Chapter Twelve
Not even in his wildest dreams had Roar imagined he’d see the day Leda boarded the ship he’d flown to Earth on. Leda walked onto Equinox’s bridge, her eyes wide, jaw slack, as if she didn’t believe where she was.
Her disbelief and awe weaved a golden loop around every second that Roar doubted this mission. Leda turned to him and smiled, and he held his breath, wanting this moment drawn out for his own selfish needs.
He hoped this memory would block out the image of Leda’s lifeless body and Charlie holding up his gun. Roar could almost feel the weight of her body in his arms, the feel of blood on his hands. But he didn’t want to focus on things he couldn’t control. Every few heartbeats, Nils’s words repeated in his mind: we’re really leaving Earth.
“What is this for?” Leda had moved toward a long, flat panel in the center of the bridge.
Roar pressed his palm against the clear panel, activating the systems. A monitor rose from the panel and a series of back-lit options scrolled across the display. “This is navigation. Over there”—he indicated the smaller station behind them—“is the helm.”
“Where the captain sits?”
“Well, we don’t have a captain, per se, but yeah. If there was a captain, that’s where he’d sit.”
“So, none of you is in charge?”
He shook his head. “In this mission, each of us was assigned a special role. Oline knows the stars better than the rest of us, so she’s the navigator. Stein knows strathdrives better than most, and Petrus is our science officer.”
“And you?”
“Well, I don’t really have a—”
“Roar is the Jäger,” Oline said.
“What’s that?”
Oline raised a sculpted blond brow. “Want to explain this one?”
Staring at his feet, Roar said, “My job was to find the weapon. It’s sort of…” He paused. “Your family has the weapon’s genes. Mine has the gene that finds yours.”
“Oh.” Something flashed in her eyes that looked almost…pained. But she looked away from him and around the bridge again before he could get a better sense. “What’s a strathdrive?”
Roar moved so that he could find her gaze again. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Tell me about the strathdrive.”
He considered pushing her to tell him, but they weren’t alone. Maybe this was a conversation for later. “All Aurelite starships run on strathium—what humans call dark energy.”
Leda’s jaw dropped. “You guys actually proved the existence of dark energy?”
Oline laughed. “Long before humans started painting in caves.”
Ignoring Oline, Leda said, “How does the ship run on dark energy? Obviously you found a way to harness it.”
“Dark energy is all around us,” Stein said. “Surrounding the ship’s exterior are millions of tiny sensors, and when they’re activated, they use the dark energy in a sort of slingshot way to propel the ship. Imagine you’ve got a hollowed-out cucumber covered in oil, and you throw it into a large body of water—it’ll keep on going until the water’s resistance slows it down. Equinox uses the same basic principle, except those sensors can control the ship’s speed, harnessing the dark energy and storing it for future use. Kind of like your solar panels.”
“So basically, Aurelites are hella smart.” Laugh lines creased the outer corners of Leda’s eyes. “All this stuff aside, I still don’t get how a ship doesn’t have a captain.”
“Well,” Roar said, “everyone’s equal on Aurelis. There are no rulers or dictators like you have here on Earth.”
“What about these Elders?”
“They’re more like advisors. When the people aren’t sure which path to take, they consult the Elders, who look after all knowledge, past and present.”
Leda frowned. “How can you not have leaders? Like, a president or something?”
Oline answered this one. “Aurelis is a democratic society with complete transparency, where every citizen holds the same rights. If a bill is proposed, we all study the ideas put forth. Often changes are made before a bill becomes a law, but so long as the idea supports our way of life, and provides security and prosperity for all, then it will most likely be passed. Every person living on Aurelis has access to the information at all times.”
Leda scrunched her nose. “And that works for you guys?”
“It has for thousands of years,” said Oline.
“Wow.” Leda puffed out a breath. “Well, go you guys.”
Oline grinned. “Go you, too. You’re one of us, Leda.”
She seemed guarded for a moment, but then a slow, sly grin spread across her face. “I guess I’d better get started on this cloak, then.”
Since she’d be working with Petrus, and Roar didn’t fully comprehend the shielding tech on Equinox, Roar left Leda to it, taking a seat next to Stein at tactical across the long, oval shape of the bridge. Busy checking Equinox’s video database for signs of detection, Stein didn’t notice Roar yet. On these rare occasions when Stein was caught unaware, his face lost the hard edge, his eyes less pinched and narrowed. He seemed almost relaxed.
Roar wondered how much energy Stein used putting up his crusty exterior. Most of the time Stein was sandpaper on everyone’s nerves. Why couldn’t they see this side of him more often? It helped explain why Roar had often spotted Petrus looking at Stein with an unreadable expression. Maybe he was searching for this side of Stein.
“I think I figured out where you went wrong,” Leda said, pointing to a string of numbers on screen. “The cloak and shield are parallel programs, and they cover the ship like a grid. If you used them simultaneously, and could see the pattern from the outside, they’d overlap, like a cross-hatch.” On a blank page of the notebook resting on her lap, Leda drew an example. “See?”
Petrus nodded.
“Each program has its own pattern and if you change just one decimal place or swap out a number, the pattern won’t work.” Leda scribbled on the page, her focus intense. “Essentially, what we need to do is go through the coding line-by-line and figure out where the problem is. Then we can fix it.”
Stein looked up from his station and groaned. “How long is that going to take?”
Fixing Stein with a fierce stare, Leda said, “As long as it takes to do it right. I’m not going to give you some arbitrary number, all right?”
“Whatever,” Stein snarled. “In the meantime, I’ll just keep watching security footage of this weird space octopus trying to break through Equinox’s shield.”
Roar’s heart somersaulted in his chest as he stared at the screen. Playing in slow motion was the same thing that had attacked the shuttle. Almost invisible tentacles snaked through space between dimensions, and at first, it tried squeezing the life from the ship, like it had done to the shuttle.
That prickly sensation returned, burning down Roar’s neck to his fingertips. “How far back does the footage show this thing going at it?”
“Gimme a sec.” Stein tapped a command on the panel. “About three hours after we parked Equinox here and hopped on a shuttle headed for Earth.”
Leda had stepped behind Stein, and she shuddered as the video replayed. “What is that thing?”
“No idea,” said Oline, “but it tried to kill us once already. I don’t think it’s a friendly space octopus.”
Petrus frowned. “If it’s been here since we arrived, maybe we brought it with us? We should warn the humans.”
Roar filled Leda in on what Petrus said, then he added, “Maybe. But if it’s been here that long, why hasn’t it attacked them?”
When no one offered an explanation, Roar began pacing and said, “It makes sense that we brought it with us. But that doesn’t explain what it is.”
“I think I can help with that.” Nils had been quiet up until then. Standing just inside the bridge with the door at his back, he chewed his index knuckle, his gaze riveted to the screen playing security footage. “My mom shouts out random things in her sleep. It’s loud enough that I had to start sleeping downstairs on the couch. Anyway, once she was screaming about the ‘reach of death’ coming to get her. I ran into her room and thought she’d woken up, because her eyes were open, and she was looking right at me. In the morning, she didn’t remember what she’d said, and she told me I shouldn’t worry about anything she said in her sleep.
“I couldn’t forget, though. My mom said some seriously freaky stuff that night. She said there was a black arm slipping through time and space, searching, always searching for her. Sleek and changeable, and hungry for revenge. It can’t be a coincidence that that thing on the screen looks exactly like what she described in her dream.”
For a moment, everyone on board Equinox froze in place, staring at the screen with the oily black tentacle. Roar ignored the tight squeeze in his chest, and the heavy sensation in his gut. How had he missed the connection? Of course the Woede were behind the mysterious and destructive thing.
Roar scratched the stubble growth on his jaw. “So it’s safe to assume the Woede know where we are. Do they know what we’re here for?”
The question was entirely rhetorical. At this point, the answer was anybody’s guess. And the Woede had never needed a reason to attack anyone before. He just hoped Earth hadn’t made their list of planets to suck dry. Even if it had, and they were busy with Aurelis right now, Leda might be able to stop them once and for all. He still didn’t know how the whole girl-as-a-weapon thing worked, but he didn’t need to. The Elders instructed him to bring her to Aurelis, and then all would be well.
“Petrus,” Roar said, “can you get a copy of the code for the cloak and take it with you back down to Earth?”
Petrus nodded.
“Good. I think you’ll all be safer down there while we work on solving this problem. Nils, do you know Norsk Tegnspråk?”
“Uh, a bit. But I learn quickly.”
Leda pursed her lips and glared at Roar. “What are you thinking?”
Roar turned away. He focused on the main viewscreen. “Someone needs to stay on the ship and make sure the Woede don’t break through the shield.”
“And that person has to be you,” she said.
He couldn’t trust Stein not to take Equinox and run if he were left alone up here, and Roar refused to leave Oline up on the ship by herself. Petrus needed to be down on the surface, working with Leda. “I’m just being practical. What’s the point of fixing the cloak if we can’t get back to Aurelis?” Roar’s words hung smoky and thick in the air, a truth no one considered. “Of the four of us, I have the most flight experience with Equinox, and Stein is a natural with tactical measures. It makes sense for the two of us to stay on board.”
“I can stay with you as well,” Oline volunteered.
Leda made a dark sound in the back of her throat, then muttered, “Sure you can.”
She’s jealous. The thought filled Roar with bubbly euphoria, but just as fast, he remembered that flash of emotion he’d seen in her earlier. “Can you guys give us a few minutes?”
Oline grabbed Nils’s arm and said, “I want to show you something.”
Petrus corralled Stein after them.
Roar waited until their voices faded down the hallway before he let out a breath and sat in the chair in front of the tactical station. He swiveled the chair to face Leda. “I think we have some…stuff…to talk about.”
“You don’t have to explain anything at all.” She dropped into a chair. “I know why you thought you liked me. It’s just this gene inside me, whatever makes me a weapon. That’s all.”
Was she serious? That was why she’d looked so hurt? “Leda, I might not know much about relationships, but one thing I do know is that I do like you. Even you already know that much. And I’m pretty sure you like me, too. Maybe our genes have something to do with how intense this feels, but the rest is real.” He smiled as she blushed. “So now that we’ve cleared that up, you can focus on your hectic math stuff, and I can keep Equinox from getting turned into space debris, and then, like Nils said, we can go and save the universe.”
“That’s a pretty big ego you’re carrying around,” she said with a smirk.
Without giving her a chance to escape, Roar leaned forward and kissed her. Hot tingles erupted over his neck where she rested her fingertips, pressed her palms down, and pulled him toward her. Time became liquid, flowing in and out the constraints of the space surrounding them. This kiss lasted much longer than the others.
She broke the kiss first and sighed at Roar’s lips. Her fingers wandered in his hair, driving him crazy. Roar swallowed. His breaths were shallow and his mind buzzed, just from a kiss.
“I don’t mean to come across as super-insecure or anything,” she whispered, her breath warm on his cheek, “but what I think you’re saying is, there’s nothing going on between you and Oline, right?”
“Right. Never has been, and never will be.”
She reclined in her chair. “You sound very sure of yourself.”
“I am.” He rested his elbows on his knees. “No offense to her, but she’s not you. Like your grandmother said, once you stop seeing yourself the way you think everyone else sees you, maybe you’ll understand that better.”