The Travels of Scout Shannon: Books 4-6

Chapter 3

3

The days passed, or rather time did. They slept when tired, woke when rested, and ate when they were hungry. The sense of being on the same schedule with each other even faded away. Emilie seemed to be always awake, getting up from the pilot’s chair only to answer nature’s call or help herself to another meal from the still nearly full cabinet. Geeta worked out to the point of collapsing but only slept for an hour or two before untangling herself from her hammock and stumbling/floating back to the tension bands.

Scout tried to keep to a normal schedule, but it was impossible to know what that was when the world outside the windows never changed. There was no day or night, a fact that Emilie and Geeta were quite used to, having spent their entire lives on board an artificially lit space station. Scout was used to the sun, to always knowing how much time remained of the day by its position in the sky. She knew the patterns in the movements of the stars at night as well. But here it was all different. The sun seemed stuck just over the peaks of the mountains behind the ship, and the stars were in configurations she had never seen before.

The only measurable change was the planet slowing rising over the horizon in front of the ship. It seemed unmoving hour to hour, but over the course of the growing number of days, it was becoming ever more prominent, lighting up the interior of their craft like a full moon over the prairie.

“It’s getting bigger, isn’t it?” Scout asked on a rare occasion when they were all awake at the same time.

“Closer,” Emilie said. This moon isn’t tidally locked.”

“What does that mean?” Scout asked.

Emilie shut down the pilot training program she had been running to give Scout her full attention. She started moving her hands in gestures that made no sense to Scout. “We’re orbiting just like the planet is, only slower. The sun is setting behind us, the planet is rising in front of us. Not at the same rate, though. Do you want me to make a model?”

Scout winced. Emilie would happily explain it over and over until Scout understood, but that could take hours. Better to focus on the important part.

“So we’re not really on the far side of the planet anymore, or at least we won’t be soon,” Scout said. “Are we still actually hiding?”

“I don’t think anyone really bothers with the moon,” Emilie said. “All of the satellites and space stations have a much closer orbit.”

“It was thoroughly surveyed by our ancestors when they first arrived,” Geeta said, wiping slick sweat from her arms with a grungy towel. They had no effective way of doing laundry, which was becoming quite apparent, but no one was going to tell Geeta to stop exercising. “They found nothing worth mining, and with most space stations being under spin to simulate gravity, there was no reason to put an outpost here.”

“But if someone was still looking for us?” Scout asked.

“Would they be?” Emilie asked. “They chased us away from the space station, but they never fired shots.”

“They were shooting at us in the hangar before we took off,” Scout said.

“Maybe us being gone means we’re as good as dead to them,” Emilie speculated. “We’re not there anymore to make trouble. It might not be worth the resources it would take for them to keep hunting for us.”

“So are we safe, then?” Scout asked.

“We have to stay here,” Geeta said. “This is where Liam’s friends know to find us.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we leave the moon,” Scout said. “But maybe we want to move the ship away from the rising planet, so we’re back on the far side.”

“I think we’re better off where we are,” Emilie said, adjusting her glasses. Since they had left the station with its network behind, she no longer had endless founts of information available to her, and Scout wasn’t even sure she needed the lenses to correct her vision. It was more like she wore them out of habit and kept tapping at them when she was thinking, also out of habit, although that often—like now—ended in her making a frustrated scowl.

Scout supposed that to Emilie, it was a lot like being blind.

“I agree,” Geeta said. “I’m worried if we try moving the ship we might draw attention. Liam put us down here with mountains all around us. I doubt we’d find a better place to hide.”

“I guess you’re right,” Scout said.

She just wished their ride would get there already.

In the middle of what Scout considered her night, when she was tucked inside her hammock with both dogs packed in around her, the midrange sensor alarm sounded. She squirmed around until her head was poking out of the canvas.

Emilie had already activated the hologram and was floating away from the pilot’s seat, searching for what had triggered the alarm. It was another trio of ships in formation at the edge of the display field. Scout and Emilie watched them as they cut across the border of the sphere and disappeared.

“Same direction as the last group?” Scout asked sleepily.

“Similar,” Emilie said at a whisper, since Geeta was still softly snoring. “Not identical. Perhaps they are increasing patrols.”

They stayed as they were for several long minutes, waiting for something more to happen, but nothing did. Emilie stretched and then sailed to the back of the cabin for another meal packet before heading back to her seat. Scout tucked her head back into the warm space and calmed the fussing Shadow with a hand on his head.

The alarm went off again some hours later. This time Scout untangled herself from the hammock and sailed out into the center of the cabin. Geeta had been exercising, but she released the bands to help look for dots of motion.

Two sets of three ships now, flying in separate formations. One was heading in the same general direction as the last two had been, but the other was on a path that was going to take it close to the moon, on the way down to a closer orbit of Amatheon.

Emilie was looking up through the windscreen and Geeta and Scout drew close behind her, hovering near her shoulders. None of them said a word as their eyes searched the star field.

Emilie saw them first, raising a hand wordlessly to point out three all but invisible specks moving through the black. There was no sound, not from the ships and not from the three of them as they each held their breath, watching the patrol ships fly by.

For a moment they stood out in sharp detail, the blue-white glow of Amatheon behind them giving them a sharp silhouette. Then they disappeared, swallowed up by that light.

“Not looking for us, I guess,” Emilie said.

“Were they close enough to see us?” Scout asked.

“Just sitting here, running nothing but life support, in the shadow of those mountains?” Emilie shrugged.

“They weren’t looking for us,” Geeta said. “I don’t have any flight training, but that didn’t look like a search formation. It was just a patrol.”

“Okay, but what happens when the planet rises a little higher and that mountain range is no longer between us and the Star Farer space traffic monitoring satellites?” Scout asked.

Emilie touched her glasses and grimaced, then remembered the ship’s computer was there to help with just those kinds of calculations. “Ship, how long until we’re no longer in that mountain’s shadow?”

“Four days,” the computer answered, providing a hologram as if someone had asked it to show its work.

“Surely they’ll pick us up by then,” Scout said, but her voice didn’t sound as hopeful as she had expected.

“We’re getting to the point where we might have to consider that something went wrong,” Geeta said.

“We’re not there yet?” Scout asked.

“No,” Geeta said, but if she had any confidence in that answer, it was drowned out by her ever-growing exhaustion.

“Four days,” Emilie said. “We can wait here until then, but in the meantime, we need to come up with some other options.”

“We can’t try crossing the barricade,” Scout said.

“No kidding,” Emilie said with a humorless laugh. “You never looked out at that ship, but its hull was crystal clear. Like, invisible. And it never appeared on any of the ship’s scanners. The sky could be full of those, and we’d never know until we were surrounded. No, the barricade is not a viable option.”

“We can’t go down to the surface,” Scout said.

“Why not?” Emilie asked. “There are lots of places that are sparsely populated, some that are even unpopulated. We could hide forever down there.”

“But the coronal mass ejections,” Scout said. “They have been stronger than ever, and more frequent since you Space Farers started taking down the satellites that made the shield. I don’t mean you guys,” she hastily added. Geeta and her sister, along with Emilie, had been working against those actions even before they met Scout.

“We could find a spot near a . . . protective place? A cave or something,” Emilie said, but Geeta just shook her head.

“We move the ship back,” she said. “Back to the dark on the far side of the moon. Then we wait again. This is where the Torreses will be coming for us.”

Emilie bit at the side of her thumb, clearly thinking something although she’d said not a word.

“That does sound like the safest plan,” Scout agreed, and Geeta floated to the back of the cabin to get a bulb of water.

Scout pulled herself closer to Emilie. “You’re thinking something else,” she said in a whisper.

“Maybe,” Emilie said, words muffled by the thumb still against her mouth. “I’m worried we’ll be seen. Geeta’s plan is the safest if we can stay hiding, but if we can’t? I want to have another plan.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be much help,” Scout said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Emilie said, leaning forward to start another training program. “I think I have an idea. Or at least the start of one. Probably won’t even need it. I’m sure they’ll be here to get us before we’ll even be in danger of being exposed.”

“Yes, I’m sure they will,” Scout agreed.

But four days later, the dust-covered lava bed behind the ship was gleaming brightly in the reflected light from the planet, the shadows of the mountains like jagged teeth stretched over the plain.

And just behind them, one sawtooth was marred by a smooth arc. The light was touching the very apex of the ship. It was time to move.

“Taking off, gliding back, and landing should be easy enough, right?” Geeta asked.

Before Emilie could even answer, the ship alerted them to movement, a strange repeated beeping that was not its usual quick tone. The hologram flickered to life, and they saw why. Six squadrons of ships were now passing close enough to the moon to set off the alarms. Four were heading towards the barricade, but two were on a path to pass right overhead.

“They’ll see us,” Scout said. “The light is hitting the top of the ship. The ship is like chrome; it shines like starlight. They can’t miss us!”

“We can’t move now; they’d definitely see that,” Emilie said. “We just have to hope if they do see a gleam they’ll assume it’s just part of the lava bed reflecting back at them.”

“The lava is like glass,” Geeta said. “Maybe they will.”

They fell silent, gazing up through the windscreen until the faint specks of the ships came into view. They flew overhead, never changing formation or making any move to stop or land.

They all released their breath at the same moment when the outline of the ships had been swallowed up by the brightness of Amatheon.

“We have to leave,” Scout said.

“They might not have seen us,” Geeta said.

“They might have and reported us to their command,” Scout said. “Just because they didn’t come after us themselves doesn’t mean no one will. They clearly already had a place to be.”

“We can’t move,” Geeta said. “How will the Torreses know where to find us if we do?”

“I have a plan,” Emilie said. “It’s a bit tricky, but I think I can pull it off.”

“Pull what off?” Geeta asked.

“Look,” Emilie said, zooming out the hologram using the controls on the console. Then she tapped something else and tiny dots glowed a bright green, scattered throughout the cabin in a chaotic band.

“What are they?” Scout asked.

“Those are abandoned space stations,” Emilie said. “When the population fell after the war, these were left unmanned. Most don’t have spin, but this one here does,” she said, making one green dot flash.

“It looks close by,” Scout said.

“It is close by,” Emilie said. “Close enough where we can watch for activity around the moon. The moment anyone arrives who could be looking for us, we’ll know and can send a message. We can be sure it’s really the Torreses before we expose ourselves.”

“But won’t we be risking somebody seeing us moving? Somebody connected to one of the groups hunting us, or just someone who just reports seeing us, and that report gets back to our pursuers?” Geeta asked. “Hopping over the surface of the moon is one thing, but that is crossing actual space. Space we’ve seen these patrols crossing repeatedly. Watched space, I think we’d have to assume.”

“I can do it,” Emilie said with firm confidence. “The ship’s computer and I have been working all the angles for days. I can fire our rockets here to get away from the moon, but just one burst. Then I kill the engines and momentum takes us straight there.”

“That will work?” Scout asked dubiously.

“Yes,” Emilie said. “It’s just physics.”

“But someone might see us,” Geeta persisted.

“Only if they’re looking, and if they know exactly where to look. Our rocket will flare, but only close to the lunar surface. The same as if we changed position to move further back along the far side. So that risk is the same. Crossing open space, with our engines off, we’ll be pretty close to invisible.”

“Pretty close,” Geeta repeated.

“More than close enough,” Emilie said. “We might show a little bit of heat, we might reflect a bit of light, but it’s nothing anyone would notice unless they were actively scanning every kilometer between here and that station looking for us.”

“And if they were actively looking for us here, we would have seen a lot more ships,” Scout added.

“Exactly,” Emilie said.

They both looked to Geeta, who was biting her lip. Scout was all too aware that in the cabinet under the toes she was standing on was Geeta’s sister Seeta, deep in a stasis from which she might never come out.

“All right,” Geeta agreed at last. “Show me how it’s done.”