The Defiant
Chapter Four

I was a little slow on the uptake, and didn’t even have the presence of mind to start screaming in terror until we’d hit the net.

It was a big, square mesh affair, twenty by twenty feet, stretched in the darkness. We landed in different places on its surface, then bounced and landed in a painful heap in the center. We stopped moving just in time to see the floor snap shut above us, plunging the pit into inky darkness. Chaos ensued.

“Get your elbow out of my ribs!”

“Ow! Stop pulling my hair!”

“Whose leg is this?”

Eventually we untangled ourselves and tried to make it to the edges, which was more difficult than it sounded because the net wasn’t pulled taut but had a lot of give to its strands, making it hard to crawl and impossible to stand.

The darkness was such that all I could see of the others were smudgy outlines. I had just started to worm my way to what I thought was the edge of the net when the lights switched on.

I covered my eyes in pain for the third time since I’d woken up. These people needed to learn how to make a gradual transition between illuminations.

When my eyes had adjusted to the brilliance, I cracked them open and took in the scene.

The net was stretched across a square hole, dipping slightly below the ceiling of a cavernous room the size of a warehouse. The edges of the net were attached to the walls of a shaft, which rose up to the bottom of the floor of the corridor we’d been in earlier. There was no way we could get out of it. We were trapped.

The ceiling of the enormous room was striped with fluorescent bulbs, the source of the blinding light. The room looked empty, the only thing in it a weird mechanical contraption with a square of metal attached to an extendable arm.

We watched as a door in the wall of the large room opened and a dark figure entered. It walked to the crane-like object and stepped onto the metal square, which began to rise toward the ceiling.

It stopped near the net, and we got a good look at whoever it was.

It was wearing a big black robe with an attached hood. A blank silver mask without eye- or nose-holes covered its face. It cocked its head slightly to the right, regarding us curiously as we lay entangled in the net.

“Who are you? Why did you bring us h—” Seven began, but a smoothly mechanized voice issuing from the silver mask cut her off.

“You will replace the details of your mission aboard your ship, the coordinates of which are pre-programmed into your shuttle’s computer. Do not attempt to deviate from your course,” it said.

“What mission? What ship? What’s going on here?” Five asked angrily.

“You will see this through to the end as you already agreed, or you will not regain your memories,” the voice continued in a monotone without acknowledging Five. “Good luck.”

All seven of us immediately protested heatedly, Four in particular releasing an impressive string of furious expletives, but the figure ignored us and the metal arm lowered it to the floor. It exited the room, leaving us hanging in the net. The lights switched off again, and we were plunged into pitch blackness.

“What just happened?” Two asked, a slight shake in his voice. I couldn’t blame him. Even if you were all right with having your memory wiped, meeting a bunch of strangers, and being told that you were being forced to fulfill some sort of mission, there was still the fact that we were currently suspended several dozen feet above the floor by an unknown, hostile captor.

No one answered him. After a few moments of ominous silence, Three voiced her own question:

“Any idea what this supposed ‘mission’ is?”

“No, and I don’t think we’re supposed to,” I said after a moment, remembering the figure’s words. “After all, they wiped our memories and told us there was information aboard some kind of ship. Which means they didn’t want us to remember the details of this.

“According to Mask Guy, we agreed to this whole thing. I don’t know about you guys, but this isn’t my idea of fun, so we were probably coerced. For what purpose, I have no idea. And we’re just kids. None of this makes sense,” I finished, picking impotently at the net.

“Well, from the looks of it, we’re all younger than eighteen. There has to be a specific point to that. They wouldn’t pick minors for no reason,” Seven said.

“We’ll know more when we get to the ship, apparently. Speaking of, are they ever going to let us go?” Five said, his voice a picture of practiced boredom.

“Why not make us wait?” Four muttered. “It’s not like we can go anywhere.”

It was true. There was no way to scale the walls of the shaft, and even if we could, there was no guarantee we could get the trapdoor to open. Down wasn’t an option either. The mesh of the net wasn’t wide enough for even Four’s bony frame to wriggle through, and a forty-foot fall would await anyone who tried, anyway.

We were stuck.

What felt like days but was probably only an hour or so later, I was starting to fall into a stupor borne from the lack of sensory stimulation when the floor above us opened outward like a camera shutter and the net beneath us began to rise to meet it.

The upward movement of the net sent us sliding into the center again, which ignited another set of angry protestations. I pushed Four’s sharp elbow away from my side and rolled out from underneath Six’s legs, crawling to the side of the net. I watched as the distance between us and the trapdoor shortened.

The movement of the net shuddered to a halt as we reached the floor of the hallway where we’d been before.

Except it wasn’t the hallway where we’d been before.

It was a huge stretch of concrete outside under the sky, surrounded by empty, rolling hills of parched yellow grass. The air was hot and humid, choking my lungs with its weight.

The only other feature of the stretch of concrete was a large, square landing pad, which was currently occupied by a shiny passenger shuttle, the kind that was paired with a larger ship and used to make planetary landings, equipped with dual antimatter engines for thrust. The hatch was open.

I scrambled from the net. The ground was hot and moist beneath my feet, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was barefoot, a rather obvious fact that I should have noticed before now. Maybe I was still a little out of it.

The other gathered beside me, in front of the landing pad, looking at the shuttle like they were expecting someone to emerge from it.

“Looks like our ride’s here,” Two said.

“Or we could just run,” Five suggested, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the plains of grass. “There’s bound to be civilization around here somewhere.”

“We’re not leaving. Didn’t you listen to that guy in the mask? If we don’t do what they tell us, they won’t give us our memories back,” Three said.

“But we could just—”

“Five, we’re taking the shuttle. The only question is, how are we supposed to fly it?” I said.

“Maybe it has an autopilot?” Six suggested via Three.

“I can fly it,” Four said suddenly. And without another word, she took off across the pad and scampered up the ramp and through the shuttle’s hatch.

The rest of us exchanged a glance. Five shrugged, and we followed Four up into the shuttle.

It was plain, utilitarian like a military transport, but seven seats were lined up in the center in lieu of benches along the walls. One seat was placed by itself in front of a huge computer panel of curved glass, covered with flashing buttons and command inputs. The other seats were arranged in three rows of two behind the control seat.

Four was already strapped into the first seat, carefully inspecting the huge panel in front of her.

“Anything in there about the mission?” Seven asked.

“This computer isn’t sophisticated enough for that kind of memory storage. It’s just meant to ferry us back and forth from the main ship. I’m sure the computer aboard will have our mission details,” Four said absentmindedly. She typed a quick command in using a selection of the colored controls, and the hatch door closed behind me with a whoosh.

“Seat belts, everyone!” she said. We all sat down (I got stuck next to Five in the pair of seats behind Four) and buckled up.

Four started the engines. A low rumble registered low in my ears, making my teeth vibrate as the positrons venting into the attenuating matrix heated the hydrogen. The shuttle began to lift from the ground.

“So how are we supposed to replace the ship?” I asked.

“Its orbital pattern is programmed into the shuttle’s computer. The course was already laid in. It’ll direct us to it,” Four said, running her hands over the vast control panel. The flashing lights were reflected in her round green eyes, and I was struck by how young she looked, a little girl sitting at a computer console twice her size. But she also looked at home, more comfortable with the controls of a machine than with any of us. Though to be fair, we’d all only known each other for about two hours.

Behind me, no one was talking. Seven was braiding her hair back. Three and Two watched out the windows as the world receded beneath us.

I turned to Five, but he glared at me stonily, and Four was totally absorbed with her computer, so I just looked to the window and walked the ground fade away as we rose toward orbit.

The grassy area that we’d been in appeared to be abandoned, but as we ascended, I began to see signs of life, houses and streets. Far off to my left, a small city came into view. The urge to tell Four to change course to it was strong, but I reminded myself that if I did that, I’d probably never replace out who I was.

Instead of torturing myself by watching the ground, I looked up at the clouds. The sunlight dazzled me as we passed into the pearly Elysium of the upper atmosphere, bringing with it a peculiar feeling.

“I’ve been here before,” I murmured, half to myself.

“What?” Two asked from behind me.

“This feels familiar. I’ve gone up into space before,” I said, still gazing out the window at the brilliant sunlight.

“What else do you remember?”

“Nothing. It wasn’t even me remembering anything, it was just a flash of familiarity, like déjà vu,” I said.

“Do you think this means that we’ll eventually regain our memories?” Three asked, translating for Six.

“I don’t think so. And even if they do come back, it will certainly take a while, so I think our best bet is to do this mission, and have them returned.”

“So you just want us to play right into his hands?” Five snapped.

“What other choice do we have? Don’t you all want your memories back?”

“It depends on what the mission is,” Two spoke up. “If it’s something horrible, I’m not sure it’s worth it—”

“What are you talking about? What mission could be so horrible that doing it is worse than never getting your life back?” Three asked from the back.

“I don’t know, maybe transporting weapons for an army? Killing children? There could be hundreds of things.”

“They wouldn’t make us do that,” Seven said, trying to sound certain, but she was fiddling with her hands like she wasn’t sure. Her normally warm, pleasant voice quavered.

“How do you know? How do you know they’re not going to make us bomb a colony or something to get our memories back?” Two fired back.

“I just—”

We all started talking over each other, trying to make our points heard. Five’s face gradually turned redder and redder, and Three looked like she wanted to hit someone.

“Oy! Would you all quit yapping? This is all pointless until we replace out what the mission is, anyway! And if you hadn’t been arguing, you’d have seen the ship!” Four yelled over us.

Six heads turned in unison toward the viewscreen at the front of the shuttle, through which a ship was visible in orbit of the Earth.

I could tell I knew quite a bit about spacecraft just from looking at the ship. It was a nebula-class Defiant, older than some of the newest colonization vessels but still in excellent condition, with four engines and a shuttle bay at the back.

I said as much to Four, who turned around and looked at me curiously.

“That’s right. How’d you know all that?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly and turned to look out the window at the Defiant as Four typed in a command and the back bay doors of the ship slid open to admit us.