Chapter 21

For about the eightieth time, Jase Garrett wondered what the heck he was doing.

Resting, he leaned his weight into the mountain. He was sweating, and he wanted to wipe his face, but being in his suit made that impossible. He’d adjusted his temperature controls twice, but he was still fogging, and it was hard enough to see as it was. The surface was in near-total darkness, the feeble light of the brown star coloring the terrain various shades of gray, rust, and a queer, dull, washed-out bronze that verged on muddy yellow. He flicked his tongue over his upper lip and tasted salt. He squinted, speared the beam of his flash into the slope below. The light picked out slurries of bronze rock and sand-colored debris. Tricky going. He’d have preferred hiking with the light off to free up his hands. He scanned the star-studded sky. The planet’s larger moon was near the horizon and the smaller one was higher, but neither cast much light and the steely starlight wasn’t bright enough. One misstep, and he’d go tumbling. One thing he didn’t want was to get hurt here,now, kilometers from help, especially when no one knew where he was. The biosphere, where they’d been living for almost a week and a half, was nestled on the far side of the valley, in a wide cirque. If something happened, he’d lie here for hours before anyone showed. Ifanyone showed before his air ran out.

Smart.He peered back down the mountain. Really smart move, Jase.What had he been thinking? He should’ve been in his quarters, dutifully studying something.Astromechanics. Parallel plane differential calculus. Something. But nooo.He was out here, mucking around over red rocks on a dead planet, trying not to get himself killed.

And being tugged— pulled—somewhere. He felt it, in his mind. He knew going any further was nuts, totally crazy. But when he thought about turning back, a mosquito whine at the back of his brain started: a mental tug that had led him to stand on a rocky face above a dead lake on a blasted world.

And something really bad had happened here. Jase angled his light behind and back up the mountain. Maybe explosions, or a war, a really bad war.Here, the sides of the mountains had fallen away, like orange wax melting under a hot flame. The pass had disappeared and been replaced by a series of chutes that jagged down the mountain, almost as if water had scoured out the rock, leaving deep, wide furrows. The steep mountain chute he’d chosen was littered with rust-colored scree and rubble. There was loose rock and scree everywhere, and that made the going treacherous, like picking his way over a vertical sheet of glare ice.

He’d found a pass incised into the rock about a kilometer northwest of the biosphere. At first, the pass had looked like nothing more than a dried stream, and Jase would have trudged by. But then that mental clarion call tickled his brain and when he got right up to the earth and swept the ground with his flashlight, he saw the faint but unmistakable impressions of footprints worn into the rock. From the people who used to live here.Staring at the footprints, Jase had felt a cold finger of dread trail along the knobs of his spine. Ghosts.Jase had felt them from orbit and then felt them again, stronger, on the surface. There were ghosts here, ghosts that floated just out of sight, hovered behind the rocks. Lived beneath the ground.

He’d taken the path anyway.

Nerves, he told himself as he trudged along, the beam of his flashlight punching the semi-darkness. Just nerves. Heck, who wouldn’t be a little nervous: stuck on a dead planet, a zillion kilometers from anyone, and cooped up in a biosphere with a guy like Su Chen-Mai?

Jase’s eyes darted right and left, scouring the steep mountain terrain. Twice, he could’ve sworn he was being followed. Twice, he’d ducked into the shadows, nerves jangling. But there’d been no one. Just his imagination: nothing more.

He checked his air. Eight hours left. At the rate he was going, he probably had just enough air to make it a third of the way down before he had to turn around. Again, he considered going back. Again, he discarded the idea. Might as well keep going for as long as he could, see how far he got. Next time (what was he thinking, there was going to be anext time?),he’d bring spare air, maybe leave it somewhere so he could change out and get back without having to rush.

He sidestepped, careful to keep his weight angled into the mountain. His feet bit into the earth, and he knew they crunched rock, though he heard nothing but his own breathing because there was no atmosphere to carry the sound. He wished there was something else to focus on but himself: his breathing, the fact that he was sweating so much he felt oily. He was sore, and his thighs trembled with fatigue and a hot burn from muscles that hadn’t been used in quite this way for months and months. His knees creaked and screamed with pain from the long downhill trek. His nose itched, and this was guaranteed to drive him crazy. And (wasn’t this just his luck?)he had to pee. Really bad. Just the thought made his groin clutch.

But there wasn’t anything he could do about the sound, his aching muscles, the way his nose itched so much his eyes watered because he was in a stupid environmental suit, a couple four, five kilometers away from the biosphere, under a dead sky littered with the hard, sharp points of millions of stars. There wassomething he could do about having to pee. He just didn’t want to. Not in a suit. No matter how clean everyone (his mom, his dad, but especially his mom)said it was, no matter how well the suit grabbed all that stuff and recycled it, or did whatever.No way.

He hadn’t planned any of this. Oh, he knew that his predicament (the pain in his thighs, the itch in his nose, the need to pee really bad)was entirely his own doing. He couldn’t even claim that he was just a stupid kid because he wasn’t a totalkid, and even when he had been, he hadn’t ever been stupid.Like, he shouldn’t even have been in the suit. But either he waited until all the adults were gone then steal a suit and sneak out of the biosphere and not tell a soul (not even Pahl) and risk getting grounded for life; or go absolutely-stark-raving-bonkers-bathouse-crazy with boredom. Probably his dad wouldn’t ground him for life. Probably.

But he hatedenvironmental suits. Stewing in a tin can, breathing canned air:That’s the way his mom described it, only she likedit, go figure. Jase didn’t know what a tin can was;he had to look it up. After studying a pretty strange painting by a twentieth-century guy who made a fortune painting the same soup can in different colors, Jase figured out two things. Being cooped up in a tin can looked uncomfortable, but the painter had been brilliant.

A couple of years ago, Jase worried that hating environmental suits might keep him out of Starfleet Academy. (That was when he was just a little kid though. Now that he knew he wasn’t ever going to the Academy because he was going to be an artist or something, he probably wouldn’t need to stick a toe inside an environmental suit.) He knew that sometimes transporters broke down, or shuttles blew apart, and you needed to know how to use a suit. He’d visited his mom enough times while the Enterprisewas in dock to understand that all sorts of people worked outside, in suits, all the time. He used to stand at one of the dock’s observation bays, his face plastered to cool glass, and watch the structural engineers, tiny as ants, crawl over the gray hull of his mom’s ship. And the most inane thought: What happens if they have to pee?