“Report!” the humanoid orders.
Beside me, Electra stiffens and becomes the same Electra who first set foot on the Hindsight. “Senior Cadet Pilot Electra Zox,” she snaps, then nods at me. “With Junior Cadet Trouble Hindsight.” Briskly, she pulls from her coverall pocket her ID scanner, which Reetha fixed up for us. Electra scans her own ID and holds the device out for the other cadets to see. They nod, and she holds the device to my neck and secretly pushes another button that makes a fake ID come up: Trouble Hindsight, human, junior cadet in the StarLeague military. She shows it to the cadets, and they nod again. So far, so good.
Now for the tricky part.
“As ordered by General Smag,” Electra says, “I have, with this cadet’s assistance, captured the escaped shapeshifter.” She points at the cage that I’m holding.
“That is a rat,” says the wrinkled pink humanoid dubiously, peering at it.
“It is not,” Electra says scornfully. “It is a shapeshifter that has taken a rat form.” On cue, the rat hisses and bites at the mesh of its cage, its scaly tail thrashing and its whiskers bristling.
The humanoid takes half a step back, frightened. “Won’t it escape?”
“No,” Electra says in a don’t be stupid voice. “The cage is made of a special top-secret material that prevents the shapeshifter from shifting. It is not a danger to you.” Then she lowers her voice to a menacing whisper. “Unless the door to the cage somehow were to open. Then it would shift into a monster beyond your wildest fears and destroy you and everyone else on this ship.”
As she speaks to the trembling cadets, I catch a glimpse, on the other side of the dock, of an officer in a StarLeague military uniform, along with four soldiers, marching in our direction.
Electra sees them too, but she doesn’t get flustered. Still speaking briskly, like somebody used to giving orders and being obeyed, she says, “Now Cadet Hindsight will take the shapeshifter to your commanding officer.” And then, without allowing the cadets to say another word, she spins on her heel and marches back toward her Dart.
Leaving me on the dock with a rat in a cage.
41
Electra wasn’t happy with this part of the plan, and neither was the captain, but in the end they agreed that it made sense. While Electra waits in the Dart, I’m supposed to get to the lab where the shapeshifters are imprisoned. Once I’ve rescued them, I get them back to the Dart, we fly to the Hindsight, and escape. Simple, right?
What I wasn’t expecting to see is General Smag marching toward us, followed by a bunch of StarLeague soldiers.
Seeing Smag’s bulging forehead and jutting chin gives me a jolt of fright, but I stick to the plan.
“Ow!” I shout, and drop the rat’s cage. “It bit me!”
As the cage hits the metal deck, its door pops open and the rat bursts out.
The pink humanoid cadet shrieks and jumps back, bumping into the lizardian cadet; they both stumble aside, colliding with two of the approaching soldiers. The rat darts through the tangle of legs, scurrying for the nearest shadowy hiding place.
Go, rat, go!
“The shapeshifter!” I shout. “It has escaped!” I point in a random direction. “Quick! Chase it!”
Somehow my shouts don’t have the same effect as Electra’s orders.
Instead of going after the rat, General Smag has stopped; his soldiers have their weapons drawn, protecting him. He is already issuing commands.
“You”—he points at the wrinkly pink cadet—“report to the energy-tracking crew; alert them that the shapeshifter is on the ship. And you”—he points at the lizardian—“report to the lab and tell them to lock down and raise the threat level.”
Then he turns his piercing black eyes on me. “You”—he points at me, and my heart freezes in my chest, even though I know he’s never seen me in my human form—“you’re with me, Cadet.” With that, he turns on his heel and strides across the deck, barking more orders as he goes.
Surrounded by soldiers, I follow him off the dock, into a corridor, and then through a wide door into what must be the Peacemaker’s bridge—its control center. It is a vast room with a gleaming metallic floor; there are ranks of control panels, blinking with buttons and schematics and flashing lights. In the middle of the bridge is the command chair. Rushing around are more soldiers and young cadets, and some nervous-looking people in white lab coats—scientists. The general strides onto the bridge, followed by his bodyguards. I try to slither off at the last second, but one of the soldiers reaches back and drags me in with them.
“Close the doors,” the general orders. “Initiate emergency external-protection protocols.”
A soldier punches a button on a control panel, and a light starts to flash red, and a heavy metal wall studded with rivets slides down from the ceiling and locks into place over the bridge’s door.
This isn’t part of the plan. I’m supposed to be pretending to chase the rat while heading for the lab deep inside the Peacemaker. I have to free the shapeshifters!
Instead I’m trapped in a room with fifty soldiers and General Smag.
A blink, and I could shift into the Hunter and fight my way out.
But no. Not yet. The most important part of our plan is that nobody gets hurt, not if we can help it.
One of the soldiers nearby casts me a frowning look, and I realize that I don’t look very cadet-like. Quickly, I go to the edge of the room, where I stand stiffly, the way Electra taught me.
The Knowledge’s eye, I realize, is hovering at my shoulder.
“Shhh,” I whisper to it. “Stay hidden.”
Another soldier glances over at me; her antennae twitch suspiciously. I snap to attention again, staring straight ahead. The room is noisy with soldiers at the control panels, talking on communication devices, reporting to other soldiers.
“Sensors!” General Smag orders. He is standing at a control panel, looming over the shoulder of a junior officer. “Has it shifted yet?”
“No energy spike, sir,” the officer reports.
“It’s still in the rat form, then,” the general says. He knows that I give off that rare energy when I shift from one shape to another. “Continue to monitor. It must be captured.”
That’s when he decides he’s ready to question the junior cadet who brought in the shapeshifter.
“You,” he snaps, whirling around to face me. He points. “Report.”
“Me?” I blurt out.
General Smag’s all-black beady eyes stare at me as he comes closer, flanked by two of his bodyguards. His heavy footsteps ring on the metal deck. My human boy shape was new to me when I went onto the Hindsight, so he’s never seen me as Trouble. Still, all I can think as he comes closer is that he can see me, he has to!
“You captured the shapeshifter,” he says in his deep, commanding voice. “How?”
“It . . .” I stammer. I am not good at this. “It was in its rat form, and we caught it in the cage.”
“We?” the general prompts.
“Me and Electra,” I explain. “She’s—the other cadet. The Dart pilot.” I step away until my back is against the metal wall, but still the general leans in, examining me. “The rat went right into the cage.”
His eyes narrow with suspicion. “You are speaking of the most powerful being in the galaxy.”
Really?
“And it went into the cage without a fight?” he asks.
“Yep,” I say. “Just walked right in.”
“If it allowed itself to be captured so easily . . .” The general straightens and turns away. “It intended to come here.” He snaps out another order. “Prepare for an attack.”
“Sir,” puts in a soldier; her frondy antennae twitch. “Surely we are safe on the bridge. The shapeshifter cannot get in here?”
I almost laugh. They’re not as safe as they think they are.
Somehow the general senses this; he swings back around. “You think this is funny, Cadet?”
“Well,” I admit. “A little.”
The general stalks back toward me. His beady eyes glare. “You’re no StarLeague cadet,” he realizes. He looms over me, threatening. “Who are you?”
In response, the Hunter stirs inside me. “I’m Trouble,” I tell him.
A vein in his bulgy forehead pulses. “Trouble? What do you mean, trouble?”
“General!” calls the junior officer, who is gaping at a readout on the control panel. “We’re seeing a buildup in the shapeshifter energy signal. It’s preparing to shift.” The officer’s voice grows higher with alarm. “Sir, the signal is coming from here. The shapeshifter is here! It is inside this room— It is right . . .” She turns, searching, and then points at me.
“. . . there!”
42
General Smag straightens—tall and broad, he stares down at me. “You.”
“Me,” I say, and give him my best smile.
He backs away; the rest of the soldiers are pulling out their weapons, but half of them look confused—they haven’t figured out that the innocent-seeming cadet Trouble is a lot more devious than he looks.
“The rat was a decoy,” the general concludes. “The senior cadet. Electra Zox. She has betrayed her orders. Scan for her ID chip,” he says over his shoulder. “Is she on the station?”
She shouldn’t be. She should be safely on the Dart, waiting to pick me up after I rescue the shapeshifters.
“Yes, sir,” answers a soldier at a control panel.
Oh no. Electra didn’t follow the plan—she didn’t go back onto the Dart, as she was supposed to. She must have seen that I got picked up by General Smag. Knowing Electra, she’s gone to rescue the shapeshifters herself.
The general’s big chin juts. “Track her,” he orders his soldiers. And they can, because Electra has an ID chip that shows them exactly where she is on the Peacemaker.
“We’ve got her, sir,” the officer at the control panel says in a shaking voice while glancing nervously at me. “She’s in a corridor outside the weapons lab.” He pauses, listening. “Sir, the lab is locked down—she is trapped there.”
“Send soldiers after her!” General Smag orders. The officer obeys, barking the command into a communication device. “Tell them to shoot to kill.”
“No!” I shout. “Leave her alone!”
As my voice rings out, the soldiers bring their weapons to bear on me. One of them loses their battle with fright and pulls the trigger—
—but it’s too late, because I have already shifted.
* * *
Distantly, my Hunter ears hear screaming and shouted orders echoing across the Peacemaker’s bridge, but I pay little attention to them, or to the energy bolts whanging off my armored skin.
Electra. The Hunter must get to Electra before General Smag’s shoot-to-kill order is carried out. Then—rescue the other shapeshifters.
I spend a nanosecond studying the reinforced door, analyzing it for weaknesses. There are none. Still, I run at the door, ramming a shoulder into a riveted seam. There is an echoing clang, but the door is barely dented.
General Smag, the Hunter realizes, is still shouting orders into a communication device.
The soldiers scream and shout and scatter as I whirl, leap over a bank of control panels, landing with a heavy thump on my clawed feet. The general stumbles back while another soldier scrambles under a nearby chair as I bring a claw down, shattering the controls at the communication station. I spit a ball of concentrated acid onto another panel and it starts to disintegrate, the air filling with the acrid smell of melted plastic.
Electra. She’s in trouble right now. The Hunter must save her.
I leap onto the control panels and then hurl my entire heavy weight at the metal door and again it dents—but holds.
Electra! I roar.
And then, strangely, everything around the Hunter slows down. I see General Smag ducking to hide behind the command chair; I smell the smoke rising up from the smashed panels; I see The Knowledge’s shiny metal eye hovering just below the ceiling; I see a humanoid soldier pointing a weapon and closing her eyes as she fires it, and I hear the sizzle of the energy bolt burning through the air as it travels toward me and I reach out and brush it aside. I turn back to the wall and realize that everything around me seems slow because the Hunter is moving extremely fast.
I have shifted—but not my shape. I have shifted into the gaps between seconds.
Huh, as the captain would say. I didn’t know I could do this!
The Hunter turns and studies the door again. It shimmers as if it is a silver curtain. To the Hunter, the wall is only a small thing that is in its way. Again I rush toward it, only this time my shoulder doesn’t crash into it, denting the metal. Instead I shift between each molecule of the wall, as easily as stepping through a doorway. A flash, and I’m out the other side, into a corridor where a troop of soldiers is really wonderfully surprised to see me.
“The shapeshifter!” one of them screams.
Here comes Trouble! I roar back at them, and they fling themselves out of my way as I start down the corridor, heading for the lab, where Electra is trapped.
43
Outside the ship’s bridge, all is chaos and red lights and infrared lights flashing and energy bolts zipping past and soldiers shouting, and what looks like General Smag and a bunch of his bodyguards hurrying down another corridor—but I ignore all of it, heading for the passageway that leads to the lab, where Electra is in trouble. It’s a straight, narrow corridor with lights along the edges of the ceiling. As I lope down it, the lights go out—but the Hunter, I find, can see in the dark. I catch sight of the end of the corridor, but before I reach it, an emergency door irises shut—a blast door, part of their emergency lockdown. I do my new phase-shift thing and pass right through it.
Strangely, when I stride through the closed door, The Knowledge’s eye is waiting for me on the other side—watching everything.
I race into another corridor, and from around a corner I hear the sound of weapons firing and the shout of orders. I race in that direction. As I pass, I see that in the outside walls of the corridor are recessed doors—the entryways into the weapons lab in the science area. Thanks to the schematic that The Knowledge gave us, I know exactly where I am, and where I have to go.
As I come closer, I see the backs of StarLeague uniforms and the flash of energy bolts. They’re huddled behind a corner, popping out to fire at one of the recessed doors. From that cave-like space comes the flash of weapons fire.
Electra. She’s there, trapped.
I lope up behind the StarLeague soldiers.
Excuse me.
At the sound of my claws on the deck, one of them, an insectoid, looks over her carapaced shoulder. Seeing me, she screeches and drops her weapon. The rest of them whirl, and a few fire their weapons, the energy bolts deflecting off me. One bolt ricochets from a wall and almost hits another soldier, except that I reach out and catch it with my claw. With my other claw I grab a few weapons and crush them. A roar from me, and all five of the soldiers take off running, screaming as they go.
As they flee, I take three bounding steps and reach the door where Electra is hiding.
She has her back propped against the wall and an array of weapons lined up on the floor next to her.
Her face is keen and resolute, her tintacles are bright blue, and she has a smear of red across her chin.
Red. Blood.
She is injured.
“Hello, Trouble,” she gasps, and starts trying to climb to her feet.
I shift into my human form. “How badly are you hurt?” I ask.
She grabs the wall to steady herself. “Not bad.” She gasps again as she tries to put weight on one leg. “But not g
ood, either.”
“I’ll get you back to your Dart,” I tell her, and before she can argue, I shift into my Hunter form and swing her into my arms. In this shape I’m not a lot bigger than my human boy form, but I am much, much stronger.
“Ow!” she protests, wriggling.
Spikes on my shoulders. Sorry! Trying not to drip any acid from my fangs on her, I start back toward the corridor that leads away from the science area. Halfway down it, we reach the emergency door that I phase-shifted through—which I can’t do with Electra in my arms.
“Wait!” she calls, and points to the panel next to the door. “I know the protocols.” She pauses to catch her breath. “And the codes.” I take her closer and she leans over and hits a few buttons, and the door dilates open, and I hurry through it and keep going until I reach the dock.
On the dock, which I passed through on my way to find Electra, are scorch marks from energy bolts and a few discarded weapons, and the red and infrared lights are still flashing, and an emergency warning appears on all the screens, but there’s not a single StarLeague soldier. With my claws skidding on the shiny floor, I hurry to the Dart, where I set Electra carefully down and shift into my human shape again.
“Come on,” she says, gripping the frame of the outer hatch with bloody fingers.
“No,” I tell her. “You go. I still have to rescue the shapeshifters.”
“Trouble,” she growls. “There is no way. You can’t even get in there—believe me, I tried.”
“The Hunter can get in,” I tell her, and I don’t mention that I’m not sure I can get out again. “But I have to hurry. If too many of those StarLeague soldiers join the fight, somebody will end up getting hurt.”
“Weapon,” she says, and gives me a bleak smile.
“Weapon yourself,” I say, and pat her on the shoulder. “Go back to the Hindsight. Ask the captain to please pick up me and the shifters outside Peacemaker. Tell her to hurry, because I’ll be in my blob of goo form, and I don’t want to forget her or you or anybody. All right?”
Trouble in the Stars Page 15