“All aboard!” Rhea called out, waving the other girls toward a bright blue air train in the center of Rhealo’s capital city. She jumped into the train and held the door open, urging the others to hurry. “Pick up the pace, girls. The next express train doesn’t come for an hour, and if we miss this one, we miss the mission.”
Luna pinched her nose closed and stepped aboard. “Can you imagine what kind of germs are lurking inside this train?”
Rhea shrugged and readjusted the bag of trackers she had slung over her shoulder as the train whooshed out of the station. She gazed up at a huge poster hanging on the inside wall of the train. Each of the five princesses’ faces were splashed across the poster, along with WANTED and REWARD scrawled across the bottom. These Wanted posters had been cropping up all over the galaxy. Geela was obviously eager to capture the five girls so she could consider her takeover a total success. Each of the girls felt a small glimmer of pride every time they stood under one of these and failed to be recognized.
As SPACEPOP changed into their spy gear after the show, Rhea had decided that the easiest way to get to the eastern edge of Rhealo’s capital was to take public transportation. Their tour bus was far too conspicuous, she’d pointed out, and a blown-up Skitter would be impractical for getting them from one side of the city to the other without being seen. The space taxi companies had all been taken over by Geela’s employees, which made them off limits. Thus, a bus or train was the only thing that could shuttle them to the city outskirts in a hurry.
One of the very few positive side effects of Geela’s takeover was that air trains and space buses throughout the galaxy now all ran on time—mostly because people were too terrified to leave their homes unless they absolutely had to. There was never a backup in the traffic lanes since the usual hustle and bustle of people shopping and going to work and meeting up with friends had come to a standstill. So right at the scheduled time of 10:23—with their spy outfits covered with ridiculous capes and several of Chamberlin’s cardigans—the girls boarded an express train to the eastern edge of the city.
Luna was not pleased about their mode of transport. And she made sure everyone knew it. “Are we there yet?” she whined, gazing out the train’s dirty window at the stark, angular buildings that surrounded them. “Now are we there? Does anyone have any sanitizer?”
At the second to last stop, a cluster of Geela’s guards boarded the train and stood just a few feet from the princesses. Rhea pulled her hood farther over her face, and the other girls followed suit. The four guards gave them a brief once-over, but didn’t connect them to the five faces on the Wanted poster. “What are you doing out at this hour?” one of the guards snapped at them. “It’s past curfew.”
“We are on our way home,” Rhea answered quietly. “We were at a Geela support rally in the center of the capital.”
The guard grunted. “Very well.” Then she turned away to chat with the other guards, apparently satisfied that they were sharing the train with Geela supporters.
When the train reached its final stop, the black-clad rebels waited until the group of guards had disembarked, then they stepped off the train. The girls hid in the shadows until the air train platform was clear, then peeled off their cardigans and capes and raced down the moving staircase to street level.
Cloaked in their black spy suits, the girls ran through the streets, making their way toward the enormous transport bays and open spaces beyond the warehouse district. According to the instructions Captain Hansome’s team had hidden inside Juno’s drum kit, Geela was currently storing all her space-tankers in the transport bays at the far outskirts of Rhealo’s capital.
As they prepared, Rhea explained to the other girls that each of these bays spilled out onto wide open spaces used as landing pads by larger space vehicles—supply tankers, interplanetary passenger transports, military vessels, and the like. Since Geela had taken over the planet, only the empress’s vehicles were allowed to use the landing pads and bays. All large shipments in to and out of Rhealo had been halted for the foreseeable future, and the only way to get from one planet to another was to charter a smaller transport with funds most Rhealo residents didn’t have. This was yet another way Geela was choking the residents of the galaxy.
By the time the girls reached the transport bays, it was already ten minutes to twelve. Hansome had told them the empress’s fleet of space-tankers switched locations at midnight every night to avoid an enemy attack. “We only have a few minutes. We’ll need to split up if we’re going to have any hope of getting trackers on all of the vessels,” Athena said. “Let’s meet up here afterward—this is our rendezvous point.”
“We can use our communicators if we get lost!” Hera chirped, happily waving her compact in the air. She couldn’t wait to use her spy gadgets on a real mission.
“Yes, Hera,” Athena said. “If you got lost or needed help, that would be the perfect time to use your communicator.”
Hera rubbed her hands together, excited. “Yippee. I can’t wait!”
“Everyone ready?” Athena asked. “There are five transport bays. That means one for each of us. There are probably ten tankers parked in each bay, so we’ll need to move fast!”
“And remember,” Rhea said, glancing around. “Don’t get caught.”
“Can I please just trash a couple of Geela’s tankers? Pretty please?” Juno pleaded.
“No,” Athena said, cutting Juno off. “Tracking the tankers to their next location will be of more use to the Resistance. Let’s prove to Hansome we are capable of following instructions and execute at least one mission as requested. I have a feeling we will be rewarded with even better missions in the future.”
“Fine,” Juno snapped. Then she raced away, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll take bay five. Whoever places the most trackers before midnight wins. Go!”
Juno dashed away from the other girls, racing toward the farthest bay at a full-out sprint. She felt confident she could place a tracker on every single one of the space-tankers in her bay and be back at the rendezvous point before any of the other girls had finished their piece of the mission.
All five girls had studied the tracking devices before they set off on the mission and discovered they were very elementary—small, thin, clear rubberlike discs with an adhesive on one side. To use them, you simply peeled away the backing and stuck them to the thing you wanted to track … like a giant bandage. Since they were flexible, they were supposed to mold to the shape of the object and blend in.
Juno hid under the hulking mass of one of the space-tankers. Then she dug into her bag and pulled out her first tracker. She glanced around, making sure no one could see her in the dark recesses at the back of the bay. She peeled off the backing, pressed the tracker to the space-tanker’s hull, and stepped back.
Plop.
Juno scowled. The tracking device had popped off the ship and splatted to the floor. Juno’s heart pounded, her nerves on edge. She glanced around again, then hastily reached down to the floor and scooped up the tracking device. She pressed it to the ship again, holding it in place for a few extra seconds to get the adhesive to stick.
Plop.
Again, it fell to the floor. She dug in her bag, fumbling around for another tracker. “Come on,” she begged. “Let this one work.” But when she peeled off the backing, she found the second tracker wouldn’t hold either. She growled as she tried a third. No luck. Clearly, she was going to have to come up with plan B.
Taking a deep breath, Juno slipped along the back wall of the bay to the other side of the building. She got down on all fours and scuttled toward a mechanic’s truck. When she was sure no one was watching, she scrambled up onto the truck and fumbled around in a pile of stuff until she found a tube of something she knew would work: Moon Glue.
With a proud smirk, she pulled off the cap with her teeth, squeezed a glop of glue on the back of a tracker, and pressed it onto one of the space-tankers. It stuck!
“One down,” she muttered. “Nine to go…”
In bay four, Rhea was having the same issue.
“Captain Hansome looks good,” she muttered, as she fumbled with the adhesive on a tracker, “but I sometimes wonder if that guy’s working with a full deck.”
Like Juno, Rhea had also come up with a creative solution for attaching her trackers: hat pins. She always had some on hand, just in case her own hat came loose during a show or someone needed a wardrobe adjustment. She dug deep and unearthed a small pile of the sharp, pointed, pearl-encrusted pins. Then she jabbed one through a tracker and pressed the pin into the space-tanker’s aluminum hull.
She smiled at her handiwork. “That will do.”
As usual, practical Athena had prepared for any possible issues that might arise. So when she discovered the tracking devices were equipped with faulty adhesive, she reached into her bag and grabbed the double-sided tape she had brought along for just this reason.
“Athena,” Hera hissed into her communicator. “Come in, Athena!”
“Yes, Hera?” Athena replied in a clipped voice, her breaths coming quickly.
“My trackers won’t stick!” Hera was close to tears. When she arrived at bay two and found that the tracker wouldn’t stick, she had optimistically tried every single one of the devices in her bag, maintaining hope that the next one she tried might work.
Athena’s answer came back immediately. “Use something else to stick them on.”
Hera began to say, “But what?” then stopped herself. She knew the other girls thought she was naïve and a little foolish and needed extra care sometimes. Hera didn’t usually worry too much about what others thought of her, but she did long for the other girls to respect her more. If she could come up with her own solution to the problem, perhaps she could earn their respect. “Okay, thanks, Athena. Over and out.”
Hera closed her eyes, methodically removing everything but the problem at hand from her consciousness. She transported herself to her happy place—a field full of moonberries near her family’s castle. The sweet smell of the fresh fruit made Hera feel inspired and calm.
In fact, she had begun to carry around a pack of moonberry gum so that whenever she needed a little pick-me-up … “That’s it!” Hera whispered, her eyes snapping open. “Gum! Gum is sticky!”
She dug into her pocket, popped a piece of moonberry-flavored goodness into her mouth, and began to chew.
In bay one, Luna was feeling smug and completely satisfied. Spritz! At one minute to midnight, just as the fleet of space-tankers fired up their engines, Luna squirted one final spritz of her “defy-gravity” hair serum onto the back of her last tracking device, pressed it onto the hull of a space-tanker, and grinned. The sticky hair spray worked like a charm.
As the first of the tankers rolled out of the bay and set off into the night, Luna spritzed her hair into place, then dashed toward the rendezvous spot. Her mission had been a complete success—all thanks to her hair.
A half hour later, the girls were on a train zooming back toward the center of the capital. They were buzzing with excitement and laughing about all the ways they had had to troubleshoot the faulty trackers. Between them, they had managed to tag every single one of Geela’s space-tankers before they set off for their next spaceport.
“I think Captain Hansome should be pleased,” Athena noted, reluctantly accepting a piece of Hera’s moonberry gum to celebrate.
“Come on, girls,” Rhea said. “We rocked that mission.”
“Group hug?” Hera asked.
Juno and Athena shared a wary glance, then they both nodded. “Yeah,” Juno said. “Today warrants a group hug, Hera.” As they hugged, each of the girls thought about how far they had come in just a few weeks … but also how much more lay ahead for SPACEPOP and the Resistance in the coming months. Life in the Pentangle was still further from normal than ever, but at least it finally felt like the five princesses were doing something to help get their galaxy back on track.