CALEB CRANE
MELBOURNE, FLORIDA
CALEB’S SHOULDERS WERE STARTING TO BURN. With a groan, he rolled over on the blanket and reached for his T-shirt. He pulled it onto his sunbaked torso.
“Ow,” he said.
“Man, I told you to reapply,” Daniela scolded. She grabbed the tube of sunscreen and tossed it into Caleb’s lap. “Pale ass is gonna look like a lobster out here.”
“Yeah,” he replied, blowing out a sigh. “Yeah, you told me.”
It was a cloudless day, unseasonably warm, the white-capped waves sending salty spray up on a lazy breeze. The sand shimmered here, the beach pristine, without any other people in sight. Next to Caleb, Daniela reclined on her elbows, her lean body clad in a white bikini, sweat dimpling her abdomen. Caleb should’ve been enjoying the hell out of this.
So why wasn’t he?
A private beach, all to themselves on Florida’s Space Coast—so called because it was where NASA and any number of defense contractors, including Sydal Corp, were headquartered. Maybe it was their host that bothered him. Maybe that’s what kept Caleb from completely turning off his mind and enjoying this unearned vacation.
But Mr. Sydal—Wade, he insisted they call him Wade—had been nothing but nice to them. They stayed in guest rooms in his sprawling beachside mansion. He fed the visiting Garde lavish meals cooked by his personal chef, showed off his multitude of engineering projects, and let them use the beach and his infinity pool. Massages and tennis lessons were also on offer, although Caleb hadn’t partaken in either. It’d been almost a week of that pampering and Mr. Sydal—Wade—asked for nothing in return.
Sydal spent most of his time in his technology-filled basement workshop. The gadgets and gizmos in there would’ve made Dr. Goode jealous, Caleb thought. Sometimes, he took meetings at the navy base in the area. He had his own paid security detail.
This was a cream-puff detail. There was no reason for Caleb to feel so on edge.
And yet, he couldn’t shake that feeling.
Caleb thought about calling his uncle. But what would he tell Uncle Clarence? That Melanie Jackson was a huge wimp who needed a “break” from Earth Garde life after a week of photo ops and some light construction work? She’d been protected from the worst of the invasion by her president father, had never gone to the Academy, and was basically coddled at Earth Garde. Did she really need a vacation from her vacation?
Maybe that wasn’t the most charitable assessment of Melanie, but it didn’t help Caleb’s opinion that she mostly ignored him and Daniela, preferring instead to spend her free time video-chatting with people from her old life—prep school classmates, senators’ kids, future leaders of the free world.
No. Lawson wouldn’t care about that. That was kid stuff.
What did his uncle want him to uncover?
A crab scuttled past their blanket, black eyes like twin periscopes swiveling around. The little guys were called ghost crabs. Caleb had first spotted them scampering across the sand a few days ago. Bored and tired of swimming, he’d spent a solid hour reading about them online.
“Check it out,” Caleb said, pointing the gold-tinted crustacean out to Daniela. “Those guys change their colors to blend in with the sand. Pretty cool, huh?”
Daniela tipped down her paperback—some lurid romance novel she’d picked up at the airport—so she could regard Caleb.
“You could learn something from them,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
As they watched, the crab buried itself back in the sand, only its pair of elongated eyes visible.
“It means you could try going with the flow a bit,” Daniela replied. “I see you over there, wheels turning and shit. You’ve been sulking around since we got here.”
“I’m not sulking,” Caleb responded sulkily. “Don’t you just think . . . I don’t know? Like this is weird?”
“Man, we saved the world from an alien invasion,” Daniela replied, her braids shaking back and forth as she laughed. “I mean, the Loric did most of it, but we were there, too. They should be giving us free vacations for the rest of our lives. Be like the crab, man. Chill.”
“I think they blend in like that to avoid predators.”
“You see any predators out here, Caleb?”
Caleb turned his head to look back at the beach house.
“I don’t know.”
People were starting to gather on the house’s back deck. Caleb could see Wade there. The man was supposedly in his fifties, but his baby face and angular black goatee made him look younger. He wore his hair long like a surfer, not a strand of gray in there—just like his beard. In another bout of boredom, Caleb had watched some of Mr. Sydal’s TED talks from before the invasion, where he lectured on the possibility of achieving immortality—physical or digital. It all went over Caleb’s head, but just by looking at him and listening to him talk, Caleb could tell the guy wanted desperately to stay young forever.
Sydal was surrounded by the usual horde of assistants and interns. All of them were young and attractive, fresh out of Ivy League schools. They mingled with the more professionally dressed research-and-development reps from various engineering and military concerns, everyone gathered to watch the day’s launch from the comfort of Sydal’s estate.
Caleb could pick out the military brass from the crowd by their haircuts and rigid postures. For a second, he swore he saw his dad up there. Too much sun.
In the middle of it all, of course, was Melanie. Even at a distance, she looked especially vibrant. Her blond hair flowed loose around her head, the wind plucking at her tennis skirt and blouse. Sydal kept a fatherly arm around her shoulders, introducing her to his various guests. Just like on their missions with Earth Garde, Melanie held herself apart from Caleb and Daniela, so much so that he was always surprised to see how easily she turned on the social charms.
Waiters circulated through the crowd on the deck with hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. Caleb and Daniela had been invited to Sydal’s little party but had opted to watch the launch from the beach instead.
“Crazy that guys like him are still interested in space travel,” Caleb said to Daniela. “Especially when we know there’s nothing really out there. All the aliens are trying to come here.”
“You’re just full of deep thoughts today.”
“Thanks.”
A loud chant started on the deck. A countdown from ten.
Caleb tipped his sunglasses down to watch the vessel take off. The sleek, silver-plated ship rose up from its launchpad down the beach and cut soundlessly through the perfect blue sky. The aircraft was disc-shaped, like the cliché idea of a flying saucer. Sydal probably thought that was clever. A crimson glow came from the wannabe UFO’s underbelly. It looked like it was on fire, but those were actually the thrusters.
That was repurposed Mogadorian technology. The military had recovered tons of Skimmers after the invasion and Sydal had been selected as one of the developers to work on reverse engineering it. Today was a big day for Wade and Sydal Corp: they were the first company to get a prototype flight-ready. In an effort to distance his work from the hostile aliens that provided its foundation, Sydal had christened the ship the Shepard-1, named for the first American to make it into space.
The Shepard-1 swooped around, propelled by its thrusters, stable and under control. It did a loop-the-loop, much to the delight of Sydal’s guests. Then, the ship went vertical, rising higher and higher, until it was just a silver speck. Caleb lost sight of it. The plan was for the Shepard-1 to reach the exosphere. The crowd on the deck fell silent, huddled around Wade and his tablet that displayed the craft’s diagnostics.
“Hope it doesn’t blow up,” Daniela remarked.
Moments later, a cheer went up from the deck. The Shepard-1 had reached the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Soon, the ship came back into sight, drifting gracefully back down and onto its launchpad.
Everyone applauded. A complete success.
“Cool,” Daniela said dryly, barely looking up from her book. “Nice to see we humans have got spaceships now. And it’s nice that thing didn’t shoot at us, huh?”
Caleb glanced back at the deck where Sydal was getting bombarded with back-patting and handshakes.
“Don’t you get the feeling that this Sydal guy thinks everything that came from the war—the tech, the blasters, the warships, even us with our Legacies—it’s all just toys for him to play with?”
Daniela shrugged. “What do you want from a nerd like that? He probably reverse engineered a Rubik’s Cube when he was a toddler. And I’m pretty sure Dr. Goode does the same stuff.”
“It’s different,” Caleb replied. “Malcolm is trying to help us.”
“I’m going to go take a nap,” Daniela said. She closed her book, stood up, and gathered her towel. “Try to chill out, okay, Caleb? No one here is out to get you.”
Caleb did not chill out.
A few minutes after Daniela left, Caleb stood up and headed back to the mansion. The gathering on the deck was now a full-fledged cocktail party, none of the guests eager to leave behind Sydal’s hospitality. No one paid Caleb any attention as he skirted around the side of the house and entered through a side door.
During the tour when they first got there, Wade had briefly taken his Garde guests by his workshop. It was on the first floor, right across the hall from the gym. Sydal had laughed sheepishly about his “geek sanctuary,” told Caleb and the others that they’d find his projects boring, and instead guided them into the fitness center where he had elliptical machines hooked up to VR.
Caleb had wanted to poke around the workshop ever since. What better time than now, when everyone else was distracted at the Shepard-1 reception?
Sydal didn’t even keep the room locked. The workshop got plenty of light from its floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the beach visible beyond. The space was immaculately organized, tools and gears and circuit boards all in their proper places. A half dozen drones of various sizes sat dormant on a workbench. On a nearby easel were a stack of hand-drawn schematics.
Caleb put his hands on his hips. This wasn’t exactly an evil lair. It sort of reminded him of Dr. Goode’s laboratory, although way less chaotic. What had he really been expecting to find?
A familiar shape on the topmost schematic caught his eye. With a curious frown, Caleb approached the easel.
The technical sketch looked at first like a thumbtack combined with a microchip. Caleb recognized the device as the same one they pulled out of that girl Rabiya’s temple when they rescued her from the Harvesters. An Inhibitor. There were handwritten notes in the margins of the sketch, the tidy writing presumably Sydal’s. Easily removed; difficult to attach; painful.
Caleb flipped to the next page. A human skull was sketched there in perfect detail. One of the Inhibitor chips was drawn directly attached to the bone, its little prong penetrating 3.4 millimeters—the exact measurement was scribbled right there, along with a bunch of other calculations that Caleb couldn’t make sense of. There were more notes. Highest possible voltage? How much = too much? Prone to short-circuit.
Grimacing as he imagined having one of those things stuck directly into his head, Caleb went to the next sketch. This one wasn’t nearly as technical as the ones that preceded it. A freehand version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was jotted on the paper in pencil, squiggles of blue highlighter running through the limbs, coalescing in the chest and head. Columns of impenetrable equations spread out from the figure, some of them running up against the edge of the paper.
Written across the page: Source of Loric energy? Can it be detected? Neutralized?
Caleb wished he had a cell phone or a camera. He wondered what Dr. Goode would make of these designs.
“What are you doing in here?”
Caleb jumped at the sound of a woman’s voice. It was Lucinda, one of the Sydal’s many college-aged interns. She was pretty, in her early twenties, with hair the color of nutmeg, a smattering of freckles, and sharp green eyes. She was dressed professionally, a neat skirt and a high-collared blouse. She had a stack of paperwork under her arm. Caleb swallowed.
“Uh . . . ,” he replied, not sure what to say. “I was just—”
“Those are all out of date,” Wade Sydal said airily, waving at the sketches as he entered the room behind Lucinda. He smiled at Caleb as he set down his tablet, the one that had been monitoring Sherpard-1. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I doodle. Please don’t judge my work based on those.”
“I wasn’t. I mean, I—” Caleb’s eyes cast about desperately, looking for an excuse for him to be in here. He settled on the bench full of robotics. “I was curious about the drones.”
“You’re a nervous guy, Caleb. I’ve noticed that about you,” Sydal said, coming over to stand before him. He jerked his thumb in Lucinda’s direction and lowered his voice. “All my assistants are trained to keep an eye out for intellectual piracy, but don’t let her intimidate you. I’m sure we’ve got nothing to fear from a member of Earth Garde. Right, Lucinda?”
“Right,” Lucinda replied, barely even looking at Caleb anymore. She was on her phone, answering emails.
“Piracy, uh, no, I was just, uh—” Caleb took a deep breath. Infiltration wasn’t really his strong suit, apparently. “I was just bored, I guess.”
“Hey, mi casa es su casa,” Sydal replied. His eyes lit up and he considered Caleb anew. “I’m a little busy right now with the whole groundbreaking spaceflight thing—”
“Oh, yeah, congratulations,” Caleb said hurriedly.
“Thanks,” Sydal replied. “But hey, next time you’re bored, I’d love to take a look at those Legacies of yours. Maybe run a few tests. See what we can figure out. Duplication pretty much defies all known physics, right? I live for that stuff.”
“Oh, um . . .”
Caleb let his gaze slide to Sydal’s sketches. The man seemed intent on figuring out how the Loric ticked and how to stop them. Should Caleb really submit to some kind of tests? He couldn’t think of a polite way to say no and, as the awkwardness between him and grinning Wade stretched on, he felt one of his duplicates nearly pop out from the anxiety. Caleb took a breath, steadied himself, and nodded in a way he hoped was casual.
“Yeah, sure,” Caleb said. “Cool.”
“Cool!” Sydal repeated, slapping Caleb on the shoulder. “Lucinda, get something with my young friend here on the calendar.” Just like that, Sydal was leaving the room again, returning to his cocktail party. He shouted over his shoulder. “The people in this house are going to change human existence! What a time to be alive!”