15

“Well?” Becka chimes in. “What now, Captain?”

The ship trembles as the regular engines restart and a few more brutally silent seconds hang in the air. I turn around toward the crew.

“I’ve got it,” Ari says as the 118 tilts to one side. The ship does two groaning summersaults before leveling out.

“HE’S GETTING IT,” the ship corrects.

“We’re fine,” Ari says defensively. “But where am I supposed to go?”

I don’t know what to tell him. We’re four hundred light years away from home. Without a working light speed engine, it’ll take us literally forever to get there. I wonder if we made a bad choice. If escaping was a mistake. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time—get away, get help. But now that we’re up here all alone, we’re no use to anyone.

“Jack?” Becka asks again.

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Your ring. Look.”

I look down at my hand. She’s right. I don’t know when it happened. I must’ve been so distracted that I didn’t hear the beep or see it start to glow. But I have a video message. Way out here, an impossible distance away from home. Which means that it can only be from one person.

I open my hand and speak into my palm. “Play the last message,” I say. I make a throwing gesture with my hand, which tosses the message to the big window screen in front of us. Our view of space disappears—replaced by the face of my dad, sitting on the couch in our living room on Ganymede.

“Hey Jack,” he says into the camera. “This is a recording. Obviously. And if you’re watching this, well, I’ve probably made a huge mistake.”

He’s wearing a pair of jeans and a plaid, button-down shirt. He looks like he always looks: silly, smart, and itching to get up and run in circles. His right leg is shaking up and down like he drank too much coffee. I don’t know when he created this message. But I don’t think it was after the attack.

“I saved this video to your ring,” he continues, “and hid it in an invisible file folder. It’s only supposed to play if I don’t reset a remote clock on my end every few days. So if you’re able to access the recording, something’s happened to you, or me, or both. And I think I know why. Well, sort of.”

I take a deep breath and turn around for a second to look at Ari. His eyes are wide. He knows that I’ve been waiting months for some kind of explanation. It’s only a recording, I know. But it’s something.

“Let me start at the beginning,” my dad says. “I’ve always performed my own personal experiments in my free time. You know that. Played around with inventions and ideas.”

He leans forward and puts his hands on his knees like he does when he’s excited about something. “Then, at the beginning of this school year—around August or September—I figured something out. I was mixing and matching formulas for a chemical compound that was supposed to power the apartment at half the cost. Instead I ended up creating a workable Alcubierre drive that could be interwoven with almost any ship’s thrusters . . .” He waves his hand. “The science doesn’t matter. The point is, Jack, I did it. Solved a riddle that’s been in humanity’s way for centuries: How to travel at the speed of light. How to travel faster. Much faster.”

He sits back again, like the thrill of it still blows him away.

“It was incredible. I don’t know how much of the credit I can take. It was kind of an accident. But it was my accident.”

“I wanted to tell you right away. Tell your mother. Tell everyone. And then, something strange happened. I was on my computer in the science lab—I hadn’t actually built anything yet. I was just using the theoretical compiler and a few Pencils to mock up the design. And within seconds of putting the fuel molecule together—quantum hexachloride—I got a message. I don’t know who it was from. I tried to trace the source every way I know how, but never could. Whoever it was worked hard to cover their tracks.”

My dad pauses. His voice is lower when he continues, like this next part is serious. Dangerous.

“That first message was only a single word: ‘No.’ But they kept coming: ‘Stop this.’ ‘It will bring only trouble.’ Things like that, longer and longer every time. Then, a couple of weeks later, just as I was getting ready to begin the real work of building the engine, I received the last message. It was longer than the others. More personal. Every single word stuck in my brain. It said, ‘These are not threats. They are warnings. If what you are creating is detected, it will bring destruction upon all those you care about. Turn back, before it is too late.’”

My dad smirks.

“Heavy, right? It seemed unbelievable to me. Still does. Maybe it’s some hacker who’s playing a practical joke. Or a mega-corporation, trying to prevent this technology from disrupting the propulsion industry. I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to let it stop me—not when I was on the verge of something important. Something that would allow humankind to explore the universe. It’s bigger than me. Bigger than all of us.”

I hear the words he’s saying and, in my brain, I know that he’s right. He needed to finish his work. It was too important to stop. But my emotions are all mixed up. He knew that something bad could happen? He put me in danger on purpose? Light speed or not, shouldn’t I be the most important thing in his life?

“Still,” my dad continues, like he’s reading my thoughts, “if there was even a chance that going public with what I was doing would put you at risk, I couldn’t take it. Believe me, hitching humanity’s first light speed engine to the PSS 118 wasn’t my first choice. But I didn’t see any other safe way to continue my work without a ton of red tape. And I kept it all a secret. From you, from your mother, from Principal Lochner, from the ship’s crew. I mean, I knew someone on the 118 would realize something was up eventually. I’d get spotted going into or leaving the engine room at the very least. So I made a hundred other pointless modifications to throw everyone off track in case I was found out. And hid the real work—the heart of what I was building—inside a small, secret panel deep within the engine room. Only you and I can access the panel and only you and I can trigger the software that runs the relevant program.”

He shrugs and grins at me again.

“And everything pretty much worked out. By the time I got busted for unauthorized use of the engine room, the job was done. I was only running a few last-minute diagnostic tests. And I have to admit it was a little amusing to see everyone freak out over those useless decoy wires I added to the fusion reactor.”

I hear Ari speak from behind me.

“So this video is from after he got fired?”

I nod. “I guess so.”

“I’m sorry for that day, Jackie,” my dad says. “I know how rough it was for you and how angry you were at me. You haven’t really taken my calls lately, and I get it. I’ve kept tabs on you through Tina.” He means Ms. Needle. “She tells me that the other kids have been giving you a hard time. And I’m sorry for that too. And your mother.” His shoulders slump. “Worst year ever, huh, buddy?”

Massive understatement.

“I don’t want to take the risk of revealing what I’ve built until you’re off the ship. And that day’s coming soon. Today—the day I’m recording this message—is June 1st. The last day of school is in just over two weeks. My plan now is to wait it out. You’ll be home in no time and then I’ll feel much more comfortable telling my story to whoever wants to listen. Maybe I’ll even make a buck or two.”

He winks at me.

“What’ya say? Hawaii? Something more exotic? Fiji, maybe? Tahiti?”

I feel my cheeks getting hot. My dad knows me way too well.

“But like I said, if you’re watching this, something’s gone wrong. Maybe I’ve been thrown in jail or worse. Maybe something’s come after us. I don’t know. But if we’ve been separated, I need you to hear this. To try to understand.” He pauses and stares into the screen. He wants me to know that he means what he’s saying. “I did this for you. I got the chance to give you a bigger, hopefully better world than the one I was given. So I had to take it.”

My eyes are glassing over, but I don’t care. Ari and Becka seeing me cry seems so tiny compared to what I’m watching.

“And in case someone bad does come after the 118 while you’re still onboard—well—the engine I built should work just fine. In theory. I want us to make the maiden voyage together. But if I can’t be there, you finish the job for me, okay?”

He holds up a hand to wave goodbye. It’s an awkward gesture and I think he knows it.

“Love you, son.”

The screen flickers and goes back to being a window, leaving the stars to twinkle as we drift in orbit around Elvid IV. I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there’s anything to say. After hearing this recording, I have even more questions than I had before. But at the moment, the only question that matters is the one Becka asked after we ran out of gas: what now?

We’re still stuck out here, and it’s still mainly my fault. But I might be able to fix it.

“Becka?” I ask, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.

“Yeah?”

She uses the same I-feel-so-bad-for-you voice that the teachers have used a lot lately. But coming from her, it feels different. Becka rarely cuts anyone slack. She’s letting me know she’s with me. And I appreciate it.

“You’re on comms and the scanner, right?”

She nods.

We can’t give up. We’ve made it this far. And I’m the captain, I remind myself. I’m the captain.

I take a deep breath. “We’re free. Out of fuel for my dad’s engine. But free.”

“I guess,” Becka says. “Can’t go far, though.”

“But there has to be more in this solar system than whatever’s on Elvid IV, right? If we can find it, maybe we can find a way to replenish the fuel supplies. Traveling faster than the speed of light may be new for us—”

“But they probably do it all the time,” Ari finishes.

“Exactly,” I say. “Like, maybe you can just buy quantum hexachloride at a gas station or something. Enough to make it to Ganymede and bring back help for everyone else.”

“But we don’t have any Elvidian money,” Becka points out.

“So what?” I say. “We figured out how to get out of that jail—we’ll figure out the next part too. Right now, all we need is a place to go.”

Becka nods and touches her screen, swiping this way and that.

“Well, Captain,” she says after a minute, totally unsarcastically, “according to my readings, the most populated planet in the solar system with—whoa—57 billion sentient life signs is . . . the ninth planet down from the suns.” She looks up, smiling. “And it’s not that far away.”

I nod. That’s a lot of life signs. More aliens on that one planet than there are humans in our entire solar system. I can’t tell whether that means finding light speed fuel will be really easy or really hard.

“How long will it take us to get there?”

“Sending you coordinates now, Ari,” Becka says.

“At top speed?” Ari answers, looking at his screen. “It won’t take long. Four or five hours, maybe.”

I wind through some displays on my chair’s computer console, bringing up the ship’s supplies. At least we have plenty of regular fuel. We can wander around this system for months, no problem, although I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

“Good,” I say. “Set a course.”