Randoms (24 page)

“Not really, because this is a simulation suite, not an airless moon,” he said with a grin. “Anyhow, we should have at least enough breathable air in this ship to last an hour, so the sim won't declare us dead.”

“Nayana may not be as smart as she thinks she is,” Tamret said, “but even she can figure out that if we drop off sensors as we pass a moon, we're probably on that moon. She'll come looking for us.”

“She'd better,” Steve said. “Otherwise this plan is total pants.”

“Wouldn't want that,” I mumbled.

We positioned ourselves so that the moon was between us and Nayana, and when Tamret signaled the crest of the radiation wave, Steve pointed us toward the surface and throttled hard.

The nanites must have been messing with my brain chemistry, because my stomach felt like it was coming out my nose, and my eyes were being pushed into my brain. It was horrible, and I had no doubt that if we were trying this in real life, it would be a whole lot worse.

We dropped like a stone toward the blue menthol surface, and then, with lightning reflexes, Steve leveled us. I felt another violent, nauseating jerk, and he must have felt it too, but he remained calm and in control. He carefully set us down, and he killed the ship's power.

We were in complete darkness. Pure blackness. I sat there, listening to the three of us breathe.

“Here's a question,” I said, keeping my voice low as if somehow Nayana and the others might hear me. “How are we going to know when they're in lance range if we have no power?”

Steve, I couldn't help but notice, did not answer.

“You do have a plan, right?” Tamret asked. “Because if I have to kill you, I'm going to feel bad about myself.”

“Why is it I have to think of everything?” he asked.

“Oh, my glob!” I shouted. “You just lost this for us.”

“This plan,” Tamret observed, “is total pants.”

“Look at it this way,” Steve said. “At worst it will be a tie. They'll never find us.”

We were silent for a few minutes. I was irritated, not really angry. Steve's plan had been good up to this point. The problem
was that there was no way to track Nayana's ship. If only we had some means of following their movements that wouldn't register on their sensors.

Except we had exactly that.

“Okay, guys,” I said. “How do you feel about working maybe a little bit outside the rules?”

“Cheating? I feel fine,” Tamret said.

“Prefer it, if you want to know the truth,” Steve said.

I turned on my data bracelet. “You can follow the sim from an outside channel, right? We saw Ms. Price doing it. So, we'll be spectators.” I found the sim and called up a three-dimensional representation of the contest. There we were, on the surface of the moon. And there was Nayana, making her way toward us.

“Brilliant,” Steve said. “As soon as they're in range, we power up.”

Suddenly I felt bad about bending the rules. “I know it was my idea, but maybe we shouldn't do this. When you think about it, it's not really fair.”

“Sure it is. We're using the resources we have available.” I could tell from Tamret's voice that she was grinning.

“Absolutely,” Steve agreed. “Besides, she's welcome to use her bracelet, same as us. Nothing unfair about it.”

“Except she's hunting for us with her ship's sensors, not her bracelet,” I said.

“Her mistake,” Steve said. “Let's wait until she's about thirty miles out, and then we'll power up and strike.”

“I love this!” Tamret shouted. “We're going to totally destroy her.”

We sat there for ten minutes, watching Nayana's slow
progress on a three-dimensional grid projected from Steve's bracelet. She was being thorough, performing slow and deep scans, but she was circling slowly into our range. A couple of times she tried to send messages to us, as if we would forget we were hiding and answer. I suppose I couldn't fault her for trying.

“She should be within thirty miles in less than thirty seconds,” Tamret said.

“Let's wait for twenty, just to be safe,” Steve told me. “I'd hate to get this close and blow it because the cable isn't up to spec.”

We waited until she was within range and powered up the ship. The lights turned on, and our consoles chimed as they instantly came to life. I went to work, and it took me another twenty seconds, which felt endless, to get a confident lock on her ship. There was no messing around here. We had one chance to get this right.

I found my target, locked it in, and fired.

The plasma lance is incredible technology. Both the lance and the cable itself are made entirely out of ionized particles, the lance composed essentially from the same stuff as lightning. In space, where there is no sound, it would make no noise, but the moon had some kind of unbeatable atmosphere, and we set off a deafening sonic boom as the lance flew free.

As soon as the forward tip of the lance came in contact with the energy shields surrounding Nayana's ship, it sensed the resistance, and its own nanoparticles instantly began to restructure its atomic makeup, deionizing and turning the lance and its cable into a superstrong metal alloy. It passed effortlessly through the shields and affixed itself to their hull, bonding with the metal so that there was, for all practical purposes, no way to detect where the hull ended and the lance began.
Meanwhile the nanoparticles were generating gravitons that caused Nayana's ship to be drawn to ours, as if caught in a gravity well. Nayana could not pull away. She could only resist or be pulled down to the planet's surface. She chose to resist, and her ship came to a full stop.

The technology was powerful, but it had its limitations. All Nayana had to do now was reconfigure her shields, just for a moment, to protect against physical impacts. The cable would then be severed on the atomic level. That was precisely what she did. The cable fell away.

That was the moment our victory was assured, because I'd been waiting for her to switch shield frequencies, and the instant she did, I unleashed a steady stream of PPB bursts. She had been at full stop, and we were at full stop, so her systems were easy to target. My first blast took out her shields. Then I took out her engines, and then the weapons. In a matter of seconds, she was dead in space, drifting and powerless to defend herself.

Nayana signaled us, and Tamret put her on speaker. “Fine,” she said. “We surrender. Whatever.”

Before Steve could say anything, Tamret stepped around to my console, and began to fire PPB blasts. Her fingertip danced happily on the console, sending out blast after blast, until Nayana's ship exploded.

“Hey!” Nayana shouted over the comm.

“Even when she's dead,” Tamret said, “she won't stop talking.”

•   •   •

“You cheated,” Nayana said as we met out in the hallway. She had her data bracelet streaming three-dimensional data. Clearly, she was smart enough to figure out how we had pulled it off.

“We didn't cheat,” I told her. “We won.”

“You went outside the sim to monitor us,” Nayana said. “This is supposed to simulate real-world conditions. In the real world, you can't go outside reality to watch your enemy.”

“In the real world,” Steve observed, “you use whatever you can to defeat your opponent. And we did.”

“Just admit we won,” Tamret said.

“You didn't win honestly,” Nayana snapped.

“There is no honest,” Tamret said. “You either get the enemy or the enemy gets you.”

“There are rules of engagement,” Mi Sun said, “and you violated them. I know your boyfriend likes to just shoot things out of the sky, but that's not how we do things in the Confederation.”

“Someone is all high and mighty,” Tamret said. I noticed she was not denying I was her boyfriend, and I wondered if that meant anything, but it seemed like a bad time to raise this question. “Tell me how many points you racked up in there so I can relieve you of them.”

“I refuse,” Nayana said, folding her arms. “And I am disappointed with you, Zeke, betraying your own kind for these aliens.”

“His own kind who won't have anything to do with him?” Tamret asked.

“I'm not going to argue with an animal.” Nayana lifted her chin imperiously. “And I am absolutely not giving you any experience points. If you try to take them, I won't hesitate to report you.”

“We did promise,” Charles said.

“I didn't promise to be cheated.”

“It does seem like a bad idea to take Earth experience
points and hand them over to another planet,” Mi Sun said.

“Except that you lot agreed to it,” Steve said. “Not quite cricket to back out now, seeing as you suggested this wager in the first place.”

“And now I'm suggesting you forget it,” Nayana said.

Tamret stepped forward. I knew that look, and it meant nothing good. “You cheating she-[
pig
].”

“At least I don't look like I pee in a litter box,” Nayana answered.

I wedged myself between them. “This bet was a bad idea to begin with, so why don't we move on. We played the game, we learned some things, and we all got XP. Everyone wins.”

Tamret's ears shot back. “I don't believe this. You're taking her side.”

“I am not taking her side,” I said. “I'm taking
your
side. I don't want you to get caught doing something that will ruin everything for you.”

“You're not thinking about me. You're too busy trying to win over the people who treat you like dirt to worry about your real friends.”

“That is not true,” I told her.

“I'm so done,” Nayana said. “You two can have your little master-pet argument on your own time.”

She headed toward the door, and Charles and Mi Sun followed.

The three of us stood there, me feeling ashamed and angry and nervous from the adrenaline and hormones and who knew what else bouncing around in my system. Tamret seemed to be firing on pure rage. Steve tasted the air, and I could tell he didn't like what he was getting.

“Yours are emotional species,” he said.

Tamret growled and actually stomped her foot. “How's this for emotion? I hate her. I don't care if I get in trouble. I am going to get even with her.”

“Tamret, please don't. Just leave it alone.” I knew I was in dangerous territory, but I couldn't let her self-destruct. “Just give yourself a day to cool off. See how you feel tomorrow.”

She stared at me, her disbelief hard to miss. “You really would drop me to get back in with your delegation, wouldn't you? That's why you're trying to protect Nayana.”

“I'm trying to protect
you
. I don't see why you don't get that.”

“I don't get it because the second she crooked her finger at you, you went running.” She pulled open the door to the hall so hard I thought it might come off the hinges. And then she was gone.

Steve put a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I still love you, mate.”

•   •   •

Steve and I went out for a snack, but I can't say I enjoyed myself. I was distracted by what had happened with Tamret, upset that she was so angry with me, and mildly heartened that she seemed to be jealous of Nayana. I was also worried. I hated how ready she had been to hack into secure Confederation files with an enemy's full knowledge. The thought that she might get caught, might get kicked off the station, filled me with dread. She represented a full third of the beings I fully trusted on the station, and as much as I liked Steve and Dr. Roop, I had never held hands with either of them and, frankly, never intended to.

Steve and I called it quits shortly before curfew. I dropped
him off at his room and was heading down the hall to my own, hoping that Charles would be either asleep or, preferably, still out, when I saw Ms. Price coming toward me.

“Well, look who it is,” she said, flashing an unexpected smile at me. “Ezekiel Reynolds, scourge of the Phandic Empire. The Butcher of Ganar. Destroyer of worlds.”

“Uh, hey there.” I said.

“You're up kind of late, aren't you?” she asked.

There was something about her mood that I couldn't quite make sense of. She was upbeat, but it didn't feel natural to me, like she was trying to convince me, all of a sudden, that she was my buddy.

I shrugged. “I was just hanging out with—” I stopped myself. She didn't want me hanging out with Steve.

“I know who you're spending time with.” She shook her head, not quite able to fathom my foolishness. “I recall telling you to spend less time with those aliens.”

“I don't see the humans lining up to hang out with me,” I said.

“Hmm.” She put a finger theatrically to her chin, pantomiming contemplation. “Maybe we should do something about that.”

Or maybe we should run away screaming,
I thought. I said, “Sure. I guess.”

“What do you say I take you out for a bite to eat. I think you and I have a great deal to discuss. You have this idea that I'm not looking out for you, and I suppose I can see things from your perspective, so in the best interests of our delegation and our planet, maybe we should get to know each other better. There's this place that serves amazing plant sushi in Nebula Heights. You know that neighborhood?”

I checked the chronometer on my data bracelet, hoping the time would get me out of this conversation. “It's like five minutes before curfew.”

She waved her hand. “You don't need to worry about that if you're with me.”

I didn't know if that was true or not, but I had the strangest feeling that it wasn't, and that Ms. Price was trying to get me into trouble. Not that it mattered. Even if I was entirely sure she was right and I was allowed to go out and have vegetable sushi with her, the last thing I wanted to do was make conversation with her in the middle of the night in a strange part of the city about how I needed to abandon my friends.