?

Running my fingers along the smooth plastic lid of my sleep pod as it sealed without me inside, I realized it didn’t matter how hard it was. I’d have to figure it out. The Landrovers were my only option to set things right. I still couldn’t reach my grandpapa, and my parents wouldn’t disobey Lieutenant Crophaven outright, even though Mom studied the enemy right in our greenhouse. Rescuing Sirius was up to me. That thought scared me as much as it pumped courageous blood through my veins.

Without another thought, I slipped on my pants and velcroed my boots. Everyone was sleeping soundly in their pods. I could sneak out and steal a Landrover without my parents finding out until the morning. By then I’d be long gone.

After stuffing my backpack full of supplies, I tiptoed to the portal of our family unit and punched in the exit code. I typed a quick message to my parents, saying I was all right and had gone away to be alone. I programmed the message to appear well into the morning, giving me time to get away. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be too angry.

The portal dematerialized, and I stepped into the dimly lit corridor without looking back. I listened for footsteps, but all I heard was the distant hum of the
New Dawn
’s operations as my grandpapa slept. A sense of timelessness fell over the ship, everything hanging in suspension, like a satellite in deep space. The vacant halls made my imagination run on overdrive.

What if I was the only person alive, doomed to roam a lost civilization. I wondered if the aliens died out all at once, or if a few survived to watch their colony perish.

Shivers tickled my spine, so I tried to refocus my thoughts on less scary subjects. I needed a plan to convince the guards to allow me to leave the ship in the middle of the night. I could tell them I forgot to turn on the irrigation system and all our plants would wither if I didn’t get out there. Or I could say Mom was still in her lab and needed me to bring her something from our family unit. They wouldn’t check her locator, would they?

As I weighed the various stories, I turned the corner to see a man in uniform slumped over by the exit. I froze in my tracks, thinking he was sick with the microbes. If so, I had to alert the entire ship, and then I wouldn’t get five feet from the ship’s portal.

He took in a deep breath and let out the nastiest snore, snot clogging his nose. I sighed with relief. He wasn’t sick at all. He slept on duty! I crept up to him and felt around his neck for his ID card. If he guarded the portal, he’d have access to the outside in case of an emergency.

I found the cord underneath the fold of his uniform and slipped out the card. Ted Barrister, it read.
Well, Ted, you’re going to have to explain this one to Crophaven on your own.
He shifted from one elbow to the other, but didn’t wake up.

I slid his card through the portal lock, hoping it wouldn’t make too loud a beep. The portal dematerialized and the humid air of Paradise 21 wafted in.

Before I entered the dark night, I clicked my locator, ejecting the energy cell. The movement was almost automatic. I’d done it hundreds of times before while sneaking around on adventures with Sirius. This time, not having it on could be dangerous. I stored the cell in my pocket. Best to keep it with me just in case.

I ran between half-constructed buildings and through metal frames for large skyscrapers to the excavation site out back. The heaps of dug-up turf lay behind the greenhouses where I spent most of my time, at the far edge of the colony where no one wandered or asked questions. Sliding down the private incline where Corvus had taken me, I trespassed into another world.

The construction team had unearthed half of the alien structures, right down to where the foundation melded seamlessly with the purple crystal in the planet’s core.

I stared at exquisite architecture, impossible by our standards. Yet the towers still stood after centuries, thin pinpricks of twisting ivory, like houses of angels with numerous windows yet no doors. Geometrical patterns so intricate I couldn’t tell where they started or ended were carved into the sides in a language I’d probably never understand.

Ladders were set up to reach the inside, tempting me to explore. But I had a mission to accomplish. Tearing myself away from the forgotten city, I approached the Landrovers in the back.

I had to climb the tires to reach the door. My backpack weighed me down, and I thought I’d topple over into the rotting turf they’d dug up the previous day. The stench tickled my nose, threatening a sneeze. I held my breath and squeezed the inside of my nostrils shut. My fingers found the grooves at the top of the tires and I pulled myself up.

The hatch rose with a gentle buzzing sound. Inside were two front seats and a panel of computer screens, all showing different gauges and charts. I threw my backpack into the passenger’s seat and climbed into the driver’s seat. Peering out the sight panel at the tangle of jungle, I touched the steering wheel. My fingers stretched around the thick plastic and I felt like a little kid in an adult’s job. I tried to turn the wheel right and left but nothing happened. The Landrover must be locked down.