Barbary

Something glided through the picture.

Her heart pounding with excitement, Barbary bent closer over the scanner.

“Mick,” she whispered, “hey, come past again, okay?” The portion of the image taken up by transparent raft roof increased. She held her breath.

As if he knew she was coming after him, Mick brought himself up short against the plastic and peered directly at her. He opened his mouth wide. If they had not been separated by the vacuum of space, she would have heard his plaintive yowl.

“Okay,” she said, laughing with relief. “I’m coming to get you, you dumb cat.” The scanner grew foggy. She had come so close to crying that she had misted up the mask. She sat up and reached into it to rub away the condensation with her sleeve. She glanced outside to check the position of Mick’s raft.

To her shock, it — and Mick, looking at her — lay no more than twenty meters away. She was gaining on it.

“Heather!” she cried.

She pushed the scanner out of the way and pulled her jacket off Heather’s shoulders. She shook her, but Heather remained sound asleep.

“Heather, come on!”

Barbary did not intend to come this far and lose Mick. She did not know if they could turn around and come back for him if they passed his raft. She jammed her hands into the grasps of the claw controls. She reached out; the grapples extended from beneath the raft. She opened her fingers and closed them; the claws followed her motion.

The distance between the rafts diminished to ten meters, then to five.

Barbary reminded herself again and again that the key to doing anything in space was to do it calmly and smoothly. She did not feel calm. She felt terrified and ignorant. Sweat rolled into her eyes. She could not take her hands from the grasps, and she was afraid to take her gaze off the other raft long enough to lean down and rub her forehead on her sleeve.

“Heather!”

Even if Heather woke now, there was no time for her to take over the controls. As her raft approached Mick’s, so much faster than it had seemed to be moving when they were far away, Barbary grabbed for it.

As she clenched her fingers in the grappler controls, the two rafts came together with a tremendous, wrenching clang. Barbary gasped, fearing she had rammed hard enough to breach the hull of Mick’s raft or her own. The ships began a slow tumble. Around them, the stars spun. Barbary squeezed her eyes tight shut. That was even worse. She opened her eyes again. The claws kept the two vehicles clamped tight together. She could no longer see Mick, for he was underneath her. But as the reverberations of the crash faded, she heard, transmitted through the hulls, Mick’s angry, objecting howl.

She laughed with relief. The motion of the rafts was beginning to make her dizzy, though, and the rafts would continue to tumble till someone used the steering rockets to counteract the spiraling twist. Heather would know how to do it.

“Hey, Heather.”

Usually when Heather wanted to sleep some more, she muttered and pulled her blanket over her head. This time, she lay still.

“Heather?”

Heather’s hands felt cold as ice and her skin was very pale. Frightened, Barbary leaned down and put her ear to her sister’s chest. Her heartbeat sounded weak and irregular. Barbary wished she knew what it was supposed to sound like, or what it usually sounded like.

Afraid to try to wake her again, Barbary covered her with her jacket and pillowed Heather’s head in her lap.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I got Mick, I can get us back.” She studied the controls. She would have to figure out how to make the ship stop tumbling, then turn it around. She wished she did not feel so dizzy —

Then she thought, You dummy! If you turn on the radio and the computer, back at Atlantis they’ll send out the signal to bring us back. It’s what they’ve wanted all along!

She threw the two switches, and got ready to be bawled out.

The radio remained silent.

As the raft rotated, an enormous shape slid past the roof.

The rotation of the raft slowed, though Barbary felt no vibration from the steering rockets.

The huge shape slid into view again, the rotation stopped, and Barbary found herself gazing through the roof at the looming alien ship.

Barbary put her arms across Heather as if she could protect her.

Slowly, the raft moved toward the irregular, multicolored hull.

Chapter Thirteen

The alien ship drew the raft closer, growing larger and larger till its expanse of incomprehensible shapes stretched as far as Barbary could see.

Trembling, she hugged Heather. She wrapped her jacket around her sister’s shoulders, trying to keep her warm. The raft slid between two irregular projections from the alien ship’s hull: a spire taller than any building on earth, covered with delicate strands and symbols, and a wavy, faceted shape resembling the crystals that form around a string suspended in a supersaturated solution of sugar and water.