Galactic Battle (2 page)

“So what's the assignment?”

Emmie grabbed John's shoulders, her blue eyes huge, and spoke slowly. “He wants me to . . . wait for it . . . test drive a new model t-dart!”

“Wow!” said John. The current t-darts were already awesome. He couldn't imagine what a new one would be like!

“Jegger's thinking of upgrading all the school's t-darts to the new models,” Emmie went on. “But he wants to make sure they're still okay to learn in. So he's asked me to take one out for a spin and see what I think.”

“Because you're one of the best pilots this school's got,” John said.

“Oh, hush,” Emmie said, though she was smiling. “I just love flying, that's all. Here we are. Hangar eighty-seven. Feast your eyes on this!”

The brand new training dart stood in the hangar, bathed in a single spotlight. Like the older models, it was a sleek, sharp-nosed ship with short, swept-back wings at the rear and a transparent bubble cockpit. But every inch of its metallic surface gleamed like silver — even the chrome-like rims of the blast turbines were sparkling clean, not sooty from exhaust fumes like every other t-dart he'd seen.

Emmie pressed her key card to the side of the craft and the bubble cockpit silently slid open. Inside were two seats, plush and billowy, and each with an identical set of controls.

“Should we suit up?” John asked.

“The manual says we don't need to,” Emmie said. “Helmets only. I wonder what that's about?”

“Nice seats!” John said, stroking the soft fabric. A tiny light came on in the console as he did so, and a voice purred, “Human and Sillaran life forms detected. Adjusting settings for maximum comfort.”

“Wow,” breathed Emmie. “Train in this ship? I could live in it!”

“Check this out!” John said, settling himself in his seat as the bubble closed above them. “Onboard drinks dispenser, snack bar, holovid player . . . talk about luxury options!”

As their safety harnesses automatically fastened around them, John and Emmie pulled on their helmets. Instantly the ship's soft voice whispered, “Activating SecondSkin spacesuit nano-weave.”

A tickling sensation spread over John's body. He looked down and, to his amazement, saw a silvery layer of fabric spreading out over his chest, arms, and legs. He'd worn a SecondSkin before — they clung to you like a second skin, hence the name — but this one was being woven around him as he sat there!

“Nano-weave microbots!” Emmie said, holding up her hand and watching the fabric glide over it like a liquid-metal glove. “Microscopic machines that can create a spacesuit around you. Now that's tailoring!”

“You'll never have to worry about forgetting your spacesuit again!” John laughed.

“Okay,” said Emmie. She sounded businesslike now that the suits were complete. “Let's see how she handles in flight. Ready to go?”

“Are you kidding? Fire her up!”

Emmie ran a preflight check, powered up the main turbine, and ignited the engines. John's stomach was a tight knot of excitement as the takeoff sequence counted down and the hangar doors slid open.

The view always took John's breath away, no matter how many times he saw it — stars shining bright as diamonds in the infinite darkness of space. It was amazing enough to see space through the ship's countless windows, but flying out among those stars in a tiny craft like this was just incredible. It made him feel very small and full of wonder.

“Easy does it,” Emmie muttered, carefully steering the little ship up and out of the hangar. “When we're a safe distance away from Hyperspace High, I'll put the pedal to the metal. See what she can do.”

That was Emmie all over, John thought. She loved the thrills, but she'd never put anyone at risk. No wonder she was the favorite student of Sergeant Jegger, the three-legged Space Flight instructor.

“Okay. This is a smooth ship,” Emmie said, banking them around so that they were flying alongside Hyperspace High. “The intertial compensation works like a dream.”

“What the heck's that?” John laughed. “And since when did you get technical?”

She stuck out her tongue. “It's a new flight feature. The ship makes tiny corrections so you don't oversteer.” She pursed her lips. “But maybe that's making things too easy. People won't learn if the ship does the job for them.”

John stared through the bubble at Hyperspace High beside them, looking a bit like an enormous cruise ship. Through thousands of windows and transparent panels, he could see students and teachers walking the halls, sitting in classes, or enjoying a snack. Down in the lower levels, huge robots and machines were working hard.

They flew further and further, and still the huge ship lay beside them.
It's amazing how big Hyperspace High really is,
John thought.
I've been here for almost a semester now, and I sort of know my way around, but there are so many places I haven't been. Places still to explore . . .

“That's far enough,” Emmie said, once they had finally put the ship behind them. “Time to try some fancy stuff. Hold on tight!”

Emmie put the little t-dart through its paces, throwing it into barrel rolls, swift zigzag turns, and finishing with a starfire flip — spinning the dart back to face the other way and using the main thrusters as a brake. It was like riding the best roller coaster in the universe.

Emmie finally slowed the t-dart back down to a steady cruise. “I think this model gets the Emmie Tarz seal of approval,” she said, patting the console affectionately. “Want to take the controls?”

“You bet!” John said.

Emmie switched the input to John's set of controls. She selected an iced Brucko juice from the drinks dispenser and plugged it into her helmet, then lay back in the sumptuous seat watching the stars go by and sipping through the helmet straw.

John fired up the hyperdrive, sending the little t-dart thundering through the gulfs of space. He felt weightless, joyful, and free, with all the promise of deep space open before him. He could skim the surface of a gas giant or watch a supernova engulf the skies. John grinned to himself.
There might be some drawbacks to studying here at Hyperspace High,
he thought,
like not being able to tell Mom and Dad where I really am . . . but I wouldn't trade it for the world. At a boarding school on Earth, I would never get to fly through space with a cool girl from a different planet!

He glanced over at Emmie. Just when he'd been feeling miserable and homesick, she'd turned up and taken his mind right off it.
I'm lucky to have her as a friend,
he thought.
There aren't that many people who can tell when you're bottling sadness up inside you — and then do something about it.

From their studies of Galactic Geography, John knew there was an abandoned planet nearby that looked a bit like Earth. John flew the t-dart over the ruins of an alien city that glittered in the pale light from the sun, then out over a frozen sea.

“Cool!” Emmie said with a whistle. “We'd better take her home now, though, or we'll be late.”

“I just want to get a better look — it reminds me a little of home,” said John, flying closer to the shining world. He steered the t-dart on a quick game of thread-the-needle with a derelict ring-shaped space station, flying the craft dead center through the hole in the middle without even needing to use the computer to assist. Emmie was right — the ship did handle like a dream.

“Let's get going, John,” Emmie said, a little nervously. “We don't want to be late.”

Another short blast on the hyperdrive brought them back alongside Hyperspace High in no time. John brought the t-dart around in a sweeping arc, past the colossal bridge section at the front of the massive vessel and back toward the hangar. Soon after, they gently touched down inside it.

Emmie pulled off her helmet and shook her hair free. “Phew. We must have been out there for hours!”

“Can't have been more than half an hour, right?” said John, but he felt a little uneasy. He'd lost all sense of time while flying the t-dart.

As they tried to leave the hangar, the smooth white form of an Examiner moved to block their way. John felt more than uneasy now. There was something faintly sinister about the faceless, hovering robots. They were frighteningly efficient at their job, which was to enforce the school's many rules.

Most of the time they would leave you alone, but if you stepped out of line, they had ways of setting you straight.

Emmie gulped. “Is . . . everything okay? We were just leaving —”

“NEGATIVE,” the Examiner said in a flat electronic voice, glaring at them with its single red digital eye. “STUDENTS RILEY AND TARZ HAVE VIOLATED RULES.”

“What did we do?” John asked nervously.

“STUDENTS WERE INSTRUCTED TO BE PRESENT IN THE CENTER AT TWELVE SHARP. CURRENT TIME: TWELVE ZERO SEVEN.”

“Oh no!” Emmie groaned. “This doesn't sound good.”

“I'm so sorry I made us late, Emmie,” John said, feeling more miserable than ever.

“TEACHER'S PERMISSION WAS NOT DETECTED. EMERGENCY WAS NOT DETECTED. CONCLUSION: ABSENCE WAS WILLFUL.”

John braced himself.

“YOUR PUNISHMENT WILL BE DETENTION.”

“I can't believe that stupid machine wants us to give up our whole lunch hour for detention,” John grumbled. “I was looking forward to lunch!”

“We were only seven minutes late!” Emmie agreed. Sighing, she added, “But you can't reason with the Examiners, and you can't argue — they don't want to know!”

John and Emmie reached the entrance to the Center. “Come on,” John urged. “Kaal's bound to have saved us a place.. . .”

John's voice died away as the doors opened into the Center.

For the students, the Center was the beating heart of Hyperspace High, a place of shops and cafés where they could go to relax, gossip, or just hang out together. It was like the school's own private shopping mall, light-years ahead of what any Earth school could offer. It was beautiful, too, with a sparkling lake in the middle surrounded by deep-green trees. Around the sides of the massive space were many levels of balconies, which housed a great variety of restaurants.

But today, the Center looked completely different. All the windows, which usually gave a view of starry space, were now flat black. Even the huge dome above the Center was like a black mirror.

John stood dumbfounded, trying to take it all in. It was the Center, but it had been transformed almost beyond recognition. The balconies around the sides had somehow extended, joining up with one another to form viewing galleries like those in a sports arena, and the tables where the students usually ate had disappeared.

Where is Kaal?
John thought.

He could see students chatting excitedly between themselves, lounging on bloated, rubbery black cushions that looked like beanbags. These MorphSeats engulfed the students like a strange jelly, adjusting to support all the different alien body types.

But there was no sign of John's big Derrilian friend. Trying to find him among all the students would be like looking for a red dwarf in the Milky Way.

It was proving hard to see anything at all in this auditorium. It was all so black — the windows, the cushions, the balconies. The only bright spot in the whole auditorium was where the central lake used to be. It was now a dazzling white stage the size of a football field, made from some sort of translucent material and lit from within. It was throbbing, a band of light sweeping from one end to the other and then back again. Two Examiners stood by the stage, as if they were guarding something invisible, or that hadn't yet appeared.

John snapped back to reality, as Emmie was tugging on his arm. “They haven't started yet! Quick, let's sit down before the Examiners give us any more trouble!”

Together, they worked their way along an elongated balcony, squeezing past students sprawled on their cushions, trying to find empty seats. John felt like someone turning up late to the movie theater.

Eventually, they found two empty seats on the very far right of the arena, tucked away near an emergency exit. At the exact moment John sank into his seat, Lorem, the headmaster, shimmered into being on the stage. Lorem looked remarkably like an old human being, with a bald head and wrinkle-lined face, and he sometimes reminded John of a monk. But his strange purple eyes were anything but human, and when you saw him turn into a ball of energy, the resemblance vanished completely. The headmaster also had the very nonhuman talent of being able to see into the future.

Right now, he was a truly striking sight. Lorem always had a faint glow around him, but in the midst of all this blackness and lit from beneath by the stage, he flared with light like an angelic being.

Lorem raised his hands, and the chatter among the students fell silent, as suddenly as if someone had turned down the volume.