The Travels of Scout Shannon: Books 4-6

Chapter 4

4

They all seemed to be thinking the same thing: there was no time to waste. Scout gave the dogs water from a bulb, a process they were getting used to if they didn’t exactly like, then tucked them together into the same cabinet they had been in when they had landed. The netting of tape was still there to hold them inside; she just had to add a few fresh strips to keep it closed once more.

Geeta buckled into the seat beside Emilie and at Emilie’s instruction brought up screens that showed her what the ship was detecting around them. Nothing so far, but she wanted to be prepared.

Scout made a final pass around the cabin, retrieving an empty water bulb and a lone towel and securing them in a cabinet, then came to float between the two seats. She had one of Geeta’s tension bands connecting her belt to a loop on the floor but mainly kept herself in place with a hand on the back of each of the two seats.

“Ready?” Emilie asked.

Scout gripped the seat backs tightly. “Ready.”

She braced herself, remembering the feeling of lifting off from Amatheon’s surface, but the moon did not hold them anywhere near so tightly. Emilie, bottom lip firmly between her teeth, fired the rocket in a single short blast. The ground came up under Scout’s feet, and for one magical moment, she was standing properly again.

Light from Amatheon flooded the cabin as they rose higher than the mountain range that had been shading them for so many days. The light passed over them in a bright band, then they were beyond that as well, once more in darkness save for the lights of the ship’s control panels around them.

The dogs whimpered, and Scout felt herself flinching. As much as she knew better, her instincts were still telling her that making any sound was going to draw attention. But no one could hear them even if they all screamed at once at the top of their voices.

Sound wasn’t what was going to give them away.

“Something in range,” Geeta said, using her ensign voice.

Emilie didn’t respond, eyes on a digital counter in the console in front of her. When it finally reached zero, she killed the engine. The feeling of standing up drifted away again as the ship maintained its velocity.

“Where are they?” Scout asked, leaning over Geeta’s seat.

“Three formations,” Geeta said, pointing to the screen. “Following the same basic path as the others.”

“Aren’t we also heading that way?” Scout asked.

“More or less,” Emilie conceded. “But we’ll be passing behind them. They won’t notice us.”

Scout’s fingers dug into the spongy material of the seat backs and she leaned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the ships in the black before them, but without a ship’s computer to highlight them, they were invisible.

“We can’t see them,” Emilie said as if reading her mind. “They can’t see us. We only know where they are because their transponders are on. Ours isn’t.”

“Okay, now we have two more squadrons,” Geeta said. “Following the planetary path.”

“Does that cross our path?” Scout asked.

“We’re going to pass between them,” Emilie said. “Neither have any reason to be scanning for us, and without actively looking they’ll never see us. It’s okay, Scout. Space is really big.”

Scout didn’t say anything. It was too strange, the idea that it was possible to hide in the open with no cover. Out on the prairie, it might be possible to duck down into the grass to be out of sight, but anything taller than the grass, any rover or girl on a bike, was visible for kilometers. Even without the plume of dust kicked up by her bike tires.

“Just think, when we get there we’ll be able to stand up,” Emilie said. “To stretch and jump and run and lie down in a way that actually feels like lying down.”

Scout smiled wistfully at that last one. Sleeping in a floating hammock was nice in a way, but it would be nice to sleep without startling herself awake by her own stray hand floating in front of her face like it was someone else about to attack her.

“This is our closest point to the first group,” Geeta said, voice at a whisper. Scout strained again to look out the windscreen. She thought she saw three specks together, the edge of one muting a star ever so slightly, but then she might have been imagining it.

“No change,” Geeta said. Even her confident ensign voice was betraying a touch of relief.

“I told you,” Emilie said, her attention on another counter, one with nearly an hour left to count down.

“Second group, to our left,” Geeta said, and she and Scout both looked that way. Geeta glanced back down at the screen from time to time as if to remind herself of their relative positions, but Scout saw nothing out there.

“And they’re past,” Geeta said, sitting back with a grin. “Now we just wait.”

“Yeah, but keep an eye on the screen still though,” Emilie said. “We’re at the edge of what we’ve been observing all those days back on the moon. This is probably empty space since the few stations around here are all abandoned, but then again it might not be. And whatever patrols move through here, we don’t know their patterns.”

“Shouldn’t we have thought of this before?” Scout asked. “There must have been something we could have sent to recon.”

“There wasn’t,” Emilie said. “The ship’s computer and I discussed it. But don’t worry.”

“Space is big,” Scout said, and Emilie gave her a thumbs-up.

Scout thought about letting the dogs out but decided against it. She would just have to stuff them back in the cabinet again before they started the final navigation to the station, and she wouldn’t catch them unprepared this time. Besides, they seemed completely content. Gert for one seemed to enjoy having Shadow pressed up against her, unable to flee as she nipped at his ears and snuggled against his neck. He occasionally made grumpy sounds of protest, but Scout suspected he didn’t hate the attention as much as he pretended to.

“Ships coming,” Geeta said, and Scout leaned over her shoulder to see the screen.

It was a bit of an understatement. The edge of the screen was lighting up with more and more dots of light. Dozens and dozens of them, none of them seeming to fly in any sort of formation.

“Are you sure this place is abandoned?” Scout asked.

“Yes,” Emilie said, but the way she lingered over the word implied quite a bit less than her usual confidence. “The station isn’t even in range yet. Those ships are between us and it, I’m sure of it.”

“That’s not exactly heartening at the moment,” Geeta said to Emilie.

“It’s fine,” Emilie said. “They still would have to be looking for us to see us. And why would they?”

“Unless we hit one of them,” Geeta said. “I think they’d notice that.”

“Not likely,” Emilie said.

“It’s not like you knew they were out here when you did the math,” Geeta said.

“The odds of hitting anything are extremely remote,” Emilie said.

“Space is big,” Scout said again.

“And if something really does look like it’s going to get in our way, I’ll just goose the positional rockets.”

“That will draw attention,” Geeta said.

“Maybe, but I don’t think it’s going to come up.”

“I guess we’ll see,” Geeta said, turning her attention back to the screen.

Scout felt herself getting lightheaded and realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled with a whoosh and Geeta reached back, eyes never leaving the screen, to give her hand a squeeze.

Emilie’s lip was back between her teeth even though she wasn’t doing anything with her hands. She was sitting at the controls, but there was nothing she could do but wait, the same as Geeta and Scout.

They were all nervous.

New dots of light finally stopped appearing at the edge of the screen. There was empty space once more, on the far side of what looked like a band of dots all moving past each other, although from where to where wasn’t clear. They just had to get past it, like crossing a river.

Not something Scout had ever done, she admitted to herself with a little shiver. The prairie lands she grew up on had mainly been dry. The one river she had seen had by default become one of the borders of the world she inhabited. She wasn’t willing to risk trying to cross it with her bike, not when she couldn’t see how deep it was, how swift the current, or what lurked in its muddy depths.

At the moment, she’d rather risk crossing that river.

“Here we go,” Geeta said as the band of dots moved down to the center of the screen.

Scout looked out the windscreen in front of them first, then detached the band to float to the back of the cabin to peer at the viewscreens there. Still no sign of anything, although she stared so hard she started seeing stars that weren’t out there in the sky.

“Space is big,” Emilie said again in a singsong.

“How can they all travel this close together without hitting each other if no one can see each other?” Scout asked, floating back up to the front of the ship.

“All of the ships have transponders,” Emilie said. “That’s why they appear on our scopes.”

“But we don’t appear on theirs,” Scout said.

“Not at the moment, no,” Emilie said.

“So they can avoid each other, but they don’t even know we’re here?”

“Exactly,” Emilie said. “The ship will warn us in plenty of time if something is on a trajectory that will cross ours.”

“Then we fire our rockets and light up everyone’s screens,” Geeta said glumly.

“Not likely,” Emilie said.

“Which part?” Scout asked.

“Both,” Emilie said. “Even if we goose the positional rockets—and it would only take a nudge to get us clear—no one is going to see unless, again, they are actively looking.”

“Which they aren’t, because if every ship is on scope with its transponder signaling, there’s no reason to be looking for anything,” Scout said.

“Now you’re getting it.” Emilie looked back over her shoulder to give Scout that wide, maniacal grin of hers.

It took several long moments to cross the river of ships, but as Emilie predicted, nothing ever passed close enough to them to require evasive action. Scout and Geeta watched the screen as the band of dots moved further and further down the screen, until it vanished completely, dot by dot.

“I just had a thought,” Scout said, and Emilie shot her a quizzical look. “What if someone else was out there too, out among the ships, without a transponder signaling? They could be following us, and we’d never know.”

“Let’s not get paranoid,” Emilie said. “We’re nearly there.”

Scout reattached the tension band to her belt as Emilie’s hands hovered over the controls, eyes on the countdown clock. She had put Liam’s earpiece in her ear. No one would be guiding her into an unmanned space station; Scout guessed she was listening to the computer talk her through the docking procedure.

“There it is,” Geeta said, but she wasn’t looking at her screen. She was looking out through the window. Scout’s eyes found a patch of darkness that was blotting out stars as the ship drifted forward, more and more stars the closer they got.

“No lights?” Scout said.

“Don’t need them,” Emilie assured her.

“Protocol says basic life support will be running when we dock,” Geeta told her. “It will be cold at first, but there will be air. And once we get to the command deck, we can turn up the heat and turn on all the lights.”

“In the meantime, I don’t need to see to dock this thing,” Emilie said. “The ship does all the work, really.”

She put her hands on the controls but still made no moves, just waited with her whole body so tense she reminded Scout of Shadow when he had a mouse trapped in its hole and could hear it scratching around and he just knew it was about to dart out at any moment.

Then Emilie reached forward and pressed a button, one quick jab, and the ship lurched forward and rolled partly on its side.

Not that that meant much when they were once more at a steady velocity and Scout was still floating between the seats. There was no up or down, not yet.

Emilie gave the positional rockets another nudge, changing their trajectory again, and then a third time.

Something was looming over them, not reflecting enough light from distant Amatheon for any of its features to be illuminated. Scout only knew it was big—not as big as the last space station she had been on, not by a long shot, but far more immense than any ship.

Then they were inside, drifting down a long tunnel to the heart of the station. And with the stars now left behind them, they were in complete darkness.