Chapter 7

I did spend too much time staring out the window, he thought as he plunged back into the darkness.

That’s why I’m a bad student. There are too many interesting things outside the window. My mind wanders during tests; my classes don’t interest me. But now I’m barely passing high school and have no idea what I’ll do with my life.

In the darkness, he saw the same two glowing signs: play game and prologue.

This was his last chance to win the game. Guess it’s time to find out what’s in the prologue. He swam toward the sign.

A scene started to play like a short movie. He no longer had control over his own actions or motions. This is why I hate cut scenes, he thought, but this is my last life. I don’t care so much about being trapped here, but I’m not losing the game without putting up a fight. I’d better find out as much as I can.

First he saw a space station. It was small and shabby compared to the Orionan ship. There was an image of Earth painted across its broad, silver surface. But he wasn’t on the space station. He was drifting away from it, standing at the window of a little ship. I’m leaving the station, he realized. Heading out to explore space.

He turned and faced people he assumed were his crewmates. Their names appeared over their heads like TV credits, then faded: Jalea, a serious-looking woman with hair cropped close to her head, stood by the ship door. Boris, who wore glasses and looked barely older than Lobo in real life, was next to her. At the ship’s controls were Dagney, a very tall, muscular woman, and Chen, a short, stocky man with dark stubble covering most of his face. There was barely enough room for all of them in the tight cockpit.

Jalea was explaining that their mission was to travel through a cloud of space dust and see what was beyond it. Light and sound could not travel through the cloud, so whatever was beyond it was a total mystery to their station’s researchers. The ship would not be able to communicate with the space station once it was immersed in the cloud.

“How long will we be out of touch?” Chen asked uneasily.

“However long it takes to complete our mission,” Jalea answered.

She continued, telling them all about rumors of an intelligent life-form just beyond the dust cloud. She pulled up holographic slides with bad three-dimensional drawings of Orionans.

Lobo found his mind wandering, then shook his head to bring back his focus. This is important, he told himself. Pay attention.

Chen leaned forward in his seat. “Where did we get the drawings?”

“From the last scout to enter the cloud,” Jalea answered.

“And what happened to him?” Dagney wondered.

Jalea was quiet for a moment, glancing away from them. “We don’t know.”

The ship jolted to a stop. The light-up displays dimmed and went black. The lights flickered. Dagney turned her attention to the controls, flipping switches and pounding on buttons.

Then the robots broke into the ship. They looked like Spec—little mechanical balls floating in the air, each with four arms. But these robots had laser blasters poking out of their round bodies. Jalea turned to face one and got blasted. She fell to the ground, unconscious.

Lobo tried to bat the robot closest to him out of the air with a fire extinguisher, but the robot turned to him and fired its blaster again. Several aliens pulled Lobo and the other humans out of the ship, and then took them to the cargo bay of a much bigger ship. Lobo saw that their tiny ship had been swallowed whole by the bigger one. The humans were crated like animals and stowed. He could see some of his companions through the slats in his crate: Jalea shouting in frustration; Chen with his hands around his legs, face buried in his knees; Boris examining his cage, as if looking for a way out. Two aliens communicated in hisses and squeals, and they both walked away.

Lobo looked up through the crate and saw a hovering robot watching them. It looked exactly like Spec.