CHAPTER 55

ATLAS

FIND ANOTHER WAY

“As far as we know, they never hacked into any of us,” Atlas said once everyone had arrived back in the next docking platform that everyone agreed to meet in after the encounter with the Atua aliens. “As far as I can tell, they successfully made it into our dummy systems. But they hadn’t yet made it into any of the systems that matter.”

The docking platforms were designed with safety as a priority. There were multiple technological systems on them that were designed to look like they did things. But really, they were set up to slow down any hack attempt.

“So they were tricking us?” Peter asked. “They wanted us to visit them so they could hack into us and maybe take over this new weapon?”

“Correct,” Atlas replied. “I’m guessing this was always their plan. They wanted to infiltrate our system and let us all carry the nanobots back to one of our planets where they could closely make their way in.”

“So as soon as we touched down on that platform, their bots were moving in,” Angelique said. “They didn’t care what we did after that. Their mission was to infect us with a new virus and then leave.”

“So they failed to hack into us,” Unity said. “And by the sounds of it, we failed to reach an agreement with them. So what do we do now?”

“We can go back home?” Atlas proposed.

Peter shook his head. “Not yet. We haven’t gotten closure on what we needed to.”

Angelique looked at Peter, studying his face. “What else can we do? They basically said our one trump card doesn’t matter.” She paused for a second. “You’re not thinking of using the weapon, are you?”

Atlas stopped listening. He was directly connected to the spacecraft, so he had the ability to use the ship’s immense resources. In this case, he was receiving two simultaneous alerts.

The first message was from an alert he’d set up on the weapons. It meant someone had triggered it. He hadn’t told anyone, but as much as he wanted to free himself from the concern of being the one who pulled the trigger, he also didn’t want the weapon to be used unless he was okay with it being used. Someone had triggered the weapon to fire.

Atlas looked at Peter, studying his face for a second. To Peter’s credit, he hadn’t reacted. If it was Peter who’d just tried to destroy the Atua, he wasn’t showing it on his face.

Atlas decided not to follow up any longer. There was another more pressing situation he needed to investigate.

He left the room where everyone else was and entered the virtual reality world of his ship.

Atlas had recently forgone the use of paper and pen. He still liked to visually see things written on paper. But he’d built an add-on that would take his mental thoughts and translate them into written format. To any observer, it looked like a floating pen and notepad moved around and followed him.

“Ship, are we receiving an encrypted signal?”

Ship appeared in the room. “There isn’t a signal; it’s the original message Peter broadcast in this system bouncing off asteroids. We’re hearing an echo.”

“You might be right. But can you humor me?” Atlas wasn’t too sure what was going on. But he felt like the cadence of the echo wasn’t matching with what he would have expected. There was a rhythm to it. It wasn’t random. “Is there a pattern in the echo? Is there Morse code in there?”

Ship paused for a moment. Then he smiled. “You’re right; it’s musical notes. It’s the theme song to Zelda.”

“Icarus?”

Ship shrugged. “Unless it’s a trap by the Atua, there’s only one person who would broadcast a signal like that.”

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“Can you identify where it’s coming from?”

Ship shook his head.

“Can we pretend to be an echo back? Send the signal out in the general direction we detected it?”

The two of them waited in patience for the signal to be confirmed. There was a section of the asteroid belt in the system where the echo-like signal was originating.

“I’m moving us closer,” Ship said.

“Is there a way for us to let Icarus know it’s us?” Atlas scratched his head. “What about the theme song to Mission: Impossible? Can we send that across?”

It was an intense wait, but it wasn’t long until the theme song to The White Lotus came back.

“Okay, now he knows it’s us,” Ship said.

Ship guided them toward a large asteroid. It looked almost like a massive nose as it slowly spun around.

There was no visible sign at all that anything was in the system. Ship used active sensor pulses to scan and noticed there was a high concentration of metals in this asteroid. Nothing out of the ordinary, except this particular asteroid didn’t look like it had a lot of metal in it.

Ship fired a tight-beam communication at the asteroid.

Almost instantly, they received a reply. A small probe began surfacing from the very bottom part of the asteroid that looked like a nostril. It was tiny and moved slowly toward them.

“Atlas, we have no means of taking Icarus on board.”

“Can we set up a connection with him to communicate?”

Ship nodded.

“Peter, is that you?” Icarus’s voice came through the speaker.

“It’s Atlas. I heard you needed a pickup,” Atlas said, laughing. “How did you end up all the way here? Did you sneak back here after they attacked Titan?”

“Who attacked Titan?”

Atlas thought that maybe this was a copy of Icarus, a version of him that hadn’t had the experiences of coming back to Titan. Atlas decided to change the subject, assuming it was better to tell Icarus about what had happened in person. “This design of spacecraft doesn’t have any way for you to enter. I’m not sure how we’re going to get you on board.”

“So you’re not here specifically to rescue me?” Icarus asked.

“We are, but it’s complicated,” Atlas said, lying to him. There was so much he needed to explain to Icarus.

“I have a grappling hook if that helps?”

Ship shook his head. “We’ll use the tractor beam, as we don’t want you to make contact with our ship. We have a specially built docking station that we’ll carry you to.”

It took them a couple of times to get it right. But it wasn’t long before they were towing Icarus and his Ship toward one of the docking stations.

Throughout the journey there, both parties quizzed each other. They both wanted to make sure the other was who they said they were. It wasn’t anything malicious. They just both had a unique understanding of the lengths the Atua would go to in order to hack their way into their systems.

Atlas didn’t find any evidence to the contrary. He was confident it was truly Icarus when they arrived back at the nearest docking station.

But still, he was happy that they had the specifically built spacecraft that completely sealed them off from the outside world. It meant once Icarus was inside of it, he could speak with Icarus, and if Icarus was carrying a virus, he wouldn’t be able to infect Atlas—or any of the others.

It took a while, but eventually, Icarus’s small, little, not-so-interstellar-worthy probe was haled inside. He was cordoned off in a glass section where he couldn’t interact with anything else.

Icarus and the Ship of Icarus projected themselves on the outside of their probes using the hapticgraphic projectors.

“Is that really you?” Atlas asked, standing next to his Ship and looking through the window.

“In the flesh.” Icarus pointed to his duck avatar.

Ship looked at Atlas, then back at Icarus. “How did you end up in that asteroid?”

“You wouldn’t believe how close they came to capturing me. I transmitted the data containing my matrix here, but because I was under so much heat when they chased me, I didn’t want to risk trying to escape yet. I figured I’d wait a few hundred years. Hope they forgot about me before inching my way out of the system.” Icarus looked at Atlas. “Did you hint that another version of me made it back to Titan?”

Atlas and Ship gave a quick recap on everything that had happened since they last spoke. They omitted many of the details around the level of destruction on Titan but told him enough so that he understood the gravity of the situation and why they were there.

Once Atlas had successfully updated Icarus on everything that had occurred recently, he popped back into the other meeting space and told everyone to hop across into this one. He didn’t tell them why. But he loved seeing everyone’s face light up when they saw who was behind the glass wall.

Once the initial surprise and introductions were completed, everyone got down to business.

“Based on everything I learned about the Atua while I was on their planet,” Icarus said. “I believe they’re telling the truth. They would rather die than be subjected to the embarrassment of treating us as equals. They see us as no different to the Penquins. We are resources for them to use.”

“So how do we negotiate with a species that would rather die than give us any concessions?”

“Let me think—” Icarus started to say.

The Ship of Atlas interrupted everyone. “I’m getting a reading that hundreds of rockets just launched from the planet below.”

“Are they warheads or starships?” Peter asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ship replied. “Based on the size of things, I think they’re a mix of both.”

“Broadcast this message to all the ships and over the planet.” Peter took a step backward and turned to address some sort of hidden camera. “Stand down. Do not attack us. We are leaving.”