Chapter Thirty-Four

Azid was furious. They had lost their one chance of getting an edge over Team Halikkon, and they were never getting it back. He knew that for a fact. He clenched his fist and punched the wall. Their cover was blown.

“Shit!” he yelled. He walked to the corner and yelled insatiably into the air, the most hateful cursing they had ever heard.

He blamed it all on one person.

Rebecca.

Right from under their noses, she had snatched the girl away to safety. He clutched his teeth, cursing in a fury.

“Get to the warehouse. Now! We have to make for TITAN before they come down on us.”

Aura regained consciousness, finding herself on a blanket in the middle of a cold, windowless room on the concrete floor. She could taste drywall dust lingering in the air as if the place was still under construction.

She made her way to the larger room, where the remains of Argosys all gathered in the warehouse. Her eyes searched for Rebecca or Viktoriya. There was no sign of them. Aura exhaled. Whatever the price of her betrayal was, she would accept it in full to just know that Azid had not harmed the girl.

“You traitors. Look what you’ve done, Aura! If you were—If we could pull this off without you… You are lucky you’re not dead,” Azid said, waving his hands in the air at the surviving men who stood by silently.

“Our brothers are dead, still lying in their own blood over there, because of your petty betrayal.”

“Z, it was a little girl,” Aura said, trying to object.

“A little girl? Was her life worth the lives of those faithful men? Was it?” Azid barked in return.

“You really want me to answer that?” Aura challenged.

Azid gave her a death gaze, but Aura had enough.

“Look, you’ve been off it for a while now, Z. You are so obsessed with the plan you don’t consider the casualties. Those men did not die because of me. They died because of you and your obsession with gaining this edge over a bunch of scientists. So what exactly are you getting out of all this? What is in this for you, to be so far out on the fringe to cause all this?”

No one had ever dared challenge Azid like that before. They were all too scared of him, even though they did not say it.

He wondered if she had somehow found out his real motivation for the mission.

Azid turned and stared at Aura. If she wasn’t a critical element of getting TITAN taken care of, he would have killed her right there.

But he knew she was, in fact, critical, much more than just necessary. She was by far the most brilliant, most clever, and resourceful hacker their elite group had ever encountered.

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“You are going to fix this!” he said as he turned back to his remaining followers.

“Get everything ready. We make our move on TITAN now. Right now! Make sure she does her job, or we’re all dead; we’ll all freeze to death!”

He stormed out of the room, still shouting and cursing.

Aura now realized clearly that she must continue with this mess that she was in. Otherwise, she would just be another dead enemy of Argosys.

The crew of hackers ascended to the top floor of the warehouse. There, they hustled through the hall, out the roof access, and up the poorly maintained fire escape to the roof.

Their dropship—a small spacecraft, initially built for shuttling supplies within Earth’s orbit—waited, ready to launch, on the landing pad.

Aura bounded to the dark-gray vessel, her blond hair tousling in the wind. She motioned to the pilot, who revved the engines into gear upon seeing Aura’s hand motion.

A roaring noise ripped through the air, almost knocking her off-kilter. Some of her more junior team members plugged their ears. Then, shuffling up the open ramp, they piled into the back bay of the ship.

She took a seat and adjusted the gun holstered to her hip as she sunk deeper into the worn leather. Then, pulling the safety harness across her lap and shoulders, she fastened herself in for the flight to TITAN.

“There will be drones,” Alex said.

“Covered. He is crazy, you know.”

She flicked at her phone, sending off a snippet of the code she’d recovered from the apartment.

“Look, I’m not concerned about him, Aura. I don’t care. All I’m interested in at this point is reversing this thing, so my wife and son don’t freeze to death because of your science fair experiment—built by a bunch of single-cells. I’m here for my family and me.”

She stared back at him, wanting to curse him for his stupid arrogance as a few more members took their seats.

“We had to stop global warming. You can understand that; even the single-cells can. I Just sent Joel iSpace Force’s proprietary electromagnetic pulse algorithm. He’ll be able to download that to our ship’s weapons system and take out the drones.” She sighed and said,

“Alex, listen. Halikkon only intended to help with TITAN. None of us had any idea that we’d screw things up so badly. I’m with you. I want this undone so Earth will warm again. We’re on the same side, you and I.”

She nervously tapped her foot on the ground, distracting herself by tugging and adjusting every strap and buckle, eagerly watching the bay door slowly close. The hiss of the pressure lock latching in was music to her ears.

“Pilot to crew, welcome aboard,” came the familiar voice of Joel, the Argosys pilot.

He announced calmly, “Prepare for immediate lift-off. Prepare for immediate lift-off.”

Aura and Alex braced themselves against the back of their seats, looking around at the other members. “Wait, what? Z is not on board? He’s not coming?” Aura asked.

“Launch in three… two… one…”

The weight of a truck came crushing down on her shoulders, but she held herself upright.

“And we have lift-off.”

She had been to space a few times—well, Earth’s uppermost atmosphere, if she was being precise—and each time, it only became more and more magnificent.

TITAN lived, orbiting Earth, at the very highest point of the troposphere, teetering on the edge of the lower stratosphere. They had placed it there strategically. Most greenhouse gases—the root cause of the climate crises—became trapped in the troposphere.

They had searched hopelessly for decades, trying to find a way to calm and reverse the eventual scorching of Earth.

TITAN was the solution; in its most basic form, a greenhouse gas removal system, placed in the stratosphere to eliminate the harmful gases from the lower atmosphere and disperse them out into deep space.

Unfortunately, it became painfully clear that it had done its job all too well, ushering in the terrible Frost.

She stared out the bay window as they ascended. At about ten kilometers from Earth’s surface, the sky looked infinite. Full of possibility.

She had a fleeting feeling of joy for a moment, taking in Earth’s majesty and the stars.

The feeling faded when she gazed upon her reflection in the window and saw only a menacing betrayal that had taken over her previous form.

She saw the reflection of a monster.