by Dan Wells
Zero frowned. “So why does it do that?”
“There are several theories,” said Sancho, “but nobody knows for sure. One theory suggests that there might be a ninth planet in our solar system, beyond the Kuiper Belt, and that the asteroids beyond the Kuiper Cliff have been pulled out of place by its gravity.”
Zero’s jaw fell open. “Whoa. Another planet?”
“Such a planet has never been confirmed,” said Sancho.
“But it’s the only explanation that works, right?”
“There are many possible explanations,” said Sancho. “This remains a popular one, however, because it answers a number of other questions as well.”
Zero’s eyes opened wide. “Like alien pirates from a hidden planet?”
“There are no alien pirates,” said Sancho.
Zero frowned. “That’s dumb.”
“The solar system consists of eight major planets,” said Sancho, “and a number of asteroids so big that we call them dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris, Sedna, and more.”
“I’ve heard of Sedna,” said Zero.
“Sedna’s orbit takes it to the farthest reaches of the solar system,” said Sancho. “Even at the closest point in its orbit, it is several million kilometers beyond even the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. That puts it too far away to be affected by Neptune’s gravity—the farthest known planet from the sun—but it is obviously being affected by something. But scientists do not know what. An undiscovered planet beyond the Kuiper Belt could solve that mystery, and more.”
“That is so amazing,” breathed Zero. “A hidden planet. Does it have a name?”
“Scientists do not give official names to hypothetical planets, but the traders and miners who live out here call it Tacita.”
“Why?”
“Every planet in this system is named after a Roman god or goddess,” said Sancho. “Tacita is the goddess of death and silence, which I suppose the miners think is a fitting name for a hidden planet.”
Death and silence—the explanation made Zero shiver. He wanted to ask about it, but it scared him so much that he found himself changing the subject.
“There are miners out here?” Zero asked. “What do they mine?”
“Most people who work in the asteroids mine ice. That is what most of the asteroids are made of. But recent shipments to the inner planets have shown an increase in molybdenum—a rare metal—suggesting that someone has found a new source of it.”
“Okay,” said Zero, “never mind. I don’t really care about the economics of industrial shipping, or whatever. I guess my real question is how is it still hidden? I mean, if Tacita exists, why don’t we know about it? If we can send starships to Murasaki, twenty light-years away, why can’t we map our own solar system?”
“The United Earth fleet is working on it,” said Sancho, “but the Kuiper Belt is a dangerous place. The probes and satellites sent out to explore it have almost all been destroyed.”
“This just gets spookier the more you talk about it,” said Zero. He thought about the asteroid that had changed course to hit them, seemingly out of nowhere, and he shivered.
Moving asteroids. Ruined probes. A secret, hidden planet. The goddess of death and silence.
What was really going on out here?
Chapter Twelve
CARGO
ZERO ARRIVED AT Ring 1, only to discover that it wasn’t the true end of the ship: the rest of the aft section was taken up by the massive Medina StarDrive, which was so large and so complex that he could actually go inside of it, or at least part of it, and explore. Some hatchways were clearly marked as airlocks, leading out of the ship and into the vacuum of space, and he stayed away from those. He poked around the engine for a bit and then started opening the various cargo bays to see what was inside of them. A surprising number of them—surprising to Zero, at least—were full of construction materials. He knew they were going to build a new colony on Kaguya, but for some reason, he hadn’t really expected to build the colony, like with metal and tools. Exploring a new planet was supposed to be fun, not work.
He opened one of the construction crates and found a box of bright LED flashlights. He didn’t have any pockets, but a flashlight seemed like a useful thing so tucked one into his coverall. Also in the crate were a bunch of boxes labeled “Self-Sealing Bolts”: little metal rods, about the size of his pointer finger, with what looked like a button on the tip of each. He picked one up and pressed the button, and instantly the bolt grew white-hot; he threw it with a yelp, and it sent off a shower of sparks, and then it was done. He looked down at it, lying on the bulkhead, and saw that it had melted itself to the metal. He tried to move it, but it was stuck. It had welded itself to the floor. “Cool,” he said, but his fingers still hurt from touching it. He left the rest of the bolts where they were, and moved on.
He left the construction materials behind and started exploring the other bays. He found the nineteen landing barges, and the vast empty space where the twentieth had been before Jim had taken it. The barges were built as part of the outer hull, but with the ability to detach and fly away. The missing barge had left a massive, barge-shaped hole in the ship, sealed only by a small airlock. Why had Jim left? Had something gone wrong that Zero hadn’t found yet? Was Jim trying to escape, or maybe trying to bring back help? Was there a deadly disaster that Zero should be trying to solve, but he just didn’t know about it?
He thought again about waking somebody up. His dad would be the best. His dad had helped build the ship, so he’d know everything about how it worked and how to shoot the asteroids and everything else. And if there really was a huge problem coming, his dad would be able to solve that, too. But he didn’t know how to wake anyone up without killing them. Zero’s dad was right there, ready and waiting to help. But Zero couldn’t get his help because it might kill him. Exploring the ship was fun, but he missed his dad.
He moved on and found another cargo bay full of all- terrain rovers, partially disassembled and waiting to be carried down to the planet’s surface. They looked like fun, and he sat in one’s driver’s seat for a while, but he couldn’t actually use them in the ship, so he eventually got bored and kept exploring.
After an hour or two he was really starting to get hungry again. Why had he thrown that pizza away instead of cooking it? He thought about going back up for more food, but decided to open one more door first.
Jackpot.
He found the colony’s food.
The meal bricks in the pilot’s rec room were designed to be quick, easy, and extremely durable. The food in the cargo bay was simply put into stasis, just like the people in their pods, to keep it fresh until they arrived on Kaguya. There wasn’t much room to poke around—the people who’d packed this room had been very efficient—but he found that he could wriggle his way through certain gaps between the boxes and read the labels to see what was inside. “Seed Corn.” Well, that one was boring. “Seed Wheat.” Also boring. Where was the candy? The next box said, “Whole Strawberries,” and he smiled. That was more like it. He couldn’t exactly open it right now, though—the construction material would be fine after a hundred years in the open, but the food would spoil. Anything he opened now would be ruined by the time they reached Kaguya, and since there was no way he could eat an entire crate of food, even in a week, he left it alone. He could dream, though. Twenty light-years from Earth, and they’d still have real strawberries.
He rounded another corner in the cramped cargo bay and caught a scent—he wasn’t even sure what kind of scent it was because so much of this part of the ship simply smelled like ‘empty ship,’ but this stood out because it was different. Not as delicious as the freshly rehydrated cheeseburger he’d eaten last night, but definitely organic. He squeezed between two more giant metal crates and found it: one of the food boxes was open.
“Hey, Sancho!”
“Yes, Mr. Huang?” The AI’s voice was distant, from out in the hallway; Zero figured that there must not be a speaker i
n the cargo bay.
“One of these food boxes is open,” Zero shouted.
“They are not supposed to be open.” Sancho paused, and then spoke again. “It is possible that Jim may have opened it.”
“No way,” said Zero. “I can barely fit back here—there’s no way Jim could. But since it’s open anyway, it’s all going to go bad by the end of the journey, right?”
“Probably long before that,” said Sancho.
“Then I may as well eat it now, right?” He put his fingers under the lid and pried it farther open. “I mean, if it’s just going to go to waste anyway.” The objects inside were packed with clear stasis gel, just like the stuff he’d been covered with in his pod. He reached in, dipping his hand in the goop, and pulled out a can. He held it close to his eyes and read the label. “Whole Jalapeños.”
“Yum,” he said, and let the can float in the air next to him; he loved spicy food, and a can of jalapeños would be a great addition to his freeze-dried meal bricks back in the rec room. He reached into the open crate again, probing around in the gel, and this time he pulled out a square metal container with a small attached key to open it. He wiped away the goop and held it up to the faint light: Banana Chips.
“Aw, yissss,” he said. He wiped away more of the gel, even rubbing it on his coverall to clean it off, and then used the key to peel back the lid—just enough that he could reach in with his fingers, but not enough to let the banana chips drift out. He ate one, feeling the sweet rush of the sugar race across his tongue, and then dug out two more and shoved them in his mouth. “This is the best crate ever!”
If this crate had such awesome stuff just sitting at the top, what else could he find if he dug down inside of it? He let the banana box float next to the jalapeño can and reached in again, this time probing for something different. Suddenly his hand touched a can that felt wrong—the surface was bulging, not flat. He frowned, and pulled it out, and saw that the can was swelling up, like whatever was inside was getting bigger and trying to burst its way out. He’d seen this kind of thing before, shopping with his mom. He called out to Sancho: “I think I found the problem.”
“Was it a faulty latch?”
“More like a faulty canning factory,” said Zero. “One of these cans of”—he read the label—“tomato sauce has gone bad. This happened at home once and my mom told me all about it. It was canned wrong and now there’s bacteria growing inside of it, and it made the can bulge out so much it broke the seal on the crate.”
“That still sounds like a faulty latch,” said Sancho. “Is the can dangerous?”
“Not really,” said Zero, looking at it. “Not unless I try to eat it. I’d get food poisoning pretty fast, and it’d be nasty.” He pushed the can into another gap between the crates, and let it drift away from the good food still in the crate. “So: I won’t eat it.”
“That is a good plan,” said Sancho.
Zero grabbed his bananas and jalapeños, and worked his way back through the narrow crawl spaces to the door. When he came out, he ate another banana chip. “This, though, I can definitely eat.”
“The cargo manifest is not updated in real time,” said Sancho, “so I don’t know what you pulled out of the crate.”
“Sorry,” said Zero. “I forgot you couldn’t see.”
“I can see star systems, and the silent dance of a billion asteroids,” said Sancho. “From my perspective, it is you who cannot see.”
“Okay, but you don’t get to eat banana chips, so I win.” He tucked the can under his arm, opened another door, and found . . .
“Oh, come on,” he said, deflated. “More construction supplies? How many buildings do we have to build in this stupid colony?” He stared at the boxes, trying to decide if he wanted to keep exploring or head back up to the rec room. Just as he had made up his mind to leave, his eye fell on the sign detailing the contents of the nearest crate. It wasn’t metal or plastic or concrete or anything else: it was paint.
“Now that is something I can use,” he said. He let the food cans drift in the air and pushed himself over to the crate. It opened easily. He pulled out several colors, and dug through a second crate for supplies—an apron, some brushes, a chain, and some magnetic clamps. He used the chain to tie together all the cans in one long tail—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, white, black, jalapeños, and banana chips—and pulled them behind him, out of the cargo bay and into the central column. He grinned, and jumped back up toward the fore of the ship.
Chapter Thirteen
ACTION FIGURES
“ALL RIGHT,” SAID ZERO, and tied the apron around his waist. “Let’s get started.” He turned on the flashlight, wedging it into a corner of the bulkhead, and then laid out the paint cans in front of his brothers’ stasis pods. He used the magnetic clamps to keep the cans from floating around, and carefully opened them. He half expected the paint to float up and out of the cans, but it didn’t; he guessed that made sense, because there was nothing trying to pull it up, just like there was no gravity trying to pull it down. He dipped his brush in the black, and lifted it back out. A ball of black paint hovered around the bristles of the brush, not dripping down or soaking in or anything. He nodded, and looked at Park’s stasis pod.
“I still think you look like an action figure,” he said. “You just need a little something extra.” He used the black paint to draw a mustache on the plastic shell of the stasis pod, right over Park’s face. It looked perfect! He added a pointy beard, and an eye patch, and then a few dots for warts. He let go of the black paintbrush, letting it hang in the air, and dipped another brush in the red. “A good action figure needs a name,” he said. “How about . . . Bonehead Boy!” He wrote, “Bonehead Boy!” in large, red letters across the top of Park’s stasis pod, right above his head, and then added a few extra exclamation points just for fun. He let that brush float next to the black one and grabbed two more; he dipped one in blue and one in orange, and used them to paint a bright costume onto the shell of the stasis pod. He stepped back to admire his work. If he stood just in the right place, his older brother looked like the worst superhero ever.
“Perfect,” said Zero, and got to work on Yen. If Park got an eyepatch, Yen needed something really special. A black eye! But he couldn’t just paint it in black—a real black eye was purple or green, or sometimes both, and he had green paint but he didn’t have purple. He used his red brush to make a blob of red paint in the air, and then dipped his blue one into the middle of it and swished it around. He could mix paint right in the middle of the air! Doing things without gravity was the best. The blob turned purple, and he slapped it onto Yen’s stasis pad to give him a big picture of a bulging black eye. He used the black to paint on crooked teeth and a worm crawling out of his ear, but the worm didn’t work very well. He used the yellow paint to draw on another super suit, and then mixed some brown and painted it in big, nasty lines right on Yen’s legs. “You’re Captain Poopy Pants!” he shouted, and used the red paint to write the name on the top of the stasis pod. Just as he was trying to decide if he should paint a tiger or something to eat Yen’s head, he heard a sound. Not just heard it, he felt it: the air echoed with a distant thud, and the whole ship seemed to vibrate for just a second.
Zero looked up. “Sancho?”
“It appears that a ship has docked with us,” said Sancho.
“People?” asked Zero, and let go of his paintbrushes. They turned silently in the air. He kicked off the nearest stasis pod and floated to the end of the aisle, looking out into the hall. “Maybe it’s Jim coming back!”
“I did not see them coming on our sensors,” said Sancho. His voice had the same uncertain tone to it that he’d had when he’d discovered Jim was missing. “That is curious.”
Zero stopped, his excitement frozen in a moment of fear. “You . . . didn’t see any ships throwing asteroids at us, either,” he said.
“It appears there may be a fault in my sensor package,” said Sancho. “I will have to run a diagn
ostic.”
“Do you think it’s—”
“Done,” said Sancho. “I have found a section of new code in my sensor program, causing me to overlook the specific transponder code of this ship.”
“You’ve been hacked?”
“It would appear so. This is not a good sign.”
“No, it’s not,” said Zero, and looked back out into the hallway. He crept up toward the open center column, moving from handhold to handhold, and listened. There was nothing. He spoke in a tiny whisper. “Sancho, can you hear anything?”
“They have docked with airlock B on Ring 240,” said Sancho, matching Zero’s quiet volume. “They have not yet opened the door, but they are trying to bypass the security locks.”
Zero thought he heard the sound of a door hissing open, but he couldn’t be sure if it was real or just in his imagination. 240 was sixty Rings away.
“Stay out of sight,” said Sancho. “Something is very wrong.”
Chapter Fourteen
PIRATES
ZERO WAITED, TRYING to be quiet, trying to hear what the new arrivals were doing or saying. He couldn’t hear anything.
I just have to wait for Sancho, he thought. Sancho can solve—
But then he froze. He knew Sancho couldn’t do anything. He was only a navigational computer. He could probably listen in on the intruders, but he couldn’t tell who they were or do anything to stop them.
Zero would have to do this himself.
He crept toward the center column, but stopped. Even with the struts, he’d be easy to see in that wide center space, and he still didn’t know if he wanted these people to see him. Who were they? Why were they here? Had they really hacked into Sancho, trying to hide their ship from his sensors? Why would they do that unless they were up to something bad?