Out of This World Read online

  “The cave is down there,” said Ilara, pointing. And indeed there was an entrance in the rock, along a path that ran down off the cliff. “Come. We must hurry.”

  But Boston didn’t move. He was studying the cave thoughtfully. “Hey, Ilara,” he said. “You remember that time when you and I were in the Silver Mountains on Kadis IV, and we found a cave just like this that turned out to be full of spikebats?”

  Ilara gave him a puzzled look. “Yes, I remember,” she said. “But I doubt there are any spikebats here.”

  “I guess not,” Boston said, and shoved her off the cliff.

  “Ilaraaaa!” Mazzy screamed. Ilara screamed, too, flailing at the air as she plummeted into the gully and was swallowed up by the poisonous sludge at the bottom.

  “What did you do?” Mazzy yelled at Boston. Dunk lumbered over and seized his arms, pulling them up behind his back with an iron grip.

  “Oh, hey, easy now!” said Boston, chuckling.

  “Easy now?” Mazzy cried. “We ought to throw you off that cliff after her!”

  Jack stared at Boston in appalled shock. “You killed her!” he said. “You killed Ilara!”

  “Relax,” said Boston. “Take a look.”

  They went to the edge of the cliff and looked over. Ilara had broken the surface of the sludge and was waving her arms helplessly. Except it wasn’t Ilara anymore. Those elegant features had started to run like wax. Her fingers had melted together into an oozing mush. As Jack watched in horror, Ilara turned into a throbbing blob of shiny slime, long tentacles thrashing wildly in the air as she sank. At last the sludge closed over her head, and there was a loud, stinking burp from below that sent them all reeling back from the edge with their eyes watering.

  “Phew!” said Thomas. “So long, Jodie Ellis.”

  “That was your girlfriend?” Mazzy asked Jack. “The slime creature?”

  “She was not my girlfriend!” Jack cried.

  “It was the Changeling,” said Boston. He looked over his shoulder at Dunk. “You feel like letting me go now? I hear medical bills come straight out of your pay packet if you injure your employer.”

  Dunk let him go as if he were on fire. Boston massaged his shoulders and stepped away, wincing.

  “I got suspicious when we saw her in her cell. She’s far too high-and-mighty to ever say thank you to someone like me, even if we did just save her life. And that story about Kara didn’t ring true, either. Hard to believe the Traitor of Rakkan would be so sloppy as to let a Host read her mind. And why would she need an escape route through a cave?”

  “But what if you’d been wrong? How could you be sure?” Mazzy asked.

  “We never went to the Silver Mountains on Kadis IV,” said Boston. “And spikebats? I just made them up.”

  “So the whole thing was a setup?” Jack asked.

  “They figured you’d come for us and left the Changeling there to lead us into a trap. I expect that inside that cave we’d find a lot of Mechanics waiting for us. So I think we’ll take another route, huh?”

  “Smart work,” said Gradius. “Well done.”

  “Thanks, kid,” said Boston, ruffling his hair. Jack would have given a lot to be able to get a photo of the look on Gradius’s face right then.

  “So if it wasn’t Ilara,” said Dunk, “where’s Ilara?”

  Boston pointed toward the Firehawk. “In there, probably. Shall we go find out?”

  The cargo bay of the Firehawk was a smoky cavern, echoing with engines. Robot vehicles rolled back and forth down the ramp while Mechanic laborers loaded them up using their powerful hydraulic arms. In the frenzy of activity, nobody noticed a handful of stowaways sneaking away from one of the vehicles, to hide behind a pile of junk in a corner.

  “What are they doing?” Thomas wondered, peering in horror at the Mechanics. They were a mix of meat and machinery, things who had once been human but whose bodies and faces had mostly been replaced with parts that looked like they came from rusty digger trucks. They snarled and glared as they worked, lifting enormous loads with ease.

  “Looks like they’re clearing everything out before this thing launches,” said Gradius. “Everything that can be salvaged, they’ll take. That’s how Mechanics are.”

  “But they’re bringing things in as well,” said Mazzy. She pointed. “See?”

  As they watched, several Mechanics unloaded an enormous metal cylinder from the back of a particularly large vehicle. There were thick, riveted windows in the side, like portholes, and within they could see a strange sparkling substance that hurt the eyes to look at. It was like the afterimage of the sun, or the negative of a photograph: burning bright, but all the colors seemed somehow reversed.

  “Is that …” Boston gasped.

  “Antimatter,” said Gradius grimly.

  “The rumors were true, then? The Braxians knew how to make antimatter? The most powerful energy source in the universe?”

  “I guess they did,” said Gradius. “And since they all got turned into Mechanics, that means the Mechanics know, too.” He got to his feet. “Let’s follow that cylinder. I want to know what they’re doing with it.”

  They made their way around the edge of the room, moving between stacks of junk to avoid the gaze of the Mechanics. Mazzy spotted a service hatch high up on one wall that looked like it might lead into the next chamber, where the cylinder of antimatter had gone. One by one, they clambered up the ladder and slipped inside, concealed by the fog of engine fumes that hung in the air.

  “Y’know, if the Mechanics weren’t so dirty, they’d be a lot harder to sneak past,” Jack mused, stifling a cough with his fist.

  The service hatch led to a walkway that crossed another huge chamber, high up in the air. When it was Jack’s turn to climb, he found Gradius and Boston crouched on it, looking gravely down. Their faces were lit from below with an eerie white light. In the chamber, stacked in haphazard piles, were hundreds of cylinders, just like the one they had seen earlier. The whole room seethed with the strange glow of antimatter.

  “This is bad,” said Boston.

  “You can say that again,” said Gradius.

  “I think I pretty much summed it up the first time, actually.”

  Jack slid up close to them and looked over the edge of the walkway. Mechanics moved about between the piles. Scattered among the cylinders were several larger devices, huge metal tanks covered in cables and lights.

  “What are those?” he asked, pointing.

  “I think they’re bombs,” said Gradius. “I think this aircraft is just one giant bomb.”

  Jack went pale. “You said that a few pounds of that stuff could power a city for a hundred years,” he said. “What could that much antimatter do?”

  “There’s enough here to blow up a planet,” said Boston. “This much antimatter, all released at once … it would be like a supernova. If they flew this through a rift gate, it wouldn’t matter if it got blown to bits within seconds, because it would take the whole planet with it.”

  Gradius’s eyes were flinty. “We have to stop this,” he said.

  “Well, duh,” said Jack.

  There was no way to get near the piles of antimatter without being seen by the Mechanics, and there were too many bombs to disable before dawn even if they could. They had to seek another way to prevent the disaster to come. They headed into the depths of the Firehawk, where the corridors became emptier. Most of the Mechanics were in the cargo bay preparing to leave, it seemed. Only a few were left patrolling the quiet, cold passageways farther in.

  “If we can’t stop the bombs, what can we do?” Thomas asked.

  “We can stop the Firehawk from taking off. That might buy us some time, at least,” said Gradius.

  “And we have to find Ilara, too,” said Jack. “She’s nearby, I’m sure of it.”

  Gradius gave him a funny look. “What makes you so certain?”

  Jack frowned. “I don’t know. I just know. She’s over near the scanner bay.”

&nb
sp; “That’s a total guess!”

  “It is, isn’t it?” said Jack. He was as puzzled as anyone. “But I’m sure. I mean it. I’m dead sure.”

  “We don’t have time to go running off to investigate a hunch,” Gradius said impatiently. “This w—”

  “Scanner bay, you said?” Dunk talked over him, addressing Jack. “Lead on.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? We have to get to engineering, sabotage the engines!”

  “Sorry, fella,” said Dunk. “We’re going to find Ilara. And the day I listen to management over a working joe, like Jack here, is the day I hand in my union card.”

  “I’m going, too!” said Thomas. “I love hunches!”

  “And me,” said Mazzy. “Ilara’s a friend. Or, like, a crewmate, at least. Maybe just an acquaintance, actually.” She frowned. “In fact, she’s kind of a pain, but we’re going to get her, anyway.”

  “But I might need you to disable the locks in engineering!” Gradius protested.

  “Tough,” said Mazzy, heading off after the others.

  Boston shrugged at Gradius as he followed. “The people have spoken.”

  “Amateurs!” Gradius cried in exasperation, but in the end he had no choice but to go with them.

  Jack could hardly keep the smile off his face. You might be the big-shot hero, Gradius, he thought, but the rest of us, we’re a team.

  He made his way through the corridors as if he’d known them all his life. It was a strange feeling. He was being drawn, pulled along by a relentless curiosity to see what was behind a certain door in the scanner bay. By the time they reached it, he was practically jigging with anticipation.

  “You think she’s in there?” Mazzy asked.

  “I have no reason to think so,” said Jack. “But she definitely is.”

  “Good enough for me,” said Mazzy. She put her cable into the keypad and the door unlocked.

  Inside, Ilara sat rigidly in a large metal seat that hummed with power. Her hood had been thrown back and a band of metal surrounded her head. She stared blankly ahead and did not seem to see them.

  “The Changeling! ” Thomas screamed. He pulled Boston’s blaster out from its holster and pointed it at Ilara’s face. Mazzy snatched it off him before he could work out how to fire it and handed it irritably back to Boston.

  “Let’s just see before we shoot her, eh?” said Jack, patting him on the shoulder. Thomas took a few calming sucks on his empty inhaler while the others disconnected her from the chair and helped her stand.

  “It’s about time you all got here,” said Ilara, annoyed. “What were you doing, playing cards or something?”

  “That’s our Ilara!” said Boston. Impulsively he reached to hug her, but the withering stare she gave him made him reconsider. “Yep, definitely her.”

  “Of course I’m Ilara, you fool. What are you talking about?”

  “Long story,” said Boston.

  “All right, I’ll just read your mind, then.”

  “Wait, no, don’t!” Boston cried, but it was too late. Ilara’s face turned to a picture of horror.

  “It’s been how many days since you washed your underwear?” she asked in disgust.

  “I ran out of briefs!” Boston cried. “I’ve been busy!”

  Ilara turned away, dismissing him with a shake of the head. “Humans!” she sniffed. “Do you know how hard it was to reach out to your minds and lead you to me with that machine trying to block me?” She looked at Jack, and Jack was surprised to see the barest hint of a smile there. “At least someone was listening,” she said.

  Jack smiled back at her. All of a sudden, she didn’t seem quite so scary.

  There was a crackle of static and a blare of horns from out in the corridor. The kind of music that usually meant an official announcement was about to be made.

  “What’s that?” asked Thomas, already hurrying out to investigate. Jack followed him, in case he fiddled with anything that shouldn’t be fiddled with, and the rest came after.

  They traced the noise to a video screen in a small control room for monitoring the scanners. As they arrived, the introduction was just ending, and the screen switched to show General Kara standing in front of a grim landscape of factories beneath a filthy brown sky.

  “Is that … Braxis Prime? The home of the Mechanics?” Thomas said.

  “Wouldn’t like to be a travel agent for that place,” said Jack. “And they said Earth was bad.”

  “Cholera. Syphilis. Spanish flu. Rabies. Ebola.” Dunk was ticking fatal diseases off his fingers.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Everyone shut up,” Gradius told them. “I want to hear what she says.”

  Mazzy’s eyes darkened with hatred as Kara began to speak, her half-human face staring into the camera.

  “Citizens of the Nexus,” she said. “For too long you have refused the call to become part of the machine. Obsessed with your own selfish lives, you deny the wishes of the Kernel, who would make us all one. One race, one people, together. All of us, using the planets of the Nexus as they were meant to be, as fuel for greater things. Together we would break away from the need to use rift gates. Together we would build giant spacecraft powered by antimatter. Together we would learn to navigate the stars! But you … you fear change. And we need the resources of your planets. So we are bringing change to you.

  “In less than one hour, we will stage a demonstration of our power. We will destroy one of the planets of the Nexus entirely. There is nothing you can do to stop it. You have only to watch. After that, you will surrender, let the armies of the Mechanics occupy your lands, and submit to the necessary conversion. You will have no choice. The alternative is annihilation. And as you will see, we now have the capability to wipe you out, whenever we choose.”

  She leaned in close to the camera, and for the first time there was a glimmer of emotion in her eye, a glint of wicked enjoyment.

  “Citizens of the Nexus, enjoy the show.”

  A terrifying boom made them jump, and the corridor began shaking violently all around them. They stumbled this way and that, grabbing on to whatever they could as a deafening roar filled the Firehawk.

  “What’s going ooooon?” Thomas wailed, clinging to a pillar like a koala made of Scotch tape.

  “The Firehawk!” Gradius yelled. “It’s launching!”

  “That can’t be right!” Jack yelled back. “Kara said it wouldn’t launch till dawn! It’s only been an hour since the sun went down!”

  “Oh no,” said Mazzy, her face going slack as she realized what was happening. She stumbled over to the video screen, swaying unsteadily as she punched buttons. The picture changed to the view from an outside camera, which was shaking and shuddering. Over the horizon, they saw the edge of a newly rising sun. It was twice as large as when it had gone down.

  “How did it get bigger? How is it coming back up?” Thomas howled.

  “Remember the star map?” said Mazzy. “Remember we saw the thirteenth planet? It had two suns. Night must only last an hour here!”

  “So we’re stuck in this thing?” Boston cried. “We’re stuck on a giant bomb that’s headed through the rift gate to blow up a planet?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Mazzy. Her eyes began to scroll with numbers. “Calculating chances of survival …”

  “Don’t bother, we already know,” said Jack.

  “What do we do? What do we do?” Thomas cried.

  “We get to the bridge,” said Gradius. “Maybe we can’t stop this thing from launching, but we can stop it getting to wherever it’s going. If we reach the central computer, Mazzy can redirect it. Right?”

  Mazzy’s eyes cleared. “Right. I hope.”

  “Then let’s go. We should be able to make it as long as the guards haven’t noticed we’re here yet.”

  An alarm began to blare in the distance. “Intruders on board! The prisoner is missing! All guards to full alert!”

  “Now that,” said Dunk, “is bad timing.”


  Jack ran for his life as a hail of blaster fire streaked over his head. The others were crammed into cover in doorways on either side of the passage. Boston reached out as Jack approached and hauled him roughly in, just before a blaster bolt sizzled through the air where his head had been. He collapsed against the wall, gasping.

  “Not that way,” he said.

  Lumbering after him were six Mechanics. Two of them were enormous, ogre-like laborer types, while the others were smaller and almost entirely made of metal, with only a few patches of pale flesh left to show they were ever anything but robots. They carried energy rifles and cannons, and they weren’t shy about using them.

  “Here,” said Gradius, handing Jack a spare blaster pistol that looked to Jack like a toy gun. Then he leaned out and shot one of the Mechanics square in the chest. The others fled into cover and hid there, taking potshots down the passageway.

  “Is there another way around?” Boston called over the rumble and shake of the Firehawk as it powered its way through the sky.

  “Only way to the bridge is through this corridor,” said Dunk. “The other bulkheads seal up for security when the alarm goes off.”

  “Can’t you control them or make them shoot each other or something?” Jack asked Mazzy. “They’re half machine, after all.”

  “I can hack into anything if I can access it remotely,” said Mazzy. “Like TOF-1’s monocle. But Mechanics use old-school tech that you have to plug into, precisely to stop people like me from getting into it. I can’t even access the plans for this craft without finding a terminal to jack into.”

  “It’s like my phone. You can never get a signal when you need one,” Thomas commiserated.

  Jack was turning over the blaster in his hand, frantically trying to find the trigger. Gradius grabbed the barrel and steered it away from him. “Careful where you’re pointing that.”

  “How do I even fire this thing?”

  “There’s a thumb stud on the side. There. Have a go.”

  Jack found the stud, then, feeling suitably armed, he popped up from behind the pipes and aimed a shot at the Mechanics. A volley of blaster fire sent him cringing back into cover.