He checked the route.
He double-checked it.
Perfect.
Dash tapped the screen, finalizing the input. Then he wrapped his hands around the horizontal metal bar installed above the portal.
This was it.
Moment of truth.
He took a deep breath and swung himself off his feet and into the tube. A gush of air swept him into motion, speeding him toward the heart of the Cloud Leopard.
“Wooooooooooo!” Dash whooped, but the wind stole his scream away. He flew through gleaming tunnels, powerless to stop himself, even if he wanted to. Up and up at breakneck speed, then a sharp left into a branching tube, down so fast and so steep his stomach leapt into his throat. It was like the world’s wildest waterslide, except instead of sputtering through freezing water, he was surfing a cushion of warm air. Dash veered right. He zoomed through one loop-the-loop, then another, plunged down another sharp drop, and shot out of the tube like a cannonball. He landed with a thud exactly where he’d planned, on the lower level of the ship’s training center.
Mission accomplished.
“Woo-hoo!” Dash cheered when he checked his time. One minute, two seconds. A new ship record. Three miles of tubing made for thousands of different routes through the ship and the crew was competing to see who could find the longest one. Carly had managed 52 seconds on her last run—Dash had spent hours trying to beat her. He clasped his hands over his head like a prizefighter. “Victory is mine!”
Yes, Dash was the team leader on an interstellar mission hurtling through space at speeds faster than light. Yes, he had the most important job in the world—maybe the galaxy. And that one job was actually more like four: Piper was the ship medic, Carly was the science and tech officer, Gabriel was the navigator and pilot—and Dash had to know everything they did. Just in case.
In the fifty-five days since they’d left planet J-16, he’d had plenty of important things to do: memorizing ship schematics, practicing in the flight simulator, studying up on their next destination, the planet Meta Prime.
But Dash had his priorities straight: he always made time for tube surfing.
“One minute, two seconds!” he called out. “Ship record, for sure! Yesss.”
“Watch out next time!” Piper cried. “You almost landed on some ZRKs!”
“What?” Dash suddenly realized he was surrounded by a cloud of tiny, golf ball-sized machines. They were buzzing like a hive of angry bees. Or like a hive of miniature robots he’d almost sat on. “Uh, sorry, little guys.”
The Cloud Leopard couldn’t function without its fleet of tiny ZRKs. The clever robots prepped mission tech, repaired damage to the ship, and did anything else the crew might need. They were also pretty good at getting in the way.
“Remember, ZRKs are people too,” Piper said. She was nowhere in sight. “Well, not technically.”
“Not at all actually,” Dash pointed out. He looked around for the source of Piper’s voice but couldn’t find her. “Where are you, anyway?”
“Up here!” Piper shouted.
Dash looked up.
Way, way up.
The training center was an enormous atrium, two stories high. And sure enough, there was Piper, hovering above a catwalk, nearly a hundred feet off the ground. Piper grinned and waved down at him. The catwalk was less than two feet wide, but Piper didn’t look too worried. She knew she couldn’t fall. Her air chair wouldn’t let her.
Until she was five years old, Piper was just like any other kid. Then came the accident.
She could still remember how it felt when they told her she would never walk again.
She could still remember how it felt to walk, because she did so in her dreams.
Piper told herself it didn’t matter. She was just as smart as other kids, just as brave, just as capable. Hadn’t she proven it by getting chosen for this mission? Thousands of kids from everywhere on Earth had tried for a spot on this ship—the smartest, toughest kids the world had to offer. And out of all of them, the people in charge had picked her.
The best part of the mission was getting the chance to save the world. But the second best part was definitely her brand-new, custom-built hovercraft wheelchair. Who cared whether or not she could walk? Now she could fly!
She’d spent all morning zipping around the upper level of the training center watching the ZRKs at work and the rest of the crew at play. The tubes may have been fun, but they couldn’t compare to her air chair.
“A new ship’s record!” Dash cheered himself again, heading across the training room toward Gabriel and Carly, who’d taken over the basketball court. Neither of them noticed. For weeks, Gabriel and Carly had been complaining about their training regimen. They were getting bored, doing the same exercises every single day. So STEAM 6000, the ship’s robot, had come up with something different.
STEAM designed a virtual reality training game, just for them. It seemed to be some combination of basketball, fencing, lacrosse, and juggling fire. Dash didn’t quite understand the rules, but Carly and Gabriel had been at it for days. They wore thick black virtual reality glasses, and ducked and weaved around virtual fireballs and digital lightning bolts that no one else could see.
They looked totally ridiculous. But Dash kept that opinion to himself.
“Don’t you guys ever sleep?” he asked them from the safety of the sidelines.
Carly ducked, then jumped over some invisible hurdle. She kicked out her right leg, then grunted as if something had whacked her in the stomach. “Can’t sleep,” she gasped. “Too busy winning.”
“You must be asleep now,” Gabriel jeered as he slid to the ground and wrapped his hands around an invisible ball. He caught it with his fingertips and slammed it back toward Carly. “Because you’re dreaming.”
“What’s the score?” Dash asked.
“Where are we, Steamer?” Carly asked.
The training robot didn’t hesitate. “The score is 62,094 to 61,997, in favor of Carly, yes sir! She’s beating him like a drum, she is!”
“In your face!” Carly squealed, just as Gabriel launched a barrage of something at her head. Dash swallowed a laugh.
“Now 62,098 to 62,094 in favor of Gabriel,” STEAM corrected itself. “He is the king of the world, he is!”
Carly grimaced. She liked Gabriel, but she loved winning. “You’re going down, Gabe,” she said.
Dash grinned at his crew. No one would guess these were two of the smartest twelve-year-olds on Earth—or that the fate of the planet was in their hands.
It was easy, at times like this, to forget about their mission. To forget that they couldn’t make it back home without retrieving all six of the elements, and if they failed, they would be stranded. Lost in space forever, while the people of Earth slowly ran out of fuel and energy, until the whole planet went dark.
Sometimes, it was good to forget. To revel in the fact that he was on a state-of-the-art spaceship equipped with Ping-Pong tables and a digital copy of every movie ever made. But it was also times like that, the fun times, when he missed his family the most. His mother and his little sister, Abby, were all alone back in Orlando. He imagined them staring out at the city gone dark, every light powered down for the energy curfew. Or maybe they were gazing up at the stars, wondering when he would come home. If he would come home.
Dash was proud to lead this mission—to risk everything to save his family and his planet.
But deep down, he was terrified he wouldn’t be able to do it.
It amazed him that he could stuff so many opposing feelings into his brain at the same time. It was smaller than a football in there—how could there be room for them all?
STEAM suddenly eeped in alarm. “No time for games anymore!”
“One more serve,” Carly complained. “I’ve got him this time, I know it.”
“Check yourself before you wreck yourself,” STEAM said excitedly. Dash groaned. The robot might be the most advanced piece of human technology ever made, but sometimes
it sounded more like the star of a lame old TV sitcom. “I have word from the navigation deck, we’re exiting Gamma Speed.”
Dash snapped into commander mode. “Exiting Gamma Speed!” he called up to Piper. “All crew to the bridge!”
“Yes, sir.” Gabriel saluted, winking at him. Gabriel was still getting used to the idea that Dash could tell him what to do. Teasing Dash about it helped.
Usually.
“Let’s go!” Carly said, racing the others to the tube portal as Chris’s voice echoed throughout the ship.
“All crew members, please report to the navigation deck,” he said. “Exiting Gamma Speed imminently.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Gabriel said, and leapt into the tube after Carly.
Chris was the fifth member of their crew. He was a few years older and spent most of his free time by himself. Dash and the others didn’t know much about where he’d come from or how he’d ended up on the Cloud Leopard. Unlike the rest of them, Chris hadn’t had to compete for a spot. Commander Shawn Phillips, the leader of Project Alpha, had simply assigned him to the ship.
And he did it without telling the other members of the crew.
It had taken Gabriel some time to get used to that too—and he wasn’t the only one. Chris was supposedly some kind of super-genius who’d helped design the Voyagers’ mission. Which meant he knew things about it the others didn’t. And no one liked being in the dark.
One by one, the crew whooshed through the tubes toward the fore of the ship, popping out on the bridge. Piper skimmed her air chair down the central corridor and met them on the flight deck a few seconds later. The enormous, wraparound window showed a sky streaked with shimmers of light. At Gamma Speed, stars didn’t look like stars. More like ribbons of luminescence, wrapping and spiraling around the Cloud Leopard at wild speeds. It made Dash dizzy to look at them, but he could never force himself to look away.
“Ready?” Dash asked his crew as they assembled on the flight deck. A shiver of excitement ran down his spine. The ship exited Gamma Speed on autopilot—all they needed to do was strap in and prepare to enter orbit. That is, unless something went wrong.
Dash was always prepared for something to go wrong.
“Ready,” they said in unison. The four members of the Alpha crew strapped themselves into the flight seats lined up before the controls. Traveling at Gamma Speed felt the same as standing still, and once the ship was in orbit, the ship’s artificial gravity system would kick in. But getting from one to the other took a little getting used to.
It also took a pretty tough seat belt.
Gabriel slipped on the dark flight glasses that would let him take manual control of the ship once they entered Meta Prime’s orbit.
Chris had his own flight seat in his private quarters, but he’d opened up a comm line with the bridge. “Ready from here,” he reported.
“Prepare to exit Gamma Speed,” the computer warned.
Dash gripped the edges of his flight chair. The ship shook and heaved. Massive g-forces flattened him against the seat. The force of deceleration rattled his teeth and made his skin feel like it was melting off his face.
“I-I-I-I-I ha-a-a-a-a-ate thi-i-i-i-i-i-i-is pa-a-a-a-a-rt!” Carly complained through clattering teeth.
The others couldn’t answer—they were trying too hard not to be sick.
The pressure intensified. Dash wondered how flat he could get before he turned two-dimensional. Or before his brain melted out of his ears. Then, just when he couldn’t take it a single second longer—
It was over.
Gravity returned to normal. Or, at least, artificial normal. The ship stopped shaking, the engines stopped roaring, Gabriel shifted them into a stable orbit, everything was totally fine. Exactly as it was supposed to be. Except…
“Uh, guys, am I seeing things?” Gabriel asked, taking off his flight glasses and pointing a shaky finger at the window, which, only seconds ago, had looked out at a starry stretch of empty space. “Or is that…?”
“Mass hallucination?” Carly suggested hopefully. “Some kind of side effect of Gamma Speed they didn’t tell us about?”
“It’s really there,” Piper said, chewing on her lip. “But I don’t see how it’s possible. Dash? What do you think?”
Dash said nothing. Only gaped at the view, eyes wide. He blinked hard as if to clear his vision.
It didn’t work.
Something was materializing in space before his eyes, something huge that blotted out the stars.
And that something was another ship.
D. J. MacHale, Project Alpha
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