“Except for when you don’t,” I say, because there’s no chance she’s obeying orders right now.
She glares at me. Then she blinks and takes a quick breath, as if she’s realized something.
I realize it at the same time. Once I’ve gone down to the planet to collect this valuable object for The Knowledge, she will be alone on her own Dart ship.
Which means she has a choice to make.
Go or stay.
I have to make sure she knows that it’s a real choice. “Electra,” I say slowly.
She looks up and meets my eyes. Her hands are clenched into fists. Her tintacles have gone dead black.
“You know the threat that Captain Astra made? That the Hunter would come after you if you try to get away?”
She jerks out a nod.
“I wouldn’t ever hurt you,” I tell her. “Not even in my Hunter form.”
She scowls, but doesn’t say anything.
“Are you . . .” I take a shaky breath. “Are you going to be here when I get back?”
Her face is stern. Her tintacles are lying limp on her shoulders. She turns to the Dart controls but doesn’t do anything; she just sits there, and she doesn’t answer me.
30
I don’t remember much from before I was a dog puppy on the station, but I know that I’ve never seen the curve of a planet looming large in a spaceship window.
From up here, the planet’s surface looks smooth, and I can see the thin bubble of its atmosphere. Clouds swirl over most of its surface; below that are glimpses of blue—oceans—and brown—land. We emerge from the planet’s shadow, and the weak bluish light of its sun shines into my eyes. The Knowledge’s eye is buzzing, as if it’s interested in seeing all of it.
“You’d better brace yourself,” Electra says in a flat voice. She pushes a button at the controls. “We’re about to hit atmosphere.”
You already know that space is mostly empty. That’s why we call it space, right? Right. A ship in outer space cruises along with nothing bumping against it, not even air molecules. Once a ship hits the bubble of air around a planet—the atmosphere—it builds up heat from friction. Not all ships are made to go into atmosphere and down to a planet—the Hindsight isn’t. That’s why it’s a cylinder, like a tin can. The Dart is aerodynamic—that is, made to fly through air—and it can go down to a planet.
As we zoom into the atmosphere, the Dart starts to shake, and then the shaking turns to noisy rattling. Out front, the planet gets nearer, taking up the entire window, and flares of heat flash past us. We’re falling now, not flying, going faster and faster as the gravity of the planet pulls us in.
After a few loud, rattling minutes, Electra flips a switch and pushes a button, and the Dart’s fall turns into a quieter glide. Below us, the surface of the planet is hidden by a thick layer of cloud. She turns toward me. Her face is blank, and I can’t tell if she’s decided what she’s going to do. “Any lower than this, and we’ll trigger an alert on the planet. You’ll have to get out here.”
My heart is beating fast from excitement. “Is the air all right out there? For a human, I mean?”
She checks a reading on the control panel. “It should be fine. You’ll fall fast enough that the air will become more breathable fairly quickly. It’ll be cold, though.”
“That’s all right.” I’m worried about the captain, of course, and about Electra’s choice, and about this strange task that The Knowledge has set for me, but in the meantime, this is going to be fun.
The Knowledge’s eye bobs over to me. “Are you coming too?” I ask it. As an answer, it dives down to nestle inside my shirt. It feels cold and smooth against my skin, but after a moment it warms.
Electra fastens a harness around herself and points to the Dart’s door. Only clouds are visible now, outside the front window.
“Once the door is open,” Electra warns, “you’ll be sucked out immediately.”
“I’m ready,” I say happily, and grin at her, bouncing on my toes. I can’t wait to go.
She scowls suddenly and turns away. “The Vault is directly below us,” she says. “Goodbye.” And she hits a button on the control panel.
As the Dart’s outer door opens, I’m sucked out into the howlingly loud, roaring, ice-cold, cloud-damp air. Falling. Flying! Wheeeeeee!
I tumble away from the Dart and down, down, down, and then spread my arms and legs wide, and my fall steadies. Air rushes past my ears; my teeth are clenched against the cold. The clouds surround me, a fuzzy blur of white and gray. I’m coated with cloud-wet that quickly freezes, turning to ice that crackles over my skin. I fall and fall and fall, and the air gets warmer and less thin, and I take gasping breaths.
At last I fall out of the clouds into a dazzle of brilliant light.
The planet is spread out below me—so close! It’s not smooth anymore, but covered with tall, pointy bumps—mountains!—and green areas that must be forests, and a wide stretch of water that glimmers with sunlight.
“Hold on!” I shout at the eye, the words ripped from my mouth as I fall.
I should have shifted before jumping out of the Dart, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Electra, and I wanted to see how my human self would like falling.
I like it enormously, but soft, squishy human me won’t like the crashing-into-the-planet’s-surface part, so it’s time to shift.
The form I choose has powerful leathery wings and a sleek scaled body that is almost as big as the Dart ship. My eyes are very keen; this kind of animal is probably good at spotting its prey from the air. Through those eyes, I immediately see the building that must be the Vault.
You know the word vault, don’t you? I had to look it up on the screen. A vault is “a room or chamber for the safekeeping of valuables.”
Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? You just open the door, step into the vault, get what you want, and go out.
This Vault is not simple.
From up high, where I am, the Vault looks like a sphere, but a huge one—almost as big as one of the mountains in the distance. Its outside layer is completely smooth, and made of metal that gleams blue in the setting sun.
Inside, the Vault has layers, one sphere inside another inside another. Think of it as this kind of vegetable called an onion. There’s no easy way in. I’ll have to fight my way through every level to reach the smallest center sphere, the Vault’s core, where the object is located.
A twitch of my long snaky tail and a flap of my wings, and I arrow toward the Vault, then spiral down to land in a field of vegetation nearby. Grass, I think it’s called.
The Knowledge’s eye streaks down, landing with a sizzling thud in the grass next to me. Dizzily, it lifts itself out.
I shift back into my human boy form, roll over onto my back, and look up.
The sky. It arcs overhead, striped with clouds and far higher than any ship ceiling, any station dock. It is beyond huge. And I’m so tiny. I’m used to that, from floating through space in my blob of goo shape, but the sky is different. It presses down on me. I close my eyes and fling my arm over my face and feel certain that I’m about to get squished.
The grass prickles against the skin of my back and legs. I hear the sound of air moving—wind, I think it’s called?—and the nervous hum of The Knowledge’s eye hovering nearby.
Cautiously, I peek out from behind my arm. The sky is still there, a partly cloudy greenish blue, the sun a blue sliver going down behind a faraway mountain.
The Vault looms nearby, a huge metal ball. It gleams dully in the fading sunlight, and its dark shadow covers the grassy hill that I’m lying on.
I sit up. The sky still hasn’t crushed me. I guess that means it isn’t going to. I shiver as more wind blows over my bare skin. My stomach growls, reminding me that if I’m going to do much more shifting, I will need to eat something. A lot of something, a
ctually. Eight bowls of stew would taste really good right about now.
Whether I have food or not, it’s time to complete my mission so I can get my captain back and get an answer to my question.
After looking around to see if my clothes happened to fall out of the sky anywhere nearby—they haven’t—I start toward the Vault.
31
Shifting into my rat form, I can sense the trail markers that other rats have left outside the Vault. Following the markers, I avoid the alarm sensors, scurrying through grass tunnels and then into a pipe that leads me straight into the building. Along the way I keep my whiskers twitching in case there’s any food around—rats will eat anything—but there’s nothing, really, except grass and then metal and cement.
The Knowledge’s eye comes with me, bobbing along behind my slithery rat tail.
The inside of the Vault is a series of concentric spheres, like one ball inside another ball, inside another ball . . . and each level has valuable things in it from different places all over the galaxy.
The object that The Knowledge wants me to bring back to it is in the very center of the Vault, the innermost, smallest, most secure sphere.
In my rat form, I enter the outer sphere of the Vault, squirming through a drain, emerging into a narrow passageway. The curved walls are made of metal, and there are shelves with objects on them lined up in a long row. Art and handicrafts and tools and weapons, probably organized according to which galactic species made them. I can’t see them very well, because rat vision is blurry and sees mostly in darks and lights but not much color, and also I’m low down at floor level. There’s a lot of dust in here; it makes my whiskers twitch.
Keeping to the edge of the passageway, I scurry through many twists and turns, places where the passage splits and goes in other directions. The Knowledge’s eye follows and my stomach keeps telling me that it’s hungry.
There should be a door or a tunnel or something that leads inward, to the next sphere, and I have to find it.
I round a curve and run straight into a shiny, rat-sized metal thing that is trundling along the edge of the wall. It’s a robot device; it is sucking up the dust from the corridor floor, and has been scent-marked by a rat—it is not a danger. It stops; a metal antenna swivels, scans me, and scans The Knowledge’s eye; then it beeps, changes course, and continues on its way, cleaning as it goes.
Huh. I go on, scurry-scurry-scurry, around curves, past a collection of weaponry from somewhere in the outer reaches of the galaxy, down a corridor hung with oil paintings. They are just muddy blurs to my rat eyes, but I’m pretty sure none of them is a picture of The Lady. I would know her anywhere. I go on; the eye follows.
Then I stop. The objects on the shelves. I can’t see them very well, but I’ve realized that a sculpture that I just passed seems the same as one I passed earlier.
I patter back to it and gaze up.
It’s too blurry. I can’t tell.
I’m lost. Rats!
Wait. I’m being stupid. I’ve been in my human shape for so long that I’m going about this the way a human would—going by sight.
But I’m a rat! And I shouldn’t be thinking of this as a storage area—it’s a maze.
As it happens, rats are extremely good at figuring out mazes.
Instead of going by sight, I should be paying more attention to the markers left by previous rats that came this way. My nose twitches as I scurry along the passage until—there! An old, faint scent mark. It contains all kinds of information useful to a fellow rat. I follow her trail and it leads me through more twists and turns until I reach an opening in the passage.
I go through it, and the scent marks end, and I realize that if I’m going to make it farther into the Vault, I’m going to have to shift into a different form.
The doorway to the next inner level of the Vault is located at the bottom of a long, narrow shaft. The walls are way too steep and smooth for a rat to climb down.
My blob of goo form could do it, but I don’t like to spend too much time in that shape, and I might need it later.
32
My stomach growls.
I know, I tell it. I need to be careful. If I don’t find something to eat—and soon—I’ll risk running out of energy. I don’t have much choice, though. The captain is human and not dangerous like me, and The Knowledge has her, and who knows what it’s doing to her. And Peacemaker is out there. General Smag may not know exactly where we are, but he has this mysterious ability to find us, so I know I don’t have long to complete this mission.
The Knowledge’s eye hovers in front of me, buzzing as if it’s impatient.
All right. Slowly, to conserve energy, I shift into the form of a gekkonid, an amphibious being that has five bulbous toes at the end of each of its four legs; each toe is covered with tiny hairs that make the toes super grippy and able to stick to almost any surface. Most gekkonids live on space stations and work as janitors who clean walls and ceilings.
In my gekkonid form, I skitter straight down the wall, followed by The Knowledge’s eye, to the round door at the bottom of the shaft.
When I get there, I realize that I’m going to have to shift again. Gekkonid toes are very good at clinging to walls, but not so good at opening latches.
I shift into my human form because hands with opposable thumbs are good at opening tricky things, go through, and immediately have to shift into a crystal spider form that comes from an airless ice planet and is not affected by the cold. This level of the Vault is frozen, with shards of light glittering from every sharp surface. Using the spider’s eight legs, I make my way past elaborate sculptures made of frozen water with steaming liquid nitrogen waterfalls, towering icicles, elaborate laceworks of ice crystals.
I make it through to the next door. Hah! Take that, frozen ice sphere!
With an effort, I shift out of the crystal spider form and into the form of tiny insectoids with a collective mind. They squeeze through the narrow crack that is the next door, and into the next sphere. This one has no gravity, and I have to shift again into a creature that can travel through it. And then to the next level, which is for methane breathers, so I have to shift again. And then to the next. And the next.
All the while I’m aware of the time passing, General Smag getting closer, the captain waiting and maybe in danger.
And I’m getting hungrier.
The next shift, into a scaled, cold-blooded being that can breathe water, is much harder. I make it through that level and realize that at some point I lost The Knowledge’s eye. I am so hungry that the hunger is all I can think about. It doesn’t just growl, it roars.
After the water sphere, my fish form flops onto a hard surface for a moment, and then I shift, slowly, into my human form. I lie there, dripping wet and panting. Stew, I think. Noodles. Protein bars. More stew.
Slowly, I sit up.
And I realize that I have a problem.
The sphere I’m in is noticeably smaller than the rest. That means I am close to the center of the Vault, its core. I am about to find the object that The Knowledge sent me here for. This is good.
The problem is that I have to not only find the object, but bring it back out again, and that means shifting through level after level until I’m outside the Vault.
“All right,” I whisper, and I’m alarmed at how shaky my voice sounds.
I’ll just deal with the next steps when I come to them. I can’t think about the captain or about other shapeshifters or about Electra’s choice and whether she’ll be waiting for me when I get out of the Vault. I just have to get the object.
Slowly, I get to my knees and then totter to my feet. My head spins, and I put a hand back against the wall to steady myself. I’m on a small ledge that runs around the inside of the sphere. The metal walls curve in above and below me. There’s no light except from a round platform that floats at the very c
enter of the sphere. Something is resting on it, and it is glowing.
That must be it. The object at the very center of the Vault that I am supposed to bring back to the asteroid. The Knowledge said I would know it when I saw it.
I squint. The object is . . .
. . . is it a bowl of stew?
I think it is. With wisps of steam coming off it. And a spoon, which I don’t think I’m even going to bother with. Oh, I can almost smell the protein-cubey and brown-sauce goodness. GO, my stomach roars at me.
I realize that I have no way of getting over to it except by shifting into a creature that can fly—and then a narrow bridge unfolds from the ledge that I’m standing on.
“Come on, Trouble,” I tell myself.
Taking a steadying breath, I start across the bridge. With each step I take toward the bowl of stew, the bridge falls away behind me. There’s no way back—except by shifting.
Halfway across I stop to rest, panting, feeling like I’m carrying an entire spaceship on my shoulders. For one gasping breath I have time to think that I might be making a big mistake, and then the bridge below my feet starts to crumble away and I have to go forward again. Stumbling, I make it the rest of the way across, to the center of the sphere.
It’s a circular metal platform just a little wider than I am tall. Around its edges is a faint glow.
There is nothing on it. No bowl of delicious stew. Not even a scrap of a drip of sauce or a lingering aroma.
Wait. What?
Under my feet, the last remaining section of bridge gives a tingle and then falls away.
Using the last of my strength, I scramble onto the platform to keep from falling. The moment I touch the platform’s surface, a globe of light snaps into place, enclosing me in a small spherical room.
And I realize that I’ve just stepped into a trap.
33
Immediately I try to jab my hand through the wall of light, and it gives me a shock, just like the one I got from the restraining cuff in the mess-room of the Hindsight. The shock leaves me sprawled on the round platform, staring up at the dome of light overhead. The platform is ice-cold, and I start to shiver.
Trouble in the Stars Page 11