Wyatt did her job. You were the one who messed up.
I shouldn’t get him thinking about this or he’ll warn her. Hey, Tom, did you know we’re right on course to pass over the Great Red Spot?
Tom was entirely distracted. Awesome, he thought. So awesome.
He stared, dazzled, through the vessel’s electronic eyes as the massive red spot of Jupiter slipped around the vast curvature of the planet. He gazed at the livid clouds. His neural processor told him the hurricane was three times the size of Earth, and it had raged for hundreds of years.
And then, it happened.
The harvester they were escorting plunged out of their sensor range. Then the other harvesters hurtled toward Jupiter. CamCo vessels began to follow. Tom saw Cadence Grey’s ship diving in a suicidal course for Jupiter. Yosef Saide’s ship veered after them, then collided with Elliot’s ship, blasting them both to pieces.
Wait, Heather thought. Wait, wait, wait. Something’s wrong.
And suddenly, it was their turn. Their thrusters roared to life and fired, propelling them straight toward Jupiter in a death charge.
Uh, Heather? Tom thought as that swirling red mass of storms grew larger and larger. You should aim us somewhere else. The ship began shaking violently as Jupiter’s gravity exerted more and more of a pull on them, and he felt Heather trying to fight whatever force it was that had seized control of their navigation.
Through the sensors of their ship, he could see more and more CamCo vessels veering in fatal death plunges, heat shields blasted by the friction with Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Oh my God, I’m not in control of the ship, Heather thought. I think we’ve been hijacked.
Tom felt a thrill of excitement and worry.
Their own heat shields lit as they plunged into Jupiter’s outer atmosphere, the vessel jolting furiously, pressure mounting on a hull not designed for atmospheric travel. They burned hotter and hotter as they plunged deeper into Jupiter’s gaseous mass, gravity accelerating them to a lethal speed.
Soon, gravity began to buckle their hull, and the red clouds on all sides began to tear at them, battering them with vicious, six-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds. In the fleeting moments before their destruction, Tom focused on the buzzing in his processor and leaped out into the vessel, interfacing with it, momentarily dazzled by the alarms blaring in every system as Jupiter consumed it.
And then, for a microsecond, maybe two, his brain met another person’s, a neural processor that wasn’t his, that wasn’t Heather’s, interfacing with their ship and directing its death plunge. Shock suffused Tom. Who was . . .
At that moment, their vessel was obliterated, snapping Tom back into his body in the Pentagonal Spire.
ALL THE TRAINEES were ordered to the cell adjoining the Census Chamber, and one by one, they were escorted in to have their memories of the event extracted.
The guard poked in his head, calling for the next trainee. “Covner, you’re up. Martin, you’ll be next.” Walton rose and followed him from the room.
Tom’s stomach was in knots. No one had used the census device on him since Blackburn had interrogated him for treason. The Middles around him chattered away.
“I’ve never had the census device used on me,” Jennifer Nguyen said.
“Oh, it’s straightforward,” Lyla told her. “You think about something, then the memory uploads. It’s sort of cool.”
Tom started laughing. He couldn’t help it. He ignored the dirty looks the two girls sent him and kept staring at that door, feeling like a mass of nerves. Yes, he knew this wasn’t going to be like the last time he’d sat under that metal claw with Blackburn at the controls. He really did. Intellectually. But the very idea of there being anything cool about the machine that had nearly driven him insane struck him as hilarious.
He forced himself to stop laughing and leaned back against the wall—the wall of the same cell where he’d been confined for two days. It was also the waiting room for those scheduled for memory viewing. His eyes kept straying to the spot he’d punched, over and over, while his mind was fraying.
“Guys, think,” Vik proclaimed, a crazy glint in his eyes as everyone swung their attention toward him. He spread his arms. “We became brave new pioneers in human history: we were all brutally Jupitered today.”
“Jupitered?” Lyla echoed.
“Killed by Jupiter,” Vik explained. “No other warships have crashed into Jupiter before. Ours are the first.”
In the corner where she was sitting, back to the wall, Wyatt spoke up, “Elliot and I weren’t.”
Vik sent her a startled glace. “You guys didn’t get destroyed?”
“No, we did get destroyed. Elliot and I were hit by Yosef’s ship when he started to plunge into Jupiter,” Wyatt explained.
“So you were Jupitered.”
“Yosef killed us, not Jupiter.”
“So you were Yosef’d—because of Jupiter,” Vik said.
“Because of kinetic energy!”
“Kinetic energy directly caused by the gravity of Jupiter.” Vik clenched his fists before him. “The most diabolical planet of them all.”
“That’s so stupid, Vik. Jupiter isn’t diabolical. It’s a gas giant, and we owe it our lives. A lot of asteroids that could cause mass extinction on Earth hit Jupiter instead of us because of Jupiter’s gravity.”
Vik shook his head. “You forget, Enslow: a lot of asteroids that wouldn’t even end up anywhere near Earth get redirected toward Earth by Jupiter’s gravity. If human beings never move beyond this planet, odds are, we’ll all get wiped out by a meteor someday, perhaps even a meteor that only reaches us because of that gas giant you so eagerly defend. All humanity could be Jupitered one day. That’s as diabolical as it gets.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you want to talk about future doom, then one day the sun will use up its hydrogen, turn into a red giant, and destroy our planet anyway. Does that mean the sun is evil?”
“We won’t get sunned for a few billion years, Evil Wench. We could all get Jupitered tomorrow.”
“Stop saying ‘Jupitered.’ It’s not even a word! You made it up.”
“Now I’m getting Wyatted,” Vik complained to Tom.
“Stop making up any words!” Wyatt cried. “It’s so annoying!”
Lyla spoke up. “You guys are both annoying.”
Wyatt looked hurt, Vik grinned proudly, and Tom started laughing again. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt strange, almost giddy, more so every second he waited.
“You, too,” Lyla said to him. “You, especially, Raines. Nothing is funny. Stop laughing. We get it. You’re freaked out. Boo hoo.”
Tom stopped laughing. “I’m not freaked out.”
Lyla mimed crying and adopted a whiny voice: “Oh no, I am so, so scared of the census device.”
“I am not scared of the census device!”
Lyla smirked. Vik grew indignant on Tom’s behalf and pointed at her. “You’re wrong, Martin. Dead wrong. The only thing Tom fears is proper table etiquette.”
“Yeah,” Tom agreed. Then, to Vik, “Hey!”
Vik gave a laugh that sounded like a giggle, and then the door to the cell slid open, and Olivia Ossare strode inside. “Hello, everyone.”