“They fried the nanoprojectors,” Benny said.
Drue let his helmet hit the wall. “I hate these guys.”
The door to the research lab slid open. “The path is clear,” Pinky said. “For now. Go.”
They didn’t hesitate. In seconds they were down the hall and around the corner, looking for the spot in the wall that would lead them to their friends. It slid open as they approached, and the three of them practically threw themselves inside. The door closed behind them.
They powered down their helmets and tried to catch their breath in the stabilized environment. Benny looked around the room. Ramona was standing at a workbench with the alien radar and what looked like several other small electronics she’d taken apart. Ricardo had taken his gloves off, and Jasmine was wrapping fabric torn from a dust cover around his knuckles.
“You’re okay!” she shouted, running to hug Hot Dog.
“Good timing,” Trevone said, looking up from a HoloTek he had propped up on one of the racks of old inventions. “The Earth forces are here.”
24.
Benny pointed to Ricardo. “Are you okay?” he asked as he hurried over to Trevone’s side.
“I’m fine,” the leader of the Pit Crew assured him. “And I’ve been in contact with Kira. Everyone’s holding up down below. They’re just scared. Pinky told us what you’ve been up to. Very smart.”
“Yeah, but now the hologram projectors are dead,” Drue said.
Pinky appeared beside him. “Not all of them. But unfortunately we won’t be able to do anything on such a large scale again.”
Benny watched a fleet of green blips on Trevone’s HoloTek approach the Taj. A blinking number in the top right corner kept increasing as more and more lights appeared on the screen. 42. 67. 88.
“The Taj sensors are picking up the incoming Space Runners from Earth,” Trevone said. “Meanwhile, we can only track the aliens on Dr. Bale’s radar. And Ramona’s taken that apart to try to boost its range and power using some of the spare parts from Elijah’s old machines. All we’ve really got is the security feeds to show us the full scope of what’s happening up top.”
He swiped the screen, and then they were looking at the courtyard. The alien ships were still parked there, and several Alpha Maraudi seemed to be patrolling the area. A wall of glowing green rock had grown over the entrance to the garage, sealing the spare Space Runners—and Dr. Bale and his team—inside.
It was hard to believe that all this was happening just ten yards or so above their heads.
“They’ve gotta have more ships than the ones parked here,” Benny said. “Drue saw a ton of them. They must be back inside that big floating mother ship.”
A muted rumbling came from somewhere inside the resort.
“The soldiers that were trapped in the video game room have escaped,” Pinky said, “by blowing a hole in the side of the wall with Dr. Bale’s cannon.”
“The Taj is a mess,” Ricardo said quietly. “At this rate it’ll be completely destroyed. Even if the Earth reinforcements do want to use it as a base, there might not be anything left of our home.”
“It looks worse than it is,” Trevone said. “A few key repairs and it’ll be inhabitable again. Though the Grand Dome’s force field will take much more time to replace. The generators that powered it are completely fried.”
“Do you think the Earth army can take down the Alpha Maraudi?” Hot Dog asked.
Trevone shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea.”
Jasmine raised a finger in the air. “It’s not exactly comforting to say, but from what we’ve seen, Dr. Bale’s weapons do work. Think about that alien ship he destroyed with one shot. And the drones. Even the cannon that the aliens are using to blow through the Taj.”
“I don’t even want to imagine that superweapon of his,” Trevone said.
“I wish we knew where it was buried.”
Hot Dog slammed her right first into her left palm. “I bet we can get him to talk.”
“Speaking of which,” Drue said, “you totally, like, drop-kicked an alien earlier.”
“On the spaceship she head-butted one,” Benny added.
“Where did that come from?”
Hot Dog shrugged. “Before I got into flight sims, I was super into fighting games, so I took some self-defense and martial arts lessons. There were a bunch of free community classes when crime started to go up in Dallas.”
Drue grinned. “I like this side of you.”
“You say that only because you haven’t been on the receiving end of it,” Jasmine said. “Yet.”
Benny began to walk in little circles around the center of the room, his fingers drumming on the sides of his legs.
“Okay, so we’re blocked off from the underground bunker,” Benny said. “And there’s about to be a big space fight above us.”
“That’s the basic situation, yes,” Trevone said.
“If the Alpha Maraudi win, they’ll take over the Taj,” Ricardo said. “If they haven’t demolished it by the end.”
“Let’s not forget the ninety-six EW-SCABers underground,” Jasmine added. “Plus the McGuyvers, the rest of the Pit Crew . . .”
“And us,” Drue said. “I don’t want to end up frozen in rock or some kind of alien’s pet.”
“But if the Earth forces win, they’ll ship us all back to Earth and try to blow up the alien home world,” Hot Dog said.
“Sooo . . . what do we do?”
Benny looked at his friends, then at Ricardo. The Pit Crew member didn’t say anything, but Benny could guess what was on his mind: Elijah was maybe still out there somewhere, too.
He thought about what they were all saying, and about the limited options that were open to them—as well as the outcomes they had no control over. And his mind, as always, drifted back to his family. There was a scenario he could clearly see where the human fighters took back the Taj and shipped him home to the Drylands—where within twenty-four hours, maybe, he could be reunited with his grandmother and his brothers, even if it did mean a death sentence for the Alpha Maraudi. But as enticing as the idea of being back with his family sounded, he knew part of him would never be okay with this scenario.
He wondered if all this could have been avoided if Elijah or Dr. Bale—if someone had tried to work with the Alpha Maraudi instead of taking up arms against them or completely giving up on humanity.
“I don’t want to go back to Earth,” Benny said finally. “I mean, I do, but I think there are bigger things to worry about here.”
Suddenly, the room shook. There was a crashing sound from above, and for a moment Benny was sure the roof was going to cave in around them.
“What’s going on?” Ricardo asked, jumping to his feet.
Trevone looked at the video feeds of the courtyard. “An alien ship just went down near the garage.” He looked to Ricardo. “The fight has started.”
“Ugh,” Drue groaned, as they crowded around the feed. “Can’t these cameras go any higher? I want to see what’s happening.”
“They’re security cams. They weren’t designed to watch space.”
“Ramona, get that alien radar put back together,” Jasmine said.
The girl clicked her tongue. “Roger, roger.”
There was intermittent shaking all around them. Benny expected to see the aliens from inside the Taj run out to their ships, but according to Pinky they weren’t moving at all. It was as if they weren’t concerned.
And then they figured out why.
“Oy,” Ramona chirped, coming up behind them. “Critical mass.”
She handed the radar off to Jasmine, who gasped.
The screen showed waves of small crafts streaming from the giant alien mother ship. Their bright orange radar blips filled the sky above the Taj, like all the stars in the galaxy had congregated above the resort. There were at least as many alien ships as there were Earth forces. Possibly more.
The Taj shook around them again.
??
?We have to do something,” Hot Dog said. “There’s a war breaking out above us. We can’t just sit around down here waiting to see who wins.”
“She’s right,” Trevone said.
“We could try to use the battle as cover to slip out and reactivate the elevators,” Drue suggested.
“That just means we’d be waiting underground,” Jasmine said. She tapped on the alien radar and changed the setting so that it showed the walking skeletons of all the Alpha Maraudi still wandering the halls of the Taj. “Plus, we’d have to get past all these soldiers.”
“So where else can we go?” Hot Dog asked.
Benny stared at the screen, trying to think of something, anything they could do. The skies above the Taj were now filled with the unsettling sight of countless alien skeletons flying through the air. They were lit up in orange, along with the metallic backs of their ships.
“Wait,” Jasmine said. “Ramona, how much did you upgrade this scanner? Can it zoom in?”
“Affirmative,” she called from behind one of the racks where she was rummaging through other devices and gadgets. “I’m a leet pro, J. Double tap.”
Jasmine touched the screen a few times, until it was zoomed in on the giant alien ship. There were a dozen aliens clustered around what Benny assumed was the ship’s bridge, a handful of others scattered throughout the vessel. She looked at Benny. “The asteroid mother ship was impenetrable to our lasers. But we have a secret weapon.”
“That glove,” Ricardo said.
Benny stared back at them, taking a moment to try to process what they were getting at. “Hold on. Are you suggesting we, what, break into the mother ship?”
“I am not at all against stealing that thing just for fun,” Drue said. “But what do we do with it after?”
“We get out of here,” Hot Dog said, her face starting to light up. “No matter who ends up winning this fight, they’re not just going to let us stick around.”
“Think of all the information on that ship,” Trevone said, his eyes wide.
“Right,” Jasmine said. “If we wanted to find some way to keep our two civilizations from destroying each other, this could be a way of doing it. There’s so much we don’t know about them. This could be a chance to learn.”
“To try to communicate with them,” Benny said, his mind spinning. “Just like we talked about earlier.”
“Plus, there’d be plenty of room for the rest of the EW-SCABers on board,” Jasmine added.
Ricardo’s eyebrows shot up. “We could figure out if—where they have Elijah.”
“You’d leave the Taj behind?” Benny asked him.
Ricardo took a moment before he answered. “We’d be bringing the best of the Taj with us, wouldn’t we?”
Benny looked at Jasmine, his mouth hanging open. “Is this really a good idea?”
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. But I also didn’t think it was a good idea to steal a car and save Hot Dog, and that turned out pretty well for us.” She shrugged. “All things considered. This is definitely not something I would have suggested before coming to the Taj, but I guess things change.”
“The rest of the EW-SCABers could evacuate through the back tunnel using the SRs the McGuyvers brought down there,” Ricardo said. “Whoever wants to fly back to Earth can once we’re in the clear.”
“We’d need a way to get up to the ship and . . .” Trevone paused for a moment, calculating. “A way to get Benny to be able to touch the side of it and create an entrance.” He pointed at the spot on the screen where the smaller crafts had been coming from. “This would appear to be the best place to dock. It could be a hangar of some sort.”
“Uh, guys, look around you,” Drue said. He motioned to the prototype Pinky had pointed out to them earlier—the one with the metal disks that shot out of the bottom, hypothetically giving Elijah the ability to safely land on a passing comet. “This thing was basically designed to hijack a ship.”
“What do you think, Benny?” Hot Dog asked.
“You could always hand the glove off to one of us,” Ricardo said. “If you’re not up to it.”
Benny wasn’t sure about this at all, but it did seem like the only option that might not end disastrously for the Alpha Maraudi or the humans. Dr. Bale and Drue’s father obviously weren’t going to listen to them, but maybe they could reason with the aliens instead. Even if they couldn’t, this would buy them more time.
It was a risky move, but it could work. And in Benny’s gut, it felt right. Even if it sounded insane, it was at least something they could try.
“This would be incredibly dangerous,” he said. “No one has to go along with this plan. I understand if you’re scared. I totally am, too.” He looked around at his friends. “There’s no shame in staying here and hiding out.”
A few moments of silence passed. Then Hot Dog spoke.
“We followed you out into deep space to shoot a bunch of asteroids and ended up in a space battle,” she said. “Hijacking an alien ship probably isn’t that much worse, right?”
“Yeah, and there’s no way I’d let you guys leave me here and go play hero without me,” Drue added.
Ricardo and Trevone glanced at each other. “We’re in,” Ricardo said.
Jasmine smiled a little and nodded. Ramona just shrugged.
“Okay,” Benny said, letting out a long breath. Despite everything, he felt good having his platoon at his back. “Then let’s figure out how to do this.”
“This sounds very brave, but there are several variables I’m worried about,” Pinky chimed in. “For example, if the aliens saw you going for their mother ship, surely some of the fighters would disengage the Earth forces and try to stop you.”
“Yeah,” Benny said, an electric idea buzzing in his brain. “We need stealth. We need the environmental mimicry systems that Dr. Bale has on his vehicles.”
“That could work,” Jasmine said, a smile growing on her face.
“Wait,” Ricardo said. “Even if we did sneak aboard, we’d have the aliens on the ship to deal with. They won’t exactly be friendly.”
“We can see that it’s sparsely manned on the scanner,” Trevone said. “Most of the Maraudi on board must have been soldiers sent out to fight.”
“But they’re strong and superfast and some of them have knives in their hair. Not to mention whatever rock things they’re using to take down Space Runners now. They are definitely not pushovers,” Hot Dog said.
“Being a human statue is pretty low on the list of things I want to do in my life. We totally should have taken Dr. Bale’s plasma blasters.” Drue groaned.
“You’re not helping.”
“He’s right, though,” Ricardo said. “I mean, I don’t love the idea of using Dr. Bale’s weapons but . . . I don’t know what else to do. We need something.”
“Hey, trolls,” Ramona called from behind one of the racks. She walked around the corner holding up a pair of silver gloves—the electromagnetic gauntlets that Elijah had used to move around Space Runners when he was still testing them out. “Aren’t alien skellies made of metal?” she asked.
A moment of silence settled on the room before everyone started talking at once. Jasmine was the only one who was quiet, as she tapped on the alien radar.
“Guys,” she said as she raised her hand. But Benny and the others were still asking questions over each other.
“How do we know this’ll work?”
“Do the gloves even turn on still?”
“How did I not think of this?”
“Guys!” Jasmine shouted. Benny was shocked into silence—Jasmine wasn’t exactly the type to yell at them. But it worked: everyone shut up.
“There’s a readout of their bone composition here,” she continued. “That must be how Dr. Bale figured out how to scan for them. Part of their skeletal system is composed of unidentified elements, but the rest is mostly made up of a cobalt compound.”
“They’re ferromagnetic,” Trevone said.
; “So . . .” Hot Dog said. “Is that a yes, or . . . ?”
Jasmine just smiled. “Ramona, you’re brilliant.”
“Bingo, J.,” Ramona said. “I keep telling you newbz that.”
25.
“Okay, so, how do these things work?” Benny asked. He stared down at his hands, the gold alien glove he’d swiped from the first mother ship on the right, a new bulky silver magnetic one on the left.
“They’re very similar to the gravity gloves you used in your video game exercise,” Pinky said. “The magnetic force is projected by the band on the knuckles and is activated by the button on the side of your index finger. Hold it down to capture something in the magnetic field and move it around. Press it briefly to create what I suppose could be called a single burst. Hit it twice, and you’ll reverse the magnetic pull.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll be skipping any pulls, thanks,” Hot Dog said. “The last thing I want is a tentacle monster flying at me.”
“Mine’s not working,” Drue said, furiously mashing the button on the side of his glove.
“There’s a power switch on the wrist,” Pinky said. “But I highly suggest that you not turn it on until you’re actually ready to use it. You’re in a relatively small room full of metal and handling a piece of equipment you’ve never used before.”
“I’ll be careful,” Drue said, tapping the wrist of the glove. “We need to test these out before we try to use them against an ET.” He held his fist out at one of the prototype models a few feet away. “To me, my Space Runner!” he said.
Drue hit the button on the side twice, and suddenly he flew through the air, his fist ramming into the side of the car, denting the passenger door.
“OW!” he shouted.
“Drue!” Benny and Hot Dog both yelled.
He got to his feet, rubbing his shoulder. “I thought you said this would reverse the pull. It nearly took my arm off.”
“Ah, I forgot to warn you that the opposite pull is quite weaker than the normal mode. You’re limited to lifting things proportional to your own body weight, or else you’ll be pulled toward your target.”