Daniel Coldstar #2 Read online

  Nails pushed him away. “Do you mind?”

  “What’s going on?” demanded Daniel.

  “Time’s up,” said Nails.

  “The Tarafand invasion force is here?” Daniel quipped. He knew they were still days away.

  “Worse.”

  “Worse? How can it be worse?”

  “They’re looking for you.”

  “Who are looking for me?”

  “Ionica. Ben. They know you’re missing. They’re out combing the entire area, searching for you.”

  Daniel dismissed the news by shifting the image to one side so he could still see where he was going. “We knew that would happen.” He glanced down at Jasper. The anatom led the way, gesturing for him to follow. Not far now.

  “Disappearing in the middle of a rescue mission to go off on this little adventure was never a good idea,” Nails insisted.

  “What other chance was I going to get?” Daniel argued. It would have been easy to have listened to them back at the Seventh Summit and forgotten about this whole risky venture, but that wasn’t who Daniel was. If it had been, he never would have escaped the relic mines in the first place.

  “Well, guess what?” Daniel said. “I found it.”

  Surprise drifted across Nails’s face like a sun sliding out from behind a cloud. “Are you serious? It’s real?”

  “Yes, it’s real. It’s right where he said it would be—”

  “Who said it would be there?” An angry voice cut in.

  Everyone froze.

  Busted.

  Nobody knew what to say at first. How long had Ionica Lux been eavesdropping on this channel?

  Nails gulped. “I think she can hear us.”

  “You think?” said Daniel.

  “Hey, Nails,” Ionica said, changing her tone. “Did you get your nails done?”

  Completely disarmed, Nails ran a hand over his recent headicure. What used to look like shriveled, bumpy brown scales had transformed into smooth and thick nails through good nutrition and proper care. Now they were painted in iridescent colors, with a sleek pink stripe along one side, stretching from front to back.

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you like it?”

  “Like it? I love it!”

  “Thanks,” Nails replied bashfully.

  “I tell you what. If you don’t want me to pull your nails out one at a time, get off this channel.”

  Daniel rolled his eyes, but Nails took the intimidation seriously. He grimaced and ended the call.

  “Daniel Coldstar, where are you?” Ionica demanded.

  Daniel and Jasper had reached the doors to the bridge. After a little anatomic tinkering they flew open and the pair stepped into what had once been the functioning command center of the starliner.

  Above them, the upside-down seating and consoles were arranged on a ring-shaped deck with an enormous clear bubble of carbonic glass beyond that, which would have been the floor once upon a time. Daniel suspected the idea was to give the crew a clear view of the docking platforms whenever the ship arrived at its destinations on a cruise. Now the glass bubble served as a roof, covered in vines, nests, and animal droppings.

  “Are you going to answer me?” Ionica said.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters because war is about to explode across this entire planet! When the Tarafand arrive, nowhere will be safe. We’ll have to evacuate.”

  “I don’t understand why the Sinja don’t just fight their own battles,” Daniel replied. “They do have the Mythrian Army now.”

  “Have you seen any sign of that army, anywhere in the galaxy, in the past year?”

  “Nope.” He jabbed a finger at what appeared to be the ship’s databanks, a large array of computer equipment that sat around the rim of the room. “See what you can retrieve,” he whispered to Jasper.

  “I heard that!”

  Jasper shrugged and went to work, producing a screwdriver from a compartment at the end of his flipper.

  “You know how the Sinja operate, Daniel,” Ionica added. “Why fight a war when you can get two planets to destroy each other for you? That’s what they’ve been doing ever since they got their hands on the Book of Planets.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Daniel snapped angrily. “The whole galaxy is in chaos because of me. This planet is now at war with the Tarafand because of me.”

  It had been an elaborate scheme to be sure, but nobody could deny that the many star nations spread across the galaxy would not be in this position if it had not been for Daniel leading his supposed ally Hex, an anatom compromised by the Sinja, right to the Book of Planets in the Truth Seeker Vault.

  An ancient relic with incredible power, the Book of Planets revealed all, from the weather to the complete defenses of every planet in the galaxy. Since Hex had stolen it and delivered it to the Sinja, the galaxy had descended into turmoil. The Sinja had fomented war on countless worlds by supplying opposing alliances with information obtained from that very book. Mixing in truth with just enough lies and suspicion to create panic. Refugees streamed across the galaxy trying to escape the chaos that reigned supreme.

  “Daniel,” Ionica replied quietly, “that’s not what I meant.”

  Daniel didn’t want to hear it. “Look,” he said. “I won’t be much longer, and I’ll be back to help.”

  “Why should I believe you?” she insisted.

  “Because I said so!”

  A loud slammmm!

  Daniel froze. Jasper stopped what he was doing and looked up.

  Something had just landed on the dome and was tearing at the hull to get inside. To get to them.

  “Just trust me,” Daniel whispered. “But now I have to go.”

  3

  SHOWDOWN

  The deafening sound of ruptured metal filled the destroyed command center.

  Carbonic glass looked like ordinary glass, but it acted like metal and did not shatter. Instead, a slice of the dome peeled back like the skin on fruit, raining dirt and debris down into the room.

  A moment later, Daniel heard the visitor land on the underside of the command ring with a thud. The visitor paced back and forth, searching.

  Daniel bided his time. Waited for his moment. When the visitor jumped down right behind him—Daniel did not flinch.

  The visitor reached out. Grabbed him. Turned him around. Only to have Daniel smile and evaporate in a cloud of holocule dust. The programmable matter-energy molecules, more solid and real than a hologram, served as the perfect decoy.

  Confused, the visitor whirled around, only to find herself thrust into the light as the real Daniel emerged from the shadows and pinned her to a buckled support column.

  “Ionica?”

  Ionica Lux seemed different somehow. In the shadows, her pale skin virtually glowed, while her long dark hair, tied in a ponytail and secured with Hemma beads, seemed to melt into the darkness.

  She blinked at him. “Sinja tactics. Really?”

  “What? No! Just tactics,” Daniel protested. “How did you find me?”

  “I’m surprised the whole galaxy didn’t find you,” she said. Then she too burst into a cloud of holocule dust.

  Another perfect decoy.

  “Hey, not fair!” He spun around in frustration. Where was she? How did she find him—? Wait a second. He snapped his fingers. “You followed Alice’s trail through the jungle? Am I right?”

  “No,” Ionica called back. “Though if you’d just learn to skyride there wouldn’t be a trail through the jungle to follow. You could have jumped here.”

  Daniel zeroed in on her voice. She was still outside. “Sure,” he said. “And jump in blind? You know they call this place the Death Jungles for a reason.”

  He stepped out from under the dusty command ring to see Ionica standing in the sunlight on the edge of the hole she’d created, hands on her hips. Her uniform gleamed in the light.

  Daniel rolled his eyes. “Can’t you ever just use a door? Seriously, how did you find
me?”

  “The same way anyone can find you. That signal from your Identifier is readable from a hundred miles away.”

  Daniel exhaled slowly. His Identifier. Most days he tried not to think about the blasted thing, but it loomed over his life like a bad smell. In the relic mines, the Sinja had implanted a socket into each grub’s head to control them. Identifiers were tiny chips inserted into a socket’s control circuits that told an Overseer who they were dealing with so they didn’t have to think. With thousands of grubs to deal with, Overseers hated having to think.

  “We’ve gone over this a million times,” said Ionica. “Quit wandering off on your own. Remember that headhunter back on Safatee? You’re a walking target. The Sinja want you dead. If I can find you, they can.”

  “I can defend myself,” Daniel said. “Besides, that chip’ll be gone soon. Astrid’s got it all figured out.” He turned his back on her to help Jasper remove the panels from the databanks.

  Ionica had clearly never heard such garbage. “No she doesn’t.”

  Daniel ignored her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Removing the data panel. What does it look like I’m doing?”

  Ionica grimaced. “You’ll never get it open if you do it like that.”

  Daniel gritted his teeth, twisting the release pins around and around. “I’ve got this. They’re coming loose.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “They are! I can feel it.”

  “You have to push them in. Use your thumbs.”

  “I know what I’m doing!”

  Out of patience, Ionica jumped down into the room for real this time and elbowed Daniel out of the way. She pressed the release pins with her thumbs. The panel fell away.

  “You’re annoying,” said Daniel.

  Jasper gave an approving hum.

  “So, is the ship named after you,” she asked, “or are you named after the ship?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Daniel replied.

  “Well, whatever the answer, we have to go. The Tarafand are here—”

  “Wait a minute, what do you mean, they’re here? They can’t be here. Guardian Alioth said they were days away.”

  “This is a war zone. Things change. Now we have our orders to collect the refugees and get out of here. We can’t get caught in the middle of this. Come on.”

  “I can’t leave,” Daniel insisted. “Not until I get what I came here for.” Reaching around inside the databank, he fumbled until he found a release mechanism and carefully slid a data core out of its housing. The cube-shaped object, a solid crystal wrapped in a latticed metal jacket, weighed far more than its appearance would suggest.

  He dropped the cube into his backpack and moved on to the next computer bank.

  “Daniel,” Ionica insisted. “You’re a Truth Seeker. You have a responsibility to the people trying to flee Oota Mheen.”

  “Then maybe I shouldn’t be a Truth Seeker anymore,” Daniel snapped, poking around for more cores.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Daniel ignored the question. “Just let me finish up and we can get out of here.” He eased another data core out of its housing. “You okay over there, Jasper?”

  The anatomic penguin hummed cheerfully as it dragged two data cores over to Daniel’s backpack and deposited them inside—

  Chirp, chirp . . . Chirp, chirp . . .

  The communications bleep came from Ionica’s utility belt.

  Daniel gave her an uneasy look. “The Equinox?”

  She nodded, opening the channel to the mighty splintership.

  Daniel couldn’t see Ionica’s holographic screen from his angle, and she had the comms audio fed directly into her ear, but he got the gist when he heard her say: “I found him. He’s okay. Little Daniel got lost.”

  When she ended the conversation, Daniel said, “Hey, I’m not lost! I know exactly where I am.”

  “Please. I was just protecting you.”

  “I don’t need you to protect me.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. “You’re not going to do it. Now, are you done?”

  Daniel nodded, slinging the heavy pack over his back. “How much time do we have?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Ionica said. “Or they leave without us.” She glanced around at what was left of the ship. “How did you even find this place?” she asked.

  But Daniel did not have a chance to reply. All around them, the shadows were moving.

  In the blink of an eye, the two Truth Seekers ignited their Aegis shields, defensively standing back-to-back, bracing themselves for what was to come.

  But neither of them was prepared for what emerged.

  4

  THE HIDDEN

  A small figure edged nervously toward them; it was a child, frail and hungry.

  He was perhaps five or six years old. His shaved head and torn clothes were filthy. In a voice as quiet as the night, he asked, “Did Ammee send you?”

  Daniel and Ionica eyed each other and lowered their shields. What was this kid doing here?

  “Who might you be?” Ionica asked gently, kneeling down, trying to put the boy at ease.

  He retreated a step, unsure how he was supposed to react.

  “Who is Ammee?” Daniel asked. This kid looked too familiar. Too much like everyone he remembered back in the mines. Too much like his failure to rescue them and the nightmares that had come since that failure.

  “Ammee,” the boy replied. “Ammee and Baba.” Maybe they were local words, some Oota Mheen slang, or maybe they were just words the boy had made up. Either way, the sheer longing in his eyes told them everything they needed to know.

  “Mommy and Daddy?” Ionica asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “I’m Ionica,” she said. “This is Daniel. What’s your name?”

  The boy glanced back toward the other shadows, uncertain of whether he needed their permission.

  “Are they your friends? They can come out now. It’s okay.”

  The boy shook his head. The shadows stayed where they were.

  “Where did your ammee go?” Ionica asked gently.

  “To the war,” he said simply.

  “How long have you been here?”

  The boy shrugged. “Ammee said it would be safe. She said no one would look for us here.”

  “Safe?” Daniel replied, perplexed. “This place?” There couldn’t be a more dangerous place on this entire planet. “How long have you been here?”

  The boy shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

  “Tillowil!” a small voice cried from the shadows. A girl’s voice. “Tillowil, I’m hungry.”

  Annoyed, the boy turned to the shadows, raising a finger to his lips. “Shh! Kember!”

  Ionica rose to her feet, peering into the darkness with him. “We have food,” she said quickly. “Here.” She reached into her utility belt and pulled out an emergency ration. “It’s not much, but you can have it.”

  Daniel followed her lead, pulling out a handful of the tiny energy-packed bars. “Take mine too,” he said. “You’d be doing me a favor, actually.”

  Tillowil’s eyes lit up as though he’d just discovered the greatest treasure in all the galaxy.

  “We can get more. If you come with us, I’m sure we can feed all of you,” Ionica insisted.

  “How many of you are there?” asked Daniel, tossing an emergency ration into the dark. He heard the scuffle of feet as the other children fought over the food. He guessed maybe ten or fifteen.

  He guessed wrong.

  Slowly, very slowly, the children of the shadows shuffled into the light, revealing face after starving face. Their eyes sunken, their cheeks stretched thin. Each child wore a mask of horror.

  There were perhaps as many as a hundred. And all it took to gain their trust was the promise of food.

  Something wasn’t right here. Daniel felt it in the pit of his stomach. He’d played this game before with the Overse
ers and the Sinja. Anything could have crept into the wreck of the Coldstar and attacked these kids. Why hadn’t it? Because this was how they broke them. Their child soldiers. They took them. They abandoned them. Left them in danger.

  And then with the promise of help—they “saved” them.

  “We have to get them out of here,” Daniel said.

  “All of them?” Ionica scoffed, still reeling from the sheer numbers of children who were crowding around.

  “We’re not leaving them,” Daniel insisted.

  “Of course not! But how do we get them through the jungle alive?”

  “We’ll figure it out!”

  They would have to figure it out quickly.

  The Coldstar shuddered and groaned, and the air filled with the rage of engines as warships streaked across the skies above them.

  5

  DARK SKIES

  “Ben, we need a miracle,” Daniel said.

  “This whole bloody planet needs a miracle,” Ben Quick replied, on edge. The two boys could see for a hundred miles across the treetops. Crouched on the edge of the ruptured dome, they watched as a deafening swarm of Tarafand forces flew low over the jungle—fighters, bombers, troop landers—all headed for their target over the horizon: Loronoh, the capital city.

  Ben shimmered briefly, losing form, before fusing back together. Another holocule projection, but with good reason. Seeing through the eyes of a holocule avatar was as good as Ben actually being there, and made it easier for him to get an idea of Daniel’s situation. Physically, Ben was still aboard the Equinox.

  He reminded Daniel of Blink a little, with those same Burn World eyes with no pupils. Though his personality was completely different; cocky, sometimes overconfident. His hair was always scruffy, his boots never fastened properly.

  A look of panic washed over him. “The first wave has arrived—” Ben ducked to the sound of an explosion Daniel couldn’t see. “Crikey, that was close!”

  Daniel winced. “Stay safe, will you?”

  “That’s rich, coming from you. Didn’t you just ask me to fly a cargo pod through an invasion force to come pick you up?”

  Actually it was worse than that. These transports didn’t have any weapons or defensive capabilities of any kind. Though Daniel wasn’t about to remind his old roommate of that.