Dangerous (32 page)

He studied my face, one eyebrow lifted. “Not yet,” he said.

Howell sighed. “Good. Then let’s proceed, shall we? A

world to save, blah, blah, blah.”

I pushed Dad’s hospital bed into the private bedroom that

had been mine once and asked Luther to watch over him and

make sure he slept. I moved a massively heavy steel shelving

unit in front of their door. They were temporarily trapped, but

at least no one could get in.

Only the boss lady and Dragon were waiting for me in

Howell’s office.

She entered a code into a wall safe, Dragon entered a sec-

ond code, then Howell again, followed by voice recognition and

an eye scan. She opened the safe, and Dragon brought out a

heavy metal box. It was scratched and gouged as if it had been

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chiseled free of something. The lid bore the symbol of all five

tokens intertwined like the formal version of what I bore on my

chest.

“Dragon, where do I begin?” she asked, blinking.

“Big Barda, I think,” he said.

“Tell me, Miss Brown, how did a previously uncharted as-

teroid manage to reach Earth at such an angle as to nestle per-

fectly into Earth’s orbit?”

“Because it was sent here on purpose,” I guessed.

She nodded. “We were the first to reach Big Barda and

discovered she was lousy with platinum—one of the rarest ele-

ments in the Earth’s crust and yet highly useful and therefore

more precious than gold. We built a lab on the asteroid and

were able to produce the carbon nanotubes needed for a space

elevator much faster in a weightless environment. We tugged

Barda into geosynchronous orbit and used her as the anchor

point for the ribbon. A Beanstalk ride costs 1/50 of a Space Bee-

tle launch, allowing us to mine the asteroid. Our profits turned

a megalomaniac like GT a nauseating shade of green. So he

bought out one of my astronauts to spy for him. And—there’s so

much to tell. What next, Dragon?”

“There was a metallic mark on the asteroid,” said Dragon.

“Yes, and it seemed purposeful, like a character of writing.

Buried beneath it in a chunk of ice we found this platinum con-

tainer. Inside were the five tokens and this disc.”

She opened the lid. The box was thick on all sides, the

bottom bearing six grooves. Five of the grooves were empty. In

the center groove lay a flat, circular object. Howell lifted it out,

and I saw that the disc was transparent like glass, smooth on

the outside and full of cracks on the inside. Closer, the cracks

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looked like deliberate cuts, symmetrical facets, like a diamond

inside-out.

Dragon took the disc from Howell’s palm and placed it un-

der a strong lamp. The direct light pierced the disc and images

rose out like colorful candle smoke.

“You are only the third human to view this,” said Howell.

“It’s basically alien video,” said Dragon.

The colors twisted together, shapes emerging.

“We learned you have to relax your vision,” Dragon said.

My mind ached trying to form order out of chaos, and I

gave myself an eyeball headache.

“Whatever species made that, their eyes don’t work like

ours,” I said.

When I kind of dazed out, I could discern figures. Smoky

blue and pink. The marks of the tokens. Some movement. A

ball. Figures on the ball. Figures gone. Figures again, smoky

blue and pink. What was it trying to communicate? I leaned

forward.

My body felt yanked, my muscles burning with whiplash. I

couldn’t feel any floor beneath my feet. Suddenly I was in space

without a pressure suit, and I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t

breathe. Between me and the stars the smoky images whooshed,

urgent, chaotic. I clawed at the air or lack thereof. I should have

been floating, but I felt like I was falling.

I was screaming. And I was on my knees, Howell’s carpet

beneath my hand.

“Maisie,” Dragon was saying. Howell was backed against

her desk, her face a mask of alarm.

“I was . . . I was in space,” I said.

“You weren’t.” Dragon was crouched beside me, his arm

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around my shoulders. “You were here.”

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Howell whispered. “The thinker

token?”

“I guess so.” I took deep breaths and shut my eyes to avoid

looking at the disc. “My tokens must receive the data directly,

shout it right at my brain. It seemed so real.”

“Maybe you can get more out of it than we could,” said

Howell.

I nodded, but I didn’t open my eyes.

I felt Dragon take my hand. His hand was so large, I felt

like a small girl again, my dad walking me across the street to

the park.

“I’ve got you, Brown,” he said.

“Don’t let go,” I whispered.

I opened my eyes and fell once more into the images of

the disc.

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C h a p t e r 4 1

Again I seemed to be in space, the freezing vacuum press-

ing against me, piercing into my eyeballs, my eardrums, trying

to pull me inside-out into the endless blackness. I tried to ig-

nore my body, to focus just on viewing. It was like being shoved

underwater and pretending I wasn’t drowning.

I saw two ships, nearly black as space, move toward a green

planet. Pink shapes poured out of the boats, and like a creeping

mold, blackness consumed the planet. Suddenly I was hurtling

into the planet too, toward something—or somebody. Not hu-

man. A squat body, limblike parts, something like eyes that were

silver and always moving. I seemed to go into an eye, where I

felt both terror and urgency.

That image spit me out, and I was streaking through

space, past one solar system, into another, toward a second

green planet.

The scene there was chaotic, everything so alien nothing

made sense, like watching a dozen movies all laid over one an-

other. I wanted nothing more than to shut my eyes. But I forced

myself to watch. Finally amid all the images I noticed some-

thing familiar—the marks of the tokens on alien bodies. I was

seeing the original fireteam.

The fireteam was on that second green planet. Then the

fireteam was in space with me. The two ships the color of be-

tween-stars were coming. The fireteam went inside one. Maybe

I did too. I couldn’t comprehend anything that I saw, images

pummeling me like fists.

Dangerous

Then there was only one ship. It left. The planet below me

was still green. The marks of the tokens went into a box and left

too. Ahead, a blue-green planet, spinning, spinning . . .

I shut my eyes. I was curled up on the carpet. I was shaking.

Dragon still held my hand. He helped me up into a chair.

“Put it away, please,” I said, and I heard a clink and a lid

shut.

I took some trembling breaths. “There were two ships.

Spacecraft. They annihilated Planet A somehow, because it

turned black. Before they all died, the inhabitants of Planet A

sent a warning to Planet B—a colony planet, I guess, because

the inhabitants there looked similar. By the time the spacecraft

arrive at Planet B, there was a fireteam waiting. The fireteam

destroyed one of the spacecraft, and their planet didn’t go black.

The other spacecraft fled. The Planet B inhabitants put the to-

kens into a box, into an asteroid, and sent it to . . . to us. Because

that’s where the second ship was heading.”

“And it’ll try to change our planet from green to black,” said

Howell.

“And you’re the fireteam, so you will stop it,” said Dragon.

Yes. This was the Purpose. Every cell in my body seemed

to sing with it. My eyes teared up with relief like hammer blows

that the Purpose was clear. Or somewhat clear. Or not very clear

at all, now that I thought about it. A shame the complicated ac-

tions of the alien fireteam hadn’t been more obvious.

There had been five of them. And there was one of me.

“Brown?” said Dragon. “You okay?”

I looked at the twisted curves I’d squeezed into my chair’s

armrest.

Robots don’t break chairs when they get scared. Robots

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don’t get scared. What if the chair had been someone’s arm? I

shuddered, disgusted with myself.

“You should have told us—”

“I planned to, once you were stable, trained, and unified,”

Howell said.

“Whatever. Each token grants a specific ability, so all those

skills must be needed to stop the spacecraft.”

“Which is why I insisted you claim Jacques’s token,” said

Howell.

I glared up at Howell. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop the aliens from killing Earth,” she said,

her eyes uneasy.

“Why are you involved?”

“Because I’ve invested a lot in these tokens already. When

aliens invade, there’s surely money to be made. Rule of war.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said.

Howell looked at Dragon as if she hadn’t understood the

question.

“Maisie finds your motivation in this so shocking she thinks

you’re plying her with humor,” Dragon said.

Howell nodded slowly. “Would that be funny? I could try

that sometime, if it would be funny.”

“Howell is making an effort to increase her comic intel-

ligence,” Dragon explained to me.

I resisted pulling out what was left of my hair. “Tell me the

rest,” I said.

“We tested the tokens as best we could on Big Barda,” said

Howell. “Nothing happened when we handled them. Now we

believe that was because we were adults.”

Dragon settled into a professor tone. “At puberty, adoles-

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cent brains have a growth surge and gain as much gray matter

as adult brains, but they still lack some white matter. White

matter connects the different brain regions, and eventually,

myelin coats the white matter, making it more efficient. We

think it’s myelin that prevents nanites from entering and alter-

ing adult brains.”

I thought of those blue figures. “There’s no way the species

that made the tokens have our same brains.”

“Exactly!” said Howell. “But their anatomy must include

something akin to our central nervous system, to enable them

to move, communicate, build as they have. Perhaps their adults

can
bond with the tokens.”

“The tokens must have sensors to tell which hosts would

support the nanites,” I said. “But how do you know that it has to

do with the age of the brain?”

“Kira and Gabe,” said Dragon, and Howell rubbed her eyes

again.

“Crew members,” she said. “When Dragon and I took the

disc back to Earth, we left the tokens behind, fearing atmo-

spheric pressure might affect them. While we were at HAL—”

“Let me guess—Gabe and Kira are younger than the rest of

your crew?” I said.

Howell nodded. “Twenty-two and twenty-three, both bril-

liant for their age. When they touched the tokens, well, you

experienced firsthand what happened. Soon after, Gabe gained

strength and Kira technological clarity. But after a time they

became violently ill. I imagine the nanites discovered Gabe and

Kira’s brains were too old after all and were rejecting them as

hosts. The station commander put them in the emergency pod

and accompanied them back down the Beanstalk. We lost con-

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tact with the pod at reentry. It broke apart.”

I remembered reading news reports about the tragedy. Ob-

viously, there’d been no mention of tokens.

“We believe the tokens removed themselves from Gabe and

Kira,” said Dragon, “thereby stopping their hearts. Unbonded,

tokens cannot exist in higher levels of gravity. As the pod neared

Earth’s mesosphere and gravity increased, the tokens were re-

pelled. They slide through living flesh without a mark, but

metal—”

“The tokens ripped a hole in the elevator pod,” I said.

“We never would have located the tiny tokens adrift in space

if they hadn’t been suspended among the pod debris, orbiting

the Earth,” said Howell. “We compared Gabe’s and Kira’s stan-

dard prelaunch brain scans with the rest. Their frontal lobes

were not yet completely encased in myelin, so we concluded we

needed younger hosts.”

“Teenagers,” I said.

“I believe Gabe’s and Kira’s brains had been
too
developed,”

said Howell. “There wasn’t much myelin, so the nanites could

enter and alter the brain, but their synapses were fully formed,

their areas of expertise already developed, and other areas go-

ing dormant. Adolescent brains are playgrounds, still open to

programming. Habits are not yet locked in, personality is in flux,

knowledge and skill areas are open. Teenagers are the perfect

subjects.” Howell sighed. “If I could have my adolescent brain

again and start over, I could rebuild myself. I could pursue doz-

ens of different courses of study. I could be brilliant.”

“You are brilliant,” Dragon said