The Interplanetary Expedition of Mars Patel, page 1
1. Welcome to Zero Gravity
2. Interference
3. Breaking the Rules
4. Arrival
5. Landed, Maybe
6. Cargo Beep
7. Daisy to the Rescue
8. It’s Raining, It’s Pouring
9. Colony with Martians
10. Keep Safe
11. Even the Romans Had to Poop
12. Watch Your Back
13. Signals
14. The Surprise
15. Watch Your Step
16. Live to Spy
17. A Good Reason
18. Lifeboat
19. The Getaway That Got Away
20. Blast
21. Ash Cloud
22. Holding Down the Fort
23. Wind
24. End of the World
25. A Promise Is a Promise
26. Aftermath
27. This Is the New Order
28. Aftershocks
29. In the Old Colony
30. Secret Operation
31. Ahead of the Curve
32. It Would Take a Miracle
33. A Quest for Normal
Acknowledgments
About the Author
When Mars dreamed of traveling to distant planets, vomit wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. But here he was hurtling through space on the Pruitt 3, hurling into a barf bag.
“Mars, say goodbye to Earth! You are about to go on the adventure of your life!” crowed Oliver Pruitt, the billionaire inventor who had orchestrated this journey on his own spaceship. Of course, he wasn’t actually in the cockpit. Only a hologram version of him stood there. But that didn’t stop the man from gushing virtually from his control center millions of miles away. “Go on, float around,” Oliver called out as Mars turned green. “Welcome to zero gravity!”
Just a few minutes ago, after leaving Earth, Mars had unbuckled his harness and felt himself free-floating inside the walls of the cockpit, somersaulting and pinwheeling his way through the cabin. First he was right side up, then he was upside down until his limbs felt like clouds, and the universe zoomed by outside in a veil of darkness. Was this really happening to him? Was he really on a spaceship headed to the planet Mars?
Meanwhile, Oliver Pruitt watched, looking sharp in his maroon space suit. Mars wasn’t even sure when Oliver had changed. Back on Earth, he had appeared to Mars and his friends in a muted white flight suit. Now Mars’s friends and his mom were left behind, maybe forever. It had been twelve minutes since liftoff, but to Mars, it felt like a lifetime. He needed to know where Aurora was, and why Oliver had led him to outer space, far from everyone Mars loved.
But first Mars had other problems. He heaved into the paper bag.
“I think I just barfed up a lung,” he said weakly.
“Nothing like traveling through space for the first time! What you’re feeling, Mars, is motion sickness as your body adjusts to weightlessness. But don’t worry. You’ll get used it in no time. And then the fun really begins!”
The door to the cockpit burst open.
“Mr. Pruitt, we’ve got a problem,” announced a girl in an orange flight suit who had tumbled into the room. She was small-boned with a slightly upturned nose and a cascade of dark brown curls floating around her square face.
Mars stared in disbelief. “You’re Lost in London! I mean, you’re Julia!” He recognized her immediately from the missing-children flyers he and his friends had found back in Port Elizabeth. But where had she come from? Had she been on the spacecraft the entire time? “When did you get here?” he asked.
Julia rolled her eyes at him but her voice was gentle. “Mars, I didn’t get here, I’ve been here. But honestly, I don’t have time to explain when we’re in an emergency. Mr. Pruitt, I need to know if—”
But hologram Oliver Pruitt was fading away.
Julia’s eyebrows knitted together. “Mr. Pruitt!” she repeated crossly.
“Sorry, Julia! Have to run! But it sounds like you’ve got it under control!” Oliver Pruitt was growing fainter and fainter until he was just a shimmer.
“Wait! Don’t go!” Mars cried out. “You need to answer my questions. Where’s Aurora? What’s going to happen to my friends and my mom? And why did you lie to me? Why did you make us go through all of that on Earth?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” Oliver said wryly.
“I need to know!”
“I had to make sure you were ready for the Red Planet.” Oliver now was barely an outline. “Wait until you get here. The Colony will blow your mind!”
“Colony?” Mars repeated. “Is that where Aurora is?”
“There’s so much to tell you, Mars. About why I chose you for the mission. Because you are—”
The spaceship lurched horribly.
“WARNING: BREACH IMMINENT IN SECTOR C.” The announcement rang across the speakers, followed by an alarm.
“Mr. Pruitt!” Julia said again, more urgently. But Oliver Pruitt had vanished from the cockpit. “Oh, great! Just what we need. A commander-in-chief who’s MIA.”
“WARNING: BREACH IMMINENT IN SECTOR C.”
The alarm sounded again, and Mars felt like his life was repeating. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that he and Caddie were hiding out in a janitor closet at school during a Code Red? Were alarms going to follow him his whole life—even in space?
“Is that warning serious?” Mars asked nervously. “What does it mean?”
Julia had floated to an intercom mounted on the wall and now said loudly into the mic, “We need you on the flight deck—NOW!” Then she turned to Mars. “It means that if we don’t do something about that hole in Sector C, we’re going to burn up like a marshmallow on an open flame. Which is what I was trying to tell Oliver Pruitt before he vanished on us.”
“WARNING: CATASTROPHIC BREACH IN SECTOR C. CATASTROPHIC BREACH IN SECTOR C. ALL SYSTEMS DISENGAGE IN THREE MINUTES.”
“Does that mean we’re going to die?” Mars felt his heart thud. Until now it had seemed like things were going well enough. Sure, he’d thought Pruitt Prep was a normal school on Gale Island, until he found out that it was also a spacecraft heading to Mars. And sure, Oliver had tricked him into coming on board, but Mars hadn’t expected to die on the man’s watch.
Now Oliver was gone. And catastrophe was around the corner.
“It means we have to handle this problem ourselves,” Julia said. “That means you, Mars.”
“But I d-don’t—” Mars stuttered in a panic. “I’ve never been on a spaceship, and I never—”
Julia steeled herself. “I get it. This is all new for you. It’s natural to freak out. But I need you to calm down so you can help us not die. You think you can handle that?”
Behind Julia, a panel slid open. A teenage guy in a gray flight suit floated in. His brown eyes were wide-spaced and intelligent, and he looked like he hadn’t had a haircut in weeks. “Places, everybody,” he said easily. “These interplanetary space shuttles don’t fly themselves.”
Mars stared at him, agog. Who else was on board this spaceship?
“You really took forever, Orion,” Julia said. “We have less than three minutes.”
Orion tumbled toward the cockpit and slipped into the pilot seat. He strapped himself in next to Julia, who was already strapped and waiting for him. “I heard, I heard,” he said to her. He inputted some numbers into the control panel. “Julia, you handle the throttle.”
“Roger that.”
Orion turned to Mars. “How about you, Butterfly?” he said evenly.
“Butterfly?” Mars repeated. “Wait, who are you?”
“Mars, Orion, Orion, Mars,” Julia said, making quick introductions. “He’s the pilot.”
“Think you can spin us?” Orion pointed to a wheel mounted on a console behind them.
“I guess,” Mars said unsurely.
“That will mean you aren’t buckled in, OK?” Orion asked. “So hold on tight, or you’re really going to be flying around here like a butterfly. Start turning that wheel. Now!”
The wheel was surprisingly heavy. Mars gripped the handle with both hands, breathing hard as he rotated. “What does this do?” he asked, panting.
“We’re turning this craft manually,” Orion explained, his eyes on the flight monitor. “I already applied a patch from the service module, using a bot. That ought to hold us. Later, when we get to the space station, we’ll repair the breach for real.”
“OK.” Mars stopped talking as he concentrated all his energy on turning the wheel. Orion was right. It was taking everything to hold on so that Mars wouldn’t find himself thrown against the walls of the flight deck.
Meanwhile, Julia and Orion continued steering while Mars kept turning the wheel and announcements blared overhead: low pressurization, acceleration, deceleration, oxygen levels, radiation levels. Then a few minutes later, the announcements stopped. The lights came on in the room. And the spinning stopped. Mars let go of the wheel and floated gratefully to an open chair. Through the monitors, he could see the spacecraft moving forward as Orion finished entering coordinates into the panel.
“Back on autopilot,” Orion said. “And on track to reaching Pruitt Space Station at expected arrival time.”
“Excellent work, Orion,” Julia said. “Of course, you are the best pilot at Pruitt Prep.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one who spotted the breach.” Orion stretched back in his chair.
“Why do you keep calling me that?” Mars asked.
“’Cause you look like one, flying around like somebody’s gonna eat you.”
“No, I don’t!” Mars jumped up from his chair so suddenly that the momentum spun him forward into the monitors. He leaned back, rubbing his sore arm.
“Butterfly!”
“Quit calling me that!”
“Oh, bloody stop, both of you,” Julia said. She had clearly had enough. “Orion, you know who he is. He’s Mars Patel.”
Orion gave a good-natured smile and held his hands up in the universal gesture of backing off. Even though he looked a few years older, it was clear he respected what Julia had to say. “’Course. I was just messing with him.”
“Just because this is your second trip to Mars,” Julia said, “doesn’t mean you get to ruffle everyone’s feathers.”
“I got you,” Orion said.
Behind Julia, Mars noticed something strange with one of the monitors. “Hey, why is it dark in the cargo hold? Is everything OK? Did something break when we were spinning?”
Orion’s smile faded. “Nope. It’s dark for a reason, Butterfly. Stay out.”
“Why?” Mars asked. “Maybe you should check—”
Orion stood up quickly, his feet catapulting him off the ground. “I said, stay out!”
“It’s some special delivery Mr. Pruitt put Orion in charge of,” Julia said to Mars. “Even I don’t know what it is. But boy, does Orion get his shorts bunched up over it.”
“Why does everything have to be so secretive around here?” Mars grumbled.
“Listen, Butterfly Breath,” Orion said. “This ain’t no H. G. Wells Middle School. Yeah, Julia and me know all about you and your friends back home. If you guys don’t like something, you just break the rules and go to detention. Well, that’s not how it works here. You mess up, you DIE.”
“I think I can take care of myself,” Mars said hotly. He decided to ignore the fact that just a few minutes ago he had been clutching a barf bag.
“Mars, Orion is right,” Julia said gravely. “This is a dangerous place. Remember what just happened.”
“You mean the breach?” Mars said. “I thought that was an accident and we fixed it.”
Julia and Orion glanced at each other. A whole unspoken conversation seemed to flow between them.
“That breach was no accident,” Orion said ominously. “That was sabotage.”
Six Months Later
Life had fallen into a routine on board the Pruitt 3. Every morning, Mars did pilot training with Orion, followed by computerized lessons on spacecrafts with Julia. Then Mars and Orion hit the stationary bike, treadmill, and weights machine on the flight deck for their daily hour of exercise. For some reason, Julia never joined them. She said she had her own exercise routine, which she insisted on doing at five in the morning. Mars asked her why she couldn’t do it at the same time as they did.
“I can’t be hanging out every second with you guys,” she said as she surveyed a flight screen. “Somebody’s got to make sure we’re on track.”
Mars stared out the observation window at distant stars punctuating the silent and vast spacescape. The voyage was so smooth, it would be hard to tell they were moving if it weren’t for the window. “Um, don’t you need to take breaks, too?” he asked.
“Whizzing meteors and flying debris don’t take a break, do they?” Julia said pointedly. “We have to watch out for threats to the spaceship at ALL TIMES.”
Meteors and flying debris? Really? So far, they hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary in the six months since the breach. And that was something Julia and Orion wouldn’t talk about. Why didn’t they trust him? What were they keeping secret from Mars?
Orion tried to shrug it off. “It’s Julia’s first mission, and she wants to get it right. So give her some space. Get it? Ha, ha.”
Orion had been on the last flight to Mars, so he knew all the drills and he was more laid-back. But he was not exactly an open book. The other big mystery aside from the breach was the cargo hold and why Mars had to stay away. But the more he pestered Orion for details, the more determined Orion seemed not to tell Mars a darn thing. At one point, Mars tried the cargo hold door when no one was looking, but it was locked—only Orion knew the access code. More secrets.
Still, a friendship had formed among the three of them. They ate lunch and dinner together in the crew cabin, making their way through reconstituted packets of tandoori chicken, fettuccine alfredo, and pad thai. They talked about Oliver Pruitt and the Colony on Mars, and about the mission and why they were there.
For Julia, it was a chance to do something new.
“First I was looking for the missing kids,” Julia said, referring to the hundreds of children who had gone missing around the world, who were actually at Pruitt Prep. “Until I found out where they were. After that, it was seriously boring being in my flat in East London. It’s not like I’ve got a trove of kids like me to converse with. And I love my parents, but they own a hardware store. How long can I talk about lug nuts and home repair?”
“Me? I had nothing else better going on,” Orion said. “This is way cooler.” Mars asked him if he missed his family. “I am my family,” was his reply.
“Well, you guys had a choice,” Mars said. “I’m just sort of here.” That wasn’t true. He’d had a choice. And the choice had been to protect his friends. And find Aurora. But Mars didn’t know then that his choice would include going on some kind of interplanetary expedition.
“Maybe butterflies just go where the wind takes them,” Orion said, grinning.
That was the other thing. The teasing. But it was different here. Not like the Boof picking on Mars in middle school for being smart or weird. Here, everyone looked out for one another. Julia gave them daily schedules. Orion always checked that the machines were calibrated just right so Mars didn’t get stunned or winded during pilot training. And when they went to bed, Orion made sure everyone said good night every night. Like family.
In the afternoons, the three of them conducted experiments in the service module, where they grew zucchini, potatoes, and sugar snap peas inside an incubator, and built small robots to help with housekeeping. Mars was surprised by how busy he was. The spaceship was smaller than his tiny apartment in Port Elizabeth, but it had everything you could want, from food to rocket fuel to exercise equipment to space toilets. Still, when Mars remembered his home, he would catch his breath. How was his mom? How would she manage without him? He still could hear her voice over the phone when he’d said goodbye to her from Pruitt Prep back on Earth.
“I always knew you have a great destiny,” she had told him, her voice cracking. Did she know what his destiny really was? To fly to Mars? He’d left her behind, and all his friends: Caddie, Toothpick, JP, Jonas. Were they happier without him, or had he managed to destroy their lives, too? All those weeks of detention, the suspensions from school, and not to mention being social delinquents—that was all his fault, too.
The only thing that gave Mars hope was finding Aurora. At least his other friends were safe at home with their families. But who was looking out for her? Her dad was never around, and neither was her mom. What if Aurora had gone on this mission with Oliver Pruitt because she was desperate? Because she didn’t have a choice? Or what if Oliver had taken her away for some other reason? So many secrets. Oliver Pruitt might be the most untrustworthy human being in the universe. And yet here Mars was, traveling in a rocket ship to meet him. It kind of blew his mind.
Meanwhile, there was no way to get in touch with his friends or his mom. All Mars had was an interplanetary phone that used some complicated technology that Julia had tried to explain to him, but it went in through one ear and out the other.
“IP phones only connect to the Colony,” she said. “They’re meant for official business and emergencies. So you can forget about texting your girlfriend, Aurora.”
Why did everyone think Aurora was his girlfriend?
“I’m not texting her,” he said. Even though that was exactly what he was doing.
So far, Aurora hadn’t written. But maybe one of these days she would. He had to keep trying so she would know he hadn’t forgotten her.
Today he texted her because it was important—the most important news of all.
