I pulled on the exposure suit over my clothes. Baggy and wrinkled, it was a big one-piece jumpsuit with attached gloves and a hard ring that clicked around my neck when I zipped it up the front with a plastic fastener that wasn’t really a zipper. It sealed me in, and Shiro showed me how to use the buttons on the neck ring to make a thin, transparent helmet come out of it and wrap over my head.
“All the tech is in the ring,” he said, manipulating the panel in the pilot’s dashboard. “It makes oxygen and filters breathing waste. This is the simple kind, just designed for quick outside work. It will keep us warm and breathing for a while once we land.”
I settled into the co-pilot’s chair and watched him power the shuttle up. Alarms sounded in the bay around us.
“What’s that noise?”
He touched the panel again. “Warning that a shuttle is taking off. The hatch behind us is about to open right to space. Best if no one without a suit is caught walking around the hangar.”
Right.
There was no rearview mirror, but one of the screens in front of me showed the view from behind. The huge bay door opened to reveal black, starlit sky outside. With a small lurch, our shuttle lifted off the hangar floor and backed away from the others. Small windows on each side showed the door to the hangar passing by, then the huge outside of the Siitsi ship as we pulled out of the hangar. I watched through the windshield in front as the hangar door slid shut, and Shiro spun us around, facing away from the ship.
Just black sky. I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea where to go.
The artificial gravity kept me in my seat, and I felt us nose down. Shiro manipulated the panel and the long steering rods to pull us around under the giant ship. A small gray circle appeared in my view.
“Is that the moon?”
He shook his head. “It’s the planet. The moon is on the other side of it. There’s no way we can really hide once we’re on the other side of the planet, but at least they won’t have as much visual warning if we come from this side.”
I thought about that. “Probably not looking visually, though, are they?”
“Nope.”
Who knew how the Botanists scanned for other ships? Maybe we would get incredibly lucky and find that they relied on their own ship’s reflective cloaking ability to keep them safe. Maybe they weren’t scanning for approaching ships at all.
Right.
“They’re plants, though,” I said, continuing my thought aloud. “So maybe they’ll be dormant in the cold? You said it’s an icy moon?”
“It won’t be cold inside their ship,” Shiro answered. “But I doubt they’re expecting trouble.” He nodded to a little door behind our seats. “We’ve got some weapons in there, and I packed some explosives in the back. If we have any kind of surprise on them, we might not die immediately.”
A dark chuckle rumbled from my throat. He knew we were going to die on this mission just like I did. But he came anyway.
“Why are you here, Shiro?”
His eyes closed for a moment as we flew.
“A whole lot of years ago, I did something stupid. Just one missed step that took me out in the middle of a dinosaur jungle. The rest of the guys on my team had to leave me there. No choice at all. I couldn’t walk.” He was rubbing a spot on his leg, almost reflexively. “I made them leave me because trying to drag me along would have killed all of them, along with everybody else that was depending on them. They said they’d come back for me.”
I waited for him to continue.
“It didn’t look good.” He glanced over at me. “Dinosaur jungle and all. I was dead meat out there, literally.” His hands gripped the steering rod. “But they came back. I was almost gone, washed up on a riverbank, totally broken. But Caleb came back, just like he said he would. None of the other soldiers survived. Nobody knew where I was. Nobody else on that planet would have ever come for me. But Caleb came back.”
He understood. Shane was waiting for me. He believed it just like I did. He knew we would almost certainly die trying to save him.
But once upon a time, someone named Caleb came back for him.
“Thanks, Shiro.” There was so much more I could have said, but everything I felt was in those words.
“You’re welcome.”
We flew in silence. The gray planet grew in the front view screen, and when we veered around it, a small, white moon appeared ahead of us. It was half shrouded in darkness from the angle of the star that was its sun.
A planet. A moon.
On my years aboard the Horizon Delta, we had passed a lot of stars in the distance. But we never got close enough to see a planet as more than a tiny, glowing dot in the sky. There were asteroid fields and meteors, but nothing like a real world.
On the way to the trade moon, I’d been sealed in a filthy box. When I emerged, I’d been too panicked to revel in the feeling of an actual world beneath my feet. But now, here it was.
We passed the planet on my side, and I watched its rocky gray surface roll past. Dull and dead, it was still the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen. As we approached the ice moon, it revealed itself to be full of mountains and crags. Long shadows from the angle of the sun made it dappled white and gray on its light side, and the dark side was a rippling black sea.
“Where are they parked? Can you tell?”
Shiro was watching one of the screens in front of him. “I was assuming they’d keep the big ship in orbit and send a shuttle for whatever they’re doing on the moon’s surface. But I’m tracking the beacon on the Horizon shuttle. It’s parked on the planet, but faint, partially blocked.”
The shuttle bucked as we neared the moon’s atmosphere.
“I think they landed their whole ship down there,” Shiro said. “I’m coming in from the dark side. The scan shows they’re parked at the side of a mountain right at the twilight line. I’ll come in low and land us on the far edge of it. We’ll have a little walk to get to it, but if they’re not scanning for us, they might not realize we’ve landed so close.”
I gripped the edge of my seat against the bumping of the little craft. Fire filled our windows, the burn of entering an oxygenated atmosphere.
“How likely is that? Them not looking for us?”
He shrugged, knuckles white on the steering rods. “Not likely.” A grin split his face. “But that’s kind of my specialty. The world I’m from, nothing is ever easy, and every morning might be your last, in an ugly, bloody way.” He turned and winked at me. “Maybe this is our last morning. But Horizon soldiers don’t go down without a fight.”
The fire cleared, leaving the moon’s dark night around us and a shadowy surface below.
“I’m not much of a soldier,” I said. “But those plants took my people. I didn’t ask for this fight, but one way or another, I’m going to finish it.”
We bounced through the sky toward the icy mountain in the distance.
The Botanist ship was on the other side. My brother was in that ship.
Hang on, Shane. Two Horizon soldiers are coming.