17

HIDDEN FIGURES

ANTON REALLY WAS QUITE THE SHEPHERD. WITHIN MOMENTS, HE’D gathered us all up and herded us out of the observatory and back into the long train of chambers that made up the main stem of the station.

“I think it’s probably time to go check on Dr. Underberg, don’t you think, Gillian?”

“Um . . .” I was still dumbfounded, fighting to regain the power of speech after Anton’s shocking announcement. I shuddered to think of what kind of big, fiery thing the Shepherds would use to try to convince the people of Earth that the world was ending. If they really did have the power to alter astronomical data, they could simply invent an asteroid coming to hit the Earth. That would scare millions. Terrify the entire population of the Earth enough to listen to anything—absolutely anything—that the Shepherds wanted them to.

And we would be a part of it.

We all floated effortlessly through the cabins, but not Dad. He lurched, awkward, from handhold to handhold, looking green the whole time. “Go slower,” he begged. “This microgravity doesn’t suit me.”

“Take your time, Sam,” Anton said. “It’s not like we’ll be far away. You can’t get too far away from anyone on Infinity Base.” His tone was pleasant, but there was no mistaking his words. It was a threat.

I cast a look behind me at my father, who was clenching his jaw as the space grew between us. He met my eyes, and nodded slightly.

Play the game. Lie like a Shepherd.

I wasn’t certain that I could, but I knew one thing for sure—if I pulled this off, then the second I got back to Earth, I wouldn’t stop until everyone in the world knew what kind of liars they were.

“I’ve been trying to open a channel of communication to Underberg,” Anton was explaining to us. “But he refuses to respond. Still, I know he is receiving my messages, even if he won’t talk to me.” He ushered us through the door back into the entrance chamber. “Or undo the latch.”

“Gillian!” Savannah called. She was gripping a handle near the air lock. “Did you see your father? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “It’s like Nate told us. He’s just a little . . . spacesick. How are you guys?” Savannah was probably wishing she’d stayed back on Earth like she’d wanted to.

“I’m . . . adjusting,” Savannah said, her expression sour. “Anton really wants Dr. Underberg to open the door.”

“But he won’t,” Howard announced.

“Indeed,” Anton broke in. “I was hoping your presence might make a difference, Miss Seagret. Would you care to enter the air lock and give it your best shot?”

“Um . . .” I looked at Eric. “Alone?”

What if this was some kind of trick, and Anton wanted me in the air lock so he could manipulate Dr. Underberg? Eric’s join us or die joke didn’t seem very funny. Anton could easily threaten to make Dr. Underberg open the door or unseal the locks, pushing me out into space.

“Of course not,” Anton said, looking confused. “I’ll be going in, too.”

“Why?” I asked, my voice shaky.

“So I can meet Dr.—” Realization dawned on his features. “Gillian, do you think I want to hurt you?”

“No,” I said. Yes. Absolutely.

“If I wanted to hurt you, to hurt any of you, I’d have done it already. I know where everything is on this station, I knew you were coming, I even had two of you unconscious, in my care. Hurt you? Don’t be silly! I want to help you. All of you, including the stubborn old man in there.” He pointed out the air lock. “And it would be a big help to me right now if you went with me and helped convince him of that fact. I’ve read your father’s book. Dr. Underberg trusts you. He trusts you enough to bring you here. And now you are going to get him to trust me.”

Again, I was herded by the Shepherd, this time right into the tiny air lock. Anton was massive next to me in the crowded space. Nervously, I maneuvered over to the door to Wisdom, careful not to touch him. He hooked the upturned toe of his slipper around a handle set in the floor and appeared to be standing, casually, arms crossed, like he was lining up at the post office.

I stared down at his feet. “So that’s what the elf toes are for.”

Anton glanced down. “Oh, yeah. Do you want a pair?”

“No. I’ll stick to my utility suit.” At least I could trust it, unlike anything having to do with Anton. I looked at the closed hatch on Wisdom. “Do you want me to knock or something?”

“I’ve no doubt he’s watching us. Just explain the situation.”

That’s what I was afraid of. Explain the situation. We’re the hostages of a lunatic, and we’re all pretending everything is fine so he’ll let us go back to Earth. Oh, and he’s standing right behind me, so why don’t you go ahead and give him complete access to your ship?

“Hey, Dr. Underberg,” I said, wondering if I sounded as dumb as I felt. “Gillian here.”

I waved, just in case maybe he was only getting a visual and not sound.

“We’ve got my dad and Nate.” I counted them off on my fingers. “And they are totally okay.” I made the scuba-diving symbol, with my index finger and thumb forming an O with the other three fingers straight up. “We’re all fine here. Anton”—I pointed back at him—“has been very . . . welcoming.”

I checked with Anton. He gave me a thumbs-up.

“And he wants you to open the door. So. You know. Could you?”

And then I stepped back. I hoped I’d sounded sincere enough for Anton. And I hoped Dr. Underberg was as suspicious as ever and didn’t let us in.

A minute passed, and nothing happened. “Maybe he’s asleep,” I suggested to Anton. “He . . . falls asleep a lot.”

“He’s not asleep.” Anton’s tone had turned dark, and he pushed me aside. “He’s impossible. Maybe Dani really is his daughter. It certainly would explain where she got her stubborn streak from.”

I shrank back, scared both by the growl in his voice and by how much space he took up in front of the little hatch. Anton may not want to hurt us, but he totally could.

Anton raised his fist and banged on the hatch. “Open up in there!”

I pushed myself backward as his shouts echoed around the tiny hatch. The air lock was as small as the inside of a car, and Anton took up most of the space.

“Um . . . ,” I said softly, but he wasn’t even listening.

“Don’t you get it?” Anton screamed at the thick door. “I don’t care about Elana’s plan. I think whatever they did to you when I was a kid was an absolute waste! You had a lot to offer us. You still do, but you can’t do it from in there!”

I glanced back through the air-lock door, where the others were gathered, peering in. Behind them, I saw my father, clinging awkwardly to the walls. I was pretty sure Anton’s voice was carrying just fine.

Gingerly, I eased myself back into the room. I don’t think Anton even noticed, because he was still shouting uselessly at Dr. Underberg’s spaceship.

“You think I don’t know exactly what’s going on in there? I’ve seen the analyses you’ve done on your ship every time you pop in here to make repairs and steal supplies.”

“Dad?” I squeaked. I gestured to the door on our end. Anton wasn’t paying any attention to us. We could close the door right now. We could lock Anton in the air lock. Make him our prisoner.

“Your heat shields are damaged, your propulsion rockets are running at seventeen percent of normal, your air filtering is completely out of whack, and . . . come on, Aloysius. Let’s be honest here. Not even your batteries have enough juice to get you back to Earth at this point. What choice do you have?”

Dad awkwardly clawed his way toward us. “Don’t,” he said softly, shaking his head.

“But this is our chance.” I clasped my hands in front of me. “We could trap him.”

“And then what?” Dad said. “We still can’t get home if he’s in between us and Underberg’s ship. And even if we could, you heard him—Underberg doesn’t have the power to get us back to Earth.”

“But Shepherds lie!” I protested.

Anton had now resorted to cursing and kicking at the door with his soft slippers. I didn’t think that would accomplish anything but bruising his feet.

“Do you think what Anton is saying about Underberg’s ship is a lie?” Dad asked.

I hung my head. “Honestly?”

“No,” said Howard. “It’s a real wreck in there. Wisdom, though, maybe. The Shepherds fixed it all up.”

And he wasn’t the only one thinking of Wisdom. Anton had moved on to shouting about that, too. “You know I’m right, Aloysius! I personally overhauled your second ship from top to bottom for the past six months. I know exactly what kind of junk you’ve been flying around on here. You’re lucky you haven’t dropped out of the sky!”

Yikes.

“Okay,” I said. “What about the shuttle you guys came up on?”

“Who would fly it?” Nate asked. “Howard?”

“Yes!” cried Howard.

“Shh!” we all warned him.

Howard clapped his mouth shut. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. The real problem is the landing. You can’t just land a spaceship like it’s an airplane.”

“You can’t land an airplane, either, Howard,” Nate pointed out.

“I don’t know how the Guidant spacecraft lands,” Howard said. “Does it parachute into some field like the Russian Soyuz capsule? Does it fall into the sea? You can’t just land. You need a team on the ground to come get you.”

The Shepherds. I sighed. Even if we got back to Earth, we still needed to play nice.

“Listen, while he’s distracted,” Dad said. “Are we all on the same page here? Nod and smile. Do your best to seem as if you’re considering all his points. Don’t overplay your hand—he’s a genius—but don’t argue with him too much.”

“You should have seen Sav here go after him before about bees or whatever,” Nate said. “I thought we were all dead meat.”

“That’s good, though,” Dad said. “If we all just immediately converted it would look suspicious. A little hesitation and uncertainty on our parts is realistic. Remember, the point is to get back home. Just keep your head down and pay attention.”

“There is no down,” Howard said. “We’re in microgravity.”

Savannah groaned.

“If you don’t know what to say,” Nate suggested, “ask him about the base. He can talk about it for hours.”

I pursed my lips and gazed longingly at the air-lock door. Or we could skip all this pretense and just lock Anton in until he promised to send us home. My fingers itched to slam the door on him. I pictured laughing in triumph as he rushed back to us, his face pressed against the portal window.

But Dad was right. Then what? What if he refused to help us? We weren’t about to leave him there to die. And whenever we did open the door again, we’d have lost any chance of getting him to trust us, to believe we were on the Shepherd side.

I pulled my hand back, balling it against the thigh of my utility suit. Maybe I was becoming more like a Shepherd than I thought.

ANTON YELLED AT the hatch of Knowledge for another five minutes, while we all stood there wondering what to do.

I shook my head. If only there were a way to get a message—a real message—to Dr. Underberg. But I didn’t know if he could see us or just hear us, and we couldn’t risk letting our guard down with Anton watching our every move.

I looked at Howard. “Do you remember how to make the ciphers? The number ciphers like Dani was using at Eureka Cove?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking affronted that I would doubt him. “It’s just an alphabet.”

“Can you make one?” I asked.

“With what keyword?”

“Omega,” I said quickly. That was the one Dr. Underberg used on the code book he’d given Howard.

Inside the air lock, Anton’s tone had turned cajoling. “Don’t you want to see the base without sneaking around?” he was asking Underberg. “I’m sure you haven’t gotten a chance to really enjoy all the features.”

Howard opened one of the pockets on his thigh and pulled out the space pen we’d gotten him for his birthday. Nate rolled up his shirtsleeve for Howard to write on his arm.

“What do you know?” Howard said. “It really does write in microgravity.”

“Hurry,” I said.

“What do you want it to say?”

I bit my lip. I didn’t know. And I wasn’t sure how we’d communicate it to him anyway. Tap it out, like Morse code?

“Make it say ‘play along,’” Dad suggested. He looked at me and shrugged. “More allies couldn’t hurt.”

“Especially one who could actually land a spaceship,” Eric added.

“Yeah, that’s good.” I toyed with the zipper pull on my suit. I was getting as bad as Howard. He painstakingly inked the code on his brother’s wrist as I tried to think of ways to get a message to Dr. Underberg.

“Fine!” Anton snapped, then came shooting out of the air lock. I nearly gasped in surprise and quickly looked at Howard and Nate. Howard was still holding his pen, but Nate had pulled his sleeve back down.

“I’m not in any rush. He’s only hurting himself in there. I can’t imagine all the medical problems he’s experiencing. I could help him, you know. We could wean him back onto gravity. We could put him in torpor and ship him back to Earth.”

“You could lure him out in the open and then kill him, like the Shepherds have been trying to do for decades,” I blurted, then clapped a hand over my mouth. I was going to suck at this lying thing.

But Anton merely sighed. “You’re not wrong, Gillian. We really haven’t given Underberg any reason to trust us, have we?”

Nate floated up behind me and bumped his arm against mine. I looked down.

Oh my goodness. That was a lot of numbers.

Anton was still talking. “It’s amazing he’s even been communicating with Dani.”

I was breathing heavy. Nine numbers. Big numbers.

“Yes,” I said, raising my voice. Could Dr. Underberg hear us all the way in here? He had to be listening, especially after Anton’s outburst. “They were communicating. In code. They had a code they used to send messages back and forth.”

“Figures. Dani was always obsessed with codes. She and her mother used to do the same thing.”

“Did she ever teach them to you?” I asked.

“Gillian,” Dad warned.

“You were friends when you were kids, right?” I asked. “How old are you now? Forty-one?”

“Good guess.”

I swallowed thickly. “And Dani has to be thirty-four, right?”

Nate stiffened beside me. I checked his arm again.

“She’d find that flattering. She’s closer to—”

“She told us you dated.” I barreled ahead. “How long? Fifteen years?”

Anton’s expression turned grim. “We were together for a while, yes. But that doesn’t make her betrayal okay. The Shepherds raised her, and look how she turned on us.”

My voice was shaking. “She did it to save her father.”

“She never even met him.”

Focus, Gillian, focus. Nate put his arm around me, as if to steady me. I checked out the numbers again. “Well, he must have been fifty-five when she was born.”

“He wasn’t even around when she was born.”

Five more. Just five more. “And she was fifteen when her mom died, right?”

Anton’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”

“Gillian!” Dad barked.

But I was too far gone. “I can’t imagine what it’s like for her. Down there. Alone. Thirty-four . . .”

Anton floated my way. “What are you—” He caught me by my clenched hands and pulled me away from Nate.

I saw Nate shoving his sleeve back into place as Anton wrenched open my fists as if they contained clues.

“What are these numbers?”

“Let go of her!” Dad cried.

“Eleven!” Howard shouted. “Thirty-five! Fourteen!”

Silence. Nothing but the sound of the machines whirring.

Anton regarded me carefully. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing.” I was still a terrible liar.

“What did you say?” he pressed.

My mouth was so dry I didn’t know how I found my voice. “‘Run away.’”

Anton dropped my hands in disgust. “That’s the wrong number of letters, little Seagret. But you’re getting better at deception. We’ll make a Shepherd out of you yet.”

No, They would not!

Dad rushed to my side. “Leave my children alone.”

Anton laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve been nothing but good to your children, Sam. They’re the ones who won’t help me.”

Just then, from inside the air lock, we heard a mechanical whir. The door to Knowledge was opening.