Mike Stellar Read online

  A chorus of “belt”s filled the e.c. My mind raced and my heart careened around my chest. Why didn’t Nita pack any of her stuff to bring to Gram’s? Come to think of it, what was going to happen to all our stuff back home while we were gone? What about my simulator games and the vis recorder? How was I going to record all the MonsterMetalMachines episodes? There were so many questions; it was all happening too fast. I mean, if I’d had more time to think about it, I might have been possibly, sort of, maybe excited about becoming a space traveler. But right now it was like everything was spinning away from me. There wasn’t time to grapple with what was happening. I felt lost and we were still in the driveway.

  Mr. Shugabert leaned around from the passenger’s seat and said, “Everyone comfortable?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Excellent.” He flashed a beaming smile of what looked like hundreds of teeth. “I am so stoked.”

  The e.c. whirred to life. I took one last look at our house, at the light blue shutters I’d helped Dad paint last summer, at the unshrunken grass. And then we were off.

  It didn’t take very long to drive to the Project. That was why Mom and Dad had bought our house in the first place. It was close to their work and they could get there quickly in case of an emergency. Mom’s a mission coordinator and Dad’s a mission doctor. And when bad things started happening with the first Mars mission, it was lucky they lived so close. They practically took sleeping bags to the office. Those times really stunk.

  My mind snapped back in gear as the electri-car slowed. All our seat belts popped off at the same time. The doors slid open and we stepped out in front of the Project. Mr. Shugabert got our boxes from the trunk. Mom and Dad and Nita hugged and Mom said they’d be checking in on her during the once-a-week Earth-bound communication each family was allowed. It was like Nita was going to summer camp. I just glared at her, not really thinking about the fact that it would literally take engineering feats of spaceflight to see her again.

  Finally she grabbed me, gave me a big hug, and whispered in my ear, “Watch out for anything strange.” She kissed the top of my head and said in a low voice, “Help me try to find Hubble.”

  Then she got back into the electri-car. What was she talking about? How could we find Hubble? We’d already tried. He was gone, along with everyone else who had been on the Spirit.

  Nita sped off.

  Mom and Dad walked to the front doors of the Project with their heads high and smiles on their faces. It was like they abandoned their firstborn child every day. Mr. Shugabert led the way, carrying our boxes. The Project’s doors slid open as he scanned his ID badge. I watched Mom and Dad walk into the building and I felt sick to my stomach.

  Inside, it was killer. I momentarily forgot my sick feeling as I felt a glimmer of excitement bubble up from my toes. The control room blinked and glittered like a supernova. People ran around with handhelds and shouted into their collartalks. Huge holoboards hung on the far wall. One holoboard showed the shuttle preparing for liftoff. Another showed SpacePort and the Sojourner spacecraft orbiting around the moon.

  The last one had a grainy picture on it. It looked like just a blank black screen until you really stared at it. In the middle floated a seething mass. It looked kind of like the vapors you see rising from the road on a hot day. The Fold. Every now and then a shimmer of color shot around the Fold’s edges. As scary as it seemed, it looked awesome. That was our shortcut to Mars, and I still couldn’t believe our ship was going into that thing. It looked like it was just waiting to eat us and then give a yellow burp.

  Then the Fold disappeared and was replaced by something huge and pink. What was it?

  The picture focused.

  A tongue!

  The image widened and some teeth closed into a grotesque smile. The brightest blue braces I’d ever seen took up the whole screen. The camera pulled back farther, revealing the grinning face of the palest girl this side of the moon. She turned her face side to side and I could see that she was talking nonstop, but there was no sound. A few minutes later she was gone and the lurching Fold was back up on the screen.

  Mr. Shugabert disappeared into an elevator with our boxes, but not without giving me an idiotic grin first. This guy … it was like he lived his whole life in a chewing gum commercial or something.

  Mom tugged my arm and led me and Dad to the other side of the room. As we walked, they greeted some vaguely familiar people with a wave. A tall man with round glasses waved back. I might have seen him at last year’s Project employee picnic. Seemed like we had talked about robots while we’d waited for the bathroom. I followed Mom and Dad to the elevator where he stood.

  “Jim,” Dad said in his professional voice. He nodded in the man’s direction.

  “Albert, Marie,” Jim said back, nodding at them.

  “This is our son, Michael,” Dad said as if I was an alien or a ham steak for sale.

  “I think we met at the picnic last year,” Jim said, smiling. I smiled back, but my grin faded when the pale girl from the holoboard bounded up next to us.

  “Albert, Marie … Michael … this is my daughter, Larc.”

  “Hello, ma’am, sir, child of ma’am and sir,” the gangly girl said, flashing us a glimpse of those crazy blue braces.

  In the elevator, I tried to get a good look at Larc. Tall like her dad, pointy bird nose, practically clear blue eyes. I looked away as she caught my eye and smiled.

  The elevator jolted up a few stories and we popped out in an empty, stark white hallway. Everyone piled out of the elevator. Mom gave my shoulders a squeeze and said, “Don’t look so freaked out. We’re just going to the locker rooms to get changed. Oh, and, Mike? Make sure to leave your clothes—and everything in your pockets—in the locker you’re provided. No outside communication devices are allowed on the ship.”

  How did she know I had my peapod?! I hope when I’m a parent, I can be psychic, too. I made a face and walked into the locker room.

  A few minutes later, back in the elevator, Mom and Dad exchanged looks. I chewed my lip. I felt like an idiot dressed in a shiny kite. These jumpsuits were ridiculous. And why did Mom and Dad keep looking at each other like that? They kept glancing at each other like they were trying to communicate telepathically.

  I rolled the peapod around in my pocket, along with the grasshrinkers I’d brought with me, breaking the rules. I wanted to keep my ties to Earth, I guess. Besides, I’d only been away from home for like an hour and I already had a million things to tell Stinky.

  We all rode the elevator up to the fifth floor. I’d been there a million times. Mom and Dad have their offices on the fifth floor. I felt a small wave of comfort settle in as I stepped onto familiar ground. There were a whole bunch of people in there, too, even some kids. Most of them looked just like I felt. Totally freaked out. That was a little comforting, too.

  Mom tapped me on the shoulder and I jumped about three feet.

  “Can you sit on that bench outside my office, honey? Dad and I will be right back.”

  I did what she said, fighting my impulse to argue.

  Be calm. Brave. Make them feel guilty, I decided as I sat down. Nerves of steel. Nerves of steel. They hurried toward a cluster of adults standing by a large computer screen.

  “Mars, huh?”

  I jumped again. So much for nerves of steel. I whipped my head around. Larc had snuck up behind me and sat on the bench. She was staring at me with her icy blue eyes.

  I hung my head in my hands. “I guess.”

  “Aren’t you excited?” she asked. “It’s a new world. And we’re the pioneers.”

  I looked at her like she was insane.

  “What kind of a name is Larc, anyway?” I asked. That was rude of me, but I was too freaked to care.

  “It’s Carl spelled backwards,” she said.

  I thought for a second. “No, it isn’t. Carl spelled backwards is L-R-A-C.”

  She shrugged like I was wrong and she was right.

  I closed my eyes and tried
to pretend she wasn’t there. My brain was on the verge of going, “Okay. Whatever. Initiate shutdown. I’m just going to hum the theme song to MonsterMetalMachines now.” I wondered if this was how Nita felt most of the time. That made me laugh and I thought about what she had said. Something about finding Hubble and watching out? Even talking about finding Hubble was crazy.

  “What’s so funny?” Larc asked, leaning in my face. Her white hair brushed my shoulder with a swish.

  I started to slide away but Dad suddenly reappeared. I jumped up. “Okay, Michael,” he said with a serious look. “We’re all set. Let’s go take our seats on the shuttle.” He gave me a short, squeezy hug that seemed totally out of place and weird. “I know this is an exciting day for you. It’s exciting for all of us.”

  I shook my head. If he’d paid attention to me for two seconds that morning, he’d have seen that I was anything but excited about this trip. Well, except that I did feel kind of excited. We were going into space, after all. I’ve been learning about space since practically before I was born. My nursery had little rocket ships on the wall. So the idea of really, truly going into space; really, truly stepping on a different planet … Well, deep down inside I was excited. But I would never let Mom and Dad know that.

  Outside on the launchpad, the shuttle was hulking, smoking, and vibrating. Its sheer giganticness blocked out the sun—like a giant blue beehive. It couldn’t be a good sign that my first impression of the ship was that it reminded me of Mrs. Halebopp. Not a good sign at all.

  We are all going to die.

  I gripped the bar in front of me. It shook fiercely, like the bolts might come loose at any moment. I tried to look at Dad, but the g-forces were so strong I couldn’t move my head even a millimeter. It felt like the world’s strongest vacuum cleaner was sucking my cheeks out through the back of my head.

  My teeth were dried out and my tongue felt like it was coated in sand. Not the time to hyperventilate.

  Really. Not.

  The. Time.

  The last time I’d hyperventilated, it had been at the doctor’s office, so that had worked out pretty well. But there weren’t any nurses here with paper bags. Only fantastically loud roaring, violent shaking, and invisible headrest vacuums.

  And fire. Did I mention fire? Because nobody told me there was going to be fire. Out of the corner of my bulging eye, I saw yellow and orange flashes. They cast my whole row into jumping shadows.

  We are going to die, I thought again, refusing to scream like the other children. Nerves of steel. Nerves of steel. I wanted to meet my fate like a man. Even if just a hyperventilating man in a shiny jumpsuit.

  Up the aisle, I caught a glimpse of the cockpit, where Mom sat. As mission coordinator, she communicated with Mission Control and made sure the ship stayed on course. I saw darts of her black hair shaking in the hurly-burly of early takeoff.

  As we rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere, the shuttle slowed down and eventually leveled off. We floated for a few minutes, tethered to our seats by our seat belts, and then we were sucked back into our seats. I got this queasy, gutter-ball feeling in my stomach. The captain had turned on the AutoGrav. The children calmed down now (though I could hear one blowing chunks from the AutoGrav) and Mom made an announcement letting us all know that the turbulence was over.

  With the g-forces a rapidly fading nightmare now, I turned to Dad and growled, “You didn’t tell me about the shooting flames.”

  He shook his head and said, “Mike. How many takeoffs have you watched from the back porch? A thousand?”

  I shrugged, and despite myself, my grimace turned into an embarrassed grin. He was right. And in every single one of them, I never actually saw the shuttle; it was more like a ball of flame reaching into the sky.

  “I’ll be right back,” Dad said abruptly. He manually unclicked his seat belt and lumbered toward the cockpit. He stopped about three rows behind the cockpit and bent down to talk to Jim. Dad pulled his medical kit out of his jumpsuit and offered Jim a small vial. Jim took the vial and shook Dad’s hand. Larc turned around in her seat and waved at me. In the semidarkness of the cabin, her stark white hair looked almost lit up from inside.

  Dad was coming back to our row when a hand shot out from a seat and grabbed his wrist. It was Mr. Shugabert.

  Dad leaned down toward him and said something like “medical necessity,” and then the hand let go of his wrist.

  “What was that all about?” I asked when he jolted back down the aisle.

  “I just gave Larc’s father a vitamin serum for her. She’s a little sick from the ride and this is a new serum specially formulated to settle a queasy stomach.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “With him.” I pointed. “Why is Sugar Bear so grabby?”

  “Oh.” Dad shrugged. “He was just saying hi.”

  “Why is he even here, anyway?”

  “It’s no big deal, Mike. Your mom is a busy lady and busy people need assistants. Plain and simple. The Project thought it would be nice for Mr. Shugabert to come along and help take care of things for the family. That way Mom and I can more easily concentrate on the mission.”

  “A babysitter,” I said grimly.

  “Don’t be silly. He’s an executive assistant.”

  I gave Dad a dubious look.

  “You’ll hardly even notice he’s on the trip.”

  “Right,” I said, watching Dad scratch his nose. Hubble once taught Stinky and me that if someone’s scratching his nose while talking it is the number one sign that that person is lying.

  Hubble.

  “So, what about Nita?” I asked. I wondered if I should mention to Dad that Nita had asked me to look for Hubble. Ever since the first mission—when everything went wrong and Hubble was lost—well, she hardly ever mentioned his name anymore. It was so weird that she’d mentioned him this morning. I rubbed my temples. The thought of Nita not coming on the trip still made my stomach churn. Or maybe that was the AutoGrav.

  “She should be at Gram’s by now. I’ll see what I can find out when we get on the ship. You know we’re not allowed any personal Earth-bound messages, right?” He looked at me skeptically. “No peapods. No handheld IMs. It futzes with the systems.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said irritably. “One Earth-bound call, per family, per week,” I chirped, imitating Mom. I slouched in my seat, grumbling. Why did everyone always think I wasn’t paying attention when they talked?

  The shuttle slowed to a stop with a loud click. Everyone looked around nervously. Then Mom came through the cockpit doors.

  “Everyone,” she said, with her eyes dancing and a smile threatening to engulf her whole face, “we’ve just established air lock. We’re connected to the Sojourner now and we should be opening the door any minute.”

  There was a pause and then a smattering of halfhearted claps that turned into a roar of applause. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought we were gonna die. I joined in the clapping. It stunk smelly gerbils to be moving, but it would have stunk a lot more to blow up on the shuttle flight!

  Mom walked over to me and Dad and squeezed our shoulders.

  “We’ve made it,” she said. She sounded almost relieved.

  Dad kissed her cheek and then stuffed something into Mom’s flight suit pocket. It looked like another vial of that vitamin stuff.

  Mom started off toward the cockpit and patted the pocket Dad had just “secretly” invaded. “I’ll see you on board,” she said to us over her shoulder.

  Our seat belts automatically unclicked, and the other passengers gathered up their readers and carry-on bags. You could tell that everyone was a little apprehensive and nervous … even most of the grown-ups. But it had been a rather exciting hour.

  Dad handed me a clear vial of vitamin stuff. “Here’s to keeping the queasies away,” he said, offering up his own vial to toast. I glowered. He was always making me and Nita gobble down vitamins, minerals, and Frankenfoods. Every time Dad gave me something to put in my mouth, it made
me want to puke. I held the vial up and examined it. The liquid was clear, but gross specks floated around. Silvery chunks, even. Blech.

  He clinked his vial with mine, even though I didn’t hold it up for the toast. “Bottoms up, kiddo,” he said. I pinched my nose and chugged. Shockingly, it didn’t taste that bad. Kind of minty.

  We made our way down the aisle and walked through the air lock.

  Then … wow.

  The Sojourner’s lobby was four or five stories high, and very long and skinny, like Fierce Mangle (the best MonsterMetalMachine ever). Gray railings on each level formed long rings around the inside of the ship. On each floor, white doors stood out from the dark walls. They had no windows or doorknobs or anything.

  Straight ahead, far down at the end of the tube-shaped ship, was a huge window that bubbled out into space. That end of the ship must have been three and a half football fields away.

  There was a sign on a table just inside the air lock. It said “Welcome to the Sojourned Please take your mapper!” The mappers were stacked and labeled alphabetically.

  I ran up and grabbed the mapper labeled “Stellar.” It was a tiny little box. I pressed a red button in the center and a hologram of the ship hovered over the box.

  “Cool,” I said quietly.

  “Cool what?”

  I jumped. Mom had snuck up behind me.

  I held up the mapper for her. “Yep. Pretty cool,” she said.

  “Come on, let’s get going, you two,” Dad said. He acted impatient, but I could tell he liked the mapper, too.

  The hologram showed a hovering arrow over a doorway in the back of the projected little ship. The arrow was labeled “Stellar Residence.”

  I pointed and said, “Home sweet home.” We started walking to our new apartment. We passed the cafeteria and the public bathrooms and even what looked like the captain’s quarters. We kept walking and walking, down one hallway and up another … around one corner and through a doorway … Finally it seemed like we were getting close. I noticed the only people still hunting around were us and Jim and Larc.