“I think you won,” I said to Charles.
He looked at me, raised a brow,
and seemed genuinely confused. Which was rare, so I let the pause drag on a moment to savor the feeling.
“You won. Everyone’s scared of you. No one’s going to bother you, and you can pretty much do whatever you want. They’ve even stopped messing with me because they think you’ll come after them if they do.”
“You don’t think I would?”
I smirked at him. “I suppose if it was a matter of life and death. But no, I think you’d stand back and watch me flail.”
He made a sound that might have been denial, or meant that he was agreeing with me.
“If people don’t mess with us,” he said finally, “it means we can focus on more important matters.”
“Like Stanton.”
And just then, Stanton arrived to sort us into our various shuttles for the trip to Tranquillity.
* * *
I didn’t get to sit in the cabin, mostly because the cabin was too small, but I did get the shuttle captain to leave the door open so I could watch from the front seat of the passenger compartment. The thing wasn’t that big. A nice cozy trip.
The shuttle copilot was also the field-trip guide, a Collins City staffer who did this for a living, flying shuttles and escorting herds of students. Stanton didn’t come with us—she was on a different shuttle.
I pointed this out to Ladhi, who passed it along to everyone else. We’d managed to keep our core group together, along with Angelyn, George, and a couple of others.
“Thank goodness,” Elzabeth said with a sigh. “She’s creepy.”
“Just keep your eyes open, like always,” Charles said.
The shuttle trip was expected to take an hour. The cabin was sparse, with thinly padded seats along both sides and small round view ports next to them, tubing and juncture boxes visible along the ceiling, and lots of warning signs about where emergency survival gear and first-aid kits were stored. And really big warning signs pointing to a lifeboat, a cramped automated lander accessible through a door in the back. In glaring red letters, the warnings didn’t inspire confidence. If something went wrong out here, there wasn’t a whole lot anybody could do about it. Even on Mars, if you were outside the colony structures, you could still theoretically survive for a while as long as you had a breathing mask because there was atmosphere, even if it was super thin. Here on the Moon, not so much. The stars glared as starkly as they did everywhere else, and the cratered surface below glowed silver, unreal almost. In another couple of hours, the Moon’s rotation would take us into night, where everything would turn dark. That was the Moon, everything black and white. Fortunately, the soft rumble of the engines sounded fine. We wouldn’t crash. Probably.
Most everyone was quiet, looking out their view ports and murmuring back and forth with each other. I leaned forward to look into the pilot’s cabin with its wider view port, showing the lunar landscape scrolling under us.
So I saw it first, when the copilot leaned over to the pilot and murmured, “Baz, I’m not feeling well.”
But Baz had already slumped back in his seat, eyes closed. The guide shook him once before slumping over herself with a deflating sigh. I spent the next few heartbeats in complete disbelief. Utter disbelief. There could be no greater disbelief. Both our pilots had just passed out.
Stanton poisoned our pilots. Just to see how good we were at getting out of this one.
“Charles!” I gasped, my voice squeaking. Then I unhooked my safety harness and clambered out of the seat and into the cabin.
Charles, Ethan, and a couple of the others crowded in behind me. I felt for the pulse at their necks, first the copilot and then the pilot. They both had pulses, both were still alive. I shook the pilot, yelling in his ear to wake up. He didn’t budge.
“They’re probably drugged,” Charles said calmly.
“Then who’s flying the shuttle?” Ethan asked. He hid his anxiety well, but not as well as Charles.
“Polly, help me get them out,” Charles said, reaching around me to unbuckle their harnesses.
It was tough, because only one of us could squeeze into the cabin at a time, in the narrow spaces between the seats and instrument panels. I was thinnest, so I leveraged each of them out of the seats while Charles and Ethan waited to pull them into the main cabin. At least they were super light in microgravity. The others found survival blankets in the emergency gear to try to make them comfortable.
Somehow, Charles and I ended up in the seats, staring out the wide view port and at an immense panel of blinking lights, scanners, readouts, and buttons. I was in the pilot’s chair. Where I’d always wanted to be. I was suddenly terrified.
The shuttle had an automatic-guidance system. It seemed to be working just fine. Everything looked normal. Nothing was flashing red, no alarms were blaring.
“Charles, what do we do?” I asked breathlessly.