MiNRS (20 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

End Game

I returned to Elena’s hideaway.

There was no flare, so Elena hadn’t been here since our talk, but I knew she’d be back. I opened the hatch and got out, quickly walking over to the nook.

I turned on my headlamp and reached in for the picture book. I opened it very carefully and stared again at the valentine Elena had preserved for so many years. I ran my finger over the word
love
and cried. I didn’t even bother holding it back this time.

I took off my helmet and grabbed the letter from the headband. I carefully tucked it inside the book. I hoped the things I said would help Elena understand what I was about to do.

I put the book in its place and then got back into my digger.

I took a deep breath and closed the hatch. The dashboard lights came on. I realized I was still holding Elena’s picture in my hand. Again I stared at the image and the
CrisTFer
she had written on the back.

Then I remembered.

I remembered exactly when Elena had given me the picture. It had been just after we’d started school on Perses. Valentine’s Day. She’s made it for me and left it on my desk. I’d taken it, thanked her, and then forgotten it when school had ended.

I hadn’t thought about it since.

I debated putting the picture back. Then I put it on top of my dashboard.

The quickest path was a straight line from there to the Landers’ ship. But I didn’t want to be predictable, so I made a few slight turns. That would confuse any sensors the Landers were using to detect someone on the way to attack.

I stared at the picture of Elena and me holding hands, and it calmed me. She was probably getting close to finishing her first search by now. I imagined her and Darcy chatting about what they would do when they got back to Earth. The games they would
play and the desserts they would eat.

Halfway through the trip I noticed a red blip on my screen. It was coming up straight behind me.

I was being followed. Someone had grabbed a digger with a warning signal inside. I eased up on the speed and took a sharp right turn. Then I circled back and waited.

The red blip crossed in front of me. I paused a few seconds and then cut through the wall, turning to follow the digger. It stopped just ahead of me. I came up right behind and nudged the back.

The cockpit hatch opened, and Alek stuck his head out.

I popped my latch as well and yelled, “Alek! What the heck are you doing here?”

He was so mad, he was shaking. “You promised me,” he said. “You told me you’d take me along.”

“I also told you that my job was to save as many of us as I could, and that includes you.”

“That’s not good enough, Christopher,” he said. He began shaking more violently. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. I need to fight. I
need
to.”

I watched him. His eyes filled with tears. “Why?”

He stared at me, his lips trembling. “Brock. He’s dead because of me.” He let out a long moan. “When the
Landers started firing, I panicked. I threw him in front of me. They shot him, and I ran. Your father grabbed me and threw me into the elevator. It should have been Brock in that elevator and me on that field.”

“Alek, I . . . You can’t blame yourself. You panicked. You said that yourself.”

He shook his head. “No. We were best friends. He needed me to defend him, and I didn’t. I can’t bring him back, but I can fight now to save everyone else.”

I understood what he meant.

“You have to let me fight,” he repeated, shrinking back into his seat.

“I’m sorry I lied.”

“I looked for you after Elena and Fatima left. When you weren’t there, I knew you’d left me behind. When I tried to start the digger, I realized you were going alone. I fixed the wire pretty quickly and followed.”

I sighed. “I am sorry. It’s just that this isn’t a burden I want to put on anybody else.”

“I asked for it,” Alek said. “You always think you know what’s best for everybody. Sometimes you just need to listen to what other people are telling you.”

I nodded. “Okay. No more lies. Here’s the plan, but you have to do exactly what I tell you.”

Alek nodded, wiping his eyes. “Okay.”

“We are going to attack the Landers’ ship directly.”

Alek nodded.

“We’re going to destroy it and everyone inside.”

Alek nodded again.

“It’s a one-way trip.”

Alek nodded one more time, then closed his hatch and fired up his digger.

•   •   •

We arrived underneath the landing pad. The Landers’ ship was just a few feet above us, through a thin veil of rock and concrete. It was late, and the Landers were probably settling in for the night. I felt a twinge of remorse for what I had planned. But I knew there would still be plenty of armed guards who’d be shooting to kill as soon as they spotted us breaking through the surface.

Jimmi had tried talking to them. They’d killed him in cold blood. We’d tried hitting their machinery, and they’d responded by killing Finn.

This was the only choice the Landers had left us. Kill or be killed.

I opened my microphone and tapped three times. I looked behind me and saw Alek turn away to my left. I saw a quick flash of blue and knew he’d activated his disrupter and was starting his ascent. There was no turning back.

I closed my eyes and fired my engine. The digger rose higher and higher, faster and faster. The sound of exploding atoms and grinding stone rose to a high-pitched crescendo.

Then, in an instant, we broke through the surface and slammed into the bottom of the ship’s hull. The disrupter shredded the metal, and blue sparks illuminated the scene. Alek was only ten feet to my left, his digger also searing a hole in the Landers’ ship.

Our disrupters stopped burning, and we fell back down our holes. We went down about twenty feet, then carved a new attack line in the rock. The disrupters reengaged, and we flew back up. Again we burned holes in the hull, and again we fell back inside Perses’s crust to recharge.

The hope was that we could hit the same spot each time, gradually burning more and more of the metal away.

We rose a third time. This time, the Landers were waiting. They crouched on the ground on the edge of the ship and fired their guns. They aimed low, thank goodness, trying to avoid hitting their ship. As a result, most of the blasts hit the ground near us, or went wide of their target.

But not all of them.

A pulse struck the hood of my cockpit, shattering the metal supports. A second shot hit the ground but sent large chunks of rock through the air.

Without the hood to protect me, I was hit by a spray of stone.

One ricocheted off the hull of the ship and smashed into my forehead, just under my helmet. A searing pain spread through my head, like it was splitting apart. All I could see was red.

I could taste blood on my tongue.

My disrupter shut down, and my digger fell back down the hole.

I could hear the scrape of the shattered hood struts against the rock walls over my head.

I ducked forward to avoid being scraped myself. The digger landed with a thud, and my engine shut off completely.

My ears were ringing. My head felt like someone had driven a spike into it. I tried to concentrate. I began pushing buttons on the dashboard. The disrupter fired, then turned off. The drill swirled, but why wasn’t I moving?

I looked up toward the hull of the ship. There were blue flashes reflecting off the metal. Alek was still blasting the hull. Then I saw something else. White light,
from inside the ship. The last hole I’d made had broken through into the interior.

The realization focused my brain. I grasped that the engine had shut off when I’d fallen back. Quickly, I held the ignition button until it roared back to life.

The light above me began to grow smaller. The ship was taking off!

There was only one chance left. It was time to turn off the sensor on my disrupter and make one final ascent straight into the heart of the Landers’ ship. The disrupter would stay on, igniting the air inside the ship, turning it into a giant bomb.

I turned on my radio. It didn’t matter if the Landers were listening now. “Alek! Alek! I’m going in. Fall back! Get out!”

Alek didn’t answer. I looked up. More blue sparks were reflected off the receding bottom of the hull. Alek was continuing to cut into the ship.

“Alek! Get out!”

Again, no answer. Again, more sparks.

I couldn’t wait any longer.

I gunned the engine and then reached under the dashboard to turn off the sensor.

My fingers searched and searched but came up empty.

The switch was gone.

The blue light of Alek’s disrupter continued to reflect off the hull of the ship.

Alek had taken my switch and used it to disable his own disrupter.

I breached the surface, but the ship had pulled away. I looked to my left, but Alek was gone. I stared at the hole I’d made in the ship. The white light from inside the ship had turned electric blue.

“Alek, no!”

My radio crackled to life. It was Alek.

“Sorry, Christopher,” he said, his voice calm and determined. “Please tell everyone I didn’t die a coward.”

There was a tremendous screaming explosion.

The entire sky was lit up by a giant fireball.

The blast sent my digger careening back down the hole, followed by a cascade of rubble.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Awakening

My head throbbed. I
could hear noises around me, but my ears continued to ring.

I struggled to get my arms free to dig myself out. My arms were pinned to my side.

“He’s awake,” said a voice somewhere in the fog.

Landers! They’d survived. I’d been captured.

Shadowy forms, maybe three or four of them, approached.

I winced, preparing for a blow to my head or a gunshot between the eyes.

Instead I felt a soft kiss on my cheek. A face took shape.

Elena.

“Sunlight takes a little getting used to after a couple of months in a mine, doesn’t it?” she said. She took my hand and squeezed my fingers.

“Elena,” I said. Tears filled my eyes. “Is it over?” I croaked.

Elena just nodded.

Fatima came up next to Elena. “We know what Alek did,” she said. “We’re safe now. The Landers are gone.”

All I could do was nod. The effort must have completely drained me, because I apparently fell back into unconsciousness again. The last thing I saw was a hallucination, a vision of my mother and father, alive, standing next to the bed. “We survived,” I whispered.

•   •   •

Eventually, days later, I woke up. I was in a hospital room, not in a tunnel lying on a makeshift cot. There was only one place where a room like that existed: the base hospital. It was aboveground to provide easy access to medical vehicles from the colony or the farming district.

The windows must have been shattered in the attack, because the glass was completely gone. A warm muggy breeze was flapping the posters that Mandeep, or a helper, had tacked in place as makeshift curtains. One corner had come loose, and it made little snapping sounds when the breeze gusted. I stared at it.

WE ARE WHAT MAKES MELMING MINING GREAT. WE ALL WORK TOGETHER.

I could hear the sounds of kids playing soccer, or something, outside. Darcy’s laugh carried into the room, and I choked up.

“So, Fearless Leader, are you with us for a while this time?”

Elena’s voice, a wonderful sound.

I turned to face her and smiled. “I hope so,” I said, wincing at my stiff muscles.

She was sitting on a chair next to me. She had bags under her eyes and looked exhausted but beautiful. Her hair had grown even longer. She reached her hand out to me, and I reached my left hand to touch her. I stopped. I was missing two fingers, my middle finger and ring finger on my left hand.

Elena’s lips quivered. “We thought you were dead. When we found you, your body was so bloody and twisted. We needed to cut the digger apart before the hole caved in around you . . . more than it already had. It wasn’t a very precise operation under the circumstances.”

“It’s a pretty small price to pay,” I said. “And, hey, I can make the
I rock
symbol with my hand way easier now!” I threw my hand into the air and stuck out my tongue.

Elena laughed so hard, I thought I’d cry.

“How did you find me?” I asked after we’d calmed down.

“As soon as I found the beacon, I dropped Darcy back at camp.”

“The beacon!” I said. “Did you fire it off? What does it look like?”

“Whoa, one thing at a time. I’ll get to the beacon in a second. But back to your original question. It took me and Fatima all of two seconds to figure out that you and Alek had both left with diggers.”

“So?”

Elena frowned at me. “Fatima realized at least one of you had to be in a digger with a warning signal inside.”

“You were able to follow Alek.”

“Not right away. But when we couldn’t pick up the signal closer to the camp, we knew you were heading farther away. You weren’t looking for the beacon, so where could you be heading?” She stared at me, her lips pursed but trembling.

I looked away. “I didn’t want to put anyone else in danger, so I needed to keep the plan a secret. Alek only found out by accident.”

Elena shook her head and pointed her finger at me. “Don’t you ever do that again. I’m not kidding. From now on, you do not shut me out.”

“I hope I never have to come up with a plan like that again.”

“I’m not talking about strategy, Christopher!”

I was confused.

“I got your letter,” Elena said.

My cheeks turned red. I’d said a lot of things, personal things, in that letter. Stuff I just couldn’t tell Elena face-to-face.

She tossed the letter onto the end of the bed. “I didn’t read it, Christopher. I’d like to think I didn’t have to, to know what you’d say.”

I took the folded paper in my hand and turned it over again and again. Was Elena asking me to say those things now? Why was I still so flustered and confused? My head started to hurt again. Elena was clearly waiting for me to say something. But what?

The door slammed, and Pavel ran into the room.

“Guys, there’s a signal coming from Earth!” Then he ducked back into the hallway. The door swung on its hinges.

I turned to Elena, but the moment had passed. She was standing, smoothing her shirtfront. She didn’t look at me.

“We did find the beacon. It wasn’t a pie with whipped cream. Darcy was very disappointed.”

“Which sequence was right? Yards or miles?”

“It’s always about the codes with you, isn’t it? Not surprisingly, given your love of threes, Tunnel Three was the right starting point,” she added, shaking her head. “And it was definitely miles. If it had been yards, we’d have found you and Alek before the attack.”

“So what was it like?”

“It was more like a giant series of connected disks very close to the surface. The numbers in the squares turned out to be the code that activated the emergency signal. We triggered it two days ago, after we were certain all the Landers had died in the explosion. The signal has been going out ever since. Of course, the Blackout only ended today.”

Today? I’d been out cold for nearly two weeks!

I struggled to get up. Elena put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll get a wheelchair. We should all hear this message together,” she said.

She left. I went to put the letter on my bedside table. Elena’s picture was there, burned a bit around the edges and ripped and taped back together.

I tossed my letter to the side. I resolved to tell Elena what was in the letter as soon as she came back.

The door swung open again.

“Elena, I do . . .”

It wasn’t Elena; it was Mandeep. Elena followed behind her, pushing a wheelchair.

I shut my mouth and closed my eyes.
Idiot
, I thought, again.

“This is not a good idea,” Mandeep said. “He shouldn’t move too much.”

Elena rolled her eyes.

“I’m in charge here, and I demand to be let go,” I said. “And I’m not taking a vote.”

Mandeep looked angry, but she and Elena eased me out of the bed and onto the wheelchair.

It hurt—a lot. Elena carefully tucked some blankets around my legs. I tried to grab her hand, to try to send her some kind of signal. But she quickly walked around behind the chair and began to push me down the hallway.

So many questions were left unanswered. Who were the Landers? Who were they working for? Where had they hidden before the Blackout?

Maybe whoever was answering our distress call could help.

The hallway ended outside a small office.

Pavel was sitting on a chair in front of a radio receiver, squeezing his headphones tightly over his ears.

He looked up when he saw me come in, and
dropped the headphones around his neck. “The Landers destroyed all the other stuff, so I grabbed this one from a digger. It’s tuned into the same frequency as the beacon.”

“Nice work,” I said.

He put the headphones back on and turned to the radio. “It’s started up again.”

Every few seconds or so he’d scribble something down on a sheet of paper. Then he took off the headphones. “I’ve had to listen to it a few times to be sure, but I think I got it all,” he said.

He handed me the paper.

They are coming to get you.

They are coming to get you.

They are coming to get you.

They are coming to get you.

I looked at Pavel, who smiled. “It’s been repeating that same message for about five minutes now.”

“Yes! Rescue!” I said. Elena hugged me.

We all began dancing around the room. Fatima and Mandeep gave each other a high five.

Pavel twirled in his chair.

Then he cocked his head.

“Wait, there’s something else coming through.”

He clasped the earphones back over his ears and began decoding the message. He closed his eyes, concentrating, then grabbed his pencil and began writing.

He handed me the paper, a stunned expression on his face.

I read it with a growing sense of alarm.

They are coming to get you.

They are coming to get you.

Hide.

Hide.

Hide.