Longshots, p.14
Longshots, page 14
She cut him off. “Just think about it. If you decided you don’t want to end up living like your uncle, then maybe start with the young lady currently sitting near the primary hatch in a puddle of her own tears.”
That image twisted in his belly as sharp as a knife. He really had been a jerk. “Thank you, Sheila. I’m sorry.”
“You’re welcome, Captain Chase. Oh, and I’ve matched a star map location to the stars outside. I know where we are.”
Chase’s face brightened. “Turbo! I knew you could do it! I’ll go tell Bree.” He made it halfway to the door then stopped and turned around. “Sheila, did you record the first vid stream to the governor?”
“Of course I did.”
“Would you mind loading it? I want to see something.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chase found Bree exactly where Sheila had said she would be, sitting on the floor of the main hallway by the primary hatch, knees drawn up to her tear-streaked cheeks.
He wasn’t sure how to begin. “Bree, I…”
She snapped her head up and caught his eye. “You what? You thought of something else mean to say? Save it. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Yeah, this was starting off great. He sighed deeply and dropped onto the floor beside her. “I’m sorry. I was a huge jerk. Like a black hole of a jerk. A galaxy-sized jerk. And, well, I’m really sorry.”
She looked at him but said nothing. He took it as a good sign. At least she wasn’t yelling at him.
“You were right. You’ve given me no reason to say anything like that, or even think it. You’ve been nothing but really turbo about everything since you saved our butts on the Jupiter. And all I’ve been thinking about is myself since then. I’m going to make it up to you, I swear. Just. Please would you give me another chance?”
She didn’t reply at first, just kept looking at him. Finally, she said, “It really hurt my feelings when you said that. I don’t like to talk about it, but being the governor’s daughter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I haven’t had any friends since I was very, very little. Everybody my age worries about how they act around me, and it doesn’t help that my mom and dad are really protective of me. But with you and Lock, it was like having real friends for once. And it made me kind of happy, even in the middle of all this. I guess I started getting upset when you said Daddy’s oldest friend was betraying him because if he can’t trust someone like Worrell, what hope do I have to ever find a normal friend? Then, with Lock being gone and you getting so mean all of a sudden, I just, I couldn’t take it, I guess. But really, it’s a lot my fault that your brother isn’t here, and all I do is complain about my dad when yours could be anywhere. So I guess I can see why you got so mean.”
Chase shook his head. “No. That’s no excuse. I had no right to take things out on you, and Lock, well, that’s as much my fault as anyone’s. But you know what? I think I know how to make us both feel better about it.”
“How?”
“Sheila found us. Or, well, she figured out where we are. What do you say we skip outta here, get to the Catapult, and find Lock?”
“She did, really?”
Chase nodded, smiling.
Finally, her mouth widened into her usual bright grin. “Turbo! Good work, Sheila!”
“Thank you, Miss Bree,” the computer replied over the intercom speaker. “Are we ready to depart, Captain?”
“Yes, Sheila. Set a skip course for ’Pult Station. We’ve got a galaxy to save.”
“And a brother to find,” Bree added, scrubbing the tear marks from her cheeks.
“Acknowledged, Captain. Skipping now.”
With that, the entire passageway seemed to lurch around them without really going anywhere. They were on their way.
“Now.” Chase stood. “Come up to the bridge with me. Unfortunately, I need you to see something.”
Bree gave him an uncertain look but extended her hand so he could help her up. “Why is it I don’t think I’ll like this?”
Chase explained as they made their way back to the bridge. When they got there, he pointed her to the comms console, which showed her original conversation frozen at the frame where Prime Minister Worrell first appeared with his shaven head and bushy white eyebrows.
“Go ahead and start the playback,” he said.
She hesitated for a moment, troubled, but eventually reached forward and pressed the screen’s Play button.
First, her own voice came on the recording. “Oh, Prime Minister Worrell, I didn’t know you were listening in.”
The prime minister then replied, “Yes, I just happened to be here discussing that very mission with the governor. I’ll be departing soon. So don’t worry about that at all. We’re just looking forward to the Itzabella delivering you here quickly and safely.”
Chase tapped the screen, hitting the Stop button. “You see?”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Bree tapped her finger on the console.
“Yes, I’ve watched the whole thing six times to make sure. You can, too, if you want, but there’s absolutely no mention of the Itzabella in the stream anywhere. We weren’t broadcasting our beacon signal at the time. You didn’t inform the operator where you were, and if you remember, Lock bounced the signal off a bunch of places so it wouldn’t be traced by the Jupiter, or anyone else for that matter.” He paused for a second to let that sink in. Finally, he added, “There’s just no way Worrell could have known the name of our ship unless he’d talked to Cain.”
“There has to be another explanation. I just can’t believe it.”
“Maybe there is,” Chase allowed. “Maybe I’m missing something. But I think it’s weird enough that until we’re sure, we should stay away from him when we get to the station.”
Bree considered it for a few seconds, finger still tapping the console. At last, she stopped and turned to him. “Okay, fine. We’ll avoid him for now. Daddy can get to the bottom of that once we deal with stopping the rebels.”
Chase smiled. He maybe hadn’t convinced her all the way, but it was good enough for the time being.
The skip flight to Catapult Station was agonizing. The navigation console displayed an icon of the ship on a blue line that represented their path, which ended in an oval that was supposed to be the space station. The blinking image of their ship inched its way across the line so slowly it was impossible to tell if it was actually moving or just his eyes playing tricks on him.
Chase quit staring at it about a third of the way there, a few hours after they entered skip and with at least six more to go. Bree spent most of that same time watching and rewatching the video stream of the message to her father, searching, without any luck, for some evidence that Worrell could have known the name of the ship.
Eventually, thankfully, the rhythmic pulse of skip travel and the days of near-constant activity since he and Lock had left Terran Station in hopes of finding the governor’s daughter caught up with him. He fell asleep, face down on the nav console.
He woke to a soft chirping coming from under his cheek then a well-known lurch back to normal speed. Chase snorted softly, looked up at the display in front of him in confusion. The sleepiness burned away sharply, though, as reality came back to him. On the nav display, their blinking ship was positioned right on top of the oval. They’d arrived. Even better, the braking thrusters apparently did their job and slowed the Itzabella. They wouldn’t be crashing into the space station after all.
Behind him, near the front display windows, Bree gasped.
He wrenched his neck around sharply. “What’s wrong? Are we too late?”
“No,” she replied, barely whispering. “I’ve just never actually seen it like this before. I’ve been here lots of times, and even flown through it once on a trip to Old Earth. Daddy never let me watch because Mom always worries the ship’s windows will break apart from gravity or force or something. But this… it’s… amazing.”
In front of them, still thousands of miles away, the New Terran Interstellar Transportation Conduit filled the emptiness of space. It was a huge circle filled with what appeared to be a constantly moving, somehow-shimmering spiral. Some people said the spiral was only an optical illusion, an artifact of the massive energy moving around within the frame that somehow catapulted ships to Old Earth in just under a day, a trip that had taken Bree’s ancestors over two hundred years of skip travel. To accomplish that should have been impossible, at least as far as Chase understood it, but Lock had told him once it worked because the device was near a well-known black hole, which was itself visible as just a small disc of complete black on the far side of the Catapult itself.
’Pult Station was what made the marvel more impressive because without it nearby to provide scale, just looking at the Catapult wouldn’t have meant much. But the station—an exact duplicate of Terran Station, in orbit around the planet New Terra—was, as Chase knew, gigantic. Its size would dwarf the Itzabella when she drew close. That same space station, though, looked small enough from that distance, it seemed the Catapult could possibly hold hundreds of them within the center of its circle.
A ship like the Itzabella flying into the sea of whirling energy at the center of that monstrous device would be little more than an insect flying through a hangar door.
“What’s it like, traveling hundreds of light-years back to Old Earth in just a day?” Chase asked, standing beside Bree, eyes wide with marvel.
“It’s strange,” she said, still whispering. “At first, you get this crazy rush. It felt like the time I talked Dellina into letting me try a cup of coffee on vacation and I ended up talking like a hundred words a second. But that sensation faded after a minute or two, they told me, because my body got used to it. After that, everything was kind of normal. Except for the buzz.”
“The buzz?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s like having a bug buzzing around your head constantly, but more inside it than around it. You get used to that, too, enough that by the time you get to Old Earth, you’ve forgotten about it.”
“I bet you miss it by then, huh?”
She smiled. “Not really, because when you finally get there and come out of the Catapult on their end, you feel like you’ve come to a screeching halt, then for a few seconds, everything’s in really, really slow motion. And when that wears off, you’re just normal again.”
“I’d like to do that someday. I’d like to see Old Earth just once. I bet it’s really turbo.”
“I guess. Probably depends on who you go with.”
“You went with your parents?”
Bree nodded. “It was all ‘official visit’ stuff. Fancy dinners and ‘my best behavior.’ I didn’t have much fun.”
“Well, next time, make sure you take some good friends.” Chase gave her his best grin.
Bree laughed.
“Enough gawking. Sheila, request clearance to dock on station, please.”
“Already taken care of, Captain. Clearance requested and confirmed.”
“Thank you. Take us into port, then.”
Sheila managed their approach flight and coupling sequence, even avoiding the hard thud commonly experienced when a ship came into a space station docking slip too fast. After not even half an hour from their arrival out of skip, they were hooked up and ready to board ’Pult Station.
Standing at the hatch with Bree, Chase opened the portal and peeked out, half expecting to find a platoon of Shock Troops waiting for them in those creepy, shiny black helmets. Thankfully, no one was there. Before stepping out, though, Chase paused. “Sheila?”
“Yes, Captain?” the ship replied.
“We don’t really know what’ll happen here. So, keep everything up and ready in case we need to get out quick. Okay?”
“Acknowledged, Captain. I’ll keep the motor running, Chase.”
Chase smiled. “Thank you, Sheila. For everything.”
Together, he and Bree stepped off the Bella and sealed her up tightly behind them. Then they made their way through the crowd of people working in the starship port. The docks on New Terran space stations were always incredibly busy, in Chase’s experience, which made moving around without notice easy. There was no telling who Worrell might have in position to keep an eye out for them.
“This place is just like Terran Station,” Chase said as he and Bree neared one of the four elevators on that level. “With so many people, how will we find your Salen guy?”
“I thought about that on the way here,” she replied. “No matter what he’s doing here, he’ll be using his naval credentials to move around. We should be able to look him up in the portal security logs.”
Chase stopped, letting people in the crowd flow around him. “Um, and you have access to that?”
She smiled back. “Well, not officially. But Daddy’s not very good with computers and asks for help sometimes. I know more about the system than most engineers—and his personal access codes. If there’s information about Salen in there, it’ll be a snap.”
He shook his head, chuckling. “It’s like having a princess and a hacker all in one.”
“Come on.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him to the closest lift.
They found a New Terran Authorized Use Only terminal a few levels down on a deck with a large number of New Terran government offices. At Bree’s suggestion, Chase left her at the terminal to look up whatever she could find on Salen in the system while he hung around at the railing at the center of the level and just looked up and down at the floors above and below them. She thought that two kids huddled around a government data point would call attention to them, while she was more likely to be overlooked by herself.
Whether that was true or not, no one bothered her while she dug through the system, and the only person who said anything to Chase was a grandmotherly-looking woman who came out of one office and asked if he knew where she could find a restroom. Still, he constantly had to force down the fear that Shock Troops would appear out of nowhere and surround him.
“Between the waiting and expecting Shock Troops at any second, I’m likely to crack before she finds anything,” he mumbled, watching people unload from the nearest elevator for the twentieth time.
Finally, Bree joined him at the railing. “I got it. Salen’s been here two days, and he’s only been in two places—the brig and the auxiliary engineering closet on sublevel forty-four. It says he logged in there earlier today and never logged out, so he should be there now.”
He nodded. That made a lot of sense. Just like on Terran Station, the brig would be on the lowest level any unauthorized civilian would have access to, and the decks below that would be heavily restricted. Worrell could easily shuttle Salen back and forth on those levels, and no one would ever know.
“Can you get us down to sublevel forty-four?”
“I think so.” Her usual smile was gone, though, and her lips were pressed tightly together. She was just as nervous as he was.
“Let’s go, then. If we don’t get this over with soon, I’ll be jumping at my own shadow.”
“You’re not alone,” she said as they made their way to one of the elevators.
Thankfully, they didn’t have to wait long for one. When they got on, a dozen other people were inside. Chase, knowing they would have to enter a security code to get to sublevel forty-four, instead hit the button for sublevel thirty. After stopping at what seemed like every level between where they’d gotten on and where they wanted to go, they eventually found themselves without any other passengers and headed to the bottom.
While they were still dropping toward sublevel thirty, Chase flipped open the Authorized Use Only panel on the elevator’s control console and tapped the Level button then typed in forty-four. Instantly, the panel display demanded a keycode.
“Cross your toes,” Bree mumbled as she keyed in a sequence of letters and numbers. She must have gotten it right, though, because when she finished, the background of the panel turned green, and the message read, Thank You.
After a brief stop at thirty—which probably would have seemed strange had anyone been watching since no passengers got on and they didn’t get off—the elevator raced to sublevel forty-four. It chimed at their destination, and as the doors opened, Chase tightened his fist until his knuckles turned white while Bree rapidly tapped her fingers against the control panel. If someone was standing there, waiting, they would have some quick explaining to do.
Luckily, the door opened into a dark, empty hallway.
Chase exhaled a breath he’d held long enough for his chest to tighten. “Wow, I’ve never been down here. These floors are a lot different from the ones above.”
“It looks like it,” she agreed. “They aren’t open in the center like the civilian levels. I guess these are all more closed off.”
Chase popped his head out of the lift and saw nobody in any direction. “Okay, let’s go. Show me the way.”
“Follow me.” Bree darted out and immediately turned left.
They walked quickly down another dark, empty hallway before she stopped at a door labeled Engineering–Aux. She quickly typed in another code on a panel beside the door, which clicked and slid open, followed by a brief whoosh of some kind of gas.
Again, Chase popped his head through the doorway. Seeing nothing but darkness again, he stepped into the room, waving Bree to follow. She did, closing the door behind her.
They tiptoed as quietly as they could through a short hallway that turned right then ended in an opening. The soft bluish glow of display monitors flickered just beyond the opening. With a sigh of relief, Bree stalked ahead of Chase, turning to the right and almost running through the opening.
“Wait!” Chase whispered.
Something seemed wrong. But it was too late, so he raced after her into the more open part of the room. Which was empty save for Bree and two banks of computer consoles.
