Stolen Flyght – Chapter 20

No. I very much do not want to go see for myself.

Even through the fortified control room, we can feel the energy pouring from the portal. The place hums, and my hair stands on end. The jump gate sparks and hisses like an electrified, angry cat. No, thank you. I do not want to go anywhere near it.

But I don’t have much of a choice, once again.

Now that everyone knows what we’re going to investigate, Skylar, Carlos, and Gloria scramble to get hazmat suits of their own. They want to run in there and see what this thing is.

I have surrounded myself with a bunch of crazy lunatics.

“No offense, mates, but I’m hanging back on this one.” Eamon raises his hands in the air. It’s scary that I identify with Eamon of all people.

“I’ll stay behind with him,” Lia says. She crosses her arms over her chest, her eyes locked on the glowing and sparking gate.

I keep my eyes on the room below as I zip up my suit. The gate is not the only thing in the chamber. A holding area for equipment is in front of the gate. A table loaded with goods is taped off, down and to the right. A door to the left is marked ‘Supplies.’ The rest of the place is empty except for Nina’s super-soldiers who have advanced ahead of us.

Nina tries to brush past me, but I grab her arm. “What’s up with them?” I jerk my chin at the super-soldiers.

Wait.

I hold her arm tighter as I look at the men, then at her.

“Whoa. Why didn’t I see it before? They’re… Japanese? Like…” I want to say ‘pure blood,’ but that feels wrong. No one cares about that anymore. We’re all a blend of so many diverse Earth backgrounds. But these guys?

Nina pulls her arm from my grip. “You should see what we have down there.” She points to the table. “You speak Japanese, right?”

I nod, my eyes locked on the table. I can’t see what anything is from this distance.

“Do you read it too? In the original written form?”

“Yeah. My mom insisted.”

The door to the room opens, and everyone takes a step back. Lia and Skylar cover their ears with their hands. Eamon winces. All the hair on my body stands straight up, and the high-pitched whine gives me an instant headache. Everything vibrates from my eyes to my teeth to my toes.

If my anxiety was bearable before, it’s through the roof now. Nothing good can come of this mission. I can feel it before I even enter the room. This whole situation went from not-so-bad to fucking-insane.

We advance through the door and down the stairs to the stone floor, coming closer to the gate with every step. The whine in my ears intensifies, and my back and scalp prickle. Dread covers me like a heavy blanket. This is so not right.

Stopping at a yellow caution line in front of the gate, I hold my breath as I take it in. It’s one thing to traverse these machines in a ship, and it’s another to feel the power of it washing over my skin.

The power of it.

“Hey,” I say, lifting my voice over the drone, “how much power do you need to run this thing?”

Nina flattens her lips. “A lot. We have a nuclear power facility right under us.” She glances down at her feet, so I do too. “It’s, um… It’s not safe to be here for an extended period of time.” She moves to walk away from the gate to the table, but I step in her path.

“Why is it on? Can’t you turn it off when you don’t need it?” That’s how the other gates are run. The transit authority shuts them down periodically to conserve power and keep the machines serviced. This is why everyone has appointments and time slots for travel between systems. Otherwise, there would be no downtime and no way to keep things running smoothly.

“It’s complicated,” Nina shouts over the din. “There is no receiving gate. We figured out how to bore through” — she waves her hand in the air — “space-time and target remote systems. We keep it on until we’re done exploring a world, and then we move onto another one.” She points at the liquid-blue field. “There are teams there right now. If this shuts down before they return, that’s it. They’re stuck there. We’ve never been to the same spot twice.” She stops and thinks for a moment, her eyes turned upward. “But Karen said this is our second time on this particular world, so maybe things have changed in the last few days.”

I wrap my arms around my body as I look at the shimmering gate. This kind of technology has never happened before. We’ve always connected planets and systems with a series of outbound and return gates. It’s why we took so long to connect the Brazilianos and Californikos Systems in the first place. Only the big jump ships could make the trips in the beginning.

What does this mean for our return to Earth? The recent news is that the gate network to reach back there is only half-built. Will this bring us there quicker? Do I want the military to have this much power?

No.

“Come see this.” Nina gestures me over to her. It’s hard to tear myself away from the gate. The pull to walk into it and be whisked away from all my problems is strong.

Before I go to Nina at her table of artifacts, I get my bearings. Jinzo and Carlos are poking around in an open panel next to the jump ring. Jinzo’s lips are moving, so I assume he’s talking stuff over with Carlos. Skylar and Gloria are in the supplies room. Nina’s men stand guard.

I keep my eyes on them as I cross to Nina. On the table, she has peculiar-looking datapads in a style I’ve never seen before, bags with Japanese writing on them, a device that looks like a long stick with footholds, and plenty of other Japanese items like tiny Buddhas, temple charms, and kimonos. But what stands out to me are the items of clothing with emblems on them — a white wave, a yellow mountain, a blue horse, a red fish. They seem so strange yet familiar.

“These items came from a world called Hikari.” She looks at me, hoping for me to recognize something, anything on the table. I rest my gloved hands on each item, reading what’s written there but not understanding what any of it means.

“Hikari means ‘light’ in Japanese.” I pick up a datapad to power it on, but the display remains off.

“Yes, yes, we know.” Sarcasm does not look pretty on this woman.

“Do you know what ‘bakana’ means?” I ask, tipping my head to the side.

“I don’t think I want to know.”

I sigh. “So, where is Hikari? Why are there Japanese people there?”

“It’s three hundred and seventy light-years away.”

Shit. That’s far. Farther than any of our ships can jump. It would take them a long time to get there.

“And there are Japanese people there because they colonized that system, just like we colonized this one.”

“Other ships made it off Earth and colonized other systems?” I hold my breath and wait for the answer. This is news! We always suspected separate ships left Earth during the Exodus, besides the ones that came here, but the information is slim. It’s all conjecture.

“Yes! Can you believe it?”

She gazes down at everything on the table while I try to process what I’m seeing. Everything here is from an alien world, far, far away. But it’s an alien world inhabited by Earth-origin humans, people I share a common heritage with. The bag with the Japanese writing on it calls to me. I pick it up and examine all the little details. A museum in a city called Shin-Osaka was displaying works by local artists using some kind of, maybe, projection technology.

I turn to look at the gate again. I could walk through that gate and fit in with the people of this world, and that takes my breath away.

I set the bag down and close my eyes before I resign myself to letting it all go. I may be related to these people, but they’re so distant, I can’t even fathom what they must be like.

“This could be what we need to reunite us all,” Nina says, her voice light and breathless. “And if we search hard enough, we may even find the origin of the Rio plants.”

“They didn’t originate on Rio?” This is the first I’m hearing of it.

She shrugs. “That’s the leading theory right now. Otherwise, how do they match so well with some humans? We think…” She looks at the gate and licks her bottom lip. “That this technology can, not only, travel through space but also time.”

I shake off a shiver. This is a lot more than I bargained for today.

I stare at the gate, too. This is technology Athens Industries wants. It’s what they sent me here for. How in the hell am I going to tell Renata about this?

A blur jumps from the corner of my eyes, and one of Nina’s super-soldiers runs into my field of vision and launches himself into the shimmering surface of the gate.

“No!” Nina calls out, holding up her hands. “Stand down!”

“What the…” I back away as another body, and another, flies past me and enters the gate.

Nina’s eyes are wide, her mouth slack. She runs and throws herself in front of the last two remaining soldiers. “Don’t,” she commands, her hands on his chest.

I run up next to her. What does she think she can do against this guy?

His eyes are locked on her, not blinking, not wavering.

“You will not steal from us any longer.”

“We… We didn’t steal from you. We liberated you.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen any of these guys smile. “Liberated us? By overriding our command functions?”

“They did?” Nina is at a loss for words. “You just needed a little push in the right direction.”

“You hacked us. Now, we cracked our own code, and we’re going home.”

“But… They didn’t treat you any better there. Here, you can start over.”

“Not as your slaves.” He pushes her aside, straight into me, and we both tumble to the floor.

Ow! My knee smarts as it twists to the side, and Nina lands on top of me. I hear pounding footsteps in time to glance up and watch the last two men sail into the portal.

The portal wavers, screams at a high-pitched frequency, and shuts off. My ears ring from the lack of noise, and my heartbeat echoes in my head.

“Shit.” I thrust Nina off of me. “Didn’t you say there were people on the other side?” My voice rises to a screech.

“What did you do?” Nina’s voice lowers to a commanding tone as she gets to her feet and crosses the floor to Jinzo and Carlos.

Carlos throws his hands up in the air. “I didn’t touch anything.”

Jinzo shakes his head. “We didn’t do it.”

We all turn to the silent gate. Seeing it disconnected and dead sends a chill through me.

“Did you…” I catch my breath. “Did you steal them from their homeworld?”

When Nina stays quiet, I hobble after her. Fucking knee.

“Answer me! You want our help? Fucking be honest for once!” My throat rasps over my demands.

This is it. This is my breaking point. I am so done with the lies and the deceit.

Nina stares me down.

The rage I’ve held back since we walked in this room explodes from my chest.

“I will fucking leave you here to die, and I won’t even be sad about it. So, tell me now, or so help me God, you will regret not being more forthcoming.”

“Yes!” She throws her arms up in the air. “They make the most advanced androids we’ve ever seen on those worlds. Just beyond…” She shakes her head. “They were so real, we thought they were humans. So we brought them home with us. Changed them. Freed them.”

“Stole them.” The military not only steals from me, but they steal from everyone.

Breath heats in my chest as I look over the table of artifacts from this world, Hikari. These were all stolen too.

“You’re stealing from everyone!”

“Not me,” Nina says, bringing her hands to her chest.

“After what I just saw and heard? Bullshit.”

“This… This has all gone too far.” She deflates. “This is one reason I’m ready to leave.”

“Don’t bullshit me.” I point right at her. “I saw your face when we walked into that control room. This shit excites you. You happily bossed around those men” — I correct myself — “those androids. You barely batted an eye when you took the Amagi right out from under me, under Skylar.”

I wave to Skylar, standing in the door to the supplies room.

“Your manipulative actions have left us in ruin.”

It’s us against her now. She has no one left to back her up.

I push past her and stalk over to Skylar. Skylar puts her hands on my chest, stopping me from entering the supplies room.

“Viv, they stole from at least three other planets, other systems. Maybe four.”

I slide past her into the room and stand next to Gloria. She picks up an item, looks at it, and sets it down carefully. The military labeled the shelves with numbers and Earth-origin country designations. I focus on the shelf that reads ‘Eastern North America.’ That had been the second ship to leave Earth after the Russian Federation! The news stories from the Earth archives wondered what had happened to the colonists. The ship’s communications had failed after only five years.

They must have made it to their destination.

I take a step forward to look at the items closer, but Skylar pulls on my arm and shakes her head.

“Don’t, Viv. It’s like looking at a graveyard. It’ll just make you even more angry.”

“It’s incredible,” Gloria whispers, setting a child’s doll back on the shelf. She sighs. “Yeah, this makes me sad and angry.” She turns to me. “Renata Dellis will want to know about this, but even she would never go this far. This is what we always dreamed of, reuniting the human race, but at what cost?”

She’s right. I don’t want her to be correct, but she is. The cost is too high.

Pushing myself to walk away from the room, the table of stolen items from Hikari shines like a beacon. I ignore Nina, grab the colorful emblems and a datapad from the table, and step back, raising my voice to the entire room.

“This is it. We’re done here. We can’t let this go on.”

Jinzo nods to me, and everyone but Nina seems in agreement.

“Burn it all to the fucking ground.”