The Nerdy Dozen #2 (14 page)

DUST SWIRLED AROUND THE CREW MEMBERS AS THEY
wandered out into the desert of Mars. Their suits were quickly coated in red dirt.

“This is where they should be,” said Kip. “We found the coordinates from this photo.”

Kip held out the satellite image of her parents' lab to Neil.

There's no way anybody survived this.

He studied the photo of the ruined lab and dropped it to stare at the actual site in front of him. It looked even more uninhabitable than the picture promised. Sharp scraps of futuristic metal and lab supplies littered the ground, glinting in the murky sunlight.

“Let's fan out,” said Neil. “Everybody start looking for clues or something. We can cover more ground this way. If their parents are alive, we have to find them.”

Starting from the rubble of their parents' shelter, Kip and Edmond began frantically shouting the names of the lost astronauts. Neil knew this was all probably wishful thinking,

“No way!” yelled Dale and Waffles. Neil's heart began to race, hoping the brothers had discovered something.

The gravity was more substantial than on the moon, leaving less hang time for major jumps or potential food tosses. Neil tried to remember what Lars had said about hobbling about in low gravity.

Run like a pony or something?
Lars was unlike anyone Neil had ever met, for better or for worse. Despite trying to capture him and his crew, Lars was still just a kid looking for some buddies. Having gone by the name Neanderthal for at least half of middle school, Neil knew the prickly sting of isolation.

Neil approached a small ridge and saw Waffles and Dale in an exploration rover.

It was huge, with eight all-terrain tires. One wheel was punctured, and piles of dust gathered around the vehicle.

Harris came over and nudged the machine with his foot. “We can fix that flat in no time.”

The group propped up the vehicle on rocks and swapped out the faulty wheel with the spare on the back. In what seemed like seconds, they had successfully hot-wired millions of dollars in specialized NASA equipment. More miraculously, it started. The battery still worked! Waffles steered it off the ridge, landing with a crunch.

“Just like back home!” Waffles yelled.

“Well, don't break it,” said Dale. “We'll drive this puppy around and keep searching. Can cover way more ground this way.”

“We've got to be quick, guys. We've basically got twenty-two hours until Q-94 makes contact,” Neil said.

It was Sunday afternoon, and they'd need to double-warp drive the whole way back to Earth if they wanted to get the
Newt
back in time.

“Commander, an interesting development over here,” said JP through his helmet's radio. “I think you'll want to see this.”

Neil made his way to JP and stood next to him. So far, they'd barely covered much ground.

“Do you see these tracks?” JP asked, directing Neil's eyes to three flat lines pressed into the ground.

“What about them? Probably just the rover taking rock samples before it died,” Neil said.

“That's what I thought, but the measurements between them are identical to the landing gear for our Whiptail,” JP said. “The depth of these tracks into this top crust shows me it was a heavy craft. A Whiptail not flying but driving that way.”

Neil could see the deep grooves, and he agreed it had to be the tracks of a Whiptail, or something similar. His eyes followed the ruts as far as possible, but they continued toward a mountain that looked a mile away and was barely visible.

“Well, looks like we're taking a road trip,” Neil said.

WAFFLES STEERED THROUGH THE MARS COUNTRYSIDE AND
arrived at the base of the large mountain. The tracks in the ground continued upward.

“Got something on the starboard side,” said Corinne. Neil turned his glance the same way to see a giant roaming cloud in the distance. It was a dense mix of rock and dust, so thick Neil couldn't see through it. It looked the size of seven tornadoes combined.

“Dust storm,” shouted JP. “We need to find cover!”

The storm was headed straight toward them, already pelting the group with hail and rocks.

“Should we turn back?” asked Waffles, unsure.

“I don't think we have time!” answered Neil. He scanned the mountain. “See that little group of rocks? Let's try heading there.”

Waffles steered the rover toward a pile of boulders, which looked a bit different than the remainder of the Martian landscape, but not by much.

Neil could feel the wind getting stronger as it pushed against his chest. The sun began to slip away behind clouds of dust, and Neil turned on the lights attached to his backpack. They were useless, like his family car's high beams in a snowstorm.

“Something's moving!” shouted Corinne.

Neil turned to see a hatch opening from the ground, its exterior camouflaged. Two shadowy figures crept out.

“The aliens have finally come for us!” Biggs shouted. “If they start interrogating us, nobody tell them that pizza is a thing, okay?”

The two figures that approached wore similar outfits.

“Come with us!” shouted a man's voice through his helmet, his face hidden by a sun shield. He held out a hand in Biggs's direction. “You can trust us!”

As visibility went down to nothing, Biggs took hold. He reached back and grabbed on tightly to Corinne, who did the same for her nearest neighbor.

“Nobody let go! Follow me!” Biggs said.

The group formed a chain and cautiously followed Biggs into the hatch. Neil could hear pieces of rock collide with his helmet, and he grew worried as bigger sounds meant larger pieces.

Am I going to die with Martian mole people?

As Neil stepped down, an electronic lantern illuminated the small shelter. It was some kind of temporary structure, its walls covered with mathematic equations. The two people in grubby suits slid back their reflective sun shields.

“Mom!”

“Dad!”

“Kids!”

Kip and Edmond screamed in joy at the sight of the familiar faces. A year in space had left the astronauts looking untamed. Mr. Minor looked like a starved seventh-grade science teacher. He wore a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache that connected to a patchy beard. His wife's curly blond hair was pulled back in an unruly ponytail. Her hair took up the lower third of her helmet, like straw spread out on a floor.

She was a few inches taller than her husband, with equally yellowing teeth. It was for the best nobody could smell their breath, as outer-space dental hygiene was probably the first thing to go in a survival situation. They were both filthy, and Neil wished he knew what that kind of dirtiness felt like.

Neil and his fellow gamers watched the joyful hugs from the shocked astronauts. Biggs, Corinne, and even Trevor cried, although he tried to act like he hadn't. It was like an emotional YouTube clip, where families were at long last brought back together. Except it was happening in real life, and it didn't have a comments section.

“I knew you'd be here,” said Kip, her face soaked with tears. “I knew you'd make it.”

“I heard you on the TV!” said Edmond.

“We had a hunch that worked,” said Mrs. Minor.

“Once we realized radio transmissions were dead and that there was insufficient fuel for a return trip to Earth, we put our noggins together,” said Mr. Minor, playfully bouncing his head with his wife's. “We knew where to find this volcano, and we created an underground lab at the base to get away from these storms and continue our mission.”

“And what was that?” asked Sam, enthralled. “And why the volcano?”

“Well, it's something called Q-94.”

“Believe us, we know all about it,” said Sam.

“We tried to get in touch, but it sounds like they figured it out, then. So you're aware that NASA's predictions were incorrect?”

“Very.” The sounds of a massive dust storm raged on overhead.

“Our ship was designed to fire a special missile to harness and capture the asteroid, to be brought into our orbit to be studied,” said Mrs. Minor. “But the missiles malfunctioned, and we ended up here.”

“And as for the volcano, we're critically low on chemical fuel. We've got some solar panels on the ship, but they can't generate the power we need to break free of this atmosphere,” Mr. Minor explained.

“We did some testing, and this volcano is past due for serious seismic activity. The way these ships are designed, and the amount of heat their armor can withstand, we can activate the thrust of the ship once we—”

“Get it flying fast enough?” answered Sam. “Believe us, we know all about that.”

“So we drove the
Golden Gecko
up here, and we've been waiting patiently for the volcano to erupt, to dislodge our ship and help fire us into orbit,” said Mr. Minor.

“How long have we been gone?” asked Mrs. Minor.

“You were declared lost by NASA a year ago,” said Neil. “I saw the plaque dedicated to you both.”

“And what about the pancakes? And the slippy seals swimming through the air?” asked Mrs. Minor, batting at the open air a few feet around her head.

“Um, repeat that back?” said Neil, unsure if these were advanced astronaut terms he would never understand.

“The lumberjacks should be here any minute. Make sure all the kittens are gift-wrapped,” Mrs. Minor said, rapidly blinking her eyes and ending each sentence with a little whistling noise.

“Oh no,” Sam said. “Finch had us go over something like this in that SQUID medical training.”

As the crew's medical specialist, she put a hand to the foreheads of the Minors and held her hand out, one finger pointed out.

“Follow the tip of my finger,” she said to Mr. and Mrs. Minor. Sam slowly moved her finger back and forth, fixated on their pupils. She looked serious, and she took her time diagnosing her patients.

“It's just what I feared,” she said solemnly. “Advanced Space Silliness. Stage two, maybe even stage three.”

“What does that even mean?” asked Trevor.

“Their brains are loopy, especially Mrs. Minor's,” Sam said. “A year in space all alone? The human mind isn't meant for it. We need to get them back to Earth soon, before their condition gets worse. If it goes untreated, symptoms can be irreversible.”

Sam looked at Kip and Edmond, who listened with concerned faces.

“They'll be okay; we just have to get them out of here.”

The news relieved the Minor children, and they once again hugged their parents tightly. Mrs. Minor looked at the group more closely, surprised.

“Why, you're just a bunch of kids,” she said. “How did you even make it here?”

“Well, an old pilot hazing ritual,” Neil said.

“Shuttle Fury
?
It worked?” asked Mrs. Minor. “I didn't even get past level two on that darned thing. Clint barely played two hours.”

“Ha! See?” said a defensive Neil, but no one paid attention—the sounds of the storm had stopped.

Clint stood at the top of the bunker and lifted the hatch to look outside. The worst of the storm was past.

“Clint, if we're leaving, we need to get the research from the ship,” Elle said as they stepped outside.

“The
Golden Gecko
,” Sam said in awe. “I can't believe it actually exists.”

“Oh, the old bird's in tip-top shape, too,” said Clint. “Enough fuel for the warp drive back, but that's about it.”

“Well, we won't even need it if you all came in a new ship.”

“Well, Kip and Edmond did,” said Neil. “We came in the
Fossil
.”

“What?” Clint said, his face shocked. “That hunk of junk still works?”

“Complete with Boris the chimpanzee cosmonaut in the middeck,” said Neil.

“He's come out of retirement? Draymond's really shooting from the hip on this one, eh? We'll go now to the
Golden Gecko
, and we can—”

And at that moment, the desolate ground of Mars began to shake. Neil saw a slim black plume of smoke drifting up from the top of the Martian volcano.

“My cats! The volcano!” said Mr. Minor. “We've no time to spare!”