Trouble in the Stars

by Sarah Prineas

  I have no idea if this matters to the captain and everybody else. Still, I have to try. “We have to find the shapeshifters,” I say from my corner.

  The captain whirls to face me. “What?”

  “There are other shapeshifters,” I say. “Reetha said there are, so it must be true. We have to go find them.”

  “Do we?” the captain asks.

  Yes. We do. For a long moment I just look at her. At Captain Astra, who used to have a cold darkness in her eyes. She used to think that You’re always alone in the end.

  But she doesn’t believe that anymore. I know it. “Can we?” I ask.

  The captain takes a deep breath. Then she lets it out. She scrubs both hands through her curly gray hair and then looks at each member of the crew in turn. “Anybody have a problem with this?”

  Amby just blinks, but Shkkka twitches an antenna to say no problem, and Telly, grinning, says, “Let’s do it.” Reetha nods.

  “All right,” the captain says. “This is what we’re going to do. Assuming that rat-bit stealth-box is ready?” she asks, with a glance at Shkkka.

  “It’ssss ready,” Shkkka answers.

  “Finally,” the captain says.

  “What is a stealth-box?” I put in. I know it’s something Shkkka has been working on for the past week. “Is it some kind of ultra-top-secret sneak device?”

  The captain grins widely. “Hah. Yes. It bends a pocket of space around us, like a little hiding place. Very useful, if often out of commission.”

  “How does it work?” I ask.

  “Science,” the captain says with a shrug. “Shkkka and Reetha understand it. Anyway, assuming it works properly, we’ll hide in our little pocket of space, and when Peacemaker gets here, we will be long gone and untraceable.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  The captain shakes her head as if I’m being stupid. “To find the shapeshifters.”

  “No, you are not,” Electra announces, raising her weapon. Suddenly she looks grim and dangerous. “Everybody against the wall,” she orders. “I am taking over this ship until General Smag arrives.”

  “Wait,” I say, getting up from my place in the corner.

  When I move, everyone in the room freezes, staring at me.

  Then Electra turns, grips her weapon with both hands, and aims it at me. “Stay back,” she snaps.

  She’s being brave, but she’s also being stupid. “Electra,” I protest.

  She grits her teeth. “I am a StarLeague Dart pilot. I don’t have any choice. Now put your hands up. I don’t want any trouble from you.”

  “Trouble is what you’ve got,” I say, and as I speak, my voice turns raspy, and before she can fire the weapon, I’ve shifted—in a flash—into the Hunter again. In one mighty bound, I’m across the room, ripping the weapon from Electra’s hand, crumpling it, and dropping it to the floor.

  Then I shift back and I’m standing there, barefoot, and the crew is all cowering away, even though I’m in my human shape again. Electra glares at me, and her hair tentacles lash angrily around her head.

  The captain recovers. “Go, uh . . .” She waves a shaking hand at me. “Go put your clothes back on, Trouble.”

  Feeling a little shaky myself, I go back to my corner and get dressed, while Reetha seizes Electra roughly, pulls the ID scanner out of the pocket of her coverall, and drops it into her own pocket. Then Reetha puts a menacing claw on Electra’s shoulder. “Space ’er?” she asks.

  I finish pulling a shirt over my head. “No!” I say.

  “Trouble, you don’t know about these Dart pilots,” the captain says. “They’re fanatically loyal and trained from birth to be deadly. She has to go.”

  I stay where I am and say carefully, “Electra’s a kid.”

  “She’s trouble,” the captain warns.

  “Yes, she is,” I agree. “But she’s a person.”

  Electra is staring at me, as if she’s surprised that I don’t want to toss her out into space. Her face is pale and her hair-tentacles are drained of color. She’s scared.

  “If you put Electra out the airlock,” I remind the captain, “she will get ebullism and die.”

  “All right,” the captain says, and blows out a frustrated breath. “Fine. We won’t space her.” Then she turns to Reetha. “You said there are other shapeshifters. Where do we have to go to find them?”

  Reetha, it turns out, doesn’t know.

  22

  After Captain Astra growls at Reetha for not knowing where we need to go to actually find the other shapeshifters, they hurry off to the bridge to get the stealth-box set up and to tell Amby to plot a new course. Telly goes out after putting the restraining cuff onto Electra again.

  And then Electra and I are alone in the mess-room.

  My brain is still bouncing around inside my skull because of everything that has happened, but above all I’m starving, so I go to the galley. I don’t bother making the stew properly, I just open the packets and dump them straight into my mouth. At the same time, I’m ripping open protein bars and gulping them down. Then I eat half of the lettuce from Telly’s garden, including the roots.

  Once I’ve taken the edge off my hunger, I go out to the mess-room because I want to talk to Electra. I have so many questions for her. I flop onto the floor with a pile of protein bars on my belly.

  But before I can start, she asks me a question.

  Her face is still very pale, only green around the edges, and her hair-tentacles are pale and droopy. She’s sitting on the couch, not far away. “It was you,” she says, her voice bitter. “Wasn’t it? You attacked my Dart ship and damaged it so that I was captured?”

  “Yep,” I say, and take a bite of protein bar.

  She makes a disgusted sound. “I can’t believe what an idiot I am.”

  “No you’re not,” I protest.

  “I had a mission,” she says savagely. “I made a stupid assumption that this stupid ship was harmless, and now I’m paying for it, all right? So just shut up about something you don’t know anything about.”

  So grumpy. Maybe she’s hungry. “Want a protein bar?” I ask her.

  “No,” she mutters. “I do not want a stupid protein bar.”

  I sit up. Since she’s actually talking to me for once, I might as well try asking some questions. “Do you know where I escaped from?” I ask. “I mean, you saw the Hunter, right? What kind of place could hold me?”

  She gives half a shrug. “A class-four military prison could.” She gnaws on a thumbnail. “Actually no. It didn’t, obviously. I don’t know where the prison was. The StarLeague keeps the location of all of its prisons secret, for obvious reasons.” Then she glares at me. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you, criminal.”

  I don’t remember if I’m a criminal or not, so I don’t bother arguing with her about it. Instead I get to my feet and go to a locker. Taking out the remote, I bring up a cookbook on the screen. “What species of humanoid are you?” I ask.

  “Why do you want to know?” she asks suspiciously.

  “You’ll see,” I promise.

  “Tintaclodian,” she answers.

  I blink.

  She reaches up and wraps one of her hair-tentacles around a finger. “We’re called that because of our tintacles.”

  “Not tentacles?” I ask.

  “No.” The tentacle around her finger turns darker blue, then black, then a murky green, and then it goes blue again. “They change color. Tint. Tintacles.”

  “They show how you’re feeling,” I say.

  “Sometimes,” she says, and then looks away.

  I look up tintaclodians in the cookbook. It says that Electra’s species likes eating insects, among other things. “What’s grasshopper?” I ask her, studying a recipe. “Is it a kind of vegetable?”

  She doesn’t a
nswer. Instead she gets to her feet and stomps away, muttering to herself. After a minute, she stomps back, her tintacles waving angrily around her head.

  “All right,” she growls. “Fine.” She glares at me.

  “What?” I prompt.

  She gives an exasperated sigh. “Thank you,” she says through gritted teeth, “for not letting the captain put me out an airlock.”

  I can’t help it—I smile at her. She’s so polite! “You’re welcome.”

  I find myself feeling strange, complicated human emotions about Electra. At the same time that I feel dislike toward her because she’s grumpy and she called me a thing and it and doesn’t think I’m a person, I feel something else about how brave and determined she is. I think it might be like.

  Electra flops onto the couch and stares at the ceiling. I eat five more protein bars and don’t talk to her, because I can tell she needs to do some thinking. And then the captain hurries back into the mess-room with Reetha. “Search her,” she orders, pointing at Electra.

  Electra stands still while Reetha goes through her pockets. “What are you looking for?” she asks.

  The captain scowls at her. “You’ve been signaling to General Smag, haven’t you?”

  Electra blinks. Her tintacles turn pink.

  “I think that means she’s surprised,” I point out.

  “So you haven’t been signaling the general,” Captain Astra concludes.

  “Nothing,” Reetha reports, finished with her search.

  “Rats,” the captain curses. “We’ve checked the Dart ship, too, and there’s no tracking device. So, before we switched on the stealth-box, how was Smag able to follow us?” She narrows her eyes. “Do you know?” she asks Electra.

  Electra’s hair-tintacles turn muddy brown. “No,” she snaps. “But it doesn’t matter. General Smag is relentless. Now that he knows the criminal is on board, he will never stop pursuing you. This tin-can ship will not escape the StarLeague military. When you are caught, you will all go to prison.” She turns her glare on me. “And it will be entirely your fault.”

  “Maybe they won’t catch us,” I say.

  “They will,” she promises. “Peacemaker is coming. Even with that stupid stealth-box, there is no escape.”

  “But maybe there is,” I say.

  “Ugh!” Electra huffs out a disgusted breath. “Why am I even talking to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “You said you weren’t going to.”

  The captain rolls her eyes. “Enough arguing.” She points at Electra. “You stay here.” She points at me. “And you come with us.”

  I follow her and Reetha out of the mess-room. They know there’s no point in putting a restraining cuff on me, but, the captain says, they do not want me roaming around the ship. So they’re going to lock me up.

  “But—” I start to say, to remind them that I must have, after all, escaped from a class-four military prison. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I doubt anything on this ship can hold me.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” the captain interrupts. Keeping her distance, she leads me out of the mess-room and along the corridor to the crew’s sleeping rooms. Reetha follows. We get to a door; the captain taps a button to open it. Inside is a small room. Its walls are painted dark blue, and there are no blankets or pillows on the narrow bed. “Go on in there,” she orders.

  “But—” I start to say again, because we haven’t talked about where we’re going to find the shapeshifters, which is what we’re supposed to be doing, right?

  “Trouble,” she says impatiently, “Peacemaker and General Smag are out there somewhere and I have our escape to plan and a very temperamental stealth-box to do it with. I don’t have time to deal with you right now.”

  I step into the room.

  A second later the door slides shut behind me. I immediately try to open it again from the inside, but I can’t. They locked me in.

  23

  I sit down on the bed.

  All right. I will be normal and good. The captain is busy and she doesn’t want me roaming around the ship, so I’ll stay here.

  I lie down and look at the ceiling. It is painted dark blue too, and it has tiny stars stuck all over it. The room smells like cleaning chemicals. I can hear the soothing hum that is always in the background on this ship.

  Electra is so sure that Peacemaker is coming after us. General Smag, she said, is relentless.

  I can just picture the huge StarLeague military ship following us. Like a . . .

  Do you know what a shark is? Sea creature, lots of teeth? Yes?

  Peacemaker is like a shark, swimming through the deepest darkness of space. A huge, terrifying predator. And Hindsight is an awfully small fish.

  My stomach growls, distracting me. “I know,” I tell it. Soon the captain will remember that I need to eat a lot, and Reetha or somebody will come with six bowls of stew and a pile of protein bars, and maybe even dessert.

  I fall asleep thinking about food, and when I wake up, it seems like a long time since I last ate, and I am very, very, very, very, very, very hungry.

  The captain put me in here, but she didn’t actually say that I had to stay in here.

  “Trouble,” I say warningly to myself.

  As an answer, my stomach growls loudly at me.

  “I can’t argue with that,” I reason, and shift into my blob of goo form. Extending my pseudopods, I crawl up the wall to a grated vent at the edge of the ceiling. I ooze through it, then shift into a rat. In that form, I scurry along until I find another grate, shift and ooze through it, and come out in a corridor, where I have barely enough energy left to shift into my human boy shape.

  The red-painted door of the mess-room is only a few steps away. I hit the button to open it and peer inside.

  The only person there is Electra, asleep on the couch. Quietly, I go to the galley and get a few protein bars, and I also grab a coverall out of a locker and put it on, because humans don’t like it when other humans are not wearing clothes.

  Leaving the mess-room, I pad barefoot down the corridors until I get to the bridge. The doorway is open, and I go in.

  The captain is slouched in her scruffy chair next to the control panel, which has a dent in it with bits of broken plastic and wire sticking out. She’s the only one there.

  Seeing me, she gets to her feet. “Trouble,” she says warily.

  I hold up the protein bars. “Midnight snack?”

  Her eyes narrow. Slowly, she sits back down in her chair. “I have to keep reminding myself that you’re not human. You’re not what you look like.”

  I tell her what I keep telling myself: “No matter what shape I’m in, I’m always me.”

  “The Hunter is you?” she asks.

  My blob of goo form does this thing when it’s in deepest space. It pulls in all of its pseudopods and shuts down most of its senses and its surface hardens, like rock.

  My human body wants to do the same thing. I crouch and wrap my arms around my knees, making myself small. “Trouble is me,” I say quietly. “And the Hunter is me.”

  “Hmmm,” the captain says. “Why did the Hunter come to the mess-room?”

  “I was hungry,” I whisper.

  “Heh. That’s what I thought.” The captain leans over to look at me, her elbows on her knees. “You know, Trouble, I’ve been sitting here thinking about what happened. And I realized that you scared us all, but you didn’t actually hurt anyone, and you didn’t even do that much damage to the ship.” She straightens. “Let’s see. You dented the mess-room door. You terrified Amby. You smashed the control table here, next to my chair.” She pulls at one of the wires protruding from the panel. “What you didn’t know is that it doesn’t work anyway. I only use it for holding a cup of kaff.”

  I extend a pseudopod—a leg, I mean—and climb to my f
eet. “An old moldy cup of kaff,” I say.

  “In fact,” the captain concludes, “Electra did more damage shooting at you than the Hunter did.”

  “Do you think Electra’s right?” I blurt out. “Will General Smag catch us and send us all to prison?”

  The captain gives a lazy smile. “They won’t catch us so easily. We’ve used the stealth-box before, Trouble. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to stay hidden from the StarLeague.”

  “Waaaaait,” I say slowly, figuring something out that I should have figured out before. “You . . . this ship. You left the station in a hurry. I was there when you gave the order to close the outer hatch. You said . . .” I remember it, me in my dog puppy shape, crouched behind a pile of junk in the corridor. “You said you didn’t want the StarLeague officer poking his nose around in your ship.” I shake my head. “All of that had nothing to do with me.”

  “Ah!” The captain taps her nose. I have no idea what it means. “Go on,” she says.

  I feel something bubbling up in my chest. It’s something dogs don’t do, and neither do blobs of goo. It’s a laugh. I clap both hands over my mouth to keep it from getting out.

  The captain raises an eyebrow.

  And I can’t help it—the laugh bursts out. “You are a criminal!” I say.

  “Criminal,” she scoffs. “That’s not a very good word for what we do.”

  “What do you do?” I ask, and I suddenly hope it’s not something bad that hurts other people. But I know the captain, and I don’t think that it is.

  She smiles in a familiar way. For an instant she looks like The Lady. “We have regular cargo, and we trade between stations like an ordinary ship, and when the StarLeague is watching, we obey StarLeague laws. But sometimes we go to the darkest places between stars, and we switch on the stealth-box, and we wait in our little hidden pocket of space. There are people who, for various reasons, refuse to live under the strict rule of the StarLeague. People who desperately need supplies—seeds or medicine or farm equipment, things like that—and they meet us in those in-between places. When we’ve unloaded our cargo, we continue to the station.”