THIRTY-FOUR
THE RING
Shielded behind the bar, March has seen Anies trying to take me away. Several rows of bullets blast into the sculpted mahogany in an explosion of wood shards. Not good . . . He can’t cross the room until he’s gotten rid of the three remaining men, and that’s without taking into account the elevator. It went down a few seconds ago, and whether it’s coming back up full of Lions or the Queen’s men will determine whether we live or die.
I kick and jerk in vain in Anies’s grip as the door gets ominously closer, and his men slowly back up in a cluster to protect our escape, guns and rifles in hand. There’s no time left. When I hear renewed gunshots coming from behind the bar, I expect to see March jump out in the open, but that’s not it. Above our heads, the crystal chandelier illuminating the room tinkles and creaks dangerously . . . before crashing to the ground, taking out one of the Lions in the process. My eyes briefly screw shut at the sight of the sea of blood-covered crystals now covering a copy of Anies’s favorite Persian rug.
One of the two remaining men, the one with the rifle, switches to automatic, and proceeds to literally shower the bar with bullets while Anies forces me to cover the remaining feet toward the door, kicking and screaming. I know for sure that March fires back, and there’s only one guy who makes it out of the room before the oak door slams closed and the digital lock on the wall blinks red. I look around frantically; we’ve jumped back to the future and into a sterile circular hallway. Here too, large numbers on the walls indicate various gates leading back inside the dome. Their LEDs have all turned red. They’ve locked up the place, no doubt to stop the progression of the Queen’s and Erwin’s men.
Behind us, a loud bang shakes the oak door. I scream, “March!”
The Lion escorting us darts cold, gray eyes at the door. “Commander, ons moet nou gaan.” Commander, we have to go now.
Anies lets go of my arm to fist my hair brutally and gives a tug that threatens to snap my neck like a twig. His voice is a low growl that raises goose bumps on my skin. “One thing I’ve learned in my old age is to forgive, Island. You’ve tested my patience, but I will forgive you once more, because the future matters more than the past.” He tugs harder, and I cry out in pain. “Any more missteps would have grave consequences.”
That man made me an orphan: no need to elaborate on what consequences. I find no snark left in me to respond to his threats as he drags me along the hallway to the only gate flashing green. Number 1.
On the other side, in a long white room about the same size as the salon we just escaped, crates of equipment await next to a row of black pressure suits. At the other end of the room, near a wide circular air lock marked with yellow safety stripes, a group of men and a woman are ready. Their suits are on, and they carry round helmets whose visors reflect the bright fluorescent lights above our heads. Legit astronauts wouldn’t have holsters strapped to their thighs and torsos though . . .
They’re looking at me, and suddenly I see two ghosts. Hillstone, Chopra . . . The names and faces I saw on television flash in my mind, and I recognize that tall black woman with the short caramel brown hair, and the young Indian guy with a fierce mohawk, who gives the impression that he’s hiding behind her. Commander Claire Hillstone, Flight Engineer Bahjin Chopra. Both supposedly dead along with their seven unfortunate crewmates.
“Claire, help her,” Anies orders.
He can’t be serious . . . He just can’t. But she’s walking toward me, her dark eyes full of determination, and the Lion who escorted us to this room gives me a little shove. Anies gauges me coldly. “You have ninety seconds.”
With this, he grabs one of the pressure suits and disappears with one of the evil astronauts behind a set of sliding doors that engulfs them with a low hiss.
As soon as he’s gone, she grabs my arm roughly and pulls me toward a similar door, with Anies’s personal watchdog following us. When I resist, she slaps me hard, the impact made even worse by the thick gloves she wears. “Millions of people out there would sacrifice everything to be in your place.”
I’m sorely tempted to snap back they can take it, when the doors slide closed and she throws a stretchy gray leotard at me. Primed by fear and some amount of unbidden humiliation, I strip hastily in front of them and slip on the jumpsuit. The material is strange; the moment it clings to my skin, I feel a little cooler—something meant to regulate my body temperature inside the pressure suit?
She’s approaching with it, by the way. God, whatever March and Angel are doing out there—whoever they’re killing—I hope they hurry the hell up, because that bunch of illuminati is seriously considering literally putting me in orbit. Once I’ve slipped my legs in the lower half of the suit, Claire and the guard help me shrug on the top, made heavy by a small and flat backpack—compressed air supply, likely. She seals the two halves of the suit’s steel belt together and screws the helmet on my head. Once it’s safely in place, she fiddles with a digital screen integrated in the suit’s arm. Air is expelled with a soft hiss, and I feel the pressure suit tighten around my body until I can move my arms and legs more or less freely. I look down at the data glowing green on the screen; I’m breathing 78.09% nitrogen, 20.92% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and 0.06% carbon dioxide.
Okay. One minute from now, someone is going to pop from behind a door and say they filmed everything, and I’ve been punk’d. This is the only rational outcome I can envision. But there’s no camera, and Claire seals her own helmet while the guard invites me to come out first with a flick of his gun. In the white room, everyone else has their helmets in place and their suits tightened around their bodies like mine, including Anies. I swallow hard. This man isn’t just evil, or even a complete psychopath. He’s lost his shit, and his followers are too blind to see it.
Praying he can hear me through the helmet, I blurt out the first rational argument that comes to my mind. “We . . . we’re gonna eat up to 4 g during takeoff. I’m not trained for this, and your lungs . . . Even if this thing doesn’t fail and kill us all, I’m not even sure you can survive that kind of acceleration!”
A faint smile stretches his lips as his voice filters inside my helmet, relayed by a speaker. “I don’t intend to die until I’ve reached for the stars, and you won’t either.”
I wish I could be as confident—or as dangerously deluded—because ahead of us, the air lock is opening slowly, and I’m not ready. I’m panting hard, and the glass of my helmet starts to fog as Anies and Claire each place a hand on my shoulder and push me forward into a tunnel leading to a second air lock—Odysseus’s.
Cut from the outside world inside my suit, I have no idea what’s going on out there, but I pray with every fiber of my being that someone damaged that ship, and it can no longer take off or something. No . . . wait, wait. If it’s damaged . . . it could blow up, with us inside. Oh God, I regret ever dreaming of going to space.
The second air lock rotates and, tormenting inch after tormenting inch, opens. I glimpse dark walls covered with glowing screens, buttons, wires everywhere. Windows. Anies’s men help me fold into one of the nine horizontally placed seats and secure my seat belt straps, pulling them tight—intentionally, I suspect. At last, I can see what’s happening in the dome. Chaos unfolds all around us, with some of the scaffolding around Odysseus destroyed, orange helmets and soldiers running in all directions, smoke everywhere . . . rising to the cloudy sky. I look up and see the concrete roof of the dome slowly parting, the two halves retracting inside the walls.
“You can’t launch in these conditions . . . The whole place is coming apart!” I yell while his men strap Anies in the seat next to mine.
In the pilot’s seat, Claire starts flipping switches as a monotonous male voice crackles through the ship’s speaker, informing her that it’s T minus ninety seconds before launch. “Your friends had better get the hell out of here if they know what’s good for them,” she shoots back. “The boosters are going to clean up the place.”
When the full implications of her words register, I go rigid. She’s right. If they can actually start the rocket boosters, the entire dome will turn into a blazing inferno while Odysseus ascends. I strain against my seat belt. March! He’s down there somewhere. I roll panicked eyes at the window, hoping not to see him anywhere near the ship.
On the dashboard, a light starts to blink red.
“It’s the payload unit,” that Bahjin guy says, his fingers flying fast on a keyboard to track the origin of the alert. “Hull integrity is okay, but maybe they didn’t seal it properly . . .”
Before he’s done going through the ship’s data feed, the button stops blinking and turns back to a reassuring green.
Claire turns to him. “False alarm?”
“Do we have time to postpone launch and check?” Bahjin asks tartly.
Anies’s bark cuts through their exchange, “False alarm, we’re launching.”
In my helmet, the voice keeps on talking, devoid of emotion.
Odysseus is now running off its nine onboard electrical cells . . . We have a go for auto-sequence start . . . Odysseus’s onboard computers now have primary control of all the ship’s critical functions . . . T minus fifteen seconds and counting . . .
The cabin starts vibrating much worse than any plane takeoff, a rumble that twists my stomach, tears through my eardrums. I grip the armrests. This isn’t real, and if it is, I just want March to be safe, away from this hell.
Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
Lose the ignition . . . lift off.
White smoke engulfs the ship, and I stare at the patch of sky barreling toward us. We’re moving too fast, and I try to breathe, but the Gs pile up, crushing my throat, my lungs. It seems barely a few seconds flash by, before the voice says we’re three miles in altitude, and we broke the goddamn sound barrier . . . Next to me, Anies seems lifeless, his arms folded on his chest. The engine revs up. My eyeballs are drilling inside my skull; blood hammers in my temples and, with it, agonizing pain. Through it all, I hope that rotten piece of shit actually died in his own ship.
I blink, and for a moment, everything goes dark. The next thing I register is Claire’s voice, announcing that we’ve reached sixty-three miles in altitude, and we’re traveling at five thousand miles an hour. Around the ship, the sky has become an indigo blanket as she drones into the speaker that we’re more than halfway to orbit and a little over a hundred miles away from Odysseus’s gravitational ring.
This is a nightmare, and I’m gonna wake up. If not, at least I made it through the acceleration . . .
Anies’s voice rasps in my helmet. “See? We’re both alive.”
“You’re completely crazy . . . What are you gonna do now? Take us all to Mars along with your missiles?”
Bahjin’s laugh bursts through the speaker. “We’re not going to Mars. Actually we’re gonna stay real close to Earth. Like, uncomfortably close!”
I squirm in my seat to stare at Anies’s profile. “What does he mean?”
“Island,” he asks, “do you know the speed of the fastest ballistic missile currently deployed on Earth?”
“Mach 22,” Bahjin quips from the front seat.
Anies gives a nod inside his helmet. “And can you imagine how fast a projectile would hit the target if fired from outside the atmosphere?”
I look around the ship, at the eight sickos riding with me. I think of the long tube I thought was part of the payload—a launching ramp. My supercooling suit does little to stop the sweat from beading on my forehead as the truth dawns on me fully. “You modified it so it can fire missiles.” I take a shuddering gulp of air. “You’re gonna use reentry speed to fire missiles so fast the interception systems won’t able to keep up.”
“Mach 26,” Claire confirms in a cold voice. “Once we’ve docked to the ring, it will absorb the recoil, and we’ve reprogrammed the command center to control the launch. Depending on the orbit, a missile shot from Odysseus will take less than thirty seconds to hit the target. It’s the ultimate nuclear dissuasion.”
Bahjin removes his helmet, grabs a candy bar from a pouch in his pressure suit and starts munching on it, speaking between mouthfuls. “It’s completely awesome. Take your average ICBM, Topol-M, Dongfeng, whatever . . . you fire it, and then sure, it’s flying fast, but you gotta cover thousands of miles to hit your target. Those guys, on the receiving end, they literally have ages to detect and intercept you.
“Now, take Odysseus: you just use your boosters to get in position above your target. You dash at seventeen thousand miles per hour outside the atmosphere: they can’t do anything about that. Then you’ve got, what, two hundred miles tops to cover, with a missile that can hit twenty thousand miles per hour at cruise speed.” He shakes his head and waves his half-eaten chocolate bar at me. “You know that Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle the air force has been testing?”
I shake my head slowly. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I figure it’s going to come in handy if Anies actually goes through with this madness and fires a missile to Earth.
“Well,” Bahjin replies, “even if it could actually intercept something—and right now it’s intercepting shit—it wouldn’t be enough to stop us. We’re at the top of the food chain, like, really at the top.”
“But the Chinese missiles,” I say. “They’re not designed for atmospheric reentry . . . aren’t they going to blow up?”
“We were primarily interested in the warheads they contained,” Anies replies.
Bahjin’s voice echoes his. “They were crap . . . We had to redesign them almost completely, but at least we had the warheads,” he concludes with a snort, right before a series of LEDs start blinking red on the dashboard. “They’ve spotted us,” he snaps, his tone suddenly cool and focused. “They’re trying to access our systems.”
“As expected,” Anies says. “But they’re too late.”
I gulp. “The US government wants its ship back?”
Bahjin chuckles. “You bet they do. But they don’t know who they’re dealing with. I reprogrammed everything in there. Bahjin Chopra, PhD is awesome!”
That’s when I feel the change in my body, and I notice the sky all around us, or lack thereof. The thruster has stopped, and we’re gliding in the immensity, weightless. Beneath us, Earth’s atmosphere is a graceful blue arc blending with the dark horizon. We’re in space.
I stare through the window for several endless seconds, having forgotten how to blink, how to breathe. I’m brought back to reality by the clatter of Bahjin typing furiously on his laptop. “They managed to connect to the ring’s system; they’re trying to lock it up to stop us from docking.”
Anies leans back in his seat. “I trust you,” he simply says.
“Strength and honor, sir,” Bahjin grunts as he battles NASA’s attempts to shut him out of Odysseus’s orbital ring.
Strength and honor . . . I’ve heard this before, but I can’t remember where. I gather though, that like Morgan, Claire and Bahjin basked in Anies’s light and let that sun blind them. Frumentarii. That’s what March called those who sell their souls to the Lions, like Morgan. Do they know Anies killed him? Or maybe they just don’t care . . .
In the front, Bahjin raises a victorious fist in the air. “I killed the last connection to their satellites; we’re in command.”
Anies’s lips twitch. “By the time they manage to launch an emergency mission, we will be long done.”
In that moment, I don’t know whether to be horrified or admire his uncanny ability to always plan ahead of his adversaries. We continue to drift until a white shape comes into view. My jaw goes slack, and air whizzes in my throat as I gaze at the terrifying beauty of Odysseus’s ring.