Rosie closed her eyes against the stars, seeking some respite from the constant light. The suit felt bulky and she was battling claustrophobia. The helmet was lightweight, but it wasn’t that comfortable and smelled of stale rubber. She tried to control her desire to rip the thing off her head. There was no air left in the ship and only the basic systems were operating to stop it from becoming a vacuum. It was also freezing. Without the stabilising effect of life support, the temperature in the ship had dropped to minus thirty and she could feel the cold through her suit. The pylonic fibres stopped her freezing to death but they weren’t made to be worn for thirty-two hours. She wondered how much colder she’d be by the time they made it to Mars.
If they did.
Images came to her of the ship veering off course, straight into the burning atmosphere; the ship exploding as they hit the Martian soil. Her aunt wounded, clutching her stomach. Her dad somewhere else, waiting for rescue that never came, or worse, already cold.
“Rosie,” Riley’s voice crackled in her ear. “It’s time to rotate the fuel cells.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t want to move right now.
“Rosie!”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” Without all the ship’s computer systems on, they had to rotate the fuel cells by hand or they would overload and implode. She unclasped the straps and floated out of the bridge and towards the access tunnels, pulling herself along using whatever handholds she could find. She kept seeing Pip, looking at her with that pathetic expression on his face after he’d seen her aunt lying in a pool of blood. As if he was surprised. As if he didn’t think he was responsible. Shame and humiliation filled her again as she realised just how stupid she’d been – holding his hand, going all girly over his blue eyes, thinking he felt the same. Idiot.
She climbed down the short ladder and into the tunnel. She had almost finished rotating the cells when Riley’s voice came through her com. “Rosie, there’s something going on up here on the console. Some lights flashing. Have you finished yet?”
“Nearly.” She pushed the last cell into place. “What do you mean, lights flashing?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking you. Just get up here.”
She exhaled in exasperation but bit back her smart retort. “I’m coming now.” She flicked the cell operations back on and drifted back to the bridge.
“You took a long time.” Riley looked worried as she floated to her chair. “These lights have been blinking on and off for the last few minutes.”
“I had to change four cells,” she said defensively. “It takes a while.”
“Not that long. What are these lights?”
She checked the console then said with alarm, “It’s the low-frequency sensor. It’s picked up a moving body behind us.”
“A ship,” said Riley and swore.
Rosie’s heart sank and she said desperately, “Are you sure? Could it be an asteroid or space junk?”
She switched the view port to the sensor sweep.
Riley peered at the grid and the small dot the sensor had picked up. “It’s moving in a predictable trajectory. It’s got to be Yuang. He’s caught up, must have a core drive, or something comparable. He’ll be right on our tail when we reach Mars.” The stars reflected in the glass panel of his helmet as he looked at her. “How good a pilot do you think you are, Rosie?”
“Are you kidding? This is the first time I’ve done it for real.”
“Well, you’re going to have to try as hard as you can because we have to come up with a plan that’s going to get us to Mars, and on the ground, before Yuang catches up with us.”
“But don’t you want to talk to him?”
“Yes, but on my terms, not his,” Riley said. “Yuang’s ship will have weapons, you can guarantee it.”
“So what do we do?”
“He’s waiting for us to get closer to Mars.”
“Why?”
“Besides the fact he can’t fire in hyperspace, if I know Yuang he’ll want us to be an example to others. He wants us to be in range of the Enclave’s monitoring systems so the Ferals there can see what happens to those who defy Helios.”
Rosie felt a chill. “What do you think he’ll do?”
“Most likely he’ll shoot out our engines, disable us so we are forced to allow him to take over the pod or risk the ship imploding.”
“Are you sure?” Rosie said.
“Not one hundred per cent, no, but I got to know him – far better than I’d like – when I was captured.”
There was something in his voice that made Rosie ask, “That’s not all, is it?”
Riley hesitated. “No. If Essie’s still alive, it’s likely he’ll use her as leverage.”
Something felt like it was slowly constricting her chest. “But if we give up, then he’ll have all of us,” she said.
Riley slowly nodded and suddenly, it all began to sink in. If they gave up, they lost any hope of helping the people in the labs, any hope of exposing Helios. Her aunt’s sacrifice would be for nothing.
“Aunt Essie wouldn’t want that,” she said, her voice unsteady.
“No. She wouldn’t.”
She stared at the console, panic starting to rise in her chest.
“Rosie.” His voice was calm, steady. “Slow down. We don’t have much air left.”
She realised she was starting to hyperventilate and tried to slow her breathing. “Have you got any ideas?”
“Not yet.”
She thought hard but she couldn’t seem to get past the part about giving up on her aunt.
They both sat in silence for a while, until Riley pulled her around to face him. “Okay. First option: does the pod have any emergency escape craft?”
“One,” she answered. “But I diverted all its energy to the drive. There’s no power left in it. We can’t use it. We wouldn’t survive. Planetfall would kill us.”
“Pity.” Riley was studying the controls of the flight deck.
He turned to her. “Okay, so how do you think you’d go controlling the pod in a freefall?”
“What!”
“Our original plan was to make maximum speed to Mars then squeeze the power off, using what little we had left to cruise in and land, but what would happen if we started conserving some power now?”
“We’d slow down and they’d catch us.”
Riley shook his head. “Yuang could have caught us already. He’s waiting until we get there. If we slow the drive a little, we’ll have a slug of energy left when we get there.”
“To do what?”
“We’ll use it to burn our thrusters out and create a heat shield to confuse the missiles. Yuang won’t be able to lock on to us. And if we do it at the right time, just as we hit the atmosphere, the burn of our re-entry will cover us enough to get to the ground.”
Rosie was afraid he’d been going to say that. “But we might not have enough power left to control the landing at all.”
Riley said nothing. He didn’t have to; they both knew that if the heat shield didn’t work, they’d be dead anyway.
“But what about my dad and aunt? If we don’t make it …”
“If we’re gone and the diary is destroyed, he might let them go.” But he didn’t look at her as he said it.
“Yeah, right,” Rosie said softly.
“I’m sorry, Rosie, that’s all we’ve got.”
“Yeah.” She felt strange, detached.
“There’s always the chance that he won’t be able to resist talking to me,” Riley said. “We have a lot of … history. He probably won’t fire unless he has to. It might buy us time to make it. And we could make it. Then, once we land, we’ll get you to Genesis. I have some friends in the colony who can help. You can hide and I’ll go see Yuang at the Enclave. I’ll make him let your aunt and dad go.”
Sure, whatever. She stared out at the stars. He made it sound so easy. She wanted it to be easy. She wanted her aunt to be okay, her dad to be here with her, and her mum back. But that was a fairytale; this was reality. Reality was Helios and the MalX, Pip betraying her and Yuang waiting to kill them. And she’d be damned if it was all going to be for nothing.
“If we do this and we survive,” she said, “I’m coming with you. I want to help you stop Helios.”
He gave her a long, level look. “Rosie …”
“No.” She glared at him. “My mum died from the MalX, my friend is dead, probably my aunt as well and for all I know, so is my dad. Helios has killed everyone I love. I am not going to hide in the colony while you go off and get yourself killed. Besides, how are you going to do it alone?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“How? Once you offer yourself up, they’ll probably kill you. If we can figure out a way for me to get in, while Yuang’s busy with you, I could try to get some of the information we need or at least stop the selfdestruct. We have the codes.” She knew she was right. A strange recklessness had come over her. She knew she could die but it didn’t seem real, any of it. She just had to act.
“Rosie, it’s too–”
“Dangerous? Riley, we can’t just let all those people die. I’m good at computers; I’ve been top of my class for the last two years. I can get in. I can stop the selfdestruct and maybe I can even figure out a way to get the lab files without the code key.”
“And what happens if you get caught?”
“Then I guess I join the rest of my family,” she said bluntly. “But if you tell me the codes and give me some idea of the layout of the Enclave, perhaps I won’t.” She met his stubborn stare. “Who else have you got, Riley?”
His jaw tightened. No one was the answer and she could see that he knew it.
With slow movements he pulled his sister’s diary from his pocket.
“I don’t know how to activate it,” she said.
He punched in the password. “I don’t have the Enclave layout but we can come up with a rough idea. I know a bit about it.” He watched her as she took the diary and began scrolling through the codes. There were eight including the selfdestruct deactivation sequence. She thought she should be able to memorise them.
“If I find someone else at the colony, the deal is off,” he said. “I do have some friends there.”
“Fine,” she said, but really, who was he trying to kid? It was just her and him. She paused, not sure what she’d committed herself to, then began readying the ship and reciting the code sequences in her head.