The New Frontier Page 5

  The workers moved in the same robotic fashion that the two men outside the entrance did, almost like they were sleepwalking. The workers shuffled back and forth between machines, pushing buttons and moving things. They didn’t notice the girls up on the ledge, doing their best to stay out of sight.

  To the right of the ledge was a corridor that looked as if it spiraled down to the floor of the factory. Lauren motioned to Julia to move down the corridor, but when they got about halfway down, they heard footsteps. There wasn’t anywhere to go, as the sides of the corridor only had a handrail. The girls froze and huddled against the rail like scared animals.

  The footsteps got closer and closer until they saw a man their father’s age come up the hallway. He approached, but ignored the girls entirely, plodding along almost as if he were in a trance. He slowly trudged up the hall, passed the girls, and kept going.

  Their hearts pounding, they wondered what had just happened. The girls stood up and another man approached, oblivious to them. Lauren moved in front of the man and waved her arms. The man didn’t notice her, so the girls continued down the spiral walkway to the factory floor.

  Still cautious of being seen, the girls hugged closely to the wall, out of sight. On the floor, the machines sped by, barely clearing over the heads of the working men. There was a large bay door that had been out of sight to them when they were standing on the ledge, but on the floor they saw that it opened onto a space dock. Inside the bay doors were six giant bins filled with rocks. Enormous grapples clasped the rocks and transferred them to the conveyer belt.

  As the rocks sped down the conveyer belt, they were pulverized by hammers and then collected in the bins at the far side of the warehouse. The girls stayed in the shadows close to the wall and snuck over to the bins.

  Julia peered over the side of one of the bins to take a peek at the crushed rock. It contained the crystals she had discovered in the rocks from the asteroids. Amazingly, the crystals weren’t smashed with the other rock fragments. They were completely intact. She was so fascinated, she didn’t notice another bin hovering right above her. Lauren lunged for Julia, knocking her out of the way before the bin came smashing down beside them. They both fell to the ground. Julia looked up, dazed.

  “Be careful!” Lauren said.

  “I didn’t even see it!” Julia stuttered, quivering from fright.

  She stood up, dusted off, grabbed a few crystals, and put them in her fanny pack.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Lauren said, and they made their way to the spiral corridor, careful not to be noticed.

  Outside the entrance, the girls stood for a moment in a daze, wondering what had just happened.

  Lauren pulled her phone out of her backpack. “5 missed calls,” it blinked at her.

  “Mom’s going to kill us,” she said, and they quickly headed toward home.

  Chapter 5

  Getting Really, Really Sick

  Back at home, the girls snuck in, hoping their mom wouldn’t notice how late it was. Unfortunately, their mom was waiting in the kitchen, talking on the phone. As soon as the girls came in, she looked up.

  “Here they are,” she said with relief to their dad on the other end of the phone. “I’ll call you back.” She put the phone down and then turned to the girls and demanded, “Where have you been? I tried calling you several times. I’ve been calling half the station trying to find out where you were! Your dad is out there looking for you.”

  Lauren stammered, “We were just in the park. Some girls were mean to us in the plaza, so we left and were playing in the park.” Then she added, “I guess I had my phone in my backpack and didn’t hear it.”

  “And you didn’t think about calling me and telling me you were OK?” Their mom stood up from the table and walked stiffly to the counter. “Here.” She shoved two plates of cold mac and cheese in front of them on the table. “Eat this and go straight to your room. You two are in big trouble.”

  The girls bowed their heads and sat down. The cold mac and cheese wasn’t very appealing, but they ate it without complaint.

  “How could you not think that I would be worried sick about you?” their mom asked. She was visibly shaken and trembled slightly when she spoke. The girls felt bad for scaring her and sat eating with their heads down, guilt ridden.

  When they’d finished choking down the cold food, they went to their room and shut the door. Once in their room, their mood changed.

  “What do you think that was?” Julia said excitedly as she took her new treasures out of her fanny pack and set them on her desk.

  “We’ve got to tell somebody about that place,” Lauren said.

  “Who would we tell? Mom and Dad are so mad at us right now, we couldn’t tell them. They’d see that place and ground us for life!” Julia said.

  Julia swiveled around in her chair to look at her desk. “I’ve seen these crystals before.” She held one up to her microscope and looked at it. It refracted the light as beautifully as the ones from the asteroid belt.

  “They’re the same ones that Dad brought back.” She looked at it, and then pulled down the box where she kept the other crystals.

  She opened the box with the crystals, but she didn’t immediately recognize the crystals she had put in there. One was roughly the same size as they one she’d dropped into the box, but it was a much different color and had a strange glowing green growth all over it. The residue that had been on the perimeter of the box had all but disappeared.

  “Lauren, come look,” she said, as she reached in her drawer for some tongs.

  Lauren walked over to look. Julia reached for the crystal with the tongs to pull it out of the box. As she touched it, a horrible stench permeated the room.

  “What is that smell?” Lauren coughed. Julia coughed, too. “Put it back!” Lauren shouted. The two coughed uncontrollably.

  “Turn the fan on,” Julia shouted to Lauren as she put the crystal back in the box and sealed it.

  Lauren reached for the fan switch and turned it on. Within seconds, the smell dissipated from the room.

  “What was that?” Lauren demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Julia responded innocently. “They were the same crystals we just found. They’re the same as the ones Dad brings back.”

  “Well, keep them in there! I never want to smell that again! Ugh, I feel sick.” Lauren rubbed her stomach as she spoke.

  Their mom opened the door. “Lights out, you two,” she said sternly and then started to close the door. She stopped and came into the room, where she wrapped her arms around Lauren’s shoulders. “Listen, I was really worried about you two today. We’re in a new place that I’m just getting to know, and I had no idea where you were. I was just worried.”

  She stroked Lauren’s hair a couple of times and then walked over and gave Julia a hug, too.

  “We know,” Julia said. “And we’re sorry.”

  The girls quickly got their jammies on and hopped into bed.

  *

  The next morning, Julia awoke with a sharp pain in her stomach. She swiftly jumped up and ran to the bathroom just in time to lose last night’s mac and cheese in the toilet. Lauren was close behind.

  “Watch out!” She was holding her mouth. Julia moved over and Lauren threw up, too.

  “Unghh, I feel awful,” Lauren said, wiping her mouth.

  “Oh, my stomach.” Julia heaved again just as their mother came in to wake them up.

  “What … ?” Their mother saw the two girls crowding around the toilet. “What’s wrong with you two?”

  “I don’t know,” Lauren said, wiping her mouth again. “We just got up and felt sick.”

  “You must have caught something at school,” she said, putting her hand on Julia’s forehead.

  The listless girls scarcely heard what she was saying. They both suddenly felt groggy and barely made it back to bed before falling back asleep.

  What seemed like only a moment later the girls woke up to their mother’s voice,
telling them a doctor was here to figure out what was wrong with them.

  Behind her, a man wearing the white doctor’s coat came in and smiled at them.

  “How are you two feeling?” he asked.

  “Not so good,” Lauren said, pulling herself to a seated position in her bed.

  “My stomach hurts,” Julia added.

  “OK, let’s see what we have here.” The doctor took his medical device out of his pocket. It almost looked like Julia’s microscope, but it had a handle grip allowing him to hold it steady with one hand and a larger screen above the handle. “Open your mouth and say ahh,” he said to Lauren. He moved the apparatus up and looked through it at Lauren’s mouth. Then he looked at her eyes.

  “That looks OK. Now, can you give me your arm?” Lauren cautiously stretched out her arm. When he took hold, she flinched, pulling her arm back.

  “It’s not going to hurt. I just need to check your blood,” he said.

  He tapped a button on the device’s screen and held it over Lauren’s arm. Lauren peeked at the screen and saw her blood flowing through her veins. A circle appeared highlighting something floating in her blood. The doctor pulled back the device to read the screen.

  “Hmm. Some unidentified microorganism. They probably picked it up at school.”

  Their mother looked worried. “Is that bad?”

  “No, we see that a lot out here. Most of the time antibiotics will take care of it. They don’t seem too sick. Their bodies are just fighting it off.”

  He turned to examine Julia.

  “Same thing,” he murmured after looking at her mouth and eyes and running the same test on her blood. “Let’s start them on some antibiotics.”

  He pushed some buttons on his medical device.

  “We’ll also watch them for the next few days. There are some sensors in the room that will monitor their vitals,” he waved his hand in the general direction where the sensors resided in the ceiling.

  Their mother thanked him and left the room to show him out. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and the girls heard a robotic voice request, “Please take the bottle.”

  Julia pushed halfway out of bed, suspecting that the voice was coming from one of the robotic medical delivery carts she’d seen in the halls. She wanted a closer look, but she was too fatigued to stand up.

  Their mother came back into the room with a bottle of purple syrup and gave each girl a dose. Before she was out of the room, they were asleep again.

  *

  Deep in the girls’ minds, they were struggling in an identical dream so vivid they felt as if they were living it. Together they journeyed to a foreign ship, floating in space. It loomed in front of them. Arms grew from its center, making it look like a giant spinning starfish.

  In a flash, they found themselves in a hall on the breathing ship. Around them, the walls were alive. The humid air was heavy and thick and rocked rhythmically like waves in the ocean.

  Julia reached to touch the spongy wall. It recoiled as she touched it. The two were transported down the hall, not knowing where they were going or how they were moving. The hall branched, and they were propelled down corridors, twisting and turning to the point that they had no idea where they had started.

  People emerged from the shadows, slowly walking through halls, dazed like the people they’d seen in the factory on Cielo Prime. Intermingled with the people were ashen-faced hominoid creatures the size of a young adult. The two drew closer to one of them. In the shadows, they could scarcely make out the details of the creature. A cold chill overcame them as they neared it.

  They floated deeper into the ship to the very center. An enormous mass pulsed in front of them. Flashes of colored light shot through the mass as it glowed. It was alive. Surrounding it were the crystals from the asteroid belt, shimmering with a multicolored glow when the blob flashed.

  The closer they got to the mass, the more they could feel it tug the life out of them. Slowly, methodically, it felt like it was overtaking them.

  Suddenly, Julia woke up in a cold sweat with her heart pounding, whimpering.

  “Julia!” Lauren was at her bedside shaking her. “Wake up! Are you OK?”

  Julia opened her eyes, blinking the sweat off her eyelashes.

  “Lauren? You’re OK? I thought …” Julia stammered.

  “It was a dream, Julia, you had a bad dream. I did, too.” Lauren reassured her.

  “What was yours about?” Julia asked.

  “It was awful. We were on some living, breathing ship.”

  Lauren felt a tremor go through her sister, then Julia said, “That’s where I was in my dream … that thing, that pulsing thing, it felt like it could look right into me, like it was cutting something out of me. It was horrible. Then, all of a sudden we were ripped away from it and I woke up.”

  They both sat still for a little while until the door opened and their mom appeared, blinking and with sleep-mussed hair.

  “Are you two OK? I heard a scream.”

  “Yes, I just had a bad dream,” Julia answered quickly. She met Lauren’s eyes, and the girls silently affirmed to each other that they would keep the dream a secret.

  Their mom walked into the room and put her hand on Julia’s head. “You’re burning up. Here, let me take some of the covers off. Do you feel OK?”

  “Yes, just a little hot, but feeling better.” Julia said.

  “I’m going to be awake for a while to make sure you’re OK, so if you need anything, let me know. Try to get some sleep.” Their mom walked out of the room, briefly stopping at the doorway and looking back at them, then closely the door softly behind her.

  “Let’s just keep that between us,” Lauren said.

  “I’ll try, and I never want to see that again.” Julia said. She turned over and closed her eyes.

  Chapter 6

  Strange Things Are Starting to Happen

  The girls finally felt well enough to go back to school. It had been a week since they got sick, and they still felt a little queasy. Their father had to go back out to the asteroid belt for a few days, came home again, and then had to go back out for some emergency. However, their mother was there to help them fully recover.

  The first day back at school was uneventful. They hadn’t missed enough days to get too far behind. By the end of the day, they felt better, and when they met their mother and Maia and Evan after school, their mother surprised them.

  “How about we go get some ice cream?” she asked.

  The girls perked up a little bit. “Yeah that sounds good,” Lauren said.

  The five of them headed up the stairs and out to the plaza. At the plaza, the mean girl and her crew were sitting in the same place Lauren and Julia had seen them last time. The mean girl glared at Lauren when her mother wasn’t looking, but Lauren didn’t care today.

  Lauren and Julia got their favorite pumpkin ice cream and sat at a table, eating their cones while their mom watched Maia and Evan try to eat ice cream and play on the playground at the same time. Alyssa approached their table.

  “Hi, Lauren, I missed you at school and tennis,” she said.

  “I haven’t been feeling well for about a week,” Lauren responded. “Julia and I got a really nasty stomach bug.”

  Alyssa continued, “Hey, I wanted to apologize for Kara being so mean before. She has issues.”

  “Seems like it,” Lauren replied.

  “You really surprised her! Nobody treats her like that. I think she got what she deserved.” Alyssa smiled as she spoke.

  “Yeah. And nobody treats my sister like that,” Lauren confirmed.

  “Well, I’ll be at tennis tomorrow. See you then!” Alyssa walked off.

  “What was she talking about?” their mother asked. She had been close enough to hear the conversation.

  “Nothing. We took care of it,” Lauren said.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Julia said, tugging at Lauren’s shoulder with one hand and pointing with her ice cream cone in the other. �
�I haven’t seen one of those things before.”

  Their mom looked toward where Julia was pointing. “What? I don’t see anything.”

  “Right there, Mom. It looks like a raccoon or something,” Lauren added.

  Lauren and Julia could clearly see a creature perched behind the wall where Alyssa and the other girls were sitting. It almost looked like a raccoon, but it was larger and its hands were more like a monkey’s hands.

  As they were watching, it stood up on its hind legs and looked over the wall. A second creature came up beside it and seemed to whisper something in the first one’s ear. It disappeared behind the wall again.

  “Mom, can’t you see it? There were two of them there just now,” Julia probed her mother.

  “Julia, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t see anything,” her mom insisted.

  Julia turned to Evan and Maia, who had run up sweating from the playground. “Can you guys see it?” They ignored her, eating their ice cream.

  The mean girl, Kara, rummaged through her backpack and then left it sitting on the ledge. One of the creatures ducked behind the wall and reappeared next to Kara. The girls in the group didn’t notice the creature as it put its hands right inside her backpack.

  Lauren got up and ran over to the girls. “Look!” She pointed at the creature. “Julia didn’t take your phone. It was that thing!”

  The girls turned to look where Lauren was pointing with blank looks on their faces.

  “What are you talking about?” Alyssa asked Lauren. “There’s nothing there.”

  As she spoke, the creature looked directly at Lauren and Lauren looked at it. Locked in a stare, the creature didn’t know what to do. It blinked, then grabbed something out of Kara’s backpack and ran off.

  “There it goes!” Lauren shouted. “And it took something from your backpack.”

  Kara grabbed her backpack and looked. “You! You took my wallet? How did you do that? Give it back!”