Nova (24 page)

*00:14:59*

*00:14:58*

*00:14:57*

Quickly I poke the chip again, relieved when the countdown vanishes once more.

*—:—:—*

I have the key now; I know how to start the final countdown. There’s nothing to stop me from going Nova now. But first there’s something I have to do.

Michael answers the door on my third knock. His mouth drops open the moment he lays eyes on me. “Lia!” he breathes, lunging forward and wrapping his arms around me.

“
Michael
.”

“I thought you’d gone,” Michael is saying, his words half obscured in my hair. “I thought you’d gone, and I would never see you again.”

“It’s okay, Michael. I’m still here.”

“I was so de-fish! Getting mad at you when really I was mad at myself for driving you away. I linked practically every captain on the station this morning, trying to find out what ship you were taking, but by the time I got there it was too late. The
Kiss
was already gone.”

“You came looking for me?” I lean back, astonished. A smile slowly spreads across my face as I remember Standish’s reaction to my resignation. No wonder he didn’t seem surprised!

Michael shrugs. “Of course. You’re my best friend. How could I let you leave without saying goodbye?” He blinks, his face creasing as he finally takes in the fact that I am, in fact,
here.
“What are you doing here? The
Kiss
left hours ago.”

“I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Then you’re staying?”

I nod. “Yes, I’m staying.” He starts to hug me again, and I gently push him away. “You’re not, though. You have to go. Take Teal and Taylor and get off this station. Now. Tonight, if possible, or else tomorrow morning. It doesn’t matter where you go, just take the first passage off you can get.”

“Huh? What are you talking about? Why do I have to go?”

“Because,” I tell him with a sad smile, “sometime in the next forty-eight hours, I’m going to blow up this station.”

29
“THIS IS LUNAR!” MICHAEL SAYS
for about the tenth time in the last half hour. He’s pacing rapidly back and forth, only pausing every few seconds to throw me an
Are-you-vaccin’-me?
look.

“Yeah, I think we’ve already established that,” Shar replies snidely. “Now are we going to do this or not?”

The three of us are assembled in Michael’s room, Shar and I sitting in a semi-circle on the carpet while Michael paces. Teal and Taylor are both out, and the bedroom door is locked. Still, my palms are sweating as I contemplate what we’re about to do.

I linked Shar on my way to Michael’s. I knew he would need proof to pick up his entire family and take off, and I intend to give it to him.

Once Shar arrived, I talked over the plan with her in a hushed voice while Michael was in the bathroom. Unsurprisingly, she was not happy about it.

“Are you completely glitching?” she demanded, in somewhat more than a whisper. “What if you start seizing again? Or actually
die
this time?”

“Then you’ll have Michael to help you dispose of my body.”

She gave me a black look. In response, I just held out my hand. Fear and suspicion in her eyes, she slowly took it, only to drop it almost immediately and back away.

“Your clock! What did you do?”

I let my inner eye drift to the ticking mechanism.

*—:—:—*

“I remembered how to deactivate it . . .
and
restart it,” I added before she could get too excited.

“Then you’re really going to do it?”

“I have to. You know the reason why, and now I need you to show Michael as well. Then both of you need to get on the nearest transport and get the hell off this station.”

To make my point, I grabbed her hand and transferred all my remaining funds into her link account. Shar watched the transaction in silence. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?”

I just laughed. “I haven’t been sure of anything since I stepped foot on this station. I am sure of one thing, though: This is the expanse’s only chance.”

Shar stared at me, for once her face completely unreadable, her silence stretching out so long I started to sweat. At last she nodded. “So be it.”

“Just don’t let Michael see my parents or what I am. I can handle his shock, but not his pity.”

“Show the Spectre but not your dad? How am I supposed to do that?”

I shrugged. “Just show the part where I’m inside his mind, I guess. Leave the rest—” My voice choked and I stopped, swallowing a few times as though it could somehow negate the aching in my heart and the lump in my throat. “He doesn’t need to see the rest of the stuff with my parents, okay?”

Shar nodded, understanding and pity clear in her gaze. She’d seen my parents; she understood why I couldn’t bear to see them again. Not like
that
.

Now I give Shar a speaking look as if to say,
Don’t forget—no bomb, no parents.
Shar gives me a look back as if to say,
I hate you. Now seal your mouth and let’s get this over with.

Ah, if only I wasn’t dying in just a day and a half, I’m sure Shar and I would end up best friends for life.

“Well, Michael?” I ask him. Still muttering, he drops down to the floor between me and Shar, completing the circle. I reach out and take both of their hands.

Compared to my first experience, the link is surprisingly easy this time. The intense fear from before is muted, almost nonexistent. Either Shar feels more confident now that she knows what to do or she’s figured out how to hide her feelings. It helps that I know exactly what I want to show Michael. With the memory block already partially opened, we glide easily into my memories. It’s strange having not one but two presences in my mind, but I push past the oddness and concentrate on showing Michael the important stuff. More memories have trickled in since my initial link with Shar, and I try to go back to the beginning as far as I can, showing memories of my time with Jao, Cavendish, and the other members of the Tiersten resistance. Our flight from Tiersten when the Spectres invaded is just beginning when from far away I hear a door slam open. A voice intrudes on the memory.

“You know you’re not supposed to lock the door, Michael, and if you do, you should at least use a password that’s more than three letters. Michael? Hello? Anyone home? What are you
do-
ing?”

A fourth presence suddenly enters the link. Shar starts to pull her hand away from mine to break the link, but I tighten my grip. Let Teal see! She has as much right to know as Michael.

The scene at Tiersten ends as we make our escape, and I move on to the memory chip, my false identity and my meeting with Jao. Now all I have left to show is what we’re fighting.

Even knowing what’s coming doesn’t prepare me for that first flash of terror as the Spectre grabs me. Instinctively, I try to flee the memory, but it’s too late. The experience is too powerful, rolling over me like a tidal wave, and all I can do is clutch the hands in mine tighter as I relive the horrible sensation of being eaten by the Spectre in my father’s body.

Fear. Revulsion. Horror. The combined emotions of not one but four people explode through my mind. They rage through me like a fire, and I cry out, the sensations too huge to contain.
Stop, stop, please, let me go!

Then it’s gone, the emotions evaporating as quickly as they arose, my mind empty and alone once again. I blink my eyes open and realize I’m no longer holding Shar’s hand. She yanked her hands out of the circle to shatter the link.

Silence reigns for a long moment, then everyone’s voice breaks out at once.

“Oh my God, Lia! Was
that
one of them?”

“Johansen, say something! You’re not going to die or vac out or anything, right?”

“It’s okay, I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“What the Hell was that?!”

Teal’s panicked shriek is enough to shut the rest of us up. Her body is visibly trembling, her hand resting on Michael’s shoulder. She must have tried to shake him earlier to get his attention, and that was when she accidentally entered the link. Shar and I exchange a look.

“You’d better sit down.”

Explaining is not easy or quick, but I manage it eventually. Teal is pretty overloaded, unsurprising considering her last minute addition, and even Michael seems pretty shaken up. I don’t blame them. Still, I manage to explain the situation well enough with a little help from Shar, who sits next to me rubbing her head and refusing to look at anyone. The only thing I don’t tell them is that
I’m
the bomb. Better for them to think I’m some junior demolitions expert than know the truth.

Michael shakes his head, rubs his face, and then shakes his head again. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen him utterly speechless. I wait with bated breath for him to speak.

“So it’s all true—what you told me before, about being a Tellurian agent sent here on a mission. You’re really
not
Lia.”

“I’m sorry, Michael. I wish I was, but I’m not. They just gave me her identity so I could get on the transport with the other prisoners. I don’t know what happened to the real Lia. Maybe she’s still on Tiersten.”

Or maybe she’s dead
.

Michael bows his head. He doesn’t need me to say it. After a moment, he continues. “Then you’re really going to blow up the station to keep these aliens, these Spectres, from spreading?” When I nod, he asks. “If they’re incorporeal, how do you know a bomb would work?”

Well, technically I don’t. I’m a prototype; the first of my kind. However, even if I don’t manage to destroy the Spectres, I should still be able to accomplish my primary mission. I blink. Primary mission? Oh, keeping the Spectres from spreading, I suppose. “I’m—it’s a special kind of bomb.”

“Is everyone infected by these things?” Michael asks, glancing around the room fearfully, as though the Spectres might be floating around him at this very moment.

“No, so far it seems to be just the ex-prisoners, and a few officers as well,” I add, remembering the officer I encountered on Level Two my very first day on the station. “You, Teal, Taylor, Shar—all of you are okay. That’s why you have to get off the station, now, before it blows.”

“But you can’t!” Michael bursts out. “You can’t just blow up the station. Think of all the innocent lives you’d be taking. Maybe the infected ones can’t be saved, but the rest . . .”

I shake my head sadly. “Oh, Michael, don’t you understand? Every single person on this station is already lost.”

I watch his face fall as the implication sinks in. Even if we stand by and let the infected refugees go, all the Spectres won’t simply get on those transports and leave us in peace. The majority will go, using the convoy to spread through the expanse in every direction, but some will stay. Enough will stay.

I’d lay odds that within an hour after that convoy pulls away carrying its terrible cargo, there won’t be a single free person left on this station. I know because that’s the Spectres’ MO. They bide their time, waiting and breeding, until they’ve finally bred enough new Spectres to take every human at once. Then they attack. It’s exactly what happened on Lunar Base 3 and Argos Station. It’s exactly what happened at Tiersten Internment Colony. They came, they multiplied, and when the time was right, they struck en masse. Now the same thing will happen on New Sol. I can only assume the reason we aren’t all slaves yet is the convoy. Compared to a fleet of ships ready to ferry them throughout the expanse, what’s one small space station like New Sol to the Spectres? No doubt they’re waiting for the convoy to arrive to make their move. With the convoy due to arrive soon, it’s only a matter of time. Hours, if I’m right.

The others look grim as I tell them about it. Even Michael’s objections are silenced by this horrible piece of information.

“So why didn’t you just blow up the transport on your way here?”

Teal’s level tone cuts through the silence with ease. I glance at her in surprise. “The transport?” I ask. “Well, I didn’t take out the transport because . . .”

The transport!
I suddenly remember the nagging feeling I had when I first disembarked, like there was something I hadn’t done, and understanding bursts through my brain. I was never supposed to blow up the station. I was supposed to go Nova on the transport!

It was my clock; that’s what threw me off. It didn’t start until right after I arrived on the station. I’d thought it started too early, activating right at the most dangerous moment, when Rowan was checking me in. Only it didn’t start too early; it started too
late
.
The memory is coming back to me now, filtering back through the hole in my mind.

“It’s all timed out now. Your clock will activate approximately thirty-eight hours before your arrival. Once it starts, your real memories will come back. At that point, it’s imperative you don’t have contact with any possible psychics. In fact, it’s best to avoid having contact with anyone at all, if you can help it. The transport should drop from the jump path approximately three hours before arrival. You’ll have roughly one hour to get to a console and transmit the contents of the data chip—you know where it will be hidden—to the station before you go Nova.”

It makes so much more sense. Why blow up a station full of innocents when you could just blow up a transport full of enemies? Well, the refugees themselves are innocents, but they’re already lost anyway. So what went wrong? Why didn’t my clock start up?

I think back to my trip on the transport. Nothing really jumps out at me, only . . .
the door control
. It malfunctioned a week into the trip and gave me an electrical shock. I blacked out and felt dizzy for two days afterward. What if the shock damaged the chips in my head? It would explain why my clock didn’t activate on time and why it didn’t count down correctly once it did. It would even explain why all my memories didn’t come back the way they were supposed to once the clock started. All this trouble because of some stupid door control? I bet the doc never imagined
that
possible contingency.

I want to put my head in my hands and moan, only now understanding the full extent of my failure. By going Nova on the transport, I could have taken out the Spectres and derailed the peace talks all in one shot. Now because of my failure, New Sol is lost and the Celestian delegation is only days away from setting foot on New Earth.

Looking Teal in the eye, I sadly shake my head. “Because I screwed up. And now everyone on this station, and maybe even the entire expanse, will pay for it.”

Sitting in the tunnel next to the SlipStream, I stare at the wall as my thoughts chase round and round in circles. Destroy the station, don’t destroy the station. Kill thousands of innocents, don’t kill thousands of innocents.

Go Nova, don’t go Nova.

I know what I have to do, and yet my heart feels sick with grief. Must I really destroy a station full of people with hardly a second thought? My head says yes, but I can’t help wondering how much good will come of it in the end. I’m just one girl and this is just one station. Even if I stop the Spectres here, they’ll just find some other way in. Jao suspected they’d already started infiltrating the Celestial Expanse. For all we know, half the expanse is already infected.