Fugitive From Asteron Read online

  As Chuck’s glance moved from me to Mykroni, his face looked cunning, as though he was surveying the situation and calculating his next move. He then dropped his head and put his hands over his face.

  “Dad, I’m in trouble, and it’s all my own fault. I have no one to turn to except you.” He looked up at Mykroni. “It’s not because this guy butted in”—he glanced disapprovingly at me—“but actually, I am sorry for the way I acted . . . really sorry.”

  Chuck’s sudden change of mood calmed Mykroni down. He turned to me and smiled. “Get back to work, Alex. I don’t need any rescuing.”

  As I was about to return to my seat, Chuck offered me his hand for a shake. “No hard feelings,” he said, as if it were my behavior that needed excusing.

  I shook his hand warily. He smiled at me, but there were no crinkle lines around his eyes. Chuck was the first Earthling to shake my hand whose smile did not extend to his eyes. Was his apology sincere? I glanced at Mykroni, who seemed taken in by the gesture.

  The two men stepped outside. I could still hear muffled voices through the closed door, but they were calmer now.

  “What do you say, Dad?”

  “Why do I always give in?”

  “I’ll come by the house for it later.”

  “Come with a payment schedule, one you can stick to this time.”

  “Of course. Say, I really appreciate this!”

  “A day will come when you push me too far.”

  From a window on the flight deck, I watched Chuck leaving. I noticed that Mykroni did not call him son.

  On my first day at MAS, after my job interview, I had asked Kristin why Mykroni addressed me by that word. “It’s a term of fondness,” she explained, then added: “Mykroni has a real son who works at MAS. You’re bound to bump into him.”

  Indeed I had.

  I was invited to join a meeting later that day. When I arrived at the conference room, Kristin’s flight instructor, Jeff, greeted me at the door. Jeff was also a pilot at MAS and captain of the flying team Kristin belonged to, called the Gold Streaks. The team’s name reflected the curved gold stripe on the graphite body of their planes, which ran from the tapered nose, across the fuselage, to the tip of the tail.

  “Thanks for coming, Alex,” Jeff said. “Come in.”

  I sat at an oval table with Jeff, Kristin, and the other five MAS pilots performing in the upcoming air show. On the wall was a large, high-resolution photograph of six sleek planes flying in a triangular formation with the sun glistening off their fuselage and their wing tips almost touching.

  During the past two weeks I had flown with each of these pilots in a similar configuration. On Asteron I had learned the high-performance, high-speed flying in tight formation that they were trained to do. The superb technical advancement of their crafts made it possible for me to learn their flying patterns in a short time.

  After we all exchanged greetings, Jeff told me why they had asked me to come: “Alex, we’ve been looking for an eighth pilot to join the Gold Streaks. We fly in air shows around the area, and our biggest event is the show that Rising Tide has every year on Reckoning Day. Our team is completely voluntary. None of us has to fly in this show to be a pilot at MAS, although the company helps our team out. It gives us time off from work to practice and lets us use its planes—and it likes the publicity it gets from our performances.

  “Anyone who joins the Gold Streaks must be approved by every one of the other fliers. Since the nature of the work is inherently unforgiving of any mistakes, every pilot on the team has to have the highest trust in all the others. We had a meeting in which your name was nominated as the eighth flier. We voted, and it was unanimous. We all want to have you on the team. No one so new to MAS has ever been offered a place in the formation before. So this is a compliment to your flying, Alex. It’s the highest compliment we can pay, because we trust you with our lives.” Jeff paused while the others nodded in agreement. “So what do you think, Alex? Would you like to join the Gold Streaks?”

  I looked at Jeff, Kristin, and the others as they smiled at me. For the first time, I was being rewarded for the thing that made me unequal, made me stand out, made me different from others. I felt a bond with the people before me that went beyond flying and embraced life itself.

  “I indeed would like to be on the Gold Streaks. Thank you. I accept!”

  Then the most amazing thing happened. The pilots raised their hands to me and clapped. I thought of the other Alexander when he hit his home run. I remembered how his face had looked when the crowd cheered. I did not have a name for the high lift of his head, the contentment in his eyes, the glow on his face. I knew only that he acted the opposite of how I had been taught, which was to look down when others addressed me. At that moment, with the pilots clapping, I raised my head high like the nose of a plane on a climb.

  When the meeting ended, I approached Kristin. “What is it called,” I asked, “when a person is pleased with the things he can do, with his . . . abilities?”

  Her big eyes swept across the ceiling as they did when they reached for answers to my questions. Then she smiled. “It’s called pride. It’s what you felt just now at the meeting. I know because it was all over your face, Alex. You looked so proud—of your flying and of yourself. And you deserve to be.”

  I thought of all the things Earthlings cared about—their food, their clothing, their gardens, their work. I realized that these things were important because the Earthlings prized something else above all. This something was not what I had been taught to appreciate. At the top of the mountain of an Earthling’s cares was his own person, not as a small stone in a massive mound but as a separate peak of its own.

  “Alex, do you realize you smiled at the meeting? That’s the first time I ever saw you smile. And your eyes crinkled too, the way you say Earthlings’ eyes do. For a minute, I thought you might even laugh. You looked as though you really could, you know.”

  Earth’s only moon was a sliver in the sky that night, protecting me with darkness as I entered my spacecraft in the empty field. I glanced at my watch: It was midnight. There were no lights on along the winding lane of dwellings folded into the hillside, including Kristin’s house, across the road. Lifting myself up to the craft, I thought of Kristin, my job, the Gold Streaks—all the things I now had to live for. Feran and his world were fading fast, like a nightmare exposed to the light of day. I was eager to get back to my apartment, sleep for a few hours, then wake up early to prepare for my classes on the solar system and my exercises in navigation. Later, there were rehearsals for the air show. I had so much to do in the rich new existence that was my life. I sat by the radio’s serene blue monitor on the flight deck. It had remained dormant for two weeks. Perhaps Feran had returned to Asteron and found another amusement. I checked for messages, but I expected none. Suddenly, jagged vertical lines slashed the monitor, forming the rising and falling inflections of Feran’s malevolent voice.

  “Animal!” he raged, gashing the screen with sharp peaks of violent colors. “Did you expect me to drain the entire Gulf of California on your behalf? I have recovered enough sections of the camper to realize your vile traitor bones were not in it. I found the parachute, and it was still stowed.”

  The camper had a parachute that could be deployed so that the vehicle would have a good chance of landing intact and staying afloat for a while to enable a rescue.

  “If you were inside the camper, you would have deployed the chute. Even you would not be so stupid as to fail in that task.”

  I could have released the chute from the mother ship, but a parachute landing in which the camper remained intact would have made it easier to locate—and easier to discover I was not aboard. So instead I took my chances with the chute stowed. What were the odds that Feran would find that particular piece of equipment in the miles of sea and know for certain that I had not deployed it? Did his luck mark my doom?

  “There was not a fragment in the water to suggest the spacecraft h
ad hit, and no reports of any ship crashing over land either. Where are you, pig? You have no fuel and no password for navigation. You are trapped where you are.”

  The new blue shirt, which Kristin said matched the color of my eyes, was now stained with dark patches of sweat.

  “You are an alien on a hostile planet. Do you think you can hide from the supreme ruler of Asteron? Oh, and by the way,” he added mockingly, “Coquet has learned of your little trick, and she is quite displeased with you.”

  I listened in dismay.

  “No doubt you are hiding somewhere, like a rat in a sewer.” He laughed viciously. “So I am going to help you, traitor. You give me the metal box in the ship’s bay, which is of no value to you, and I will give you your rotten life, which is of no value to me. You get rid of something you have no need for, and I will do the same. Call me.”

  He gave me his phone number.

  “Call and tell me where the cargo is. That is all you have to do, and I will pick it up and have no further dealings with you.”

  I stared at the screen, waiting for him to finish.

  “You have twenty-four hours to get me the cargo in exchange for your life. Of course, if you do not comply, Coquet will want to know. She will demand that I find you. She will want to play with you until she has her fill. Then, swine, you will die exquisitely.”

  The waves of Feran’s voice disappeared into stillness. The monitor returned to a peaceful blue. And I dropped my head with a thud against the flight deck.

  Chapter 12

  After I had heard Feran’s message on Friday, my sixteenth day on Earth, his threats pounded my mind like a headache I could not shake.

  How long? I wondered, as I sat in a meeting room on the MAS airfield. I gazed at one of our team’s planes parked outside. The exquisite flying machine looked like a painting framed within the large window. How long? I wondered the entire weekend, while I flew one of those awesome machines in rehearsals for the air show and met with the other Gold Streaks after each run to correct any near errors in a routine intolerant of any mistakes. Despite the safety I felt in the air, how long could I remain alive while on the ground?

  This question continued to worry me when I returned to work on Monday morning to perform underwater maneuvers in a spacesuit, mimicking the buoyancy of space. Two divers were on duty for the sole purpose of rescuing me should a failure of my life-support system trap me underwater in the suit. Why the painstaking effort to protect my life? For the pleasure of Coquet?

  How long would it take Feran to find me? There were almost a million people in the city of Rising Tide. What group would Feran be stalking—young males, pilots, aliens, or alien pilots? I shuddered at the thought of how small that last group might be.

  And why was Feran holding a flexite suit that belonged to Merrett Aerospace Systems, a suit used solely for a secret project? How was Feran linked to Project Z? Did he have a spy at MAS? Because Feran nurtured a cadre of spies on Asteron as meticulously as the Earthlings tended their gardens, I figured he must have had someone gathering information for him on the now-canceled secret project. But with the security measures in place for MAS grounds and buildings, it would be difficult for someone from the outside to break in. Indeed, I had learned from Kristin that MAS had experienced no break-ins, or even attempted break-ins, for the duration of Project Z. Without evidence of any breach of security from the outside, I figured Feran’s spy might more likely be someone inside MAS.

  After completing my work in the tank that Monday, I joined Kristin for a soft drink during our break. Too worried to sit, I stood over her as she relaxed on a bench in a grassy area outside our building, with the soaring MAS rocket sculpture behind her in the distance.

  At the risk of raising her suspicions, I leaned toward her, my foot on the bench near her legs, and once again I asked why she hated Asteron.

  Her hand stopped with her cup midway to her mouth, as if she had lost her desire to drink. She placed the cup on the bench and paused a long while before answering. “They do things to us. Then they disappear like ghosts without a trace.”

  “What did they do to you, Kristin?”

  Her mouth drew tight and her eyes became hard with hatred, an unyielding hatred that surprised me. Although she flew only unarmed craft, Kristin had the skill to be a military pilot. When I saw her face at that moment, I felt certain that she could drop a deadly payload without flinching. I knew how the name of my vile homeland could drive me to kill, but I had no idea why it seemed to evoke the same response in Kristin.

  “Others say we can’t prove a thing, but I think they come here and try to hurt us!” She stared fixedly into space at a disturbing vision of her own.

  I raised her hands to my chest and squeezed them. “How did they hurt you, Kristin?”

  “Why do you insist, Alex? And why do you stare so intensely?” She pulled her hands away and drew back from me. She did not seem to notice hitting the drink by her side, which spilled onto the grass. “How can this concern you?”

  I righted the cup and leaned in closer. “Did Asteron have anything to do with Project Z?”

  “No, not with Project Z.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Asteron had nothing at all to do with Project Z.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you look so troubled at the mention of that planet, Kristin?”

  “It’s something I want to forget, something that happened before Project Z started, so, Alex, please don’t pester me! And don’t get crazy again over dangers that are only in your mind. You have this thing about Project Z, you know.”

  I continued to ponder this matter as I walked to my workplace after our break. The only direct link I had to both Asteron and MAS was Mykroni. But he had been here for twenty-five years and acted just like the Earthlings. Besides, after a lifetime of suspecting everyone around me of being an agent—and many were agents—I could not bring myself to doubt the man who called me son and who presided over my training as though I were a rare gem he was cutting. I would have to find another link.

  Kristin was troubled by Asteronians who seemed to sneak around like ghosts, upsetting her contentment. I too was haunted by those ghosts, especially the bristly presence inside the black cape that I could not escape. It seemed to accompany me when I arrived at my workspace, a narrow room containing the essentials of my new life: a desk at the end under a window, a computer, several monitors, and rows of shelves rapidly filling with notebooks and manuals from my studies. I sat at my desk and reviewed the things I knew about Project Z.

  According to Kristin, the people involved with that secret project were a small group of accomplished scientists and engineers whom her father had worked with closely in the past. Others who performed more limited tasks on the project were, she said, handpicked veteran employees who had been with the company for many years. It seemed unlikely that a spy from Asteron could infiltrate such a carefully selected project team. Perhaps the spy was someone inside MAS but outside Project Z. How, then, could the spy learn about this secretive undertaking? To know about Project Z, I figured, was to read its computer files.

  As a pilot in the Space Travel Division, I could access some of the MAS databases with security codes. Would not the Project Z team, including Dr. Merrett, use a similar protocol to access its databases? I pulled my keyboard toward me to conduct a small test. When I tried to search for entries containing the term Project Z, only one item came up. It was a memo that Charles Merrett had sent to his employees announcing the cancelation of the project. That memo, available to the entire staff at MAS, contained no information about the nature of the project. I continued searching, but I found no other documents on the project. As I suspected from common security protocols, the files from the secret project appeared to be unavailable on the company’s general computer system. The records from the secret project were probably accessible only via specific computers in protected workspaces with their own separate syst
ems.

  I figured it would be difficult for someone outside the project to gain access to these restricted files. I restlessly tapped my fingers on the keyboard. Was there a simpler way?

  Pondering the matter, I leaned back in my chair and gazed out the window. Outside my building was the executive parking lot, and across from it was the executive office building, where Dr. Merrett had an office. I had an idea. Could a spy somehow have read privileged information from Dr. Merrett’s computer monitor? Could a spy have seen Dr. Merrett’s screen with a telescope from a window in our building? Because Dr. Merrett managed the project personally, he would have been the one with access to all of its files—the perfect person to spy on. Surely a computer in his office would have access to those files.

  Earthlings did not expect danger. Instead, they were relaxed. There had been no wars on the planet for a century and no break-ins at MAS for years. Despite the secret nature of Project Z, could Charles Merrett have been relaxed? I wondered if he could have overlooked a way in which a sinister mind might steal information from him. I decided to look for an opportunity to examine his office.

  My chance came that afternoon. From my window I noticed Kristin’s slim form as she walked toward the executive office building with flowers in her arms. Guessing what she was going to do with them, I raced out to meet her. Just as I thought, she was about to bring the flowers to her father’s office. I asked if I could accompany her. At first she hesitated. “He’s been so grouchy lately. I really don’t want you to meet him until he’s back to his cheerful self again.” But when I prodded, she relented. “Well, okay. Come with me.”

  Dr. Merrett was not in when we arrived. However, his assistant, a nicely groomed older female, introduced to me as Margaret, looked up from her desk to greet us with a smile. She extended her hand to me for the handshake that I found typical of Earthlings. Eyeing Kristin’s flowers, Margaret approached an electronic keypad by the closed door of Dr. Merrett’s office in what seemed like a routine procedure for them. While Kristin and Margaret exchanged a few pleasant words, I positioned myself in a spot where I could see the numbers the assistant pressed. With neither of the females paying attention to me or showing the slightest suspicion, I committed the code to memory.