The Nerdy Dozen #2 (7 page)

INSIDE THE
FOSSIL
, THEY WERE FORCED TO CROUCH AS THEY
made their way to the cramped main flight cabin. White space suits with helmets and backpacks full of oxygen were secured to the walls.

The whole craft itself was a small compact wedge, like a space shuttle and a minivan merged together. It had stubby wings that stuck out on either side and four windows looking out from the control deck. At any given time, Neil was basically touching two of his fellow recruits, and everything pretty much smelled like a zoo exhibit.

“Now just know we'll be with you the whole time. We'll be in constant contact during the entire mission,” said Finch. “Everyone settled in?”

Everyone gave him a thumbs-up, and Neil could hear the exterior door of the ship being sealed. Dale closed the circular door leading from the ship's main cabin into the air lock. He latched it shut with a firm twist of the metal handle and then secured himself into his locking chair.

There were two rows of seats separated by a small space to walk in the center. Dale and Waffles were seated way in the back, with Neil and Trevor up front. Sam was behind Trevor, and the seat behind her was left empty, meant for Yuri. Jason 1 and Jason 2 completed the row ending with Waffles's grinning face.

Across the small primate walkway, and directly behind Neil, was JP. Then Biggs, in charge of communicating with Dallas, and Riley and Corinne took the seats after.

Neil looked at the control panels in front of him. All things considered, it looked rather familiar. The gauges seemed similar enough to the ones Chameleons had, and the joystick for the Whiptail felt comfortable in Neil's hands. It felt like the whole thing was created to be like a video game, just designed for chimpanzees. Controls and gauges used pictures instead of words. A few were marked with pictures of apes screaming, with red circles slashed through them.

“Okay, I won't touch some of those controls. Whatever they may be,” Neil said to himself.

With a howl, Boris descended to the middeck, below the flight deck. A hatch in the floor led to his boiler room–like quarters, where he was to regulate the pressurization and other technical aspects of the flight.

“Come in, Biggs. Repeat, come in, Biggs. Do you hear me?” said a voice over the headset pulled over each gamer's head. It was Dallas.

“Read you loud and clear, Houston,” Biggs said. “Er, Dallas. Someplace in Texas. Listen, we've got an angry-chimpanzee situation happening. Any advice on how to approach it?”

“Don't worry about him; he's always cranky,” said Dallas through the ship's radio. Everybody could hear both sides of the conversation, but only Biggs had actual radio control. “That's why he had to leave his crew and come retire in Florida. They couldn't take it anymore. Boris, are you clear for launch?”

The chimpanzee underfoot gave a couple of quick whimpers followed by a metallic clanking noise.

“Copy that. You're all set for launch, recruits.”

“Well, that sounds promising,” said Sam from her seat.

Neil shifted in the tiny pilot's perch. Under an insulated white space suit, Neil wore a thin heating and cooling unit that channeled water through every inch of an astronaut's constricting pressure suit. It was a bit stiff, but Neil had a feeling it could come in handy.

He twisted his neck to let a little air flow past his sweaty neck.

“Let's see if your Chameleon skills carry over into the space race,” said Trevor as he and Neil watched the launch timer slowly count down from sixty. They checked gauges on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, but mostly prepared themselves for g forces that might squeeze all liquids from their bodies. Boris would be able to adjust any levels—they could simply focus on flying the craft once it reached outer space.

The rocket would propel the capsule and the Whiptail spacecraft to the farthest reaches of Earth's atmosphere. The main boosters would detach, and the Whiptail's jet engine would take over. Neil could hear the bridge and scaffolding pull away. For now the windows were still dark and covered.

“Ten . . .” came Dallas's voice over the ship's radio.

“Well, I feel great about Neil being in control,” said Biggs from his station. He made a signal with his hand that kind of looked like a rabbit with four or five legs. The Universal Biggs Language was going to need a pretty thorough reference key to clear up any confusion.

“Nine . . .”

“Eight . . .”

Neil nodded his head, and Finch's voice filled the helmet of every suit.

“Okay, astronauts. Just like your last mission,” Finch said as the final seconds ticked by with robotic beeping noises. “And don't think I'm not timing this. Extra points for a speedy recovery.”

Neil gave himself a few seconds to breathe, and with that, the microphoned voice of Finch declared liftoff.

Neil felt a low rumble, unlike anything he'd experienced before. The rocket violently shimmied back and forth and was suddenly plucked up from the ground. It was like someone dropped a yo-yo, only to jerk it back up toward their palm in an instant.

The unrelenting power of five gs of pressure crushed Neil as the ship rocketed toward space.

But then Neil felt a slight change in trajectory. He heard a bleating warning noise coming from his control dashboard.

While the initial thrust felt like the rocket was headed straight up, it now felt like they were jetting through the atmosphere at a weird angle. The plane was veering downward.

Summoning all his strength, Neil asked a question of his deputy pilot, Jason 1.

“What's . . . our . . . altitude?” Neil said, forcing his body to use neck muscles he didn't even know existed.

“We've not yet broken the atmosphere,” Jason 1 responded.

If the rocket were off by the slightest bit, they would come crashing back to Earth in a few deadly seconds.

As his body was jostled with the force of ten rickety traveling-carnival rides, Neil's eyes turned to the manual override.

There was no other choice. Neil disengaged the autopilot and took control of the spacecraft. The controls felt sort of like a Chameleon, and Neil manipulated the ship with confidence.

“What are you doing?” croaked Trevor from the seat next to Neil.

“Keeping us alive,” Neil said as the spaceplane burst out of the payload capsule protecting it. As the nose of the plane cleared the debris, Neil was greeted by a blinding light.

“Oh man! Aliens!” Biggs yelled.

“No, snow!” shouted Neil as he wrestled with the craft's controls. For a split second the flurries of snow opened up, and Neil watched a jagged mountain range appear before him, like the teeth of an angry snow monster.

Neil yanked the controls left, but the speed of the
Fossil
was too much, and the ship designed to explore galaxies collided with an arctic mountain range. The crew screamed as the thud of the crash resonated up through the seats they were strapped into.

Neil looked for any lever or handle marked with a flying chimp and pulled them all furiously. He could feel the ship at the edge of a cliff, just barely, come to a complete stop. A glaringly white expanse stretched before them.

“Welcome to space, you guys!” shouted Waffles.

NEIL GROANED AS HE UNFASTENED HIMSELF FROM THE SEAT
to make sure each body part was still intact. They were, barely.

“So, what now? Unless the universe looks like a ski resort, I'd say we're in the wrong place,” said Corinne, worried.

“And I think the crash broke the radio. I can't hear NASA anymore,” said Biggs. “Hello? Houston? Dallas?”

A transmission fuzzed in and out, but it was mainly clipped words and choppy noises.

“We must be near a magnetic pole. There's a field of something interfering,” said JP, inspecting the waveform transmitted by the radio. “Hello? Houston, are you there?” Only a static buzz answered him.

“Well, I'm not just sitting here,” said Sam as she unhooked herself from her chair.

The eleven crew members filed out of the door Finch sealed minutes before, squinting at the snowy wilderness around them. They all wore their compressed NASA flight suits, clear helmets firmly attached to their uniforms. Since they were not yet in space, the bulkier suits meant for space walking stayed tied to the walls of the air lock. Snow flew diagonally, and powder whipped up off the ground in all directions. Visibility was an issue, as anything past twenty yards was a white blurry mess.

“Well, what's the plan, dude who got put in charge?” asked Waffles. They all turned to Neil, the commander and leader of their now-arctic adventure.

“Yes, Master and Commander, where are we?” said Riley. “Our town blacksmith, Lord Carl, tells horrific tales of cannibal Vikings and frost ogres in places such as these.”

Frigid winds swept up all around the crew, relentlessly pummeling the side of the ship, which echoed through the mountain range with a spooky howl.

Neil felt pressured to provide answers. He looked to Sam for assistance, but her face seemed as scared and concerned as the others'.

“Well, first things first, let's look at the plane for any damage,” Neil said.

Hey, that actually sounded like the correct thing to do.

“Right,” said Dale, followed by his brother.

The team quickly spread out around the now-frostbitten Whiptail, stamping about until they found a small spot of damage on the wing.

A tiny corner of a piece of the high-tech paneling had peeled up, barely a malfunction but enough to alter the course of the ship.

Trevor kicked a huge chunk of snow in front of him and thrashed his arms in frustration.

“Well, now what do we do out here, huh?” Trevor screamed, his visible breath getting shorter and more frequent.

A few people moaned, and nobody seemed ready to refute Trevor. Without any way to get ahold of Finch or NASA, being stranded was becoming a distinct possibility.

“Well, let's not overreact,” Neil said, half in agreement with Trevor's negative outlook.

Trevor kicked the metallic side of the plane's wing. The space-age material absorbed the kick, but Neil watched some snow from the collision fall from the ship's wing. A small logo was uncovered on the corner of the heavily bolted metal sheeting.

BEED INDUSTRIES
it read, with some sort of long lightning bolt in the background.

Neil crinkled his eyebrows—that name sounded familiar.

Harris Beed! Beed Industries belonged to Harris's father!

“Guys. If we can't reach NASA,” Neil said, the gears of his brain turning, “maybe we can get . . . Harris.”

“You mean the guy who basically tried to illegally steal a top secret jet, as well as destroy all video games in the world apart from his own?” JP asked, his voice serious and concerned.

“Yup, that's the one,” Neil said, his voice brimming with confidence. “In case you guys have forgotten, we have a mission to get back to, a ship to fix, one to save, and right now Harris's help is our only option.”

He knew Harris wasn't actually an awful person, just a bit mixed up. If anyone was able to help them out in a ridiculous situation like this, it would be Harris, a ridiculous person.

“Now we just need to figure out a way to contact him. Our radios are definitely out?”

“Yes, Commander. Maybe something just got knocked loose,” said JP, heading back inside the
Fossil
.

“I could go check on it, too. But I'm not exactly sure how it all works,” said Trevor. “I can't figure out if a chimpanzee picture with a mouth closed and arms straight up means ‘do' or ‘do not touch.'”

“Okay. Biggs and the twins stay with me. Everyone else head inside; we're going to go find some help. You said you've been working with Harris, right?” Neil asked. “We need to find a way to call him.”

The rest of the group trudged inside. Sam gave Neil a hug and sent them off.

“I've got Harris's private number,” Biggs said proudly. “We've been trying to find a time to talk about some new smells for our game. He's a very particular man when it comes to his privacy and ostrich scents.”

Neil felt weirdly jealous. After exchanging gaming names earlier, he had expected to be the one hearing from Harris.

“Let's find a lookout,” said a helpful Dale.

With squeaks from their bulky space-suit boots, Waffles and Dale attempted to scramble up the ship's wing to climb to the top. The snowy conditions didn't help matters, and the two kept sliding back down. They trudged through the snow to the front of the plane, and Biggs boosted the brothers up. Neil followed behind, resting a hand on the side of the spaceship.

“You know, call me crazy, but I might know this mountain range,” said Waffles, glaring out across ice fields sparkling in the fierce sunbeams. “Yeah, I think if we just curl around that last hill, there may be something. I kind of think this is a level on Yeti Bobsled.”

“You think? Also, what's Yeti Bobsled?” asked Neil. He'd spent all summer glued to Chameleon, so he wasn't up-to-date on the newest offerings in the gaming world.

“It's sort of like hide-and-seek with mythical frost beasts,” Waffles explained. “It's a five, maybe six, out of ten. Could use more yetis. But this mountain range is definitely in there. I remember that hill that looks like a baby camel. There's an outpost that way. Can you see a beacon?”

Neil thought for a second, following Waffles's pointed finger toward a small humped mountain with a speck of blue light. It was a better plan than nothing.

“Guess we've got no other choice. Let's go, everybody. Waffles, we'll follow your lead,” Neil said. As commander of the mission, Neil knew he had to make decisions, and fast. Now, just how were they going to get there?

“I'll come with you guys,” added Biggs.

The brothers climbed down from the ship, and Dale ducked inside the chimp-scented air lock of the
Fossil
. He quickly reappeared, and in his arms he clutched a yellow plastic brick. Neil instantly recognized it as an inflatable emergency raft. It looked just like the one from the Chameleon. The twin brothers pulled a valve, and the raft sprang to life.

“I think this might work,” said Waffles, looking at the steep hillside around him. While the
Fossil
was angled directly off an icy cliff, the other side of the peak was a gradual decline that fed into a snowy valley. It looked like a ski resort's quadruple-black-diamond run.

Biggs hopped into the raft and grabbed tightly onto one of the canvas straps stemming from the floor. Dale stood behind and braced both hands on the back of the emergency blow-up sled.

“A yeti bobsled isn't complete without four people,” said Waffles, trying to wedge himself into the raft. “Technically it's not complete without three hundred pounds of yak meat, but we'll make do. Now hop in!”

Well, here goes nothing.

Neil jumped into the inflatable life raft, and Dale gave them all a quick push before darting in next to his brother. They instantly gained speed. They coasted over snow and ice, leaving a trail of flurries in their wake.