Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon

 

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For Liz Briggs, a tough critic and great friend

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgments

Copyright

 

CHAPTER ONE

For the fourth time in as many days, Chase Garrety was mad enough to spit nails.

His swift footsteps echoed off the walls of the metal corridor as he rushed through the soldiers' quarters of the starship
Kuyddestor
, muttering dire threats under his breath. How on Taras had this happened again, after everything he'd tried? Asking, begging, threatening—nothing seemed to work on her. He stopped short in front of one of the dozens of identical doors and stabbed at the entry key embedded in the wall. The door slid open almost soundlessly, and he stormed into his sister's bunkroom.

Lilli glared at him from her narrow bed, where she sat hunched with her back against the wall, knees drawn up toward her chin. The tiny chamber was not even two arm spans across, with a wide metal crossbeam on the ceiling that made it feel even smaller.

Chase stood shaking his head, almost speechless with anger. What could she possibly say that would make him understand her behavior? “And?”

She looked down at her wool bedcover and plucked an invisible piece of fuzz. In a barely audible voice, she mumbled, “It was a mistake.”

“A
mistake
?” The words came out in a shout. He glanced over his shoulder at the open hallway and hit the interior key to close the door. The last thing he needed was more people's attention.

This time it had happened in the cafeteria. One moment Lilli was sitting at a long table sandwiched between a group of younger children and a handful of soldiers, and the next she was gone. Vanished. Luckily for her, she was so quiet that most people didn't pay much attention to her, and their minds tended to invent a rational explanation when she disappeared—so far everyone just thought she was incredibly stealthy. Nobody knew the truth: that the girl who sat among them wasn't real, that she was just a projection, a “traveling copy” of Lilli's body sent from wherever she actually was.

Until she got bored and withdrew the projection. Just like she had from the observation deck the day before, and the medical bay the day before that, and the fourth-level hallway the day before that. Chase was never there when it happened, but somehow word always filtered back to him about his ninja sister.

“Why? Why do you keep doing this? Eventually someone's going to realize there's something weird going on. They'll figure out you're not normal.”

Lilli nipped at a cuticle and gave him a baleful look that made her seem much older than ten. “Nobody saw me go. I'm always careful.”

“Careful?” Chase rolled his eyes. “I don't want to hear ‘careful,' I want to hear ‘yes, you're right, I won't do it again.' If I can manage to open doors instead of walking through them, you should be able to walk around in one single body like a normal person instead of projecting a copy everywhere.”

She ran a hand through the choppy blond hair she insisted on cutting herself and didn't answer, casting her eyes at the floor with a shrug. Anger swelled up inside Chase. “You do realize we're supposed to be hiding here, right? Those people who killed our parents, who locked you up in a lab? They're still out there. All it takes is one slip-up, and they'll find us. Do you want that to happen?”

She exhaled sharply, a tiny indication of her own fierce temper. “What do you think?
I'm
the one who knows how bad it really was. I'm the one who
remembers
.”

Chase rubbed the spot between his eyebrows. Somehow she always managed to twist his words into her advantage when they fought. “Lilli—”

“Just leave me alone. Stop trying to be my parent. You're not responsible for me.”

But he was responsible for her, even if he was only three years older. He was the only family she had left. And as long as they were living aboard a Fleet starship, they needed to hide the special abilities that had been passed down to them from their parents, a pair of genetically enhanced soldiers created by the Fleet itself. “If you can't control yourself, I'm going to have to tell the captain what you're doing. You're putting him at risk too.”

She arched a pale eyebrow, but didn't comment on his formal name for the man who was once Uncle Lionel to them both. Before the attack that destroyed their family and erased Chase's entire memory of their shared childhood. She didn't say anything at all, but she didn't need to. They both knew there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.

The first time Lilli had seen him after the attack that, as far as she knew, had killed everyone in her family, she'd thought he was a clone of her dead brother and tried to stab him. At the time he hadn't even realized that the grief-crazed girl was his own sister. She was still as much a stranger to him now as she had been then. How could he make her see how reckless she was being? “It's dangerous for all of us when you travel. Just—please, promise me you won't do it anymore, okay?”

She gave him a flat little smile and, in a voice crackling with sarcasm, said, “Sure thing, big brother.”

And then she blinked out like a light.

Chase yelped in frustration and raised his hands, grabbing uselessly at the air. It was impossible to tell the difference between the real Lilli and her traveling copy—for all he knew, he hadn't seen the real her in weeks. And he had no idea where she was hiding on the ship when she disappeared like this. How had their parents dealt with this wild animal of a daughter? For a brief instant, he was furious with them for being gone, for leaving him alone with her. Then he felt like a jerk.

He whirled around to the door, perversely tempted to phase right through it to show that Lilli wasn't the only one who could break the rules. But he imagined someone walking down the hall who would see him emerging from the solid door like it wasn't even there. Why couldn't Lilli see those kinds of consequences?

He pressed the exit key, and the door slid open. A second later, two soldiers in gym gear jogged past. Chase gave a fierce nod, his point proven.

His own bunkroom was at the other end of the long hall. When he walked in, Parker was sitting at their shared desk, typing furiously with one hand and swiping his fingers over a touchscreen with the other. Without turning around, he asked, “How'd the disciplining go, boss?”

“She did it again, right in front of me!”

Parker paused and half-turned, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that?”

Chase gave him a dark look. “I need to figure out where she's hiding.”

“On a ship that houses over two thousand people?
Pfft
. Good luck.” He turned back to his computer.

Chase punched the door key closed and sank onto his bunk.

After the attack on his family, he'd awoken on the planet Trucon, rematerialized from the particle disperser attack that should have vaporized him for good but with no idea who he was, what had happened to him, or why he was able to phrase through solid objects. He was grateful that he'd managed to find the answers to these questions, even though he'd also learned his memory would probably never come back, and that his parents' friend Captain Lennard had given him, his sister, and their friend Parker shelter aboard his Fleet starship. But in the three months since they'd come to live on the
Kuyddestor
, Chase's life had become safe, steady, and endlessly frustrating. Nearly every interaction with the sister he'd fought so hard to save turned into a fight. He'd tried everything: random acts of kindness, asking questions, not asking questions, being attentive, giving her space. Nothing seemed to get through to her, and instead of grounding him, his relationship with her made him feel more adrift than ever.

Chase rose to his feet and walked to the window. Outside in black space, the glow of distant stars outlined a massive patchwork collection of metal structures, the Movala mining colony. For the past three months, the
Kuyddestor
had been protecting the colony from raider attacks—a mission the captain had taken on in order to get the ship far away from Fleet High Command until he could figure out which corrupt arm of the Fleet had carried out a massive attack on the planet Trucon, setting up one of the
Kuyddestor
's own officers to take the fall. The captain had told a very public lie to save his officer—a lie that showed he, too, knew about the Fleet's deception. Not one day went by when Chase didn't worry about retaliation from whomever it was they'd foiled.

Chase swiped his fingers across the window, which was not, in fact, a real window. Their room was located somewhere deep inside the belly of the starship, and the window was actually a video screen that displayed the view from the observation deck. With each swipe, the view changed quickly to recordings of a scenic forest, a mountain, a twinkling cityscape. One more flick of his fingers, and Chase found himself viewing the inside of the command bridge, where the ship's top officers were hard at work.

“You finally hacked into the bridge camera,” he said, only slightly surprised. Parker had already hacked into much more.

“Yeah. I can't get audio yet, but this isn't bad, right?” Parker glanced up at Chase, grinning at his accomplishment.

Chase nodded absently, his eyes locked on Captain Lennard, who strode across the bridge to lean over the shoulder of someone at console. It was the first time Chase had seen the captain in over a week.

Parker reached past him and flicked the screen back to the cityscape scene. “Don't leave it set to that view for very long. If somebody walks in, I don't want them to see what I've done.”

“Understood. That's really cool.”

“Yeah, well.” Parker turned back to his computer. “Unfortunately, the other project's not going as well.”

Chase glanced over at their shared desk, which was covered in bits of wiring and an assortment of tools. Parker touched an angled monitor resting amid the clutter and scanned over the day's accumulation of data.

“Nothing yet,” he said, stating what Chase already knew. Soon after they'd arrived on the ship, the chief medical officer on board, Dr. Bishallany, had removed a tracking chip from under Parker's scalp. The chip had been placed there by Parker's guardian, a mysterious weapons dealer named Asa Kaplan, who'd created an identical chip found under Chase's skin—although Chase still had no idea what Asa's connection to him or his family was. The captain wanted Parker's chip destroyed, but Parker had insisted he could disable its tracking function inside a one-way radio blocking enclosure, which would still allow him to hunt for its source by intercepting the chip's reply to his former guardian, the man who held the answers to many of both his and Chase's questions.