Randoms (33 page)

“We'll be fine,” Tamret said.

I was less confident, however. “What's plan B?”

“Plan B,” Nayana said, “is that we give up and head back to the station. I like plan B, just in case you were wondering.”

Tamret smiled at me like we were sharing a secret. “Zeke and I can do this.”

“You know that for sure?” I asked.

“I know it for sure.” She met my gaze. This was no joke and no boast. She meant it.

“Alternatively,” I proposed, “we could try to slingshot around the sun to generate enough speed to produce a time warp, and then rescue the prisoners before they were ever taken.”

“Is that from a movie?” Mi Sun asked. “I hope you are being a dork, because if you're not, then you're a total idiot.”

“I'm being a dork,” I assured her.

Once they had finished with their briefing, and we had calculated the time and coordinates for our approach, Tamret walked us through the prison terrain itself. She called up the map of the compound, pointing out the main building and the bunker. The bunker contained a huge underground complex, and it served as the barracks, the armory, and the warehouse for storing Former artifacts.

Our sensors told us that there were exactly 203 sentient beings on the surface. Based on their movement patterns, which we were able to get the computer to analyze, it seemed that only forty-seven of these were guards. The rest appeared to be prisoners.

“The real problem will be once we've found Zeke's father,”
Steve said. “We can conceal our descent using gravity and radiation, but there's no way they're going to miss us when we take off. This whole plan depends on figuring something out once we're past the point of no return. Otherwise, that Phandic cruiser in orbit is going to stop us before we get anywhere.”

“We've come all this way,” I said, “and it hasn't been an accident. Dr. Roop picked us for this, and he's been training us for this. I don't believe he would have led us here if he didn't think we could do it, but I have to be honest and say I don't love going in if I can't tell you how we're getting out. You guys have been great, but I can't force you to do this. If you want to turn around and go home, we will. You can drop me off somewhere first. I'll find another way back here. But I'm not going to make you take this risk.”

“Good idea,” Nayana said. “Let's go back.”

“For what?” Mi Sun asked. “To be arrested for theft and kicked out of the Confederation? If we don't come back with that Phandic ship, we've done all this for nothing. I say we keep going.”

Charles tapped my arm excitedly and then pointed at Nayana. “She is the prim, golden robot, and Mi Sun is the beeping, competent, silver robot.”

I gave him a fist bump. “You have learned much, my friend.”

“We've already done the impossible,” Charles said to Nayana, “and we have been led to it. We may as well see where our streak ends.”

“Fine,” Nayana said. “But I am going to complain the whole time.”

•   •   •

She was as good as her word.

The more Nayana thought about it, the more she seemed
to hate the idea of coming at a straight dive and plummeting toward a planet at a speed that would render some of us, possibly all of us, unconscious. Admittedly, I could understand her concerns.

“What makes you think you can pilot a ship well enough to pull this off?” she asked.

“Look at me,” I said. “What do you see?”

“A guy who needs a shower?” she suggested. “A twelve-year-old in a stolen spaceship?”

“Look higher, like above my head.”

She did, and her eyes went wide. “What? Sixteen? That's not possible.” The rest of the humans were elevens, proud of it, and had been stuck there for a long time.

“I applied my unused points before we left the station. I'm level sixteen, and I've put every single skill point I have into the piloting track. That means I have the endurance, constitution, and agility to do this.”

Nayana's reaction surprised me. She burst into tears.

Charles moved toward her to comfort her, but she waved him away. “Leave me alone. I want to go home.”

“You want to go back to the station?” Mi Sun asked irritably. “We already decided this.”

“Not to the station. Home. Earth. My room. I want my bed and my things and my mother and father and my pet ca—my pet. I don't want to be here anymore. You're all brave and crazy, but I'm not. I'm not one of you.”

Tamret let out a long sigh and sat down next to Nayana. “As much as I hate to say it, you
are
one of us. And you
do
belong here.”

Nayana looked up at her.

Tamret rolled her eyes. “I don't like you, Nayana. In fact, I kind of hate you and would like to stick my claws in your eyes.”

“Focus,” I said.

“But,” Tamret continued, “you're the one who realized we needed to be looking at the selection committee. You figured out what was important and what was noise when it came to what we already knew. And that gigantic brain of yours cut through the Phandic patrol patterns like a hot knife through [
congealed animal fat
]. I don't know anything about this game you're supposed to be so good at, but as near as I can tell, it means you're able to see patterns and figure out strategies, and we need that.”

Nayana shook her head. “You don't get it. You're not afraid of anything, but I'm scared, okay? I am afraid I'm going to die, and I'm totally freaked out.”

Tamret rolled her eyes. “I won't let anything happen to you. I'll look out for you or whatever.”

All the lip biting and hand wringing told me Nayana wasn't buying it. “You say that, but, how do I know you mean it?”

Tamret sighed, like she was getting ready to jump off a cliff. “Fine. You want a guarantee. How's this. I invoke the ritual of bonding, and declare before [
the first tier deity of family
] that you are now my sister. Okay, we're like family now, so I will have your back. I pretty much have no choice, so have your big-baby cry and get it out of your system, because in about ten minutes we're going to be falling out of the sky so fast there's almost no way you're not going to pee all over yourself while blood vessels burst until you black out.”

Nayana sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hands. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing,” Tamret said, and walked away to give Nayana some time.

I followed her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “That was great. I know that sort of thing isn't easy for you.”

“The part about clawing her eyes out was pretty easy.”

“I know. But that's a big step, isn't it? Making her your sister?”

Tamret shrugged. “Not really. I just have to make sure nothing bad happens to her if I possibly can, which, just between us, I was probably going to do anyhow. Just on principle. But if it helps her pull herself together, then it helps you get your father.”

Tamret had just made a girl she found painfully annoying a member of her family, and she'd done it to help me. There was no way to thank her, not really, so I just took her hand, and we sat quietly for a little while. Then I turned to her. “Am I completely nuts to go down there, to bring everyone with me? I'm not a soldier. I'm a kid. I have no idea what I'm doing.”

She swiveled in her chair toward me. “Let me ask you something, Zeke. Is that how you feel, or how you think you should feel?”

I considered the answer to her question. “It's how I think I should feel.”

“In your heart, do you believe you can do it?”

“Yeah,” I said. And it was true. When I thought about what we were planning, what insanity we had lined up, I honestly believed I could pull it off. It wasn't hope or optimism; it was a weird certainty, like how when you turn on a light switch you expect the light to go on. You don't think,
I
sure hope the light comes on this time.
I expected to succeed.

“Why am I so confident?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Don't overthink it. Go with how you feel. I'll tell you a secret about yourself,” she said. “It's something only I know, and now you'll know it too.”

“What's that?”

“It's not just me,” she whispered. “You can do anything too.”

“I wish I believed that.”

“I believe it,” she said, “and that will have to be enough for now.” She gave my hand a squeeze and then let go. “Now let's go break into this enemy prison I've heard so much about.”

•   •   •

We kept on the far side of the planet from the Phandic flying saucer, but as we banked in, we caught a brief glimpse of it out the port-side screen. It was huge, maybe a third larger than the ship we'd fought in the
Dependable
. Its shape wasn't silly, and it didn't put me in mind of an old movie or a comic book or the countless parodies that showed laughable aliens in their absurd ships. No, the Phandic saucer was dark and looming like a predator. I felt my heart pound and my stomach flip. Then the ship was gone from my view. I wished it could be as easily gone from my mind.

Steve was our best pilot, so he was running helm, but he hadn't put extra points into constitution. Maybe his Ish-hi toughness would get him through, but we were taking no chances. I was on navigation, and Tamret was along for the ride, but on a ship like this any of the consoles could switch over to helm in an emergency. Our plan required just one of us to remain conscious on the way down. If none of us did, we'd never know, because we'd be obliterated when we hit the ground.

We were all strapped in as tightly as we could manage. I felt
my own safety belts almost squeezing the air out of my lungs. The lights and buttons and icons all glared up at me, and I knew if I let my mind wander, I would be terrified by the torturous complexity of them. It was like when you board a plane and you glance into the cockpit and see those endless dense rows of identical switches and you wonder what they can all mean and how anyone could possibly understand them all. I did understand the console, though, and for better or worse, we were going through with this landing.

When I was younger, I loved the TV show
Batman: The Brave and the Bold
, which took its name from a silver-age comic book that always featured team-ups. Each episode of the animated show would have Batman joining up with some other hero or team, and the whole thing had this silly feel to it—totally different from the gloomy tone of just about every other Batman comic or movie.

I loved the program so much I went back and collected as many of the old
Brave and the Bold
comics as I could find, and when I read each issue, I went in with one question: Which one was brave and which one was bold? I spent more hours than I would like to admit trying to tease out the difference between the two terms, and what I decided was that guys like Superman and Martian Manhunter were brave. They put themselves in danger for the greater good. They were willing to take risks and make sacrifices because doing so was the moral choice. Guys like Green Lantern and the Flash were bold—they were reckless and daring, Sure, they wanted to do the right thing, but their willingness to expose themselves to harm smacked of daredevilry, like their powers filled them with the urge to take chances.

I always admired the brave heroes, and I wanted to be one of them, but I didn't have what it took to be brave. Bravery required true courage. There was a nobility in bravery. As I prepared to drop down to that planet, I knew I was not being brave. I was being bold. I was reckless. I was taking other kids, the best friend I'd ever had, and a girl I cared about, into the most dangerous situation I could possible imagine, and somehow I had convinced myself I could do it.

•   •   •

Steve looked at his readout panel, which he'd configured to display solar flares. “Going to be soon, mate.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You feel good about this?”

I thought about it, and my answer surprised me. “I don't know why, but I do.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “Because I'm scared out of my bleeding mind. Coming up in three, two, one. Now!” He throttled the ship forward, and we all lurched back, but the g-force inhibitors kicked in like they were supposed to. We hadn't taxed them. Not yet.

The ship began to buck violently, and the engines whined. Despite being strapped in, I jerked violently in my seat. It was impossible not to feel like we were crashing, like we were doomed. Part of me wanted to panic, but part of me watched with calm dispassion, as though this were a movie, and a boring one. I began to wonder if the dread was somehow forced, like a memory of something that had once scared me as a little kid but meant nothing now.

Steve worked the panels in a state of near hypnosis. He flicked his tongue, as if the scents in the air could tell him
something about the ship's system. Maybe they could, for all I knew. Maybe it was a nervous habit.

“Listen up, sentients,” he said and the turbulence increased. “Tighten your sphincters.” Then we pivoted toward the atmosphere and throttled hard as we made entry. The shields kicked in, and the main screen showed the heat and fire building up toward our nose, generated by the incredible friction of reentry at top and stupid speeds. The g-force inhibitors were already maxing out, and I could feel pressure in my eyes and my sinuses. We were tossed violently. The engines screamed, and I heard the disconcerting sound of metal groaning under stress.

“Turn back,” I heard Nayana moan. “I can't do this.”

I wanted to tell her she could, but the effort of speaking was too much. Instead I watched as Steve broke through the atmosphere and cut the engines and we became nothing more than a meteor hurtling with murderous force toward the surface of a strange world.