The space-shuttle carrier was comprised of two levels. On the top level at the front was the cock-pit which housed the computer navigator and the droid hostess after she'd tidied away the drinks trolley. The rest of the upper level was a bar lounge. Camel back sofas surrounded low drinks tables, lit by Tiffany table lamps. A window curved all around the carrier, offering a breathtaking view of the stars. The staircase to the deck below and the cabins stood in the middle of the lounge.
Will's box lay across the back aisle. Day sat where she could monitor it, though she couldn't actually see Will. She sipped her water, noting how Amber draped herself across Ferdinando.
Her sister got up from the table she, Ed, and Ferdinando occupied, and dangling a cocktail glass in her slim hand, slunk through the lounge.
"Geeze, you're so serious, Sis. Reminds me of when you were little. When you didn't get what you wanted, you would stop talking." She laughed and sipped her fruit cocktail through a pink, paper straw. "You drove Mom crazy with the silent treatment."
"Why do you want Will?"
Amber's gaze flicked towards Ed as though finally understanding something. She put down her glass and squashed in beside Day. "Listen, whatever you think you know, whatever Will told you, you've got it all backwards."
Day moved up the sofa, putting distance between them. "So you're not going to explain?" A memory of when she was seven or eight years old raced through her mind. Amber was deciding whether to lend her a star necklace that she desperately wanted to wear to a Princess party. She had taken her time, prolonging Day's anxiety, enjoying the control she had over Day's emotions.
"Ed is your boyfriend, you idiot. Forget Will."
"Ed and Dayna?"
"What do you think? That's why he was the one on the mission with you."
No, in her gut she didn't feel it. That couldn't be the truth. "Tell me what you want with Will."
Amber sighed. "I could explain, but what's the point? The truth is sitting below your personality implant. You could find it for yourself right now if you wanted to. But you don't want to. Another forty-eight hours and we'll be on Mars, the implant will be removed, and you'll be you again."
She stood, swept up her drink and sashayed back to Ferdinando.
Forty-eight hours until they reached Mars... Day wished she could spend the next two days in her sleeping quarters, locked away from Ed and Amber. But she didn't want to leave Will alone in the box. What if they got rid of him, threw the box out of the airlock?
She closed her eyes and pressed a palm to her forehead. A loud pop of gunfire filled her head. Blood and bits of flesh dripped across the inner screen of her mind.
Swallowing hard, she opened her eyes and studied her surroundings to orientate herself. She breathed deeply to calm her racing heart. Ed's gaze locked on her. She stared back. Suddenly, he bolted from his seat, stalked through the lounge, and disappeared into the cockpit.
Ferdinando wandered over to Day's table.
"May I?"
Her blank face wasn't an invitation, but Ferdinando carried on as though he hadn't noticed. His swarthy features and lilting accent placed his origins in southwest Europe, perhaps Italy or Spain.
The ice in his glass tinkled as he raised it to his lips. "Humankind settled on the moon over a century ago. But Mars—we never colonized Mars. Have you ever wondered why?"
"No. But who knows, maybe I have and you wiped it from my memory."
"Several decades ago, the Unified Northern Territories sent a mission to Mars to explore colonization. They discovered something strange, an energetic flux with similar properties to a microcosmic black hole.
They built a scientific base to explore and test the phenomenon. But as experiments and tests on the energy intensified, they observed a correlation between the stability of earth and moon's weather systems and the growing energy field. Twenty years ago, the scientific base was closed down. But it was too late. The Earth's southern hemisphere was already under great upheaval. There was no way they could reverse the process. All they could do was protect the energy porthole from ever being used again."
"And what does that have to do with you and Will Van de Berg?"
Ferdinando's wrist watch beeped. "Excuse me." He answered his communication link. Day couldn't hear the voice coming through his ear implant, but she could see the tiny holo image projecting up from his watch—a police droid.
"I see," Ferdinando said. "We give you permission to come aboard and make your search."
Ed burst through the cockpit door. "Police patrol are here," he said. "They've traced us from the convict shuttle. They've cast hooks."
"Let them come aboard," Ferdinando answered.
"Dom, Ceasar," Ed said to the men who had searched for Day on the convict shuttle, "come and help me move Mr. Van de Berg."
The men got up. Ed's bodyguard, who also guarded Ferdinando and Amber, stood to attention by the shuttle exit.
Ferdinando smiled. "Everybody remain calm."
Day watched Ed retrieve an enormous chain. Despite its size, the chain was obviously made of a light metal. The man called Ceasar attached the end of the chain to the top of Ed's box with a giant carabiner clip. Ed pressed a button. The box's air vents closed, releasing gas into the chamber. Dom opened a door at the rear of the shuttle. Behind it was a small compression compartment. The three men lifted Will inside.
"Better hurry that up," Amber called from the other end of the lounge. Day edged towards them. What were they doing?
Dom attached the other end of the chain to a clip at the far end of the compression compartment.
"Wrap it up boys," Amber called.
Ed, Dom and Caesar hurried back into the shuttle lounge.
"Wait!" Day caught Ed's arm as the compression compartment swished closed. "Wait, why is he out there?"
"And they're in," Amber announced.
The door at the front of the shuttle slid sideways. Behind Day, the compression door of the ship opened. The metal box with Will in it flew out into space, dangling by its chain. Day's breath flew out into the vacuum with it.
"Turn around," Ed said, squeezing the top of her arm.
The carabiner holding Will's box at one end and fastened to a cleat in the compression wall at the other, vibrated.
"Ed, it's not holding." At that moment, as though confirming her worst fears, the cleat broke off from the wall. She gasped, but the cleat didn't get sucked outward, it was part of a crawler droid, which now slowly crawled out of the ship. As soon as it had passed through the pressure door, the door closed.
Which meant Will was in a metal box, attached to the space shuttle by a chain, which was attached to a droid now crawling around outside.
"The box is made from Kevlar," Ed said, closing his fist around her arm and dragging her to the nearest seat. "The chain is an aluminum alloy. We closed the air vents. He'll be fine. For a few minutes."
"You're insane."
"I'm not the one who shot my lawyer. Now sit down." Ed pushed her into a sofa. Ferdinando was greeting the officers at the front of the lounge, asking what they were searching for. Ed set a countdown on his watch. Seven minutes. Was that how much time Will had until he ran out of air?
Ferdinando held up his wrist, and an officer scanned his ID. The second officer worked his way through the lounge, holding up a heat detector that resembled a metal pencil. Holes in the metal flashed green as he went through the lounge.
"It's a heat detector," Ed said. "It's why Will-boy had to go outside. Couldn't hide him in the walls."
"What about me?" The officer who'd scanned Ferdinando was now scanning Amber's wrist monitor.
Ed gave her a sideways look that she couldn't fathom. "Why haven't you got rid of the personality leach, yet?" There was accusation in his voice. He thought Day was resisting. That she didn't want to become Monday—Dayna again.
Amber's tingling laugh caught Day's attention. Her sister was trying to stall the officer, but the policeman was definitely a droid because it didn't hesitate in its duties.
Day's hands locked at her sides as the officer strode towards her and Ed. Her body stiffened. They'd put Will out, but what about her? If the officer had a face recognition program, and if her picture was flagged, she had about three seconds before he identified her. What would happen then? Would the droids try to arrest her? Would more droids show up and arrest all of them?
This time they would put her in a maximum security ship where the possibility of escape was zero. Not to mention Will, who would be dead of asphyxiation in—she glanced at Ed's watch—three minutes, twenty-three seconds, and counting.
Dom and Caesar stood up and moved in front of the officer, offering their wrist monitors for scanning.
"Why are they stalling for time?"
"Once we picked you up," Ed said, "Ferdinando began the erasure of Monday Hollis and launched your true identity back into the northern hemisphere's registration system."
"But?"
"The system is a network. It takes time for the program to hack all the nodes."
The police officer with the heat scanner asked for Ed to open the compression chamber. Ed complied and the droid went inside. The first droid finished with Dom and Caesar and crossed to Day's table. She stood, legs shaking.
Unless you were watching closely, you wouldn't have noticed him scan her face as he approached. Unless you were paying attention to the minutest alterations in the droid's voice, you wouldn't have known he'd received an initial confirmation of identity as he asked for her wrist monitor.
She held up the monitor the authorities had fixed before putting her into suspension. She imagined the droid checking her, while simultaneously calling for backup. That's what caused the voice alteration. The program's attention was being split between two tasks.
She didn't think twice. She didn't think at all. As she raised her wrist scanner, her other arm thrust upwards, palm first striking the officer's jugular. Obviously she couldn't stop him breathing. But there was a chip lodged behind the vocal cords. A chip necessary to the brain function and if she dislodged it, she could disconnect the droid from the global network.
Ed saw the attack and entered the comprehension chamber. At the moment the second officer realized something was wrong, Ed shot him in the forehead, putting him out of action.
The first officer grabbed Day's wrist. A burning ring scorched her skin. She twisted, smashed a cocktail glass against the table and shoved the broken end into the droid's eyes. He released her, but the pain on her wrist didn't let up. She glanced down and saw a metal band smoldering as it fixed into her skin.
The officer's eye bled a greenish-pink puss—it was the fluid that covered its circuitry and helped sustain the organic flesh envelope. He reached for his belt. Driven by pain, Day swiveled backwards, ran and leapt at him. She grabbed his head between the crook of her right arm and twisted as hard as she could. There was a loud crack. The cord between backbone and brain disconnected. The officer's head lolled to one side, and he fell to his knees as all the energy drained from his wire neural network.
"Was that really necessary?" Amber asked.
Day pulled at the metal band around her wrist. It had meshed to her skin. Not only did it burn, but tiny electric spikes were now pushing into her wrist, electric worms burrowing under the surface. When they reached her blood, hundreds of them would circulate through her body, impossible to extract.
She ran across to the table, and plunged her hand into an ice bucket. The throbbing brought tears to her eyes, but the cold gave relief.
Thinking of cold...
Her gaze darted back to the compression compartment where Ed kneeled beside the droid he'd shot, his wrist monitor connected up to the droid's internal circuitry.
Carrying the ice bucket with one hand plunged inside, she staggered to Ed.
"Get Will in!" she shouted. She dropped down beside him and grabbed his watch. Forty-one seconds left of oxygen.
"Get him in!" she screamed.
Ed looked past Day at Ferdinando, who nodded. Then he entered a program on his wristwatch. Day pressed her face against the window to the compression chamber. Nothing. Nothing was happening.
But then she saw the crawler droid's suction legs coming around the side of the external door.
It moved so slowly. Couldn't they get it to move any faster?
When it finally sunk back into its original position, molded into the wall, another humanoid-looking droid emerged from the wall, assembled from the lightweight plates. It was a space droid, designed to resist massive temperature changes and atmospheric variations. It pulled in the chain.
"Can't it go faster?" she asked.
Ed's jaw clenched. She grabbed his arm and checked the time. Minus twenty-six seconds. A person could survive approximately two minutes without air. Will was fit, and maybe he was meditating to slow down his heartbeat.
Ed shoved her off and returned to the lounge where everyone was watching them. At the stairs he stopped, glared and Ferdinando, then vanished to the lower deck.
The chain curled up on the compression floor and finally Will's box came into view. Day counted the seconds, but kept losing count as the pain in her wrist blurred her thoughts.
Finally, Will's box was inside, and the external door closed. The air vents released. Oxygen filled the room. The metal box sank to the ground.
"Open the door!" she shouted. But the door to the chamber was already opening. She ran in and fumbled to release the air vents at the bottom of the box. She'd lost all use of her right arm with the ring the office had burned into it. She fumbled, panicking.
"Move aside." Dom crouched down next to her, and a moment later the small ridges at the bottom edge of the box reappeared.
Day rubbed ice off the letter-box peek hole and peered through. Will lay motionless, eyes closed, face blank.
"Open it."
Dom looked to Ferdinando and Amber for approval. Ferdinando touched something on his wristwatch. There was a great hissing sound, followed by a pop. The lid came off and automatically slid to the side.
Day reached in and pressed fingers to Will's neck. His pulse throbbed, strong and steady. All the strain winding tight in her, holding her together, released. She sunk to the floor and moaned, the burning in her arm swallowing her up.
Hi guys!! Hope you like the chapter. Don't forget to vote or comment if you can. Your feedback motivates me to work faster! Thanks, C.